It's not that bad an idea for some passwords to be clearly visible if the user want's that. Who hasn't got numerous accounts with trivial passwords which basically we don't care if they got hacked.
Then there is the browser saved password, each time you need to log in the browser fills in the needed password and then one day you need to log in and the web page is a bit different and you end up brute forcing the password from the usual handful that you use.
One useful option i'd like to see is a password protected list of my browser saved passwords. That way I could see my many passwords associated with various accounts while still keeping them safe from everybody but me.
I'm fed up with being denied access to my own account passwords, usually its the ones i access once or twice a year.
why shouldn't you be able to have sudo like access to your own passwords. most of the time you get them reset by getting an email sent to your usual sign up email address any way.
5 minutes of plain text passwords could save a whole heap of wasted time.
obviously this comment wasn't made by me someone hacked my/. account. (like it really matters) the biggest danger is that perhaps a weak password may get used where a stronger one should have been used.
There is one problem with public domain and that is it's near free and in competition with current works.
Imagine a world where copyright ends after 30 years. So now anything 1979 or earlier can be legally downloaded watched read or listened to. Thats a pretty good cache of media, Led Zepplin hendrix the beatles the stones to name a few, most if not all of asimovs books, a huge catalogue of film Star wars would be PD (i think that was 77) The great escape, the italian job, and many many others.
Now don't get me wrong for me I would love it, and there is more than enough available to mean i'd never have to spend a single cent on media again. Thats what today's content makers would have to compete with or would they? because even with silly length copyright laws I still rarely buy up to date media
maybe current media will have to be supported largely by the young, pretty much as it is anyway.
I kind of feel sorry for your wife, you make her sound like a car. Attractiveness is more than just looks and not bragging rights.
There are some women who look great but are not anything like attractive once you get to know them. Even the ones that are will not look so great after 20 years and a few kids and neither will you.
Physical looks are not that important what makes a woman attractive is who she is, I know I married a beautiful woman and she's better than a ten in my eyes, i don't care how anyone else would rate her and the interesting thing for me is her score improves the longer I know her.
Last year I bought an SLR camera at a carboot and it's working fine with some good lenses. I always wanted one when I was a kid.
However I compromise on developing by getting the film processed only and get a copy on CD without prints.
It's really prints which cost and most pictures will have some faults over/under exposed, badly framed, out of focus, tilted ect. So why pay for them to be made into prints.
Once I have my CD I can then proceed to clean my photo's much the same as anyone would with a digital camera.
But why bother with an outdated format? Quite simply the camera and lenses produce images of a far greater quality than I could get with most affordable digital camera's and I can get a photo in lighting conditions most digital camera's fail in. I will obviously take less photo's than with a digital camera, but that camera captures more good quality images.
Cost wise it probably costs me around the same as a packet of cigarettes or a pint or two.
A professional photographer will spend a lot of money on a really good digital camera and gets the results fast which is often needed, but for an amateur like me thats not needed and I get more quality shot's with my SLR without needing to spend 100's if not 1000's to get a digital equivalent. To be really honest it's mostly about the quality of the lenses, in theory i could get a digital slr that takes my lenses.
That doesn't mean I don't use digital camera's at all, but you can guess which ones my favorite.
I used to have a contract with T-mobile in the UK, one thing that I really didn't like was the inability to put a cap on the monthly charges. Largely I was concerned with the possibility of my phone getting stolen and getting billed for a lot of expensive calls.
Even the insurance option didn't do a thing to help. The first 24 hours of calls (after the phone was notified as stolen )was excluded and by that point T-mobile would have a block in place (and wouldn't be charging me from that point).
Whats the point of an insurance policy which does nothing except replace the handset provided it gets broken or stolen in an acceptable way.
I was told that basically as long as I kept paying the bill on time that they would automatically keep raising the credit limit. The only way to restrict it would be to keep paying the bill late and damage my credit rating!
At the end of my contract i switched to prepay. I consistently pay less than when I was on contract. There are so many calls that are placed outside of your inclusive minutes that your pretty much only getting calls to friends and family on your price plan. With things like free skype calls on mobiles (on prepay as well as contract) the mobile phone contract is becoming more of a one sided deal. The only plus side is building a credit history which will help when you want to go for a car loan or mortgage, not that the banks are offering much these days.
It would be a valid point if anything like a decent version of Linux shipped with most netbooks, the customised Xandros isn't too bad but has very limited repositories. Linpus lite please, it lasted about as long as it took to get home to remove it from my aspire one and install Ubuntu.
The Dell mini9 did get ubuntu by default, i've never seen one but I hear they are good at running OSX.
The Netbook remix version of ubuntu is pretty lousy too with bits removed to make it less than it could be.
It'd be fair if it wasn't true that even existing Linux users first impulse was to remove the shipped version of "linux" and put a decent version on instead. It took a while to work out most of the niggles with mainstream linux versions to work well with Netbooks, its still not perfect, some applications are still working down to the desktop with interfaces that fit on a netbooks screen.
Ubuntu 9.04 works out of the box on my aspire one, and I like it but in the mean time Linux versions of netbooks are not so common any more.
Apart from Dell, most netbook manufacturers seemed to have decided a limited version of linux is what they wanted, probably in order to distinguish them from their laptop offerings. These days Netbooks are small laptops and seem to be missing the point, ultra portable, with good battery life and reasonable performance.
I'm pretty happy with what i've got but it was never offered to the general public.
The BNP membership like to be anonymous as well, they were not happy at all that their membership list got published on the net.
seriously thou what message is being sent if the police had knowledge that a serving officer was a card carrying member of a group such as the KKK , or BNP.
It compromises the police since they are there to serve the community all of it. What happens in court when that Police Officer comes to testify and his extremist views are brought in to focus? It would seriously damage his credibility as a witness, even if he was professional enough not to allow his views to color his evidence.
In practical terms you can't control the views of an individual officer but you can certainly hold them to a standard and define what is expected of them. It's not perfect but its the best we can hope for.
In theory the Police are impartial and don't allow personal opinions to influence their job, ahem.
But there is a difference between an officer who may be motivated outside of his passion to uphold the law and one who says oh yes i am a card carrying paid up member of the KKK. The first one you suspect might be racist, the second freely admits he is!
The real story here, is that the UK government is trying to censor the opinions of its employees. This is totally unacceptable. The officer should be free to express whatever political opinions he wants, including being critical of his superiors, as long as he does it when he is off-duty.
I'm sympathetic in this particular case however a few months ago a BNP membership list was published, amongst the many names were a few serving police officers. Now for good reason serving Police officers are not allowed to be BNP members. With the vile racial prejudices inherent in the BNP you don't really want police officers who subscribe to these extremest views.
What i'm trying to say is that censoring the opinion of Police officers isn't always unjustified however the difference here is that this would be personal.
http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardTagger
This can be fairly successful, it's able to match tracks from audio finger prints as well as filenames and existing tags, typically successful to about 80-90% 100% tends to be mp3's already organised as albums.
Still a major job to tag stuff, but a lot more efficient than doing it all by hand. No I don't have a perfectly tagged collection but its improved.
unfortunately one area that will never be right is genre.
Trolls don't discriminate, just because somebody makes crazy threats doesn't mean they actually believe in what they are saying or are supporters of one faction or another.
some people just want to stir things up just for the sake of it.
Mono's interesting it could be useful but its risky to build it into a core package without being sure that it can't be used as a lever against Linux. Anyone who is aware of the history of Unix and how it was taken away from the very people who developed Unix should be able to understand that viewpoint.
Mono certainly isn't essential just yet and perhaps some distributions holding back is a good thing.
If microsoft is wanting net to be a success across platforms you'd think they would be willing to clarify their stance, if there is no intention of using it against Linux or other operating systems.
Google became the best search engine by being better than the rest, which then created an audience for targeted advertising. Google is all about getting clicks on the adverts on its pages.
Now i'm not saying Bing is better at search than google, but if it is then it makes sense for users to use Bing if its bringing better search results, which is bad for google as it reduces the numbers of people clicking on its ads.
Google has a balancing act to perform, if Google is too good at finding what we want , we don't click Ads. Which is probably why google has remained the best search engine available for a long time.
Microsoft is in an interesting position they are not nearly as interested in targeted Ads in the shrort term as they primarily want users to switch from google. This should mean they will be trying to produce better search results than google which is what we want.
Google must respond by producing better search results and there are two obvious area's in which they could improve, location and quality. Google allows advertisers to target ads to users in a particular city but don't allow users to filter results based on location very easily. Google also lets some really bad results float to the top of its search results, parked domains, malware serving domains, wiki pages and price comparison sites which often don't even have the product your interested in to compare.
If i was going to improve search quality at google, i would leverage some of the tools currently used for advertisers, let users choose to search in a particular locale of their choice. secondly clean up the search results maybe semi automated by using bounce back, where users land on a page and then hit the back button almost immediately that should reduce a pages page rank and drop it down the results list.
I'd also give users the option to blacklist sites as preferences. We all have sites we don't find useful or companies we dislike. The tricky thing is our searches are not always the same, when you want to buy something , you dont want the same results returned as when your looking for information about something.
Just as firefox has prompted IE to become a better browser, Bing may well be doing a similar thing to Google.
One things for sure better search will reduce ad clicks which will reduce revenue at google or increase advertising cost, or both.
Personally I'm one of many who don't give a Monkeys about K Dawsons alleged poor editing or NYCL's alleged bias. Legions tend to be a bit larger in number than the regular handful of posts bitching about it. Theres somewhere in the order of 1-2 million registered slashdot users and most stories will attract less than 500 comments, with a handful of complaints. complainers are probably out numbered by trolls and not necessarily a completely separate group.
Anything that can be used to wind up slashdot users can and will be used repeatedly.
In this particular case the interesting thing is can the prosecution prove their case with valid evidence, and what just what is valid evidence. Making available a list of file names isn't the same as offering copyrighted material. Emule for example will often respond with 1000's of file sharers having files named exactly what your looking for but usually the reported file size makes it obvious that the file is something else.
Lets get one thing straight if she was going to be fined a few hundred dollars, then perhaps "well she probably did it" is almost acceptable There's probably few people who haven't infringed copyright one way or another, who hasn't sung happy birthday without paying royalties.
But the RIAA doesn't want anything like a proportionate penalty but close on $250,000 for that sort of penalty there should be real indisputable legally gathered expert evidence.
It's not what she did thats bringing this penalty upon her but what everyone else did but never got caught doing that she's getting clobbered for.
So given a random chance of catching swine flu, which may not be that bad and having the vaccine which could as bad or worse which do you go for?
Personally as a diabetic I'm supposed to get a regular flu shot anyway, although I don't. This flu is supposed to be worse for the fit and healthy due to the bodies immune system going haywire trying to contain the virus, perhaps having a weakened immune system is better in this case.
I'm fairly certain I'm not going to go for the shot even if its made available and just take my chances.
So is there anyone on here, who can make an informed choice?
I freely admit i have no medical training what so ever. I'm I just being cynical in thinking the big pharma companies are going to make out like bandits.
I wonder how karma will work for those on here thinking that wealth should buy them the vaccine?
Well said , and with that thought in mind i'm off fishing. The Mackerel have been showing up occasionally this week and if not watching the sun rise and getting some fresh air and exercise sets you up for the day.
ok my testing from ireland using three.ie and three.uk
three.ie modem no iplayer three.co.uk iplayer streaming doesnt work, but downloading does.
however with a 7gb cap per month, I can't really use it.
most people with a contract with three can currently terminate early (with some determination) since they are ending like home. From the end of june Three users can enjoy the incredibly low roaming rate of £100 per Gb or £675 more per month than the current £25 for 7Gb that they currently offer on their sister network.
Do they really think anyones going to pay these rates? At least before they got the advantage of keeping it in the family so to speak. (actually as it happens 3 is probably the best choice in ireland as well) just a waste having to buy a 2nd modem.
If you want to run ubuntu on a netbook specifically an aspireone but a lot applies to netbooks in general may i recommend this page. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne There are similar pages but if your Netbook hasn't got a page you can easily start one contribute the bits you know and others will add the bits you don't.
To remove the y constraint (allowing you to move your windows up and not just down) enter this in a terminal
Theres a couple of other things that can help right click the menu bars top and bottom and add the show hide buttons sometimes thats just enough to make buttons visible.
you could also perhaps rotate the screen into portrait mode (not that useful as a work around).
For long term improvements please file a bug report, the developers may be quite unaware that they have made an unusable ui for netbook users and may not realise there is an issue.
you know thats not a bad idea, make it a touch screen too with a few user buttons plug into vga port and usb and let me attach it to the outside of my netbook and i'm sold, might even pick up a small usb keyboard to go with it.
Actually that little unit could be useful on a server / desktop
What is Google, most people would say a search engine but is it? Googles income comes from providing links to adverts that relate to a particular search provided of course people searching with Google click on the ads.
If a particular search results in you clicking on to a search result rather than an advert google hasn't earned anything. Some of these ads cost a sizable amount for that click.
If you wanted to improve google as a search engine then making it easy to filter out particular sites could dramatically improve the front page results. Also to limit the area's in which search results come from is another obvious choice. For example if your looking for a restaurant you might want to limit your search to restaurants within say 20 miles of your location.
user preferences should be able to hold a list of unwanted sites, ebay and wikipedia seem obvious choices along with sites which seem to think when you look for one thing that you want another thing instead.
Some of these things like searching for stuff within a geographical location might sound hard to implement but google allows advertisers to target ads to city level.
So really when you search with google you are the product google is selling to its advertisers.
Google may be best for search but its not as good as it could be, unfortunately becoming a better search engine could be detrimental to their bottom line as less ads get clicked.
This pretty much goes for any search engine not just google but if your competing with google, localising search and allowing users to filter out sites and types of sites would give an edge over google. Perhaps there would need to be a why search option (looking to buy something would filter different results compared to say technical information)
yours is quite a good post but it kind of sets Germans apart from other nationalities and I don't think this is a distinction that can be made.
Germans are not really in a class of their own, abuse of power isn't unusual and particularly in hard economic times protectionism tends to become more open. Where ever you live buy --- (insert your country name here) and protect our jobs become a common rallying cry.
Theres no real difference between people fundamentally we all have the people we care about, some we don't much care for, all of us have some national pride. Once it gets to people outside of our national group we suddenly pretend that "other nation" is different and we have the right to treat them differently to our own kind.
We are all one kind human, mankind and fundamentally we want the same things. Politics sets us against each other and its a farce because all we really want is a safe comfortable environment to raise our families and what we get are stupid groupings of special interest groups , align with us and we will see you right unfortunately the reality is the politicians only take care of their own and damn the rest of us.
It's pretty much evident that most people can not see enough difference between the parties to even bother to cast a vote.
People are just people when it comes down to it, just when our leaders do evil things we justify it in the name of national interest.
It's pretty obvious these are the big global players but that doesn't always make them top everywhere. For example Allegro.pl is a pretty big auction site for Poles. gumtree.ie is a better craigs list for Ireland.
There are some really good national and regional sites. Some things a local player can do better than a big multinational, especially once your talking languages other than English.
One weakness of google is it's great at bringing in results from all over the world but pretty useless at finding local information. Wouldn't it be nice if a search engine could fetch results only relevant to a particular geographic area. Googles also lousy at setting up user preferences I'd like to filter my results with an adblock like filter, ideally tailored to my individual requirements.
Perhaps someones already developed something that can preprocess and post process a google search removing the crud from the returned sites.
I've a feeling Google doesn't want to improve its search results too much, since it makes money from Ads and if the natural search results bring in what users are looking for then thats a lost click from the google ads on the side and the top.
So it's quite possible to make a better search engine, unfortunately that will tend to minimize revenues from advertising.
A touch screen tablet is interesting , a clam shell design able to be used either in touch screen mode or regular clamshell would be even better. I don't like the idea of touch screen only due to the damage it would get just being carried round.
I'm just looking for a better netbook really, a bigger screen isnt an improvement but increased versatility is.
your mention of gifts made me think of the channel islands which are not subject to uk tax laws and ideal to send cd's and dvd's from. Well actually too, and then from
Normally duty is payable on import but where the value is less than £20 then duty is waived. Creating a huge industry with the likes of Tesco's jersey able to ship at 15% lower prices due to no VAT being charged.
Seems like 99p music tracks are even less worthy of collection.
I wonder what the 2nd hand value of an MP3 is exactly? If you buy a track from iTunes what can you sell it to me for? It's arguable the resale value is 0 and any track from any file sharing service is used and therefore has a value of 0 and tax due would be a percentage of 0 which is 0.
You are not charged tax on what you could have paid for something since when you buy something for say $50 in a sale, tax due isn't based on the previous selling price of $100 is it?
If there is no profit being made then can there be tax evasion? If your g/f has sex with you without charging you is that tax evasion, the hooker would have charged? Obviously the answer is no you don't have to pay market rates for services rendered that are given freely and therefore there is no tax due.
Sky provides Satellite Tv to the Republic of Ireland as well as the UK. It's largely the same service with the addition of RTE1 and RTE2 (broadcast encrypted) into the bundle (these are terrestrial channels in Eire) There was a Sky News Ireland but thats now a few minutes of news each day.
It's a bit tricky to guess which channels would be available to both UK and the Republic of Ireland, because some channels belong to Sky and some are only carried by the same satellites. I would guess bbc, itv channel4 and 5 wouldn't be part of the deal being uk only and rte being republic only. The bbc iplayer isn't available to republic of ireland IP addresses, although the satellite transmission is unencrypted.
Funny thing is that if you have a three (uk) 3g dongle in the republic the bbc iPlayer works but not with a three.ie 3g dongle (3's like home service means you pay no extra using their 3g broadband on sister networks but this is coming to a crashing halt at the end of june, lots of contracts are being (can be) terminated early due to this detrimental service change).
The ending of "like home" really demonstrates stupidity and greed on the part of Hutchinson Telecom. Since the alternative to expensive roaming is a local sim card, 3 customers are now more likely to use rival networks abroad and since the changes allow service contracts to end they are hemorrhaging customers from their domestic services too.
My use of Three (uk) broadband in the republic tends to suggest that 3 use their internet infrastructure for the international part of calls any way, Speedtest.net detects my uk 3 modem as being near London and my irish 3 modem to be near Cork. This also explains the iPlayer quirk.
Tell me again why roaming and international calling is so expensive?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that bad an idea for some passwords to be clearly visible if the user want's that.
Who hasn't got numerous accounts with trivial passwords which basically we don't care if they got hacked.
Then there is the browser saved password, each time you need to log in the browser fills in the needed password and then one day you need to log in and the web page is a bit different and you end up brute forcing the password from the usual handful that you use.
One useful option i'd like to see is a password protected list of my browser saved passwords. That way I could see my many passwords associated with various accounts while still keeping them safe from everybody but me.
I'm fed up with being denied access to my own account passwords, usually its the ones i access once or twice a year.
why shouldn't you be able to have sudo like access to your own passwords. most of the time you get them reset by getting an email sent to your usual sign up email address any way.
5 minutes of plain text passwords could save a whole heap of wasted time.
obviously this comment wasn't made by me someone hacked my /. account.
(like it really matters) the biggest danger is that perhaps a weak password may get used where a stronger one should have been used.
There is one problem with public domain and that is it's near free and in competition with current works.
Imagine a world where copyright ends after 30 years. So now anything 1979 or earlier can be legally downloaded watched read or listened to. Thats a pretty good cache of media, Led Zepplin hendrix the beatles the stones to name a few, most if not all of asimovs books, a huge catalogue of film Star wars would be PD (i think that was 77)
The great escape, the italian job, and many many others.
Now don't get me wrong for me I would love it, and there is more than enough available to mean i'd never have to spend a single cent on media again. Thats what today's content makers would have to compete with or would they?
because even with silly length copyright laws I still rarely buy up to date media
maybe current media will have to be supported largely by the young, pretty much as it is anyway.
I kind of feel sorry for your wife, you make her sound like a car.
Attractiveness is more than just looks and not bragging rights.
There are some women who look great but are not anything like attractive once you get to know them. Even the ones that are will not look so great after 20 years and a few kids and neither will you.
Physical looks are not that important what makes a woman attractive is who she is, I know I married a beautiful woman and she's better than a ten in my eyes, i don't care how anyone else would rate her and the interesting thing for me is her score improves the longer I know her.
just found this link http://www.theothermartintaylor.com/moveabletype/archives/cameras/000217.html Pentax K1000
Last year I bought an SLR camera at a carboot and it's working fine with some good lenses. I always wanted one when I was a kid. However I compromise on developing by getting the film processed only and get a copy on CD without prints. It's really prints which cost and most pictures will have some faults over/under exposed, badly framed, out of focus, tilted ect. So why pay for them to be made into prints. Once I have my CD I can then proceed to clean my photo's much the same as anyone would with a digital camera. But why bother with an outdated format? Quite simply the camera and lenses produce images of a far greater quality than I could get with most affordable digital camera's and I can get a photo in lighting conditions most digital camera's fail in. I will obviously take less photo's than with a digital camera, but that camera captures more good quality images. Cost wise it probably costs me around the same as a packet of cigarettes or a pint or two. A professional photographer will spend a lot of money on a really good digital camera and gets the results fast which is often needed, but for an amateur like me thats not needed and I get more quality shot's with my SLR without needing to spend 100's if not 1000's to get a digital equivalent. To be really honest it's mostly about the quality of the lenses, in theory i could get a digital slr that takes my lenses. That doesn't mean I don't use digital camera's at all, but you can guess which ones my favorite.
I used to have a contract with T-mobile in the UK, one thing that I really didn't like was the inability to put a
cap on the monthly charges. Largely I was concerned with the possibility of my phone getting stolen and getting billed for a lot of expensive calls.
Even the insurance option didn't do a thing to help. The first 24 hours of calls (after the phone was notified as stolen )was excluded and by that point T-mobile would have a block in place (and wouldn't be charging me from that point).
Whats the point of an insurance policy which does nothing except replace the handset provided it gets broken or stolen in an acceptable way.
I was told that basically as long as I kept paying the bill on time that they would automatically keep raising the credit limit. The only way to restrict it would be to keep paying the bill late and damage my credit rating!
At the end of my contract i switched to prepay. I consistently pay less than when I was on contract.
There are so many calls that are placed outside of your inclusive minutes that your pretty much only getting calls to friends and family on your price plan. With things like free skype calls on mobiles (on prepay as well as contract) the mobile phone contract is becoming more of a one sided deal. The only plus side is building a credit history which will help when you want to go for a car loan or mortgage, not that the banks are offering much these days.
It would be a valid point if anything like a decent version of Linux shipped with most netbooks, the customised Xandros isn't too bad but has very limited repositories. Linpus lite please, it lasted about as long as it took to get home to remove it from my aspire one and install Ubuntu.
The Dell mini9 did get ubuntu by default, i've never seen one but I hear they are good at running OSX.
The Netbook remix version of ubuntu is pretty lousy too with bits removed to make it less than it could be.
It'd be fair if it wasn't true that even existing Linux users first impulse was to remove the shipped version of "linux" and put a decent version on instead. It took a while to work out most of the niggles with mainstream linux versions to work well with Netbooks, its still not perfect, some applications are still working down to the desktop with interfaces that fit on a netbooks screen.
Ubuntu 9.04 works out of the box on my aspire one, and I like it but in the mean time Linux versions of netbooks are not so common any more.
Apart from Dell, most netbook manufacturers seemed to have decided a limited version of linux is what they wanted, probably in order to distinguish them from their laptop offerings. These days Netbooks are small laptops and seem to be missing the point, ultra portable, with good battery life and reasonable performance.
I'm pretty happy with what i've got but it was never offered to the general public.
The BNP membership like to be anonymous as well, they were not happy at all that their membership list got published on the net. seriously thou what message is being sent if the police had knowledge that a serving officer was a card carrying member of a group such as the KKK , or BNP. It compromises the police since they are there to serve the community all of it. What happens in court when that Police Officer comes to testify and his extremist views are brought in to focus? It would seriously damage his credibility as a witness, even if he was professional enough not to allow his views to color his evidence. In practical terms you can't control the views of an individual officer but you can certainly hold them to a standard and define what is expected of them. It's not perfect but its the best we can hope for.
In theory the Police are impartial and don't allow personal opinions to influence their job, ahem. But there is a difference between an officer who may be motivated outside of his passion to uphold the law and one who says oh yes i am a card carrying paid up member of the KKK. The first one you suspect might be racist, the second freely admits he is!
The real story here, is that the UK government is trying to censor the opinions of its employees. This is totally unacceptable. The officer should be free to express whatever political opinions he wants, including being critical of his superiors, as long as he does it when he is off-duty.
I'm sympathetic in this particular case however a few months ago a BNP membership list was published, amongst the many names were a few serving police officers. Now for good reason serving Police officers are not allowed to be BNP members. With the vile racial prejudices inherent in the BNP you don't really want police officers who subscribe to these extremest views.
What i'm trying to say is that censoring the opinion of Police officers isn't always unjustified however the difference here is that this would be personal.
http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardTagger This can be fairly successful, it's able to match tracks from audio finger prints as well as filenames and existing tags, typically successful to about 80-90% 100% tends to be mp3's already organised as albums. Still a major job to tag stuff, but a lot more efficient than doing it all by hand. No I don't have a perfectly tagged collection but its improved. unfortunately one area that will never be right is genre.
Trolls don't discriminate, just because somebody makes crazy threats doesn't mean they actually believe in what they are saying or are supporters of one faction or another. some people just want to stir things up just for the sake of it. Mono's interesting it could be useful but its risky to build it into a core package without being sure that it can't be used as a lever against Linux. Anyone who is aware of the history of Unix and how it was taken away from the very people who developed Unix should be able to understand that viewpoint. Mono certainly isn't essential just yet and perhaps some distributions holding back is a good thing. If microsoft is wanting net to be a success across platforms you'd think they would be willing to clarify their stance, if there is no intention of using it against Linux or other operating systems.
Google became the best search engine by being better than the rest, which then created an audience for targeted advertising. Google is all about getting clicks on the adverts on its pages.
Now i'm not saying Bing is better at search than google, but if it is then it makes sense for users to use Bing if its bringing better search results, which is bad for google as it reduces the numbers of people clicking on its ads.
Google has a balancing act to perform, if Google is too good at finding what we want , we don't click Ads. Which is probably why google has remained the best search engine available for a long time.
Microsoft is in an interesting position they are not nearly as interested in targeted Ads in the shrort term as they primarily want users to switch from google. This should mean they will be trying to produce better search results than google which is what we want.
Google must respond by producing better search results and there are two obvious area's in which they could improve, location and quality. Google allows advertisers to target ads to users in a particular city but don't allow users to filter results based on location very easily. Google also lets some really bad results float to the top of its search results, parked domains, malware serving domains, wiki pages and price comparison sites which often don't even have the product your interested in to compare.
If i was going to improve search quality at google, i would leverage some of the tools currently used for advertisers, let users choose to search in a particular locale of their choice. secondly clean up the search results maybe semi automated by using bounce back, where users land on a page and then hit the back button almost immediately that should reduce a pages page rank and drop it down the results list.
I'd also give users the option to blacklist sites as preferences. We all have sites we don't find useful or companies we dislike. The tricky thing is our searches are not always the same, when you want to buy something , you dont want the same results returned as when your looking for information about something.
Just as firefox has prompted IE to become a better browser, Bing may well be doing a similar thing to Google. One things for sure better search will reduce ad clicks which will reduce revenue at google or increase advertising cost, or both.
Personally I'm one of many who don't give a Monkeys about K Dawsons alleged poor editing or NYCL's alleged bias. Legions tend to be a bit larger in number than the regular handful of posts bitching about it. Theres somewhere in the order of 1-2 million registered slashdot users and most stories will attract less than 500 comments, with a handful of complaints.
complainers are probably out numbered by trolls and not necessarily a completely separate group.
Anything that can be used to wind up slashdot users can and will be used repeatedly.
In this particular case the interesting thing is can the prosecution prove their case with valid evidence, and what just what is valid evidence. Making available a list of file names isn't the same as offering copyrighted material. Emule for example will often respond with 1000's of file sharers having files named exactly what your looking for but usually the reported file size makes it obvious that the file is something else.
Lets get one thing straight if she was going to be fined a few hundred dollars, then perhaps "well she probably did it" is almost acceptable There's probably few people who haven't infringed copyright one way or another, who hasn't sung happy birthday without paying royalties.
But the RIAA doesn't want anything like a proportionate penalty but close on $250,000 for that sort of penalty there should be real indisputable legally gathered expert evidence.
It's not what she did thats bringing this penalty upon her but what everyone else did but never got caught doing that she's getting clobbered for.
Ok so flu can be pretty bad but then theres problems with vaccines too.
e.g 1976 http://www.capitalcentury.com/1976.html
So given a random chance of catching swine flu, which may not be that bad and having the vaccine which could as bad or worse which do you go for?
Personally as a diabetic I'm supposed to get a regular flu shot anyway, although I don't. This flu is supposed to be worse for the fit and healthy due to the bodies immune system going haywire trying to contain the virus, perhaps having a weakened immune system is better in this case.
I'm fairly certain I'm not going to go for the shot even if its made available and just take my chances.
So is there anyone on here, who can make an informed choice?
I freely admit i have no medical training what so ever.
I'm I just being cynical in thinking the big pharma companies are going to make out like bandits.
I wonder how karma will work for those on here thinking that wealth should buy them the vaccine?
Well said , and with that thought in mind i'm off fishing. The Mackerel have been showing up occasionally this week and if not watching the sun rise and getting some fresh air and exercise sets you up for the day.
ok my testing from ireland using three.ie and three.uk
three.ie modem no iplayer
three.co.uk iplayer streaming doesnt work, but downloading does.
however with a 7gb cap per month, I can't really use it.
most people with a contract with three can currently terminate early (with some determination) since they are ending like home. From the end of june Three users can enjoy the incredibly low roaming rate of £100 per Gb or £675 more per month than the current £25 for 7Gb that they currently offer on their sister network.
Do they really think anyones going to pay these rates? At least before they got the advantage of keeping it in the family so to speak. (actually as it happens 3 is probably the best choice in ireland as well) just a waste having to buy a 2nd modem.
If you want to run ubuntu on a netbook specifically an aspireone but a lot applies to netbooks in general
may i recommend this page. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne
There are similar pages but if your Netbook hasn't got a page you can easily start one contribute the bits you know and others will add the bits you don't.
To remove the y constraint (allowing you to move your windows up and not just down) enter this in a terminal
gconftool-2 --set /apps/compiz/plugins/move/allscreens/options/constrain_y --type bool 0
Theres a couple of other things that can help right click the menu bars top and bottom and add the show hide buttons sometimes thats just enough to make buttons visible.
you could also perhaps rotate the screen into portrait mode (not that useful as a work around).
For long term improvements please file a bug report, the developers may be quite unaware that they have made an unusable ui for netbook users and may not realise there is an issue.
you know thats not a bad idea, make it a touch screen too with a few user buttons plug into vga port and usb and let me attach it to the outside of my netbook and i'm sold, might even pick up a small usb keyboard to go with it.
Actually that little unit could be useful on a server / desktop
What is Google, most people would say a search engine but is it?
Googles income comes from providing links to adverts that relate to a particular search provided of course people searching with Google click on the ads.
If a particular search results in you clicking on to a search result rather than an advert google hasn't earned anything. Some of these ads cost a sizable amount for that click.
If you wanted to improve google as a search engine then making it easy to filter out particular sites could dramatically improve the front page results. Also to limit the area's in which search results come from is another obvious choice. For example if your looking for a restaurant you might want to limit your search to restaurants within say 20 miles of your location.
user preferences should be able to hold a list of unwanted sites, ebay and wikipedia seem obvious choices along with sites which seem to think when you look for one thing that you want another thing instead.
Some of these things like searching for stuff within a geographical location might sound hard to implement but google allows advertisers to target ads to city level.
So really when you search with google you are the product google is selling to its advertisers.
Google may be best for search but its not as good as it could be, unfortunately becoming a better search engine could be detrimental to their bottom line as less ads get clicked.
This pretty much goes for any search engine not just google but if your competing with google, localising search and allowing users to filter out sites and types of sites would give an edge over google. Perhaps there would need to be a why search option (looking to buy something would filter different results compared to say technical information)
yours is quite a good post but it kind of sets Germans apart from other nationalities and I don't think this is a distinction that can be made.
Germans are not really in a class of their own, abuse of power isn't unusual and particularly in hard economic times protectionism tends to become more open. Where ever you live buy --- (insert your country name here) and protect our jobs become a common rallying cry.
Theres no real difference between people fundamentally we all have the people we care about, some we don't much care for, all of us have some national pride. Once it gets to people outside of our national group we suddenly pretend that "other nation" is different and we have the right to treat them differently to our own kind.
We are all one kind human, mankind and fundamentally we want the same things. Politics sets us against each other and its a farce because all we really want is a safe comfortable environment to raise our families and what we get are stupid groupings of special interest groups , align with us and we will see you right unfortunately the reality is the politicians only take care of their own and damn the rest of us.
It's pretty much evident that most people can not see enough difference between the parties to even bother to cast a vote.
People are just people when it comes down to it, just when our leaders do evil things we justify it in the name of national interest.
It's pretty obvious these are the big global players but that doesn't always make them top everywhere. For example Allegro.pl is a pretty big auction site for Poles. gumtree.ie is a better craigs list for Ireland.
There are some really good national and regional sites. Some things a local player can do better than a big multinational, especially once your talking languages other than English.
One weakness of google is it's great at bringing in results from all over the world but pretty useless at finding local information. Wouldn't it be nice if a search engine could fetch results only relevant to a particular geographic area. Googles also lousy at setting up user preferences I'd like to filter my results with an adblock like filter, ideally tailored to my individual requirements.
Perhaps someones already developed something that can preprocess and post process a google search removing the crud from the returned sites.
I've a feeling Google doesn't want to improve its search results too much, since it makes money from Ads and if the natural search results bring in what users are looking for then thats a lost click from the google ads on the side and the top.
So it's quite possible to make a better search engine, unfortunately that will tend to minimize revenues from advertising.
A touch screen tablet is interesting , a clam shell design able to be used either in touch screen mode or regular clamshell would be even better. I don't like the idea of touch screen only due to the damage it would get just being carried round.
I'm just looking for a better netbook really, a bigger screen isnt an improvement but increased versatility is.
your mention of gifts made me think of the channel islands which are not subject to uk tax laws and ideal to send cd's and dvd's from. Well actually too, and then from
Normally duty is payable on import but where the value is less than £20 then duty is waived. Creating a huge industry with the likes of Tesco's jersey able to ship at 15% lower prices due to no VAT being charged.
Seems like 99p music tracks are even less worthy of collection.
I wonder what the 2nd hand value of an MP3 is exactly? If you buy a track from iTunes what can you sell it to me for? It's arguable the resale value is 0 and any track from any file sharing service is used and therefore has a value of 0 and tax due would be a percentage of 0 which is 0.
You are not charged tax on what you could have paid for something since when you buy something for say $50 in a sale, tax due isn't based on the previous selling price of $100 is it?
If there is no profit being made then can there be tax evasion? If your g/f has sex with you without charging you is that tax evasion, the hooker would have charged? Obviously the answer is no you don't have to pay market rates for services rendered that are given freely and therefore there is no tax due.
Sky provides Satellite Tv to the Republic of Ireland as well as the UK. It's largely the same service with the addition of RTE1 and RTE2 (broadcast encrypted) into the bundle (these are terrestrial channels in Eire) There was a Sky News Ireland but thats now a few minutes of news each day.
It's a bit tricky to guess which channels would be available to both UK and the Republic of Ireland, because some channels belong to Sky and some are only carried by the same satellites. I would guess bbc, itv channel4 and 5 wouldn't be part of the deal being uk only and rte being republic only. The bbc iplayer isn't available to republic of ireland IP addresses, although the satellite transmission is unencrypted.
Funny thing is that if you have a three (uk) 3g dongle in the republic the bbc iPlayer works but not with a three.ie 3g dongle (3's like home service means you pay no extra using their 3g broadband on sister networks but this is coming to a crashing halt at the end of june, lots of contracts are being (can be) terminated early due to this detrimental service change).
The ending of "like home" really demonstrates stupidity and greed on the part of Hutchinson Telecom. Since the alternative to expensive roaming is a local sim card, 3 customers are now more likely to use rival networks abroad and since the changes allow service contracts to end they are hemorrhaging customers from their domestic services too.
My use of Three (uk) broadband in the republic tends to suggest that 3 use their internet infrastructure for the international part of calls any way, Speedtest.net detects my uk 3 modem as being near London and my irish 3 modem to be near Cork. This also explains the iPlayer quirk.
Tell me again why roaming and international calling is so expensive?