Just take a look. I have the numbers to at least three more places in a 2 km radius. You know how you get them? By clicking "see more results"--which I can only access from the web interface.
Last night I searched for the same string at home (about 2 km away from that spot) and the second result was a place in Modena.
Don't get me wrong: GMaps on the iPhone is still great, but on the go, it's limited. Many businesses, which is what I'm often looking for on the iPhone, are still sorely missing.
I can't comment on how open that app is, as I don't know enough about its inner workings. However, though I'm no IT professional, if I wanted to take a look at its code, I wouldn't know where to find it. I just know that if I want to measure anything that's not a series of segments I'm gonna have to buy the Pro version.
Anyway, get this: GMaps for the iPhone is practically unusable in my first language, which is not English. It keeps reporting results that are tens of km away. At the same time, the web version (yes, the one that shows you ads) is working fine for me.
Why are results different? Could it be that they're not working as hard on GMaps for a competing platform as they are on their own?
And where's the Google Mobile app for non-American users? We've known the iPhone would be sold in other countries for months now. Surely they are working as hard on GMobile for the iPhone as they are on Android, right?
All apps and platforms and users are equal, right?
Backups are differential on a block level (blocks are a few MB, if I'm not mistaken). File identities and extended attributes are preserved. Upload resume and "on the fly" (i.e., without re-uploading) encryption key changes are supported for a premium (JD Plus service).
I'm not sure how secure the web access interface is, but I think you can disable it.
I'm trying to set up a collaborative network for a small non-profit organization. Right now, 'free (at least) as in beer' is not an option for any such tool.
However great Gmail's interface, Google Apps is not really ready for serious corporate/pro team use IMHO.
You may recall that up until a few days or weeks ago, members contacts were not automatically populated for new accounts--everyone had to manually fill them in for keeps. Although that was fixed, there's no way to create and propagate contact groups (as opposed to mailing lists) automatically--and mailing lists won't just cut it as users can't see who actually is on the list. Nor can they make new groups and propagate them to their sub-team.
Also, the inability to "force" chosen calendars into members calendar areas is almost a showstopper for us. I wonder how many larger corporations can cope with that. The way I'm working around this is adding calendar widgets to relevant sections and asking users to click the button and add the agenda to their calendars. We're still testing, but I'm not seeing satisfactory compliance...
Finally, support is egregiously non-existent. They have an apparently smart policy on the discussion groups: if you post a lot (presumably in response to people's queries), you get benefits. Well, I have yet to receive a single answer as to why "naked domain" addressing (http://mydomain.com/) used to work on my host but doesn't after CNAME modifications. And I'm getting 404's, not DNS errors! I may be getting what I'm paying for, but then again, my EUR 0 are worth a lot more on most other freeware communities around the Web.
For one, I've gotten better support and answers from the guys at Zoho.com, while on my free plan. Their offerings are also way more complete and functional, though slightly worse performance-wise, than Google's. Too bad they don't have 2nd-level domain customization (AFAIK) and, more importantly, they have a price for multiple projects we can't afford as of yet.
And don't even get me started on the lame Google Pages -> Sites app... Either you have a full-time coder dishing out Google Gear applications for you, or you're much better off clicking away at Wordpress or Joomla GUI admin pages... Layout templates? They look all the same. CSS customization? Severely limited. Actually I think you can customize your Blogger.com site more than you can Google Sites.
All in all, organizations of all sizes considering/using Google Apps have a lot more to worry about than a few sparse hours of email downtime...
Ok, enough with the tedious rant, but just a quick reminder to those using the free Apps edition: be advised that one of the main selling points of Google Apps, unified logins, is closed unless you sign up for the paid plan. You'll have to pay to let users login from your actually-usable-and-professional-looking blog/CMS into their Gmails, Docs and Calendars using the same account.
Oops, I forgot to mention the video which shows (from the outside) how the calibration is done. I'm not sure if this link will work as the URL is a mess, but you can also find it in Notebook.com's original post.
No paper: Pantone's huey calibration software is run, the lid is closed and reopened a minute later.
I deal with pictures occasionally in my job, and I've had to manually/ocularly calibrate my monitors more than once. Big pain, especially when you don't have adequate lighting in the room.
The automatic calibration video really struck me as innovative, though nowhere close to game-changing, at least for a portable monitor. However, I don't understand where the system gets color information from.
The laptop has a camera on top of the LCD, so if there were, say, a tiny mirror near the trackpad it could see the monitor when the lid's down; but I see no reflective surface in the keyboard area--how does it see the monitor ouput?
Anyone care to share their take (or knowledge) on this? Just curious...
Calendar: Find a tool (and there are some, I just can't think of the name now) that will allow you to bring Google Calendar data off of the server and into a local app.
For Calendars and Mail, here's what I do (Mac OS X 10.5):
Spanning Sync for 2-way syncing of contacts and calendar to Address Book and iCal, respectively
Mail.app for IMAP sync of email
A (rather convoluted, I must say) series of backup jobs using JungleDisk, which mirrors to Amazon S3 using encryption; I guess Mozy or Carbonite (if they ever manage to come up with a Mac client) would be the same.
Time Machine to keep hourly incrementals over WiFi both at home and at the office
SuperDuper for disk mirroring to an external drive at home and, when I actually get past my laziness, to another one in the office
Time Machine backups are frequent and automatic, but you can't boot off of them if you don't have a Leopard disc at hand. When used in conjunction with location-aware "script runners" such as the free MarcoPolo, no action is required except the initial backup run. The system mounts the relevant network drive in each context, and TM does the rest.
SuperDuper backups are there to give me something to boot off of in case of catastrophe. They don't need to be up-to-the-minute: that's what the TM/online ones are for.
As an iPhone 3G user, Installer.app is not (yet) an option for me, so I'd have to go with the open source Cydia.
However, I have to somehow risk the integrity of my device before trying it--granted, a restore should fix my phone if anything goes wrong, but there's no 100% warranty after all.
So I find myself wondering about what I'm missing out on. I tried googling for a repository, but apparently there isn't a website detailing all software available for Cydia, nor has anyone even tried to set one up.
I think that's a flaw with the current "jailbreak community." I don't know if that applies to Installer.app as well, but that's not an option for me. Moreover, Installer.app has been around for longer and I've been able to find some sparse info on those apps at the very least.
I guess I'll hold jailbreaking my phone until I can find a thorough list of available apps.
I haven't seen any comments about online backup solutions.
They're quite cheap (~ $50-$100 per year with unlimited storage) now and they make for the (almost) perfect off-site backup solution.
I've tried Mozy.com and Amazon S3.
While not technically a dedicated backup solution, Amazon is quite cost-effective for me and has amazing bandwidth -- I can upload or download through my 24/1.2 mbit connection at full speed 99% of the time. Yes, it's not very user-friendly at first, but after setting up JungleDisk (or your choice of WebDAV interface) and any backup application the first time, you just let the scheduler work its way through your data.
Mozy is cheap at $60/year/computer with unlimited storage, but I get modest connection speeds to their servers. Yet, their Windows client is extremely simple to set up. The Mac client (still a beta) is also good, although not ready for "production" work, yet. Linux is a no-go, though.
Of course it's always best to also keep a local device for quick backups/restores of large amounts of data, but the peace of mind and convenience afforded by online solutions... It's priceless to me...
Sorry about the dupe post below. However, the latest press release according to their official archive dates back to June 8, and it's about their second quarter results.
Although not a Berlusconi fan myself, I've watched TV interviews of the prosecutor in charge for the investigation. He said it took them years thanks to the "social engineering skills" the "organization" has, as another reader pointed out.
The guy made a mistake, so the police made the first connection between a messenger and the boss himself. It was something about him needing fresh linen if I'm not mistaken. Of course they broke the code in a matter of minutes, but it took them ages to just get a hold of one message. Then they had to trace back the messengers chain.
To sum it up, I'd say that the biggest part of the investigation has been done under the Berlusconi administration and the center-left government before that.
GP is trollish and flame-ish, but you also missed the point. He's referring to the part where the blurb says "and learn, among other things, just how Marshmallow Peeps came to rule the world."
To be frank and international with you, marshmellows outside of North America rule Jack and shit... And Jack left town...
I basically agree with your comment. However, the article does have to do with email disclaimers. This ruling, IMHO, implies that no content of an email message may be legally binding if it doesn't include the full names of the involved parties.
I guess one might hypothesize that this means that no disclaimer signature in an email can be legally binding, as one of the involved party (the reader) should at least affix their signature at the bottom of it to certify acceptance of the conditions. That's pure speculation, though.
The problem IMO is that the Da Vinci Code is only as fictional as named characters go. The symbologist doesn't exist, the French hottie is not real, the English Lord was never born. But what is depicted as their own uncovering of a mystery, well, that's already been written in that very form.
It's not as if Dan Brown had written a book about Mary Magdalene and her life based on the scenario depicted by Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and from this he proceeded to explain what "really" happened. The book purposedly used lame characters and in-book storyline to deliver a fascinating theory in the same form (albeit reduced in scope) as HBHG. If you read HBHG you will find two "detectives" uncovering a mystery - but they're two BBC journalists who actually exist and wrote that stuff. The "inexplicable" success of the Code, IMO, comes from the theory underneath it, exposed in a much more accessible (read: dumbed down) form than the original book -- which I enjoyed, by the way.
So my point is (and I think it's the same idea that brought about the lawsuit): can you make a commercial work based essentially on someone else's book, and get away with it by basically enclosing the original book's content in quotation marks?
Granted, the fact that the Code is just a hollow work of fiction stuffed with HBHG content is questionable, and I guess the judge will have to decide over that. But if you ask me, it's just that, with the possible exception of the bit about Leonardo's Last Supper, which is in turn copied and pasted from another book I can't recall right now.
For your 2001 example to be more fitting, I think the problem should be like this: in a not-so-distant future, a mysterious accident happens to a spaceship around Jupiter -- we're talking about the real world, not fiction. No official explanation is given by government(s) for the disappearance of the ship. A journalist starts collecting evidence on the mystery, and proposes that the onboard computer just went nuts. He publishes his theory in a book.
Then Kubrick comes around, shoots a movie about a police detective uncovering the mystery, one bit at a time, pieceing together a puzzle which finally looks exactly like the original journalist's book. Kubrick gives no credit whatsoever to the first guy.
It may not be copyright infringement because Kubrick doesn't use the journalist's own words or material. But it may be plagiarism because there's no one way to solve the puzzle, yet Kubrick based his work on the journalist's solution, citing the same evidence. Ok, sorry Stanley, RIP...
But here's the kicker: either the theories presented in "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" are fact, or they are not. If they are fact, then they are not copyrightable, which means Dan Brown is free to use them however he likes.
That's too easy. If I write a great scientific article describing facts and manage to get it published on Nature, the publisher is going to copyright it. From that point on, whoever wants to use that work for commercial purposes will have to pay good money, or at least get permission.
That's why bibliography and citations exist in scientific books, by the way: I can write in my article "as Smith et al. wrote, headaches are bad" and cite N articles scientifically proving the same claim, but I'm not supposed to include Smith's article in my book, unless I get permission. I guess I can even paste in short sentences from the article, but not the whole thing. Not even a table or graph, AFAIK.
If you read "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," you will find that it's not as Dan Brown just cited the two English guys. He just copied and pasted key portions of the book, enclosed them in quotation marks, and attributed them to his fictional characters. He then proceeded to build his own book around those hypotheses/facts. To make it worse, Brown's citing of HBHG has not even been done in a scientific context: it's a book marked as fiction, marketed to the general public with no pretense of extending the original authors' work. That's where a line might be drawn by the judge, IMO.
I agree that if this or similar laws are effectively enacted and enforced, we're pretty much done for.
However, I'm afraid there's not necessarily a need for further trusted computing initiatives in order for the big telcos to make a buck out of this legislation. Right now in Italy and many other places, if you sign up for regular Internet service, you're asked to identify yourself for billing purposes. Throw in a little bit more data at sign up, such as the serial number of your ID card, passport or driver's license and you might actually fall within the law's requirements.
If they ask you for this kind of ID proof, the big telcos may entice you to sign up for their wireless plans, and grant that you're a registered user whenever you connect to their APs. Thus, they can actually pass on the message that you may only have legal WLAN access around town if you sign up for paid access, because after sign up they can claim they checked your ID at sign up. The law doesn't mention the very simple fact that you could lose/lend your account to someone else or use someone else's ID to register - who's going to check the serial numbers? Only the police can, and will they build the infrastructure to do that in real time? Don't think so. So it's not a real security measure, it's just propaganda ("No illegal immigrants on the 'Net, here!") plus a big push for large-scale wireless operations by the big (or at least, commercial) ISPs.
But what about the small guys? Or the non-ISP entities (local authorities, educational, shops offering free Internet)? They won't be able to afford the cost of ID checks, not even at sign up, and/or users won't bother with registration. They will either be kicked out of the "market" (i.e., won't be able to offer free Internet on their own), or will be forced to sign up for WLAN offerings by big telcos.
This could be the end of the small-scale, free Internet access that is making the US ever more connected in universities and public venues -- and before the ubiquitous wireless phenomenon has even started in Italy!
I don't know about Italy, but here in Spain, the main teleco company Telefonica doesn't require any ID photocopy when signing up for a new phone line with ADSL service - they just want the ID number, and as the whole process can be done over the phone, I don't think there's any sort of verification.
It's the same in Italy, for private connections. Sometimes they only ask for your fiscal code, which is a univocal code constructed from your name, place and date of birth. They use it for fiscal purposes and billing.
What is required of Internet cafés and WLAN providers is absolutely ridiculous, and it is but a populist attempt to address the issue. It is perceived by many that right now only the poorest immigrants need to go to Internet cafés because they can't afford a private connection. So they're turning up the heat on web cafés in order to give the impression that they're checking the terrorists more effectively. This is according to the perverse equation "(il)legal Arab immigrant = probable terrorist."
However, no one is apparently asking how a café's waiter can ever guarantee the validity of the ID they're presented with -- and I blame the press, especially, for not asking that question. They're just required to blindly photocopy the thing and set it aside, as if anyone was actually going to pick up the papers and check them.
I don't know what ISP you were trying to sign up for, or when, but at present they require a billing address and so-called "codice fiscale," fiscal code, which is a code constructed from your name, place and date of birth. It's a univocal identifier for every citizen, and is usually required for billing purposes.
Sometimes citizenship/legal residence is (inadvertently?) required for even the most trivial tasks in many places. Try reloading a Cingular pre-paid phone over the phone: if your credit card's billing address is not in the US, it won't work. And the operators will helpfully suggest you get an American credit card to work around the problem...
It's been on the news for months. The proposed bill, announced July 27, has actually been enacted as an executive provision ("decreto ministeriale," ministerial decree) by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It's now awaiting ratification by Parliament, which is required to make it an official law. It will expire if it's not voted on, or rejected. It's been called "decreto Pisanu," from the name of the signing Minister, since late August.
Next time, as an Italian, try reading papers or web dailyPuntoInformatico. The third story is about cafés being raided and closed in Florence for several criminal offences. Some of them have been shut down for 5 days because of violations of "decreto Pisanu," as further proof that this idiotic law is already being enacted.
What is, to me, the worst part has not been mentioned in the/. blurb. The wording in the law, apparently, makes ID recording mandatory for public WiFi access, as well, independent of the nature of the service - be it paid for, free of charge/public, or a city-wide municipal network. This may very well kill the stuttering penetration of commercial and public WiFi in Italy. Who's going to pay for the guy in charge of checking the validity of, and registering ID for people who want to connect to the library's free wireless network? Or just think of the lines to get registered for the airport's network...
Re:What was wrong with Azureus?
on
GCC 4.1 Released
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the info, I have one more question though - that's just me knowing pretty much nothing about Java. Say I have an existing installation of Azureus and upgrade to GCC 4.1. Does that mean I could scrap my JRE? Or would I have to recompile Azureus to do that?
Furthermore, notice how I wrote "library/plugin" instead of application. And finally, my main point is that with a CC license they can't just go and patent their concept.
Too bad I don't have mod points for you, man, and too bad your comment is buried at the bottom. To all the wankers already going off about MS patenting the specs:
Take a look at the licensing information - get to the source.
Ok, if you really are that lazy, it's a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5, which means you only have to credit MS for this stuff, and release your own stuff (plugin/library?) under the same license.
I don't really know how that word ended up there... But looking at X-Lite's GUI, with those black & greenish colors and rounded shapes, it kinda makes me think of a lair from "Aliens." Eerie.
BTW, if a "phone simulator" won't even let you paste in phone numbers copied from your Address Book, you can pretty much tell our world is doomed!
Apparently this is a re-branded SIP client from CounterPath. I've used their voice-only free client, X-Lite, on my Mac.
I find the interface ominous, and the audio quality pathetic (but it might be the VoIP service provider's fault.) However, it has one good quality: it works seamlessly in a NAT, even if you have several clients in your network.
I must confess I didn't take the time to find out how it does this (server-based communications? UPnP binding random ports? or switching to different ones if the default is occupied?). In any case, that's a solution to the one problem that bugs me with iChat and many other similar products. Although they're starting to implement UPnP port forwarding, the presence of two or more clients in the NAT seems to break them, if anything because they (or the user themselves) can't change the ports they run on.
This might be a good reason to give this thing a try, I guess -- granted, I don't know if it does perform as well as his older cousin, yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Just take a look. I have the numbers to at least three more places in a 2 km radius. You know how you get them? By clicking "see more results"--which I can only access from the web interface.
Last night I searched for the same string at home (about 2 km away from that spot) and the second result was a place in Modena.
Don't get me wrong: GMaps on the iPhone is still great, but on the go, it's limited. Many businesses, which is what I'm often looking for on the iPhone, are still sorely missing.
Google Earth.
Glad you mentioned it.
I can't comment on how open that app is, as I don't know enough about its inner workings. However, though I'm no IT professional, if I wanted to take a look at its code, I wouldn't know where to find it. I just know that if I want to measure anything that's not a series of segments I'm gonna have to buy the Pro version.
Anyway, get this: GMaps for the iPhone is practically unusable in my first language, which is not English. It keeps reporting results that are tens of km away. At the same time, the web version (yes, the one that shows you ads) is working fine for me.
Why are results different? Could it be that they're not working as hard on GMaps for a competing platform as they are on their own?
And where's the Google Mobile app for non-American users? We've known the iPhone would be sold in other countries for months now. Surely they are working as hard on GMobile for the iPhone as they are on Android, right?
All apps and platforms and users are equal, right?
I second the recommendation.
Backups are differential on a block level (blocks are a few MB, if I'm not mistaken). File identities and extended attributes are preserved. Upload resume and "on the fly" (i.e., without re-uploading) encryption key changes are supported for a premium (JD Plus service).
I'm not sure how secure the web access interface is, but I think you can disable it.
I feel for you.
I'm trying to set up a collaborative network for a small non-profit organization. Right now, 'free (at least) as in beer' is not an option for any such tool.
However great Gmail's interface, Google Apps is not really ready for serious corporate/pro team use IMHO.
You may recall that up until a few days or weeks ago, members contacts were not automatically populated for new accounts--everyone had to manually fill them in for keeps. Although that was fixed, there's no way to create and propagate contact groups (as opposed to mailing lists) automatically--and mailing lists won't just cut it as users can't see who actually is on the list. Nor can they make new groups and propagate them to their sub-team.
Also, the inability to "force" chosen calendars into members calendar areas is almost a showstopper for us. I wonder how many larger corporations can cope with that. The way I'm working around this is adding calendar widgets to relevant sections and asking users to click the button and add the agenda to their calendars. We're still testing, but I'm not seeing satisfactory compliance...
Finally, support is egregiously non-existent. They have an apparently smart policy on the discussion groups: if you post a lot (presumably in response to people's queries), you get benefits. Well, I have yet to receive a single answer as to why "naked domain" addressing (http://mydomain.com/) used to work on my host but doesn't after CNAME modifications. And I'm getting 404's, not DNS errors! I may be getting what I'm paying for, but then again, my EUR 0 are worth a lot more on most other freeware communities around the Web.
For one, I've gotten better support and answers from the guys at Zoho.com, while on my free plan. Their offerings are also way more complete and functional, though slightly worse performance-wise, than Google's. Too bad they don't have 2nd-level domain customization (AFAIK) and, more importantly, they have a price for multiple projects we can't afford as of yet.
And don't even get me started on the lame Google Pages -> Sites app... Either you have a full-time coder dishing out Google Gear applications for you, or you're much better off clicking away at Wordpress or Joomla GUI admin pages... Layout templates? They look all the same. CSS customization? Severely limited. Actually I think you can customize your Blogger.com site more than you can Google Sites.
All in all, organizations of all sizes considering/using Google Apps have a lot more to worry about than a few sparse hours of email downtime...
Ok, enough with the tedious rant, but just a quick reminder to those using the free Apps edition: be advised that one of the main selling points of Google Apps, unified logins, is closed unless you sign up for the paid plan. You'll have to pay to let users login from your actually-usable-and-professional-looking blog/CMS into their Gmails, Docs and Calendars using the same account.
Oops, I forgot to mention the video which shows (from the outside) how the calibration is done. I'm not sure if this link will work as the URL is a mess, but you can also find it in Notebook.com's original post.
No paper: Pantone's huey calibration software is run, the lid is closed and reopened a minute later.
I deal with pictures occasionally in my job, and I've had to manually/ocularly calibrate my monitors more than once. Big pain, especially when you don't have adequate lighting in the room.
The automatic calibration video really struck me as innovative, though nowhere close to game-changing, at least for a portable monitor. However, I don't understand where the system gets color information from.
The laptop has a camera on top of the LCD, so if there were, say, a tiny mirror near the trackpad it could see the monitor when the lid's down; but I see no reflective surface in the keyboard area--how does it see the monitor ouput?
Anyone care to share their take (or knowledge) on this? Just curious...
Calendar: Find a tool (and there are some, I just can't think of the name now) that will allow you to bring Google Calendar data off of the server and into a local app.
For Calendars and Mail, here's what I do (Mac OS X 10.5):
Time Machine backups are frequent and automatic, but you can't boot off of them if you don't have a Leopard disc at hand. When used in conjunction with location-aware "script runners" such as the free MarcoPolo, no action is required except the initial backup run. The system mounts the relevant network drive in each context, and TM does the rest.
SuperDuper backups are there to give me something to boot off of in case of catastrophe. They don't need to be up-to-the-minute: that's what the TM/online ones are for.
As an iPhone 3G user, Installer.app is not (yet) an option for me, so I'd have to go with the open source Cydia.
However, I have to somehow risk the integrity of my device before trying it--granted, a restore should fix my phone if anything goes wrong, but there's no 100% warranty after all.
So I find myself wondering about what I'm missing out on. I tried googling for a repository, but apparently there isn't a website detailing all software available for Cydia, nor has anyone even tried to set one up.
I think that's a flaw with the current "jailbreak community." I don't know if that applies to Installer.app as well, but that's not an option for me. Moreover, Installer.app has been around for longer and I've been able to find some sparse info on those apps at the very least.
I guess I'll hold jailbreaking my phone until I can find a thorough list of available apps.
Does anyone know of one?
I haven't seen any comments about online backup solutions.
They're quite cheap (~ $50-$100 per year with unlimited storage) now and they make for the (almost) perfect off-site backup solution.
I've tried Mozy.com and Amazon S3.
While not technically a dedicated backup solution, Amazon is quite cost-effective for me and has amazing bandwidth -- I can upload or download through my 24/1.2 mbit connection at full speed 99% of the time. Yes, it's not very user-friendly at first, but after setting up JungleDisk (or your choice of WebDAV interface) and any backup application the first time, you just let the scheduler work its way through your data.
Mozy is cheap at $60/year/computer with unlimited storage, but I get modest connection speeds to their servers. Yet, their Windows client is extremely simple to set up. The Mac client (still a beta) is also good, although not ready for "production" work, yet. Linux is a no-go, though.
Of course it's always best to also keep a local device for quick backups/restores of large amounts of data, but the peace of mind and convenience afforded by online solutions... It's priceless to me...
Sorry about the dupe post below. However, the latest press release according to their official archive dates back to June 8, and it's about their second quarter results.
Talk about fact-checking...
... But published on calderasystems.com nameservers:
I don't know anything about this stuff... Could the nameservers have been compromised?
Although not a Berlusconi fan myself, I've watched TV interviews of the prosecutor in charge for the investigation. He said it took them years thanks to the "social engineering skills" the "organization" has, as another reader pointed out.
The guy made a mistake, so the police made the first connection between a messenger and the boss himself. It was something about him needing fresh linen if I'm not mistaken. Of course they broke the code in a matter of minutes, but it took them ages to just get a hold of one message. Then they had to trace back the messengers chain.
To sum it up, I'd say that the biggest part of the investigation has been done under the Berlusconi administration and the center-left government before that.
GP is trollish and flame-ish, but you also missed the point. He's referring to the part where the blurb says "and learn, among other things, just how Marshmallow Peeps came to rule the world."
To be frank and international with you, marshmellows outside of North America rule Jack and shit... And Jack left town...
(Bruce Campbell, instead, rules everywhere, period.)
I basically agree with your comment. However, the article does have to do with email disclaimers. This ruling, IMHO, implies that no content of an email message may be legally binding if it doesn't include the full names of the involved parties.
I guess one might hypothesize that this means that no disclaimer signature in an email can be legally binding, as one of the involved party (the reader) should at least affix their signature at the bottom of it to certify acceptance of the conditions. That's pure speculation, though.
The problem IMO is that the Da Vinci Code is only as fictional as named characters go. The symbologist doesn't exist, the French hottie is not real, the English Lord was never born. But what is depicted as their own uncovering of a mystery, well, that's already been written in that very form.
It's not as if Dan Brown had written a book about Mary Magdalene and her life based on the scenario depicted by Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and from this he proceeded to explain what "really" happened. The book purposedly used lame characters and in-book storyline to deliver a fascinating theory in the same form (albeit reduced in scope) as HBHG. If you read HBHG you will find two "detectives" uncovering a mystery - but they're two BBC journalists who actually exist and wrote that stuff. The "inexplicable" success of the Code, IMO, comes from the theory underneath it, exposed in a much more accessible (read: dumbed down) form than the original book -- which I enjoyed, by the way.So my point is (and I think it's the same idea that brought about the lawsuit): can you make a commercial work based essentially on someone else's book, and get away with it by basically enclosing the original book's content in quotation marks?
Granted, the fact that the Code is just a hollow work of fiction stuffed with HBHG content is questionable, and I guess the judge will have to decide over that. But if you ask me, it's just that, with the possible exception of the bit about Leonardo's Last Supper, which is in turn copied and pasted from another book I can't recall right now.
For your 2001 example to be more fitting, I think the problem should be like this: in a not-so-distant future, a mysterious accident happens to a spaceship around Jupiter -- we're talking about the real world, not fiction. No official explanation is given by government(s) for the disappearance of the ship. A journalist starts collecting evidence on the mystery, and proposes that the onboard computer just went nuts. He publishes his theory in a book.
Then Kubrick comes around, shoots a movie about a police detective uncovering the mystery, one bit at a time, pieceing together a puzzle which finally looks exactly like the original journalist's book. Kubrick gives no credit whatsoever to the first guy.
It may not be copyright infringement because Kubrick doesn't use the journalist's own words or material. But it may be plagiarism because there's no one way to solve the puzzle, yet Kubrick based his work on the journalist's solution, citing the same evidence. Ok, sorry Stanley, RIP...
But here's the kicker: either the theories presented in "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" are fact, or they are not. If they are fact, then they are not copyrightable, which means Dan Brown is free to use them however he likes.
That's too easy. If I write a great scientific article describing facts and manage to get it published on Nature, the publisher is going to copyright it. From that point on, whoever wants to use that work for commercial purposes will have to pay good money, or at least get permission.
That's why bibliography and citations exist in scientific books, by the way: I can write in my article "as Smith et al. wrote, headaches are bad" and cite N articles scientifically proving the same claim, but I'm not supposed to include Smith's article in my book, unless I get permission. I guess I can even paste in short sentences from the article, but not the whole thing. Not even a table or graph, AFAIK.
If you read "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," you will find that it's not as Dan Brown just cited the two English guys. He just copied and pasted key portions of the book, enclosed them in quotation marks, and attributed them to his fictional characters. He then proceeded to build his own book around those hypotheses/facts. To make it worse, Brown's citing of HBHG has not even been done in a scientific context: it's a book marked as fiction, marketed to the general public with no pretense of extending the original authors' work. That's where a line might be drawn by the judge, IMO.
I agree that if this or similar laws are effectively enacted and enforced, we're pretty much done for.
However, I'm afraid there's not necessarily a need for further trusted computing initiatives in order for the big telcos to make a buck out of this legislation. Right now in Italy and many other places, if you sign up for regular Internet service, you're asked to identify yourself for billing purposes. Throw in a little bit more data at sign up, such as the serial number of your ID card, passport or driver's license and you might actually fall within the law's requirements.
If they ask you for this kind of ID proof, the big telcos may entice you to sign up for their wireless plans, and grant that you're a registered user whenever you connect to their APs. Thus, they can actually pass on the message that you may only have legal WLAN access around town if you sign up for paid access, because after sign up they can claim they checked your ID at sign up. The law doesn't mention the very simple fact that you could lose/lend your account to someone else or use someone else's ID to register - who's going to check the serial numbers? Only the police can, and will they build the infrastructure to do that in real time? Don't think so. So it's not a real security measure, it's just propaganda ("No illegal immigrants on the 'Net, here!") plus a big push for large-scale wireless operations by the big (or at least, commercial) ISPs.
But what about the small guys? Or the non-ISP entities (local authorities, educational, shops offering free Internet)? They won't be able to afford the cost of ID checks, not even at sign up, and/or users won't bother with registration. They will either be kicked out of the "market" (i.e., won't be able to offer free Internet on their own), or will be forced to sign up for WLAN offerings by big telcos.
This could be the end of the small-scale, free Internet access that is making the US ever more connected in universities and public venues -- and before the ubiquitous wireless phenomenon has even started in Italy!
I don't know about Italy, but here in Spain, the main teleco company Telefonica doesn't require any ID photocopy when signing up for a new phone line with ADSL service - they just want the ID number, and as the whole process can be done over the phone, I don't think there's any sort of verification.
It's the same in Italy, for private connections. Sometimes they only ask for your fiscal code, which is a univocal code constructed from your name, place and date of birth. They use it for fiscal purposes and billing.
What is required of Internet cafés and WLAN providers is absolutely ridiculous, and it is but a populist attempt to address the issue. It is perceived by many that right now only the poorest immigrants need to go to Internet cafés because they can't afford a private connection. So they're turning up the heat on web cafés in order to give the impression that they're checking the terrorists more effectively. This is according to the perverse equation "(il)legal Arab immigrant = probable terrorist."
However, no one is apparently asking how a café's waiter can ever guarantee the validity of the ID they're presented with -- and I blame the press, especially, for not asking that question. They're just required to blindly photocopy the thing and set it aside, as if anyone was actually going to pick up the papers and check them.
It's all just a propagandistic stunt.
I don't know what ISP you were trying to sign up for, or when, but at present they require a billing address and so-called "codice fiscale," fiscal code, which is a code constructed from your name, place and date of birth. It's a univocal identifier for every citizen, and is usually required for billing purposes.
Sometimes citizenship/legal residence is (inadvertently?) required for even the most trivial tasks in many places. Try reloading a Cingular pre-paid phone over the phone: if your credit card's billing address is not in the US, it won't work. And the operators will helpfully suggest you get an American credit card to work around the problem...
It's been on the news for months. The proposed bill, announced July 27, has actually been enacted as an executive provision ("decreto ministeriale," ministerial decree) by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It's now awaiting ratification by Parliament, which is required to make it an official law. It will expire if it's not voted on, or rejected. It's been called "decreto Pisanu," from the name of the signing Minister, since late August.
Next time, as an Italian, try reading papers or web daily Punto Informatico. The third story is about cafés being raided and closed in Florence for several criminal offences. Some of them have been shut down for 5 days because of violations of "decreto Pisanu," as further proof that this idiotic law is already being enacted.
What is, to me, the worst part has not been mentioned in the /. blurb. The wording in the law, apparently, makes ID recording mandatory for public WiFi access, as well, independent of the nature of the service - be it paid for, free of charge/public, or a city-wide municipal network. This may very well kill the stuttering penetration of commercial and public WiFi in Italy. Who's going to pay for the guy in charge of checking the validity of, and registering ID for people who want to connect to the library's free wireless network? Or just think of the lines to get registered for the airport's network...
Thanks for the info, I have one more question though - that's just me knowing pretty much nothing about Java. Say I have an existing installation of Azureus and upgrade to GCC 4.1. Does that mean I could scrap my JRE? Or would I have to recompile Azureus to do that?
So what, is it the only license possible?
Furthermore, notice how I wrote "library/plugin" instead of application. And finally, my main point is that with a CC license they can't just go and patent their concept.
Too bad I don't have mod points for you, man, and too bad your comment is buried at the bottom. To all the wankers already going off about MS patenting the specs:
Take a look at the licensing information - get to the source.
Ok, if you really are that lazy, it's a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5, which means you only have to credit MS for this stuff, and release your own stuff (plugin/library?) under the same license.
I don't really know how that word ended up there... But looking at X-Lite's GUI, with those black & greenish colors and rounded shapes, it kinda makes me think of a lair from "Aliens." Eerie.
BTW, if a "phone simulator" won't even let you paste in phone numbers copied from your Address Book, you can pretty much tell our world is doomed!
I find the interface ominous, and the audio quality pathetic (but it might be the VoIP service provider's fault.) However, it has one good quality: it works seamlessly in a NAT, even if you have several clients in your network.
I must confess I didn't take the time to find out how it does this (server-based communications? UPnP binding random ports? or switching to different ones if the default is occupied?). In any case, that's a solution to the one problem that bugs me with iChat and many other similar products. Although they're starting to implement UPnP port forwarding, the presence of two or more clients in the NAT seems to break them, if anything because they (or the user themselves) can't change the ports they run on.
This might be a good reason to give this thing a try, I guess -- granted, I don't know if it does perform as well as his older cousin, yet.