It's true. No taxes on jet fuel due to international treaties, despite every individual country taxing every other kind of fuel. There's a lot of tax exception going on around aviation. (No sales tax either on international airports. No idea why.)
GroenLinks is definitely part of a coalition of green parties. I have no idea about the Pirate Party, but my guess is they'll join a coalition eventually. Some years ago, a Dutch civil servant for the EU uncovered some scandal, got fired, started a party (Europa Transparant) and got elected into the EP. Originally as independent, but he too eventually joined the green/left coalition (much to the chagrin of many of his voters he didn't identify with green/left at all), simply because that gave him more influence.
It all still amounted to nothing, unfortunately. Which is rather depressing and doesn't bode well for the Pirate Party.
You're right that lobbyists seem to have more power than independent parties inthe EP, and that definitely needs to change. Maybe the Pirate Party can get some funding (from their members or from their salary as EP members?) and wine and dine some of their colleagues?
I fully agree we need a lot more transparency, accountability and democracy in the EU, but privacy and copyright/patent law are most definitely European issues. It's important to have a voice in the EP, even if it is a small one.
The system needs to change though, so that independent parties can let themselves be heard at least on their most important issue.
Great news! Unfortunately I couldn't vote for them, but just before the elections, I noticed that the number 4 candidate on the list of the Dutch party GroenLinks has practically the same ideas (and priorities) as the Pirate Party. I voted for him, but unfortunately GroenLinks only got 3 seats (which is still a pretty good result).
Of course these parties are still a tiny minority in the Europarliament, but if they can explain to their colleagues what's so wrong about current IP laws, they might end up having some very real impact.
If pound coins actually weighed a pound, everyone would have to go to the gym just to be able to carry enough money to buy a few beers
Originally (way back in the middle ages or something) a pound was the value of a pound of silver. Because pounds of silver were a bit heavy to carry around, they made them gold coins. The connection with the weight was definitely there, though. (It's devalued a bit since then, I'm afraid.)
It's an interesting lesson in homophobia, isn't it? In muslim countries, where homosexuality is sometimes severely punishable, there's also no taboo on men holding hands. The implication is that they are friends. It's only in the West (most of europe too, as far as I know) where men don't hold hands because it's gay.
Even men who kiss men (a taboo that is slowly receding fortunately) don't hold hands as far as I know. Maybe it's more an invasion of personal space thing than that it's gay? We don't mind women invading our personal space, but with men it shouldn't take more than a hug or a kiss?
You may be right. However, if you are indeed right, big productions are done for. Authors will be thrown back 500 years and be dependant on external sources of income. They will be dependant not on their skill but on their patronage.
400 years. That's when the first printing monopolies were granted. But that was only so the printers/publishers could make a living. It's only since the 20th century that authors could live from their copyright. Before that, any author that could live from his writings did that because of patronage, which, by the way, can be very dependent on skill (depending on the kind of patronage).
It will be, at best, like TV is today. Music fans will go from being the customers to being the product, sold to advertisers, or ideological causes, and you will hardly see any singers, actors or... without a pepsi or cola light in hand.
Not at all. Many music fans will remain customers, and their idols will make a handsome living from concerts. For most musicians, that's already their major source of income, and it has always been like that. That won't change as long as rock stars are idolised.
Of course allowing free downloads will change the game, but the game has been changed several times already, and art has always survived, often even flourished. The same will happen now. People just need to find a new way.
The only people who are really fucked are the record companies and other publishers of other people's work. Self-publishing is too cheap and easy, exposure is free, and artists and customers can find each other without the help of a middle man. Their business model is obsolete, but we don't lose much by losing them.
The article (unlike the summary) considers software engineering a part of computer science. But software engineering is quite a bit different from other kinds of engineering, and computer science isn't quite the same as physics either.
Mine is that it rarely is on the ISP side. In the 6 years (wow, 6 years already!) I have had exactly one "drop" of connectivity which was the ISPs fault. That's not bad for residential ADSL. Companies should demand better uptimes than that.
My home ADSL is doing quite well too, but the cable I had before that was crap. At my previous job, our corporate DSL dropped so often that I insisted we get a backup internet connection, and I believe my current job has also experienced a hiccup in the half year that I work there. And these were both web companies, so we really can't do anything when the net is down.
However, having an ISP that fucks up days of connectivity is a no-no. At that point you search another IT crew who actually negotiates correctly with ISPs. Meaning: give them hell if the Internet drops a whole day.
Don't worry, the ISPs get hell. But you still lose a day. Shit just happens, and the only way to prevent it is redundancy. You've clearly ben lucky, but not everybody is that lucky. And blindly counting on luck is risky.
Keep in mind that 99.9% uptime still means it can be down for half a workday every year. No ISP can guarantee perfect uninterrupted service. You can get lucky, or you can get unlucky. Or you can get a redundant connection, but that's not something your small business with Secretary Sally is going to do.
Opera is still very much ahead of the curve. It has an integrated email/RSS client,
I don't want email in my browser, and which browser doesn't have an integrated RSS reader nowadays?
content (ad) blocker, user scripting, an IRC client, a Bittorrent client,
That was once ahead of the curve, but now it's standard.
a real widget engine,
I'm not familiar with it (despite the fact that I'm an Opera user), but it sounds similar to Fluid. But that wouldn't be integrated in the browser, but a seperate app that uses the same rendering engine.
browser synchronization (via Opera Link), mouse gestures, voice recognition and face gestures built in.
Who the hell uses that stuff? They've had mouse gestures for ages, but it's not really what I'm looking for in a browser.
I'm not at all saying that Opera is bad. I consider it at the same level as Firefox and Chrome. But it used to be ahead of the game, and now other players have caught up.
Or maybe Opera really is doing cool new interesting stuff that I'll someday realise I've needed all along, and I just need to take a better look at it. But at the moment, Opera just doesn't strike me as superior to the competition anymore, where it once did. Although it's still my browser of choice for home use.
Wow reading that sure ticked me off. Microsoft basically just said that they suck and cannot ever implement any spec correctly, therefore they need version tags in html.
From what I understand, they're just claiming HTML 5 is not the same as HTML 4 or HTML 3, and the document should identify which it's using. That sounds perfectly reasonable to me, and it has always been the standard so far. Doing away with it would be stupid.
Never thought I'd see the day where Microsoft is defending the importance of proper DOCTYPEs and the open source community is ignoring it.
Don't you think the problem is somewhere else? Like having a crap corporate ISP?
Maybe, but it still happens. Servers can go down, even big ones. Even gmail has had its problems. Relying on 100% uptime from outsiders is an invitation to disaster.
Apart from that, in a corporate setup, there should not be local storage at all. "My Documents" should be pointing to a network accessible share and those should have nightly backups and offsite backups.
That is exactly what I'm saying, and it's not the same thing as storing it on a third party server over a fourth party internet connection.
I was indeed thinking more of home users (dial-up, are you kidding me? Nobody uses dialup anymore... not on my continent).
You gave me a different impression with your comment about dropping internet connections that could quickly be restored. My experience with dropped internet connections is that usually something broke on the ISP side. Anything less than that is just not terribly serious.
I'd expect only small and medium businesses to rely on services on the Internet and believe me, those do not have the infrastructure and backup facilities Corporations have.
You make it sound like backups are really complex. They're not. Small companies can and should have adequate backup facilities.
(Also, they are mostly on ADSL, which is restartable as I said... For them, it means rebooting the router, but that's not hard)
That still doesn't help you if it's a problem on the ISP's side or even further upstream.
Still, doesn't change the fact a Corporation having a bad ISP should take action and not sit there like a lame duck. Actually, I'd blame the IT guys of that corporation for failing to provide adequate service to the company.... Sorry, that's just the way it is.
You mean "anything as long as you don't have to make backups"? Sorry, but that's just ignorant. It's very easy to take your own responsibility here and make you less dependent on others.
Chris Wilson joined the HTML 5 working group (WHATWG) in April '07. Over one year, his sole contribution was that HTML versioning crap: ref.
I just read that and the WG discussion it links to, and from what I understand, Chris Wilson wants to maintain html version numbers in the doctype declaration, while others want to pretend html 5 is the only version of html in existence, which is completely stupid. I hate MS as much as the next guy, but Chris Wilson is completely correct here.
I haven't really been following the HTML 5 standard much so far, but I guess this means that HTML 5 has already done away with meaningful doctype declarations (which also helps to explain why a w3c acquaintance of mine doesn't like html 5 much).
While true that harddisks fail rarely (except from pretty much all 160Gig HDs I have owned, even from different brands), a failed harddisk will bring you down hard. An internet connection that goes down? That's as much work as reconnecting.... Many modern routers even do that for you if they sense a disconnection.
I'm not talking about a dialup line that's dropped. I'm talking about a corporate ISP that's crap.
If your internet connection is gone for a day, and all your documents are only stored online, then the entire company can't access the documents for a day. If the harddisk the documents are on crashes, you can restore them from backup, which usually takes quite a bit less than a day. And it also happens less often. Unless you have a redundant internet connection, but if that's the case, your file server is also bound to have some redundancy.
If you want to be able to access your files from different locations, then of course an online backup makes a lot of sense. But you should never rely on only online if you want reliable local access to your files.
People say this a lot, but it mystifies me. The cloud is empirically much more reliable than internal storage; hard drives crash all the time and lose *all* their data. Unless you're running a RAID and doing daily offsite backups your data is safer in the cloud because they do it for you.
What does RAID have to do with it? Regular backups have always been important, and my internet connection drops more often than my harddrive. Local storage means you're not dependent on internet connections, online storage means you can more easily access it from different locations. That's what the trade-off is here.
Nobody I know has ever lost any data stored on GMail, Flickr, or similar. The worst that I've ever seen happen is someone might not be able to log in for a few hours; maybe up to a day in an extreme case.
And that can be a big problem if you've got a big company working on something important. I've seen companies twiddle their thumbs all day because internet was down. Making yourself even more dependent on that doesn't sound like a step towards reliability.
On the other hand, practically everyone I know has experienced a hard drive crash, sometimes losing valuable data forever,
Note that I'm not complaining about our taxes. There's definitely room for improvement, but on the whole, we've got it pretty good.
In the end, most people are happy if they can take the family skiing in the Alps in winter, and baking in the sun in Spain in summer, and in between they've got food on the table, a roof over their head, and weekends free to spend on some hobbies.
Is it 10% of the home value, or 10% of the appreciation + capital gains based on income?
Home value. This makes it attractive to pay less for the house and more for carpet, curtains, furniture and other ugly crap that the original owner doesn't want, because it reduces what you're paying for the house itself. People got suspicious when I wanted to pay EUR 5000 for a beautiful solid wooden floor, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Great job with the unicode, /.
HTML entities are the only thing that works here, I'm afraid.
ummmm, I'm sure the magnetosphere shields us from the suns radiation.
Imperfectly though. Otherwise the sky would be dark during the day.
If that dangerous radiation hadn't been there at all, nobody would ever have died from anything.
You don't need active tracking. In the northern hemisphere, as long as the panels are aligned south, they will get the sun all day,
Most of the day. In summer, the sun rises and sets north-east and nort-west. But it's the mid-day sun that matters most.
And if you live close to the equator, just have it facing straight up.
It's true. No taxes on jet fuel due to international treaties, despite every individual country taxing every other kind of fuel. There's a lot of tax exception going on around aviation. (No sales tax either on international airports. No idea why.)
GroenLinks is definitely part of a coalition of green parties. I have no idea about the Pirate Party, but my guess is they'll join a coalition eventually. Some years ago, a Dutch civil servant for the EU uncovered some scandal, got fired, started a party (Europa Transparant) and got elected into the EP. Originally as independent, but he too eventually joined the green/left coalition (much to the chagrin of many of his voters he didn't identify with green/left at all), simply because that gave him more influence.
It all still amounted to nothing, unfortunately. Which is rather depressing and doesn't bode well for the Pirate Party.
You're right that lobbyists seem to have more power than independent parties inthe EP, and that definitely needs to change. Maybe the Pirate Party can get some funding (from their members or from their salary as EP members?) and wine and dine some of their colleagues?
I fully agree we need a lot more transparency, accountability and democracy in the EU, but privacy and copyright/patent law are most definitely European issues. It's important to have a voice in the EP, even if it is a small one.
The system needs to change though, so that independent parties can let themselves be heard at least on their most important issue.
Great news! Unfortunately I couldn't vote for them, but just before the elections, I noticed that the number 4 candidate on the list of the Dutch party GroenLinks has practically the same ideas (and priorities) as the Pirate Party. I voted for him, but unfortunately GroenLinks only got 3 seats (which is still a pretty good result).
Of course these parties are still a tiny minority in the Europarliament, but if they can explain to their colleagues what's so wrong about current IP laws, they might end up having some very real impact.
If pound coins actually weighed a pound, everyone would have to go to the gym just to be able to carry enough money to buy a few beers
Originally (way back in the middle ages or something) a pound was the value of a pound of silver. Because pounds of silver were a bit heavy to carry around, they made them gold coins. The connection with the weight was definitely there, though. (It's devalued a bit since then, I'm afraid.)
It's an interesting lesson in homophobia, isn't it? In muslim countries, where homosexuality is sometimes severely punishable, there's also no taboo on men holding hands. The implication is that they are friends. It's only in the West (most of europe too, as far as I know) where men don't hold hands because it's gay.
Even men who kiss men (a taboo that is slowly receding fortunately) don't hold hands as far as I know. Maybe it's more an invasion of personal space thing than that it's gay? We don't mind women invading our personal space, but with men it shouldn't take more than a hug or a kiss?
You may be right. However, if you are indeed right, big productions are done for. Authors will be thrown back 500 years and be dependant on external sources of income. They will be dependant not on their skill but on their patronage.
400 years. That's when the first printing monopolies were granted. But that was only so the printers/publishers could make a living. It's only since the 20th century that authors could live from their copyright. Before that, any author that could live from his writings did that because of patronage, which, by the way, can be very dependent on skill (depending on the kind of patronage).
It will be, at best, like TV is today. Music fans will go from being the customers to being the product, sold to advertisers, or ideological causes, and you will hardly see any singers, actors or ... without a pepsi or cola light in hand.
Not at all. Many music fans will remain customers, and their idols will make a handsome living from concerts. For most musicians, that's already their major source of income, and it has always been like that. That won't change as long as rock stars are idolised.
Of course allowing free downloads will change the game, but the game has been changed several times already, and art has always survived, often even flourished. The same will happen now. People just need to find a new way.
The only people who are really fucked are the record companies and other publishers of other people's work. Self-publishing is too cheap and easy, exposure is free, and artists and customers can find each other without the help of a middle man. Their business model is obsolete, but we don't lose much by losing them.
The article (unlike the summary) considers software engineering a part of computer science. But software engineering is quite a bit different from other kinds of engineering, and computer science isn't quite the same as physics either.
Mine is that it rarely is on the ISP side. In the 6 years (wow, 6 years already!) I have had exactly one "drop" of connectivity which was the ISPs fault. That's not bad for residential ADSL. Companies should demand better uptimes than that.
My home ADSL is doing quite well too, but the cable I had before that was crap. At my previous job, our corporate DSL dropped so often that I insisted we get a backup internet connection, and I believe my current job has also experienced a hiccup in the half year that I work there. And these were both web companies, so we really can't do anything when the net is down.
However, having an ISP that fucks up days of connectivity is a no-no. At that point you search another IT crew who actually negotiates correctly with ISPs. Meaning: give them hell if the Internet drops a whole day.
Don't worry, the ISPs get hell. But you still lose a day. Shit just happens, and the only way to prevent it is redundancy. You've clearly ben lucky, but not everybody is that lucky. And blindly counting on luck is risky.
Keep in mind that 99.9% uptime still means it can be down for half a workday every year. No ISP can guarantee perfect uninterrupted service. You can get lucky, or you can get unlucky. Or you can get a redundant connection, but that's not something your small business with Secretary Sally is going to do.
Opera is still very much ahead of the curve. It has an integrated email/RSS client,
I don't want email in my browser, and which browser doesn't have an integrated RSS reader nowadays?
content (ad) blocker, user scripting, an IRC client, a Bittorrent client,
That was once ahead of the curve, but now it's standard.
a real widget engine,
I'm not familiar with it (despite the fact that I'm an Opera user), but it sounds similar to Fluid. But that wouldn't be integrated in the browser, but a seperate app that uses the same rendering engine.
browser synchronization (via Opera Link), mouse gestures, voice recognition and face gestures built in.
Who the hell uses that stuff? They've had mouse gestures for ages, but it's not really what I'm looking for in a browser.
I'm not at all saying that Opera is bad. I consider it at the same level as Firefox and Chrome. But it used to be ahead of the game, and now other players have caught up.
Or maybe Opera really is doing cool new interesting stuff that I'll someday realise I've needed all along, and I just need to take a better look at it. But at the moment, Opera just doesn't strike me as superior to the competition anymore, where it once did. Although it's still my browser of choice for home use.
Wow reading that sure ticked me off. Microsoft basically just said that they suck and cannot ever implement any spec correctly, therefore they need version tags in html.
From what I understand, they're just claiming HTML 5 is not the same as HTML 4 or HTML 3, and the document should identify which it's using. That sounds perfectly reasonable to me, and it has always been the standard so far. Doing away with it would be stupid.
Never thought I'd see the day where Microsoft is defending the importance of proper DOCTYPEs and the open source community is ignoring it.
Don't you think the problem is somewhere else? Like having a crap corporate ISP?
Maybe, but it still happens. Servers can go down, even big ones. Even gmail has had its problems. Relying on 100% uptime from outsiders is an invitation to disaster.
Apart from that, in a corporate setup, there should not be local storage at all. "My Documents" should be pointing to a network accessible share and those should have nightly backups and offsite backups.
That is exactly what I'm saying, and it's not the same thing as storing it on a third party server over a fourth party internet connection.
I was indeed thinking more of home users (dial-up, are you kidding me? Nobody uses dialup anymore... not on my continent).
You gave me a different impression with your comment about dropping internet connections that could quickly be restored. My experience with dropped internet connections is that usually something broke on the ISP side. Anything less than that is just not terribly serious.
I'd expect only small and medium businesses to rely on services on the Internet and believe me, those do not have the infrastructure and backup facilities Corporations have.
You make it sound like backups are really complex. They're not. Small companies can and should have adequate backup facilities.
(Also, they are mostly on ADSL, which is restartable as I said... For them, it means rebooting the router, but that's not hard)
That still doesn't help you if it's a problem on the ISP's side or even further upstream.
Still, doesn't change the fact a Corporation having a bad ISP should take action and not sit there like a lame duck. Actually, I'd blame the IT guys of that corporation for failing to provide adequate service to the company.... Sorry, that's just the way it is.
You mean "anything as long as you don't have to make backups"? Sorry, but that's just ignorant. It's very easy to take your own responsibility here and make you less dependent on others.
Chris Wilson joined the HTML 5 working group (WHATWG) in April '07. Over one year, his sole contribution was that HTML versioning crap: ref.
I just read that and the WG discussion it links to, and from what I understand, Chris Wilson wants to maintain html version numbers in the doctype declaration, while others want to pretend html 5 is the only version of html in existence, which is completely stupid. I hate MS as much as the next guy, but Chris Wilson is completely correct here.
I haven't really been following the HTML 5 standard much so far, but I guess this means that HTML 5 has already done away with meaningful doctype declarations (which also helps to explain why a w3c acquaintance of mine doesn't like html 5 much).
While true that harddisks fail rarely (except from pretty much all 160Gig HDs I have owned, even from different brands), a failed harddisk will bring you down hard. An internet connection that goes down? That's as much work as reconnecting.... Many modern routers even do that for you if they sense a disconnection.
I'm not talking about a dialup line that's dropped. I'm talking about a corporate ISP that's crap.
If your internet connection is gone for a day, and all your documents are only stored online, then the entire company can't access the documents for a day. If the harddisk the documents are on crashes, you can restore them from backup, which usually takes quite a bit less than a day. And it also happens less often. Unless you have a redundant internet connection, but if that's the case, your file server is also bound to have some redundancy.
If you want to be able to access your files from different locations, then of course an online backup makes a lot of sense. But you should never rely on only online if you want reliable local access to your files.
Forcing a feature into a standard to support your own proprietary application is shoddy.
Google Wave is open source, not proprietary.
Not just that. Many developers prefer being paid for fun stuff rather than for boring stuff. It's certainly how I pick my jobs.
Also, hobby development has actually gotten quite big over the last decade and a half.
People say this a lot, but it mystifies me. The cloud is empirically much more reliable than internal storage; hard drives crash all the time and lose *all* their data. Unless you're running a RAID and doing daily offsite backups your data is safer in the cloud because they do it for you.
What does RAID have to do with it? Regular backups have always been important, and my internet connection drops more often than my harddrive. Local storage means you're not dependent on internet connections, online storage means you can more easily access it from different locations. That's what the trade-off is here.
Nobody I know has ever lost any data stored on GMail, Flickr, or similar. The worst that I've ever seen happen is someone might not be able to log in for a few hours; maybe up to a day in an extreme case.
And that can be a big problem if you've got a big company working on something important. I've seen companies twiddle their thumbs all day because internet was down. Making yourself even more dependent on that doesn't sound like a step towards reliability.
On the other hand, practically everyone I know has experienced a hard drive crash, sometimes losing valuable data forever,
Then they should have backed up their data.
There's many kinds of erosion. Atmosphere and weather are definitely among the biggest factors, but there are others.
If you want to preserve Neil Armstrong's boot print, perhaps it's better to send a mission exactly there and put a pane of plexiglas over it.
Note that I'm not complaining about our taxes. There's definitely room for improvement, but on the whole, we've got it pretty good.
In the end, most people are happy if they can take the family skiing in the Alps in winter, and baking in the sun in Spain in summer, and in between they've got food on the table, a roof over their head, and weekends free to spend on some hobbies.
Is it 10% of the home value, or 10% of the appreciation + capital gains based on income?
Home value. This makes it attractive to pay less for the house and more for carpet, curtains, furniture and other ugly crap that the original owner doesn't want, because it reduces what you're paying for the house itself. People got suspicious when I wanted to pay EUR 5000 for a beautiful solid wooden floor, though.
Opera isn't really ahead of the curve anymore, but for a long time it was the only browser that could handle my browsing habits.