One of these days I'm just going to tear off into the woods and live Thoreau-style, because it seems like the radicals are the only people having fun these days.
There is probably a database of people who do so, at least if they are as thorough as the police in Switzerland during the cold war. Apart from members of leftwing parties and environmentalists, etc. they also had a special file with all dairymen and shepherds in the mountains. There were of course "harmless" people in Alpine dairies, which had grown up there and continued what their families had been doing for generations, but there were also people who went there in order to opt out of mainstream civilization, and they were considered a potential threat. To be on the safe side, the police collected data on everyone living in Alpine dairy huts (the files were discovered in the end of the eighties together with the others during a parliamentary investigation).
I don't think this kind of spying on citizens is something new, and I suppose it was rather an exception when it was treated as a gaffe. McCarthyism is known, but most of such activities probably never came to light.
In Switzerland, during the cold war, the police spied on environmentalists, members of leftwing parties, people who traveled to Eastern Europe, people who shared houses (possibly a revolutionary commune?), etc... They were supported by many hobby spies, and the data were shared with some companies - some people found out only much later because of which fact or misunderstanding they had big difficulties to get a job. During an investigation into something else in the department of justice and police in the end of the eighties, a parliamentary commission discovered the huge amount of files that had been collected. There was a big scandal, but a few years later when there was a vote on an initiative for the abolition of the secret police, most of it was forgotten, and then they have just computerized their data collections, and now this subject is not debated much any more. I suppose that such activities by the police went on in many countries.
The new European anti-terrorism database that is planned does not sound very new to me, either. I heard a story about Germans being arrested, and later it turned out that it was because they had exchanged addresses with someone in Spain when they were there on holidays. This person in Spain had contacts with ETA, and probably everyone in his address book ended up in a database, which lead to the arrest of the Germans much later. As far as I know, this is not an untypical case, just in most cases, there were no arrests and therefore people do not know in which secret databases they are registered.
What is new is only a reorganisation of this spying activities. Possibly, it becomes more dangerous because of that, but it rather seems to me that the secret police still does what they always did, and the aim of all these talks about new databases is just to make the public believe that they are 'doing something'.
AFAIA the US is the only country where the judiciary (at least at the lower levels) is directly elected for fixed terms.
In Switzerland, judges at lower levels are elected for fixed terms by the citizens (in most cantons), the same way members of parliament are elected. Members of the Federal Court are elected for fixed terms by the federal parliament.
I don't think OpenOffice.org is "still not quite there". I used StarOffice before it belonged to Sun, and even at that time, I considered it a good alternative to MS Word, and, of course, it has developped since then.
Like MS Word, OpenOffice.org sometimes behaves differently than one would expect. But often, there is a relatively easy solution. For instance, when pasting something from web pages just use Paste Special (or what it's called) from the Edit menu and choose the desierd format. It's not as convenient as normal paste, but it's acceptable if you're used to it, and there are also situations when keeping the HTML formatting is appropriate.
I think most of it is due to habits and experience. At times when I used MS Word more often, I found it easier and more intuitive, now I find OOo easier.
There are many file format difficulties with different versions of MS Office. In organizations, where MS Office is used, but not the whole organization makes an upgrade at the same time, a have seen a policy that only RTF should be used for exchanging documents. I have also heard of difficulties with documents created with MSOffice for Apple in Windows environments. OpenOffice.org is not 100% compatible with any particular Microsoft program, but neither are the different Microsoft versions among each other.
Most people I know at the university use Microsoft Office, different versions of it. They have problems with footnotes and page numbers, but when I opened their MSOffice documents with OpenOffice.org, it was all correct. It is true that MSOffice docs don't always exactly the same when opened with OOo as when opened with MSOffice programs, one of the differences is that OOWriter does not have some of the problems Microsoft's programs have with opening documents in MS formats, even for M$-.doc documents OOo may be the better choice.
It depends how complicated the machines are, but it seems that it is very difficult to make sure everything works properly.
One would have to make sure
that the machines that are deployed are the same ones that were checked
that there is no possibility to change the code later
that the way partial results are added is not rigged
...
I think this could all somehow be possible, but it is certainly much more complex and expensive than human beings counting sheets of paper with appropriate supervision. It seems the only way such machines can seem more efficient than traditional vote counting is that security is neglected.
it's the difference between analog and binary results
Results can be binary without digital appliances being used. Where I live (in Switzerland), there are no punchcards or any such things that lead to problems with fuzzy data. People put one of several lists in an envelope - that leads to a binary result (when there is more than one ballot in the envelope, it is invalid, and, of course, too, when there are shreds of several ballots).
In many cases, people can write additional names on the ballot, cross candidates out etc., and if they do so, it is not binary any more. But every election system I know considers the implications of this - human beings do the counting, and the counting process is supervised by people who are selected in a way that prevents vote-rigging (e.g. certainly not all from the same party). If the results are contested, the counting is repeated by different people.
If it is just bits and bites in a computer, proper supervising by observers (independent or from all parties involved) is much more difficult if not impossible.
In Switzerland, the situation is again different. It is extremely unlikely that one party will have an absolute majority, but there are no coalitions. The federal government is elected by the members of both houses of the parliament. Theoretically a group of parties might form a coalition and elect ministers only from their members, but that would be against the tradition (and the way the election process goes minister by minister in not really designed for that), the seven members of the government are elected in a way that more or less corresponds to the number of votes the parties received. Neither in the government nor in the two chambers of the parliament is there a steady majority and an opposition - rather majorities are found issue by issue (for instance, for one project, there might be a majority of right-wing and centrist politicians, for another one of left-wing and centrist politicians, and often, approval and disapproval of something goes across party boundaries).
On the level of cantons (corresponding more or less to US states or Bundeslander in Germany), the situation is similar, but with the difference that the members of the government (usually 5 or 7) are directly elected by the people (in most cantons with a majority system, while parliamentary elections are proportional). This means that the cantonal governments normally consist of people from different parties, which cannot decide whether they form a coalition - it's the voters who decide which people from which parties are in the government together, not the parties themselves.
Parliamentary elections are relatively complicated, people don't just vote for a party, they can combine candidates from different lists (parties), cross out specific candidates they don't like and write down candidates they like up to twice (in some cases three times) as long as there are free lines. Furthermore, there are connected lists - if there are surplus votes for one list, they go to lists combined with it (in some cantons, there are also sub-combinations).
Election are only one part of the system, and usually they receive less attention than some of the frequent referendums and initiatives.
I have used Vivisimo a few times but never realized that their method of categorization was quite langaage independent.
I can confirm that the categorization of Vivisimo works well independently of the language, and there was not really a noticeable difference in quality, whether I was searching for English, French, German, Russian or Polish terms.
It seems that the categorizing system is basically language-independent, but that they use language-specific lists of function words that should never be used as category names. At least, I noticed that with searches in Russian, Polish and Swiss-German, sometimes function words (e.g. pronouns, prepositions) were used as category names, which does not happen with searches in English, French and German, so I suppose they have a list of stop words for some languages, but not for others. However, it mostly happened when I was entering rather unusual search terms (mostly conjugated verb forms), so that it's not really a problem. Apart from excluding certain words, it seems to be language-independent.
If it really is then DMOZ, the Human Edited Directory, ought to incorporate dynamic categorizations like this, infact to the point that someday each user should have his/her own unique categorization of the all the websites in the world...
I think human edited categories are quite different from automatic ones. Human edited categories are usually more exact, on the other hand, automatic categorization makes it possible to have much broader coverage. Both systems should be there and used when appropriate, but they should be kept distinct.
Meanwhile, are they using the words in the headings to determine categories ? Or is it words that have in some way been emphasized ? And to do this in a way that transcends language...
I don't know how Vivisimo works internally, but from what I have seen there and what I know generally about automatic categorization, I suppose that basically those words are taken as category names that are significantly more frequent on pages that contain the search term than on the other pages (or in a general corpus). Then, I suppose there is an optimization, so that the sets of documents covered by the first-level keywords overlap as little as possible (e.g. when most of documents covered by category B are also covered by category A, category B is made a subcategory of A). It is possible that headings and emphasis are used for some kind of weighting, but that's not a central issue for such statistical methods. In principle, that works all quite well in a language-independent way (it's, of course, quite a challenge to implement such a system efficiently).
While Norway isn't a member of the European Union (EU), they are -- like Switzerland -- a member of the European Economic Cooperative (EEC), and laws are quite often synchronized across EU+EEC. This might have influence on, if not directly affecting, how EU laws will be interpreted.
No, EEC means European Economic Community. It was simply the predecessor of the European Union, and Norway has never been a member of it. The organization you may have in mind, which has laws partly synchronized with the EU, is the EEA (European Economic Area), and Norway is a member of it (together with Iceland, but not Switzerland, Switzerland's relations with the EU are mostly regulated via bilateral agreements, not by membership in an organization).
Still, there is a tendency that laws are similar, even in Switzerland, that is not a member of any of these organizations (only of EFTA, which has lost much of its significance since most of its members have joined the EU). Often laws are introduced to stay "compatible" with the EU.
In principle, I agree.
However, it could also help children learn in time how to get around Big Brother (after all, only their phone can be located, not they themselves, they don't necessarily need to have their phone with them all the time, and they can swap their phones...). If they are more aware of the need for such measures, they will possibly also be more resourceful when it comes to dealing with a totalitarian state.
The point is to make spam as expensive as other means of marketing such as direct-mail, telemarketing, and fax blasting. Lawsuits can go a long way towards this.
I would even go further. Even if lawsuits aren't successful in preventing nearly free sending of bulk mails because there are still offshore servers in some countries, where there is no significant risk of being caught, fined or jailed, lawsuits are still helpful. In that case, they improve the efficiency of source-based filters, which work quite well already and are adopted by an increasing number of mainstream e-mail providers. There is a tendency that those mail sources from which legitimate mail is expected are more risky for spammers (provided there are good laws).
In this case, the accusation against Microsoft is not justified. Probably, there should be a better technical solution, but as the situation is now, any platform has to offer the possibility to send e-mails. It may be true that most spammers use Windows tools to send spam, but bulk mailers can just as well be programmed for BSD or Linux, and it even seems to me that these systems would in principle a bit better for sending large amounts of e-mails. Address harvesters aren't specific to any platform, either, as long as someone can write a program that crawls the web - and that has to be possible with any useful operating system -, they can also program address harvesters.
I think GSM or CDMA was not a real question because CDMA is hardly used anywhere in the Middle East, and it would not make sense if people needed special phones for Iraq. Also, I think it is wrong to relegate this question to point 4 (apart from the fact that it has, indeed, already been decided). Iraq certainly needs a communication infrastructure, but its existing telephone system is not very good, and building mobile networks is faster than fixing the whole fixnet telephone system.
Those who contributed to the war may contribute to the reconstruction. Why should France or Germany - who opposed the war and contributed nothing - reap the benefits of our hard work?
Nice, that's the classic justification for predatory wars, be it in ancient times or in the age of colonialism and traditional imperialism. A country puts effort (money, blood) to wars and then has the "right" to reap the benefits. That's not quite in accordance with modern views or the UN charter, it just shows how imperialism is still alive.
I know we complain about "fascism" in this country. That's a joke. The Iraqis have quite a few problems ahead. They're fighting real fascism. They don't have Thomas Jefferson or George Washington.
I wonder how two racist slave-owners like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington could be helpful for creating a stable democratic system in a multicultural and multireligious country like Iraq...
Yes, Europe is certainly very important in the competition between Microsoft Windows and Linux, possibly more important than the US, but Lindows does not play a significant role in Europe, and I don't think there is much need for it.
Lindows is basically only available in English, and support for languages is very important in Europe. Then, SuSE is the most widespread distribution in Europe, and the target market of Lindows - private newbie users - is one of several areas, where SuSE is quite successful.
I also suppose that brand-recognition for Linux is relatively high in Europe, and typical private Linux users are usually people who aren't fans of MS's operating system, so the similar-sounding name is perhaps not too good for Lindows. It doesn't seem that Lindows will play an important role in Europe.
I can see it now: Kevin Mitnick wins the first 100% evoting election by landslide of 7 billion votes.
It's been done. Saddam did it with 100% of the vote and 100% of the eligible population voting. He didn't even need electronic voting machines.
There are other dictatureships and "half-democracies" that would not go as far as the former Iraqi dictatureship in intimidating people. Certainly, they manages to rig elections in the past, but if electronic voting becomes generally accepted - and introducing it in the US contributes to that -, it will be much easier for them. The United States is sending out a wrong signal. If electronic voting is introduced in other countries where the government wants to rig election (like probably the Russian government did in Chechnia recently) and critics say that then the results are virtually impossible to check independently, the government will just say the United States has the same system and is recognised by most as a democratic state. Even if electronic vote rigging does not happen in the US itself, its indroduction makes this system that is more prone to vote rigging more acceptable, and there will almost certainly be governments elsewhere in the world that use it for facilitating vote rigging.
Is there a right-wing, non-communist dictatorship the United States has NOT supported?
Maybe there is one, I don't know any. The US supported lots of dictators in South and Central America, in several cases were involved in toppling democratically elected governments and replacing them with brutal dictatorships (e.g. in Chile), they supported rightwing dictatorships in Greece, South Korea and South Vietnam, dictators like Marcos and Saddam Hussein. It is true that sometimes, when some of these dictators don't fit US interests any more, the US turns against their former allies, but to depict the US as a force for democracy is just laughable.
The US even supported communist guerillas in Third World countries, which don't stand for democratic values, either. The condition was just that they were Maoists and therefore on the other side than the USSR in the Cold War (Angola is an example).
It is true that European powers did not do very much for democracy in the world, but at least, they did not do as much AGAINST it as the US.
Business has quite a lot of influence on politicians in the European Union, too, but there are rather more politicians in the parliament who are not linked with big business, e.g. most of the left except British Labour, the Greens and also quite a number of liberal and centrist politicians.
But in this case, I think it is not so much a question of independence from influence of big business because there are very few European companies that could profit from software patents and are in favour of them (Siemens would be an example). Most very large IT companies that are active in Europe are American and Japanese ones, while there are lots of small and medium European IT companies. So, if there is influence from European business, it will rather be against software patents.
I don't think it repeating well-known pro-patent propaganda statements that have to do very little with reality makes sense.
rivalous assets need legal protection against theft
You should look if you find a non-capitalist country to run away to since, according to your opinion, competing with an existing company is a theft, a crime. Calling copyright infringement theft is technically wrong, but in a figurative sense, the mistake is understandable to some degree, people who infringe on copyrights of others take something someone else has created. But to call a situation where people can compete with an existing product by creating one themselves as lacking protection against theft is simply absurd.
for a small company, patents are often the ONLY tools they have to keep from being steamrolled by their larger rivals. the failure to ammend the EPC to extend patent protection to software will harm small european companies and undermine their competitiveness
It seems that you don't know the situation in the US. When a small company wants to sue a large one because of copyright infringement, the large one (IBM, HP, Microsoft, Sun,...) can easily find one among their many thousands of patents that it can use against the small company and force it to cross-licencing. That is what is currently going on in the relationship between IBM and other large companies and small ones in the US. In addition, the large companies with their enormous patent portfolios can use them to blackmail smaller competitors and to force them to an agreement on their terms. The fairytale that patents protect smaller companies is as far from reality as it can possibly be.
Also, it is simply not true that smaller companies don't have a chance against the bigger competitors. If they have a good product, they have a chance in a fair market. It is such means for the biggest players like patent suit threats that make it difficult for small companies to survive attacks from larger competitors. Patents are not the only means for unfair use of power by the biggest players (others are e.g. dumping prices, bundling, introduction of incompatibilites), but they are an important element.
There is one category of relatively small companies that can profit from software patents: companies that have few workers and don't produce anything - that way, they are not vulnerable by patent countersuits -, but have a lot of money for registering and buying patents. Their business model is investing money in patents without creating anything and getting money from sueing. If that's your favourite kind of poor small companies that have to be protected, software patents are certainly a necessity.
knowledge has economic value knowledge is a rivalous asset ncreasingly, competitive advantage is conferred through the skillful use of knowledge. today, improving how a machine operates is often more valuable than the addition of one more machine. the value of knowledge, compounded by the connectivity provided by the internet, provides enormous leveraging power
You repeat "knowledge is important and valuable" in sevaral variations and seem to assume that it follows from that that abstract software principles should be "worthy" of being patent, so that others cannot "expropriate" it. Such an argumentation often seems to have some success among people who know little about the field, but it is quite non-sensical. I value art, and I know that many other people do, as well. According to your simplicistic equation of value and patentability, artistic methods should be patentable. Beethoven should have been prevented from "expropriating" musical techniques of Mozart and others, Shakespeare's innovative play techniques should then have been patented etc.
everyone is against "trivial" patents. it is actually the job of the EPO to avoid issuing patents on inventions which are obvious, lacking in inventive step, or already in
What is implicit encouragement of violence?
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Once these folks start encouraging violence (either explicitely or implicitely,) it's a different story.
I know what explicit encouragement of violence is (there are borderline cases, as well, of course), and I think it is right that this is illegal (just not 20 years of imprisonment, that would be extreme).
But what should "implicit encouragement of violence" mean? Isn't that something like "anti-Soviet activities", the favorite charge against opponents in the USSR? A whole principally fair and democratic constitutional order can be destroyed if there is one such muddy charge with which opponents can be sent to prison.
Linux starts to fall down when you try to install 3rd party applications (what if you can't get RPMs? what if you're running an older GLIBC?) or hardware.
That is down to the producers of the 3rd party applications. For instance, some programs from IBM and Sun I installed had convenient installation programs. Certainly, there are some programs that are not so easy to install on Linux (most programs are available as RPM, and good distributions already contain most of what is needed), but that has little to do with Linux as such.
I don't think so. While we can argue about whether KDE or XP is easier to use for the average user as long as everything goes well, it seems that Linux is much easier to use when something more serious goes wrong.
In an IT company where I worked and where people had quite some experience with Windows, the standard procedure when something didn't work on a machine was formatting the hard disk and reinstalling Windows. The only alternative was trying to fix data in the registry. People who complain about changing configuration files and doing things with the command line, which is needed when something doesn't work (if everything is alright, it can usually be done with a GUI) should compare that with trying to fix Windows registry entries. In contrast to Linux configuration files, usually there are no comments, explanations, manpages for Windows registry entries. Both with standard Linux and Windows installations, most things can be done with GUIs that are relatively easy to use, but when you have to go beyond that because of more serious problems, Linux and Unix systems are, in my experience, much easier to use.
With earlier versions of Windows, it happened to me several times that it broke down completely (in some cases, the C: hard drive wasn't recognised any more), and even though I didn't have much experience with Linux at that time, I found it very useful to save the data on the hard disk and in sometimes even to repair somethings. I don't think the same can be said for Window's usability for fixing problems with a Linux installation.
Of course, KDE covers up the internals of an operating system, any modern OS does that. It would be unrealistic to expect that average users can solve serious matters, they certainly can't fix a damaged C: in Windows. But for slightly more experienced people the internals are more accessible in Linux and Unix system than in Windows.
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One of these days I'm just going to tear off into the woods and live Thoreau-style, because it seems like the radicals are the only people having fun these days.
There is probably a database of people who do so, at least if they are as thorough as the police in Switzerland during the cold war. Apart from members of leftwing parties and environmentalists, etc. they also had a special file with all dairymen and shepherds in the mountains. There were of course "harmless" people in Alpine dairies, which had grown up there and continued what their families had been doing for generations, but there were also people who went there in order to opt out of mainstream civilization, and they were considered a potential threat. To be on the safe side, the police collected data on everyone living in Alpine dairy huts (the files were discovered in the end of the eighties together with the others during a parliamentary investigation).
I don't think this kind of spying on citizens is something new, and I suppose it was rather an exception when it was treated as a gaffe. McCarthyism is known, but most of such activities probably never came to light.
In Switzerland, during the cold war, the police spied on environmentalists, members of leftwing parties, people who traveled to Eastern Europe, people who shared houses (possibly a revolutionary commune?), etc... They were supported by many hobby spies, and the data were shared with some companies - some people found out only much later because of which fact or misunderstanding they had big difficulties to get a job. During an investigation into something else in the department of justice and police in the end of the eighties, a parliamentary commission discovered the huge amount of files that had been collected. There was a big scandal, but a few years later when there was a vote on an initiative for the abolition of the secret police, most of it was forgotten, and then they have just computerized their data collections, and now this subject is not debated much any more. I suppose that such activities by the police went on in many countries.
The new European anti-terrorism database that is planned does not sound very new to me, either. I heard a story about Germans being arrested, and later it turned out that it was because they had exchanged addresses with someone in Spain when they were there on holidays. This person in Spain had contacts with ETA, and probably everyone in his address book ended up in a database, which lead to the arrest of the Germans much later. As far as I know, this is not an untypical case, just in most cases, there were no arrests and therefore people do not know in which secret databases they are registered.
What is new is only a reorganisation of this spying activities. Possibly, it becomes more dangerous because of that, but it rather seems to me that the secret police still does what they always did, and the aim of all these talks about new databases is just to make the public believe that they are 'doing something'.
AFAIA the US is the only country where the judiciary (at least at the lower levels) is directly elected for fixed terms.
In Switzerland, judges at lower levels are elected for fixed terms by the citizens (in most cantons), the same way members of parliament are elected. Members of the Federal Court are elected for fixed terms by the federal parliament.
I don't think OpenOffice.org is "still not quite there". I used StarOffice before it belonged to Sun, and even at that time, I considered it a good alternative to MS Word, and, of course, it has developped since then.
Like MS Word, OpenOffice.org sometimes behaves differently than one would expect. But often, there is a relatively easy solution. For instance, when pasting something from web pages just use Paste Special (or what it's called) from the Edit menu and choose the desierd format. It's not as convenient as normal paste, but it's acceptable if you're used to it, and there are also situations when keeping the HTML formatting is appropriate.
I think most of it is due to habits and experience. At times when I used MS Word more often, I found it easier and more intuitive, now I find OOo easier.
There are many file format difficulties with different versions of MS Office. In organizations, where MS Office is used, but not the whole organization makes an upgrade at the same time, a have seen a policy that only RTF should be used for exchanging documents. I have also heard of difficulties with documents created with MSOffice for Apple in Windows environments. OpenOffice.org is not 100% compatible with any particular Microsoft program, but neither are the different Microsoft versions among each other.
Most people I know at the university use Microsoft Office, different versions of it. They have problems with footnotes and page numbers, but when I opened their MSOffice documents with OpenOffice.org, it was all correct. It is true that MSOffice docs don't always exactly the same when opened with OOo as when opened with MSOffice programs, one of the differences is that OOWriter does not have some of the problems Microsoft's programs have with opening documents in MS formats, even for M$-.doc documents OOo may be the better choice.
One would have to make sure
I think this could all somehow be possible, but it is certainly much more complex and expensive than human beings counting sheets of paper with appropriate supervision. It seems the only way such machines can seem more efficient than traditional vote counting is that security is neglected.
it's the difference between analog and binary results
Results can be binary without digital appliances being used. Where I live (in Switzerland), there are no punchcards or any such things that lead to problems with fuzzy data. People put one of several lists in an envelope - that leads to a binary result (when there is more than one ballot in the envelope, it is invalid, and, of course, too, when there are shreds of several ballots).
In many cases, people can write additional names on the ballot, cross candidates out etc., and if they do so, it is not binary any more. But every election system I know considers the implications of this - human beings do the counting, and the counting process is supervised by people who are selected in a way that prevents vote-rigging (e.g. certainly not all from the same party). If the results are contested, the counting is repeated by different people.
If it is just bits and bites in a computer, proper supervising by observers (independent or from all parties involved) is much more difficult if not impossible.
In Switzerland, the situation is again different. It is extremely unlikely that one party will have an absolute majority, but there are no coalitions. The federal government is elected by the members of both houses of the parliament. Theoretically a group of parties might form a coalition and elect ministers only from their members, but that would be against the tradition (and the way the election process goes minister by minister in not really designed for that), the seven members of the government are elected in a way that more or less corresponds to the number of votes the parties received. Neither in the government nor in the two chambers of the parliament is there a steady majority and an opposition - rather majorities are found issue by issue (for instance, for one project, there might be a majority of right-wing and centrist politicians, for another one of left-wing and centrist politicians, and often, approval and disapproval of something goes across party boundaries).
On the level of cantons (corresponding more or less to US states or Bundeslander in Germany), the situation is similar, but with the difference that the members of the government (usually 5 or 7) are directly elected by the people (in most cantons with a majority system, while parliamentary elections are proportional). This means that the cantonal governments normally consist of people from different parties, which cannot decide whether they form a coalition - it's the voters who decide which people from which parties are in the government together, not the parties themselves.
Parliamentary elections are relatively complicated, people don't just vote for a party, they can combine candidates from different lists (parties), cross out specific candidates they don't like and write down candidates they like up to twice (in some cases three times) as long as there are free lines. Furthermore, there are connected lists - if there are surplus votes for one list, they go to lists combined with it (in some cantons, there are also sub-combinations).
Election are only one part of the system, and usually they receive less attention than some of the frequent referendums and initiatives.
I have used Vivisimo a few times but never realized that their method of categorization was quite langaage independent.
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I can confirm that the categorization of Vivisimo works well independently of the language, and there was not really a noticeable difference in quality, whether I was searching for English, French, German, Russian or Polish terms.
It seems that the categorizing system is basically language-independent, but that they use language-specific lists of function words that should never be used as category names. At least, I noticed that with searches in Russian, Polish and Swiss-German, sometimes function words (e.g. pronouns, prepositions) were used as category names, which does not happen with searches in English, French and German, so I suppose they have a list of stop words for some languages, but not for others. However, it mostly happened when I was entering rather unusual search terms (mostly conjugated verb forms), so that it's not really a problem. Apart from excluding certain words, it seems to be language-independent.
If it really is then DMOZ, the Human Edited Directory, ought to incorporate dynamic categorizations like this, infact to the point that someday each user should have his/her own unique categorization of the all the websites in the world
I think human edited categories are quite different from automatic ones. Human edited categories are usually more exact, on the other hand, automatic categorization makes it possible to have much broader coverage. Both systems should be there and used when appropriate, but they should be kept distinct.
Meanwhile, are they using the words in the headings to determine categories ? Or is it words that have in some way been emphasized ? And to do this in a way that transcends language
I don't know how Vivisimo works internally, but from what I have seen there and what I know generally about automatic categorization, I suppose that basically those words are taken as category names that are significantly more frequent on pages that contain the search term than on the other pages (or in a general corpus). Then, I suppose there is an optimization, so that the sets of documents covered by the first-level keywords overlap as little as possible (e.g. when most of documents covered by category B are also covered by category A, category B is made a subcategory of A). It is possible that headings and emphasis are used for some kind of weighting, but that's not a central issue for such statistical methods. In principle, that works all quite well in a language-independent way (it's, of course, quite a challenge to implement such a system efficiently).
While Norway isn't a member of the European Union (EU), they are -- like Switzerland -- a member of the European Economic Cooperative (EEC), and laws are quite often synchronized across EU+EEC. This might have influence on, if not directly affecting, how EU laws will be interpreted.
No, EEC means European Economic Community. It was simply the predecessor of the European Union, and Norway has never been a member of it. The organization you may have in mind, which has laws partly synchronized with the EU, is the EEA (European Economic Area), and Norway is a member of it (together with Iceland, but not Switzerland, Switzerland's relations with the EU are mostly regulated via bilateral agreements, not by membership in an organization).
Still, there is a tendency that laws are similar, even in Switzerland, that is not a member of any of these organizations (only of EFTA, which has lost much of its significance since most of its members have joined the EU). Often laws are introduced to stay "compatible" with the EU.
In principle, I agree.
However, it could also help children learn in time how to get around Big Brother (after all, only their phone can be located, not they themselves, they don't necessarily need to have their phone with them all the time, and they can swap their phones...). If they are more aware of the need for such measures, they will possibly also be more resourceful when it comes to dealing with a totalitarian state.
The point is to make spam as expensive as other means of marketing such as direct-mail, telemarketing, and fax blasting. Lawsuits can go a long way towards this.
I would even go further. Even if lawsuits aren't successful in preventing nearly free sending of bulk mails because there are still offshore servers in some countries, where there is no significant risk of being caught, fined or jailed, lawsuits are still helpful. In that case, they improve the efficiency of source-based filters, which work quite well already and are adopted by an increasing number of mainstream e-mail providers. There is a tendency that those mail sources from which legitimate mail is expected are more risky for spammers (provided there are good laws).
In this case, the accusation against Microsoft is not justified. Probably, there should be a better technical solution, but as the situation is now, any platform has to offer the possibility to send e-mails. It may be true that most spammers use Windows tools to send spam, but bulk mailers can just as well be programmed for BSD or Linux, and it even seems to me that these systems would in principle a bit better for sending large amounts of e-mails. Address harvesters aren't specific to any platform, either, as long as someone can write a program that crawls the web - and that has to be possible with any useful operating system -, they can also program address harvesters.
I think GSM or CDMA was not a real question because CDMA is hardly used anywhere in the Middle East, and it would not make sense if people needed special phones for Iraq. Also, I think it is wrong to relegate this question to point 4 (apart from the fact that it has, indeed, already been decided). Iraq certainly needs a communication infrastructure, but its existing telephone system is not very good, and building mobile networks is faster than fixing the whole fixnet telephone system.
Those who contributed to the war may contribute to the reconstruction. Why should France or Germany - who opposed the war and contributed nothing - reap the benefits of our hard work?
Nice, that's the classic justification for predatory wars, be it in ancient times or in the age of colonialism and traditional imperialism. A country puts effort (money, blood) to wars and then has the "right" to reap the benefits. That's not quite in accordance with modern views or the UN charter, it just shows how imperialism is still alive.
I know we complain about "fascism" in this country. That's a joke. The Iraqis have quite a few problems ahead. They're fighting real fascism. They don't have Thomas Jefferson or George Washington.
I wonder how two racist slave-owners like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington could be helpful for creating a stable democratic system in a multicultural and multireligious country like Iraq...
Yes, Europe is certainly very important in the competition between Microsoft Windows and Linux, possibly more important than the US, but Lindows does not play a significant role in Europe, and I don't think there is much need for it.
Lindows is basically only available in English, and support for languages is very important in Europe. Then, SuSE is the most widespread distribution in Europe, and the target market of Lindows - private newbie users - is one of several areas, where SuSE is quite successful.
I also suppose that brand-recognition for Linux is relatively high in Europe, and typical private Linux users are usually people who aren't fans of MS's operating system, so the similar-sounding name is perhaps not too good for Lindows. It doesn't seem that Lindows will play an important role in Europe.
I can see it now: Kevin Mitnick wins the first 100% evoting election by landslide of 7 billion votes.
It's been done. Saddam did it with 100% of the vote and 100% of the eligible population voting. He didn't even need electronic voting machines.
There are other dictatureships and "half-democracies" that would not go as far as the former Iraqi dictatureship in intimidating people. Certainly, they manages to rig elections in the past, but if electronic voting becomes generally accepted - and introducing it in the US contributes to that -, it will be much easier for them. The United States is sending out a wrong signal. If electronic voting is introduced in other countries where the government wants to rig election (like probably the Russian government did in Chechnia recently) and critics say that then the results are virtually impossible to check independently, the government will just say the United States has the same system and is recognised by most as a democratic state. Even if electronic vote rigging does not happen in the US itself, its indroduction makes this system that is more prone to vote rigging more acceptable, and there will almost certainly be governments elsewhere in the world that use it for facilitating vote rigging.
Is there a right-wing, non-communist dictatorship the United States has NOT supported?
Maybe there is one, I don't know any. The US supported lots of dictators in South and Central America, in several cases were involved in toppling democratically elected governments and replacing them with brutal dictatorships (e.g. in Chile), they supported rightwing dictatorships in Greece, South Korea and South Vietnam, dictators like Marcos and Saddam Hussein. It is true that sometimes, when some of these dictators don't fit US interests any more, the US turns against their former allies, but to depict the US as a force for democracy is just laughable.
The US even supported communist guerillas in Third World countries, which don't stand for democratic values, either. The condition was just that they were Maoists and therefore on the other side than the USSR in the Cold War (Angola is an example).
It is true that European powers did not do very much for democracy in the world, but at least, they did not do as much AGAINST it as the US.
Business has quite a lot of influence on politicians in the European Union, too, but there are rather more politicians in the parliament who are not linked with big business, e.g. most of the left except British Labour, the Greens and also quite a number of liberal and centrist politicians.
But in this case, I think it is not so much a question of independence from influence of big business because there are very few European companies that could profit from software patents and are in favour of them (Siemens would be an example). Most very large IT companies that are active in Europe are American and Japanese ones, while there are lots of small and medium European IT companies. So, if there is influence from European business, it will rather be against software patents.
I don't think it repeating well-known pro-patent propaganda statements that have to do very little with reality makes sense.
...) can easily find one among their many thousands of patents that it can use against the small company and force it to cross-licencing. That is what is currently going on in the relationship between IBM and other large companies and small ones in the US. In addition, the large companies with their enormous patent portfolios can use them to blackmail smaller competitors and to force them to an agreement on their terms. The fairytale that patents protect smaller companies is as far from reality as it can possibly be.
rivalous assets need legal protection against theft
You should look if you find a non-capitalist country to run away to since, according to your opinion, competing with an existing company is a theft, a crime. Calling copyright infringement theft is technically wrong, but in a figurative sense, the mistake is understandable to some degree, people who infringe on copyrights of others take something someone else has created. But to call a situation where people can compete with an existing product by creating one themselves as lacking protection against theft is simply absurd.
for a small company, patents are often the ONLY tools they have to keep from being steamrolled by their larger rivals.
the failure to ammend the EPC to extend patent protection to software will harm small european companies and undermine their competitiveness
It seems that you don't know the situation in the US. When a small company wants to sue a large one because of copyright infringement, the large one (IBM, HP, Microsoft, Sun,
Also, it is simply not true that smaller companies don't have a chance against the bigger competitors. If they have a good product, they have a chance in a fair market. It is such means for the biggest players like patent suit threats that make it difficult for small companies to survive attacks from larger competitors. Patents are not the only means for unfair use of power by the biggest players (others are e.g. dumping prices, bundling, introduction of incompatibilites), but they are an important element.
There is one category of relatively small companies that can profit from software patents: companies that have few workers and don't produce anything - that way, they are not vulnerable by patent countersuits -, but have a lot of money for registering and buying patents. Their business model is investing money in patents without creating anything and getting money from sueing. If that's your favourite kind of poor small companies that have to be protected, software patents are certainly a necessity.
knowledge has economic value
knowledge is a rivalous asset
ncreasingly, competitive advantage is conferred through the skillful use of knowledge. today, improving how a machine operates is often more valuable than the addition of one more machine. the value of knowledge, compounded by the connectivity provided by the internet, provides enormous leveraging power
You repeat "knowledge is important and valuable" in sevaral variations and seem to assume that it follows from that that abstract software principles should be "worthy" of being patent, so that others cannot "expropriate" it. Such an argumentation often seems to have some success among people who know little about the field, but it is quite non-sensical. I value art, and I know that many other people do, as well. According to your simplicistic equation of value and patentability, artistic methods should be patentable. Beethoven should have been prevented from "expropriating" musical techniques of Mozart and others, Shakespeare's innovative play techniques should then have been patented etc.
everyone is against "trivial" patents. it is actually the job of the EPO to avoid issuing patents on inventions which are obvious, lacking in inventive step, or already in
Once these folks start encouraging violence (either explicitely or implicitely,) it's a different story.
I know what explicit encouragement of violence is (there are borderline cases, as well, of course), and I think it is right that this is illegal (just not 20 years of imprisonment, that would be extreme).
But what should "implicit encouragement of violence" mean? Isn't that something like "anti-Soviet activities", the favorite charge against opponents in the USSR? A whole principally fair and democratic constitutional order can be destroyed if there is one such muddy charge with which opponents can be sent to prison.
Linux starts to fall down when you try to install 3rd party applications (what if you can't get RPMs? what if you're running an older GLIBC?) or hardware.
That is down to the producers of the 3rd party applications. For instance, some programs from IBM and Sun I installed had convenient installation programs. Certainly, there are some programs that are not so easy to install on Linux (most programs are available as RPM, and good distributions already contain most of what is needed), but that has little to do with Linux as such.
I don't think so. While we can argue about whether KDE or XP is easier to use for the average user as long as everything goes well, it seems that Linux is much easier to use when something more serious goes wrong.
In an IT company where I worked and where people had quite some experience with Windows, the standard procedure when something didn't work on a machine was formatting the hard disk and reinstalling Windows. The only alternative was trying to fix data in the registry. People who complain about changing configuration files and doing things with the command line, which is needed when something doesn't work (if everything is alright, it can usually be done with a GUI) should compare that with trying to fix Windows registry entries. In contrast to Linux configuration files, usually there are no comments, explanations, manpages for Windows registry entries.
Both with standard Linux and Windows installations, most things can be done with GUIs that are relatively easy to use, but when you have to go beyond that because of more serious problems, Linux and Unix systems are, in my experience, much easier to use.
With earlier versions of Windows, it happened to me several times that it broke down completely (in some cases, the C: hard drive wasn't recognised any more), and even though I didn't have much experience with Linux at that time, I found it very useful to save the data on the hard disk and in sometimes even to repair somethings. I don't think the same can be said for Window's usability for fixing problems with a Linux installation.
Of course, KDE covers up the internals of an operating system, any modern OS does that. It would be unrealistic to expect that average users can solve serious matters, they certainly can't fix a damaged C: in Windows. But for slightly more experienced people the internals are more accessible in Linux and Unix system than in Windows.