Article 18. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; [..]
Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; [..]
Article 26. (1) Everyone has the right to education. [...]
Furthermore, China is a country where there is no absolute freedom of information. Ok, that sucks, but that's the way it is. Luckily, most other countries feel differently.
No one actually subscribes to the unlimited rights of the international charter. The freedom of expression in the Netherlands, which usually ranks higher than the US on comparative freedom/democracy ratings by Freedom House or the UNDP, is phrased as follows in the constitution:
No one requires prior permission to express thoughts or emotions, except where required by law.
Two causes for exceptions are explicitly mentioned in the constitution: protection of those under the age of 16, and prior permission required for commercial advertising.
The European Treaty for Human Rights makes a similar limitation in art. 10, and I know US states have similar limitations for minors at least. Nazi propaganda and holocaust denial are also prohibited in many western countries, as well as foul language, racism, insult, defamation, and slander, and religious movements like Scientology in some. These cases do not involve 'prior permission' though.
Similarly, the implementation of art. 26 in our constitution (art. 23 GW) allows the government to supervise the content of the curriculum, and to legislate the required skills and morals (with a government-issued attest of good conduct) of teachers.
We do not like Nazism, and the Chinese government does not like democracy. I don't think there is a moral equivalence, but the difference is not the freedom of expression, religion, or education.
I don't spend my time trying to get into these people's heads in order to negotiate with them. The objective is to defeat them, in particular working out ways to cut them off from their support bases, create and exploit divisions within the movement etc.
You have to understand them, and their supporters, to defeat them. If you want to shame them into submission by stressing the pile of bodies, which is a viable strategy in itself, you have to make sure that you keep clean hands yourself.
Their leadership literally mudered each other after an MI5 disinformation campaign. Today the group is completely defunct.
The relentless disinformation campaign of the present American administration seems to be designed to defeat the American people, not Al Qaeda and its supporters.
I thought that Ken Livingstone's statement on the London attacks was very good, he did not rely on any of the empty puffery that US politicians use.
I agree. I heard him make two statements on TV. The first one was good enough, the second one yesterday almost brilliant.
The aspect of the Bush administration's rhetoric that is counterproductive is that they keep trying to score trite political points instead of saying that 99.9% of americans are utterly opposed to Al Qaeda.
A weakness of modern American politicians in general, and Bush et alii most of all, is that when they are pretending to be addressing the world or the American people, they are actually just addressing voters. There is no distinction between diplomacy and internal politics any more. It seems like no speechwriter even cares about how a speech will be received in the rest of the world.
Chuchill said 'WE will fight them on the beaches', not 'Conservatives will fight them'.
Churchill was always very aware that the Nazis, and occupied Europe, were listening to everything he said. He was a great wartime leader in a way, but a mediocre politician.
Having said that, WWII is definitely not a good example to follow. It took most people in the world years to decide that siding with the Allied side was really the best thing to do. The Russians and British in particular were really unlikely good guys in those days, just like the Poles. It was not easy for people who had been conditioned into hating the Russians or British all their lives to recognize that the Nazis were even worse. We don't want to repeat that pattern.
The 'hating freedom' rhetoric is off the mark but it is also in some ways true.
It is a mistake to think that cults like al Qaeda are entirely rational or irrational. They are rational insofar as they do actually have a political program of sorts. But their behavior is also highly irrational and frequently borders on insanity.
It is clear that you cannot directly negotiate with a terrorist movement. Even when you reach an agreement, Al Qaeda cannot stop terrorism. It has a momentum of its own.
When reacting to it you can only react to the demands it makes publicly. The freedom hating rhetoric is completely off the mark because Osama bin Laden speaks of freedom continually.
Potential support of Al Qaeda is indeed limited to a small slice of the muslim population, but my perception is not that support is limited or shrinking. Wahhabism is becoming a mainstream faction among young muslims in Europe. The failure of the US government to address what Al Qaeda wants, and the perceived deception, plays a large part in that.
The French Resistance and George Washington tended to limit their hostillities to military targets, which is seen as "honourable" in Western circles, but that's the Western distinction between soldier and civillian talking. If your culture makes no such distinction, then attacking civillians is not de facto an unconciencable act.
I don't think this is about different conceptions of honour. Washington was able to defeat the British with French help, and he knew that. You don't meet an army in the field if there is not even the remotest possibility of achieving some goal, either directly or indirectly. The French resistance could never have defeated the Germans, but their actions assisted the allies who were going to come eventually and liberate France.
Western armies have been targeting civilians for centuries. "Honour" never prevented that. What terrorists do is just a new combination of geurilla tactics and targeting civilians. Both tactics are common, but they are rarely combined.
Military technology has now basically made it impossible for a citizen army to defeat a professional one on the field, and a Washington today would be dead long before he has build an army. Today Washington would have to choose between the path of Gandhi and the path of Bin Laden.
The path of Gandhi only works if the enemy can be shamed into submission, and requires a very good understanding of the morality of the enemy (and cooperation of the media).
The path of Bin Laden might work as long as you are capable of escalating the level of atrocity while not loosing the support of a population to hide in. This depends on how evil the "Great Satan" is perceived to be.
Bin Laden was really upset by the presence of 'infidel' troops in Saudi Arabia. They were a bit inconveniently situated for Bin Laden's aspiration of starting a coup.
Osama bin Laden explained quite eloquently why in his speech addressed to the American people before the election. A fragment:
"People of United States, this talk of mine is for you and concerns the ideal way to prevent another Manhattan and deals with the war and its causes and results.
Before I begin, I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar in human life and that free men do not forfeit their security contrary to Bush's claims that we hate freedom. If so, then let him explain why did not strike - for example - Sweden.
And we know that freedom haters do not possess defiant spirits like those of the 19. Allah have mercy on them. No, we fight because we are free men who do not sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our Nation, and just as you lay waste to our Nation so shall we lay waste to yours.
I am amazed at you. Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real cause, and thus the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred. So I shall talk to you about the story behind those events and I shall tell you truthfully about the moments in which the decision was taken, for you to consider.
I say to you Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike towers. But after we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the America/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.
The events that affected my soul in a complicated way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American 6th fleet helped them in that. And the whole world saw and heard but did not respond.
In those difficult moments many hard to describe ideas bubbled in my soul but in the end they produced intense feelings of rejection of tyranny and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.
And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressors in kind and that we destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children."
He may be lying, of course, but it is a much more plausible explanation than "hating freedom" and nonsense like that. Besides, if you terrorize people into doing what you want, you will have to explain to them what you want. From 9/11 onwards the "war" has carried its own momentum; A single solution to it no longer exists.
They're extinct because of us, but probably not because our ancestors murdered them all, in character for H. Sapiens though that would certainly be. At the Skhul cave in Israel there's pretty good evidence for moderns and Neanderthals living alongside each other for thousands of years in the same cave system.
It proves very little. We lived 'alongside' wolves and bears for millenia too, but in the end we did kill all of them. Surely there was just alternating habitation of the cave by moderns and Neanderthals, which only suggests that it took the moderns a lot of time to push out the Neanderthals in that area. Modern-Neanderthal wars would have been very small and local affairs; The evidence may just suggest that the difference in military skills was not that huge.
The area around the cave may simply have been too marginal to support a self-sustaining population, regardless of species, large enough to defend itself against bands of invaders. Therefore ownership changes easily and often.
We see similar patterns in linguistic displacement; Sometimes languages are replaced in a few decades in a large area (think of the expansion of the Roman Empire), but in many cases linguistic borders move only a few dozen kilometers after a millenium of intermittent war. The Germanic-Romance language border moved only slightly in two millenia, even though there have been lots of wars and small scale ethnic displacements along that border. History also shows us that marginal areas like mountain ranges were very effective borders when armies, and colonists, carry their food supply with them.
If programmers ran the world, the law would be clear, concise, and unambiguous. Or at least that's what they'd like to think.
In the legislative processes I am sometimes professionally involved in, the law is usually pretty clear, concise, and unambiguous when it leaves the hands of legislative drafters. After that, politicians will complain will talk to stakeholders and revise it to a messy and ambiguous law. Programmers and legislative drafters do have a lot in common.
Anybody who's actually studied law knows that actual human interactions are full of corner cases, and ass-coverings easily outweigh the meat of most contracts.
Indeed. A mature law is 80% exceptions, permissions. It is a misunderstanding to think that 'deregulation' will make live easier. Deregulation often means more litigation. People have to learn to appreciate that law is very concise given the number of different cases it is covering; That's why the sentences are so long.
I'm a bit puzzled by your statement "The first time I got 8-9 MB samples at slow speed."
What I mean to say is that the first time I downloaded I literally received completely different files from the same links, being 15 minute samples of 8-9MB. Since others apparently received the whole thing, I decided to try again and was surprised to find that the links now pointed to other files.
Apparently they have some setup that allows a maximum of connections to the whole symphonies, and redirects excess connections to 15 min samples on a much narrower pipeline. It is really weird. Parent of this thread is not talking nonsense.
Try the same links again. The first time I got 8-9 MB samples at slow speed. Second time I got the whole thing at 500 KB/sec. Maybe a ceative way of preventing being Slashdotted?
A Top Tip for getting classic computer gear is to know people in academia - I haven't paid for either of my NeXTs (cube and turbo color slab), my Ultra 1s, Ultra 5s, sparcstation 5, or my Mac Plus:-)
A few years ago I gave away several sun3's and a xerox lisp machine. I am still sorrry about that.
Second, AMD is in no danger of having a sizeable portion of their market taken by Intel and instead AMD has been making inroads into Intel's area with server class CPU offerings and the mobo makers have been making boards for them right along.
AMD is in a good position to take marketshare with their current line of processors, if only they can get the attention of corporate and generally non-geek consumers and dissuade Intel from predatory practices for some time. AMD goes to court now because they feel strong enough to pull it off. The big OEMs will not immediately join AMD's side, but AMD may not need them to prove its case.
Interestingly, AMD never mentions any mobo, memory, or chipset makers in its complaint. AMD will have supporters in that corner, and they have less reason of being afraid of Intel.
But just when are we gettingliquid hydrogen powered cars? Seriously, I'm freaking fed up with paying 20$ a gallon on gas. Maybe an infinitely available resource would be cheaper.
An 'infinitely available resource'? The closest place where it is available in substantial quantity is Jupiter.
Hydrogen on earth is usually produced from oil, just like gas, because that is cheapest. It is also possible to produce it from other sources, just like it is possible to produce fuels similar to gas from other sources, but that does not make great economic sense yet.
I think this lightweight plane has significantly less horse powers than your or my car, btw.
He is opposing a bill that would outlaw the stirring up of hatred against members of a religion. That includes jedi, sith, scientologist, whatever. The bill is very loosely worded as to what could be considered stirring up hatred. "Yoda was an arsehole, it all Jedi should be done away with" might qualify.
On the other hand this bill would have been useful for prosecuting senator Palpatine before the massacre of the jedi. He was saying things like this about the jedi all the time. Let's not forget that!
Some people did. I am sure there are many more in history, but I have not been able to google up any sites listing heroes that were killed fighting over a flag. I noted that www.peoplewhodiedfortheflag.com is still free.
"Europe has outrun the Americas for the first time in history and became the second largest broadband market in the world," TelecomPaper noted.
The addition of broadband to European homes was also greater than Asia and America, growing around twice as fast.
Leading the European charge were countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark whose broadband connectivity now only trails South Korea by a smidgen.
"Given the slow growth of South Korea, we expect that the top position, now held by South Korea, will change hands this year", observed TelecomPaper director Ed Achterberg.
Five out the world's top 10 broadband nations are European, with Hong Kong at number four and Canada at five. Switzerland, Israel, Taiwan, Norway and Sweden are all up in the top ten, boasting at least 16.9 percent fast Internet connections per 100 citizens.
A good example is the Mayan Codices. Records seem to indicate there were thousands, however Spanish priests burned them as "works of the devil" during the European conquest of the Americas. Today only 4 remain.
If the destruction of our civilization is going to be as sudden and complete as this one, the few surviving texts will definitely include works of questionable value like The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness. Later civilizations may indeed think of this age as a dark one.
You don't have to have something on an immutable, indestructable medium for it to survive.
The question is whether and how later generations want to remember us. The church and dark age kings did pass on some of the greater works of Greeks and Romans because the value of those works was at least recognized by some throughout the two millenia that have passed since their time.
History has been far less kind with the losers of history like the Egyptians, Sumerians, Mayas, Incas, etc.
The Nordic Legends weren't written down for centuries, yet today we still have them.
Germanic oral traditions are far less reliable as history. Note that there are also many reproductions of apparently classical and dark age works that are not taken seriously as a historical source. There is a variety of reasons to forge historical works.
Engravings on headstones, or big stone buildings in inobtrusive places like deserts seem to last very long. Unfortunately the texts people carve in stone (sentimental and religious drivel) are usually not the knowledge one would want to preserve for posterity.
The Longnow Foundation has the right ideas for making sure that posterity will rank us with the Eqyptians and Greeks. I think it's a good idea to add some nuclear fallout near to the monuments as a disincentive (or 'curse') for reusing materials, which has completely messed up the archeological record in densely inhabited places like Europe, India, and coastal China.
The British police force has passed on details to Interpol and the Indian authorities, in an attempt to prosecute the individual.
They are barking up the wrong tree. If only the individual in another jurisdiction is liable to sanction, why is it allowed for British banks to move personal information to foreign countries in the first place? Shouldn't the bank be fined for failing to protect personal information of British citizens?
Abuse of power by employees is not something new or interesting, but the accountability issue is. Personal information should only be moved between countries with similar protections against abuse. Having said this, I don't know anything about British law on this issue.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of people out there that have the free time on their hands to tinker with things that they find interesting. This is really how open source got to be big in the first place.
As a somewhat older university researcher I would like to point out that innovative ideas rarely come from IT companies. Most software concepts were invented in the academic world, developed into a proof of concept by researchers, and taken up by students. Some of these students will end up at closed source IT companies, but code from the academic world will more often than not end up in the open source community.
As soon as an application category (e.g. web browsers) becomes mainstream, the academic world is no longer interested, and keeping up with closed source competitors becomes the responsibility of hobbyists, and adolescents working on their CV.
People write free/open source software because they enjoy it not because it is going to make them rich.
We do actually work together with IT companies that donate software components resulting from the cooperation to us, and we publish it as open source. I have seen IT companies grow very fast because of this arrangement.
The idea is that we are an impartial outsider -- since we don't do service, only advice and proof of concept -- and large public administrations like the idea that they can switch to another IT company in principle. It helps these smaller IT companies to get contracts with these large organizations that would otherwise be afraid of depending too much on a small IT company. We serve as a kind of matchmaker for innovative application development.
The disadvantage is that competitors will take the components at some point and start competing for the contract, but the original developer usually has a huge knowledge advantage. Obviously, this business model works better for software for specialized business tasks than for consumer office packages etc.
Re:Calculator key?
on
Blank Keyboard
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Nowadays keyboards come with an extra row of buttons along the top: email, internet, volume and so forth.... and shutdown/standby. My cat loves that key.
I like more subtle statistics - for example because there is a large community of Turks in Germany, they always get at least 10 points from Germany.
Same in the Netherlands.
I don't agree with the article about 'hostility' between the Netherlands and Belgium, though. Dutch voting is usually honestly based on merit, with Turkey (because of the minority) and the contestant with the nicest dress (a tradition among Dutch gays) getting high votes.
The countries in the center of the EU are less likely to exchange votes with eachother than cliques at the edges. I don't think 'hostility' is the right explanation for that. Lack of interest in who wins is more important.
...The other mainland European countries actually think it's a real contest!
For small, poor, and generally unknown countries at the edges it is a real contest: who gets to organize the event next year. It is a lot easier to win the Eurovision contest than the EC or WC football or the Olympic games, which really matter.
For established artists from all of the richer countries it is a major risk for their careers, and they avoid it like the plague.
Slashdot Mirror
In general, filtering the Web violates:
Article 18.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; [..]
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; [..]
Article 26.
(1) Everyone has the right to education. [...]
Furthermore, China is a country where there is no absolute freedom of information. Ok, that sucks, but that's the way it is. Luckily, most other countries feel differently.
No one actually subscribes to the unlimited rights of the international charter. The freedom of expression in the Netherlands, which usually ranks higher than the US on comparative freedom/democracy ratings by Freedom House or the UNDP, is phrased as follows in the constitution:
No one requires prior permission to express thoughts or emotions, except where required by law.
Two causes for exceptions are explicitly mentioned in the constitution: protection of those under the age of 16, and prior permission required for commercial advertising.
The European Treaty for Human Rights makes a similar limitation in art. 10, and I know US states have similar limitations for minors at least. Nazi propaganda and holocaust denial are also prohibited in many western countries, as well as foul language, racism, insult, defamation, and slander, and religious movements like Scientology in some. These cases do not involve 'prior permission' though.
Similarly, the implementation of art. 26 in our constitution (art. 23 GW) allows the government to supervise the content of the curriculum, and to legislate the required skills and morals (with a government-issued attest of good conduct) of teachers.
We do not like Nazism, and the Chinese government does not like democracy. I don't think there is a moral equivalence, but the difference is not the freedom of expression, religion, or education.
I don't spend my time trying to get into these people's heads in order to negotiate with them. The objective is to defeat them, in particular working out ways to cut them off from their support bases, create and exploit divisions within the movement etc.
You have to understand them, and their supporters, to defeat them. If you want to shame them into submission by stressing the pile of bodies, which is a viable strategy in itself, you have to make sure that you keep clean hands yourself.
Their leadership literally mudered each other after an MI5 disinformation campaign. Today the group is completely defunct.
The relentless disinformation campaign of the present American administration seems to be designed to defeat the American people, not Al Qaeda and its supporters.
I thought that Ken Livingstone's statement on the London attacks was very good, he did not rely on any of the empty puffery that US politicians use.
I agree. I heard him make two statements on TV. The first one was good enough, the second one yesterday almost brilliant.
The aspect of the Bush administration's rhetoric that is counterproductive is that they keep trying to score trite political points instead of saying that 99.9% of americans are utterly opposed to Al Qaeda.
A weakness of modern American politicians in general, and Bush et alii most of all, is that when they are pretending to be addressing the world or the American people, they are actually just addressing voters. There is no distinction between diplomacy and internal politics any more. It seems like no speechwriter even cares about how a speech will be received in the rest of the world.
Chuchill said 'WE will fight them on the beaches', not 'Conservatives will fight them'.
Churchill was always very aware that the Nazis, and occupied Europe, were listening to everything he said. He was a great wartime leader in a way, but a mediocre politician.
Having said that, WWII is definitely not a good example to follow. It took most people in the world years to decide that siding with the Allied side was really the best thing to do. The Russians and British in particular were really unlikely good guys in those days, just like the Poles. It was not easy for people who had been conditioned into hating the Russians or British all their lives to recognize that the Nazis were even worse. We don't want to repeat that pattern.
The 'hating freedom' rhetoric is off the mark but it is also in some ways true.
It is a mistake to think that cults like al Qaeda are entirely rational or irrational. They are rational insofar as they do actually have a political program of sorts. But their behavior is also highly irrational and frequently borders on insanity.
It is clear that you cannot directly negotiate with a terrorist movement. Even when you reach an agreement, Al Qaeda cannot stop terrorism. It has a momentum of its own.
When reacting to it you can only react to the demands it makes publicly. The freedom hating rhetoric is completely off the mark because Osama bin Laden speaks of freedom continually.
Potential support of Al Qaeda is indeed limited to a small slice of the muslim population, but my perception is not that support is limited or shrinking. Wahhabism is becoming a mainstream faction among young muslims in Europe. The failure of the US government to address what Al Qaeda wants, and the perceived deception, plays a large part in that.
I'm from London and I appreciated it. Stop trying to stamp out humour just because of a few explosions.
It was a famous Londoner that once said:
Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly
If we lose our sense of humour just because of a few mass murders, the terrorists will have won.
The French Resistance and George Washington tended to limit their hostillities to military targets, which is seen as "honourable" in Western circles, but that's the Western distinction between soldier and civillian talking. If your culture makes no such distinction, then attacking civillians is not de facto an unconciencable act.
I don't think this is about different conceptions of honour. Washington was able to defeat the British with French help, and he knew that. You don't meet an army in the field if there is not even the remotest possibility of achieving some goal, either directly or indirectly. The French resistance could never have defeated the Germans, but their actions assisted the allies who were going to come eventually and liberate France.
Western armies have been targeting civilians for centuries. "Honour" never prevented that. What terrorists do is just a new combination of geurilla tactics and targeting civilians. Both tactics are common, but they are rarely combined.
Military technology has now basically made it impossible for a citizen army to defeat a professional one on the field, and a Washington today would be dead long before he has build an army. Today Washington would have to choose between the path of Gandhi and the path of Bin Laden.
The path of Gandhi only works if the enemy can be shamed into submission, and requires a very good understanding of the morality of the enemy (and cooperation of the media).
The path of Bin Laden might work as long as you are capable of escalating the level of atrocity while not loosing the support of a population to hide in. This depends on how evil the "Great Satan" is perceived to be.
Oh please, then what triggered 9/11?
Bin Laden was really upset by the presence of 'infidel' troops in Saudi Arabia. They were a bit inconveniently situated for Bin Laden's aspiration of starting a coup.
Osama bin Laden explained quite eloquently why in his speech addressed to the American people before the election. A fragment:
"People of United States, this talk of mine is for you and concerns the ideal way to prevent another Manhattan and deals with the war and its causes and results.
Before I begin, I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar in human life and that free men do not forfeit their security contrary to Bush's claims that we hate freedom. If so, then let him explain why did not strike - for example - Sweden.
And we know that freedom haters do not possess defiant spirits like those of the 19. Allah have mercy on them. No, we fight because we are free men who do not sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our Nation, and just as you lay waste to our Nation so shall we lay waste to yours.
I am amazed at you. Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real cause, and thus the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred. So I shall talk to you about the story behind those events and I shall tell you truthfully about the moments in which the decision was taken, for you to consider.
I say to you Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike towers. But after we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the America/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.
The events that affected my soul in a complicated way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American 6th fleet helped them in that. And the whole world saw and heard but did not respond.
In those difficult moments many hard to describe ideas bubbled in my soul but in the end they produced intense feelings of rejection of tyranny and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.
And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressors in kind and that we destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children."
He may be lying, of course, but it is a much more plausible explanation than "hating freedom" and nonsense like that. Besides, if you terrorize people into doing what you want, you will have to explain to them what you want. From 9/11 onwards the "war" has carried its own momentum; A single solution to it no longer exists.
They're extinct because of us, but probably not because our ancestors murdered them all, in character for H. Sapiens though that would certainly be. At the Skhul cave in Israel there's pretty good evidence for moderns and Neanderthals living alongside each other for thousands of years in the same cave system.
It proves very little. We lived 'alongside' wolves and bears for millenia too, but in the end we did kill all of them. Surely there was just alternating habitation of the cave by moderns and Neanderthals, which only suggests that it took the moderns a lot of time to push out the Neanderthals in that area. Modern-Neanderthal wars would have been very small and local affairs; The evidence may just suggest that the difference in military skills was not that huge.
The area around the cave may simply have been too marginal to support a self-sustaining population, regardless of species, large enough to defend itself against bands of invaders. Therefore ownership changes easily and often.
We see similar patterns in linguistic displacement; Sometimes languages are replaced in a few decades in a large area (think of the expansion of the Roman Empire), but in many cases linguistic borders move only a few dozen kilometers after a millenium of intermittent war. The Germanic-Romance language border moved only slightly in two millenia, even though there have been lots of wars and small scale ethnic displacements along that border. History also shows us that marginal areas like mountain ranges were very effective borders when armies, and colonists, carry their food supply with them.
If programmers ran the world, the law would be clear, concise, and unambiguous. Or at least that's what they'd like to think.
In the legislative processes I am sometimes professionally involved in, the law is usually pretty clear, concise, and unambiguous when it leaves the hands of legislative drafters. After that, politicians will complain will talk to stakeholders and revise it to a messy and ambiguous law. Programmers and legislative drafters do have a lot in common.
Anybody who's actually studied law knows that actual human interactions are full of corner cases, and ass-coverings easily outweigh the meat of most contracts.
Indeed. A mature law is 80% exceptions, permissions. It is a misunderstanding to think that 'deregulation' will make live easier. Deregulation often means more litigation. People have to learn to appreciate that law is very concise given the number of different cases it is covering; That's why the sentences are so long.
I'm a bit puzzled by your statement "The first time I got 8-9 MB samples at slow speed."
What I mean to say is that the first time I downloaded I literally received completely different files from the same links, being 15 minute samples of 8-9MB. Since others apparently received the whole thing, I decided to try again and was surprised to find that the links now pointed to other files.
Apparently they have some setup that allows a maximum of connections to the whole symphonies, and redirects excess connections to 15 min samples on a much narrower pipeline. It is really weird. Parent of this thread is not talking nonsense.
Try the same links again. The first time I got 8-9 MB samples at slow speed. Second time I got the whole thing at 500 KB/sec. Maybe a ceative way of preventing being Slashdotted?
A Top Tip for getting classic computer gear is to know people in academia - I haven't paid for either of my NeXTs (cube and turbo color slab), my Ultra 1s, Ultra 5s, sparcstation 5, or my Mac Plus :-)
A few years ago I gave away several sun3's and a xerox lisp machine. I am still sorrry about that.
Second, AMD is in no danger of having a sizeable portion of their market taken by Intel and instead AMD has been making inroads into Intel's area with server class CPU offerings and the mobo makers have been making boards for them right along.
AMD is in a good position to take marketshare with their current line of processors, if only they can get the attention of corporate and generally non-geek consumers and dissuade Intel from predatory practices for some time. AMD goes to court now because they feel strong enough to pull it off. The big OEMs will not immediately join AMD's side, but AMD may not need them to prove its case.
Interestingly, AMD never mentions any mobo, memory, or chipset makers in its complaint. AMD will have supporters in that corner, and they have less reason of being afraid of Intel.
But just when are we gettingliquid hydrogen powered cars? Seriously, I'm freaking fed up with paying 20$ a gallon on gas. Maybe an infinitely available resource would be cheaper.
An 'infinitely available resource'? The closest place where it is available in substantial quantity is Jupiter.
Hydrogen on earth is usually produced from oil, just like gas, because that is cheapest. It is also possible to produce it from other sources, just like it is possible to produce fuels similar to gas from other sources, but that does not make great economic sense yet.
I think this lightweight plane has significantly less horse powers than your or my car, btw.
He is opposing a bill that would outlaw the stirring up of hatred against members of a religion. That includes jedi, sith, scientologist, whatever. The bill is very loosely worded as to what could be considered stirring up hatred. "Yoda was an arsehole, it all Jedi should be done away with" might qualify.
On the other hand this bill would have been useful for prosecuting senator Palpatine before the massacre of the jedi. He was saying things like this about the jedi all the time. Let's not forget that!
No one has died for a flag, you moron.
Some people did. I am sure there are many more in history, but I have not been able to google up any sites listing heroes that were killed fighting over a flag. I noted that www.peoplewhodiedfortheflag.com is still free.
I would be surprised if countries like South Korea and Sweden wouldn't be ranked among the top nations.
They are:
1. South Korea
2. The Netherlands
3. Denmark
4. Hong Kong
5. Canada
6. Switzerland
7. Israel
8. Taiwan
9. Norway
10. Sweden
The US of A is nowhere to be seen.
From a TelecomPaper survey:
"Europe has outrun the Americas for the first time in history and became the second largest broadband market in the world," TelecomPaper noted.
The addition of broadband to European homes was also greater than Asia and America, growing around twice as fast.
Leading the European charge were countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark whose broadband connectivity now only trails South Korea by a smidgen.
"Given the slow growth of South Korea, we expect that the top position, now held by South Korea, will change hands this year", observed TelecomPaper director Ed Achterberg.
Five out the world's top 10 broadband nations are European, with Hong Kong at number four and Canada at five. Switzerland, Israel, Taiwan, Norway and Sweden are all up in the top ten, boasting at least 16.9 percent fast Internet connections per 100 citizens.
A good example is the Mayan Codices. Records seem to indicate there were thousands, however Spanish priests burned them as "works of the devil" during the European conquest of the Americas. Today only 4 remain.
If the destruction of our civilization is going to be as sudden and complete as this one, the few surviving texts will definitely include works of questionable value like The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness. Later civilizations may indeed think of this age as a dark one.
You don't have to have something on an immutable, indestructable medium for it to survive.
The question is whether and how later generations want to remember us. The church and dark age kings did pass on some of the greater works of Greeks and Romans because the value of those works was at least recognized by some throughout the two millenia that have passed since their time.
History has been far less kind with the losers of history like the Egyptians, Sumerians, Mayas, Incas, etc.
The Nordic Legends weren't written down for centuries, yet today we still have them.
Germanic oral traditions are far less reliable as history. Note that there are also many reproductions of apparently classical and dark age works that are not taken seriously as a historical source. There is a variety of reasons to forge historical works.
Engravings on headstones, or big stone buildings in inobtrusive places like deserts seem to last very long. Unfortunately the texts people carve in stone (sentimental and religious drivel) are usually not the knowledge one would want to preserve for posterity.
The Longnow Foundation has the right ideas for making sure that posterity will rank us with the Eqyptians and Greeks. I think it's a good idea to add some nuclear fallout near to the monuments as a disincentive (or 'curse') for reusing materials, which has completely messed up the archeological record in densely inhabited places like Europe, India, and coastal China.
The British police force has passed on details to Interpol and the Indian authorities, in an attempt to prosecute the individual.
They are barking up the wrong tree. If only the individual in another jurisdiction is liable to sanction, why is it allowed for British banks to move personal information to foreign countries in the first place? Shouldn't the bank be fined for failing to protect personal information of British citizens?
Abuse of power by employees is not something new or interesting, but the accountability issue is. Personal information should only be moved between countries with similar protections against abuse. Having said this, I don't know anything about British law on this issue.
I observed during my last visit in Switzerland they sell Swiss knives in the duty-free shops, after you go through the metal detector.
- But can I take a knife on the plane to a Schengen treaty country?
- That's a good question, sir. Nobody asked me about this before. I don't know.
I decided not to buy the black knife/screwdriver set/usb memory stick.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of people out there that have the free time on their hands to tinker with things that they find interesting. This is really how open source got to be big in the first place.
As a somewhat older university researcher I would like to point out that innovative ideas rarely come from IT companies. Most software concepts were invented in the academic world, developed into a proof of concept by researchers, and taken up by students. Some of these students will end up at closed source IT companies, but code from the academic world will more often than not end up in the open source community.
As soon as an application category (e.g. web browsers) becomes mainstream, the academic world is no longer interested, and keeping up with closed source competitors becomes the responsibility of hobbyists, and adolescents working on their CV.
People write free/open source software because they enjoy it not because it is going to make them rich.
We do actually work together with IT companies that donate software components resulting from the cooperation to us, and we publish it as open source. I have seen IT companies grow very fast because of this arrangement.
The idea is that we are an impartial outsider -- since we don't do service, only advice and proof of concept -- and large public administrations like the idea that they can switch to another IT company in principle. It helps these smaller IT companies to get contracts with these large organizations that would otherwise be afraid of depending too much on a small IT company. We serve as a kind of matchmaker for innovative application development.
The disadvantage is that competitors will take the components at some point and start competing for the contract, but the original developer usually has a huge knowledge advantage. Obviously, this business model works better for software for specialized business tasks than for consumer office packages etc.
Nowadays keyboards come with an extra row of buttons along the top: email, internet, volume and so forth. ... and shutdown/standby. My cat loves that key.
Correlation does not imply causality.
My favorite interpretation: "Scientific proof: geeks kill little girls"
I like more subtle statistics - for example because there is a large community of Turks in Germany, they always get at least 10 points from Germany.
Same in the Netherlands.
I don't agree with the article about 'hostility' between the Netherlands and Belgium, though. Dutch voting is usually honestly based on merit, with Turkey (because of the minority) and the contestant with the nicest dress (a tradition among Dutch gays) getting high votes.
The countries in the center of the EU are less likely to exchange votes with eachother than cliques at the edges. I don't think 'hostility' is the right explanation for that. Lack of interest in who wins is more important.
...The other mainland European countries actually think it's a real contest!
For small, poor, and generally unknown countries at the edges it is a real contest: who gets to organize the event next year. It is a lot easier to win the Eurovision contest than the EC or WC football or the Olympic games, which really matter.
For established artists from all of the richer countries it is a major risk for their careers, and they avoid it like the plague.