I have four words for you - and they aren't "I love this company"
Read the f*ing article!
I quote the article [McCurry:]"The "neutral" proposal that companies like Google are touting will ensure that they never have to pay a dime no matter how much bandwidth they use, and consumers who may only use their computers to send e-mail and play Solitaire get to foot the bill."
The whole issue is about companies will to triple charging: they already charge the end users, there's the service that gets charged for its bandwidth. Now they want to charge the service by the end user ISP.
And I dare you to read "The Trial" by Franz Kafka. I just did and it made me think about the legal system used within European Union and overseas.
[slight spoiler] One day, Josef K. is arrested. He's never told the crime he's being accused of or the law where such an act would be defined yet he must try to defend himself, with the help or without a lawyer. [/slight spoiler]
The book is out of copyright as it has been 81 years since the author died. The book wasn't perfected before he passed away so there's some chapters that weren't quite finished by then.
And to add an insult to an injury, Windows 2000 and XP will automatically transform any NTFS disk to the current NTFS version if one is ever connected. So you never can swap disks between two versions of NT tree.
This is about a private company acting as a police and a court: you have no chance to defend yourself and you have been fined by the company for their benefit. If your contract included such a phrase that would allow them to fine (= to bill) you as they wish - shame on you for signing the contract. If it didn't they're on thin ice.
What I'd ahve done was to pay the fee and on the instant I get my domain free I'd threaten to sue them if they didn't pay me back or let me defend my position. The hard part on the ISP / DNS-operator is to show that a spam complaint is genuine and it is indeed intended to advertise the site in question and it is not a joe job.
I operate 4 web sites of which 2 are registered to me personally. I agree that something must be done to the spam problem, but this isn't a solution.
That was a nice wrap-up for differences between the EU and the US.
Yet I'd like to point out that at least in some countries - my knowledge being about Nordic countries - the data the government has is scattered around branches. For example, the police has no information of your medical history. The doctor you go to see has no information about your financial status unless he asks you. Your medical history can't be transferred from hospital to another unless you approve it (this does not apply to the data on hand, though. Ambulance crew may tell the condition to doctors in the hospital etc). There's strict laws to regulate that you must be able to check what information they have about you. Also, auditing is strict. A medical professional was convicted in a Finnish court just a couple of weeks ago for reading his fellow workers data without need for that data. There's also Data Protection Ombudsman to protect John and Jane Does against illegal uses of the data. The regulation is pretty strict, for example Student Union of Helsinki University of Technology was requested to get rid of the DNS system where an IP maps into the street address and apartment number, because both of them can be used to map individual persons. For example, a net stalker that knows your IP may get your home address or someone who knows where you live might google your IP and find out what personal information he could get about you there.
The private sector in the EU has also fragments of the data, but there's no legislation in the US I'm aware of that would prevent the private sector (or the public sector) from combining different sources into one. And yes, I think I might be as scared as you are for the UK, Spain and Italy.
Unfortunately, based on first hand experiences, the people in that country do not score very high on tolerating diversity, so you may end up being on the suspect list for wrong skin color, hair color, facial features, unusual last name for the country mentioned on your passport... and that was already on the times of more 'analog' CCTV.
You must be a Swede, right?
Re:Nintendo's Wii akin to Chevrolet's Nova?
on
Both Sides of Wii
·
· Score: 2, Funny
This reminds me of the time when Finnish vacuum cleaner company Electrolux tried to invade the US markets with a slogan "Nothing sucks like Electrolux".
Software patents are not valid here in Mexico, and if I understood correctly what a lawyer friend told me, software patents have been declared invalid already, so it's not like in Europe where patents are not valid yet...
Europe is a continent. There's a lot of countries there with their own legislation, and, IIRC, in some countries patent offices have approved some software patents. The main point is that European Union has been forming a directive on patents that would unify the legislation regarding to patents. Now patent offices in different countries approve patents on various standards.
The whole point of directives is to have same standards regarding to laws in every country. And that is exactly why the corporative lobby groups concentrate in lobbying directives: they end up in to the legislation in every country. Luckily some of the countries may circumvent the spirit of the directive, as did France that pretty much took away the restrictions in DRM. That's all because the directive defines the minimum and every country is allowed to extend the laws then.
We can't get arrested for no reason, as in the UK,
So, if for example the nice officers of NSA took you today and tossed you into a secret jail as "an enemy combatant", how would your point stand? Yeah, you assume that you can't get arrested for no reason.
and we don't have judges arbitrarily ruling cases, as in France
Instead you have jurys, which consist of ordinary people who have no clue of justice system. Also, a judge could mislead your jury, too.
and we don't have a legislature that can overrule the constitution at any time - as in virtually every other democracy.
I don't know of many countries, but in my country it's much harder to pass a law that restricts something constitution has granted.
Common law and civil law have their pros and cons. It's not like one would be supreme to another.
I think they showed us 2 or 3 improvements until they ran out of useful stuff. Then they got into these "improvements":
My Network Places is replaced by the Network Center, a one-stop shop for all your local and internet networking configuration. It includes a visual map of your network layout, local and internet network status, so you can visually see which link in the network is having a problem if you ever have a problem with your connection. Microsoft is aiming to make it easier and more pleasant to browse networked machines with the Network Explorer.
Hooray! I've been waiting for a new Network Neigh... My Netw... I mean Network Center! But wait, will it suck on multi-version environment like all the previous ones? Will it work with linux and samba? Or is it just another name?
Media Center is a great way to experience video, audio, and TV on your PC, even if you don't hook it up to a television. With Media Center features shipping in all the Home Premium and Ultimate Edition versions of Vista, the installed base should expand dramatically. This means more developers making those cool freeware apps for the Media Center interface, too.
Wait... this was an ad? I thought this was an article! And I just hoped they'd included more candy to the lightweight media player UI.
How about some built-in speech recognition? That's right, Vista will include a built-in speech recognition engine, and new and improved speech synthesis. Assuming it works as well as it should, you'll be able to dictate emails or give voice commands for web navigations without buying additional speech recognition software.
I remember my friend had a speech recognition software for Windows 3.1. Didn't work back then (all you could do was to give commands, such as "close window", "close group" etc) and I doubt this won't work either. I'm really skeptical about dictating e-mails, but hey, I'm just a student... of computer and information science, taking a course of natural language processing. Trust me, there's far too many problems.
Mode drivers. Microsoft spent some of that gained performance to improve audio fidelity, primarily by transitioning the audio stack from being based on 16-bit integer operations to 32-bit floating point.
I see, maybe they'll next upgrade my photos from 6 Mpx to 12 Mpx? After all, they got the audio fidelity better so easily.
Overall, it's a bold statement to make, "Why Windows Vista won't suck", based on a beta version. Most of the stuff article shows is just eye candy and nothing special. After all, every version of Windows has been revolutionary and never-seen-before, at least on the marketing material.
The job of SEOers is to prevent me from getting useful information. Google just sent a severe smack out towards people using SEOers. I'm cheering all the way.
Not all SEOers are the same. There is legal optimization, and that is to build the page such that a search engine can index the site content and that the site will be listed with the search queries that are relevant to the site content. I bet google sees nothing wrong with improving the site responsiveness to indexing.
What you don't understand is the fact, that the price is not everything. People don't use p2p only because it's cheaper. They use it because they get much better service. Remember the times when people warned other people from using p2p because of the possible virus infections? Now you have to be careful when buying records!
What record companies and RIAA don't get, is the quality of the service together with the available selection. Want yesterdays good music? Don't waste your time going to a music store, someone in the internet has it, and is willing to share.
For some reason, expensive restaurants still exist even though you can grow your own food and/or hunt, no (big) money spent there. So the competition with the free supply of food hasn't killed off restaurants.
What if the system was designed completely different? The system would hold a list of cars that are stolen, uninsured, travelling without a valid MOT or untaxed and distribute that to cameras, which will in turn report if such a car is located. Then if you are a law abiding citizen, paying your car taxes and keeping your car road worthy you have nothing to be afraid of and your movements are not registered.
They are not going to log all the information, but instead among the logged details will be: email sender (only when using the ISP mail account) email recipient (only when using the ISP mail account) voip service connections (only using the ISP service, not for example Skype. Time and recipient saved) numbers where sms message was sent (time and place of action, recipient) phone numbers called (time and place of call, length of call, recipient)
Something positive here, Finns actively wanted as limited version as possible, whereas many other countries proposed saving of all the data, including content. Finns consistently told that the cost would be way too high and the amount of data will be too large for processing.
The original propose was to save all the TCP/IP data, but was soon discarded as the cost of saving all the data was realized by non-techies. What's most stupid in this, this will not affect those who know their way around that, i.e. terrorists who know the law and how to avoid being listed.
Seems like they are selling the product only if you buy overpriced accessories with them. This is very usual thing to do if you start to read the stories of customers that have bought stuff from the lowest scoring stores.
Friendly Article says: It issued a sweeping rejection of Lycos' argument that personal client details should only be released if they are suspected of a crime and the information is wanted by the police.
So if I want to find out the identity of whoever is writing his claims, I can just go to the ISP and say "this writing has hurt my business/feelings/whatever, give me the contact information."
What Lycos is saying here is that the information should go thru the officials, not just any random company that wants the user information. This isn't about libel, this is about hurting the privacy of an individual. I wouldn't want my information to be given anyone who asks for it, I'd like them to get a court order for that.
While this has the effect of making the image "pop out" more which looks sharp it can't extract more detailed information from the image.
No, you can't, and you're completely right about that. But in the out-of-focus picture all the information is (mostly) there, and the question is how to transform that desired subject in focus. If you have the convolution model, you can write an inverse function using Fourier transform. For a quick mathematic formula, see here and scroll a little down until you find section "Wrong lens focus". There's also software that does the trick. The downside here is that it increases the noise as you can see on the focusmagic examples, but nevertheless it's possible and already done. The original work that represents the degradation model is from the 60's.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the f*ing article!
I quote the article [McCurry:]"The "neutral" proposal that companies like Google are touting will ensure that they never have to pay a dime no matter how much bandwidth they use, and consumers who may only use their computers to send e-mail and play Solitaire get to foot the bill."
The whole issue is about companies will to triple charging: they already charge the end users, there's the service that gets charged for its bandwidth. Now they want to charge the service by the end user ISP.
And I dare you to read "The Trial" by Franz Kafka. I just did and it made me think about the legal system used within European Union and overseas.
[slight spoiler]
One day, Josef K. is arrested. He's never told the crime he's being accused of or the law where such an act would be defined yet he must try to defend himself, with the help or without a lawyer.
[/slight spoiler]
The book is out of copyright as it has been 81 years since the author died. The book wasn't perfected before he passed away so there's some chapters that weren't quite finished by then.
I wasn't sure wether I wanted to laugh or to cry. I guess that whole piece of text was so bad it was supposed to be humorous but I wasn't amused.
And to add an insult to an injury, Windows 2000 and XP will automatically transform any NTFS disk to the current NTFS version if one is ever connected. So you never can swap disks between two versions of NT tree.
No, it was SCO trying to bury their code in linux...
This is about a private company acting as a police and a court: you have no chance to defend yourself and you have been fined by the company for their benefit. If your contract included such a phrase that would allow them to fine (= to bill) you as they wish - shame on you for signing the contract. If it didn't they're on thin ice.
What I'd ahve done was to pay the fee and on the instant I get my domain free I'd threaten to sue them if they didn't pay me back or let me defend my position. The hard part on the ISP / DNS-operator is to show that a spam complaint is genuine and it is indeed intended to advertise the site in question and it is not a joe job.
I operate 4 web sites of which 2 are registered to me personally. I agree that something must be done to the spam problem, but this isn't a solution.
I for one welcome our new implanted chip overlords!
That was a nice wrap-up for differences between the EU and the US.
Yet I'd like to point out that at least in some countries - my knowledge being about Nordic countries - the data the government has is scattered around branches. For example, the police has no information of your medical history. The doctor you go to see has no information about your financial status unless he asks you. Your medical history can't be transferred from hospital to another unless you approve it (this does not apply to the data on hand, though. Ambulance crew may tell the condition to doctors in the hospital etc). There's strict laws to regulate that you must be able to check what information they have about you. Also, auditing is strict. A medical professional was convicted in a Finnish court just a couple of weeks ago for reading his fellow workers data without need for that data. There's also Data Protection Ombudsman to protect John and Jane Does against illegal uses of the data. The regulation is pretty strict, for example Student Union of Helsinki University of Technology was requested to get rid of the DNS system where an IP maps into the street address and apartment number, because both of them can be used to map individual persons. For example, a net stalker that knows your IP may get your home address or someone who knows where you live might google your IP and find out what personal information he could get about you there.
The private sector in the EU has also fragments of the data, but there's no legislation in the US I'm aware of that would prevent the private sector (or the public sector) from combining different sources into one. And yes, I think I might be as scared as you are for the UK, Spain and Italy.
I read from TFA that brain fog is one of the symptoms. Must've been that.
This reminds me of the time when Finnish vacuum cleaner company Electrolux tried to invade the US markets with a slogan "Nothing sucks like Electrolux".
A government official, speaking on a condition of anonymity told us that they were offered the full Office pack, not just Word.
Europe is a continent. There's a lot of countries there with their own legislation, and, IIRC, in some countries patent offices have approved some software patents. The main point is that European Union has been forming a directive on patents that would unify the legislation regarding to patents. Now patent offices in different countries approve patents on various standards.
The whole point of directives is to have same standards regarding to laws in every country. And that is exactly why the corporative lobby groups concentrate in lobbying directives: they end up in to the legislation in every country. Luckily some of the countries may circumvent the spirit of the directive, as did France that pretty much took away the restrictions in DRM. That's all because the directive defines the minimum and every country is allowed to extend the laws then.
Sorry to break your points here:
We can't get arrested for no reason, as in the UK,
So, if for example the nice officers of NSA took you today and tossed you into a secret jail as "an enemy combatant", how would your point stand? Yeah, you assume that you can't get arrested for no reason.
and we don't have judges arbitrarily ruling cases, as in France
Instead you have jurys, which consist of ordinary people who have no clue of justice system. Also, a judge could mislead your jury, too.
and we don't have a legislature that can overrule the constitution at any time - as in virtually every other democracy.
I don't know of many countries, but in my country it's much harder to pass a law that restricts something constitution has granted.
Common law and civil law have their pros and cons. It's not like one would be supreme to another.
I think they showed us 2 or 3 improvements until they ran out of useful stuff. Then they got into these "improvements":
My Network Places is replaced by the Network Center, a one-stop shop for all your local and internet networking configuration. It includes a visual map of your network layout, local and internet network status, so you can visually see which link in the network is having a problem if you ever have a problem with your connection. Microsoft is aiming to make it easier and more pleasant to browse networked machines with the Network Explorer.
Hooray! I've been waiting for a new Network Neigh... My Netw... I mean Network Center! But wait, will it suck on multi-version environment like all the previous ones? Will it work with linux and samba? Or is it just another name?
Media Center is a great way to experience video, audio, and TV on your PC, even if you don't hook it up to a television. With Media Center features shipping in all the Home Premium and Ultimate Edition versions of Vista, the installed base should expand dramatically. This means more developers making those cool freeware apps for the Media Center interface, too.
Wait... this was an ad? I thought this was an article! And I just hoped they'd included more candy to the lightweight media player UI.
How about some built-in speech recognition? That's right, Vista will include a built-in speech recognition engine, and new and improved speech synthesis. Assuming it works as well as it should, you'll be able to dictate emails or give voice commands for web navigations without buying additional speech recognition software.
I remember my friend had a speech recognition software for Windows 3.1. Didn't work back then (all you could do was to give commands, such as "close window", "close group" etc) and I doubt this won't work either. I'm really skeptical about dictating e-mails, but hey, I'm just a student... of computer and information science, taking a course of natural language processing. Trust me, there's far too many problems.
Mode drivers. Microsoft spent some of that gained performance to improve audio fidelity, primarily by transitioning the audio stack from being based on 16-bit integer operations to 32-bit floating point.
I see, maybe they'll next upgrade my photos from 6 Mpx to 12 Mpx? After all, they got the audio fidelity better so easily.
Overall, it's a bold statement to make, "Why Windows Vista won't suck", based on a beta version. Most of the stuff article shows is just eye candy and nothing special. After all, every version of Windows has been revolutionary and never-seen-before, at least on the marketing material.
Not all SEOers are the same. There is legal optimization, and that is to build the page such that a search engine can index the site content and that the site will be listed with the search queries that are relevant to the site content. I bet google sees nothing wrong with improving the site responsiveness to indexing.
What you don't understand is the fact, that the price is not everything. People don't use p2p only because it's cheaper. They use it because they get much better service. Remember the times when people warned other people from using p2p because of the possible virus infections? Now you have to be careful when buying records!
What record companies and RIAA don't get, is the quality of the service together with the available selection. Want yesterdays good music? Don't waste your time going to a music store, someone in the internet has it, and is willing to share.
For some reason, expensive restaurants still exist even though you can grow your own food and/or hunt, no (big) money spent there. So the competition with the free supply of food hasn't killed off restaurants.
Here in Slashdot people don't care if it's already been posted.
I think I'll submit an article about getting free stuff...
What if the system was designed completely different? The system would hold a list of cars that are stolen, uninsured, travelling without a valid MOT or untaxed and distribute that to cameras, which will in turn report if such a car is located. Then if you are a law abiding citizen, paying your car taxes and keeping your car road worthy you have nothing to be afraid of and your movements are not registered.
They are not going to log all the information, but instead among the logged details will be:
email sender (only when using the ISP mail account)
email recipient (only when using the ISP mail account)
voip service connections (only using the ISP service, not for example Skype. Time and recipient saved)
numbers where sms message was sent (time and place of action, recipient)
phone numbers called (time and place of call, length of call, recipient)
Something positive here, Finns actively wanted as limited version as possible, whereas many other countries proposed saving of all the data, including content. Finns consistently told that the cost would be way too high and the amount of data will be too large for processing.
Now excuse me, I'll be installing Tor.
I think you misspelled shit, and yes it is. For proof, turn the radio on.
http://www.resellerratings.com/seller8613.html
Customer Satisfaction
Six-Month Rating: 4.39
Average Store: 7.23
Seems like they are selling the product only if you buy overpriced accessories with them. This is very usual thing to do if you start to read the stories of customers that have bought stuff from the lowest scoring stores.
Friendly Article says:
It issued a sweeping rejection of Lycos' argument that personal client details should only be released if they are suspected of a crime and the information is wanted by the police.
So if I want to find out the identity of whoever is writing his claims, I can just go to the ISP and say "this writing has hurt my business/feelings/whatever, give me the contact information."
What Lycos is saying here is that the information should go thru the officials, not just any random company that wants the user information. This isn't about libel, this is about hurting the privacy of an individual. I wouldn't want my information to be given anyone who asks for it, I'd like them to get a court order for that.
No, you can't, and you're completely right about that. But in the out-of-focus picture all the information is (mostly) there, and the question is how to transform that desired subject in focus. If you have the convolution model, you can write an inverse function using Fourier transform. For a quick mathematic formula, see here and scroll a little down until you find section "Wrong lens focus". There's also software that does the trick. The downside here is that it increases the noise as you can see on the focusmagic examples, but nevertheless it's possible and already done. The original work that represents the degradation model is from the 60's.