Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights might apply, though (IANAL) I believe the wording is rather weaker than the US version (with my emphasis):
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. this right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information an ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
France is a signatory to the Convention though I have no idea how (or indeed if) it is implemented in French law directly.
A bit offtopic perhaps but I have been consistently impressed with the Hutton Inquiry use of the web and technology in general.
I had a quick look at their server today (28th, when the report is due out) and response time was good - checking them with Netcraft
it looks like they are running Apache (probably on Linux underneath - though Netcraft is not always reliable on this point in my experience), and recently changed over to Akamai presumably for edge caching - which would explain the good response time.
Any Slashdotters involved with the technical side of the inquiry? I was really impressed by the evidence management system where everything submitted got scanned in and was available on screen to the witnesses and (mostly) on the website as well.
I used to work in an office in a hospital which happened to be next to a cleanup room, where various sorts of waste used to get dumped, between pickups from the cleaners who would take it off to the incinerator.
One morning I come in and open up my office door when I realize I am standing in a pool of liquid of some sort, smelling a little funny. I trace it back to a split waste bag (with biohazard trefoils - danger clinical waste). I'm a little worried so track around the department trying to find out what moron failed to double-bag their rubbish correctly and what was in it.
Eventually I got somebody to admit it might be theirs and offer to clean it up, so I asked them what I now had all over my shoes...
"Oh, you're OK, I autoclaved it"
"Yeah, but what was it?"
"Well... infected human urine and blood samples, but I autoclaved it..."
Of course I had to assume that he had probably autoclaved it equally as well as he had bagged up. i.e. wrong. At this point I went a bit verbal at him and got called up before the head of department - who shut up pretty quick once I threatened to get the local safety rep involved.
Maybe this is his newest book in the USA, over here the sequel is already out: The Sundering (got that link of WJW's page).
I find myself agreeing with much of the review (cardboard cutout characters getting killed or surviving in predictable ways), but at the same time I really enjoyed the book. I particularly liked the way that, since the Shaa had restricted various sorts of tech, you could zap around between stars at FTL via the fixed wormholes, but once in a system were stuck with relativistic physics (and no nanotechnology or AI to help out).
One point I think the review missed - the reason that the characters manage to survive against vastly superior odds is that neither side have any idea how to conduct a space battle - no enemy apart from the Shaa has a fleet of any size or control of the wormholes, so all the actions in the illustrious thousands-year history of the grand Shaa spacefleet have basicallly been bombarding planets into submission from orbit. This is brought out more in the sequel.
Could have lived without the rant about the series by a different author (but I haven't read the Honor Harrington stuff so maybe it was relevant).
I once had a case of what seemed to be a software bug that was actually a "bug" bug...
The system was a database of questionnaires, hooked up to an OMR with a fairly high capacity feeding mechanism, for reading multiple-choice (fill-in-the-boxes) questionnaires. The OMR setup was in one room and the DB server on another site, where I was running various queries.
Occasionally the totals of answers ticked would be obviously wrong in the reports; after several days of fighting with the reporting stuff and the mark intepretation software I actually went in the room where the forms were being run through the OMR and discovered that it was full of little flies attracted through an open window by the heat and humidity. The flies were getting stuck on the forms and on the rollers of the OMR feeder, causing false positives on the questionnaires.
Patch was to shut the window, clean the OMR feeder and invest in some bugspray for the temp who had been happily running fly corpses through the OMR for several days.
All of whom write better fiction than any Heinlein
(bar perhaps "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress") plus golloups of enough up-to-date science as would make the Good Doctor proud.
Agreed sometimes you need a new feature that the OS does not support because the architecture is too ancient (though this happens less frequently with better designed, more modular, operating systems, naming no names...). However it is not just a case of using the servers and the usual commercial software to do stuff, many places have custom applications (developed in house or by outside contractors) that do useful work, and were developed to work on those specific OSes. Upgrading may not even be feasible (in a reasonable amount of time) if the person who developed the app is not around to handle the port.
I know of what I speak since my place migrated from NT4 (desktops in fact, but the argument would apply if we were running custom apps on NT4 servers) to XP about a year ago. I was in general in favour but asked our in-house support people how many apps I would have to rewrite/recompile to work with XP and Office XP rather than NT4 and Office 2000; they did a quick test and said it seemed trivial.
Of course it wasn't and I spent a significant amount of time that I should have been using for new projects in getting the old stuff (which worked perfectly well on the old platform) to work again.
The fixes were almost all trivial (e.g. use a different API function, or a specific configuration option) but took a disproportionate amount of time to track down (in code that has worked perfectly on the old platform for 2 or 3 years), during which the users are asking "Why doesn't it work today when it was working yesterday?"
Yes, of course we should have carried out a whole validation exercise on the new platform etc. but it can be hard to justify the time and expense of that while there is always more than enough new work to be doing.
The summary does not seem completely accurate; since the greylisting MTA sends an SMTP temp failure there should never be any false positives as long as the sending MTA is vaguely RFC-compliant (sadly not true I suspect). Or at least that was my reading of the paper...
I'm currently using Bogofilter
(and looking into CRM114) and
getting better than 99% accuracy (about 1 in 200 false negatives at the moment) and very very few false positives (maybe 2 in 5000 messages).
Of course these are MUA level filters (and yes, I know, I've already "paid" with bandwidth to download the spam) - however since the proposed "greylister" would have to be installed as the MTA at major ISPs (as the authors note) I'm not convinced that is more likely to get widespread adoption than the various sorts of adaptive client-based filtering now available, particularly as it requires a database to back the method up.
As far as I am concerned the major factor in a spam filter should be zero false positives - personally I don't mind reviewing one or two spams a week but I get really annoyed if I were to lose a real message (note the two false positives I have sent to date with bogofilter contained forwarded sales pitches along with a message).
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe someone is actually using Evolutionary Programming (not)?
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. this right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information an ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
France is a signatory to the Convention though I have no idea how (or indeed if) it is implemented in French law directly.
I had a quick look at their server today (28th, when the report is due out) and response time was good - checking them with Netcraft it looks like they are running Apache (probably on Linux underneath - though Netcraft is not always reliable on this point in my experience), and recently changed over to Akamai presumably for edge caching - which would explain the good response time.
Any Slashdotters involved with the technical side of the inquiry? I was really impressed by the evidence management system where everything submitted got scanned in and was available on screen to the witnesses and (mostly) on the website as well.
I used to work in an office in a hospital which happened to be next to a cleanup room, where various sorts of waste used to get dumped, between pickups from the cleaners who would take it off to the incinerator.
One morning I come in and open up my office door when I realize I am standing in a pool of liquid of some sort, smelling a little funny. I trace it back to a split waste bag (with biohazard trefoils - danger clinical waste). I'm a little worried so track around the department trying to find out what moron failed to double-bag their rubbish correctly and what was in it.
Eventually I got somebody to admit it might be theirs and offer to clean it up, so I asked them what I now had all over my shoes...
"Oh, you're OK, I autoclaved it"
"Yeah, but what was it?"
"Well... infected human urine and blood samples, but I autoclaved it..."
Of course I had to assume that he had probably autoclaved it equally as well as he had bagged up. i.e. wrong. At this point I went a bit verbal at him and got called up before the head of department - who shut up pretty quick once I threatened to get the local safety rep involved.
Maybe this is his newest book in the USA, over here the sequel is already out: The Sundering (got that link of WJW's page).
I find myself agreeing with much of the review (cardboard cutout characters getting killed or surviving in predictable ways), but at the same time I really enjoyed the book. I particularly liked the way that, since the Shaa had restricted various sorts of tech, you could zap around between stars at FTL via the fixed wormholes, but once in a system were stuck with relativistic physics (and no nanotechnology or AI to help out).
One point I think the review missed - the reason that the characters manage to survive against vastly superior odds is that neither side have any idea how to conduct a space battle - no enemy apart from the Shaa has a fleet of any size or control of the wormholes, so all the actions in the illustrious thousands-year history of the grand Shaa spacefleet have basicallly been bombarding planets into submission from orbit. This is brought out more in the sequel.
Could have lived without the rant about the series by a different author (but I haven't read the Honor Harrington stuff so maybe it was relevant).
The system was a database of questionnaires, hooked up to an OMR with a fairly high capacity feeding mechanism, for reading multiple-choice (fill-in-the-boxes) questionnaires. The OMR setup was in one room and the DB server on another site, where I was running various queries.
Occasionally the totals of answers ticked would be obviously wrong in the reports; after several days of fighting with the reporting stuff and the mark intepretation software I actually went in the room where the forms were being run through the OMR and discovered that it was full of little flies attracted through an open window by the heat and humidity. The flies were getting stuck on the forms and on the rollers of the OMR feeder, causing false positives on the questionnaires.
Patch was to shut the window, clean the OMR feeder and invest in some bugspray for the temp who had been happily running fly corpses through the OMR for several days.
- Greg Egan
- Iain (M.) Banks
- Alistair Reynolds
- Ken MacLeod
- Richard Morgan
- Peter F. Hamilton
- Plus one of the old masters back at work: M. John Harrison
All of whom write better fiction than any Heinlein (bar perhaps "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress") plus golloups of enough up-to-date science as would make the Good Doctor proud.I know of what I speak since my place migrated from NT4 (desktops in fact, but the argument would apply if we were running custom apps on NT4 servers) to XP about a year ago. I was in general in favour but asked our in-house support people how many apps I would have to rewrite/recompile to work with XP and Office XP rather than NT4 and Office 2000; they did a quick test and said it seemed trivial.
Of course it wasn't and I spent a significant amount of time that I should have been using for new projects in getting the old stuff (which worked perfectly well on the old platform) to work again.
The fixes were almost all trivial (e.g. use a different API function, or a specific configuration option) but took a disproportionate amount of time to track down (in code that has worked perfectly on the old platform for 2 or 3 years), during which the users are asking "Why doesn't it work today when it was working yesterday?"
Yes, of course we should have carried out a whole validation exercise on the new platform etc. but it can be hard to justify the time and expense of that while there is always more than enough new work to be doing.
I'm currently using Bogofilter (and looking into CRM114) and getting better than 99% accuracy (about 1 in 200 false negatives at the moment) and very very few false positives (maybe 2 in 5000 messages).
Of course these are MUA level filters (and yes, I know, I've already "paid" with bandwidth to download the spam) - however since the proposed "greylister" would have to be installed as the MTA at major ISPs (as the authors note) I'm not convinced that is more likely to get widespread adoption than the various sorts of adaptive client-based filtering now available, particularly as it requires a database to back the method up.
As far as I am concerned the major factor in a spam filter should be zero false positives - personally I don't mind reviewing one or two spams a week but I get really annoyed if I were to lose a real message (note the two false positives I have sent to date with bogofilter contained forwarded sales pitches along with a message).