Yay, another observation study that tries to mask its uselessness by oversimplifying the results. Correlation doesn't mean causation, no matter how many studies you do. Just because women over 50 rarely get pregnant, it doesn't mean they rarely have sex... but that's exactly the quality of results you get from observational studies and the fact that the results are easier to get mentioned in the media when you oversimplify them (fat good, carbs bad) means you get more research funding for more pointless studies. People should stress less about eating, have everything in moderation (which comes kind of naturally if there is no "forbidden" food that you end up binge-eating) and have an active lifestyle - we all die of something, we might as well live a happy life until we do and not make our lives miserable by focusing on what foods are allowed...
Just an attention seeking idiot, in my humble opinion. Just because a registrar's system will let you put a domain that's actually not available into the shopping basket and even lets you pay for it doesn't mean that you "owned" it at any point. It's like a real estate agent "selling" you the White House and accepting payment for it - doesn't mean that you now own it.
The thing to note, though, regardless of the BS nature of most of these statements, is that physical intrusions like breaking into someone's home and bugging their place of work etc. doesn't scale, so in that sense strong encryption thwarts mass surveillance.
Yeah, and if I sell 100 grams of fertilizer to someone, that has the potential of aiding terrorism because that person might be buying 100 grams from thousands of people to build a big bomb. Does that mean there should be a law against that? This whole "aiding terrorism" argument is so made up, it makes me physically sick... to be quoting "Friends": "congratulations, you have found the world's thinnest argument".
for the same reason that people use Internet Explorer - because it comes bundled and you don't have to deal with downloading extra software, setting up an account etc.
Not because it's better, more secure or offers anything new - ease of use seems to be a lot more important than all of that.
who says that the artist or record company didn't put the live video up himself? Legally? And if my friends saw the video, maybe they would notice they like the music and *would* by the track...
The problem is that all it is is a social shopping network. And of course it's a "social shopping at the iTunes store" network, so it's very, very limited. I personally think that Apple narrowed the scope of their network too much (you can't even post a link to a live video on YouTube of a song you just bought - or rather, you can but it will show up as text only with no way to click or copy&paste it) and most users will be bored by it very quickly and just ignore it. Even if Apple expands it later, a reputation once ruined is hard to improve...
The question in the summary shows the extent of the problem. No, a man page is not proper end-user documentation. It's great for a trained IT professional who quickly needs to look up the syntax for a command. But for my mom or my wife's dad, even getting to the man page is a challenge - and to get there, they need to know that man pages exist. Are there even man page viewers for the desktop? Ones that are readily accessible and preinstalled with the default system?
But I must come to Linux's defense, too. The documentation on my latest Windows system is not much better, except that a help system is built right into the desktop. It's the availability of third party printed documentation that makes the difference.
At least I've paid her a couple of times and I suspect others have done the same. There are some very convenient donation links on Groklaw and for every donation I have sent so far I have received a friendly "thankyou" email.
But even if she *did* work for IBM, that wouldn't change the facts of the case and I would still enjoy reading the legal analysis, which is pretty sound once you take out the sometimes over the top OSS "fangirlism" that I occasionally find a bit annyoing.
I installed Antivir on my mother's computer because I didn't see the point in installing a costly antivirus product when she is only online occasionally. I should have known better. My company uses NetworkStreaming's remote helpdesk server and at one point I wanted to help her with a small thing and had her download the client app - which rendered her computer completely unusable until she finally allowed Antivir, which claimed it was a malware program designed to spy on her, to quarantine the file. We bought her NOD32 the next day...
I still don't get it why people think having to carry a photo ID with you is such an intrusion. No, it's not a fundamental human right to remain anonymous. As the article says, people do give false names to the police. "The state" is what *you* make it - in an ideal world, everyone would just behave and none of these things, be it fingerprinting or ID cards, would be necessary. But we don't live in that kind of world and I'd rather just quickly show my photo ID than go through the process of fingerprinting to establish my identity, to be quite honest.
It seems to me that Goldsmith and Wu are confusing the legal authority with the technical mechanism behind the domain name system. Computers all over the world communicate using IP addresses. Domain names are an important convenience, but only a convenience.
But it's true that to reliably communicate, we need to be sure that the DNS works the way it's supposed to work. We don't send our emails to IP addresses anymore. We don't browse to websites by IP address, in fact if we did, we'd miss a whole lot of smaller sites that make use of HTTP/1.1 name based virtual hosts. So domain names are much more than just a convenience.
If you were one of the companies selling the hardware that's necessary to create a tiered Internet, would you advise lawmakers to mandate net neutrality? I'm surprised that they don't take a clearer stand against it and only say that it's premature to discuss it at this point...
The European Commission will need to decide if they are to overturn the EU Court's 2004 Anti-Trust case ruling
Ehm... it's the other way round - the commission is part of the executive and its decision is now undergoing judicial review by the court... it may sometimes seem like it, but the EU is not a bunch of banana republics where the executive controls the courts;)
You are missing the fact that members of parliament don't necessarily agree with what the government comes up with. Especially on issues like that, the vote in parliament can be very different from what the parties officially agree on - the French just had a little crisis in their parliament a couple of weeks ago where exactly that almost happened when they were discussing their new copyright law.
This is not a law yet - it's a proposal that the cabinet agreed on. It will only become law if it finds a majority in parliament, which may or may not happen, but it hasn't been voted on yet and Germany is still enough of a democracy to wait for that to happen;)
You see, the thing is Google is *not* in a different country - they actually have a subsidiary in China and it's that subsidiary that's offering the service to the Chinese. And of course they have to operate according to the law - there is no special law for Americans, no matter if they like it or not. They can of course choose to not operate in China if they don't like the law - then the Chinese government will just block access to Google in the "great firewall" (as they already do with access to the international versions of Google) and that's the end of the story...
For me the more interesting question is, don't corporations have an obligation to obey the law in countries they operate in? How can anyone seriously demand of Google (or any other company) to break the law in China? They have the right to do business there, same as in my country, and when they do, they have to do it in a law abiding way. We may not like the law and if it hurts their business elsewhere, a company may make the decision not to do business in a certain country... but that's a question of business ethics. I don't think any government should be allowed to dictate where a company can do business.
I have no idea what you're talking about regarding the football league (oh, maybe you mean Italy... I think I read something the other day). Anyway, I didn't say that Europe has no problems with racism, but I'm saying that I can't understand how anyone would see the recommendations mentioned in the original article as racist. That was my point... but I suspect you know that pretty well and just wanted to make a smart comment...
I don't get it - what exactly is so offensive about those recommendations? Could it be that's only offensive in a climate that is so obsessed with political correctness that you cannot make perfectly innocent recommendation without some people reading whatever malicious intention into it? Honestly, I don't understand this, but I think it makes me a little bit happier that I'm living in Europe...
In principle, you are right - but you will have to agree that lumping say 4 or 5 versions of Windows together is an order of magnitude less stupid than lumping say 100 distros of Linux, plus assorted flavors of Unix (including MacOS) together...
But that's not the same - we're talking about basically one Windows product with its associated unique vulnerabilities, but when we talk about Linux distros, we talk about several different ones that have the *same* vulnerability counted multiple times because it exists in multiple distros. Just one look at the CERT list and you will see all the duplicates in there. And then of course, even if you remove the duplicates, you are still left with vulnerabilities that were only present in one distribution, but got counted against "Linux/Unix" although 99% of the distros were never affected.
Hmm, really? I think unfortunately there's pretty much nothing that will deter some people/companies from abusing their power (or what power they believe to have) - anyone remember SCO vs. IBM?
Slashdot Mirror
Yay, another observation study that tries to mask its uselessness by oversimplifying the results. Correlation doesn't mean causation, no matter how many studies you do. Just because women over 50 rarely get pregnant, it doesn't mean they rarely have sex... but that's exactly the quality of results you get from observational studies and the fact that the results are easier to get mentioned in the media when you oversimplify them (fat good, carbs bad) means you get more research funding for more pointless studies. People should stress less about eating, have everything in moderation (which comes kind of naturally if there is no "forbidden" food that you end up binge-eating) and have an active lifestyle - we all die of something, we might as well live a happy life until we do and not make our lives miserable by focusing on what foods are allowed...
Just an attention seeking idiot, in my humble opinion. Just because a registrar's system will let you put a domain that's actually not available into the shopping basket and even lets you pay for it doesn't mean that you "owned" it at any point. It's like a real estate agent "selling" you the White House and accepting payment for it - doesn't mean that you now own it.
The thing to note, though, regardless of the BS nature of most of these statements, is that physical intrusions like breaking into someone's home and bugging their place of work etc. doesn't scale, so in that sense strong encryption thwarts mass surveillance.
Yeah, and if I sell 100 grams of fertilizer to someone, that has the potential of aiding terrorism because that person might be buying 100 grams from thousands of people to build a big bomb. Does that mean there should be a law against that? This whole "aiding terrorism" argument is so made up, it makes me physically sick... to be quoting "Friends": "congratulations, you have found the world's thinnest argument".
have you ever been on YouTube?
for the same reason that people use Internet Explorer - because it comes bundled and you don't have to deal with downloading extra software, setting up an account etc. Not because it's better, more secure or offers anything new - ease of use seems to be a lot more important than all of that.
who says that the artist or record company didn't put the live video up himself? Legally? And if my friends saw the video, maybe they would notice they like the music and *would* by the track...
The problem is that all it is is a social shopping network. And of course it's a "social shopping at the iTunes store" network, so it's very, very limited. I personally think that Apple narrowed the scope of their network too much (you can't even post a link to a live video on YouTube of a song you just bought - or rather, you can but it will show up as text only with no way to click or copy&paste it) and most users will be bored by it very quickly and just ignore it. Even if Apple expands it later, a reputation once ruined is hard to improve...
The question in the summary shows the extent of the problem. No, a man page is not proper end-user documentation. It's great for a trained IT professional who quickly needs to look up the syntax for a command. But for my mom or my wife's dad, even getting to the man page is a challenge - and to get there, they need to know that man pages exist. Are there even man page viewers for the desktop? Ones that are readily accessible and preinstalled with the default system? But I must come to Linux's defense, too. The documentation on my latest Windows system is not much better, except that a help system is built right into the desktop. It's the availability of third party printed documentation that makes the difference.
At least I've paid her a couple of times and I suspect others have done the same. There are some very convenient donation links on Groklaw and for every donation I have sent so far I have received a friendly "thankyou" email. But even if she *did* work for IBM, that wouldn't change the facts of the case and I would still enjoy reading the legal analysis, which is pretty sound once you take out the sometimes over the top OSS "fangirlism" that I occasionally find a bit annyoing.
I installed Antivir on my mother's computer because I didn't see the point in installing a costly antivirus product when she is only online occasionally. I should have known better. My company uses NetworkStreaming's remote helpdesk server and at one point I wanted to help her with a small thing and had her download the client app - which rendered her computer completely unusable until she finally allowed Antivir, which claimed it was a malware program designed to spy on her, to quarantine the file. We bought her NOD32 the next day...
I still don't get it why people think having to carry a photo ID with you is such an intrusion. No, it's not a fundamental human right to remain anonymous. As the article says, people do give false names to the police. "The state" is what *you* make it - in an ideal world, everyone would just behave and none of these things, be it fingerprinting or ID cards, would be necessary. But we don't live in that kind of world and I'd rather just quickly show my photo ID than go through the process of fingerprinting to establish my identity, to be quite honest.
I bet mandatory ID cards don't sound like such a bad idea now...
If you were one of the companies selling the hardware that's necessary to create a tiered Internet, would you advise lawmakers to mandate net neutrality? I'm surprised that they don't take a clearer stand against it and only say that it's premature to discuss it at this point...
You are missing the fact that members of parliament don't necessarily agree with what the government comes up with. Especially on issues like that, the vote in parliament can be very different from what the parties officially agree on - the French just had a little crisis in their parliament a couple of weeks ago where exactly that almost happened when they were discussing their new copyright law.
This is not a law yet - it's a proposal that the cabinet agreed on. It will only become law if it finds a majority in parliament, which may or may not happen, but it hasn't been voted on yet and Germany is still enough of a democracy to wait for that to happen ;)
You see, the thing is Google is *not* in a different country - they actually have a subsidiary in China and it's that subsidiary that's offering the service to the Chinese. And of course they have to operate according to the law - there is no special law for Americans, no matter if they like it or not. They can of course choose to not operate in China if they don't like the law - then the Chinese government will just block access to Google in the "great firewall" (as they already do with access to the international versions of Google) and that's the end of the story...
For me the more interesting question is, don't corporations have an obligation to obey the law in countries they operate in? How can anyone seriously demand of Google (or any other company) to break the law in China? They have the right to do business there, same as in my country, and when they do, they have to do it in a law abiding way. We may not like the law and if it hurts their business elsewhere, a company may make the decision not to do business in a certain country... but that's a question of business ethics. I don't think any government should be allowed to dictate where a company can do business.
I have no idea what you're talking about regarding the football league (oh, maybe you mean Italy... I think I read something the other day). Anyway, I didn't say that Europe has no problems with racism, but I'm saying that I can't understand how anyone would see the recommendations mentioned in the original article as racist. That was my point... but I suspect you know that pretty well and just wanted to make a smart comment...
I don't get it - what exactly is so offensive about those recommendations? Could it be that's only offensive in a climate that is so obsessed with political correctness that you cannot make perfectly innocent recommendation without some people reading whatever malicious intention into it? Honestly, I don't understand this, but I think it makes me a little bit happier that I'm living in Europe...
In principle, you are right - but you will have to agree that lumping say 4 or 5 versions of Windows together is an order of magnitude less stupid than lumping say 100 distros of Linux, plus assorted flavors of Unix (including MacOS) together...
But that's not the same - we're talking about basically one Windows product with its associated unique vulnerabilities, but when we talk about Linux distros, we talk about several different ones that have the *same* vulnerability counted multiple times because it exists in multiple distros. Just one look at the CERT list and you will see all the duplicates in there. And then of course, even if you remove the duplicates, you are still left with vulnerabilities that were only present in one distribution, but got counted against "Linux/Unix" although 99% of the distros were never affected.
Hmm, really? I think unfortunately there's pretty much nothing that will deter some people/companies from abusing their power (or what power they believe to have) - anyone remember SCO vs. IBM?