The question is not whether she broke the law or not; the question is, whether such law is even compatible with the very definition of a free state governed by and in the interests of its people.
That's why I wondered whether she was deliberately protesting against THAT LAW, or whether she got stung by an (arguably unjust) law whilst doing something that most people would consider perfectly reasonable. For example, does 'reading out names' constitute a protest? I wouldn't have thought so.
She did it on October 25th 2005, and was convicted yesterday. The law is the Serious Crime and Police Act 2005, which criminalises 'demonstrating without a licence' within a half mile or so of parliament. Surf google news for the story, it's been well covered.
Hmm, this is difficult. If she broke a law, however unjust the law may be considered, she is bound to face consequences. Having read the story now, it's unclear to me whether or not the lady in question was protesting deliberately against the Serious Crime and Police Act 2005, or whether she was carrying out an 'innocent' protest and, unintentionally, fell foul of the new law.
Yesterday, in London, England, a woman was convicted of a crime. She had read out the names of each British soldier who has dies in Iraq since the invasion, at the Cenotaph in London.
Which crime, exactly, was she accused of? What law did she break? And, if this happened yesterday, how come she has already been "convicted"??
This "only 4 percent of users can spot a phished e-mail 100 percent of the time" thing is bogus anyway: that test is flawed:
1. You can't see the message headers or underlying message source. This can be very important when trying to figure out whether something is legitimate or not;
and also, more importantly
2. There is no context for the message. If you have no relationship with $BANK, then *any* message from $BANK is a phishing scam (or advertising, which is just as bad, I guess). You don't *need* to be able to identify it as 'phish' or not from looking at the message.
In my experience, taking documents from MS Word and using them in OpenOffice is just as reliable as taking documents from MS Word and using them in a different version of MS Word.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 1
The Reagan government didn't want anything to do with AIDS because it was seen as a 'gay disease'.
I suspect that we just need to to start referring to "the H5N1 terrorists" to get UK and US governments dealing with it in an appropriate manner...
I was happy to read someone describing Microsoft Office as a 'legacy system'.
Re:Well, this has been coming for some time...
on
Nessus Closes Source
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· Score: 1
I've been pretty disgusted by the way competitors have abused Renaud's generosity
But the code was released under the GPL. The 'competitors' merely manufactured a device that (legitimately) included a copy of code made available under the GPL.
What's wrong with that?
If Renaud's business model isn't working, then that's unfortunate, but he chose to release the code under the GPL.
This seems to be a similar argument to objecting about laptop manufacturers who pre-install Linux as "abusing Linus's generosity". No-one believes that, surely?
MS Word also has problems with all the metadata. I've seen some of our scientific staff get into lots of problems when submitting Word docs for publication only to find that the 'keep past revisions' and 'authorship data' has caused embarrassment, for various reasons. I wrote an article about it: "Why Microsoft Word may be bad for your health". http://www.sungate.co.uk/articles.html or http://www.sungate.co.uk/badword.pdf (written, appropriately enough, using LaTeX)...
Using "out-of-band" key exchange is preferred, I would have thought. If you wish to be sure of the identity of your correspondent, then you really *should* check the keys "out-of-band", because otherwise you've got no idea who you're talking to.
On the other hand, if you're trying to communicate securely with someone who you only know online, then perhaps you'd rather just take your chances.
The license is NOT GPL-compatible. It also isn't recognized by the OSI. It would be preferable and should be possible for them not to pick a persnickety license.
That's what I was getting at, really... the license just sounds too complicated:-)
Well perhaps you're right: however I'm not sure, strictly, whether it meets "3. Derived works", partly since the amount of attribution and acknowledgment one must give to the original authors is very high. Although, IANAL and it's unclear.
In whatever light, the TrueCrypt license is very messy and is extremely complicated. This in itself makes it a tricky choice.
No, 'Free' in this sense normally refers to freedom. Something as described in the Debian Free Software Guidelines http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines is a typical benchmark for Free.
Just being without cost ("free") doesn't make it Free!
Although free to use, it's free-ness in other respects is unclear. The code is available to read (technically "open source"), but the license is a complete mish-mash of components, reflecting all the different contributions to it over the years: http://www.truecrypt.org/license.php
In particular, it states: "This product may be freely copied and/or distributed, provided that it is not modified or repackaged" and then goes on to say that you *can* repackage it as long as you attribute about 12 different people...
Is there not a *real* Free product which does this?
"Microsoft's Allchin has said that getting Vista out on time is more of a priority than including every last feature."
So meeting the release date is more important than the content and performance of the software itself? Well, we all knew that this was Microsoft's attitude anyway, but I'm surprised to see them admit it.
Thunderbird jumped from 1.0.2 to 1.0.6 because it received the same patches as 1.0.6 Firefox [...]
Is that really why?!? That's not a good reason to mess with the version numbers. That's just confusing. I've heard no sensible reason why the Firefox and Thunderbird versions need to be the same at any one time. They are different applications, after all.
What I was trying to figure out was why someone felt it necessary to synchronize the versions of Firefox and Thunderbird. After all, if you do that, in the future you'll either get them out of step again, or kept artificially in-step. By artificially, I mean that when critical changes are needed for one package, a corresponding copy of the other will be released whether it needs changes or not; or critical changes for one package will be stalled for release until similar changes are required to the other package.
And to whoever it was who modded my parent post 'Redundant', erm, what? Perfectly sensible question. Version numbers are supposed to indicative of (a) the progress of the project and (b) the degree of change from one version to the next. Messing with the version numbers for no good reason only causes confusion.
Not necessarily "because they can't afford new computers", but because their Win98 setups work. I regularly put a Win98 disk image on to brand new PCs for this very reason.
On our network of fifty users, we are staying with Windows 98 Second Edition for the near future; Win98 doesn't suffer from most of the worm and trojan activity that affects Win2000 and WinXP. Also, for our purposes, Win98SE Just Works.
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The question is not whether she broke the law or not; the question is, whether such law is even compatible with the very definition of a free state governed by and in the interests of its people.
That's why I wondered whether she was deliberately protesting against THAT LAW, or whether she got stung by an (arguably unjust) law whilst doing something that most people would consider perfectly reasonable. For example, does 'reading out names' constitute a protest? I wouldn't have thought so.
She did it on October 25th 2005, and was convicted yesterday. The law is the Serious Crime and Police Act 2005, which criminalises 'demonstrating without a licence' within a half mile or so of parliament. Surf google news for the story, it's been well covered.
Hmm, this is difficult. If she broke a law, however unjust the law may be considered, she is bound to face consequences. Having read the story now, it's unclear to me whether or not the lady in question was protesting deliberately against the Serious Crime and Police Act 2005, or whether she was carrying out an 'innocent' protest and, unintentionally, fell foul of the new law.
Yesterday, in London, England, a woman was convicted of a crime. She had read out the names of each British soldier who has dies in Iraq since the invasion, at the Cenotaph in London.
Which crime, exactly, was she accused of? What law did she break? And, if this happened yesterday, how come she has already been "convicted"??
This "only 4 percent of users can spot a phished e-mail 100 percent of the time" thing is bogus anyway: that test is flawed:
1. You can't see the message headers or underlying message source. This can be very important when trying to figure out whether something is legitimate or not;
and also, more importantly
2. There is no context for the message. If you have no relationship with $BANK, then *any* message from $BANK is a phishing scam (or advertising, which is just as bad, I guess). You don't *need* to be able to identify it as 'phish' or not from looking at the message.
From TFA: "we are all hard-core technology businessmen".
How appropriate.
In my experience, taking documents from MS Word and using them in OpenOffice is just as reliable as taking documents from MS Word and using them in a different version of MS Word.
The Reagan government didn't want anything to do with AIDS because it was seen as a 'gay disease'. I suspect that we just need to to start referring to "the H5N1 terrorists" to get UK and US governments dealing with it in an appropriate manner ...
I was happy to read someone describing Microsoft Office as a 'legacy system'.
I've been pretty disgusted by the way competitors have abused Renaud's generosity
But the code was released under the GPL. The 'competitors' merely manufactured a device that (legitimately) included a copy of code made available under the GPL.
What's wrong with that?
If Renaud's business model isn't working, then that's unfortunate, but he chose to release the code under the GPL.
This seems to be a similar argument to objecting about laptop manufacturers who pre-install Linux as "abusing Linus's generosity". No-one believes that, surely?
MS Word also has problems with all the metadata. I've seen some of our scientific staff get into lots of problems when submitting Word docs for publication only to find that the 'keep past revisions' and 'authorship data' has caused embarrassment, for various reasons. I wrote an article about it: "Why Microsoft Word may be bad for your health". http://www.sungate.co.uk/articles.html or http://www.sungate.co.uk/badword.pdf (written, appropriately enough, using LaTeX) ...
I have PCs runing win2k, XP and , until recently, even win98. Each newer windows had a newer and apparently "more" functional format for .doc files
Erm, no: DOC files are part of MS Office, not MS Windows. Windows is not Office.Using "out-of-band" key exchange is preferred, I would have thought. If you wish to be sure of the identity of your correspondent, then you really *should* check the keys "out-of-band", because otherwise you've got no idea who you're talking to. On the other hand, if you're trying to communicate securely with someone who you only know online, then perhaps you'd rather just take your chances.
The license is NOT GPL-compatible. It also isn't recognized by the OSI. It would be preferable and should be possible for them not to pick a persnickety license.
That's what I was getting at, really ... the license just sounds too complicated :-)
Well perhaps you're right: however I'm not sure, strictly, whether it meets "3. Derived works", partly since the amount of attribution and acknowledgment one must give to the original authors is very high. Although, IANAL and it's unclear.
In whatever light, the TrueCrypt license is very messy and is extremely complicated. This in itself makes it a tricky choice.
No, 'Free' in this sense normally refers to freedom. Something as described in the Debian Free Software Guidelines http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines is a typical benchmark for Free.
Just being without cost ("free") doesn't make it Free!
Ditto. Truecrypt is great, and free.
Although free to use, it's free-ness in other respects is unclear. The code is available to read (technically "open source"), but the license is a complete mish-mash of components, reflecting all the different contributions to it over the years: http://www.truecrypt.org/license.php
In particular, it states: "This product may be freely copied and/or distributed, provided that it is not modified or repackaged" and then goes on to say that you *can* repackage it as long as you attribute about 12 different people ...
Is there not a *real* Free product which does this?
"Microsoft's Allchin has said that getting Vista out on time is more of a priority than including every last feature."
So meeting the release date is more important than the content and performance of the software itself? Well, we all knew that this was Microsoft's attitude anyway, but I'm surprised to see them admit it.
Thunderbird jumped from 1.0.2 to 1.0.6 because it received the same patches as 1.0.6 Firefox [...]
Is that really why?!? That's not a good reason to mess with the version numbers. That's just confusing. I've heard no sensible reason why the Firefox and Thunderbird versions need to be the same at any one time. They are different applications, after all.
What I was trying to figure out was why someone felt it necessary to synchronize the versions of Firefox and Thunderbird. After all, if you do that, in the future you'll either get them out of step again, or kept artificially in-step. By artificially, I mean that when critical changes are needed for one package, a corresponding copy of the other will be released whether it needs changes or not; or critical changes for one package will be stalled for release until similar changes are required to the other package.
And to whoever it was who modded my parent post 'Redundant', erm, what? Perfectly sensible question. Version numbers are supposed to indicative of (a) the progress of the project and (b) the degree of change from one version to the next. Messing with the version numbers for no good reason only causes confusion.
So why has the version of Thunderbird leapt from 1.0.2 to 1.0.6? Is that to give it the same version as Firefox? Very bizarre...
Not necessarily "because they can't afford new computers", but because their Win98 setups work. I regularly put a Win98 disk image on to brand new PCs for this very reason.
On our network of fifty users, we are staying with Windows 98 Second Edition for the near future; Win98 doesn't suffer from most of the worm and trojan activity that affects Win2000 and WinXP. Also, for our purposes, Win98SE Just Works.
They actually test for the presence of the anti-bodies instead of the actual virus.
That's because the antibody test is simpler, quicker and cheaper and usually very accurate. Not saying it's Right, just an observation."Yes, it bothers me. Replace it."
How can they say it isn't a defect? Of course it's a defect.
According to this FAQ entry it does so, and this FAQ entry describes how too.