I've always maintained that there's a big difference between driving fast and driving dangerously.
While I agree that you don't have to drive fast to drive dangerously it is still a simple fact that the faster you travel, the greater the potential for damage if anything goes wrong...
Even if you are the perfect driver (like 90% of all drivers seem to think of themselves), keep in mind that those other 90% out there are not -- and they're on the same road as you are.
If you like to drive fast and you have the proper skills to do so, goodie: do it where you're supposed to -- on a private circuit or race track. Don't expose us (or for that matter: yourself) to more risk than needed. Thanks!
The best way to deal with blatant violations of privacy by a large corporation is a strong negative consumer reaction.
How is this a 'blatant violation of privacy', if people can either voluntarily sign up for the service (with discounts) or still use the good old service (sans discounts)?
This device is no conditio sine quae non to get car insurance at progressive: Progressive sees it as an option to offer lower rates with limited risks on their side. And even if it were compulsory, you're still free to get your car insurance somewhere else...
If Progressive somehow got their hands on this kind of data without your consent, then we'd be talking about big privacy issues. Now it's just a company trying to lure clients from the ideal (ie: crash-free) demographic...
I thought that GPL is geographically independent that can be uphold anywhere, because it was a "ethics-social-agenda"-based license
The strength of the GPL is that it's fully based on copyright law; the weakness of the GPL (in the non-US part of the planet) is that it's fully based on US copyright law.
When open source software is developed and mainly targeted at a particular country (e.g.: France), it may not be a bad choice to add a licence that is based on the local copyright laws. That will make it a lot easier to enforce and/or defend it if it should come to a trial.
Theoretically, the Berne convention should cover international copyrights. In practice are lawsuits that cover international laws a lot more difficult , and a lot more expensive to pursuit.
Going over the head of the new manager will make him mark you up as target number one whenever he needs downsizing.
The only thing you have to do at this time is to make it clear to your CIO that you consider this a problem via mail (ie: create a paper trail), and that your personal budget does not allow this. Whenever something happens that you cannot respond to properly, refer to your mails about this.
If that internet connection/pager/cell phone is a necessity to do your job properly, it should be provided for by your company.
If your new CIO is cutting these 'benefits', he either:
is making a statement to his minions (and more importantly: to his peer C-men) about being in control of the budget.
has knowledge of a shaky financial situation ahead.
wants to test you and your colleagues to find out who are submissive and who isn't.
is just a schmuck who doesn't know better.
I would make it clear to him (on paper/mail) that those tool(s) are indispensible for providing service outside of business hours and that they should not be dependable on personal budgets.
Sit it out for a couple of days/weeks, the more he is getting to know the team, he may as well see how those tools are important to you and to the business.
I wanted to make some space on my development box at work for my linux partition, so I used PQMagic to resize the NTFS partition with all my source code on my second HD...
As can be expected I ignored all 'did you backup your data' dialogs and had PQMagic crash in the middle of resizing.
I spent the rest of the day finding/trying every single commercial NTFS recovery tool I could lay my hands on to get my data back, without success.
At that point I was certain that I lost a lot of stuff that I didn't sync with my network drive, and in a last futile attempt, I ran NT's own chkdsk on the partition. That little sucker fixed my partition in 30 seconds flat. You cannot imagine the joy of that moment:)
Why must everything involving alcohol (at least in the US) automatically assume at one point or another that drinking = bad?
Perhaps because it actually is?
I'm aware that this may sound inflammatory, but technically alcohol is a hard drug -- ie: you get physiologically (?) addicted to it. Even though it is a socially accepted drug, my guess is that it causes more trouble than all other drugs combined, with the exception of perhaps nicotine/cigarettes. So a 'caveat emptor' is definitely in place...
The only reason this is is noted on the project site though is because this is part of an assignment, and they are scored on safety and ethics too. (They wouldn't have built the damn thing if they couldn't test it themselves, ofcourse;-)
I see your point, but I may have not made my point clear enough. If certain people are infringing on copyrights by doing things that are 'obviously' not fair use (ie: sharing a lot of copyrighted material to anybody who can install KaZaa), the only way to deal with them is to go through the legal system (ie: sue them). Suing these people is not 'obliterating fair use' since distributing a load of material to a lot of people is not exactly 'fair use'. It is up to the judge to decide what is fair use and what is not in each individual case.
Courts are not only the predominant tool to 'erode' and 're-define' Fair Use, they are the predominant tool to 're-define' any given law by setting precedents/case law.
Copywrite was Originally meant to prevent you from distributing someone elses work For Profit - precident over the decades has re-defined it to mean "prevents you from distributing somebody elses work, plain and simple".
One of the main issues why the 'For Profit' part is less important is that the costs of distributing copyrighted material on-line (ie: filesharing) is nearly zero. 10 years ago, it was cost-prohibitive to distribute a copy of a record/CD at large for free: I had to invest heaps of money to get it either on tape or on CD, and unless I had very expensive equipment the number of copies I could churn out was very low. Nowadays, hosting a simple MP3 for download costs me nothing, and if you have broadband internet access the bandwidth price for any downloads is in most cases negligable. This allows me to do massive distribution without a huge bill that needs to be footed.
You should Not even be able to hold complicated laws against below average people - If a law can not be understood by at least 75% of the population , something is inherently wrong.
For any law, the devil is in the details and it's a lawyers job to know every nook and cranny of it. Does that make the gist of copyright law difficult? I don't think so:
You can rip all the CD's you have for your own usage (on PC, portable player,...)
You should be able to rip all copy-protected media as well for personal use if it weren't for the DMCA. Any judge with a shred of common sense won't convict Johnny for ripping his copy-protected CD so that he could listen to it on his iPod. And there are a lot if countries where there is no DMCA-alike so this is still a non-issue.
You can lend/borrow the occasional CD to/from your friend. You can even give them an MP3 of one song you're particularly fond of.
You can not rip all your CDs, put them online on KaZaa (ie: make them available for the world in full) and expect to get away with it. Even if you didn't rip the CDs yourself but just downloaded everything yourself you're still distributing copyrighted material without consent.
Civil disobedience is fine and dandy, but there's no guarantee that the judge will go for that. If you go that way, you either hope that the judge will sympathize with your views of how the law should be, or you are prepared to face the consequences to make the rest of the community realise how wrong the law is. It is just one way to fight an unjust law.
In the end, you guys live in a democracy, so if everybody would get off their collective butts and started to care about this issue, legislation would be changed in no time. Truth is that nobody cares enough when election day comes... A bit of a self-fullfilling prophecy, if you ask me...
And suppose all illegal file sharing instantly stopped this second. What makes you think that CDs would be released without copy protection?
Because that will take all wind out of the sails of their lobbying efforts regarding the legal enforcing of DRM (ie: DMCA et al.).
Their main argument for lobbying the introduction of DRM legislation is that their copyright needs extra protection from illegal distribution (ie: on-line filesharing). From that point of view, the restriction of fair-use rights is just 'collateral damage'.
If there would be no massively on-line sharing of their copyrighted works (and don't tell me this is not happening), they would not have a leg to stand on to get DRM legislated, because at that point it will only cripple our rights. And if they can buy enough politicians to get it introduced, we would still have a clear case through the court system.
I'm aware that the industry ultimately wants to control anything and everything, and illegal uses of filesharing are giving them the right ammunition to pull this off. As I said: I don't want DRM legislated a la DMCA so we're all presumed guilty of copyright infringement, I want individual copyright infringers to be sued in court on the merits of what they did (ie: distributed that many songs to that many people), instead of being sued by under a blanket law for 'copying a CD'.
Repeat after me: just because the study proved that filesharing does not have a noticeable impact on CD sales does not make it legal!
Copyright law in many countries prevents you from distributing somebody elses work, plain and simple. These people are not being sued because they had some kind of tangible impact on sales, but because they were distributing copyrighted material to anybody (ie: nothing to do with fair use rights here).
These are the people that are making it bloody hard for the rest of us to get non-crippled CDs, because the recording industry thinks this is the way to fight them (which it incidentally is not, but that's a whole different story).
I'm glad the record industry is suing, because this is the way copyright conflicts should be dealt with: in court. Not with half-assed technological countermeasures that are making it a pain for the rest of us, and certainly not with lobbying legislation that will obliterate 'fair use' for their works.
It's been in production in Europe in a number of countries; I have a TMC-capable navigation system in my car, and traffic jams show up nicely (and I'm rerouted accordingly).
Is there a special reason why robots marketed in Japan (or Asia?) feature either musical skills, or ar able todance?
It seems that almost everytime there is a message here about a new robot coming from Japan, the feature list includes some kind of dancing/singing. Anybody knows why?
Give him a leatherman tool (provided he doesn't already have one)... A lot of choice in your budget range: for $100 you can get a nice one.
For the 'crafty' 'unique' bit, you may want to consider some special kind of packaging that is challenging to actually open... My little brother always gets the same gift for his birthday (money), but he never got a gift from me that didn't take at least 15 minutes get fully open.
One possible example: present him his gift in a box closed with a couple of padlocks, and make him earn the keys with some fun assignments (up to you to think of those).
WRT all the 'sex' postings: sex is not a 'gift' or something you should 'give'. On valentine, you should most importantly make time for each other and enjoy being together in whatever way you spend the day/evening.
[this may well be an answer on a troll]
The guy who constructed the Han Solo and Deathstar is actually one of the selected contestants (mr. Sawaya, IIRC).
That is true -- in the US. This is not the case in Europe. Here heating is transfellered with water. I recall when I used to live in the Bay Area and we had one of those air blowing heaters. Completely inefficient!
Actually, if you're heating your house with radiators (which I assume is the case), you're heating with 'hot air'... Instead of relying on a fan and ducts to distribute the heat from the central heat exchanger, your radiators (ie: local heat exchanger) are heating up the room through convection (ie: air near the radiator gets hot and rises, colder air is sucked up from below, repeat ad nauseam).
Heating with hot air (using a central heat exchanger, ducts and heat-recuperation) can be a lot more efficient than plain old radiators, provided the system has been designed/installed properly. Especially so when you have big rooms/spaces, which is also the reason why big spaces (think shopping mall, theatre,...) are almost always heated with some kind of air heating system instead of radiators.
Disclaimer: I'm European, and will be installing air heating in the house we're currently building for above reasons:)
True, but most ISPs configure their proxies to pass an X-Forwarded-For header, which includes the IP address that requested the resource.
If that's not the case, at least the feds know which ISP to subpoena for the proxy logs:-).
"Internet Protocol Address Verifier? Is this Carnivore in action?"
Methinks that would be marketing speak for an HTML mail with a web bug (1x1 transparent pixel image loaded from remote server). If the 'villain' is using a mail program that displays HTML, his IP address is logged.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you are the perfect driver (like 90% of all drivers seem to think of themselves), keep in mind that those other 90% out there are not -- and they're on the same road as you are.
If you like to drive fast and you have the proper skills to do so, goodie: do it where you're supposed to -- on a private circuit or race track. Don't expose us (or for that matter: yourself) to more risk than needed. Thanks!
This device is no conditio sine quae non to get car insurance at progressive: Progressive sees it as an option to offer lower rates with limited risks on their side. And even if it were compulsory, you're still free to get your car insurance somewhere else...
If Progressive somehow got their hands on this kind of data without your consent, then we'd be talking about big privacy issues. Now it's just a company trying to lure clients from the ideal (ie: crash-free) demographic...
That should teach me from not trusting you tinfoil-hat types :)
The guy used windowsupdatenow.com. for his toolbar. (It's in the article... nkay?)
Those who're running IE with active-X controls enabled should click on it... Perhaps get some more holes fixed :-)
When open source software is developed and mainly targeted at a particular country (e.g.: France), it may not be a bad choice to add a licence that is based on the local copyright laws. That will make it a lot easier to enforce and/or defend it if it should come to a trial.
Theoretically, the Berne convention should cover international copyrights. In practice are lawsuits that cover international laws a lot more difficult , and a lot more expensive to pursuit.
And no, it has nothing to do with either being feminist, male or a pig.
The only thing you have to do at this time is to make it clear to your CIO that you consider this a problem via mail (ie: create a paper trail), and that your personal budget does not allow this. Whenever something happens that you cannot respond to properly, refer to your mails about this.
If your new CIO is cutting these 'benefits', he either:
- is making a statement to his minions (and more importantly: to his peer C-men) about being in control of the budget.
- has knowledge of a shaky financial situation ahead.
- wants to test you and your colleagues to find out who are submissive and who isn't.
- is just a schmuck who doesn't know better.
I would make it clear to him (on paper/mail) that those tool(s) are indispensible for providing service outside of business hours and that they should not be dependable on personal budgets.Sit it out for a couple of days/weeks, the more he is getting to know the team, he may as well see how those tools are important to you and to the business.
I wanted to make some space on my development box at work for my linux partition, so I used PQMagic to resize the NTFS partition with all my source code on my second HD...
As can be expected I ignored all 'did you backup your data' dialogs and had PQMagic crash in the middle of resizing.
I spent the rest of the day finding/trying every single commercial NTFS recovery tool I could lay my hands on to get my data back, without success. :)
At that point I was certain that I lost a lot of stuff that I didn't sync with my network drive, and in a last futile attempt, I ran NT's own chkdsk on the partition. That little sucker fixed my partition in 30 seconds flat. You cannot imagine the joy of that moment
Brilliant 'modern rock' covers (mostly up-tempo) done by a couple of geezers on a whole collection of 'vintage synths'... (moogs, mellotron, ...)
Not that much different from cheesy midi files, but that record never failed to make me smile
If a pro plans on doing a lot of digital, the 1D is a far better choice:
- Full frame sensor: very big feature since it doesn't introduce the focal multiplier
- Continuous shooting is far better
- Better light measurement, AF speed, AF sensors
- Rugged, weatherproof design where all joints are lined with o-rings
A body is just a body, the real investment for any professional is the lenses, especially Canon L-glass.See here.
I'm aware that this may sound inflammatory, but technically alcohol is a hard drug -- ie: you get physiologically (?) addicted to it. Even though it is a socially accepted drug, my guess is that it causes more trouble than all other drugs combined, with the exception of perhaps nicotine/cigarettes. So a 'caveat emptor' is definitely in place...
The only reason this is is noted on the project site though is because this is part of an assignment, and they are scored on safety and ethics too. (They wouldn't have built the damn thing if they couldn't test it themselves, ofcourse ;-)
Courts are not only the predominant tool to 'erode' and 're-define' Fair Use, they are the predominant tool to 're-define' any given law by setting precedents/case law.
One of the main issues why the 'For Profit' part is less important is that the costs of distributing copyrighted material on-line (ie: filesharing) is nearly zero. 10 years ago, it was cost-prohibitive to distribute a copy of a record/CD at large for free: I had to invest heaps of money to get it either on tape or on CD, and unless I had very expensive equipment the number of copies I could churn out was very low. Nowadays, hosting a simple MP3 for download costs me nothing, and if you have broadband internet access the bandwidth price for any downloads is in most cases negligable. This allows me to do massive distribution without a huge bill that needs to be footed. For any law, the devil is in the details and it's a lawyers job to know every nook and cranny of it. Does that make the gist of copyright law difficult? I don't think so:- You can rip all the CD's you have for your own usage (on PC, portable player,
...)
- You should be able to rip all copy-protected media as well for personal use if it weren't for the DMCA. Any judge with a shred of common sense won't convict Johnny for ripping his copy-protected CD so that he could listen to it on his iPod. And there are a lot if countries where there is no DMCA-alike so this is still a non-issue.
- You can lend/borrow the occasional CD to/from your friend. You can even give them an MP3 of one song you're particularly fond of.
- You can not rip all your CDs, put them online on KaZaa (ie: make them available for the world in full) and expect to get away with it. Even if you didn't rip the CDs yourself but just downloaded everything yourself you're still distributing copyrighted material without consent.
Civil disobedience is fine and dandy, but there's no guarantee that the judge will go for that. If you go that way, you either hope that the judge will sympathize with your views of how the law should be, or you are prepared to face the consequences to make the rest of the community realise how wrong the law is. It is just one way to fight an unjust law.In the end, you guys live in a democracy, so if everybody would get off their collective butts and started to care about this issue, legislation would be changed in no time. Truth is that nobody cares enough when election day comes... A bit of a self-fullfilling prophecy, if you ask me...
Their main argument for lobbying the introduction of DRM legislation is that their copyright needs extra protection from illegal distribution (ie: on-line filesharing). From that point of view, the restriction of fair-use rights is just 'collateral damage'.
If there would be no massively on-line sharing of their copyrighted works (and don't tell me this is not happening), they would not have a leg to stand on to get DRM legislated, because at that point it will only cripple our rights. And if they can buy enough politicians to get it introduced, we would still have a clear case through the court system.
I'm aware that the industry ultimately wants to control anything and everything, and illegal uses of filesharing are giving them the right ammunition to pull this off. As I said: I don't want DRM legislated a la DMCA so we're all presumed guilty of copyright infringement, I want individual copyright infringers to be sued in court on the merits of what they did (ie: distributed that many songs to that many people), instead of being sued by under a blanket law for 'copying a CD'.
Copyright law in many countries prevents you from distributing somebody elses work, plain and simple. These people are not being sued because they had some kind of tangible impact on sales, but because they were distributing copyrighted material to anybody (ie: nothing to do with fair use rights here).
These are the people that are making it bloody hard for the rest of us to get non-crippled CDs, because the recording industry thinks this is the way to fight them (which it incidentally is not, but that's a whole different story).
I'm glad the record industry is suing, because this is the way copyright conflicts should be dealt with: in court. Not with half-assed technological countermeasures that are making it a pain for the rest of us, and certainly not with lobbying legislation that will obliterate 'fair use' for their works.
It's been in production in Europe in a number of countries; I have a TMC-capable navigation system in my car, and traffic jams show up nicely (and I'm rerouted accordingly).
It seems that almost everytime there is a message here about a new robot coming from Japan, the feature list includes some kind of dancing/singing. Anybody knows why?
Boggles my mind :-)
For the 'crafty' 'unique' bit, you may want to consider some special kind of packaging that is challenging to actually open... My little brother always gets the same gift for his birthday (money), but he never got a gift from me that didn't take at least 15 minutes get fully open.
One possible example: present him his gift in a box closed with a couple of padlocks, and make him earn the keys with some fun assignments (up to you to think of those).
WRT all the 'sex' postings: sex is not a 'gift' or something you should 'give'. On valentine, you should most importantly make time for each other and enjoy being together in whatever way you spend the day/evening.
The guy who constructed the Han Solo and Deathstar is actually one of the selected contestants (mr. Sawaya, IIRC).
Heating with hot air (using a central heat exchanger, ducts and heat-recuperation) can be a lot more efficient than plain old radiators, provided the system has been designed/installed properly. Especially so when you have big rooms/spaces, which is also the reason why big spaces (think shopping mall, theatre, ...) are almost always heated with some kind of air heating system instead of radiators.
Disclaimer: I'm European, and will be installing air heating in the house we're currently building for above reasons :)
If that's not the case, at least the feds know which ISP to subpoena for the proxy logs