You (and Greyfox) do not seem to understand what Google Ads are. They are, for the most part, not the display advertisements one tends to see on websites. Instead, they are textual only and associated with search or with websites that open up space on their site for text ads.
Ad Blocking software allows them to show and always has. And that is because they are unobtrusive and not annoying.
All of my browsers have some kind of ad-block technology in them. And the Google text ads show just fine, thank you.
I have dealt with Time Warner Cable, specifically in New York City. I have also dealt with Comcast. I think this merger is a natural for them because of several factors:
These companies are just like one another. They victimize the consumer.
If they say they will come between the hours of 8:00 AM and 2:00 PM, they will tend to come past 3:30 PM.
they will not be able to schedule you in again for another week, because you were not there when their technician called.
If you call them for technical support for any problem, you are the problem and they treat you like you are.
They both claim that degrading their signal actually helps you.
Both companies have blocked broadcasters on their networks because they have walked out on talks for fees for "retransmission consent."
Neither company has actually tried to speed up Internet service in any significant way in over five years.
The production company (NBC) owned by Comcast gets an unfair advantage over other broadcastersÃ"then uses that advantage to transmit nothing special or unique
I think they should rename the combined company "Crappy Cable Internet and Phone" which will appropriately re-define what the consumer is about to experience. Renaming themselves CCIP would be a positive step.
Industry regulation does not constitute a non-free market, just as industry deregulation does not constitute a free market. I think you did not mean to suggest that regulation un-frees markets.
While the telecommunications industry has always been regulated, there are many very competitive industries that face regulation. The regulation, in effect, creates a more level playing field for all competitors within a market. For example, the contractor I know faces regulation. He has to register as a contractor and keep his registration current for each state in which he works. The money he pays into the state for that registration goes into a fund that will pay homeowners for botched jobs where the contracting firm goes bankrupt. Contractors are regulated by local laws to require a permit for the work that they do (these regulations also cross-regulate homeowners as well). Work must be subjected to inspection so that the work performed meets building codes. But nobody is saying that contractors have a monopoly, that there is no free market for contractors. Indeed, it's a pretty free market.
To suggest that any regulation makes a market "un-free" is to not understand regulation. Or free markets.
And, certainly such a treaty does exist, else no court in the USA would have had jurisdiction to demand the payments. And, from the standpoint of operating websites, it is pretty easy to block whole countries from seeing your website. All it takes is editing a.htaccess file.
As to the banking issue, France is a signatory of a treaty within the European Community of Nations as well as the United States to sanction Iran regarding their development of atomic weapons. This is an agreement between the United States government, France and all like-minded governments that have decided that the sanctions are appropriate in view of the non-proliferation agreement signed by Iran (that's right, Iran under the Shah, but Iran, nonetheless).
Now, I am not an attorney and I do not play one on television, but my work takes me, quite frequently, into this area of international law, usually set up by treaties. In the United States, treaties are negotiated and signed by the Administration (the Executive) and ratified by the United States Senate. Many other countries also have a separate ratification process that follows a negotiation and signature. These treaties give the various courts in the various countries jurisdictionÃ"even though the violation did not occur within the borders of that court's country.
It's been a long time since we last had an active Windows-based developer. Consequently, GIMP has accumulated a plethora of bugs specific for that operating system. As much as we'd like to provide a smooth user experience for Windows users, we simply do not have the required human resources.
Hence, if you are an experienced Windows-based developer who is interested to help GIMP become a first-class citizen in the Windows world, please get in touch with us. Our main communication channels are the gimp-developer mailing list and IRC.
I received a copy of Photoshop Elements with a drawing tablet sold by Wacom for my daughter recently. It does seem to work. Perhaps Adobe is not improving it, but one does not expect Elements to do everything Photoshop does.
I think that Paint.net may have given way to PIXLR Editor for simple tweaking and enhancing.
There are a few Mac-only apps as well, but I gather you may not have a Mac, based on your statement about The GIMP.
I'm still using Photoshop CS3 (version 10), which I only upgraded because Photoshop 7 was so seriously out of date that it would not work on my new computer. I did download Photoshop CS6 when it was in Beta and I do like many of the capabilities of it, but nothing there was make or break for me.
I am using Dreamweaver CS 5.5 because it actually does more. I can see how web pages will look on iOS as well as Android smartphones. I also can work much more easily with HTML5 and CSS3. It also does a lot better work checking my php and JavaScript. So that upgrade was actually useful. I am very pleased with the fact that I have not paid every one to two years for the upgrades, which would have cost a lot more than simply buying new versions as I really needed to upgrade.
Adobe's upgrade policy, until December, was that if anyone still owned CS3 applications they would have to pay full price and get new software. They have since modified that stance because someone who is really smart must have told them that the upgrade path is an actual incentive.
Adobe's correct stance should be crystal clear: They ought to offer an upgrade path from the CS2 applications that is time-limited. There are always people who are going to buy gray-market or "used" software who will never pay what Adobe wants and never properly register their software. But there are people who may well be very attracted by an upgrade path.
And he would cause the US to allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. (Not our problem.)
Oh, and that Social Security withholding you have been paying for all along that allows my disabled sister to live? Gone. And the sons and daughters and spouses of soldiers who die in the service of our country—their Social Security checks? Gone. And the healthcare our soldiers get because they served our country with distinction? Gone. The ability of the United States to recover after a disaster like Katrina? Gone.
Personally, I'm looking forward to an America under Ron Paul, so that half our nation goes hungry. They're all lazy anyway.
I have previously written my Congressman and my Senators, but today I called the office of Senator Joseph Leiberman and found, to my disgust, he is a co-sponsor of the awful PIPA bill (the Senate version of SOPA).
I told Senator Leiberman's aide, who was handling phones this afternoon, that this bill would run me out of business. I design and build websites and the law is written in such a way that it would cause me to have to police my own clients, including any link they posted on their own websites. Also, any of their competitors could, with a complaint and no due process, demand that their websites were shut down. I also said that if the MPAA and the RIAA, who wrote this awful bill, were to start producing content that was compelling, they would not be experiencing the loss of revenue that they are blaming on the pirates.
I called Senator Blumenthal's office and found, to my relief, that while he initially was for the bill, he would not vote for it unless it was radically changed. I told the aide on the phone that I was an expert on the Internet, that I design websites and that this law could, effectively, end my business. I also told the aide that I had met the Senator when he was the Attorney General for the State and that I liked him, trusted him and hoped that he would listen to my concerns and never vote for any bill like this.
In both cases, I gave the Senators' offices my zip code and any other information they requested.
This kind of telephone call from an intelligent person who actually knows what's in the bill and what kinds of problems it could cause really gets the attention of these people in the Senators' offices and I would encourage all Slashdotters in the United States to do this. Senators are not experts on the Internet. They really need our help to let them know why the law that was written by the record industry and the film industry destroys our freedom.
Seriously, I was at a commuter rail station back when we were placing lots of National Guardsmen and women in them in order to encourage Americans to be afraid all of the time of Terrorists—but go shopping. I got into a conversation with a very nice gentleman who was just back from Iraq. He told me that "we need to reform all of these entitlements." I asked him for a definition of entitlement and he thought about it for a minute and said, "well, they're bad."
"Really?" I asked, "Where did you get this nice uniform?"
"It was issued to me," he answered.
"That's because you earned it and you are entitled to it because you did."
"An entitlement is something you earn?"
"True. you have earned the right to wear that uniform, you are entitled to it and the US Military gives you that entitlement as well as the uniform as an entitlement."
"So what is all this about these other entitlements, these bad entitlements that we cannot afford?"
"They were earned, too. In fact, you are entitled to go into a Veteran's Administration hospital to get checked out any time you feel you need to. That's another entitlement, and it's one they have their eyes on."
"That's just wrong," he said.
"Additionally, you've been paying into the Social Security and Medicare system. If you die in service, Social Security gives your survivors a check. You don't want them to get that?"
"No, I don't think so."
"You get disabled and you're entitled to a Social Security check for disability. You think that is wrong?"
"No."
Frankly, I think that the United States Military has become one great big huge "political re-education camp." They get our boys overseas and they start lecturing to them about all of this nonsense and they haven't a clue as to what they're talking about and how, what they're espousing would really look once it hit them. I know it went on in Iraq, because I have spoken to dozens who have returned, spouting exactly the same talking points. I am also smart enough to know who proposed this war in Iraq. For much of the time after the invasion, our men and women were in camps with nothing to do. And I think the political operatives made sure they had a lot of "educational materials."
If Ron Paul were actually elected, here is what would really happen:
We would downsize our military at a level that we have not so done since WW I and that would throw many of these fine men and women out of work in an economy that is not great.
Oh, but Ron Paul's largest supporters are military.
until they realize what he says really means.
This is exactly what happened under Shrub. He told everyone we needed to starve government of the money we needed for social programs. And the end result of that is a country that is having trouble digging its way out of a recession because we didn't have the money for the social support necessary to build back an economy that the bankers ruined.
Oh and we "couldn't afford" to rebuild New Orleans.
But we could afford to pay Halliburton over $1 million weekly to "rebuild Iraq."
Citizens United became a front group for giant corporations, both within and without the United States when our Supreme Court decided, as Mitt Romney said, "Corporations are people, too." And thus, they have a right to free speech. And that right ought not to be abridged, especially in politics (except we do abridge individuals right of freedom of speech by calling it a "verbal act.").
This is wholesale misuse of the 14th Amendment, which was actually written to give persons of African and non-European ancestry full citizenship in the US. It has been interpreted by people who ought to have their heads examined as "Corporations are people, too and, because there are more people, they are deserving of extra protection.
Of course, in their infinite wisdom, our Supreme Court did not consider the fact that many big Corporations are multinational now and, since they are permitted to use any amount of their money for "free speech," much of that money can come from overseas.
Which suggests, for example, that Ron Paul's SuperPAC is actually run by Iran, who would really like for the United States to be ultra-isolationist. I'm not in possession of any certain knowledge that it is, but since there are no laws requiring any reporting and since Ron Paul did vote to prevent any reporting, this makes him suspect.
So Citizens United might have initially been a well-intentioned group, but it has morphed into the single worse Supreme Court Decision in this country since the Dred Scott Case.
I note all the numbers from donors this year to Romney are lower. But it's early yet.
Problem is, you're leaving out the SuperPAC money that may very well determine the election. And, of course we cannot trace that. In the case of Ron Paul, we're probably looking at Iran, China and Russia. They would love to see the ultra-isolationist country he's espousing.
With respect to PIPA and SOPA, these are really bad bills. I have talked to two Senate offices and one Representative in person. My Representative was particularly interested in the "no due process" part of the bill, and told me he cannot support it. That is one that has been convinced.
From the companies' perspective, a lowered minimum wage decreases the buying power of the potential consumer to the point where there would be no reason to hire the 8 additional employees.
EPA regulations, when finally allowed to go into effect to stop acid rain from destroying the New England forests by the Clinton Administration, created hundreds of jobs building and installing the scrubber systems to reduce sulpher dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants (who opposed such EPA rules, saying they would kill jobs).
I wholeheartedly agree that corporate money distorts the process of democratic elections in the United States. Because the Supreme Court (in Citizens United) threw out all legislation pertaining to corporate speech, we now have a system that encourages foreign money to influence American elections. The whole idea of "Freedom of Speech" has been turned on its head, with Capital and the moneyed interests being given the largest megaphone with no requirement that they prove that their political speech is not funded or controlled by foreign interests.
I look at the ads on television today in the early primary states and wonder why China is helping Romney. I can completely understand why Iran would want to help Ron Paul, who would agree with their Defense Minister that we ought not to send our aircraft carrier group into the Strait of Hormuz. Of course we cannot know how much of their money has supported those campaigns and those of their Super-PAC allies.
The real issue here is that NBC Universal started a contest in the schools, and created a "front" to divert everyone's attention from the fact that this is a corporately-sponsored contest, where the only winners will be those who agree with the corporation's goals.
That's dishonest and this is why this contest is seen as "evil." Presumably NBC Universal will benefit from a whole bunch of free Public Service Announcements made by these people who were duped into thinking this contest was honest.
With respect to piracy, the real danger to the studios is not in the home user burning a copy of a DVD. The real danger is from organized criminals who will literally pull up to a duplication facility loading dock with a semitrailer and steal the duplication apparatus to make copies from the original master disc. Or the Chinese government officials, sworn Party members all -- and "untouchable" because of that -- who reverse-engineer the original master and crank out millions of copies that can undersell the official studio version (because they're not paying the studio). Go down to Chinatown or Canal Street in NYC and you'll see these pirated copies all over. And these illegal copies often come out before the official release date from the studios.
But now, the studios see the writing on the wall. DVD player-recorders did not have "sufficient" copy protection built in, so home "piracy" was fairly simple. So the studios all refused to allow for a high definition system without "sufficient" "safeguards." And the studios were so intransigent that we did not have a standard for high-definition DVDs until very recently. Meanwhile, the Internet has gotten faster (despite the fact that cable and telco companies have done everything they can to not increase speeds in the United States because they like collecting money without needing to create better infrastructure) and most people will simply bypass the new Blu-Ray standard by acquiring their media through electronic delivery, instead of by buying some soon-to-be obsolete player and the media it plays.
So all of the studios' dreams of being able to lock down their content (with Blu-Ray) have been for naught. Home hard drives are big enough to contain many high-definition films and consumers can build their own libraries of the films they like without needing to rip (and bypass copy "protection" schemes) from discs. Delivery is now digital and over the Internet. DVD stores are going the way of the record store. And companies like Apple and Netflix will be the distribution channel and the studios don't control them. These studio executives all sit around their offices and meeting rooms and worry about Mom and Pop, Timmy and Mary sharing their movies with their friends who have not paid for the movie.
But the real threat is elsewhere. Right now, in Romania, Ukraine, Russia or China, there is an organized criminal who has hacked into their computer system where the unprotected film is sitting. And they are downloading everything on the computer they have hacked into. And I would not be surprised that the computer in question is actually editing the studio's film. This criminal will certainly be able to release the film as soon as it hits the theatres to consumers as pirated downloads.
So what NBC Universal is trying to do here is to find a way to get Mom, Pop, Timmy and Mary to not share their movies with Dick and Jane across the street.
For what I am doing, some kind of data over cellular is a must. I build and support websites and sell to small businesses. Many of these small businesses simply don't have WiFi access, most have minimal computer knowledge. I find myself whipping out my iPad and showing them websites I have all ready delivered as proof-of-concept and so I can get a better handle on what their design sense is.
Personally, I would like something faster, and Sprint does have a 4G-based WiFi hot spot you can carry around with you and have up to five things tethered to that is really affordable. I do agree with those who don't like the fact that they have to pay a telco twice for, essentially, the same data.
For the plan I use, my business pays $15.00 monthly for the small amount of data I actually use in showing websites to clients as well as receiving and, occasionally, sending email from my iPad while not near a hot spot. It more than pays for itself in closed deals.
If you are using cellular data just for personal jollies or to "impress chix" it is a waste of funds that would better improve your life deposited in your 401(k) account. but for people who are in the field like I am, it closes deals and makes money.
I use a script for emailing the addresses of my clients and the script is server-side code. And since that does not load unless the form (for an email) is completely filled out, nobody can pre-look at my code and figure out anything.
Client's email address is in a lookup in an SQL database, so nobody can see that, either.
Solution is to capture then BLOCK the IP address of anyone sending spam through the form. So far, I have seen two messages from Belize and one from India. And now those people can no longer even load the websites they spammed. As their world gets smaller and smaller, maybe they will have so few people to email, they'll quit.
This may not work for someone as big as Google, but it certainly works for me and my website clients.
Their server technology is so secure that certain rather paranoid countries want them to give officials "back door" keys. And in this day of business espionage, that is a real plus.
In this war between Android and iPhone, the customer wins.
The "Droid Does" (multitasking) ad campaign spurred Apple to develop iOS 4.x, which allows multitasking. The first Droid smartphones got Apple off the dime with cut and paste. Customers continue to win here, no matter which phone they purchase
Personally I have an iPhone (4) and I like it. I had the original iPhone and retained it well past my contract with AT&T. I have a client who purchased a Droid Incredible and asked me to set up his email (from my server) on it. Took all of about a minute. I was very impressed by the phone and shall always retain that impression.
I think the real losers here are RIM with the Blackberry and the Palm WebOS smartphones. While Palm has innovated, they have been passed by and are now in a niche. RIM is trying to play "catch up" and the only real difference they offer in their phones is complete integration with secure Exchange Servers. They have lost utterly in the easy app purchase field.
Apple's biggest mistake so far in the United States has been the exclusivity contract with AT&T. Initially, it was a boon for Apple, but the Android smartphones are selling faster than the Apple smartphones because they are available on more networks. To the extent Apple stays with the phone company we all love to hate, they will lose market share versus the Android smartphones.
Fox is not apolitical and that is the problem with your statement. If you see that NYT, CNN, BBC and Fox are "random crap" you are completely deluded about what Google is doing.
The stories Google posts on their news site are the top hits for the particular stories listed. Choosing Fox over any other source gives them legitimacy in the eyes of Google—false legitimacy, because of Fox's rather nasty political agenda.
And I'm not saying that their right-wing sloganeering is nasty. The "nasty" issue with Fox is that they simply do not read, nor do they fact-check, nor do they error-correct for the purpose of informing viewership and readership. There isn't anyone sweating bullets about accuracy, double-checking name misspellings, making sure the geography is correct and trying—mightily—to not lie with statistics.
Having actually worked news gigs, these are things I did and did regularly, trying to do more than my job to make sure that what we reported was accurate—even to the point of risking my job by asking an anchorperson right before the news aired about the correctness of a tease he wrote to promote the show. Everyone in the real news media knows that, once you take a job with Fox, you're never going to be considered legitimate and you have blown any hint you may have had of integrity in reporting. And that's sad, because reporters seek for all of their working lives for that stamp of integrity and know that if they lose that, they have lost everything.
There is nothing random about the selection of Fox by Google. It is entirely based on the fact that people, not knowing that Fox does not check facts or even care about facts, click on the link because the source is topmost. And it's topmost because they sensationalize everything, rather than take the time to verify accuracy.
People are busy these days and do not always have enough time to take in enough news and current events to be properly educated about the facts around them. Those who chose faux news as their sole source of information will find themselves missing out entirely from facts that ought to inform the decisions they make in their lives.
My credentials? I worked for two of the three major news networks in the United States. For over ten years. And nobody at MSNBC or CNN limit their news intake to just faux news. This would be tantamount to never looking into any report about anything at all happening in the world. One would have come away from September 11, 2001 thinking that Saddam Hussein personally flew three planes into three buildings and followed that act up with ditching a plane in Pennsylvania -- and then lived to protest that he had no WMD, as he juggled three nuclear warheads while talking to the press.
CNN regularly and routinely aired the footage that the NBC Network produced from "Ground Zero" in New York (NBC's Rehema Ellis was the only reporter actually on the scene from any news agency and, to their shame, CNN used that footage to promote themselves as a news channel.
All of the news organizations' executives agreed to pool all footage from everywhere on that day and, for NBC, that was a very bad decision.
While working in news, I read three different news wires pretty much all of the time during the day, listened to NPR on my way in to work, read the New York Times, Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Daily Tribune. It wasn't enough. One newspaper I found important post-Clinton was the Cairo Journal, though the English version doesn't have the same "spin" as the Arabic and I would usually consult a translator at least two times a day.
I'm going to guess that the people who work at faux news read the Wall Street Journal as if that Murdoch-owned paper is a "newspaper of record." It is not. Prior to Murdoch's purchase, it was a newspaper that was full of corporate PR, hastily rewriting press releases churned out by the big corporations whose executives read it.
If you don't work in news, you should regularly read a "newspaper of record" (and none of the Murdoch-owned ones are) and you should alternate these sources. So if on Mondays, you read the New York Times, you should read the Chicago Tribune on Tuesdays, switch to the Washington Post on Wednesdays, read the Los Angeles Tribune on Thursdays and hit the BBC on Fridays. All of these outlets will be available on the Internet and all are pretty comprehensive. If you really like crosswords, you should pick the New York Times on the day you find it hardest -- but still possible, understanding that the easiest is published on Mondays, with the hardest on Fridays.
I don't think anyone is actually home any more for the 6:30 PM news on television.
Zenin's reply is perfect, but I will add this false news story that was heavily reported on faux news as yet another example of how they do no fact checking at all, preferring to sensationalize anything that fits their political aims.
As I said before, if faux news is the only "news" you take in, you will not understand the world around you. You will be regularly and routinely lied to and you will not comprehend correctly what is truly happening in the world.
The Royal Botanic Gardens is discovering a small minority of species are "discovered" more than once and genetic sequencing is helping to clear that up. Faux news is reporting that biodiversity is not important because most of the diversity is really false.
The difference here is spin. The Royal Botanic Garden will tend to prefer that we not destroy species. Murdoch and company would prefer that we pay no attention whatsoever to people who are saying that killing off massive quantities of our species from this planet could, in the long term, be very detrimental to life on earth.
I wholly disagree with your statement that what they report is rarely flat-out false and would refer you to any story originated by Breitbart as well as the above link to the Los Angeles Police jet pack purchase.
So in order to sow doubt about the scientific community reporting that we're killing off species and that biodiversity is important, faux news is reporting another lie.
Here's a tip for those of you getting news from the Murdoch empire: Don't use that as your single source. Read, watch and listen to other outlets, else you will be ill-informed like the rest of the lemmings who just watch faux news
A non-telephone company had a cascading problem with its ad-hoc peer-to-peer networking that provides telephony and video services at costs way below any telephone (or cable) company. The company is profitable enough to make its own way in this world.
This story was broadcast pretty-much worldwide by all media.
The non-telephone company was embarrased and released a statement to the media about how this happened as a means by which it might encourage everyone to download new, free software the will fix the problem and to cover for the public relations problem.
Skype is not a telephone company, but they allow you to provide telephony and video conferencing by using their software for free. And, for calls made to regular telephones, it's between 2.3 and 1.2 per minute anywhere in the world, offering a considerable savings over telephone companies and cable companies. When John Thomas Draper (AKA Captain Crunch) tried that with AT&T, he was convicted for wire fraud.
Five years ago, the only people who knew what Skype was were computer nerds. Today, as a result of the incredible savings people are receiving by making long-distance and international calls through Skype, almost everyone does. Five years ago, the only people who would have known of this outage were Slashdot users and a few other geeks. It would not have made news.
And that, dear reader, is the reason why this is important.
I don't plan to buy any stock in any phone company that doesn't do what Skype does.
Atilla, secession was the action that the states took well after the "nullification crisis." "Nullification" came into vogue during the Buchanan Presidency and the states that seceded did so as soon as they saw that Lincoln has been elected and they did not have the power to reverse gains in Congress made by the then-new Republican Party. James Madison was long dead by the time this was hashed out.
Your comment seems to have the father of our modern Constitution alive after the Civil War and then, what -- writing the Constitution and delivering it to the prior time line? Also, you confuse the Republicans or "Proto-Republicans," as you call them, whatever that is, with the Dred Scott decision, which says that property, once owned, remains property no matter what state it remains in or is taken to, the solution to which was proposed by Abolitionists (not Republicans) in emancipating all human property and outlawing the existence of slavery.
Republicans were created as a northern splinter of the Whig Party, which favored business and commerce and trade over the rights of individuals. Whigs splintered over the idea of secession as well as the idea at the federal government was the supreme law and that states had no right of "nullification." The new Republic-an party believed that the Republic should not be split between north and south and that any attempts to create such a split should not be allowed (hence the choice of name). The party was made up of former Whigs as well as Abolitionists, Free-Soilers and "Know-nothings," who had decided that the Union needed to be preserved. It was a pretty big tent, and Lincoln's rather fractious Cabinet reflected that.
Slashdot Mirror
You (and Greyfox) do not seem to understand what Google Ads are. They are, for the most part, not the display advertisements one tends to see on websites. Instead, they are textual only and associated with search or with websites that open up space on their site for text ads.
Ad Blocking software allows them to show and always has. And that is because they are unobtrusive and not annoying.
All of my browsers have some kind of ad-block technology in them. And the Google text ads show just fine, thank you.
I have dealt with Time Warner Cable, specifically in New York City. I have also dealt with Comcast. I think this merger is a natural for them because of several factors:
I think they should rename the combined company "Crappy Cable Internet and Phone" which will appropriately re-define what the consumer is about to experience. Renaming themselves CCIP would be a positive step.
Industry regulation does not constitute a non-free market, just as industry deregulation does not constitute a free market. I think you did not mean to suggest that regulation un-frees markets.
While the telecommunications industry has always been regulated, there are many very competitive industries that face regulation. The regulation, in effect, creates a more level playing field for all competitors within a market. For example, the contractor I know faces regulation. He has to register as a contractor and keep his registration current for each state in which he works. The money he pays into the state for that registration goes into a fund that will pay homeowners for botched jobs where the contracting firm goes bankrupt. Contractors are regulated by local laws to require a permit for the work that they do (these regulations also cross-regulate homeowners as well). Work must be subjected to inspection so that the work performed meets building codes. But nobody is saying that contractors have a monopoly, that there is no free market for contractors. Indeed, it's a pretty free market.
To suggest that any regulation makes a market "un-free" is to not understand regulation. Or free markets.
And, certainly such a treaty does exist, else no court in the USA would have had jurisdiction to demand the payments. And, from the standpoint of operating websites, it is pretty easy to block whole countries from seeing your website. All it takes is editing a .htaccess file.
As to the banking issue, France is a signatory of a treaty within the European Community of Nations as well as the United States to sanction Iran regarding their development of atomic weapons. This is an agreement between the United States government, France and all like-minded governments that have decided that the sanctions are appropriate in view of the non-proliferation agreement signed by Iran (that's right, Iran under the Shah, but Iran, nonetheless).
Now, I am not an attorney and I do not play one on television, but my work takes me, quite frequently, into this area of international law, usually set up by treaties. In the United States, treaties are negotiated and signed by the Administration (the Executive) and ratified by the United States Senate. Many other countries also have a separate ratification process that follows a negotiation and signature. These treaties give the various courts in the various countries jurisdictionÃ"even though the violation did not occur within the borders of that court's country.
That is how international law works.
I'm glad someone can assemble Ikea furniture!
The GIMP dead on Windows?!
The following was posted on the GIMP Website:
I received a copy of Photoshop Elements with a drawing tablet sold by Wacom for my daughter recently. It does seem to work. Perhaps Adobe is not improving it, but one does not expect Elements to do everything Photoshop does.
I think that Paint.net may have given way to PIXLR Editor for simple tweaking and enhancing.
There are a few Mac-only apps as well, but I gather you may not have a Mac, based on your statement about The GIMP.
I'm still using Photoshop CS3 (version 10), which I only upgraded because Photoshop 7 was so seriously out of date that it would not work on my new computer. I did download Photoshop CS6 when it was in Beta and I do like many of the capabilities of it, but nothing there was make or break for me.
I am using Dreamweaver CS 5.5 because it actually does more. I can see how web pages will look on iOS as well as Android smartphones. I also can work much more easily with HTML5 and CSS3. It also does a lot better work checking my php and JavaScript. So that upgrade was actually useful. I am very pleased with the fact that I have not paid every one to two years for the upgrades, which would have cost a lot more than simply buying new versions as I really needed to upgrade.
Adobe's upgrade policy, until December, was that if anyone still owned CS3 applications they would have to pay full price and get new software. They have since modified that stance because someone who is really smart must have told them that the upgrade path is an actual incentive.
Adobe's correct stance should be crystal clear: They ought to offer an upgrade path from the CS2 applications that is time-limited. There are always people who are going to buy gray-market or "used" software who will never pay what Adobe wants and never properly register their software. But there are people who may well be very attracted by an upgrade path.
And he would cause the US to allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. (Not our problem.)
Oh, and that Social Security withholding you have been paying for all along that allows my disabled sister to live? Gone. And the sons and daughters and spouses of soldiers who die in the service of our country—their Social Security checks? Gone. And the healthcare our soldiers get because they served our country with distinction? Gone. The ability of the United States to recover after a disaster like Katrina? Gone.
Personally, I'm looking forward to an America under Ron Paul, so that half our nation goes hungry. They're all lazy anyway.
Mod this up, please! Way up!
I have previously written my Congressman and my Senators, but today I called the office of Senator Joseph Leiberman and found, to my disgust, he is a co-sponsor of the awful PIPA bill (the Senate version of SOPA).
I told Senator Leiberman's aide, who was handling phones this afternoon, that this bill would run me out of business. I design and build websites and the law is written in such a way that it would cause me to have to police my own clients, including any link they posted on their own websites. Also, any of their competitors could, with a complaint and no due process, demand that their websites were shut down. I also said that if the MPAA and the RIAA, who wrote this awful bill, were to start producing content that was compelling, they would not be experiencing the loss of revenue that they are blaming on the pirates.
I called Senator Blumenthal's office and found, to my relief, that while he initially was for the bill, he would not vote for it unless it was radically changed. I told the aide on the phone that I was an expert on the Internet, that I design websites and that this law could, effectively, end my business. I also told the aide that I had met the Senator when he was the Attorney General for the State and that I liked him, trusted him and hoped that he would listen to my concerns and never vote for any bill like this.
In both cases, I gave the Senators' offices my zip code and any other information they requested.
This kind of telephone call from an intelligent person who actually knows what's in the bill and what kinds of problems it could cause really gets the attention of these people in the Senators' offices and I would encourage all Slashdotters in the United States to do this. Senators are not experts on the Internet. They really need our help to let them know why the law that was written by the record industry and the film industry destroys our freedom.
Dupes?
Seriously, I was at a commuter rail station back when we were placing lots of National Guardsmen and women in them in order to encourage Americans to be afraid all of the time of Terrorists—but go shopping. I got into a conversation with a very nice gentleman who was just back from Iraq. He told me that "we need to reform all of these entitlements." I asked him for a definition of entitlement and he thought about it for a minute and said, "well, they're bad."
"Really?" I asked, "Where did you get this nice uniform?"
"It was issued to me," he answered.
"That's because you earned it and you are entitled to it because you did."
"An entitlement is something you earn?"
"True. you have earned the right to wear that uniform, you are entitled to it and the US Military gives you that entitlement as well as the uniform as an entitlement."
"So what is all this about these other entitlements, these bad entitlements that we cannot afford?"
"They were earned, too. In fact, you are entitled to go into a Veteran's Administration hospital to get checked out any time you feel you need to. That's another entitlement, and it's one they have their eyes on."
"That's just wrong," he said.
"Additionally, you've been paying into the Social Security and Medicare system. If you die in service, Social Security gives your survivors a check. You don't want them to get that?"
"No, I don't think so."
"You get disabled and you're entitled to a Social Security check for disability. You think that is wrong?"
"No."
Frankly, I think that the United States Military has become one great big huge "political re-education camp." They get our boys overseas and they start lecturing to them about all of this nonsense and they haven't a clue as to what they're talking about and how, what they're espousing would really look once it hit them. I know it went on in Iraq, because I have spoken to dozens who have returned, spouting exactly the same talking points. I am also smart enough to know who proposed this war in Iraq. For much of the time after the invasion, our men and women were in camps with nothing to do. And I think the political operatives made sure they had a lot of "educational materials."
If Ron Paul were actually elected, here is what would really happen:
We would downsize our military at a level that we have not so done since WW I and that would throw many of these fine men and women out of work in an economy that is not great.
Oh, but Ron Paul's largest supporters are military.
until they realize what he says really means.
This is exactly what happened under Shrub. He told everyone we needed to starve government of the money we needed for social programs. And the end result of that is a country that is having trouble digging its way out of a recession because we didn't have the money for the social support necessary to build back an economy that the bankers ruined.
Oh and we "couldn't afford" to rebuild New Orleans.
But we could afford to pay Halliburton over $1 million weekly to "rebuild Iraq."
Well, actually
Citizens United became a front group for giant corporations, both within and without the United States when our Supreme Court decided, as Mitt Romney said, "Corporations are people, too." And thus, they have a right to free speech. And that right ought not to be abridged, especially in politics (except we do abridge individuals right of freedom of speech by calling it a "verbal act.").
This is wholesale misuse of the 14th Amendment, which was actually written to give persons of African and non-European ancestry full citizenship in the US. It has been interpreted by people who ought to have their heads examined as "Corporations are people, too and, because there are more people, they are deserving of extra protection.
Of course, in their infinite wisdom, our Supreme Court did not consider the fact that many big Corporations are multinational now and, since they are permitted to use any amount of their money for "free speech," much of that money can come from overseas.
Which suggests, for example, that Ron Paul's SuperPAC is actually run by Iran, who would really like for the United States to be ultra-isolationist. I'm not in possession of any certain knowledge that it is, but since there are no laws requiring any reporting and since Ron Paul did vote to prevent any reporting, this makes him suspect.
So Citizens United might have initially been a well-intentioned group, but it has morphed into the single worse Supreme Court Decision in this country since the Dred Scott Case.
I note all the numbers from donors this year to Romney are lower. But it's early yet.
Problem is, you're leaving out the SuperPAC money that may very well determine the election. And, of course we cannot trace that. In the case of Ron Paul, we're probably looking at Iran, China and Russia. They would love to see the ultra-isolationist country he's espousing.
With respect to PIPA and SOPA, these are really bad bills. I have talked to two Senate offices and one Representative in person. My Representative was particularly interested in the "no due process" part of the bill, and told me he cannot support it. That is one that has been convinced.
From the companies' perspective, a lowered minimum wage decreases the buying power of the potential consumer to the point where there would be no reason to hire the 8 additional employees.
EPA regulations, when finally allowed to go into effect to stop acid rain from destroying the New England forests by the Clinton Administration, created hundreds of jobs building and installing the scrubber systems to reduce sulpher dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants (who opposed such EPA rules, saying they would kill jobs).
I wholeheartedly agree that corporate money distorts the process of democratic elections in the United States. Because the Supreme Court (in Citizens United) threw out all legislation pertaining to corporate speech, we now have a system that encourages foreign money to influence American elections. The whole idea of "Freedom of Speech" has been turned on its head, with Capital and the moneyed interests being given the largest megaphone with no requirement that they prove that their political speech is not funded or controlled by foreign interests.
I look at the ads on television today in the early primary states and wonder why China is helping Romney. I can completely understand why Iran would want to help Ron Paul, who would agree with their Defense Minister that we ought not to send our aircraft carrier group into the Strait of Hormuz. Of course we cannot know how much of their money has supported those campaigns and those of their Super-PAC allies.
The real issue here is that NBC Universal started a contest in the schools, and created a "front" to divert everyone's attention from the fact that this is a corporately-sponsored contest, where the only winners will be those who agree with the corporation's goals.
That's dishonest and this is why this contest is seen as "evil." Presumably NBC Universal will benefit from a whole bunch of free Public Service Announcements made by these people who were duped into thinking this contest was honest.
With respect to piracy, the real danger to the studios is not in the home user burning a copy of a DVD. The real danger is from organized criminals who will literally pull up to a duplication facility loading dock with a semitrailer and steal the duplication apparatus to make copies from the original master disc. Or the Chinese government officials, sworn Party members all -- and "untouchable" because of that -- who reverse-engineer the original master and crank out millions of copies that can undersell the official studio version (because they're not paying the studio). Go down to Chinatown or Canal Street in NYC and you'll see these pirated copies all over. And these illegal copies often come out before the official release date from the studios.
But now, the studios see the writing on the wall. DVD player-recorders did not have "sufficient" copy protection built in, so home "piracy" was fairly simple. So the studios all refused to allow for a high definition system without "sufficient" "safeguards." And the studios were so intransigent that we did not have a standard for high-definition DVDs until very recently. Meanwhile, the Internet has gotten faster (despite the fact that cable and telco companies have done everything they can to not increase speeds in the United States because they like collecting money without needing to create better infrastructure) and most people will simply bypass the new Blu-Ray standard by acquiring their media through electronic delivery, instead of by buying some soon-to-be obsolete player and the media it plays.
So all of the studios' dreams of being able to lock down their content (with Blu-Ray) have been for naught. Home hard drives are big enough to contain many high-definition films and consumers can build their own libraries of the films they like without needing to rip (and bypass copy "protection" schemes) from discs. Delivery is now digital and over the Internet. DVD stores are going the way of the record store. And companies like Apple and Netflix will be the distribution channel and the studios don't control them. These studio executives all sit around their offices and meeting rooms and worry about Mom and Pop, Timmy and Mary sharing their movies with their friends who have not paid for the movie.
But the real threat is elsewhere. Right now, in Romania, Ukraine, Russia or China, there is an organized criminal who has hacked into their computer system where the unprotected film is sitting. And they are downloading everything on the computer they have hacked into. And I would not be surprised that the computer in question is actually editing the studio's film. This criminal will certainly be able to release the film as soon as it hits the theatres to consumers as pirated downloads.
So what NBC Universal is trying to do here is to find a way to get Mom, Pop, Timmy and Mary to not share their movies with Dick and Jane across the street.
Pathetic.
For what I am doing, some kind of data over cellular is a must. I build and support websites and sell to small businesses. Many of these small businesses simply don't have WiFi access, most have minimal computer knowledge. I find myself whipping out my iPad and showing them websites I have all ready delivered as proof-of-concept and so I can get a better handle on what their design sense is.
Personally, I would like something faster, and Sprint does have a 4G-based WiFi hot spot you can carry around with you and have up to five things tethered to that is really affordable. I do agree with those who don't like the fact that they have to pay a telco twice for, essentially, the same data.
For the plan I use, my business pays $15.00 monthly for the small amount of data I actually use in showing websites to clients as well as receiving and, occasionally, sending email from my iPad while not near a hot spot. It more than pays for itself in closed deals.
If you are using cellular data just for personal jollies or to "impress chix" it is a waste of funds that would better improve your life deposited in your 401(k) account. but for people who are in the field like I am, it closes deals and makes money.
I use a script for emailing the addresses of my clients and the script is server-side code. And since that does not load unless the form (for an email) is completely filled out, nobody can pre-look at my code and figure out anything.
Client's email address is in a lookup in an SQL database, so nobody can see that, either.
Solution is to capture then BLOCK the IP address of anyone sending spam through the form. So far, I have seen two messages from Belize and one from India. And now those people can no longer even load the websites they spammed. As their world gets smaller and smaller, maybe they will have so few people to email, they'll quit.
This may not work for someone as big as Google, but it certainly works for me and my website clients.
Mod this up!
And hopefully RIM will get a clue.
Their server technology is so secure that certain rather paranoid countries want them to give officials "back door" keys. And in this day of business espionage, that is a real plus.
In this war between Android and iPhone, the customer wins.
The "Droid Does" (multitasking) ad campaign spurred Apple to develop iOS 4.x, which allows multitasking. The first Droid smartphones got Apple off the dime with cut and paste. Customers continue to win here, no matter which phone they purchase
Personally I have an iPhone (4) and I like it. I had the original iPhone and retained it well past my contract with AT&T. I have a client who purchased a Droid Incredible and asked me to set up his email (from my server) on it. Took all of about a minute. I was very impressed by the phone and shall always retain that impression.
I think the real losers here are RIM with the Blackberry and the Palm WebOS smartphones. While Palm has innovated, they have been passed by and are now in a niche. RIM is trying to play "catch up" and the only real difference they offer in their phones is complete integration with secure Exchange Servers. They have lost utterly in the easy app purchase field.
Apple's biggest mistake so far in the United States has been the exclusivity contract with AT&T. Initially, it was a boon for Apple, but the Android smartphones are selling faster than the Apple smartphones because they are available on more networks. To the extent Apple stays with the phone company we all love to hate, they will lose market share versus the Android smartphones.
Fox is not apolitical and that is the problem with your statement. If you see that NYT, CNN, BBC and Fox are "random crap" you are completely deluded about what Google is doing.
The stories Google posts on their news site are the top hits for the particular stories listed. Choosing Fox over any other source gives them legitimacy in the eyes of Google—false legitimacy, because of Fox's rather nasty political agenda.
And I'm not saying that their right-wing sloganeering is nasty. The "nasty" issue with Fox is that they simply do not read, nor do they fact-check, nor do they error-correct for the purpose of informing viewership and readership. There isn't anyone sweating bullets about accuracy, double-checking name misspellings, making sure the geography is correct and trying—mightily—to not lie with statistics.
Having actually worked news gigs, these are things I did and did regularly, trying to do more than my job to make sure that what we reported was accurate—even to the point of risking my job by asking an anchorperson right before the news aired about the correctness of a tease he wrote to promote the show. Everyone in the real news media knows that, once you take a job with Fox, you're never going to be considered legitimate and you have blown any hint you may have had of integrity in reporting. And that's sad, because reporters seek for all of their working lives for that stamp of integrity and know that if they lose that, they have lost everything.
There is nothing random about the selection of Fox by Google. It is entirely based on the fact that people, not knowing that Fox does not check facts or even care about facts, click on the link because the source is topmost. And it's topmost because they sensationalize everything, rather than take the time to verify accuracy.
People are busy these days and do not always have enough time to take in enough news and current events to be properly educated about the facts around them. Those who chose faux news as their sole source of information will find themselves missing out entirely from facts that ought to inform the decisions they make in their lives.
My credentials? I worked for two of the three major news networks in the United States. For over ten years. And nobody at MSNBC or CNN limit their news intake to just faux news. This would be tantamount to never looking into any report about anything at all happening in the world. One would have come away from September 11, 2001 thinking that Saddam Hussein personally flew three planes into three buildings and followed that act up with ditching a plane in Pennsylvania -- and then lived to protest that he had no WMD, as he juggled three nuclear warheads while talking to the press.
CNN regularly and routinely aired the footage that the NBC Network produced from "Ground Zero" in New York (NBC's Rehema Ellis was the only reporter actually on the scene from any news agency and, to their shame, CNN used that footage to promote themselves as a news channel.
All of the news organizations' executives agreed to pool all footage from everywhere on that day and, for NBC, that was a very bad decision.
While working in news, I read three different news wires pretty much all of the time during the day, listened to NPR on my way in to work, read the New York Times, Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Daily Tribune. It wasn't enough. One newspaper I found important post-Clinton was the Cairo Journal, though the English version doesn't have the same "spin" as the Arabic and I would usually consult a translator at least two times a day.
I'm going to guess that the people who work at faux news read the Wall Street Journal as if that Murdoch-owned paper is a "newspaper of record." It is not. Prior to Murdoch's purchase, it was a newspaper that was full of corporate PR, hastily rewriting press releases churned out by the big corporations whose executives read it.
If you don't work in news, you should regularly read a "newspaper of record" (and none of the Murdoch-owned ones are) and you should alternate these sources. So if on Mondays, you read the New York Times, you should read the Chicago Tribune on Tuesdays, switch to the Washington Post on Wednesdays, read the Los Angeles Tribune on Thursdays and hit the BBC on Fridays. All of these outlets will be available on the Internet and all are pretty comprehensive. If you really like crosswords, you should pick the New York Times on the day you find it hardest -- but still possible, understanding that the easiest is published on Mondays, with the hardest on Fridays.
I don't think anyone is actually home any more for the 6:30 PM news on television.
Zenin's reply is perfect, but I will add this false news story that was heavily reported on faux news as yet another example of how they do no fact checking at all, preferring to sensationalize anything that fits their political aims.
As I said before, if faux news is the only "news" you take in, you will not understand the world around you. You will be regularly and routinely lied to and you will not comprehend correctly what is truly happening in the world.
The Royal Botanic Gardens is discovering a small minority of species are "discovered" more than once and genetic sequencing is helping to clear that up. Faux news is reporting that biodiversity is not important because most of the diversity is really false.
The difference here is spin. The Royal Botanic Garden will tend to prefer that we not destroy species. Murdoch and company would prefer that we pay no attention whatsoever to people who are saying that killing off massive quantities of our species from this planet could, in the long term, be very detrimental to life on earth.
I wholly disagree with your statement that what they report is rarely flat-out false and would refer you to any story originated by Breitbart as well as the above link to the Los Angeles Police jet pack purchase.
So in order to sow doubt about the scientific community reporting that we're killing off species and that biodiversity is important, faux news is reporting another lie. Here's a tip for those of you getting news from the Murdoch empire: Don't use that as your single source. Read, watch and listen to other outlets, else you will be ill-informed like the rest of the lemmings who just watch faux news
Here is what really happened.
A non-telephone company had a cascading problem with its ad-hoc peer-to-peer networking that provides telephony and video services at costs way below any telephone (or cable) company. The company is profitable enough to make its own way in this world.
This story was broadcast pretty-much worldwide by all media.
The non-telephone company was embarrased and released a statement to the media about how this happened as a means by which it might encourage everyone to download new, free software the will fix the problem and to cover for the public relations problem.
Skype is not a telephone company, but they allow you to provide telephony and video conferencing by using their software for free. And, for calls made to regular telephones, it's between 2.3 and 1.2 per minute anywhere in the world, offering a considerable savings over telephone companies and cable companies. When John Thomas Draper (AKA Captain Crunch) tried that with AT&T, he was convicted for wire fraud.
Five years ago, the only people who knew what Skype was were computer nerds. Today, as a result of the incredible savings people are receiving by making long-distance and international calls through Skype, almost everyone does. Five years ago, the only people who would have known of this outage were Slashdot users and a few other geeks. It would not have made news.
And that, dear reader, is the reason why this is important.
I don't plan to buy any stock in any phone company that doesn't do what Skype does.
Atilla, secession was the action that the states took well after the "nullification crisis." "Nullification" came into vogue during the Buchanan Presidency and the states that seceded did so as soon as they saw that Lincoln has been elected and they did not have the power to reverse gains in Congress made by the then-new Republican Party. James Madison was long dead by the time this was hashed out.
Your comment seems to have the father of our modern Constitution alive after the Civil War and then, what -- writing the Constitution and delivering it to the prior time line? Also, you confuse the Republicans or "Proto-Republicans," as you call them, whatever that is, with the Dred Scott decision, which says that property, once owned, remains property no matter what state it remains in or is taken to, the solution to which was proposed by Abolitionists (not Republicans) in emancipating all human property and outlawing the existence of slavery.
Republicans were created as a northern splinter of the Whig Party, which favored business and commerce and trade over the rights of individuals. Whigs splintered over the idea of secession as well as the idea at the federal government was the supreme law and that states had no right of "nullification." The new Republic-an party believed that the Republic should not be split between north and south and that any attempts to create such a split should not be allowed (hence the choice of name). The party was made up of former Whigs as well as Abolitionists, Free-Soilers and "Know-nothings," who had decided that the Union needed to be preserved. It was a pretty big tent, and Lincoln's rather fractious Cabinet reflected that.