The list of Order of Canada recipients -- 87 in all, including three Companions, 29 Officers and 55 Members -- was submitted to Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean and approved on Oct. 5, 2006.
I might be wrong, but 'can be used in court' != 'can be used by police in the course of their investigations'. A phone intercept might, for example, lead to a raid on a premises, which would then reveal evidence that could be used in court.
The Queen... then has the power of creating a new referendum (election) every 4 years
Five years is the maximum term for a Westminster government actually, although a government can call an election at any time, and it has been every four years for the past few terms. The maximum term for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly is four years though.
Also, it might be against constitutional convention these days, but isn't it still possible for the Prime Minister to be a member of the House of Lords, and therefore un-elected? I think this might be the case if the leader of the largest party was a member of the Lords.
What about the labels that sell both on the iTS and eMusic? DRM in one store, no DRM in the other. With regards to the iTS, I think Steve's bluffing. His open letter was a PR exercise. He could well act on his words with regards to the aforementioned labels, but I don't think he will.
The whole point of the legislation seems to be to stop the former, not the latter.
I don't have a particular problem with that. I think that if you want to express your opinions then you should be confident enough in the belief that your opinion is valid, to the extent that you can attribute that opinion to yourself. Free speech has consequences, and I think we should be ready to accept those consequences.
In short, if you value privacy then I think you have to recognise that it comes at the expense of somebody else's freedom of speech, and vice versa.
This is something that's always irked me about objections to the BBC's funding scheme, emanating from the likes of ITV and Sky - the BBC was there first! These companies entered the market with the full knowledge that they were competing against a publicly funded body. It would be like me building a road somewhere, and then complaining that all the other roads in the country get public money.
You have no idea how many British people just don't get this concept. Every time there's a topic on the BBC's Have Your Say board that actually concerns the BBC, you get a slew of replies demanding the abolition of the licence fee and the introduction of adverts.
Okay, so the price can be hard to stomach considering you have to pay it even if you don't watch BBC programmes... but all things considered I think it's worth it, just for that precious advert-free zone.
The problem is that it is the responsibility of the party filing the patent to check for prior art, and report their findings to the patent office. This is a clear conflict of interest. However, this is not unique to software patents, only that the effects are more pronounced because the industry moves so much quicker than most.
Reform of the patents system, not abolition of the concept, is required to ensure that they fulfil their purpose.
This wouldn't filter down to country code TLDs, would it? I would still be able to set up mypornsite.co.uk, because Nominet is responsible for all subdomains under the.uk TLD, not any American company. And even if.xxx doesn't get the go-ahead from the Americans, is there anything stopping Nominet from creating a.xxx.uk 2LD?
I think the consequences of this have been blown out of proportion slightly.
It seems to be the larger projects that are more likely to fail. You're probably not aware of this due to our Anglo-centric media, but Scotland already has a national patient database up and running and has not had the problems that the NHS has faced south of the border. I suspect that this is largely due to the fact that it was run as a centralised project with a few partners, whereas in England there are a lot more patients and NHS trusts to deal with.
(I'm sure a lot of Scots are unaware that the system is successfully in place here... too often news that is not nationally relevant makes its way onto the national news, and shapes opinions in a way that undermines some of the good work that's being done. </rant>)
Scaling things up to a European level is going to be a nightmare, but I agree that it should be done. The whole idea of the EU is freedom of movement, and I don't want to feel less safe when I cross borders.
$1.96 and $1.97 would be rounded down to $1.95, $1.98 and $1.99 would be rounded up to $2. This is how it works in Australia, where they discontinued the 1 and 2 cent coins in the early nineties. It only applies to the sum total of your purchases, so if you go to the supermarket and buy $95.54 worth of goods, the price gets rounded up to $95.55 rather than performing the rounding operation on every single item.
I don't think so. For one, shiny plastic discs are still the best distribution method for media like video. Everyone can go to the shops (high street or online) and buy a disc, but not everybody will have the ability to download that amount of data. Even for those with broadband, some ISPs (including mine) have introduced monthly download limits, and you can be sure that the movie studios aren't going to let ISPs dictate to them how many movies a customer can buy in a month.
And then there's the question of storage - even if hard drives becomes as economical as shiny discs in the future, DVRs will have to allow the user to swap hard drives in order to avoid an upper limit on the amount of media you can own at once... and at that point you're back to the portable disc paradigm again, only with a far more fragile piece of hardware.
Finally, I think you're wrong about consumers thinking long-run. When presented with a new paradigm, consumers will adopt it if they see a benefit. For example, online music - given P2P software and unlimited free music, consumers will use that resource, but there was no great clamour for the service before it was provided. That said, consumers are suckers for new things, and it's a lot easier to market something revolutionary, like the TiVo, than it is to market something that's an incremental upgrade, like HD-DVD or SACD.
Of course, the people trying to market the HD disc formats are fighting so many uphill battles that it's not surprising that they're struggling. They're trying to sell to a very small, HDTV-owning market. It's a very new market; people are splashing out a lot of money on these TVs now, so there's less money to spend on other pieces of kit. And when it comes to content, there's the choice between paying for something like a Sky HD box and subscription (not cheap) or a shiny disc player. Given the cost, not many customers are immediately going to buy both. And given the uncertainty in the shiny disc player market, nobody wants to pay early-adopter costs for a product that may lose all its support in a matter of months, so people will lump for Sky HD. That's without even getting into worries over HDCP...
The simple fact is, the US policy is not about a hegemony, nor is it about denying anyone else access.
That's exactly what the policy is about. From the BBC:
"The United States will preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space... and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to US national interests."
Translation: we reserve the right to put weapons in space, and we will deny you the right to do so. Good on China for creating an intelligent solution! Hope they patented it.
You see Bushbots have a preset bush limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own flamebait at them, until they reached their limit and shut down.
Using that iPhone example, let's say that Apple manages to sell 1,000 iPhones in the first six months of sale. That means a thousand people looked at the product, decided that the price was fair, and parted with their money. If Apple came back 6 months later and said, "Hey, we're going to add 3G support to all our iPhones, for a $50 fee," that doesn't make the price that the original thousand customers paid any less fair. If anything, it gives them the opportunity to upgrade for a relatively modest outlay, where the alternative is to buy a completely new phone. If anything, it gives Apple customers a certain amount of choice over what features they want to pay for, which is something they are regularly lambasted for on Slashdot.
Market economics come into play. If Apple charges $4.99 for an 802.11n upgrade, how many people will be willing to pay? How many customers will they lose down the line, when people start to think, "do I want to buy this piece of hardware if I might be paying further down the line to use its full feature set?" I think Apple will see a net gain, because $4.99 is not a lot of money. £2.54 by my reckoning, and I'm pretty sure I paid something similar for a cup of coffee last time I was in Edinburgh.
I don't see the benefit of this act, to anybody. Surely, if you're webcasting/podcasting music at the moment, you're either:
playing freely available music, eg Podsafe Network,
playing restricted music with the permission of the owner, already using DRM, or
playing restricted music illegally.
Number 1 is the one affected by this, but then the purpose of all of this, stated in TFA, is to prevent music theft. If the music cannot legally be stolen (because it is being given away), can the act still apply?
Number 2 is not affected, because they're already using DRM. (I'm not sure if this one actually exists yet, but I stuck it in for completeness.)
Number 3 is the bad guy that the RIAA could go after with some amount of moral justification, but if he's already breaking copyright laws then he's not going to be particularly bothered about breaking the PEARFRHIM (sorry, PERFORM) act either. And if there's already a law to prosecute him with, why introduce another one?
Of course, the bad guy in the RIAA's eyes might be Number 1, if the RIAA have acknowledged that independent artists are competition that must be crushed...
Just because we haven't found them by no means is proof they never existed. How long does it take when an attack is looming to move that stuff.
You can't seriously use this as a valid defence of the war. We all know that strategically important non-WMD weapons caches were not secured by coalition forces at the start of the war due to poor military planning, and in the ensuing power vacuum fell into the wrong hands. Assuming that the weapons did exist, and the same thing happened, we are now in the far more dangerous position of not knowing whether they existed or not, and if they did, who has them. We've essentially substituted a 'known known' for an 'unknown unknown'.
We had plenty of reasons for concern. North Korea and Iran are also starting to take actions that are attracting notice.
And coalition troops are already overstretched in Iraq (the least dangerous of the so-called 'axis of evil'), controlled by governments that have lost the confidence of their citizens in matters of war. The end result is that because of Iraq we will be unable to commit our forces to other conflicts for the foreseeable future.
You've set out the case for the war in Afghanistan, which was a retaliation against a government which harboured and financed Al Qaeda. Motives for the (entirely separate) Iraq war range from non-existent WMD to freeing the people to daddy's unfinished business, but there was no link between terrorism and Iraq until after the fall of Saddam's government.
Converting between the two shouldn't be too difficult for a maths student ^_^
360 is a useful number for measuring angles because it divides by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180 and itself. One of the arguments against metric that I've heard is that it makes it impossible to accurately divide by 3, something that is possible in some imperial systems (but not others - 14 pounds to a stone for example).
Personally I think the solution is to travel back in time, and re-engineer the human race so that we grow 12 fingers.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better, they could've maybe kept those small, choking-hazard car keys out of reach of their kids...
Yep, I've been watching too much Firefly.
I might be wrong, but 'can be used in court' != 'can be used by police in the course of their investigations'. A phone intercept might, for example, lead to a raid on a premises, which would then reveal evidence that could be used in court.
Five years is the maximum term for a Westminster government actually, although a government can call an election at any time, and it has been every four years for the past few terms. The maximum term for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly is four years though.
Also, it might be against constitutional convention these days, but isn't it still possible for the Prime Minister to be a member of the House of Lords, and therefore un-elected? I think this might be the case if the leader of the largest party was a member of the Lords.
What about the labels that sell both on the iTS and eMusic? DRM in one store, no DRM in the other. With regards to the iTS, I think Steve's bluffing. His open letter was a PR exercise. He could well act on his words with regards to the aforementioned labels, but I don't think he will.
I don't have a particular problem with that. I think that if you want to express your opinions then you should be confident enough in the belief that your opinion is valid, to the extent that you can attribute that opinion to yourself. Free speech has consequences, and I think we should be ready to accept those consequences.
In short, if you value privacy then I think you have to recognise that it comes at the expense of somebody else's freedom of speech, and vice versa.
...if they can't even keep track of where registered sex offenders live?
This is something that's always irked me about objections to the BBC's funding scheme, emanating from the likes of ITV and Sky - the BBC was there first! These companies entered the market with the full knowledge that they were competing against a publicly funded body. It would be like me building a road somewhere, and then complaining that all the other roads in the country get public money.
You have no idea how many British people just don't get this concept. Every time there's a topic on the BBC's Have Your Say board that actually concerns the BBC, you get a slew of replies demanding the abolition of the licence fee and the introduction of adverts.
Okay, so the price can be hard to stomach considering you have to pay it even if you don't watch BBC programmes... but all things considered I think it's worth it, just for that precious advert-free zone.
You can see a demo of Spaces in action on Apple's Leopard website.
The problem is that it is the responsibility of the party filing the patent to check for prior art, and report their findings to the patent office. This is a clear conflict of interest. However, this is not unique to software patents, only that the effects are more pronounced because the industry moves so much quicker than most.
Reform of the patents system, not abolition of the concept, is required to ensure that they fulfil their purpose.
This wouldn't filter down to country code TLDs, would it? I would still be able to set up mypornsite.co.uk, because Nominet is responsible for all subdomains under the .uk TLD, not any American company. And even if .xxx doesn't get the go-ahead from the Americans, is there anything stopping Nominet from creating a .xxx.uk 2LD?
I think the consequences of this have been blown out of proportion slightly.
It seems to be the larger projects that are more likely to fail. You're probably not aware of this due to our Anglo-centric media, but Scotland already has a national patient database up and running and has not had the problems that the NHS has faced south of the border. I suspect that this is largely due to the fact that it was run as a centralised project with a few partners, whereas in England there are a lot more patients and NHS trusts to deal with.
(I'm sure a lot of Scots are unaware that the system is successfully in place here... too often news that is not nationally relevant makes its way onto the national news, and shapes opinions in a way that undermines some of the good work that's being done. </rant>)
Scaling things up to a European level is going to be a nightmare, but I agree that it should be done. The whole idea of the EU is freedom of movement, and I don't want to feel less safe when I cross borders.
$1.96 and $1.97 would be rounded down to $1.95, $1.98 and $1.99 would be rounded up to $2. This is how it works in Australia, where they discontinued the 1 and 2 cent coins in the early nineties. It only applies to the sum total of your purchases, so if you go to the supermarket and buy $95.54 worth of goods, the price gets rounded up to $95.55 rather than performing the rounding operation on every single item.
I don't think so. For one, shiny plastic discs are still the best distribution method for media like video. Everyone can go to the shops (high street or online) and buy a disc, but not everybody will have the ability to download that amount of data. Even for those with broadband, some ISPs (including mine) have introduced monthly download limits, and you can be sure that the movie studios aren't going to let ISPs dictate to them how many movies a customer can buy in a month.
And then there's the question of storage - even if hard drives becomes as economical as shiny discs in the future, DVRs will have to allow the user to swap hard drives in order to avoid an upper limit on the amount of media you can own at once... and at that point you're back to the portable disc paradigm again, only with a far more fragile piece of hardware.
Finally, I think you're wrong about consumers thinking long-run. When presented with a new paradigm, consumers will adopt it if they see a benefit. For example, online music - given P2P software and unlimited free music, consumers will use that resource, but there was no great clamour for the service before it was provided. That said, consumers are suckers for new things, and it's a lot easier to market something revolutionary, like the TiVo, than it is to market something that's an incremental upgrade, like HD-DVD or SACD.
Of course, the people trying to market the HD disc formats are fighting so many uphill battles that it's not surprising that they're struggling. They're trying to sell to a very small, HDTV-owning market. It's a very new market; people are splashing out a lot of money on these TVs now, so there's less money to spend on other pieces of kit. And when it comes to content, there's the choice between paying for something like a Sky HD box and subscription (not cheap) or a shiny disc player. Given the cost, not many customers are immediately going to buy both. And given the uncertainty in the shiny disc player market, nobody wants to pay early-adopter costs for a product that may lose all its support in a matter of months, so people will lump for Sky HD. That's without even getting into worries over HDCP...
Service pack. Singular. SP2 was the only Windows service pack to have a new features count comparable to an OS X point release.
That's exactly what the policy is about. From the BBC:
Translation: we reserve the right to put weapons in space, and we will deny you the right to do so. Good on China for creating an intelligent solution! Hope they patented it.
You see Bushbots have a preset bush limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own flamebait at them, until they reached their limit and shut down.
Using that iPhone example, let's say that Apple manages to sell 1,000 iPhones in the first six months of sale. That means a thousand people looked at the product, decided that the price was fair, and parted with their money. If Apple came back 6 months later and said, "Hey, we're going to add 3G support to all our iPhones, for a $50 fee," that doesn't make the price that the original thousand customers paid any less fair. If anything, it gives them the opportunity to upgrade for a relatively modest outlay, where the alternative is to buy a completely new phone. If anything, it gives Apple customers a certain amount of choice over what features they want to pay for, which is something they are regularly lambasted for on Slashdot.
Market economics come into play. If Apple charges $4.99 for an 802.11n upgrade, how many people will be willing to pay? How many customers will they lose down the line, when people start to think, "do I want to buy this piece of hardware if I might be paying further down the line to use its full feature set?" I think Apple will see a net gain, because $4.99 is not a lot of money. £2.54 by my reckoning, and I'm pretty sure I paid something similar for a cup of coffee last time I was in Edinburgh.
I don't see the benefit of this act, to anybody. Surely, if you're webcasting/podcasting music at the moment, you're either:
Number 1 is the one affected by this, but then the purpose of all of this, stated in TFA, is to prevent music theft. If the music cannot legally be stolen (because it is being given away), can the act still apply?
Number 2 is not affected, because they're already using DRM. (I'm not sure if this one actually exists yet, but I stuck it in for completeness.)
Number 3 is the bad guy that the RIAA could go after with some amount of moral justification, but if he's already breaking copyright laws then he's not going to be particularly bothered about breaking the PEARFRHIM (sorry, PERFORM) act either. And if there's already a law to prosecute him with, why introduce another one?
Of course, the bad guy in the RIAA's eyes might be Number 1, if the RIAA have acknowledged that independent artists are competition that must be crushed...
You can't seriously use this as a valid defence of the war. We all know that strategically important non-WMD weapons caches were not secured by coalition forces at the start of the war due to poor military planning, and in the ensuing power vacuum fell into the wrong hands. Assuming that the weapons did exist, and the same thing happened, we are now in the far more dangerous position of not knowing whether they existed or not, and if they did, who has them. We've essentially substituted a 'known known' for an 'unknown unknown'.
And coalition troops are already overstretched in Iraq (the least dangerous of the so-called 'axis of evil'), controlled by governments that have lost the confidence of their citizens in matters of war. The end result is that because of Iraq we will be unable to commit our forces to other conflicts for the foreseeable future.
You've set out the case for the war in Afghanistan, which was a retaliation against a government which harboured and financed Al Qaeda. Motives for the (entirely separate) Iraq war range from non-existent WMD to freeing the people to daddy's unfinished business, but there was no link between terrorism and Iraq until after the fall of Saddam's government.
None of the major political parties do. I'm sure the majority of the population (oblivious to the benefits) would like to though.
Fixed.
Platform Equality And Remedies For Rights Holders In Music
Pear For Him? Sounds like cologne. (Well you can get apple stuff already).
Converting between the two shouldn't be too difficult for a maths student ^_^
360 is a useful number for measuring angles because it divides by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180 and itself. One of the arguments against metric that I've heard is that it makes it impossible to accurately divide by 3, something that is possible in some imperial systems (but not others - 14 pounds to a stone for example).
Personally I think the solution is to travel back in time, and re-engineer the human race so that we grow 12 fingers.