The single biggest source of problems I've had with Linux over the years has been hardware without open-source drivers. I'd go so far as to say it's the only source of unsolvable problems I've had with Linux.
If you're not a serious gamer, you don't need a card to work at 100% of its potential - 99% of the time all I need mine to do is use about 1% of its power to render a desktop. If the driver's reliable and open-source, why would I care that a different driver would give me a slightly-better FPS on the very rare occasions that it's working flat-out?
You're overlooking that fact that mobile web access is becoming huge; Apple's phone & tablet are current kings of the heap; and Steve Jobs refuses to allow Flash.
Flash is no more universal than WebM or H.264 will be.
I live with a teacher, and have worked in local schools myself.
I know for a fact that at least two of the schools in my area have discovered that their kids are busy making their own porn, which they cheerfully send each other via their phones.
Maybe our nanny.. I mean, government.. could do better by insisting that parenting children be the job of their parents, instead of insisting that it be done for them by teachers and corporations?
Funny, that: When I view the link to the printable version, I get an ad in it.
Did you just not bother to look, or did you forget to turn off your adblock before looking?:)
Meh. You can't scare people into thinking humanity will become extinct by just altering the global temperatures - we have air conditioning and central heating. Try convincing them that global warming will make the Earth blow up, that ought to do it!
Yeah, but that's not the point: I wasn't asking about this case - that's one judge's interpretation of the law. The fact that some people disagree with one judge's ruling on a case does not mean there's a need for legal reform. It means there's a need for a defendant to be able to appeal potentially-bad decisions, and that's evidently in place and happening right now. So there's no problem there.
I was asking about the problems with the current laws. The laws that prompted the creation of libelreform.org, and America to pass its own laws to protect against. What's the big problem with the law as it stands? Is there more to it than a knee-jerk "It's not the same as America so it's bad and must be changed" or is it all just hot air?
Given that my view has always been that I'd rather live with the British libel laws than the American ones, I was interested by the existence of the website linked in the summary. So I went to look at it. I even downloaded the full report.
Know what? I still can't work out what the problem is. Maybe somebody can explain it to me?
As I understand it, if an American tabloid accuses me of being a baby-strangler, if I want to prosecute for libel, I have to prove that I'm not a baby-strangler - the tabloid is innocent until proven guilty, so I'm guilty until proven innocent. The burden of proof is on me.
Conversely, in England, if a British tabloid accuses me of being a baby-strangler, I just have to prove that they published something, and that it harmed my reputation - so taking in the copy of the paper and showing that it says something bad about me is all I have to do. At this point, the burden of proof is on the tabloid: They have to provide evidence that I'm a baby-strangler.
In other words, if British reporters want to be safe from libel, they can only make claims when they have evidence to back them up. If American reporters want to be safe, they just have to be fairly sure that their claim can't be disproved.
And we all know how easy it is to prove a negative.
Reading through the comments on here so far, I see a lot of nonsense written by people who have no clue what our laws are - most/.ers seem to think that you can win a claim of libel even if you can prove that the 'libellous' statement was true, which is absolutely wrong.
So what exactly is the big problem with libel laws in Britain? Given that the website trying to reform it had no answers for me and there are a huge number of people here who seem very passionate on the subject, maybe one of you can explain it.
Sorry, but having RTFA, I still can come back to just one reason for still using IE6: Ignorance.
Okay, so there's companies that have IE6-only apps. That's no reason to not upgrade: Nobody forces you to have only one browser. Even if you don't want to have IE6 and Firefox, you can have two versions of IE itself installed. You can set up the hideously-insecure IE6 to only be able to access the company intranet where you need it, and use IE7 or 8 for the rest of the world where having a more-modern, more-secure browser is useful.
Multiple versions of IE can be done courtesy of here or here
Old hardware can run Firefox just fine - I used Portable Firefox for years when I was working for an IE-only company. You don't have to use the browser your company installs on your machine if you don't want to.
And as for IE6 keeping people away from sites like YouTube.. I'm not even going to dignify that with a refutation. Anyone who wants to get around that problem could do so without the slightest difficulty in the space of about ten minutes. This sounds more like a fairy story from the IT depertments to clueless PHB's: "Don't worry, boss, we don't need to block YouTube, it doesn't work with our browser. Not get out of my cubicle so I can watch the latest Foamy the Squirrel video, wouldya?"
When I worked at a job that not only used IE6, but used a heavily-locked-down IE6 that wouldn't even let me change the homepage.. I ran Portable Firefox from a USB drive and stopped caring.
Find a machine where the ACPI support actually complies with the ACPI specs, and the DSDT has been compiled by Intel's compiler etc, and suspend will work perfectly out of the box on Ubuntu (i have several such machines).
Great. Where do you get that information about a motherboard from? ACPI has been an achilles heel of all the Linux machines I've used, to the point that I swore off buying a new PC until I could be sure every component would work 100% with free drivers.
> If you are accusing me of libel, why should the burden of proof be on me?
Because the accusation of libel rests on the validity of the allegedly-libellous claim:
Me: I accuse you of theft
You: I accuse you of libel
If I'm innocent of libel unless you can prove otherwise, then I can call you a thief until you can prove that you're not one. And it's logically impossible to prove a negative.
If I'm only innocent of libel if I can prove that you're a thief, (or at the very least that I had reasonable grounds for believing that you WERE a thief,) then the burden of proof is on me. And that's how it should be: Why should you have any burden of proof if you've had someone defame you?
> In the UK, the "falsehood" element is missing; a true statement can be considered libelous.
That's a very strong claim. Citation needed, I think: "A claim of defamation is defeated if the defendant proves that the statement was true." - Wikipedia
Having RTFA, I can't help but consider it to be sadly biased.
e.g. One of the criticisms it makes is "in English libel cases, the burden of proof is effectively on the defendant. In other words, the defamatory statement is presumed to be false unless the defendant can prove it is true."
Maybe I missed something. Isn't this just a perfectly sensible extension of "innocent until proven guilty"? If I call you a thief and you sue me for libel, why should the burden of proof be on *you*, exactly?
What's more, it makes it sound like Singh has made the claim that chiropractors are completely bogus and can't help you with anything. When in fact, what they quote is that he argues there's no evidence to back up claims that getting your bones cracked can help with things like ear infections. Well, that's fair enough. I've been a chiropractor a few times for joint pain. They helped. Would I go to one for ear infections? Like hell would I.
In Britain, if you say "This person is a fake", you have to be able to prove it or you're liable for libel. If you say "I believe this person is a fake", that's a statement of opinion and not fact, and is held to a less rigorous standard. What, exactly, is wrong with this?
If this NY times article is an example of how good the journalism is outside of the UK, I'll stick to the current 'scared British journalists', thanks.
Sadly enough, a friend of mine teaches science to 11-16 year olds. She was explaining about genetics and reproduction. The students said she was wrong about how it worked, because they'd read in The Sun that a woman had given birth to puppies. And they wouldn't believe that an article in The Sun might be wrong
Actually over here it's illegal to call cell phones with such calls. I've never received any SMS Spam and the only unsolicited phone calls I've ever received on my cell phone were from a company that just got shut down by the FTC a few weeks ago (the auto warranty nonsense).
I came over here for a visit a month ago & bought a cell to use whilst I'm out here - my EU phone doesn't work over here.
Brand new phone, and I've given the number to maybe three people. I get a call every day or two, on average, from unknown numbers. In fact, I had one just minutes ago, from 228-209-9560
Maybe it is illegal to make all these nuisance calls, but I've had more of them with my new phone over here in a month than I've had in over a decade of owning the same number in England.
Uh.. those perks have been available in England for years. Plus when we get a phone with a contract, the phone is usually free. And can be upgraded every year, for free.
I'm visiting America for a couple months right now, so I've bought a cell phone for while I'm here, and I've been appalled at how bad your cell service is. You guys have phone companies boasting in adverts that they drop your call less than any other network. FFS, why do you put up with them dropping your call at all?!? Unless you drive through a lot of tunnels or live in serious wilderness, if your phone dropped a call in England as often as they seem to over here, the network responsible would be out of business long before your contract had a chance to expire.
And the nuisance calls.. I bought a brand new phone and gave my number to maybe three people. I've received over a dozen calls from unknown numbers, all of which Google has identified as scam callers. And I've been charged for being called by these so-and-so's.
Cell phone services over here are just dreadful. Why you all pay so much for such mediocre service, I really don't know.
You can check it out on Windows too
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm stuck with XP all day, but courtesy of the folks at KDE on Windows it's still possible to check out the release candidate for 4.3, and soon 4.3 itself should be available too. As detailed on my blog, it's as simple as:
Go to the website and grab the installer (kdewin-installer-gui-latest.exe). Should download in seconds, then you can run it to start the REAL downloading and installation process.
Stick with all the default unless you have good reason not to. Apart from anything else, most servers don't seem to have the "unstable 4.2.95" package. I got mine from ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de
Skip all the language packs unless you really need them, install the rest. Let it get on with it. When it finishes, check the "run system settings after exit" box and finish.
It has some slightly odd choices for the defaults, so I went through and set everything to "Oxygen" to make it consistent & easy. But the main reason to run this thing is just to check that the QT apps work on your machine before you try and run the full KDE environment.
Assuming it works, try a few of the other KDE apps that will have appeared in your Start menu. It has games!:o)
To get KDE itself running, you need to run something which is, for some reason, not in the options in the KDE submenu in the Start menu. Go figure. Why would they want to make it easy to run KDE on Windows after you've downloaded KDE for Windows..?
To get the actual desktop environment, you need to run plasma-desktop.exe, which in a default install will be in C:\Program Files\KDE\bin
That should launch your KDE experience, and you can have a play from there. So far, it's a little unstable (Should be better once 4.3-proper is available) but otherwise performing fairly well.
I've noticed a *lot* of Bing referrals in my access stats lately.
Almost all of them have, rather bizzarely, been one-word search strings. Here's my bing searches from the current first screen of my access stats, I swear this is genuine:
So of the last 20 referrals to me, 7 have come from bing. That's impressive. All seven have clearly been done by people with zero ability to use search engines effectively.
I've tried bing out and found it to be lousy at finding what I'm looking for. I've also got huge amounts of crud like the above filling up my referral logs. I'm seriously considering blocking referrals from bing.com just to stop it clogging up my stats.
Do I think Google should be worried? Not yet, no..
If it's got Linux installed on it, you know that the hardware it's got is supported by Linux. Nothing worse than buying a new computer and finding out it's got some chipset or other that Linux doesn't work with yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd use it.
The single biggest source of problems I've had with Linux over the years has been hardware without open-source drivers. I'd go so far as to say it's the only source of unsolvable problems I've had with Linux.
If you're not a serious gamer, you don't need a card to work at 100% of its potential - 99% of the time all I need mine to do is use about 1% of its power to render a desktop. If the driver's reliable and open-source, why would I care that a different driver would give me a slightly-better FPS on the very rare occasions that it's working flat-out?
slashdotUserName (at) gmail.com
..America's industrial pollution, being the product of democracy, leads to a surfeit of hot air, which will cause the climate to change.
Chinese pollution, made by communists, cancels out the democratic American pollution and so overall nothing happens either way.
'zat it?
You're overlooking that fact that mobile web access is becoming huge; Apple's phone & tablet are current kings of the heap; and Steve Jobs refuses to allow Flash.
Flash is no more universal than WebM or H.264 will be.
I live with a teacher, and have worked in local schools myself.
I know for a fact that at least two of the schools in my area have discovered that their kids are busy making their own porn, which they cheerfully send each other via their phones.
Maybe our nanny.. I mean, government.. could do better by insisting that parenting children be the job of their parents, instead of insisting that it be done for them by teachers and corporations?
Funny, that: When I view the link to the printable version, I get an ad in it. :)
Did you just not bother to look, or did you forget to turn off your adblock before looking?
Meh. You can't scare people into thinking humanity will become extinct by just altering the global temperatures - we have air conditioning and central heating. Try convincing them that global warming will make the Earth blow up, that ought to do it!
Yeah, but that's not the point: I wasn't asking about this case - that's one judge's interpretation of the law. The fact that some people disagree with one judge's ruling on a case does not mean there's a need for legal reform. It means there's a need for a defendant to be able to appeal potentially-bad decisions, and that's evidently in place and happening right now. So there's no problem there.
I was asking about the problems with the current laws. The laws that prompted the creation of libelreform.org, and America to pass its own laws to protect against. What's the big problem with the law as it stands? Is there more to it than a knee-jerk "It's not the same as America so it's bad and must be changed" or is it all just hot air?
Given that my view has always been that I'd rather live with the British libel laws than the American ones, I was interested by the existence of the website linked in the summary. So I went to look at it. I even downloaded the full report.
Know what? I still can't work out what the problem is. Maybe somebody can explain it to me?
As I understand it, if an American tabloid accuses me of being a baby-strangler, if I want to prosecute for libel, I have to prove that I'm not a baby-strangler - the tabloid is innocent until proven guilty, so I'm guilty until proven innocent. The burden of proof is on me.
Conversely, in England, if a British tabloid accuses me of being a baby-strangler, I just have to prove that they published something, and that it harmed my reputation - so taking in the copy of the paper and showing that it says something bad about me is all I have to do. At this point, the burden of proof is on the tabloid: They have to provide evidence that I'm a baby-strangler.
In other words, if British reporters want to be safe from libel, they can only make claims when they have evidence to back them up. If American reporters want to be safe, they just have to be fairly sure that their claim can't be disproved.
And we all know how easy it is to prove a negative.
Reading through the comments on here so far, I see a lot of nonsense written by people who have no clue what our laws are - most /.ers seem to think that you can win a claim of libel even if you can prove that the 'libellous' statement was true, which is absolutely wrong.
So what exactly is the big problem with libel laws in Britain? Given that the website trying to reform it had no answers for me and there are a huge number of people here who seem very passionate on the subject, maybe one of you can explain it.
Sorry, but having RTFA, I still can come back to just one reason for still using IE6: Ignorance.
Okay, so there's companies that have IE6-only apps. That's no reason to not upgrade: Nobody forces you to have only one browser. Even if you don't want to have IE6 and Firefox, you can have two versions of IE itself installed. You can set up the hideously-insecure IE6 to only be able to access the company intranet where you need it, and use IE7 or 8 for the rest of the world where having a more-modern, more-secure browser is useful.
Multiple versions of IE can be done courtesy of here or here
Old hardware can run Firefox just fine - I used Portable Firefox for years when I was working for an IE-only company. You don't have to use the browser your company installs on your machine if you don't want to.
And as for IE6 keeping people away from sites like YouTube.. I'm not even going to dignify that with a refutation. Anyone who wants to get around that problem could do so without the slightest difficulty in the space of about ten minutes. This sounds more like a fairy story from the IT depertments to clueless PHB's: "Don't worry, boss, we don't need to block YouTube, it doesn't work with our browser. Not get out of my cubicle so I can watch the latest Foamy the Squirrel video, wouldya?"
When I worked at a job that not only used IE6, but used a heavily-locked-down IE6 that wouldn't even let me change the homepage.. I ran Portable Firefox from a USB drive and stopped caring.
Maybe ISPs should stop fixating on P2P traffic and try harder to stop spam. Then they'd free up a ton of bandwidth AND make their customers happier.
Find a machine where the ACPI support actually complies with the ACPI specs, and the DSDT has been compiled by Intel's compiler etc, and suspend will work perfectly out of the box on Ubuntu (i have several such machines).
Great. Where do you get that information about a motherboard from? ACPI has been an achilles heel of all the Linux machines I've used, to the point that I swore off buying a new PC until I could be sure every component would work 100% with free drivers.
> If you are accusing me of libel, why should the burden of proof be on me?
Because the accusation of libel rests on the validity of the allegedly-libellous claim:
Me: I accuse you of theft
You: I accuse you of libel
If I'm innocent of libel unless you can prove otherwise, then I can call you a thief until you can prove that you're not one. And it's logically impossible to prove a negative.
If I'm only innocent of libel if I can prove that you're a thief, (or at the very least that I had reasonable grounds for believing that you WERE a thief,) then the burden of proof is on me. And that's how it should be: Why should you have any burden of proof if you've had someone defame you?
> In the UK, the "falsehood" element is missing; a true statement can be considered libelous.
That's a very strong claim. Citation needed, I think: "A claim of defamation is defeated if the defendant proves that the statement was true." - Wikipedia
Having RTFA, I can't help but consider it to be sadly biased.
e.g. One of the criticisms it makes is "in English libel cases, the burden of proof is effectively on the defendant. In other words, the defamatory statement is presumed to be false unless the defendant can prove it is true."
Maybe I missed something. Isn't this just a perfectly sensible extension of "innocent until proven guilty"? If I call you a thief and you sue me for libel, why should the burden of proof be on *you*, exactly?
What's more, it makes it sound like Singh has made the claim that chiropractors are completely bogus and can't help you with anything. When in fact, what they quote is that he argues there's no evidence to back up claims that getting your bones cracked can help with things like ear infections. Well, that's fair enough. I've been a chiropractor a few times for joint pain. They helped. Would I go to one for ear infections? Like hell would I.
In Britain, if you say "This person is a fake", you have to be able to prove it or you're liable for libel. If you say "I believe this person is a fake", that's a statement of opinion and not fact, and is held to a less rigorous standard. What, exactly, is wrong with this?
If this NY times article is an example of how good the journalism is outside of the UK, I'll stick to the current 'scared British journalists', thanks.
Sadly enough, a friend of mine teaches science to 11-16 year olds. She was explaining about genetics and reproduction. The students said she was wrong about how it worked, because they'd read in The Sun that a woman had given birth to puppies. And they wouldn't believe that an article in The Sun might be wrong
And in a few years time, they'll be able to vote
Uh-oh. Somebody better tell Perrier, Evian, Pellegrino et al that it's impossible for them to make money by selling water!
Actually over here it's illegal to call cell phones with such calls. I've never received any SMS Spam and the only unsolicited phone calls I've ever received on my cell phone were from a company that just got shut down by the FTC a few weeks ago (the auto warranty nonsense).
I came over here for a visit a month ago & bought a cell to use whilst I'm out here - my EU phone doesn't work over here.
Brand new phone, and I've given the number to maybe three people. I get a call every day or two, on average, from unknown numbers. In fact, I had one just minutes ago, from 228-209-9560
Maybe it is illegal to make all these nuisance calls, but I've had more of them with my new phone over here in a month than I've had in over a decade of owning the same number in England.
My provider is one of the ones you say can claim decent coverage.. and I've yet to leave Los Angeles, which I'm fairly sure counts as a major city :)
By that logic, shouldn't Central London be at least as bad for dropped calls as Los Angeles?
In Europe, it's rare that you pay for a phone at all - usually comes free with the contract.
Mind you, I have bought a few pay-as-you-go Nokias. I never paid more than 40UKP (About $60 equivalent, I believe)
How much did your phones cost?
Uh.. those perks have been available in England for years. Plus when we get a phone with a contract, the phone is usually free. And can be upgraded every year, for free.
I'm visiting America for a couple months right now, so I've bought a cell phone for while I'm here, and I've been appalled at how bad your cell service is. You guys have phone companies boasting in adverts that they drop your call less than any other network. FFS, why do you put up with them dropping your call at all?!? Unless you drive through a lot of tunnels or live in serious wilderness, if your phone dropped a call in England as often as they seem to over here, the network responsible would be out of business long before your contract had a chance to expire.
And the nuisance calls.. I bought a brand new phone and gave my number to maybe three people. I've received over a dozen calls from unknown numbers, all of which Google has identified as scam callers. And I've been charged for being called by these so-and-so's.
Cell phone services over here are just dreadful. Why you all pay so much for such mediocre service, I really don't know.
Go to the website and grab the installer (kdewin-installer-gui-latest.exe). Should download in seconds, then you can run it to start the REAL downloading and installation process.
Stick with all the default unless you have good reason not to. Apart from anything else, most servers don't seem to have the "unstable 4.2.95" package. I got mine from ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de
Skip all the language packs unless you really need them, install the rest. Let it get on with it. When it finishes, check the "run system settings after exit" box and finish.
It has some slightly odd choices for the defaults, so I went through and set everything to "Oxygen" to make it consistent & easy. But the main reason to run this thing is just to check that the QT apps work on your machine before you try and run the full KDE environment.
Assuming it works, try a few of the other KDE apps that will have appeared in your Start menu. It has games! :o)
To get KDE itself running, you need to run something which is, for some reason, not in the options in the KDE submenu in the Start menu. Go figure. Why would they want to make it easy to run KDE on Windows after you've downloaded KDE for Windows..?
To get the actual desktop environment, you need to run plasma-desktop.exe, which in a default install will be in C:\Program Files\KDE\bin
That should launch your KDE experience, and you can have a play from there. So far, it's a little unstable (Should be better once 4.3-proper is available) but otherwise performing fairly well.
I've noticed a *lot* of Bing referrals in my access stats lately.
Almost all of them have, rather bizzarely, been one-word search strings. Here's my bing searches from the current first screen of my access stats, I swear this is genuine:
- keyboard
- gahhh
- really
- email
- comment
- worked
- image
So of the last 20 referrals to me, 7 have come from bing. That's impressive. All seven have clearly been done by people with zero ability to use search engines effectively.
I've tried bing out and found it to be lousy at finding what I'm looking for. I've also got huge amounts of crud like the above filling up my referral logs. I'm seriously considering blocking referrals from bing.com just to stop it clogging up my stats.
Do I think Google should be worried? Not yet, no..
If it's got Linux installed on it, you know that the hardware it's got is supported by Linux. Nothing worse than buying a new computer and finding out it's got some chipset or other that Linux doesn't work with yet.