The political process is not as straightforward as the article suggests: It will first be passed on to a committee which will listen for various experts and interested parties, including copyright holders' associations. The committee will then be free to make amendments and changes to the proposal, even though the proposal is already written in a form of law text. After the committee it will probably be subjected to other various committees for review, for example the constitutional committee to check if it is in alignment with the constitution. At the end of this long committee process is the public vote in the Parliament, which is most often just a formality.
Therefore it is not guaranteed at all that the intended changes will pass even if the law will be changed in the parliament.
The finnish legislation standard used to be (until 2000's where they passed some questionable laws) to lay down technologically neutral laws, where the technology used played no important role but the actual action by the person did no matter what the tool used. This proposed legislation is just an exception to be amended to the current law, which regulates the use of other people's property, which you currently are not allowed to use without a prior permission. Currently some of the facilities offer free WiFi without informing you of such and this behaviour would be illegal by the law even when it's not easy to detect or to prosecute. So they are for the sake of clarity, going to make an exception because it is often hard to find out whether you're allowed to use the open network or not.
The human translation for newstext:
Joining a wireless accesspoint to be legalized
The ministry of justice is forming a law to allow use of unprotected WiFi access points. By the current law the unauthorized use of open networks has been illegal.
The exception is rationalized by for example, the lack of harm done, impossibility of oversight and the relative easiness of protecting the network. For the end user it is also often difficult to find out when the network is meant for public use and when it is not.
The statements received by the ministry of justice (which includes EFFI, Electronic Frontier Finland, by transl.) remind that the avilability of free WiFi access has increased in public space such as parks and air fields and they don't always inform the end user of the free availability.
According to the ministry of justice, there has been only one sentence for the use of unsecured WiFi by the district court. Higher court upheld the decision and it never went to the supreme court.
Most of the statements were for the legalization. However, many of them held it in high value that the owner of the access point should be held innocent in case of the illegal use of the access point.
Experts' opinion is that a lot of the WiFi access points are unsecured and the unauthorized use of them is common. Securing of the access point is usually easy when following the manuals of the access point.
The unauthorized use of the access point might slow the network down but it is hard to note unless there's a lot of file transfers compared to the bandwidth available.
The finnish legislation standard used to be (until 2000's where they passed some questionable laws) to lay down technologically neutral laws, where the technology used played no important role but the action did. This proposed legislation is just an exception to be amended to the current law, which regulates the use of other people's property, which you currently are not allowed to use without a prior permission. Currently some of the facilities offer free WiFi without informing you of such and this behaviour would be illegal by the law even when it's not easy to detect or to prosecute. So they are for the sake of clarity, going to make an exception because it is often hard to find out whether you're allowed to use the open network or not.
The human translation for newstext:
Joining a wireless accesspoint to be legalized
The ministry of justice is forming a law to allow use of unprotected WiFi access points. By the current law the unauthorized use of open networks has been illegal.
The exception is rationalized by for example, the lack of harm done, impossibility of oversight and the relative easiness of protecting the network. For the end user it is also often difficult to find out when the network is meant for public use and when it is not.
The statements received by the ministry of justice (which includes EFFI, Electronic Frontier Finland, by transl.) remind that the avilability of free WiFi access has increased in public space such as parks and air fields and they don't always inform the end user of the free availability.
According to the ministry of justice, there has been only one sentence for the use of unsecured WiFi by the district court. Higher court upheld the decision and it never went to the supreme court.
Most of the statements were for the legalization. However, many of them held it in high value that the owner of the access point should be held innocent in case of the illegal use of the access point.
Experts' opinion is that a lot of the WiFi access points are unsecured and the unauthorized use of them is common. Securing of the access point is usually easy when following the manuals of the access point.
The unauthorized use of the access point might slow the network down but it is hard to note unless there's a lot of file transfers compared to the bandwidth available.
I'm also a Finn and I was counting the votes at the municipal elections in Helsinki late last year. The system is even more tamper proof than described previously. First of all, the ballot box is checked at the casting of the first vote that there's no extra votes within the box. The first vote is stamped (like the rest will be) and put in to the box. The parties have a right to set an observer for the whole time until the votes have been counted. The next day the votes are recounted (which is where I was part of):
All districts are dealt out randomly to counting groups. The groups then count the votes and if they agree on the number of votes with the first count - and don't disqualified any votes accepted previously due to certain criteria - then the result is accepted. The votes can be disqualified for multiple reasons: The vote paper might be completely unmarked and it is counted separately as an official form of protesting against every party. The other reasons are ambiguous number (usually trouble separating 1 from 7 and 6 from 0 or numbers that look different upside down, like 188 vs. 881 when a single vertical bar is used for number 1.), additional non-clarifying markings in the vote that could be used to link the person to the vote (to prevent vote buying & selling), lack of stamping (to prevent people slipping in multiple votes within the true vote) or using other than official voting paper in voting. Lot of votes disqualified contain all kinds of messages to the government, from a friendly "F U government!" to cryptic messages to God or Bavarian Illuminati.
If the result is in any way different from the previous count then it is dealt randomly to another counting group which will verify the result. All the disqualified votes go to the jurisdiction to give a final verdict on the votes and if possible decide the candidate the ambiguous vote is for.
All this counting is done in a group supervised by political parties, though in current stable political environment the supervision is only superficial. Being a member of this counting process has only increased my trust in paper voting and distrust in e-voting.
Actually ministry of justice itself described 2% failure rate as "very high" compared to ordinary paper ballot. In Finland an ordinary failure rate for paper ballots cast would afaik be around 0,5% and that includes Donald Duck and offensive drawings, which are not available to evoters.
As an election vote counter I can assure that out of the approximately 7000 votes that went thru my hands during the counting, only 9 or 10 were that ambiguous that it couldn't be reliably placed to one single candidate. Those ambiguous votes go to the board of election officials that will ultimately decide whether it's a valid vote (and who has the voter voted for) or not. Other invalid votes were maybe 5 times as common. Most of the time it's a question of whether the number is "1 or 7?" and other common problems are "6 or 0?" and "5 or 6?"
The Finnish counting system was developed during times of great distress and has stood the test of time. It was good right after the civil war and therefore it's good for peaceful times too:
The votes are first grouped by candidate, then counted twice by separate persons and invalid or ambiguous votes taken aside. If the numbers differ, they're counted again by two separate persons. Then the count is recorded on two separate forms held by secretaries and those forms are cross-validated against each other.
After this, the votes are given to second counting group selected at random (obviously different from the first group) and counted again, with a possibility to take aside votes they found invalid that were accepted previously but not vice versa. If this verification count differs at all from the first count, the number of votes for candidate will be verified by counting again the number of votes for that particular candidate and if the first count seems to have been erroneous it'll be counted for the third time by a third group. Finally the invalid votes will be considered and decided whether it is an acceptable vote or not by higher election officials. Each party attending the elections have a right to set observators to the counting procedures but at times like these I saw none personally.
This whole procedure makes it really hard to cheat in the vote counting unless you're using e-voting where officials just download the XML, turn it into a PDF and print it. Then they tell us that this is the result. I'd love to link to the news video where they did that but unfortunately I'm unable to find it right now.
Finland is in a state of masqueraded communism, the taxes are highest in the world and living costs right up there too! For well above minimum wage job, you don't get even twice the amount of money to spend on things than on unemployment checks.
Some call this socialism, some call this social democracy. The fact is, however, that the social services were seriously cut down in the 90's and markets opened (although they already were open compared to real communist nations). Supporting the unemployed with worthwhile living standards doesn't make the country communist. For some reason the right wing parties are currently forming the government and if I had to choose with the regime being communist or fascist, I'd choose the latter. Trumping the individual rights for the establishment.
I can't find the exact numbers, but my best guess is that the support for the unemployed has declined - in real purchasing power - as well as has those people's purchasing power who work on minumum wage or close to one. Evidently your claim of masquareded communism doesn't seem to hold water, this is more like masquaraded fascism. For more proof, check out smash asem demonstration and police response, the rise of police powers etc.
If you believe in science AND god then your a bloody hypocrite because the scientific method can never be used on god.
If you believe in science AND human rights then you're a hypocrite because scientific method can never be used on human rights. So you have a false dichotomy going on right there.
The other one is an ideology. It doesn't require scientific proof and it's a personal attribute. Science by definition is about modeling things with scientific method. So what you're saying is that if you believe in scientific method and in something that's not testable then you are in conflict. People who can't see outside the box sometimes live a life without ever thinking that there might be exist things that are not testable. Then they bend science even further and claim that the laws of physics are the reality (they're not, they're modeling the output given inputs!). I know I'm on slashdot, but studying philosophy isn't that bad an idea. It'll teach you to think outside the box and the progress on any branch of science, even computer science, is made by those who think outside the box.
Theory of evolution doesn't say if gods exist or if they don't. They don't say gods didn't have anything to do with the appearing of man or if they did. I think this is an important aspect to be stressed in teaching evolution, since it attacks directly the false creationist claims (evolution and (Judeo-Christian God) cannot both exist).
I've been following this for some time. I can't be bothered to type out the whole post, but my blog can be found here with interesting comments too.
Man, you really should learn how to copy-paste. It's really useful. You know, I didn't have to type your message, all I did was select and then right click and "Copy" appears there, plain as a day! Then I click to this text area and again click right button and select "Paste".
I strongly suggest you try it out, I'm sure you figure it out. For experienced users there's quick key combinations and everything!
Last time I checked, IE came bundled with Mac OS and Mac OS X as well and follows standards about as well as IE on Windows. How's the lock-in argument work now?
Isn't this a pretty good example of godwins law ??
In this case, no. It's a valid point when talking about a police state - or a possibility to turn into one - to compare other police states. The real Godwin (l)uses are "you're like a nazi and therefore you're wrong." Having one's views rejected because they won't work in a police state ("You should always obey the law even if it feels wrong" "Well, suppose you're working as a gulag guard and...") is not "playing a Hitler card on the issue."
People don't even try the 'they know their OS better' crap, since the MS JVM team was using off the shelf MS C compilers and using standard OS APIs.
Of course they were. They told you themselves, didn't they? And why would a company, that has acknowledged that they did cooperate on application/OS interface, promised to cease it in an antitrust suit and still secretly continued it, as they admitted on a new suit, ever lie to you?
I think Radiohead went overboard. There is not a valid business model when you say, "Pay whatever you want". If you disagree with this conclusion than consider how you will respond when your employer or customers decide they will start paying you whatever they want to and if that's not enough for rent, too bad for you. It's no way to make a living.
There's an interesting game called Ultimatum out there. Let's say we're playing it and I'm the person that does the cut. The rules are as follows: I choose how much each of us gets (let's say we have 100 USD to share) and you accept or reject it. If you don't accept, neither of us gets anything. If I give you too little (99-to-1 or 90-to-10) you can go "screw you guys" and I lose also.
If your customers offer you this kind of scheme you wouldn't be playing with them in the future, right? You're actually kind of playing this game when they want you to do something for them. If the price is too high (they get too little, you get too much) they'll disagree and there won't be a sale.
Of course when the work is done beforehand and the payment is not mandatory the thing is quite different, but my view on the music has been since 90's that it's not the record I'm buying I'm paying for, it's for the next record they're going to make - and if they cut the middle man it's even better!
I disagree. I think you can do a controlled experiment.
First of all, have a sales prediction for a new record. Check if the record is leaked before publication and if not, check how fast the music appears on p2p. Then model the effect of appearance in p2p to sales (if it has any.) If the availability in p2p has a major effect then the sales go down with the availability. If p2p has a positive (or neutral) effect then the sales go up. If the leak time has no effect then the p2p availability doesn't affect sales.
You're incorrect.
They pay to ROMS for the privilege but IFPI doesn't want to negotiate with ROMS because "they're selling too cheap."
So it's in line with the Russian legislation but the representative(s) of artists doesn't want that money, they want more. If they did the agreement then all would be nice, wouldn't it? This is all about greed, greed and control.
A small sports club I'm working for as a webmaster, postmaster, listmaster and.*master often gets complaints that the members haven't received the mails sent on lists even though they have joined the mailing lists and that they have a valid hotmail address in there. Yet I've never thought about the reason why some are dropped and some are not - but I guess the attachments have something to do with this.
This definitely is the case, no bounces or anything are sent. Today I sent them mail that everybody should avoid hotmail and use any other mail provider instead. The bad thing is that I think only those who don't have hotmail.com address will ever see that mail.
Home contracts used to promise at least the company's best efforts to maintain a certain service level - and now they're effectively promising nothing at all.
You know there is a market price for buying guaranteed bandwidth - at least here in North Europe - but I bet you can't afford it. Neither can I. Neither does the company I work for. Buying a reserved and guaranteed bandwidth means that you can't "overbook" that amount and you have to pay it in full.
Statistically speaking a normal use of a computer isn't pushing the data both ways at 100% capability. Therefore putting in more hardware to do so will alienate the customers, who want everything and don't want to pay for anything they don't need. So, the average user opens a web page, reads it, then proceeds to another page and reads it and so forth. He wants the page to open up fast, but has no use for the surplus bandwidth. They want fast internet connection for one second in a minute. The network usage becomes a Poisson distribution and combined the usage starts to resemble normal distribution. That's what the ISPs want, it's statistically well defined and most of the time it's fast, congestion is just occasional.
Enter "Pete the Pirate". He's using the bandwidth in full and he won't fit in that normal distribution. The nice normal distribution turns skewed to the right, everyone gets worse response times and less bandwidth on average. The solution? Sell everyone guaranteed 10M/512k or what? Most of the people don't want to pay 60 times as much as they do because they don't have the need for guaranteed bandwidth. ISDN was about fixed bandwidth and it sucked. Nobody needed that bandwidth that much and therefore the costs were significantly higher than with ADSL technologies.
Solution: Transfer based billing. I think the sender should pay for the bandwidth as it is with the web sites as well. Your incoming traffic requires also outgoing traffic and you attach the interest of the company (build as little infrastructure as economically feasible) with the interest of the client (use that infrastructure as little as economically feasible).
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam (x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Not a bad try, though. Usually way more crosses on the form.
2. Saddam Hussein is still an asshole.
3. We've effectively contained him so he's not much of a threat.
4. We may have to do something about him in the future, but now is not the right time.
Gee, so if a zombie Saddam rises from the grave, what are you going to do? I thought he died almost 5 months ago and therefore I conclude that he is not a threat anymore. Unless he's coming back as a zombie, which means thing are going even worse in Iraq.
They wanted to name it as "eyeDiot", but the name was already taken. The userbase would have been then simply called "eye-diots" or "I-Diots" (spelling varies) and the system "I-diocy" ("eyeDiocy").
Besides, exactly why does *user generated* content need protection?
See, it's not the content that will be protected but it will be protected from having content. Anything that looks worth watching will be filtered.
The thruth is that the MPAA boys came over, confiscated the bowl and threatened to sue the whole family if Mortimer wouldn't confess it violated the copyrights of Pixar by swimming like Nemo. Mortimer under desperate situation, confessed and saved the family. Now seriously in debts he had no alternative but to commit suicide.
Then where does the other 40% of their profits come from?
See, they get 40% of money in from other products, but use more that 40% of their income manufacturing and marketing those products. If I remember correctly they use 10% of their income in OS and office manufacturing and marketing, so it's around 80% profit margin for each copy sold.
want to believe that this works, and could be mass-produced for $2,000. And I've seen the stuff about the Grizzly Suit. But "going out and making some videos" does not necessarily equate with "withstanding rigorous testing", and as far as I can tell, he hasn't done either with this new suit.
Time to call in the Mythbusters!
I'd like to see them get a piece of that equipment. Or I can do it myself. I bet I could get FDF interested to do the tests.
Slashdot Mirror
The political process is not as straightforward as the article suggests: It will first be passed on to a committee which will listen for various experts and interested parties, including copyright holders' associations. The committee will then be free to make amendments and changes to the proposal, even though the proposal is already written in a form of law text. After the committee it will probably be subjected to other various committees for review, for example the constitutional committee to check if it is in alignment with the constitution. At the end of this long committee process is the public vote in the Parliament, which is most often just a formality.
Therefore it is not guaranteed at all that the intended changes will pass even if the law will be changed in the parliament.
The finnish legislation standard used to be (until 2000's where they passed some questionable laws) to lay down technologically neutral laws, where the technology used played no important role but the actual action by the person did no matter what the tool used. This proposed legislation is just an exception to be amended to the current law, which regulates the use of other people's property, which you currently are not allowed to use without a prior permission. Currently some of the facilities offer free WiFi without informing you of such and this behaviour would be illegal by the law even when it's not easy to detect or to prosecute. So they are for the sake of clarity, going to make an exception because it is often hard to find out whether you're allowed to use the open network or not.
The human translation for newstext:
Joining a wireless accesspoint to be legalized
The ministry of justice is forming a law to allow use of unprotected WiFi access points. By the current law the unauthorized use of open networks has been illegal.
The exception is rationalized by for example, the lack of harm done, impossibility of oversight and the relative easiness of protecting the network. For the end user it is also often difficult to find out when the network is meant for public use and when it is not.
The statements received by the ministry of justice (which includes EFFI, Electronic Frontier Finland, by transl.) remind that the avilability of free WiFi access has increased in public space such as parks and air fields and they don't always inform the end user of the free availability.
According to the ministry of justice, there has been only one sentence for the use of unsecured WiFi by the district court. Higher court upheld the decision and it never went to the supreme court.
Most of the statements were for the legalization. However, many of them held it in high value that the owner of the access point should be held innocent in case of the illegal use of the access point.
Experts' opinion is that a lot of the WiFi access points are unsecured and the unauthorized use of them is common. Securing of the access point is usually easy when following the manuals of the access point.
The unauthorized use of the access point might slow the network down but it is hard to note unless there's a lot of file transfers compared to the bandwidth available.
The finnish legislation standard used to be (until 2000's where they passed some questionable laws) to lay down technologically neutral laws, where the technology used played no important role but the action did. This proposed legislation is just an exception to be amended to the current law, which regulates the use of other people's property, which you currently are not allowed to use without a prior permission. Currently some of the facilities offer free WiFi without informing you of such and this behaviour would be illegal by the law even when it's not easy to detect or to prosecute. So they are for the sake of clarity, going to make an exception because it is often hard to find out whether you're allowed to use the open network or not.
The human translation for newstext:
Joining a wireless accesspoint to be legalized
The ministry of justice is forming a law to allow use of unprotected WiFi access points. By the current law the unauthorized use of open networks has been illegal.
The exception is rationalized by for example, the lack of harm done, impossibility of oversight and the relative easiness of protecting the network. For the end user it is also often difficult to find out when the network is meant for public use and when it is not.
The statements received by the ministry of justice (which includes EFFI, Electronic Frontier Finland, by transl.) remind that the avilability of free WiFi access has increased in public space such as parks and air fields and they don't always inform the end user of the free availability.
According to the ministry of justice, there has been only one sentence for the use of unsecured WiFi by the district court. Higher court upheld the decision and it never went to the supreme court.
Most of the statements were for the legalization. However, many of them held it in high value that the owner of the access point should be held innocent in case of the illegal use of the access point.
Experts' opinion is that a lot of the WiFi access points are unsecured and the unauthorized use of them is common. Securing of the access point is usually easy when following the manuals of the access point.
The unauthorized use of the access point might slow the network down but it is hard to note unless there's a lot of file transfers compared to the bandwidth available.
I'm also a Finn and I was counting the votes at the municipal elections in Helsinki late last year. The system is even more tamper proof than described previously. First of all, the ballot box is checked at the casting of the first vote that there's no extra votes within the box. The first vote is stamped (like the rest will be) and put in to the box. The parties have a right to set an observer for the whole time until the votes have been counted. The next day the votes are recounted (which is where I was part of):
All districts are dealt out randomly to counting groups. The groups then count the votes and if they agree on the number of votes with the first count - and don't disqualified any votes accepted previously due to certain criteria - then the result is accepted. The votes can be disqualified for multiple reasons: The vote paper might be completely unmarked and it is counted separately as an official form of protesting against every party. The other reasons are ambiguous number (usually trouble separating 1 from 7 and 6 from 0 or numbers that look different upside down, like 188 vs. 881 when a single vertical bar is used for number 1.), additional non-clarifying markings in the vote that could be used to link the person to the vote (to prevent vote buying & selling), lack of stamping (to prevent people slipping in multiple votes within the true vote) or using other than official voting paper in voting. Lot of votes disqualified contain all kinds of messages to the government, from a friendly "F U government!" to cryptic messages to God or Bavarian Illuminati.
If the result is in any way different from the previous count then it is dealt randomly to another counting group which will verify the result. All the disqualified votes go to the jurisdiction to give a final verdict on the votes and if possible decide the candidate the ambiguous vote is for.
All this counting is done in a group supervised by political parties, though in current stable political environment the supervision is only superficial. Being a member of this counting process has only increased my trust in paper voting and distrust in e-voting.
I finally found the video: http://www.hs.fi/videot/1135240559892?kategoria=Uutiset&sivu=1
As an election vote counter I can assure that out of the approximately 7000 votes that went thru my hands during the counting, only 9 or 10 were that ambiguous that it couldn't be reliably placed to one single candidate. Those ambiguous votes go to the board of election officials that will ultimately decide whether it's a valid vote (and who has the voter voted for) or not. Other invalid votes were maybe 5 times as common. Most of the time it's a question of whether the number is "1 or 7?" and other common problems are "6 or 0?" and "5 or 6?"
The Finnish counting system was developed during times of great distress and has stood the test of time. It was good right after the civil war and therefore it's good for peaceful times too:
The votes are first grouped by candidate, then counted twice by separate persons and invalid or ambiguous votes taken aside. If the numbers differ, they're counted again by two separate persons. Then the count is recorded on two separate forms held by secretaries and those forms are cross-validated against each other.
After this, the votes are given to second counting group selected at random (obviously different from the first group) and counted again, with a possibility to take aside votes they found invalid that were accepted previously but not vice versa. If this verification count differs at all from the first count, the number of votes for candidate will be verified by counting again the number of votes for that particular candidate and if the first count seems to have been erroneous it'll be counted for the third time by a third group. Finally the invalid votes will be considered and decided whether it is an acceptable vote or not by higher election officials. Each party attending the elections have a right to set observators to the counting procedures but at times like these I saw none personally.
This whole procedure makes it really hard to cheat in the vote counting unless you're using e-voting where officials just download the XML, turn it into a PDF and print it. Then they tell us that this is the result. I'd love to link to the news video where they did that but unfortunately I'm unable to find it right now.
Finland is in a state of masqueraded communism, the taxes are highest in the world and living costs right up there too! For well above minimum wage job, you don't get even twice the amount of money to spend on things than on unemployment checks.
Some call this socialism, some call this social democracy. The fact is, however, that the social services were seriously cut down in the 90's and markets opened (although they already were open compared to real communist nations). Supporting the unemployed with worthwhile living standards doesn't make the country communist. For some reason the right wing parties are currently forming the government and if I had to choose with the regime being communist or fascist, I'd choose the latter. Trumping the individual rights for the establishment. I can't find the exact numbers, but my best guess is that the support for the unemployed has declined - in real purchasing power - as well as has those people's purchasing power who work on minumum wage or close to one. Evidently your claim of masquareded communism doesn't seem to hold water, this is more like masquaraded fascism. For more proof, check out smash asem demonstration and police response, the rise of police powers etc.
If you believe in science AND human rights then you're a hypocrite because scientific method can never be used on human rights. So you have a false dichotomy going on right there.
The other one is an ideology. It doesn't require scientific proof and it's a personal attribute. Science by definition is about modeling things with scientific method. So what you're saying is that if you believe in scientific method and in something that's not testable then you are in conflict. People who can't see outside the box sometimes live a life without ever thinking that there might be exist things that are not testable. Then they bend science even further and claim that the laws of physics are the reality (they're not, they're modeling the output given inputs!). I know I'm on slashdot, but studying philosophy isn't that bad an idea. It'll teach you to think outside the box and the progress on any branch of science, even computer science, is made by those who think outside the box.
Theory of evolution doesn't say if gods exist or if they don't. They don't say gods didn't have anything to do with the appearing of man or if they did. I think this is an important aspect to be stressed in teaching evolution, since it attacks directly the false creationist claims (evolution and (Judeo-Christian God) cannot both exist).
I strongly suggest you try it out, I'm sure you figure it out. For experienced users there's quick key combinations and everything!
I strongly suggest you check it again.
There's an interesting game called Ultimatum out there. Let's say we're playing it and I'm the person that does the cut. The rules are as follows: I choose how much each of us gets (let's say we have 100 USD to share) and you accept or reject it. If you don't accept, neither of us gets anything. If I give you too little (99-to-1 or 90-to-10) you can go "screw you guys" and I lose also.
If your customers offer you this kind of scheme you wouldn't be playing with them in the future, right? You're actually kind of playing this game when they want you to do something for them. If the price is too high (they get too little, you get too much) they'll disagree and there won't be a sale.
Of course when the work is done beforehand and the payment is not mandatory the thing is quite different, but my view on the music has been since 90's that it's not the record I'm buying I'm paying for, it's for the next record they're going to make - and if they cut the middle man it's even better!
I disagree. I think you can do a controlled experiment.
First of all, have a sales prediction for a new record. Check if the record is leaked before publication and if not, check how fast the music appears on p2p. Then model the effect of appearance in p2p to sales (if it has any.) If the availability in p2p has a major effect then the sales go down with the availability. If p2p has a positive (or neutral) effect then the sales go up. If the leak time has no effect then the p2p availability doesn't affect sales.
You're incorrect. They pay to ROMS for the privilege but IFPI doesn't want to negotiate with ROMS because "they're selling too cheap." So it's in line with the Russian legislation but the representative(s) of artists doesn't want that money, they want more. If they did the agreement then all would be nice, wouldn't it? This is all about greed, greed and control.
A small sports club I'm working for as a webmaster, postmaster, listmaster and .*master often gets complaints that the members haven't received the mails sent on lists even though they have joined the mailing lists and that they have a valid hotmail address in there. Yet I've never thought about the reason why some are dropped and some are not - but I guess the attachments have something to do with this.
This definitely is the case, no bounces or anything are sent. Today I sent them mail that everybody should avoid hotmail and use any other mail provider instead. The bad thing is that I think only those who don't have hotmail.com address will ever see that mail.
You know there is a market price for buying guaranteed bandwidth - at least here in North Europe - but I bet you can't afford it. Neither can I. Neither does the company I work for. Buying a reserved and guaranteed bandwidth means that you can't "overbook" that amount and you have to pay it in full.
Statistically speaking a normal use of a computer isn't pushing the data both ways at 100% capability. Therefore putting in more hardware to do so will alienate the customers, who want everything and don't want to pay for anything they don't need. So, the average user opens a web page, reads it, then proceeds to another page and reads it and so forth. He wants the page to open up fast, but has no use for the surplus bandwidth. They want fast internet connection for one second in a minute. The network usage becomes a Poisson distribution and combined the usage starts to resemble normal distribution. That's what the ISPs want, it's statistically well defined and most of the time it's fast, congestion is just occasional.
Enter "Pete the Pirate". He's using the bandwidth in full and he won't fit in that normal distribution. The nice normal distribution turns skewed to the right, everyone gets worse response times and less bandwidth on average. The solution? Sell everyone guaranteed 10M/512k or what? Most of the people don't want to pay 60 times as much as they do because they don't have the need for guaranteed bandwidth. ISDN was about fixed bandwidth and it sucked. Nobody needed that bandwidth that much and therefore the costs were significantly higher than with ADSL technologies.
Solution: Transfer based billing. I think the sender should pay for the bandwidth as it is with the web sites as well. Your incoming traffic requires also outgoing traffic and you attach the interest of the company (build as little infrastructure as economically feasible) with the interest of the client (use that infrastructure as little as economically feasible).
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Not a bad try, though. Usually way more crosses on the form.
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power"
So that's why they went after the big brains? Seems like DiDio was - afterall - a victim.
See, it's not the content that will be protected but it will be protected from having content. Anything that looks worth watching will be filtered.
The thruth is that the MPAA boys came over, confiscated the bowl and threatened to sue the whole family if Mortimer wouldn't confess it violated the copyrights of Pixar by swimming like Nemo. Mortimer under desperate situation, confessed and saved the family. Now seriously in debts he had no alternative but to commit suicide.
Don't believe the MPAA propaganda!
See, they get 40% of money in from other products, but use more that 40% of their income manufacturing and marketing those products. If I remember correctly they use 10% of their income in OS and office manufacturing and marketing, so it's around 80% profit margin for each copy sold.