I have been following the OOXML saga fairly closely; from Rob Weir's blog, to the NO-OOXML site (admitedly that is a rather partisan site, but I've found the technical arguments presented there generally to be both verifiable and compelling), and the Standards Blog, by Andy Updegrove who seems to know his stuff (which is bizarre since he is also a lawyer, but I guess he came from a parallel universe). I've also looked at sections of the spec myself, and I agree with the major technical criticisms; aside from being redundant in that there is already an ISO standard that could -- with well defined extensions -- cover everything Microsoft wants to include (ie, the backwards compatibility stuff), the OOXML document is a poorly worded draft of a 'standard' that is incomplete, inconsistent, and not ready for standardization.
By usual ISO standards (if it hadn't been submitted on the fast-track), it would be at the stage of a 'committee draft', with at least a couple of years of serious effort into working it into something useable. This is the process that ODF, along with most other ISO standards, went though, and if OOXML makes it through without a similar amount of scrutiny, ISO will have egg on their faces.
For Miguel to say it is a 'superb standard' means he either hasn't read it or followed the technical discussions (in which case he deserves the panning he will get for making such a clueless statement), or he really has sold out, in which case he deserves exile.
No, I don't think hemp is used for serious rope making anymore. It used to be used for climbing/rescue work before synthetics, but a big advantage of synthetic rope is that it takes a lot less effort to take care of it, as well as modern synthetics having much better strength characteristics. Your rope swing in the back yard probably rotted, as plant fibre tends to do;) Paper is probably the biggest unrealized application for hemp.
A total of 61 different medical devices were tested, and the majority could be affected by the presence of a mobile.
In particular, nine intensive care ventilators were checked, and seven of these could be "influenced" by mobiles.
Of these, six were described by the researchers as "hazardous", involving a direct physical influence on the patient.
Critical care monitors were also vulnerable, with seven out of 13 disrupted by mobile signals, while three out of seven syringe pumps were affected.
Other devices which suffered problems were dialysis machines, external pacemaker machines, feeding pumps and even air humidifiers.
I have a couple of old books on ropes and knots, that date from very early 20th C, before hemp was illegalized. They both have sections comparing the different materials for rope making, and they both state that hemp is the strongest and longest lasting, followed by sisal, and then manilla - these two being significantly inferior to hemp. I think jute is commonly used to make twine, I've never heard of it being used for anything bigger. Kenaf is in the same category as jute, AFAICT.
Industrial hemp has no THC, so there is no possibility to get a high from it. I know a few people that were trying to get some hemp plantations going in Tasmania, for prototype paper production. They were interested in hemp because, of the various alternatives to wood pulp, help appears to be the best. Why should we let ignorant hypocrites (such as yourself, possibly?) ban a useful plant just because variants of it have intoxicating effects? If someone genetically engineered a variety of tomato to contain THC, would you then ban all tomatoes?
Regrettably I am at this time unable to site a reliable source, as there seems to be no one on the interwebs who gives a damn about victorian infant fashions.
Argh, that would seriously dent my faith in the internet, if there is truely not a single site out there devoted to victorian infant fashion. In fact, I don't believe it; google gives quite a lot of results for 'victorian infant fashion', and some of them might even be relevant.
Actually, the Quakers are one of the nicer sects of christianity. They are basically tolerant pacifists, they do quite a lot of good in the community. Although I actually don't know much about them, maybe that is just a front to disguise their hidden nerve gas laboratory;-)
Actually, the Wikipedia article on Quakers is very interesting. It seems they have been moving away from christianity for quite some time. "Although Quakers throughout most of their history and in most parts of the world today consider Quakerism to be a Christian movement, some Friends (principally in some Meetings in the United States and the United Kingdom) now consider themselves universalist, agnostic, atheist, nonrealist, humanist, postchristian, or nontheist, or do not accept any religious label."
There is a lot of psychology that goes into the design of a church service. First, they start by telling you how fantastic that Jesus guy was, how he was, like, the son of God and everything. Then, they explain how YOU (personally, if not literally) fucked the guy over and nailed him to a tree. After piling on the guilt over that, only then do they bring out the money jar, with the implication that you can redeem yourself by donating to the church.
Hey, where did I make an accusation that the American system was flawed? I certainly am suggesting that the US system is based to a large extent around legal action, so it is natural that an American would think of legal action as a first resort. But my point is merely that this model is not necessarily appropriate elsewhere. It may be that the American system is very effective - I have no direct knowledge to make a judgement on that one way or the other - but it is also an expensive way to resolve disputes.
I do agree with you that Microsoft are unlikely to suddenly change their ways and start playing fair. But Microsoft is just one company, IMHO the best way forward is to rely on the other interested parties in ISO to pull them into line, as a first step. If, for the ANSI committee, 'pulling them into line' means legal action, then fine. But for the majority of other committees, I very much doubt it.
Get real. Why else would they have upgraded their status? I don't know of any objective party that has reviewed the OOXML spec and not had major technical criticisms of it. Countries joining at such a late stage surely never had time to do a proper review of it anyway. Indeed, given the size of the document, and the length of time allotted, no one has been able to do a full review of it, not to anything like the extent of what is normal for an ISO standard. But even then, there were over 10,000 comments submitted. If Microsoft had any shame, they would be deeply embarrassed at having even submitted such a flawed document for standardization in the first place. I don't rule out the possibility that some useful standard can be made out of OOXML, but it would take a huge amount of work and I suspect Microsoft arn't interested in doing anything other than cosmetic changes at this stage.
Older versions of DOS were Abort, Retry, Ignore. Fail replaced Ignore around DOS 4, I think. Later versions (5 or 6?) had all 4 of them, at least for some commands.
You are an American, I guess, by your immediate recourse to legal action as the solution to every problem? That may well be the best way to solve the problems with the ANSI committee, I honestly wouldn't know, but I can certainly say that in most other parts of the world, legal action would be about the last thing that is needed (except in cases where there was provable fraud, or some other illegal occurrence, but I suspect the number of such cases where it could be proven in a court of law is approximately zero). International standards work because of goodwill and cooperation between interested parties. Without this, there is no point having a standard in the first place. Microsoft (or at least some sections of Microsoft) clearly has a different view of how standards work, and also they clearly have no shame. IMHO they are beyond redemption, but they are just one company, and only plays a small part of the overall ISO organization. The committees responsible for the future progress of OOXML need to get back to focussing on technical issues, how to best proceed to come up with a workable standard, and get rid of the politics. (My personal feeling is that there is no way to achieve a workable ISO standard out of the current OOXML spec, but who knows, stranger things have happened.) A lot of things about the OOXML vote have no precedent in ISO history, and probably some ISO and/or National Body procedures will be changed as a result. Forcing these changes by legal action would be expensive and counterproductive, and in the process surely lose the goodwill of the member nations.
I don't think microsoft cares. They have no respect for international standards, other than what they themselves dictate. If the credibility of ISO suffers from this, I suspect it would actually make Microsoft very happy.
But most likely the vote will be 'NO' (that link is to the same blog as TFA, with an updated story). So, the main message is that after all the attempted corruptions by Microsoft, ISO survived and will hopefully be stronger for it.
I don't know if that was supposed to be sarcasm or not; I assume so since Franco was hardly a socialist. He was a corporatist tyrant. But anyway, I was referring to the post-Franco period.
But it is hard to call the privatization of the UK railways a success. Indeed, it has been quite disastrous, with terrible timetable problems, confused pricing structures, and even some deaths that are directly attributable to poor maintenance (since the company suppling the maintenance was trying to maximize profit by minimizing expense). The big problem with Britain is that all levels of government failed to maintain funding for basic infrastructure from about the 60's onwards. The local and national government saw public transport, for example, as a cash cow that they could milk without having to reinvest anything. Of course, after 30 years, the state of public transport infrastructure in the UK was about on par with East Germany, and is now so far behind the rest of Europe that it would take years to catch up, even if the government showed any signs of wanting to do so. But it is possible - even East Germany has now caught up in many places. (eg, Dresden has better infrastructure than pretty much anywhere in the west of Germany. In summary, the UK is a failed socialist state, and are now paying the price for it.
But they do qualify, because especially Germany, and to a lesser extent the UK, were basically in ruins at the end of the 2nd world war. But a better example is Switzerland, which was a rather poor country before the 2nd world war and remains a fairly socialist country. And they have the best organized public transport system of anywhere in Europe that I've seen. Spain is another example, that turned from a very poor country to about average, due to the formation and assistance of the EC (later EU).
Or most likely, getting the user's home directory so it knows where to find $HOME/.Skype to get the user's configuration settings. Virtually any program will do this, via the getpwnam function, section 3 of the Linux man page.
You seem to be advocating a society where there will be, in effect, a complete catalog available on the life of pretty much anyone on the planet, available to whoever has the money and/or time to assemble it. You seem to be comfortable with that, but I'm not sure I am. Imagine the circus US presidential elections would become when they become reduced to arguing over the number of times the candidates drank beer underage. And of course the experience will teach them to value their privacy while in office, something Cheney clearly appreciates already. So the lack of privacy won't apply to everyone equally.
It may be that such a society will emerge anyway, but I don't see why it should be inevitable. Sleepwalking is one way to guarantee it, though.
Does this mean that it's illegal to have a webcam in a public place in parts of Europe
Possibly. You would have to check the local law. Just a webcam might be OK, but if you store the images and make a database of information from stuff collected from the webcam (car license plates, faces etc) that is almost certainly illegal.
or to upload photos taken in public places to Flickr?
No, it would need to be more systematic. The data protection laws apply to databases of information you collect, random photos of a crowd don't qualify. It might mean that it is illegal to crawl flikr and compile a database of faces and locations though. A rule of thumb might be that to qualify under data protection, the information would need to be of a nature that it is meaningful/possible to verify its accuracy. For example, in the UK (and similar laws apply elsewhere in Europe) if you are a member of a club or society, the webmaster would need your explicit permission before publishing your contact details on the club webpage, and the webmaster would also have some limited responsibilities to protect that data (ie, only use it for purposes that you have agreed, have some mechanism for fixing incorrect information, etc. Nothing too onerous that an ethical person wouldn't do anyway).
There is a difference between noticing things pass by on a public street, and setting up an automatic system for pervasive surveillance. For some reason, it seems that many slashdotters don't recognize a difference?!?!
Because technology is making the dividing line between the two increasingly thin.
I don't get it, technology makes it easier to set up 24/7 surveillance, it doesn't affect at all what I notice walking down the street. How is that making the dividing line thin? If anything, it is getting further apart as surveillance technologies become more and more blatant.
You could set up such a camera in the USA. In many parts of Europe, it would be illegal. Even if you were allowed yo set up the camera in the first place, in Europe personal information is owned by that person, irrespective of who collects it. You would need the permission of everyone passing by to collect and store the information, and you would also need to provide a mechanism for people to find out what information you are storing on them and a mechanism for them to correct errors in the database. There is a difference between noticing things pass by on a public street, and setting up an automatic system for pervasive surveillance. For some reason, it seems that many slashdotters don't recognize a difference?!?!
By the way, the credit database example would also be illegal in Europe (not that being illegal means it never happens of course - the Swift fiasco transferring data to the CIA is one large scale example, as far as I know no one was ever prosecuted and it is probably still continuing. And there is probably a large number of low-level violations of the data protection laws going on all the time). See here.
I don't think it's that exactly, more like they are storing the information (indefinitely) on EVERYONE, not just people on the 'wanted' list.
Imagine instead if you were required to notify the police every time you went for a drive, including your destination and (perhaps - in next year's upgrade) number and identities of passengers. Would you object to this? If so, why is this over the line when TFA is not? Is it just the convenience of not having to bother notifying the police of your movements, but instead having it all happen automatically via the cameras?
Slashdot Mirror
I have been following the OOXML saga fairly closely; from Rob Weir's blog, to the NO-OOXML site (admitedly that is a rather partisan site, but I've found the technical arguments presented there generally to be both verifiable and compelling), and the Standards Blog, by Andy Updegrove who seems to know his stuff (which is bizarre since he is also a lawyer, but I guess he came from a parallel universe). I've also looked at sections of the spec myself, and I agree with the major technical criticisms; aside from being redundant in that there is already an ISO standard that could -- with well defined extensions -- cover everything Microsoft wants to include (ie, the backwards compatibility stuff), the OOXML document is a poorly worded draft of a 'standard' that is incomplete, inconsistent, and not ready for standardization.
By usual ISO standards (if it hadn't been submitted on the fast-track), it would be at the stage of a 'committee draft', with at least a couple of years of serious effort into working it into something useable. This is the process that ODF, along with most other ISO standards, went though, and if OOXML makes it through without a similar amount of scrutiny, ISO will have egg on their faces.
For Miguel to say it is a 'superb standard' means he either hasn't read it or followed the technical discussions (in which case he deserves the panning he will get for making such a clueless statement), or he really has sold out, in which case he deserves exile.
No, I don't think hemp is used for serious rope making anymore. It used to be used for climbing/rescue work before synthetics, but a big advantage of synthetic rope is that it takes a lot less effort to take care of it, as well as modern synthetics having much better strength characteristics. Your rope swing in the back yard probably rotted, as plant fibre tends to do ;) Paper is probably the biggest unrealized application for hemp.
From BBC News, Hospital mobile bans 'must stay'
I have a couple of old books on ropes and knots, that date from very early 20th C, before hemp was illegalized. They both have sections comparing the different materials for rope making, and they both state that hemp is the strongest and longest lasting, followed by sisal, and then manilla - these two being significantly inferior to hemp. I think jute is commonly used to make twine, I've never heard of it being used for anything bigger. Kenaf is in the same category as jute, AFAICT.
Industrial hemp has no THC, so there is no possibility to get a high from it. I know a few people that were trying to get some hemp plantations going in Tasmania, for prototype paper production. They were interested in hemp because, of the various alternatives to wood pulp, help appears to be the best. Why should we let ignorant hypocrites (such as yourself, possibly?) ban a useful plant just because variants of it have intoxicating effects? If someone genetically engineered a variety of tomato to contain THC, would you then ban all tomatoes?
Wow, way to completely miss the point of the article. Obviously, you didn't read it. And also obviously, neither did the mods.
Actually, the Quakers are one of the nicer sects of christianity. They are basically tolerant pacifists, they do quite a lot of good in the community. Although I actually don't know much about them, maybe that is just a front to disguise their hidden nerve gas laboratory ;-)
Actually, the Wikipedia article on Quakers is very interesting. It seems they have been moving away from christianity for quite some time. "Although Quakers throughout most of their history and in most parts of the world today consider Quakerism to be a Christian movement, some Friends (principally in some Meetings in the United States and the United Kingdom) now consider themselves universalist, agnostic, atheist, nonrealist, humanist, postchristian, or nontheist, or do not accept any religious label."
There is a lot of psychology that goes into the design of a church service. First, they start by telling you how fantastic that Jesus guy was, how he was, like, the son of God and everything. Then, they explain how YOU (personally, if not literally) fucked the guy over and nailed him to a tree. After piling on the guilt over that, only then do they bring out the money jar, with the implication that you can redeem yourself by donating to the church.
Psychological extortion?
Hey, where did I make an accusation that the American system was flawed? I certainly am suggesting that the US system is based to a large extent around legal action, so it is natural that an American would think of legal action as a first resort. But my point is merely that this model is not necessarily appropriate elsewhere. It may be that the American system is very effective - I have no direct knowledge to make a judgement on that one way or the other - but it is also an expensive way to resolve disputes.
I do agree with you that Microsoft are unlikely to suddenly change their ways and start playing fair. But Microsoft is just one company, IMHO the best way forward is to rely on the other interested parties in ISO to pull them into line, as a first step. If, for the ANSI committee, 'pulling them into line' means legal action, then fine. But for the majority of other committees, I very much doubt it.
Get real. Why else would they have upgraded their status? I don't know of any objective party that has reviewed the OOXML spec and not had major technical criticisms of it. Countries joining at such a late stage surely never had time to do a proper review of it anyway. Indeed, given the size of the document, and the length of time allotted, no one has been able to do a full review of it, not to anything like the extent of what is normal for an ISO standard. But even then, there were over 10,000 comments submitted. If Microsoft had any shame, they would be deeply embarrassed at having even submitted such a flawed document for standardization in the first place. I don't rule out the possibility that some useful standard can be made out of OOXML, but it would take a huge amount of work and I suspect Microsoft arn't interested in doing anything other than cosmetic changes at this stage.
Older versions of DOS were Abort, Retry, Ignore. Fail replaced Ignore around DOS 4, I think. Later versions (5 or 6?) had all 4 of them, at least for some commands.
You are an American, I guess, by your immediate recourse to legal action as the solution to every problem? That may well be the best way to solve the problems with the ANSI committee, I honestly wouldn't know, but I can certainly say that in most other parts of the world, legal action would be about the last thing that is needed (except in cases where there was provable fraud, or some other illegal occurrence, but I suspect the number of such cases where it could be proven in a court of law is approximately zero). International standards work because of goodwill and cooperation between interested parties. Without this, there is no point having a standard in the first place. Microsoft (or at least some sections of Microsoft) clearly has a different view of how standards work, and also they clearly have no shame. IMHO they are beyond redemption, but they are just one company, and only plays a small part of the overall ISO organization. The committees responsible for the future progress of OOXML need to get back to focussing on technical issues, how to best proceed to come up with a workable standard, and get rid of the politics. (My personal feeling is that there is no way to achieve a workable ISO standard out of the current OOXML spec, but who knows, stranger things have happened.) A lot of things about the OOXML vote have no precedent in ISO history, and probably some ISO and/or National Body procedures will be changed as a result. Forcing these changes by legal action would be expensive and counterproductive, and in the process surely lose the goodwill of the member nations.
I don't think microsoft cares. They have no respect for international standards, other than what they themselves dictate. If the credibility of ISO suffers from this, I suspect it would actually make Microsoft very happy.
But most likely the vote will be 'NO' (that link is to the same blog as TFA, with an updated story). So, the main message is that after all the attempted corruptions by Microsoft, ISO survived and will hopefully be stronger for it.
But you need to remember, the 45nm number comes from the marketing department.
I don't know if that was supposed to be sarcasm or not; I assume so since Franco was hardly a socialist. He was a corporatist tyrant. But anyway, I was referring to the post-Franco period.
But it is hard to call the privatization of the UK railways a success. Indeed, it has been quite disastrous, with terrible timetable problems, confused pricing structures, and even some deaths that are directly attributable to poor maintenance (since the company suppling the maintenance was trying to maximize profit by minimizing expense). The big problem with Britain is that all levels of government failed to maintain funding for basic infrastructure from about the 60's onwards. The local and national government saw public transport, for example, as a cash cow that they could milk without having to reinvest anything. Of course, after 30 years, the state of public transport infrastructure in the UK was about on par with East Germany, and is now so far behind the rest of Europe that it would take years to catch up, even if the government showed any signs of wanting to do so. But it is possible - even East Germany has now caught up in many places. (eg, Dresden has better infrastructure than pretty much anywhere in the west of Germany. In summary, the UK is a failed socialist state, and are now paying the price for it.
But they do qualify, because especially Germany, and to a lesser extent the UK, were basically in ruins at the end of the 2nd world war. But a better example is Switzerland, which was a rather poor country before the 2nd world war and remains a fairly socialist country. And they have the best organized public transport system of anywhere in Europe that I've seen. Spain is another example, that turned from a very poor country to about average, due to the formation and assistance of the EC (later EU).
Or most likely, getting the user's home directory so it knows where to find $HOME/.Skype to get the user's configuration settings. Virtually any program will do this, via the getpwnam function, section 3 of the Linux man page.
What is stopping you then? Surely you have seen the 'Zonk' checkbox on the 'Customize Stories on the Homepage' section of the user preferences?
You seem to be advocating a society where there will be, in effect, a complete catalog available on the life of pretty much anyone on the planet, available to whoever has the money and/or time to assemble it. You seem to be comfortable with that, but I'm not sure I am. Imagine the circus US presidential elections would become when they become reduced to arguing over the number of times the candidates drank beer underage. And of course the experience will teach them to value their privacy while in office, something Cheney clearly appreciates already. So the lack of privacy won't apply to everyone equally.
It may be that such a society will emerge anyway, but I don't see why it should be inevitable. Sleepwalking is one way to guarantee it, though.
Possibly. You would have to check the local law. Just a webcam might be OK, but if you store the images and make a database of information from stuff collected from the webcam (car license plates, faces etc) that is almost certainly illegal.
No, it would need to be more systematic. The data protection laws apply to databases of information you collect, random photos of a crowd don't qualify. It might mean that it is illegal to crawl flikr and compile a database of faces and locations though. A rule of thumb might be that to qualify under data protection, the information would need to be of a nature that it is meaningful/possible to verify its accuracy. For example, in the UK (and similar laws apply elsewhere in Europe) if you are a member of a club or society, the webmaster would need your explicit permission before publishing your contact details on the club webpage, and the webmaster would also have some limited responsibilities to protect that data (ie, only use it for purposes that you have agreed, have some mechanism for fixing incorrect information, etc. Nothing too onerous that an ethical person wouldn't do anyway).
I don't get it, technology makes it easier to set up 24/7 surveillance, it doesn't affect at all what I notice walking down the street. How is that making the dividing line thin? If anything, it is getting further apart as surveillance technologies become more and more blatant.
You could set up such a camera in the USA. In many parts of Europe, it would be illegal. Even if you were allowed yo set up the camera in the first place, in Europe personal information is owned by that person, irrespective of who collects it. You would need the permission of everyone passing by to collect and store the information, and you would also need to provide a mechanism for people to find out what information you are storing on them and a mechanism for them to correct errors in the database. There is a difference between noticing things pass by on a public street, and setting up an automatic system for pervasive surveillance. For some reason, it seems that many slashdotters don't recognize a difference?!?!
By the way, the credit database example would also be illegal in Europe (not that being illegal means it never happens of course - the Swift fiasco transferring data to the CIA is one large scale example, as far as I know no one was ever prosecuted and it is probably still continuing. And there is probably a large number of low-level violations of the data protection laws going on all the time). See here.
I don't think it's that exactly, more like they are storing the information (indefinitely) on EVERYONE, not just people on the 'wanted' list.
Imagine instead if you were required to notify the police every time you went for a drive, including your destination and (perhaps - in next year's upgrade) number and identities of passengers. Would you object to this? If so, why is this over the line when TFA is not? Is it just the convenience of not having to bother notifying the police of your movements, but instead having it all happen automatically via the cameras?
Since when was writing C++ code stressful? Surely if anything, writing VB code is stressful?!?!