The following is somewhat off-topic, but here it goes...
It just goes to show what a profitable business they have because they could easily cut their prices in half, still be profitable and would have more customers as people would be more willing to keep cable tv as well as have phone and internet.
FTFY. Having a great profit margin does not mean you have a monopoly. Also, the idea of giving a huge discount to retain a customer does not really sound like something a monopoly would want to, need to or normally would do.
Now, I don't know if they have a monopoly or not. All I'm saying is that your argumentation is not valid.
When Danske Bank bought Finnish Sampo Pankki, they forced it (and its customers) to move to Danske Bank group's online banking software which pretty much sucked and supposedly still sucks. And requires Java.
Sampo Pankki had one of the best online banking experience in Finland, feature- and usability-wise. It did not require Java or other sillyness from the client.
IIRC The Danske Bank applet's the client code had some obfuscation/encryption features in it but the author hadn't used it. So the code was easily opened and analyzed. One of the things they found out that the Java software collected very detailed information from the client computer and user and sent it to the server. This was information which has nothing to do with banking.
During the transition Danske Bank had a lot of problems not only in the web bank but in money transfers etc. The fiasco caused an outrage and they say even tens of thousands of customers left. This is not a small thing in a country of about 5,4 million people.
I closed all my accounts with Sampo Pankki soon after the whole thing, mainly because of the crappy web bank, Java dependency and the privacy violations. Sadly though my new bank's web bank wasn't nearly as good as Sampo Pankki had before Danske crap. But it sure beats running some spyware Java applet while doing banking online...
The law actually says the list is supposed to be used against sites outside Finland. Not sites residing in Finland. And even then this particular site has no child porn on it. And why would you block a local site ineffectively when you can just go and take the server out?
Remember the censorship and blacklist has been in use for years. Matti Nikki found out that many of the sites are totally within laws and has been compiling a list of them. Curiously, many of the false positives contained gay porn.
This story is about expanding the censorship, but it's already being used to block other than child porn sites. I'm not quite sure about the situation nowadays but originally there was no way for you to file a complaint about ending up on the list. If I recall correctly, Matti Nikki found out that apparently the police compiling a list does not constitute an official ruling, so there's no way to complain about it.
You know the major ISPs in Finland already block The Pirate Bay? It's painful for me to say, but the good thing in TPB block is that at least it got done by a court order. One way or another, sites like lapsiporno.info and TPB are going to get blocked. Then there are the online casinos, "extremists" and you know, all the Bad guys(tm)...
Your profile should feel like your home on the web — you should never feel like stuff appears there that you don't want, and you should never wonder who sees what's there.
That's they way I read this. I thought this was their wish from the beginning; don't think, just post.
There's so much white space you could call it the apartheid! I wouldn't call the design bad, though. I kinda like it, and it has a lot of potential, being quite clear.
But the clearness (clarity?) of the design comes from being washed-out and having too much white space. It needs some balance between "spacious" and "everything separated by 100 white pixels". And some contrast.
I would like to point out that the censorship law says nothing about links, or listing sites with links.
And in the law itself its purpose is said to be to promote measures which can be used to prevent access to foreign child porn sites.
Lapsiporno.info is neither foreign nor contains any child porn.
Also let it be known that Matti Nikki (muzzy) himself has actively reported actual child porn sites before, and some of them have been closed. Some was active even a year after reporting it. Of course, these sites are not Finnish.
The EFFI statement linked in the article is very thorough.
In this case there really can be only one bias: the law is bad and the way of enforcing it is even worse.
If some "facts" are not to be trusted or not true, they're just that: "facts", not facts. Granted, Wikipedia (Oxford English Dictionary) tells that the meanings allegation or stipulation have a long history in English. It does not mean that it's really the case in contemporary every-day language.
And actually the Wikipedia (OED) example quote is: "the author's facts are not trustworthy". It would sound silly to say "author's facts are not facts" because it does not emphasize the point which is that the "facts" are not trustworthy. They might not be true.
And all this is even without taking the context into account. Here we are talking about scientific (or technical) facts, and in that context you can not talk about "true facts" or "non-true facts" because there is no such thing as a non-true fact. Fact is a fact is a fact. Fact is something that exists, has existed or something that has "the quality of being actual" (i.e. it is true). Even your own sources tell that this is the case in our context.
For the rest I do not understand why people are so afraid of saying who they voted for because you should always be proud of what you voted for. If you are not proud of who you voted for then why vote that way? I would vote democrat and would be proud of it, so why would I care if someone knew that. You will start caring as soon as somebody decides to win the next election, and kills all or most of the people who voted for the wrong candidate this year.
This is to say that even in dictatorships the voting numbers itself don't have to be fabricated. It's only necessary to let the people know that They know who you're voting for and They will take action if you vote the wrong way.
1) Acquire the list of votes and voters 2) In the following years, kill, torture or otherwise affect to the people who voted wrong 3) PROF---Win the election
We've always had cameras with loudspeakers in the UK. There has been not a day without these cameras in the UK. This message brought to you by The Ministry of the Truth.
You know what that means, right? It means that not accepting MS Office files is just the tip of the iceberg. It means every other format the government uses will have to be open too, including audio/video codecs, and -- best yet -- CAD FORMATS!
They use sentences like "Belgium's government departments will be instructed to use an open file format for internal communications", "all document exchanges within the services of the Belgian Government will have to be in an open, standard format" and "Belgium's Federal services must use ODF when exchanging documents, though other formats will still be allowed for internal use". (The sucky emphasis is mine)
And when you take into account the fact of AutoCAD's DWG being de facto standard and the fact that principles and reality often collide in decisions like this, I wouldn't throw my AutoCAD away just yet.
Nevertheless it's exciting to see what this decision does in reality and what this means for European Union...
Offering money is a great way of getting people interested in many things, but do the people who are capable of creating valuable bug reports and/or patches really need these bounties?
I wonder how many crappy bug reports and patches are to be submitted because of the "easy" money being given. I do believe that the bounties will go to the right people and for the right reasons, but more the crap, the more it takes work to find the gems.
But about the other part... I am still using latest WA 2.x on my 90 MHz Pentium laptop vith 40 megabytes of memory and Windows 98 in it. I don't think it as bloated or dog slow.
And I just had to check: the Winamp Browser (as it apparently was known back then; later known as Winamp Mini-browser) came with the second 2.x version, 2.10 released on 3/24/99. (http://www.sonicspot.com/winamp/history.html)
AOL bought Nullsoft a few months after this, on 4th of June 1999. (http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/1999/0 6/07/story2.html)
I know you didn't say AOL brought the stupid browser, but I really wanted to say it did not:-)
Anyway, this truly is bad news for many Windows and Winamp users around the world.
This is like a police leaving a moderately new car, with its keys inside and doors wide open to the middle of a city and then arresting anyone who tries to start the car.
I think it's stupid, although quite a good practical presentation of users' will to go by the rules.
Why did you start installing Debian if you already had a working system? Despite the fact that Debian is the best Linux distribution, of course;-)
But if you're going to install, administrate and use any operating system effectively, IMHO you should know at least the devices you have in it.
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It just goes to show what a profitable business they have because they could easily cut their prices in half, still be profitable and would have more customers as people would be more willing to keep cable tv as well as have phone and internet.
FTFY. Having a great profit margin does not mean you have a monopoly. Also, the idea of giving a huge discount to retain a customer does not really sound like something a monopoly would want to, need to or normally would do.
Now, I don't know if they have a monopoly or not. All I'm saying is that your argumentation is not valid.
When Danske Bank bought Finnish Sampo Pankki, they forced it (and its customers) to move to Danske Bank group's online banking software which pretty much sucked and supposedly still sucks. And requires Java.
Sampo Pankki had one of the best online banking experience in Finland, feature- and usability-wise. It did not require Java or other sillyness from the client.
IIRC The Danske Bank applet's the client code had some obfuscation/encryption features in it but the author hadn't used it. So the code was easily opened and analyzed. One of the things they found out that the Java software collected very detailed information from the client computer and user and sent it to the server. This was information which has nothing to do with banking.
During the transition Danske Bank had a lot of problems not only in the web bank but in money transfers etc. The fiasco caused an outrage and they say even tens of thousands of customers left. This is not a small thing in a country of about 5,4 million people.
I closed all my accounts with Sampo Pankki soon after the whole thing, mainly because of the crappy web bank, Java dependency and the privacy violations. Sadly though my new bank's web bank wasn't nearly as good as Sampo Pankki had before Danske crap. But it sure beats running some spyware Java applet while doing banking online...
The law actually says the list is supposed to be used against sites outside Finland. Not sites residing in Finland. And even then this particular site has no child porn on it. And why would you block a local site ineffectively when you can just go and take the server out?
Remember the censorship and blacklist has been in use for years. Matti Nikki found out that many of the sites are totally within laws and has been compiling a list of them. Curiously, many of the false positives contained gay porn.
This story is about expanding the censorship, but it's already being used to block other than child porn sites. I'm not quite sure about the situation nowadays but originally there was no way for you to file a complaint about ending up on the list. If I recall correctly, Matti Nikki found out that apparently the police compiling a list does not constitute an official ruling, so there's no way to complain about it.
You know the major ISPs in Finland already block The Pirate Bay? It's painful for me to say, but the good thing in TPB block is that at least it got done by a court order. One way or another, sites like lapsiporno.info and TPB are going to get blocked. Then there are the online casinos, "extremists" and you know, all the Bad guys(tm)...
Your profile should feel like your home on the web — you should never feel like stuff appears there that you don't want, and you should never wonder who sees what's there.
That's they way I read this. I thought this was their wish from the beginning; don't think, just post.
There's so much white space you could call it the apartheid! I wouldn't call the design bad, though. I kinda like it, and it has a lot of potential, being quite clear.
But the clearness (clarity?) of the design comes from being washed-out and having too much white space. It needs some balance between "spacious" and "everything separated by 100 white pixels". And some contrast.
Just my 4 eurocents...
I would like to point out that the censorship law says nothing about links, or listing sites with links. And in the law itself its purpose is said to be to promote measures which can be used to prevent access to foreign child porn sites. Lapsiporno.info is neither foreign nor contains any child porn.
Also let it be known that Matti Nikki (muzzy) himself has actively reported actual child porn sites before, and some of them have been closed. Some was active even a year after reporting it. Of course, these sites are not Finnish.
The EFFI statement linked in the article is very thorough. In this case there really can be only one bias: the law is bad and the way of enforcing it is even worse.
If some "facts" are not to be trusted or not true, they're just that: "facts", not facts.
Granted, Wikipedia (Oxford English Dictionary) tells that the meanings allegation or stipulation have a long history in English. It does not mean that it's really the case in contemporary every-day language.
And actually the Wikipedia (OED) example quote is: "the author's facts are not trustworthy". It would sound silly to say "author's facts are not facts" because it does not emphasize the point which is that the "facts" are not trustworthy. They might not be true.
And all this is even without taking the context into account. Here we are talking about scientific (or technical) facts, and in that context you can not talk about "true facts" or "non-true facts" because there is no such thing as a non-true fact. Fact is a fact is a fact. Fact is something that exists, has existed or something that has "the quality of being actual" (i.e. it is true). Even your own sources tell that this is the case in our context.
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A%20fact
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=fact
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/fact
This is to say that even in dictatorships the voting numbers itself don't have to be fabricated. It's only necessary to let the people know that They know who you're voting for and They will take action if you vote the wrong way.
1) Acquire the list of votes and voters
2) In the following years, kill, torture or otherwise affect to the people who voted wrong
3) PROF---Win the election
PS. No, I'm not talking about the US.
We've always had cameras with loudspeakers in the UK. There has been not a day without these cameras in the UK.
This message brought to you by The Ministry of the Truth.
Well, from the real article this seems not to be so simple.
They use sentences like "Belgium's government departments will be instructed to use an open file format for internal communications", "all document exchanges within the services of the Belgian Government will have to be in an open, standard format" and "Belgium's Federal services must use ODF when exchanging documents, though other formats will still be allowed for internal use". (The sucky emphasis is mine)
And when you take into account the fact of AutoCAD's DWG being de facto standard and the fact that principles and reality often collide in decisions like this, I wouldn't throw my AutoCAD away just yet.
Nevertheless it's exciting to see what this decision does in reality and what this means for European Union...
Offering money is a great way of getting people interested in many things, but do the people who are capable of creating valuable bug reports and/or patches really need these bounties?
I wonder how many crappy bug reports and patches are to be submitted because of the "easy" money being given. I do believe that the bounties will go to the right people and for the right reasons, but more the crap, the more it takes work to find the gems.
Nevertheless, it's about time to unbloat Gnome.
But about the other part... I am still using latest WA 2.x on my 90 MHz Pentium laptop vith 40 megabytes of memory and Windows 98 in it. I don't think it as bloated or dog slow.
And I just had to check:0 6/07/story2.html)
I know you didn't say AOL brought the stupid browser, but I really wanted to say it did not :-)
the Winamp Browser (as it apparently was known back then; later known as Winamp Mini-browser) came with the second 2.x version, 2.10 released on 3/24/99. (http://www.sonicspot.com/winamp/history.html)
AOL bought Nullsoft a few months after this, on 4th of June 1999. (http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/1999/
Anyway, this truly is bad news for many Windows and Winamp users around the world.
This is like a police leaving a moderately new car, with its keys inside and doors wide open to the middle of a city and then arresting anyone who tries to start the car.
I think it's stupid, although quite a good practical presentation of users' will to go by the rules.
Why did you start installing Debian if you already had a working system? Despite the fact that Debian is the best Linux distribution, of course ;-)
But if you're going to install, administrate and use any operating system effectively, IMHO you should know at least the devices you have in it.