There was a TV news report that interest for the iPhone sale start was low in Germany (Frankfurt), too. There was a small crowd of people at midnight - very little in comparison to the US.
I think most people have better phones (e.g. a Treo offers much more than the iPhone), so a new phone with few capabilities, but an unreasonably high price just isn't interesting.
I don't know about the Brainbench tests, but I know the Java certification tests from Sun (I did SCJP 5.0 last year, currently, I'm preparing for SCWCD, and I also also read preparation books for SCBCD).
Overall, I have a relatively good impression about these tests. I would say that there are hardly any questions that are so stupid that you cannot understand what the matter of the question is. But misleading questions are definitely quite frequent. I think typically when you do mock exams in an early stage of the preparation, the main reason for wrong answers is not that you don't know the answer (though there's quite a lot you have to learn by heart, as well), but that you thought the question was mainly about one issue, but if you had looked more closely, you would have seen that another issue was what really mattered for the answer.
I think that is part of the concept of such multiple choice tests. Therefore, I think, it can legitimately be the case that someone is experienced and good at programming in a language, but doesn't do well in such an exam - the exam just doesn't test what you normally use, you don't usually see so many misleading cases. For achieving a good result in such exams it is almost a necessity to use mock exams and preparation books even if you are an experienced developer in order to see where the pitfalls are.
So, I would say that the fact that someone didn't achieve a good result in such an exam does not mean that he or she is not a good developer. On the other hand, this does not mean that the exams are worthless, either; the additional knowledge and abilities gained by preparing for the exam can be useful, and a good result shows that someone has some in-depth knowledge in a standardized range of areas (not everything that is needed, but also things not everyone has used, but which may be useful).
How can 7 USD/h pay for the rent and living? In third world countries perhaps...
Well, I don't know exactly about prices in the US, but in Switzerland, where things are admittedly quite expensive, I certainly couldn't survive with so little money - (with 42 hours per week) it would be just a little more than the rent for a small apartment.
In many countries, you would hardly find anyone who is ready to work for so little money, and to expect experience or quality for so little money is just crazy in my opinion. Generally, I think it is good when people prefer to work rather than living on social benefits, but I also think that one of the functions of a correctly working welfare system is to prevent a job market with extremely low salaries. In many European countries, no employer would find people working for 7 or 8 USD/h because people get significantly more from welfare, and I think that's right. If an employer is not able to pay decent salaries, his business is obviously a failure, and there is no point in such failed businesses living on and exploiting people. If the US had a better welfare system, they would go out of business. Unemployment would be slightly higher, but large parts of the population would earn more because people couldn't be exploited because they wouldn't be so scared of destitution.
Workers should have a certain amount of pride, and not being ready to sell one's labor for about a fifth part of its worth and donating the rest to the employer does not have anything to do with an attitude of "money, money, money".
Of course, some of the energy used in the US is used for producing goods for export, but on the other hand, some of the energy used in other countries is used for producing goods that are then exported to the US. As far as I know, the US currently has an overall trade deficit. So, if it was calculated the way you suggest, the result would probably be that energy consumption in the US is *even more* disproportionately high than when imports and exports are not taken into account.
This is not true. Religon in America today is still strong as ever. While a large portion of the role religion of is being replaced by education and science, the socially cohesive effects are as strong as ever. [...]Europe is more or less still atheistic, but the value system is certainly the same - which is why we see the objections to Turkey joining the EU, and Christian parties are still key members of government coalitions.
I think there is a significant difference between Europe and America in that respect, in most parts of Europe, religion plays a rather small role for social cohesion. The objection to Turkey has much more to do with nationalism and cultural differences and prejudices than Europeans being religious Christians - it is just one of many cases in which religion is important as an attribute of national/ethic groups, but not because of its religious content. For instance, people in Northern Ireland or countries in former Yugoslavia, where there are conflicts between groups belonging to different religions, are hardly particularly religious, religion just happens to be an attribute of groups between which there are conflicts because of reasons not related to religion.
In many European countries, parties with 'Christian' in their name are strong, but most of them are just moderate conservative-centrist parties, and although there are sometimes discussions about the role of the 'C' in the name, in practice religion is not one of the central political issues of these parties.
Some people talk about a revival of religion, but I don't think the evidence is convincing, as far as Europe is concerned. Of course, the Christian religion is not completely dead in Europe, only a small minority of people are really religions, and in most cases when religion comes up in public discussion (often in connection with Islam) it is not really about religion, but about questions of migration and cultural traditions.
If one email is all it takes to sue someone, what's to stop my father-in-law from suing me when I ask him to join the latest pyramid scheme?
How could you prove that it's the same spammer from whose list you "unsubscribed"? The spammer had no right to collect the addresses and send mails to them. This case was in the EU, not in the US where a ridiculous law allows all the many thousands of companies to send you spam until you "unsubscribe" from something you never subscribed to and thereby let the spammers know that the address is active.
Your father in law stands in a certain relation to you, a spammer doesn't. There may be a theoretical problem of some borderline cases of spamming, but in practice, about most spam, there is no doubt.
I don't necessarily think competition between standards is always bad. In this case, most independent experts agree that ODF is better. But if people at Microsoft aren't sure about that, they could create a new version of MS Office that supports both ODF and their own format. That way, there would be two independent competitions, one between standard formats and one between different software. However, Microsoft wants joint competition rather than independent one - hoping that their large market share will also help their standard. Anyway, other Office suites will support both ODF and Microsoft's format, so those who will really want to try out different standard formats and let them compete in personal use will have to choose non-Microsoft office software.
But it misses my point, it's about mindshare and attitude - we need to get to a point where people and companies will start to feel embarrassed that they can't read OpenDocument formats.
I think this can be done without dropping support for any format in OpenOffice.org. When the document is not too large, it can be sent in several formats at once. When there are no specific requirements, I usually send people both OpenDocument and PDF versions of my documents - that way, almost anyone should be able to read it (at least the PDF version), and the recipients still see that my preferred format for text documents is OpenDocument.
No, the private individuals want access to property they've already paid for. Corporations want control of property that isn't theirs without consent, and expects the owners to pay them for them to take control. Somewhat different battle here.
Actually, that's just what some private individuals want. A few of the rest just want free stuff.
Yes, in my view, that's a big difference. I think that we have the right to watch DVDs we have bought with any operating system and with any region code, but certainly I don't generally have the right to use copyrighted material for free.
The majority of filesharers (let's be honest, most people aren't just downloading stuff they've paid for, or other legal items) want reasonably priced access to content, or at least access at a price set by a competetive free market. That's the real problem: the media rights holders are used to having a monopoly, and thus being able to charge whatever they wanted. Sure, there are multiple record labels, but only one tends to release any given piece of music. So if you want to listen to Nirvana, you had to buy it through Geffen (or Sub Pop, for their first release). Same principle for movies.
I don't think that competition should be understood that way. If people think that Nirvana CDs are too expensive, they can buy other music. If the price was really too high (in terms of the market) and significantly more CDs were sold if they were cheaper, it would be in the interest of the record company to sell them more cheaply, and they would probably do so. Maybe prices are a bit too high, but probably not much too high, otherwise other bands and record companies who sell cheaper CDs would have much success (for example if CDs by Nirvana and Britney Spears were sold for $1000, hardly anyone would buy them, but there actual price is probably more or less reasonable).
There are arguments for everyone having to be able to buy basic food items at an affordable price, but I really don't think people have a right to get CDs of a specific band at a low price. No one *needs* a specific CD. If they think it is too expensive, they don't have to buy it. There are quite a lot of bands that offer free songs on their website. If it was more profitable to sell CDs cheaper, they would be sold cheaper, I think in this area the market works quite well. I don't think it makes sense to call the fact that you can buy most books only from one publishing house and most CDs only from one record company a "monopoly" because for any area there are many books and for any style there are many songs and bands (it would be different if certain elements were patented and people were prevented from writing stories with certain storylines or songs with certain formal properties - that hypothetical case would rightly be called a monopoly).
And no, that amount is nowhere near zero. It doesn't need to be free to compete with piracy. But it obviously needs to be less than $20 for a new movie and $15 for a new CD.
Yes, but the market price for CDs and DVDs is significantly lower if they have to compete with piracy, and understandably record companies don't want that. They cannot eradicate piracy, but they can make it more difficult with legal means, which weakens their "competitor" piracy and therefore allows them to keep higher prices (but not arbitrarily high prices - since no one has a vital need for specific CDs and DVDs, the prices have to be competitive in any case, they just do not necessarily have to be able to compete with piracy).
I think record companies would be insane if they just put up with illegal redistribution, and I think it is their right to sue people for copyright infringement. But people should not allow them to take measures that restrict the rights of legal users.
And like wise if the lack of a player were really the reason Linux users have to rip dvds then they could just buy a commercial playback device. Both sides are lieing out there asses.
Why should I buy a separate device if I already have a computer that can play DVDs? I don't like wasting money for devices I don't need, and I don't want too many of them standing around. A few days ago, I installed everything for watching DVDs on my laptop with SUSE Linux, but it's a nuisance that no working DVD player is included because of legal threats - certainly, many users find it too difficult to install what is lacking, and the ability to play DVDs is nowadays a rather basic function of a computer.
On one of my computers I have dual-boot with Windows, so if you already think people who want to watch DVDs on Linux are lying because they might buy a separate device for watching DVDs, you would probably think even more so about me because I could just start Windows on that computer, but in that case you're wrong. Why should one have to start another operating system just to watch DVDs?
this is about whether or not people have the right to rip and secondly if they have the right to re-distribute.
Certainly not. You can rip and redistribute DVDs with any operating system, but you cannot *watch* your DVDs with standard Linux distributions. Making a backup of DVDs can be useful, but that can be done with any operating system, as well. That unlicenced restribution is prohibited (in my view rightly so) has nothing to do with the lack of a DVD player for Linux.
In my view, there are two important problems with DVDs:
1. For no kind of content for a broad audience should there be a non-open standard format for which royalties have to be paid. That this isn't the case for most DVDs does not have anything to do with preventing illegal redistribution, it is just an attempt to force people to buy certain programs for watching DVDs that they have bought.
2. Region codes. Region codes might have some very marginal significance for preventing the sale of "pirated" DVDs, but in principle they don't make copying and illegal redistribution more difficult. On the other hand, they make things much more difficult for normal, legal users. Luckily I have an external DVD drive which I originally bought for using as a CD burner (when I had a laptop without an internal CD burner), so I can watch my American code 1 DVDs with this external drive and European ones with the internal one - but this is just ludicrous. For Russian DVDs, I would again have to use another computer because most DVD drivers in computers have a region code that cannot be reset with standard methods. Most dedicated DVD players that are sold here (in Switzerland) are region-code free. There should be consumer pressure for computer and computer DVD drive manufacturers to sell region-code free drives, as well. Region-codes are probably partly an attempt at non-competitive behaviour and partly just stupidity. Maybe those who invented them never travel abroad, don't know any foreign languages and aren't interested in films for which there is no version for their own region, but they should not think that DVD watchers are as limited as they are.
These are serious problems with DVDs, and they don't have anything to do with illegal redistribution.
Moreover, European copyrights expire sooner than American copyrights, at the moment. So a lot of valuable 20th-century material could become available.
Where did you get this crazy notion?
As far as I know, copyrights for books - and that is what this discussion is about - do not expire sooner in Europe. But copyrights for other works, such as music, do expire sooner in Europe (in Europe 50 years after their release, in the US 95 years see BBC article. Rock'n'Roll classics are already starting to get out of copyright in Europe, the first song of the Beatles in 2013. Americans will have to wait 45 years longer.
By the time the French started expanding their colonial empire the best overseas territories (those with sparse, primitive populations) were already taken. They had to conquer densely populated areas with advanced cultures, such as Indochina or Algeria. Large populations with advanced cultures are hard (almost impossible) to assimilate or destroy. For a while they managed to coerce native people to speak French and (forcefully) assimilate the French culture but eventually the native languages and cultures resurfaced and the French were kicked out violently out of those countries.
I don't know about Indochina - I suppose French does not play a central role there -, but you are wrong about Algeria. Today's Algeria can fairly be described as bilingual, French still is important alongside Arabic. I know people from Algeria who came to Switzerland as asylum-seekers in recent years. French is not a foreign language for them. The French state and the French army were kicked out of Algeria, but the French language did not vanish.
Furthermore, French is one of the most important supraregional languages in Africa (probably even more important than Swahili and English on the whole).
I don't think differences in colonial policies explain that much. English is still present in India and French is still present in Algeria, some Caribbean countries and many African countries. The one factor that probably contributed to today's position of English most is the big international importance and power of the United States in the situation that came about after the Second World War and in the Cold War.
The American movie industry has been very good at driving out foreign competition. In Europe, you can easily see good American, European and sometimes Asian films, but in the US it is more difficult to find something non-American. That narrows down people's cultural horizon.
Indeed! I use both Linux and Windows regularly, and I've certainly used Windows more in my life than Linux, but while 'su' was a matter of course for me (and KDE as in default SuSE asks me for the root password anyway, when it's needed), I only found out about how to run a program as a different user in Windows in this thread! I have the impression that the opposite of what many people claim is the case: Windows' functionality is not so much worse than Linux's, but the usability of Windows is much worse than the one of Linux - while things are relatively easy to see and find out in Linux, much of Windows' functionality is hidden somewhere or integrated in the GUI so counter-intuitively that many people believe it does not exist. (Also documentation seems to be much better with Linux, it's relatively easy to use manpages, info, apropos and package documentation, but I would not know where to look for a documentation for such things like "Run as" in Windows - maybe it is somewhere in a help file, but I think it would be hard to find.) I think quite a lot of the things people do without problems with Linux could also be done with Windows, but the bad user interface of Windows makes it more difficult to find out how it works - if Microsoft wanted to improve, they should look how things are done for instance in KDE or GNOME.
I read many articles in many newspaper about the ad and the way donations were collected, and in German newspapers, they wrote both about the ad in the New Yorks time and the one in Frankfurter Allgemeine (a major German newspaper) that was published on December 2. Firefox is, of course, a sufficient reason to write articles about, but this idea that users donate money for an advertisement for Free software is an additional topic to write about, and the more people can read about Firefox and other Free software in newspapers (not only computer magazines) the better. I think, apart from some controversial political ads, it is quite rare that ads are so frequently made a topic of newspaper articles like these ads for Firefox in the New York times and Frankfurter Allgemeine.
Wrong in the FAQ: Trillian does work with Linux
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I don't know how define "support", but Trillian works well with WINE, so they should write this in the FAQ. I use it with the SuSE rack version of Crossover Office, it's one of the preconficured suggestions for download and installation there, it works as if it was an application designed for Linux.
It may be regretted that they don't provide a link to GAIM as a Linux alternative, but I find it even worse that they create the wrong impression that Trillian does not work on Linux systems - it works very well. Are they too modest to mention all platforms on which Trillian works?
And since Trillian works so well with WINE, it would be very easy to create binaries for Linux with the WINE libraries. Some applications are difficult to port to another platform, but not to do so when it is easy is odd.
I'd even say Trillian runs particularly well with WINE, at least when it's used with Crossover Office. I use it with the Wine Rack CD for SuSE Linux, it can download and install Trillian (Trillian is one of the programs that are suggested for download and preconfigured in the Wine Rack version of Crossover Office), and it works so well that you would hardly think it wasn't a program written for Linux. It seems a non-transparent skin is used automatically if Trillian is used with the WINE Rack CD for SuSE, it is perfectly transparent and has its particular shape on my Linux desktop, and the system tray icon is not in its own window, but where it should be - in the KDE system tray, next to the Yast Online Update and Klipper symbol.
The only thing I find odd is that, given that Trillian works so well with Wine, the developers do not compile it with the Wine libraries and create a binary for Linux. With very little effort, they could have a Linux version of Trillian, and even if the market share of Linux is much smaller than the one of Windows, it seems that this small effort is certainly worth it, and then they could offer the Linux version for download and write in their FAQ that there is a Linux version.
I suppose Google search does use the frequency of searches rather than frequency of occurrence on web pages. Indications for this are that current topics frequently appear in Gootgle Suggest and that the groups of words that are suggested together are more typical for words used together in searches than for words occurring tohether in texts.
So why are there so many searches for 'Google'? I remember searching for Google on Google relatively from time to time. Why not? It's always intering what people write about new features etc.. What is very important is probably that Firefox uses Google-"I'm feeling lucky"-search for everything in the address field that is not an URL. Probably, many people just enter "google" in the address field. So, you have to type fewer characters than with "www.google.com" (of course, autocomplete would help, but when you entered "Google" instead of "www.google.com" the first time, auto-suggest will also suggest Google later). The time needed for the Google "I'm feeling lucky" search is in my view reasonable, it's quite reasonable to use it instead of the full address for well-known websites and institutions.
I don't have screen readers, but sometimes Lynx can give a rough idea how they will deal with a site. With Lynx, no suggestions are shown on the site of Google Suggest, but otherwise the page works just like standard Google search. Therefore, it might well be that Google Search works well with Screen Readers (it just doesn't provide suggestions). Actually, I think the use Google Suggest makes of JavaScript is not a problem from the point of view of accessibility - it offers something additional, but does not affect the main function (GMail is more problematic, an additional simple HTML interface should be made available for screen readers etc.).
Indeed, there are no suggestions for English search terms that could lead to pornographic sites. It seems that this is only based on a word list and much less sophisticated than "safe search".
Therefore, at present, this works only for English; with other languages it can happen that it suggests porn-prone search terms for the refinement of terms that have, as such, nothing to do with pornography. Some examples:
the first suggestion for 'fille' (French for 'girl') is 'nue' (naked)
the 5th suggestion for 'dzieci' (Polish for 'children') is 'nago' (naked)
suggestions for 'mund' (German for 'mouth') countain 'mund auf sperma rein' (open mouth, introduce sperms), 'mund ficken' (fuck in the mouth), "mund arsch" (mouth ass)
devochki (with Cyrillic letters: Russian for "little girls") gives the suggestions "devochki porno"
the first suggestion for 'smot...' with Cyrillic letters (smotret': Russian for 'watch'/'look at') is "smotret' porno"
I think this is probably quite problematic - someone enters a search term that has nothing to do with pornography, and Google suggests something pornographic for 'refinement'. Of course, this is not due to Google's intent, but due to the distribution of the things people search for and of contents on the Internet. I suppose this is one of the problems Google will want to address before offering Suggest as an option on the main page.
In fact it has been proven that all voting systems can result in contradictory results in some cases.
Most of these problems arise only when people vote for one (or another very small number) seat. In elections for a sufficiently large number of seats, proportional representation is straightforward, each party gets the percentage of seats that corresponds to the percentage of votes. Therefore, in my view, it would be more important to reform the elections to the house of Representatives first. That would be relatively easy, other parties would be represented in the legislative, and this could change politics quite a lot. Presidential elections should be reformed, too, but it is more complicated, so perhaps it shouldn't be the first priority.
It sounds good at face value, but it would result in NYC, Chicago, and LA determining the outcome of the election. Add up the population of just those 3 cities. Now add up the population of 10 states west of the Mississippi.
So you think it is right one person in a state West of the Mississippi should have more weight in the elections that one person in NYC, Chicago or LA? After so many countries in the world have introduced democracy ("one person one vote") the US should consider that move, too.
I really wish I could say that there wasn't anything to Zionism and Jewish influence in the U.S. but its a fact that Zionism is a powerful global force and there is an extremely powerful Jewish influence in the U.S.
Of course, there is a relatively strong Zionist lobby in the U.S., but its influence should not be exaggerated and many Jews don't support it. But what I find really worrying as far as US-Israeli relations are concerned are the extremely influential Christian fundamentalist who support exetreme Israeli right-wing policies because of their ideology, which is ultimately directed against Judaism (according to them, Christ can only come back to the earth when there aren't any Jews left who haven't converted to the Christian religion, in order to win them over later, their state has to be supported now). They don't want any peace for Israel and Palestine because, in their view, war is needed before the second coming of Christ.
"When Arabs love their children more than they hate Jews, there will be peace."
This is misleading for several reasons.
As far as Palestinian terrorism is concerned, it would have to say "all Arabs" or "all Palestinians". Most Palestinians don't have anything to do with terrorism, and it doesn't help when a vast majority of Palestinians rejects terror attacks against Israeli civilians, as long as there is a small minority that commits terrorist acts (blaming the Palestinian authority for letting them happen is absurd because it is the Israeli army that is in control, they have destroyed most Palestinian police posts, Palestinian police people can't travel freely and have only recently been allowed to carry arms in some places).
The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories has been going on for over thirty years, and there were many longer periods when there weren't any acts of terror against Israel, but the Israeli government still didn't end the occupation (on the contrary, they extended settlements in violation of the Geneva convention). Occupation certainly can't be called peace. Terror attacks aren't the only reason that there is no peace.
There were cases when children were used for terrorist attacks, but in most cases, the people who committed suicide attacks were young adults. Many of them had relatives who were killed by the Israeli army. There was also research by psychologists about Palestinians in prisons who could be arrested in time to prevent them from committing attacks in Israel, and they found out that they suffered from severe traumata, family members being killed or beaten, constant humiliations at checkpoints,... Then there is poverty and strict restrictions of movements. Of course, that does not justify terrorist attacks, but condemning is not enough, the conditions that breed terrorism must end. People can become terrorists because of ideologies and hate almost everywhere (e.g. McVeigh, Al Khaida terrorists,...), but hate and ideologies alone cannot explain why suicide attacks against innocent people are committed over and over again by Palestinians. One should look at the conditions in which people have to live in Palestine. I know people who were there. Most Palestinians don't become terrorists because of humiliations and killings by the Israeli army, poverty and being collectively imprisoned between fences and walls, but you can hardly claim that these things don't have anything to do with each other and it's only due to some abstract hate that there are terrorist acts committed by Palestinians.
ummm... this would have made more sense in the primaries... at least then you had a greater choice (or illusion depending on how you see the glass)...but for those unaware of your system, the whole point is to theoretically filter out the cruft, and be left with the 2/3+ most-liked/least-hated candidates - I said theoretically.
I think the way primaries offer more choices is really mostly theoretical because "electability" matters so much. For instance, if I was an US Democrat, I would have been in favor of someone like Kucinich, but I doubt whether I would have voted for him if he had a real chance of getting the nomination because he would have had much smaller chances of winning against Bush than Kerry.
If you don't like this system, you may prefer the parliamentary democracy system instead , where you don't vote for the person, but the party. This actually localises things in that you are thinking only of voting for your local representative to the Lower House, and are counting on him/her to elect a good person as Prime Minister...
In a parliamentary system, you vote for parties (or local party candidates), but in most cases it is quite clear for which prime-minister you vote when you vote for a certain party or local candidate, and I think many voters mainly think about the parties' candidates for prime-ministers. E.g. before the last German elections the main public debates, quite similar to the ones in the US, were between Schröder (SPD) and Stoiber (CDU/CSU). (When you voted for the Green party, it was also clear that you would support the election of Schröder as prime-minister with the vote because it was announced beforehand that the SPD and the Greens would form a coalition.)
Slashdot Mirror
There was a TV news report that interest for the iPhone sale start was low in Germany (Frankfurt), too. There was a small crowd of people at midnight - very little in comparison to the US. I think most people have better phones (e.g. a Treo offers much more than the iPhone), so a new phone with few capabilities, but an unreasonably high price just isn't interesting.
I don't know about the Brainbench tests, but I know the Java certification tests from Sun (I did SCJP 5.0 last year, currently, I'm preparing for SCWCD, and I also also read preparation books for SCBCD).
Overall, I have a relatively good impression about these tests. I would say that there are hardly any questions that are so stupid that you cannot understand what the matter of the question is. But misleading questions are definitely quite frequent. I think typically when you do mock exams in an early stage of the preparation, the main reason for wrong answers is not that you don't know the answer (though there's quite a lot you have to learn by heart, as well), but that you thought the question was mainly about one issue, but if you had looked more closely, you would have seen that another issue was what really mattered for the answer.
I think that is part of the concept of such multiple choice tests. Therefore, I think, it can legitimately be the case that someone is experienced and good at programming in a language, but doesn't do well in such an exam - the exam just doesn't test what you normally use, you don't usually see so many misleading cases. For achieving a good result in such exams it is almost a necessity to use mock exams and preparation books even if you are an experienced developer in order to see where the pitfalls are.
So, I would say that the fact that someone didn't achieve a good result in such an exam does not mean that he or she is not a good developer. On the other hand, this does not mean that the exams are worthless, either; the additional knowledge and abilities gained by preparing for the exam can be useful, and a good result shows that someone has some in-depth knowledge in a standardized range of areas (not everything that is needed, but also things not everyone has used, but which may be useful).
How can 7 USD/h pay for the rent and living? In third world countries perhaps...
Well, I don't know exactly about prices in the US, but in Switzerland, where things are admittedly quite expensive, I certainly couldn't survive with so little money - (with 42 hours per week) it would be just a little more than the rent for a small apartment.
In many countries, you would hardly find anyone who is ready to work for so little money, and to expect experience or quality for so little money is just crazy in my opinion. Generally, I think it is good when people prefer to work rather than living on social benefits, but I also think that one of the functions of a correctly working welfare system is to prevent a job market with extremely low salaries. In many European countries, no employer would find people working for 7 or 8 USD/h because people get significantly more from welfare, and I think that's right. If an employer is not able to pay decent salaries, his business is obviously a failure, and there is no point in such failed businesses living on and exploiting people. If the US had a better welfare system, they would go out of business. Unemployment would be slightly higher, but large parts of the population would earn more because people couldn't be exploited because they wouldn't be so scared of destitution.
Workers should have a certain amount of pride, and not being ready to sell one's labor for about a fifth part of its worth and donating the rest to the employer does not have anything to do with an attitude of "money, money, money".
Of course, some of the energy used in the US is used for producing goods for export, but on the other hand, some of the energy used in other countries is used for producing goods that are then exported to the US. As far as I know, the US currently has an overall trade deficit. So, if it was calculated the way you suggest, the result would probably be that energy consumption in the US is *even more* disproportionately high than when imports and exports are not taken into account.
This is not true. Religon in America today is still strong as ever. While a large portion of the role religion of is being replaced by education and science, the socially cohesive effects are as strong as ever. [...]Europe is more or less still atheistic, but the value system is certainly the same - which is why we see the objections to Turkey joining the EU, and Christian parties are still key members of government coalitions.
I think there is a significant difference between Europe and America in that respect, in most parts of Europe, religion plays a rather small role for social cohesion. The objection to Turkey has much more to do with nationalism and cultural differences and prejudices than Europeans being religious Christians - it is just one of many cases in which religion is important as an attribute of national/ethic groups, but not because of its religious content. For instance, people in Northern Ireland or countries in former Yugoslavia, where there are conflicts between groups belonging to different religions, are hardly particularly religious, religion just happens to be an attribute of groups between which there are conflicts because of reasons not related to religion.
In many European countries, parties with 'Christian' in their name are strong, but most of them are just moderate conservative-centrist parties, and although there are sometimes discussions about the role of the 'C' in the name, in practice religion is not one of the central political issues of these parties.
Some people talk about a revival of religion, but I don't think the evidence is convincing, as far as Europe is concerned. Of course, the Christian religion is not completely dead in Europe, only a small minority of people are really religions, and in most cases when religion comes up in public discussion (often in connection with Islam) it is not really about religion, but about questions of migration and cultural traditions.
If one email is all it takes to sue someone, what's to stop my father-in-law from suing me when I ask him to join the latest pyramid scheme?
How could you prove that it's the same spammer from whose list you "unsubscribed"? The spammer had no right to collect the addresses and send mails to them. This case was in the EU, not in the US where a ridiculous law allows all the many thousands of companies to send you spam until you "unsubscribe" from something you never subscribed to and thereby let the spammers know that the address is active.
Your father in law stands in a certain relation to you, a spammer doesn't. There may be a theoretical problem of some borderline cases of spamming, but in practice, about most spam, there is no doubt.
I don't necessarily think competition between standards is always bad. In this case, most independent experts agree that ODF is better. But if people at Microsoft aren't sure about that, they could create a new version of MS Office that supports both ODF and their own format. That way, there would be two independent competitions, one between standard formats and one between different software. However, Microsoft wants joint competition rather than independent one - hoping that their large market share will also help their standard.
Anyway, other Office suites will support both ODF and Microsoft's format, so those who will really want to try out different standard formats and let them compete in personal use will have to choose non-Microsoft office software.
But it misses my point, it's about mindshare and attitude - we need to get to a point where people and companies will start to feel embarrassed that they can't read OpenDocument formats.
I think this can be done without dropping support for any format in OpenOffice.org. When the document is not too large, it can be sent in several formats at once. When there are no specific requirements, I usually send people both OpenDocument and PDF versions of my documents - that way, almost anyone should be able to read it (at least the PDF version), and the recipients still see that my preferred format for text documents is OpenDocument.
No, the private individuals want access to property they've already paid for. Corporations want control of property that isn't theirs without consent, and expects the owners to pay them for them to take control. Somewhat different battle here.
Actually, that's just what some private individuals want. A few of the rest just want free stuff.
Yes, in my view, that's a big difference. I think that we have the right to watch DVDs we have bought with any operating system and with any region code, but certainly I don't generally have the right to use copyrighted material for free.
The majority of filesharers (let's be honest, most people aren't just downloading stuff they've paid for, or other legal items) want reasonably priced access to content, or at least access at a price set by a competetive free market. That's the real problem: the media rights holders are used to having a monopoly, and thus being able to charge whatever they wanted. Sure, there are multiple record labels, but only one tends to release any given piece of music. So if you want to listen to Nirvana, you had to buy it through Geffen (or Sub Pop, for their first release). Same principle for movies.
I don't think that competition should be understood that way. If people think that Nirvana CDs are too expensive, they can buy other music. If the price was really too high (in terms of the market) and significantly more CDs were sold if they were cheaper, it would be in the interest of the record company to sell them more cheaply, and they would probably do so. Maybe prices are a bit too high, but probably not much too high, otherwise other bands and record companies who sell cheaper CDs would have much success (for example if CDs by Nirvana and Britney Spears were sold for $1000, hardly anyone would buy them, but there actual price is probably more or less reasonable).
There are arguments for everyone having to be able to buy basic food items at an affordable price, but I really don't think people have a right to get CDs of a specific band at a low price. No one *needs* a specific CD. If they think it is too expensive, they don't have to buy it. There are quite a lot of bands that offer free songs on their website. If it was more profitable to sell CDs cheaper, they would be sold cheaper, I think in this area the market works quite well. I don't think it makes sense to call the fact that you can buy most books only from one publishing house and most CDs only from one record company a "monopoly" because for any area there are many books and for any style there are many songs and bands (it would be different if certain elements were patented and people were prevented from writing stories with certain storylines or songs with certain formal properties - that hypothetical case would rightly be called a monopoly).
And no, that amount is nowhere near zero. It doesn't need to be free to compete with piracy. But it obviously needs to be less than $20 for a new movie and $15 for a new CD.
Yes, but the market price for CDs and DVDs is significantly lower if they have to compete with piracy, and understandably record companies don't want that. They cannot eradicate piracy, but they can make it more difficult with legal means, which weakens their "competitor" piracy and therefore allows them to keep higher prices (but not arbitrarily high prices - since no one has a vital need for specific CDs and DVDs, the prices have to be competitive in any case, they just do not necessarily have to be able to compete with piracy).
I think record companies would be insane if they just put up with illegal redistribution, and I think it is their right to sue people for copyright infringement. But people should not allow them to take measures that restrict the rights of legal users.
And like wise if the lack of a player were really the reason Linux users have to rip dvds then they could just buy a commercial playback device. Both sides are lieing out there asses.
Why should I buy a separate device if I already have a computer that can play DVDs? I don't like wasting money for devices I don't need, and I don't want too many of them standing around. A few days ago, I installed everything for watching DVDs on my laptop with SUSE Linux, but it's a nuisance that no working DVD player is included because of legal threats - certainly, many users find it too difficult to install what is lacking, and the ability to play DVDs is nowadays a rather basic function of a computer.
On one of my computers I have dual-boot with Windows, so if you already think people who want to watch DVDs on Linux are lying because they might buy a separate device for watching DVDs, you would probably think even more so about me because I could just start Windows on that computer, but in that case you're wrong. Why should one have to start another operating system just to watch DVDs?
this is about whether or not people have the right to rip and secondly if they have the right to re-distribute.
Certainly not. You can rip and redistribute DVDs with any operating system, but you cannot *watch* your DVDs with standard Linux distributions. Making a backup of DVDs can be useful, but that can be done with any operating system, as well. That unlicenced restribution is prohibited (in my view rightly so) has nothing to do with the lack of a DVD player for Linux.
In my view, there are two important problems with DVDs:
1. For no kind of content for a broad audience should there be a non-open standard format for which royalties have to be paid. That this isn't the case for most DVDs does not have anything to do with preventing illegal redistribution, it is just an attempt to force people to buy certain programs for watching DVDs that they have bought.
2. Region codes. Region codes might have some very marginal significance for preventing the sale of "pirated" DVDs, but in principle they don't make copying and illegal redistribution more difficult. On the other hand, they make things much more difficult for normal, legal users. Luckily I have an external DVD drive which I originally bought for using as a CD burner (when I had a laptop without an internal CD burner), so I can watch my American code 1 DVDs with this external drive and European ones with the internal one - but this is just ludicrous. For Russian DVDs, I would again have to use another computer because most DVD drivers in computers have a region code that cannot be reset with standard methods. Most dedicated DVD players that are sold here (in Switzerland) are region-code free. There should be consumer pressure for computer and computer DVD drive manufacturers to sell region-code free drives, as well. Region-codes are probably partly an attempt at non-competitive behaviour and partly just stupidity. Maybe those who invented them never travel abroad, don't know any foreign languages and aren't interested in films for which there is no version for their own region, but they should not think that DVD watchers are as limited as they are.
These are serious problems with DVDs, and they don't have anything to do with illegal redistribution.
Moreover, European copyrights expire sooner than American copyrights, at the moment. So a lot of valuable 20th-century material could become available.
Where did you get this crazy notion?
As far as I know, copyrights for books - and that is what this discussion is about - do not expire sooner in Europe. But copyrights for other works, such as music, do expire sooner in Europe (in Europe 50 years after their release, in the US 95 years see BBC article. Rock'n'Roll classics are already starting to get out of copyright in Europe, the first song of the Beatles in 2013. Americans will have to wait 45 years longer.
By the time the French started expanding their colonial empire the best overseas territories (those with sparse, primitive populations) were already taken. They had to conquer densely populated areas with advanced cultures, such as Indochina or Algeria. Large populations with advanced cultures are hard (almost impossible) to assimilate or destroy. For a while they managed to coerce native people to speak French and (forcefully) assimilate the French culture but eventually the native languages and cultures resurfaced and the French were kicked out violently out of those countries.
I don't know about Indochina - I suppose French does not play a central role there -, but you are wrong about Algeria. Today's Algeria can fairly be described as bilingual, French still is important alongside Arabic. I know people from Algeria who came to Switzerland as asylum-seekers in recent years. French is not a foreign language for them. The French state and the French army were kicked out of Algeria, but the French language did not vanish.
Furthermore, French is one of the most important supraregional languages in Africa (probably even more important than Swahili and English on the whole).
I don't think differences in colonial policies explain that much. English is still present in India and French is still present in Algeria, some Caribbean countries and many African countries. The one factor that probably contributed to today's position of English most is the big international importance and power of the United States in the situation that came about after the Second World War and in the Cold War.
The American movie industry has been very good at driving out foreign competition. In Europe, you can easily see good American, European and sometimes Asian films, but in the US it is more difficult to find something non-American. That narrows down people's cultural horizon.
Indeed! I use both Linux and Windows regularly, and I've certainly used Windows more in my life than Linux, but while 'su' was a matter of course for me (and KDE as in default SuSE asks me for the root password anyway, when it's needed), I only found out about how to run a program as a different user in Windows in this thread! I have the impression that the opposite of what many people claim is the case: Windows' functionality is not so much worse than Linux's, but the usability of Windows is much worse than the one of Linux - while things are relatively easy to see and find out in Linux, much of Windows' functionality is hidden somewhere or integrated in the GUI so counter-intuitively that many people believe it does not exist. (Also documentation seems to be much better with Linux, it's relatively easy to use manpages, info, apropos and package documentation, but I would not know where to look for a documentation for such things like "Run as" in Windows - maybe it is somewhere in a help file, but I think it would be hard to find.) I think quite a lot of the things people do without problems with Linux could also be done with Windows, but the bad user interface of Windows makes it more difficult to find out how it works - if Microsoft wanted to improve, they should look how things are done for instance in KDE or GNOME.
Why an ad if they make a good article for free ?
I read many articles in many newspaper about the ad and the way donations were collected, and in German newspapers, they wrote both about the ad in the New Yorks time and the one in Frankfurter Allgemeine (a major German newspaper) that was published on December 2. Firefox is, of course, a sufficient reason to write articles about, but this idea that users donate money for an advertisement for Free software is an additional topic to write about, and the more people can read about Firefox and other Free software in newspapers (not only computer magazines) the better. I think, apart from some controversial political ads, it is quite rare that ads are so frequently made a topic of newspaper articles like these ads for Firefox in the New York times and Frankfurter Allgemeine.
I don't know how define "support", but Trillian works well with WINE, so they should write this in the FAQ. I use it with the SuSE rack version of Crossover Office, it's one of the preconficured suggestions for download and installation there, it works as if it was an application designed for Linux.
It may be regretted that they don't provide a link to GAIM as a Linux alternative, but I find it even worse that they create the wrong impression that Trillian does not work on Linux systems - it works very well. Are they too modest to mention all platforms on which Trillian works?
And since Trillian works so well with WINE, it would be very easy to create binaries for Linux with the WINE libraries. Some applications are difficult to port to another platform, but not to do so when it is easy is odd.
I'd even say Trillian runs particularly well with WINE, at least when it's used with Crossover Office. I use it with the Wine Rack CD for SuSE Linux, it can download and install Trillian (Trillian is one of the programs that are suggested for download and preconfigured in the Wine Rack version of Crossover Office), and it works so well that you would hardly think it wasn't a program written for Linux. It seems a non-transparent skin is used automatically if Trillian is used with the WINE Rack CD for SuSE, it is perfectly transparent and has its particular shape on my Linux desktop, and the system tray icon is not in its own window, but where it should be - in the KDE system tray, next to the Yast Online Update and Klipper symbol.
The only thing I find odd is that, given that Trillian works so well with Wine, the developers do not compile it with the Wine libraries and create a binary for Linux. With very little effort, they could have a Linux version of Trillian, and even if the market share of Linux is much smaller than the one of Windows, it seems that this small effort is certainly worth it, and then they could offer the Linux version for download and write in their FAQ that there is a Linux version.
I suppose Google search does use the frequency of searches rather than frequency of occurrence on web pages. Indications for this are that current topics frequently appear in Gootgle Suggest and that the groups of words that are suggested together are more typical for words used together in searches than for words occurring tohether in texts.
So why are there so many searches for 'Google'? I remember searching for Google on Google relatively from time to time. Why not? It's always intering what people write about new features etc.. What is very important is probably that Firefox uses Google-"I'm feeling lucky"-search for everything in the address field that is not an URL. Probably, many people just enter "google" in the address field. So, you have to type fewer characters than with "www.google.com" (of course, autocomplete would help, but when you entered "Google" instead of "www.google.com" the first time, auto-suggest will also suggest Google later). The time needed for the Google "I'm feeling lucky" search is in my view reasonable, it's quite reasonable to use it instead of the full address for well-known websites and institutions.
I don't have screen readers, but sometimes Lynx can give a rough idea how they will deal with a site. With Lynx, no suggestions are shown on the site of Google Suggest, but otherwise the page works just like standard Google search. Therefore, it might well be that Google Search works well with Screen Readers (it just doesn't provide suggestions). Actually, I think the use Google Suggest makes of JavaScript is not a problem from the point of view of accessibility - it offers something additional, but does not affect the main function (GMail is more problematic, an additional simple HTML interface should be made available for screen readers etc.).
Therefore, at present, this works only for English; with other languages it can happen that it suggests porn-prone search terms for the refinement of terms that have, as such, nothing to do with pornography. Some examples:
- the first suggestion for 'fille' (French for 'girl') is 'nue' (naked)
- the 5th suggestion for 'dzieci' (Polish for 'children') is 'nago' (naked)
- suggestions for 'mund' (German for 'mouth') countain 'mund auf sperma rein' (open mouth, introduce sperms), 'mund ficken' (fuck in the mouth), "mund arsch" (mouth ass)
- devochki (with Cyrillic letters: Russian for "little girls") gives the suggestions "devochki porno"
- the first suggestion for 'smot...' with Cyrillic letters (smotret': Russian for 'watch'/'look at') is "smotret' porno"
I think this is probably quite problematic - someone enters a search term that has nothing to do with pornography, and Google suggests something pornographic for 'refinement'. Of course, this is not due to Google's intent, but due to the distribution of the things people search for and of contents on the Internet. I suppose this is one of the problems Google will want to address before offering Suggest as an option on the main page.In fact it has been proven that all voting systems can result in contradictory results in some cases.
Most of these problems arise only when people vote for one (or another very small number) seat. In elections for a sufficiently large number of seats, proportional representation is straightforward, each party gets the percentage of seats that corresponds to the percentage of votes. Therefore, in my view, it would be more important to reform the elections to the house of Representatives first. That would be relatively easy, other parties would be represented in the legislative, and this could change politics quite a lot. Presidential elections should be reformed, too, but it is more complicated, so perhaps it shouldn't be the first priority.
It sounds good at face value, but it would result in NYC, Chicago, and LA determining the outcome of the election. Add up the population of just those 3 cities. Now add up the population of 10 states west of the Mississippi.
So you think it is right one person in a state West of the Mississippi should have more weight in the elections that one person in NYC, Chicago or LA? After so many countries in the world have introduced democracy ("one person one vote") the US should consider that move, too.
I really wish I could say that there wasn't anything to Zionism and Jewish influence in the U.S. but its a fact that Zionism is a powerful global force and there is an extremely powerful Jewish influence in the U.S.
Of course, there is a relatively strong Zionist lobby in the U.S., but its influence should not be exaggerated and many Jews don't support it. But what I find really worrying as far as US-Israeli relations are concerned are the extremely influential Christian fundamentalist who support exetreme Israeli right-wing policies because of their ideology, which is ultimately directed against Judaism (according to them, Christ can only come back to the earth when there aren't any Jews left who haven't converted to the Christian religion, in order to win them over later, their state has to be supported now). They don't want any peace for Israel and Palestine because, in their view, war is needed before the second coming of Christ.
This is misleading for several reasons.
ummm... this would have made more sense in the primaries... at least then you had a greater choice (or illusion depending on how you see the glass)...but for those unaware of your system, the whole point is to theoretically filter out the cruft, and be left with the 2/3+ most-liked/least-hated candidates - I said theoretically.
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I think the way primaries offer more choices is really mostly theoretical because "electability" matters so much. For instance, if I was an US Democrat, I would have been in favor of someone like Kucinich, but I doubt whether I would have voted for him if he had a real chance of getting the nomination because he would have had much smaller chances of winning against Bush than Kerry.
If you don't like this system, you may prefer the parliamentary democracy system instead , where you don't vote for the person, but the party. This actually localises things in that you are thinking only of voting for your local representative to the Lower House, and are counting on him/her to elect a good person as Prime Minister
In a parliamentary system, you vote for parties (or local party candidates), but in most cases it is quite clear for which prime-minister you vote when you vote for a certain party or local candidate, and I think many voters mainly think about the parties' candidates for prime-ministers. E.g. before the last German elections the main public debates, quite similar to the ones in the US, were between Schröder (SPD) and Stoiber (CDU/CSU). (When you voted for the Green party, it was also clear that you would support the election of Schröder as prime-minister with the vote because it was announced beforehand that the SPD and the Greens would form a coalition.)