I think that there are some people who are effectively a lost cause and barring some form of 'Clockwork Orange' style reprogramming being developed, should not be allowed out in society unguided.
I am not advocating '3 strikes and you get life in prison'. What I think is that there should be some form of structured, guarded communities set up that serial offenders are sent to live in.
Instead of cells, inmates would live in flats and would be required to pay rent/utility bills if they are able to find a job in the outside world (which inmates would be expected to try and find). When inmates leave the community to go to work on the outside they are GPS tagged and their locations tracked. The tags would also emit a signal so that way shopkeepers would know that a serial shoplifter has entered, or pub landlord would know if someone who serially get drunks and gets into fights in pubs has walked into the pub. They will be expected to return by set times (though there has to be some flexibilty here - ie traffic jams) and the community itself will have a set internal curfew. Yes, it's big brother, but these are convicted criminals.
One possible benefit is that an inmates family could optionally choose to live with the inmate inside the community. There was an item recently on the news about the issues surrounding sending single mums to prison that guarded communities would get around.
Hopefully over time a convicted criminal could be eased back into society. Unlike a prison environment which bares no relationship to free society, the guarded community would at least bare some relationship to outside world so hopefully the inmate would learn to behave themselves.
I have to say that I've found Evolution to be a bit unstable at times (it dies for no apperent reason, and to get it working again without rebooting requires manually killing off the processes it spawned) and the anti spam feature seems to 'disappear' emails from the Exchange server with no apparent way of getting them back.
At the moment, I honestly couldn't recommend it to people outside of the IT department (it's not quite stable enough when compared to the various Outlooks we have running in the comapny, and besides only people in the IT department use Linux at the desktop). Soon perhaps, but not right now.
Still, even with the occasional crashings, I prefer it's UI over Outlook 2003 (I have both a Linux box and a Windows box sitting side by side and I never use Outlook - I can not stand what MS have done to that application over the last couple iterations).
Now I can just trace an IP and tell the police and they will go out and actually contact that person or even arrest them instead of ignoring me altogether?
Only if you're the following -
1) The major (or at least one of the major) telecommunications companies in the police's jurisdiction.
and
2) Running a high profile donation site. *
So yeah, I could see some paranoia around the DEC's donation site (after all, there probably are some people out there who would love to get all the personal/financial details going through that site). Combine that with an inexperienced person looking for something 'unusual' in the web logs and I could see this happening.
I'm just wondering if it turns out to be true and the guy is innocent (the BBC article doesn't go into anywhere near enough detail of what the guy is alleged to have done), I'd love to know if anyone from BT is going to get charged with wasting police time (I doubt it - but you never know). Even if they don't go as far as that, BT would deserve some form of 'rap' for being clueless - even if it's nothing but a bit of bad publicity. After all, do you really want to trust the security of your site to people who can't recoginze a ligitimate user using a text mode browser (the type of which some people have to use for accessibilty reasons and hence you have to cater for anyway) and actual malicious attackers.
*) I wouldn't be surprised if they take banks and credit card companies seriously as well.
I'm starting to wonder if most, if not all, the DRM 'solutions' being sold to the music industry are actually little more than con jobs.
If a CD is going to work in a normal CD player, it's going to be copyable - put the CD in player with a digital output and wire into a PC with a sound card with a digital input and there goes the DRM and with a perfect digital copy. Even an analogue copy done properly is going to be good enough (especially after being encoded in mp3).
This simple fact leads me to believe that the people touting DRM to the music industry are little more than snake oil salesmen peddleing a panacea to an ailing industry.
The Hebrew word that was translated to the English "day" in Gensis 1 did not actually mean a 24-hour period. There was no English word with an equivalent meaning, so they substituted day.
I'm intrigued - what is the Hebrew word and what does it mean? Even if there isn't a 1-1 translation, it should at least be possible to describe it's meaning in english.
If you go to the homepage for the Spectrum Frequency review (http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consultations/current/sfr/?a=87101) and scroll down to the bottom of section 1.3 you will find the following:
We are also considering the possibilities of removing the need to have a licence in areas such as amateur and maritime although technology and usage restrictions will continue to apply.
Re:Dixons stopped VHS because of TiVo/PVRs?...
on
The VHS is Dead
·
· Score: 1
(*1) Possibly due to bad publicity they got when they automatically uploaded a BBC program without prior notification, or maybe just bad marketing in the first place. They pushed the 'pause live video' selling-point over everything else, and.... maybe that wasn't enough to convince people to shell out.
I may be a bit paranoid, but I think the marketing was deliberatly bad.
Sky knew they were going to be launching Sky+ about a year after TiVo. By making one of the least important features the main selling point would mean that the differences between the less functional Sky+ and the TiVo would be less obvious.
I also think Sky have something against PVRs in general (even thier own Sky+). PVRs threaten the revenue model of the non Movie/Sports channels which is why they're marketing Sky+ as something that can pause+rewind live tv and let you record a sports match while watching a film. The watching programmes when you want with the ability to skip over commercials is not mentioned.
I'm glad I got my TiVo while I still could. A couple of my friends had them so I knew what they were capable of and I really wanted one. I had to put off getting one untill I could afford it which was when I gave up smoking (some of the money I saved from not smoking went towards the TiVo - a little incentive that helped me quit). This was just as the TiVo's were disappearing so I ended up haveing to go to a Comet an hour's drive away to find one (IIRC it was the 7th electrical store I tried and I was just about to give up hope of finding one).
Yes! I was having an argument about this at the weekend with a couple of people who couldn't grasp how extracting energy from the wind would change the wind. While they wouldn't believe a word I said, they are the type of people who believe what they see in the media.
At least in the UK, you are required to keep tapes recorded at the broadcast feed - ie. right where it hits your link - for three months or so.
The funny thing is, the main reason for keeping broadcasts for 90 days in the U, has as much to do with the people buying commercial airtime as it does with the OFCOM regulations - if an advert gets screwed up when playing people want to to be able to go back and see what happened.
I'm really surprised that US broadcasters aren't doing this already (seeing as almost all US TV is commercial) - you would think the ad agencies would have required this long before the federal government. Or is that they already do this, but when the prudish parents council come knocking on the broadcasters door they just deny all knowledge and with an election coming up the people in power want to make it look like thier doing something for some of thier 'core' supporters?
And break the highway code with impunity! Is that a one way street? Not for you because you're on a bicycle. Is that a pedestrian crossing with crossing pedestrians? Who cares, as a cyclist you can just plough on through.
So leave behind the speed cameras, junction cameras and bus lane cameras with all the nastiness of actually getting caught doing something wrong and buy a bike. That way, you can break the law and be smug.
In cities, there is no reason to drive a car unless you carry around large boxes every single journey you make.
I take it you've never travelled outside of Zone 3 in London at night? Public transport pretty much ceases to exist after midnight if you're not in the centre of town
mail you a ticket every time you go over the speed limit
I doubt the UK government would use the technology for this, seeing as pretty much the entire driving population speeds and that with our points based penalty system being what it is, there wouldn't be anyone left on the roads whithin a couple of weeks - which would be a very bad thing for a government which derives a lot of revenue from the highest petrol taxes in Europe (for you Americans out there screaming about gas prices - we're paying around USD 6 a gallon)
don't make a complete stop and wait three seconds at stop signs
There are so few stop signs in the UK that there wouldn't be much of a point - where in the US you'd find a stop sign in Britain you'd find a Give Way sign, where you only have to stop if there's oncoming traffic.
make a right turn on red in an intersection where it isn't allowed, when it's 3 in the morning and there are no cars on the road for 100 miles
Funnily enough, right turn on red after stop isn't allowed anywhere at anytime in the UK, seeing as this would entail going against oncoming traffic. Neither is the logical equivalent (but for right hand drive) of left turn on red after stop at a stop light. Again, this doesn't matter as much as there are far fewer stoplights in the UK - the preference is for roundabouts (though some roundabouts do have traffic lights on them). If you were driving pretty much anywhere in the UK at 3am and it's so built up an area to require a stop light you can be certain that there is a car within 100 miles, in fact you can almost be certain that there will be a car within 1 mile.
But if you're stopping, and the car is almost at a complete stop, and you can clearly see that there are no cars approaching, and it is perfectly safe, then what difference does it make if you actually come to a halt and wait for three seconds?
Which is why we mostly have Give Ways instead of Stops - if it's a stop sign in the UK then you know that there's probably a good reason why you should come to complete stop.
If people lived longer would we see an end to hatred.
No, but then again hatred isn't going to go away even if people died off earlier rather than later.
Look at the generational hatreds of the world such as in Northern Ireland, the area of the world formerally known as Yugoslavia and even parts of the Muslim world where people are still pissed off about the Crusades. As long as people keep transmitting there hatreds to next generation than hatred will live on.
Man, given the proper time to unfold, that plotline would have kicked serious ass!
I'd love to know what the original arc was suppossed to have been with Sinclair in charge - they transposed some things, such as Sinclair getting involved with Delenn becoming Sheridan getting involved, but what about things like Babylon 4 and all the foretelling of the destruction of Babylon 5?
I guess this can be said for most shows, but it seems to apply more to scifi for some reasons. I think really only Babylon 5 went out on the perfect note, mainly because thats when it was supposed to happen.
There was a slight problem with the B5 - as they thought they were getting cancelled at the end of season 4 they compressed what should have been season 5 into season 4 - so you can still say that B5 didn't quite reach it's full potential (ie a longer Shadow War and a longer Civil War).
It seems that politics are killing X11 ... Of course, I firmly believe that X needs to be replaced. Just not for political reasons. Whomever's in charge of X needs to form a panel of industry experts and draft an X12 protocol. In my mind, the panel should include network engineers, usability experts, etc. It must include representatives from both open and semi-open companies - Red Hat, the KDE and Gnome teams, present X developers, Apple, IBM, Sun, and possibly even Microsoft.
So, you're saying that politics are killing X11, and the above mentioned entities should all get in a room to create X12? What do you think the politics are going to be like? Can you really seee Apple, IBM, Sun and Microsoft (MS - wtf would they want with X12) all getting together for the common good?
What about Free DOS and the myriad of other OSes out there. Hell, according to this logic, Windows would infringe. Why don't you go sue MS? Oh wait, that would be biting the hand that feeds you.:)
What about DR DOS - don't/didn't Caldera own it?With this logic MS could sue SCO.
I don't understand the need for constant new TLDs.us,.tv,.mobile)
Actually,.us and.tv are quite old - they're country code domain names for the United States and Tuvalu (though Tuvalu realized they could profit from.tv).
The only reason why it's.com and not.com.us is because DNS was inveneted in the states.
Actually.tv existed before the new TLD's, it's the ccTLD for Tuvalu. They realized that they could make some money by selling domains to TV companies, so they contracted it out to somebody. I'm not sure how much Tuvalu make with it though.
The com on the end would be pointless (it would be a subdomain of yahoo). It would be more likely to be either dk.yahoo, dk.com.yahoo (if dk had a com underneath) or com.yahoo.dk
Basically use old-style JANET address, which do put the tld first.
Slashdot Mirror
In Soviet Russia SCO delists YOU!
Whatt is going to rehabilitate him?
Nothing.
I think that there are some people who are effectively a lost cause and barring some form of 'Clockwork Orange' style reprogramming being developed, should not be allowed out in society unguided.
I am not advocating '3 strikes and you get life in prison'. What I think is that there should be some form of structured, guarded communities set up that serial offenders are sent to live in.
Instead of cells, inmates would live in flats and would be required to pay rent/utility bills if they are able to find a job in the outside world (which inmates would be expected to try and find). When inmates leave the community to go to work on the outside they are GPS tagged and their locations tracked. The tags would also emit a signal so that way shopkeepers would know that a serial shoplifter has entered, or pub landlord would know if someone who serially get drunks and gets into fights in pubs has walked into the pub. They will be expected to return by set times (though there has to be some flexibilty here - ie traffic jams) and the community itself will have a set internal curfew. Yes, it's big brother, but these are convicted criminals.
One possible benefit is that an inmates family could optionally choose to live with the inmate inside the community. There was an item recently on the news about the issues surrounding sending single mums to prison that guarded communities would get around.
Hopefully over time a convicted criminal could be eased back into society. Unlike a prison environment which bares no relationship to free society, the guarded community would at least bare some relationship to outside world so hopefully the inmate would learn to behave themselves.
Tk
But that's the 4th of February.
I have to say that I've found Evolution to be a bit unstable at times (it dies for no apperent reason, and to get it working again without rebooting requires manually killing off the processes it spawned) and the anti spam feature seems to 'disappear' emails from the Exchange server with no apparent way of getting them back.
At the moment, I honestly couldn't recommend it to people outside of the IT department (it's not quite stable enough when compared to the various Outlooks we have running in the comapny, and besides only people in the IT department use Linux at the desktop). Soon perhaps, but not right now.
Still, even with the occasional crashings, I prefer it's UI over Outlook 2003 (I have both a Linux box and a Windows box sitting side by side and I never use Outlook - I can not stand what MS have done to that application over the last couple iterations).
Now I can just trace an IP and tell the police and they will go out and actually contact that person or even arrest them instead of ignoring me altogether?
Only if you're the following -
1) The major (or at least one of the major) telecommunications companies in the police's jurisdiction.
and
2) Running a high profile donation site. *
So yeah, I could see some paranoia around the DEC's donation site (after all, there probably are some people out there who would love to get all the personal/financial details going through that site). Combine that with an inexperienced person looking for something 'unusual' in the web logs and I could see this happening.
I'm just wondering if it turns out to be true and the guy is innocent (the BBC article doesn't go into anywhere near enough detail of what the guy is alleged to have done), I'd love to know if anyone from BT is going to get charged with wasting police time (I doubt it - but you never know). Even if they don't go as far as that, BT would deserve some form of 'rap' for being clueless - even if it's nothing but a bit of bad publicity. After all, do you really want to trust the security of your site to people who can't recoginze a ligitimate user using a text mode browser (the type of which some people have to use for accessibilty reasons and hence you have to cater for anyway) and actual malicious attackers.
*) I wouldn't be surprised if they take banks and credit card companies seriously as well.
Tk
I'm starting to wonder if most, if not all, the DRM 'solutions' being sold to the music industry are actually little more than con jobs.
If a CD is going to work in a normal CD player, it's going to be copyable - put the CD in player with a digital output and wire into a PC with a sound card with a digital input and there goes the DRM and with a perfect digital copy. Even an analogue copy done properly is going to be good enough (especially after being encoded in mp3).
This simple fact leads me to believe that the people touting DRM to the music industry are little more than snake oil salesmen peddleing a panacea to an ailing industry.
The Hebrew word that was translated to the English "day" in Gensis 1 did not actually mean a 24-hour period. There was no English word with an equivalent meaning, so they substituted day.
I'm intrigued - what is the Hebrew word and what does it mean? Even if there isn't a 1-1 translation, it should at least be possible to describe it's meaning in english.
If you go to the homepage for the Spectrum Frequency review (http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consultations/current/sfr /?a=87101) and scroll down to the bottom of section 1.3 you will find the following:
We are also considering the possibilities of removing the need to have a licence in areas such as amateur and maritime although technology and usage restrictions will continue to apply.
(*1) Possibly due to bad publicity they got when they automatically uploaded a BBC program without prior notification, or maybe just bad marketing in the first place. They pushed the 'pause live video' selling-point over everything else, and.... maybe that wasn't enough to convince people to shell out.
I may be a bit paranoid, but I think the marketing was deliberatly bad.
Sky knew they were going to be launching Sky+ about a year after TiVo. By making one of the least important features the main selling point would mean that the differences between the less functional Sky+ and the TiVo would be less obvious.
I also think Sky have something against PVRs in general (even thier own Sky+). PVRs threaten the revenue model of the non Movie/Sports channels which is why they're marketing Sky+ as something that can pause+rewind live tv and let you record a sports match while watching a film. The watching programmes when you want with the ability to skip over commercials is not mentioned.
I'm glad I got my TiVo while I still could. A couple of my friends had them so I knew what they were capable of and I really wanted one. I had to put off getting one untill I could afford it which was when I gave up smoking (some of the money I saved from not smoking went towards the TiVo - a little incentive that helped me quit). This was just as the TiVo's were disappearing so I ended up haveing to go to a Comet an hour's drive away to find one (IIRC it was the 7th electrical store I tried and I was just about to give up hope of finding one).
Yes! I was having an argument about this at the weekend with a couple of people who couldn't grasp how extracting energy from the wind would change the wind. While they wouldn't believe a word I said, they are the type of people who believe what they see in the media.
Thank You Globe and Mail
At least in the UK, you are required to keep tapes recorded at the broadcast feed - ie. right where it hits your link - for three months or so.
The funny thing is, the main reason for keeping broadcasts for 90 days in the U, has as much to do with the people buying commercial airtime as it does with the OFCOM regulations - if an advert gets screwed up when playing people want to to be able to go back and see what happened.
I'm really surprised that US broadcasters aren't doing this already (seeing as almost all US TV is commercial) - you would think the ad agencies would have required this long before the federal government. Or is that they already do this, but when the prudish parents council come knocking on the broadcasters door they just deny all knowledge and with an election coming up the people in power want to make it look like thier doing something for some of thier 'core' supporters?
Tk
So sell your car, get a bike, save the planet
And break the highway code with impunity! Is that a one way street? Not for you because you're on a bicycle. Is that a pedestrian crossing with crossing pedestrians? Who cares, as a cyclist you can just plough on through.
So leave behind the speed cameras, junction cameras and bus lane cameras with all the nastiness of actually getting caught doing something wrong and buy a bike. That way, you can break the law and be smug.
Tk
In cities, there is no reason to drive a car unless you carry around large boxes every single journey you make.
I take it you've never travelled outside of Zone 3 in London at night? Public transport pretty much ceases to exist after midnight if you're not in the centre of town
Tk.
mail you a ticket every time you go over the speed limit
I doubt the UK government would use the technology for this, seeing as pretty much the entire driving population speeds and that with our points based penalty system being what it is, there wouldn't be anyone left on the roads whithin a couple of weeks - which would be a very bad thing for a government which derives a lot of revenue from the highest petrol taxes in Europe (for you Americans out there screaming about gas prices - we're paying around USD 6 a gallon)
don't make a complete stop and wait three seconds at stop signs
There are so few stop signs in the UK that there wouldn't be much of a point - where in the US you'd find a stop sign in Britain you'd find a Give Way sign, where you only have to stop if there's oncoming traffic.
make a right turn on red in an intersection where it isn't allowed, when it's 3 in the morning and there are no cars on the road for 100 miles
Funnily enough, right turn on red after stop isn't allowed anywhere at anytime in the UK, seeing as this would entail going against oncoming traffic. Neither is the logical equivalent (but for right hand drive) of left turn on red after stop at a stop light. Again, this doesn't matter as much as there are far fewer stoplights in the UK - the preference is for roundabouts (though some roundabouts do have traffic lights on them). If you were driving pretty much anywhere in the UK at 3am and it's so built up an area to require a stop light you can be certain that there is a car within 100 miles, in fact you can almost be certain that there will be a car within 1 mile.
But if you're stopping, and the car is almost at a complete stop, and you can clearly see that there are no cars approaching, and it is perfectly safe, then what difference does it make if you actually come to a halt and wait for three seconds?
Which is why we mostly have Give Ways instead of Stops - if it's a stop sign in the UK then you know that there's probably a good reason why you should come to complete stop.
Tk
If people lived longer would we see an end to hatred.
No, but then again hatred isn't going to go away even if people died off earlier rather than later.
Look at the generational hatreds of the world such as in Northern Ireland, the area of the world formerally known as Yugoslavia and even parts of the Muslim world where people are still pissed off about the Crusades. As long as people keep transmitting there hatreds to next generation than hatred will live on.
Tk
VeriSign controls the computers that contain the master list of domain name suffixes, such as ".com" and ".fr."
.fr ccTLD? Since when? I thought it was AFNIC (www.afnic.fr) whol looked after .fr?
Verisign controls
Tk
Man, given the proper time to unfold, that plotline would have kicked serious ass!
I'd love to know what the original arc was suppossed to have been with Sinclair in charge - they transposed some things, such as Sinclair getting involved with Delenn becoming Sheridan getting involved, but what about things like Babylon 4 and all the foretelling of the destruction of Babylon 5?
I guess this can be said for most shows, but it seems to apply more to scifi for some reasons. I think really only Babylon 5 went out on the perfect note, mainly because thats when it was supposed to happen.
There was a slight problem with the B5 - as they thought they were getting cancelled at the end of season 4 they compressed what should have been season 5 into season 4 - so you can still say that B5 didn't quite reach it's full potential (ie a longer Shadow War and a longer Civil War).
Tk
It seems that politics are killing X11
...
Of course, I firmly believe that X needs to be replaced. Just not for political reasons. Whomever's in charge of X needs to form a panel of industry experts and draft an X12 protocol. In my mind, the panel should include network engineers, usability experts, etc. It must include representatives from both open and semi-open companies - Red Hat, the KDE and Gnome teams, present X developers, Apple, IBM, Sun, and possibly even Microsoft.
So, you're saying that politics are killing X11, and the above mentioned entities should all get in a room to create X12? What do you think the politics are going to be like? Can you really seee Apple, IBM, Sun and Microsoft (MS - wtf would they want with X12) all getting together for the common good?
What about Free DOS and the myriad of other OSes out there. Hell, according to this logic, Windows would infringe. Why don't you go sue MS? Oh wait, that would be biting the hand that feeds you. :)
What about DR DOS - don't/didn't Caldera own it?With this logic MS could sue SCO.
Tk
I want to reserve .sex and .porn right away. Where do I sign??
.sex Considered Dangerous
read RFC3675 -
So probably not any time soon.
Tk
I don't understand the need for constant new TLDs .us, .tv, .mobile)
.us and .tv are quite old - they're country code domain names for the United States and Tuvalu (though Tuvalu realized they could profit from .tv).
.com and not .com.us is because DNS was inveneted in the states.
Actually,
The only reason why it's
Tk
Actually .tv existed before the new TLD's, it's the ccTLD for Tuvalu. They realized that they could make some money by selling domains to TV companies, so they contracted it out to somebody. I'm not sure how much Tuvalu make with it though.
Tk
So use dk.yahoo.com
The com on the end would be pointless (it would be a subdomain of yahoo). It would be more likely to be either dk.yahoo, dk.com.yahoo (if dk had a com underneath) or com.yahoo.dk
Basically use old-style JANET address, which do put the tld first.
Tk
An online survey of more than 3,500 users who saw the ads found that just 28% said they were annoying.
That's almost a third of those surveyed found the advertisments annoying. Who would want to piss off a third of thier users?
And how do they count the number of users so annoyed that they go off the site and don't bother filling in the survey?
Tk