...of the e-mail. Any attempt to block spam or phising on the basis of mixing character sets would have to confront the fact that some people do need to mix character sets. Typically representations of Mari in the Latin alphabet, for example, also make use of the Greek letters beta and eta. In fact, eta is used in Latin representations of several minority languages of Russia. And the Reddit crowd loves making weird smilies in their English-language writing by means of symbols drawn from Indian scripts.
It didn't allow you to copy from MP3 player to computer, but that's not really a thing people want to do.
Of course people want to do that. During the iPod craze, it was quite common for someone, upon seeing that his friend had a large collection on their portable device, to ask if they could could copy the music from the iPod to their own computer.
I'm not at all an apologist, my good man. As I am a linguist working with minority peoples of Russia, I am acquainted with many indigenous activists whose were put through hell by the Soviet state. Pointing out that hellish treatment progressed from one form (gulags, outright execution) to another (forced internment in psych wards, exile) is hardly defending the latter.
I for one, living in the USA, would have been shot long long time ago for running my mouth like I do here on Slashdot, had I been doing all this in 1980's KGB Soviet Union.... At the very least I would have ended up at some Siberian Gulag.
Oh, please, what a silly stereotype of the USSR, completely inappropriate for its last decade. Shooting dissidents and sending them off to gulags in the Soviet Union came to a nearly complete end with the death of Stalin in the 1950s. By the 1980s, persecution of dissidents had long since become more subtle, such as commitment to psychiatic hospitals on false grounds or pushing them into exile in the West.
There are not the same visas for every country. Romania, for example, offers a one-year visa to any visitor who claims that his activity during that time will not violate any laws. Americans are still considered somewhat cute here, so if you show enthusiasm for the country, you get it. One year is then more than enough time to befriend a local business owner who is willing to jump through the hoops of hiring a foreigner and get you a long-term permit, or falling in love with a local.
Perhaps Norway, Sweden and Denmark are more suspicious, but in my years in Finland I never saw Americans being hassled when wanting to settle down there. In Helsinki I know a number of Americans who came on holiday, enjoyed it, and managed to hang around long enough on temporary permits to transition to a permanent one. The greatest challenge in Finland was not getting permission to settle, it was finding decent employment when one's command of the language was still shaky.
Americans are immensely privileged when wanting to make a life in Europe. I and others settled down here with great ease compared to people from other countries (I know a fair few Latin Americans who have done the same but had to expend much greater effort).
The minimum amount of cash to settle in most EU countries is around 8000€. You just need to show a bank balance with that account as part of proving you can support yourself for a time, and lots of people rely on friends or relatives to fake it by depositing the money long enough to print out a bank statement and then returning the money.
Europe is full of young Americans who came as backpackers on a summer trip and then decided they liked it enough to stay (I myself did something like that years ago). While massive wealth and investing a certain amount in the respective country may allow you to skip straight to permanent residency or even citizenship, it's certainly not a prerequisite to getting an initial residency permit and starting a life here.
Not really, no. Your social contract gets signed by someone else the minute you are born.
The state issues you a passport, and when you turn 18, you can leave for any other country if you don't accept the terms that your country of birth is offering you. That may not be an option for people for repressive states that require exit visas, but it's certainly an option for anyone born in the United States, so the "social contract" idea seems to hold.
It is absolutely foolish for you to generalize across Europe, from nearly bankrupt Greece, to highly regulated and comparatively well off Germany.
Besides the fact that I have considerable experience with a range of EU countries (lived in several, currently divide my time between Romania and Finland), EU regulations usually derive from Brussels and apply to every country in the EU. Thus, air travel works the same whether one is flying out of "nearly bankrupt" Greece or "highly regulated and comparatively well off" Germany.
Health care systems differ somewhat, but my visits to the doctor are virtually the same in Romania and Finland in spite of their differences, while seeking medical career in the US on a recent trip there was a Kafkaesque experience.
The one thing that is pretty clear across the EU is that most people make a lot less money than they do in the US.
You act as if that is a problem. In the well-off countries, people generally would not want to trade their better infrastructure for slightly more money.
XBMC couldn't even get the mouse cursor to work (I bought a wireless keyboard/accel-mouse for it) without closing the bug "get a better GPU".
What in the word do you need a mouse for in XBMC? It is meant to be controlled with a television remote control, a smartphone app, or a web browser on another device. You don't even need the keyboard except when XBMC's scraper requires manual intervention.
Re:The Free Market has the Technology Now
on
The Great Taxi Upheaval
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
And yet you seem to think that a "kinda regular" inspection by a harried municipal bureaucrat will somehow magically eliminate the chance of fraud, tragedy, etc?
A complaint directed to a government bureaucrat has the possibility of threatening the firm's ability to do business overall. In the absence of regulation, a customer who has been wronged has the ability only to sue with regard to his own personal case, and that prospect doesn't trouble companies: they'll take the hit in court, and it may be that the plaintiff can't even collect from them anyway.
Look at any of our heavily regulated industries (Oil, Airlines, Medicine, Finance) and tell me how well that regulation is doing at averting tragedies and reducing the prices people pay?
I don't deal with oil or finance, but my experience with medicine and airlines in the US, where I was born, and in the EU, where I have lived for a long time now, certainly speaks in favour of more regulation.
That healthcare is cheaper here for the individual is obvious. As for airlines, consider this: delays in flights in the EU are quite rare now that the airlines would have to compensate passengers; it wasn't fear of losing face and negative online reviews that made airlines stick to their promised schedules, it was the state imposing a heavy cost. As soon as I step outside the EU and fly in parts of the world without a similar law, the punctuality of departures is visibly worse. And the regulation imposed has been smart; airfare is very low in the EU now, often lower than other forms of transportation.
Re:The Free Market has the Technology Now
on
The Great Taxi Upheaval
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
And if one service offers an obstensibly cheaper price but has deficiencies that could actually cost you more money, result in tragedy, etc., how do you know that? The cost of a service is not necessarily what it says on the price tag. So, in the absence of any real regulation, you would have to rely on third-party opinions about the company in question, and "perfect information" it isn't.
My grandfather, a grizzled mountain man who left school at age 12 and migrated north to work in an industrial sector, bringing up a large family on his single salary, seemed to everyone to be the very picture of the strong work ethic. Then he confessed in his old age that for much of his career he had just been sitting around reading the newspaper, getting down to work only when he had to look busy to management. Ditto for his coworkers. You have a rosy view of the past; slacking goes back to long before internet access at work.
Because it might be quite possible that not enough people are using the human cashier to pay the costs of employing a human cashier. However, since the mere knowledge that there's a human presence is beneficial to overall sales (people like that there's a human face, even if they don't use it), the organization will want to keep a human cashier around nonetheless.
If sales through the human cashier are low, the fee that might have to be added on purchases that way might be large enough to discourage people even more from buying from the human cashier. Therefore it makes more sense to add a smaller fee to all purchases made elsewhere.
Have it be as an Opt-In program then, where they send you a CD, containing a Live version of a modified Linux distro, putting it in your PC will make it boot to it and thus your viruses no longer matter, from there you can just connect to the voting site and enter your information.
A bootable CD, what is this, 2004? The average person today is likely to want to person any network-based task from a device that doesn't have an optical media drive, such as a tablet or laptop.
Build something. Find a problem and solve it. It doesn't matter what the problem is or how you solve it. Write a tic tac toe engine, or a photo slideshow generator, or a fart joke generator, or whatever you want to do. But you just have to do it.
I rather disagree. There are already applications out there to do those things. An important concept in software development is don't duplicate effort. After someone has taught themselves a programming language from a book or sat through a uni course, better to convince people to find an existing project on Github or whatever, fix open bugs or start working on a feature addition that the devs have put on their wish list.
Doing that teaches you how to craft patches and work with a team. Coding isn't generally a solitary thing any more, a person has to learn how to meet other people's expectations, writing code that the community around them can work with. Employers also seem to be more impressed with a portfolio of involvement in larger projects (which are by nature team efforts) than single-person itch-scratching.
I'm in my 40s now but I spent most of my 20s working in dead end IT jobs and saving up until I could put down a deposit for a mortgage.
During the heyday of the American middle class, a man working in a factory (and the sole spouse working) could pay for a home within five years in cash. That you had to rely on a mortgage to own a home shows you came of age already during the decline that has only quickened with today's millennials. It wasn't always like this.
Considering that an orchestra is going to have a human cashier working at least some hours anyway, it only makes sense that people paying through other payment methods get charged enough to help pay the salary of said cashier.
Sure it takes the customer a longer time, but that's just more time for them to look at impulse buy and sell their children more candy at the checkout.
Are self-service checkouts surrounded by impulse-buying items in the US? I am very familiar with self-service checkouts in both Finland (S-Market) and Poland (Tesco), and there are no products next to the machines. There is a row of candy items that one might pass on the way to the self-service checkout, but the queue never gets long enough that one would be stuck next to this display long enough to really notice it.
And if it takes you a noticeably longer time to go through the self-service checkout than the human cashier, you might just be clueless at technology, which isn't something I'd expect on Slashdot. After a couple of purchases through these machines, what buttons to press and where to swipe one's card quickly becomes muscle memory.
Finally, I haven't seen a buggy self-service checkout for nearly 10 years now: kinks in the beginning were quickly worked out.
GPS is a technology in Earth orbit. Plenty of critics of space exploration are fine with technologies in orbit, where they have obvious military uses, but they may not see any purpose in going further afield to other planets at this time.
At the time they were doing this ridiculous upgrade to the airport that must have cost millions - they were setting up all these silly little tables with ipads in the waiting areas. But somehow they couldn't manage to have enough immigration agents.
Airport infrastructure is typically managed by a consortium with private or state-level involvement. US customs officials are federal employees. The two parts of the airport have entirely different funding sources.
He controls the state police and the armed forces. There would have to be mutiny in the armed forces and that won't happen because they do not want to be shot by the state police.
People said Ceausescu had an iron grip on power, and look what happened in 1989: he got overthrown by some of his juniors in the state apparatus so they could rule in his place, and the army started taking orders from them instead of Ceausescu. Granted, the new Romanian leaders were able to seize power under the cover of a "popular" uprising, and such social unrest would be harder to foment in Russia, but history is just so full of examples of supposedly untouchable dictators whose downfall comes in the blink of an eye.
Slashdot Mirror
...of the e-mail. Any attempt to block spam or phising on the basis of mixing character sets would have to confront the fact that some people do need to mix character sets. Typically representations of Mari in the Latin alphabet, for example, also make use of the Greek letters beta and eta. In fact, eta is used in Latin representations of several minority languages of Russia. And the Reddit crowd loves making weird smilies in their English-language writing by means of symbols drawn from Indian scripts.
Of course people want to do that. During the iPod craze, it was quite common for someone, upon seeing that his friend had a large collection on their portable device, to ask if they could could copy the music from the iPod to their own computer.
I'm not at all an apologist, my good man. As I am a linguist working with minority peoples of Russia, I am acquainted with many indigenous activists whose were put through hell by the Soviet state. Pointing out that hellish treatment progressed from one form (gulags, outright execution) to another (forced internment in psych wards, exile) is hardly defending the latter.
Oh, please, what a silly stereotype of the USSR, completely inappropriate for its last decade. Shooting dissidents and sending them off to gulags in the Soviet Union came to a nearly complete end with the death of Stalin in the 1950s. By the 1980s, persecution of dissidents had long since become more subtle, such as commitment to psychiatic hospitals on false grounds or pushing them into exile in the West.
There are not the same visas for every country. Romania, for example, offers a one-year visa to any visitor who claims that his activity during that time will not violate any laws. Americans are still considered somewhat cute here, so if you show enthusiasm for the country, you get it. One year is then more than enough time to befriend a local business owner who is willing to jump through the hoops of hiring a foreigner and get you a long-term permit, or falling in love with a local.
Perhaps Norway, Sweden and Denmark are more suspicious, but in my years in Finland I never saw Americans being hassled when wanting to settle down there. In Helsinki I know a number of Americans who came on holiday, enjoyed it, and managed to hang around long enough on temporary permits to transition to a permanent one. The greatest challenge in Finland was not getting permission to settle, it was finding decent employment when one's command of the language was still shaky.
Americans are immensely privileged when wanting to make a life in Europe. I and others settled down here with great ease compared to people from other countries (I know a fair few Latin Americans who have done the same but had to expend much greater effort).
The minimum amount of cash to settle in most EU countries is around 8000€. You just need to show a bank balance with that account as part of proving you can support yourself for a time, and lots of people rely on friends or relatives to fake it by depositing the money long enough to print out a bank statement and then returning the money.
Europe is full of young Americans who came as backpackers on a summer trip and then decided they liked it enough to stay (I myself did something like that years ago). While massive wealth and investing a certain amount in the respective country may allow you to skip straight to permanent residency or even citizenship, it's certainly not a prerequisite to getting an initial residency permit and starting a life here.
There are plenty of countries where a US citizen can arrive with his passport and easily transition to residency within a few months.
The state issues you a passport, and when you turn 18, you can leave for any other country if you don't accept the terms that your country of birth is offering you. That may not be an option for people for repressive states that require exit visas, but it's certainly an option for anyone born in the United States, so the "social contract" idea seems to hold.
That should have read "seeking medical care".
Besides the fact that I have considerable experience with a range of EU countries (lived in several, currently divide my time between Romania and Finland), EU regulations usually derive from Brussels and apply to every country in the EU. Thus, air travel works the same whether one is flying out of "nearly bankrupt" Greece or "highly regulated and comparatively well off" Germany.
Health care systems differ somewhat, but my visits to the doctor are virtually the same in Romania and Finland in spite of their differences, while seeking medical career in the US on a recent trip there was a Kafkaesque experience.
You act as if that is a problem. In the well-off countries, people generally would not want to trade their better infrastructure for slightly more money.
While perhaps cheaper than in the Carter era, air travel continues to be more expensive in the US than in the highly regulated EU.
What in the word do you need a mouse for in XBMC? It is meant to be controlled with a television remote control, a smartphone app, or a web browser on another device. You don't even need the keyboard except when XBMC's scraper requires manual intervention.
A complaint directed to a government bureaucrat has the possibility of threatening the firm's ability to do business overall. In the absence of regulation, a customer who has been wronged has the ability only to sue with regard to his own personal case, and that prospect doesn't trouble companies: they'll take the hit in court, and it may be that the plaintiff can't even collect from them anyway.
I don't deal with oil or finance, but my experience with medicine and airlines in the US, where I was born, and in the EU, where I have lived for a long time now, certainly speaks in favour of more regulation.
That healthcare is cheaper here for the individual is obvious. As for airlines, consider this: delays in flights in the EU are quite rare now that the airlines would have to compensate passengers; it wasn't fear of losing face and negative online reviews that made airlines stick to their promised schedules, it was the state imposing a heavy cost. As soon as I step outside the EU and fly in parts of the world without a similar law, the punctuality of departures is visibly worse. And the regulation imposed has been smart; airfare is very low in the EU now, often lower than other forms of transportation.
And if one service offers an obstensibly cheaper price but has deficiencies that could actually cost you more money, result in tragedy, etc., how do you know that? The cost of a service is not necessarily what it says on the price tag. So, in the absence of any real regulation, you would have to rely on third-party opinions about the company in question, and "perfect information" it isn't.
My grandfather, a grizzled mountain man who left school at age 12 and migrated north to work in an industrial sector, bringing up a large family on his single salary, seemed to everyone to be the very picture of the strong work ethic. Then he confessed in his old age that for much of his career he had just been sitting around reading the newspaper, getting down to work only when he had to look busy to management. Ditto for his coworkers. You have a rosy view of the past; slacking goes back to long before internet access at work.
Because it might be quite possible that not enough people are using the human cashier to pay the costs of employing a human cashier. However, since the mere knowledge that there's a human presence is beneficial to overall sales (people like that there's a human face, even if they don't use it), the organization will want to keep a human cashier around nonetheless.
If sales through the human cashier are low, the fee that might have to be added on purchases that way might be large enough to discourage people even more from buying from the human cashier. Therefore it makes more sense to add a smaller fee to all purchases made elsewhere.
Sorry, that should have read "...likely to want to perform any network-based task..."
A bootable CD, what is this, 2004? The average person today is likely to want to person any network-based task from a device that doesn't have an optical media drive, such as a tablet or laptop.
I rather disagree. There are already applications out there to do those things. An important concept in software development is don't duplicate effort. After someone has taught themselves a programming language from a book or sat through a uni course, better to convince people to find an existing project on Github or whatever, fix open bugs or start working on a feature addition that the devs have put on their wish list.
Doing that teaches you how to craft patches and work with a team. Coding isn't generally a solitary thing any more, a person has to learn how to meet other people's expectations, writing code that the community around them can work with. Employers also seem to be more impressed with a portfolio of involvement in larger projects (which are by nature team efforts) than single-person itch-scratching.
During the heyday of the American middle class, a man working in a factory (and the sole spouse working) could pay for a home within five years in cash. That you had to rely on a mortgage to own a home shows you came of age already during the decline that has only quickened with today's millennials. It wasn't always like this.
Considering that an orchestra is going to have a human cashier working at least some hours anyway, it only makes sense that people paying through other payment methods get charged enough to help pay the salary of said cashier.
Are self-service checkouts surrounded by impulse-buying items in the US? I am very familiar with self-service checkouts in both Finland (S-Market) and Poland (Tesco), and there are no products next to the machines. There is a row of candy items that one might pass on the way to the self-service checkout, but the queue never gets long enough that one would be stuck next to this display long enough to really notice it.
And if it takes you a noticeably longer time to go through the self-service checkout than the human cashier, you might just be clueless at technology, which isn't something I'd expect on Slashdot. After a couple of purchases through these machines, what buttons to press and where to swipe one's card quickly becomes muscle memory.
Finally, I haven't seen a buggy self-service checkout for nearly 10 years now: kinks in the beginning were quickly worked out.
GPS is a technology in Earth orbit. Plenty of critics of space exploration are fine with technologies in orbit, where they have obvious military uses, but they may not see any purpose in going further afield to other planets at this time.
Airport infrastructure is typically managed by a consortium with private or state-level involvement. US customs officials are federal employees. The two parts of the airport have entirely different funding sources.
People said Ceausescu had an iron grip on power, and look what happened in 1989: he got overthrown by some of his juniors in the state apparatus so they could rule in his place, and the army started taking orders from them instead of Ceausescu. Granted, the new Romanian leaders were able to seize power under the cover of a "popular" uprising, and such social unrest would be harder to foment in Russia, but history is just so full of examples of supposedly untouchable dictators whose downfall comes in the blink of an eye.