Now here's a thought for people who want to visit Cuba, but still feel a bit guilty because of its repression. Take a bunch of USB sticks with you - they can be empty if you don't want to take any risks. Or maybe some flash memory, so you can claim it's for your camera, and a card reader. Hand them out to people there. And maybe you've made a small contribution to improving the human rights situation there...
large, unnamed NGOs like the UN Sorry to nitpick, but the UN is not an NGO. "NGO" stands for non-governmental organizations and examples of NGOs are Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, Cordaid, the International Red Cross etc., which operate independently from governments. The UN is very much a governmental organization, since it is composed of member states represented by their governments - in some circles they refer to these kinds of organizations (UN, NATO, EU, OSCE, OAS, ASEAN) as IGOs or international governmental organizations.
However, as people like to say, even bad data is better than no data. As some of the previous posters have said, no data may be preferable to bad data in many cases as well. However, in the cases that you mentioned I think the bad data may also be interesting for a completely different analysis: to see how governments believe they have to manipulate their data to look as good as possible to IGOs and NGOs. When you study this, you can adjust practices, standards and supervisory mechanisms in those organisations to make it more difficult for unreliable governments to rig the system.
"You know, there are real dictators in the world, who are truly evil, and are working to oppress their people."
The removal of powers from elected parliaments, by devious method, to an unelected and undemocratic executive, Council of ministers, which holds its meetings in secret, unelected commissioners, and a very weak parliament that is bought and paid for by the latter.
Too bad that your prejudice has kept you from keeping track of recent developments. This criticism has been levelled at the EU for a long time and was to an extent justified, but guess what? They have actually done something about it. The European Parliament, which is directly elected and no longer as weak as it used to be, has received new powers with every treaty revision since 1992 and plays an integral role in EU law-making. Meetings of the Council of Ministers are not secret, as you can see on its website, which states: "All Council deliberations under the co-decision procedure are open to the public. The Council's first deliberations on legislative acts other than those adopted by co-decision are open to the public. The Council regularly holds public debates on important issues affecting the interests of the Union and its citizens, as well as policy debates on the Council's programmes." FYI, the co-decision procedure is the most commonly used procedure in EU legislation. Granted, institutional reform is slow, the EU still has work to do in terms of its accountability and communication with citizens, but that hardly makes it an evil oppressive dictatorship, which is the point that you were trying to make. Apart from Belarus, you will indeed not find oppressive dictatorships in Europe at this time, and the EU was established precisely to keep it this way, which brings me to your next point.
Yes, Europe has a fine tradition historically to be able to ignore history and repeat past mistakes yet again. Europe's ability for arrogance is only matched by its fantastic ability for creating evil, two world wars, and hundreds of millions of dead. How could I possibly not trust a European elite running out of control, and with a massive cavern where democratic due process should exist, but doesn't.
Please explain first who you mean by "Europe" and who exactly is being "arrogant". Is it Britain, Germany, Russia, France, Greece, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Sweden? Does every single one of this country have a "fine tradition to be able to ignore history and repeat past mistakes"? Last time I checked, Germans are still making up for the crimes of the nazis and not exactly preparing a second Holocaust. The Scandinavians no longer send out marauding bands of pirates to rob frightened people in coastal places. In Spain acknowledgment is slowly growing for the abuses and oppression of the Franco dictatorship, even on the political right. Italy does not seem eager to resurrect the Roman Empire. You may note that none of these examples has anything to do with the other, which illustrates that you can't generalise across an entire continent. I could even go on and argue that the one country which seemed unable to learn from history (notably European colonial history) in the last few years, with an elite running out of control causing millions of dead, does not lie in Europe, but I don't want to ignite another flamewar.
In any case, as I mentioned before, the EU was established to prevent repetition of the mistakes of the past. It has been rather successful at that, considering that France and Germany are unlikely to go to war with each other at any point in the near future. It obviously does not have a perfect record, as was shown in the fall of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Still, I fail to see how you can see the current European elite as being "out of control" or suggest that it will cause millions of people to die any time soon.
This same EU that's failed 13 years of account audits?
First of all, this case is not about Microsoft Office, but about bundling of Windows Media Player with Windows and about interoperability between Microsoft server systems and other servers. Second, the rationale behind anti-trust laws (both in the US and the EU in fact, it's just that in the case of Microsoft the EU has been more persistent in pursuing the company) is that if a player on the market achieves a certain dominance, regulators need to intervene to safeguard competition. So in theory, Microsoft could one day be forced to make MS Office interoperable if it had achieved such a dominance on the market that it stifled competition. That is what happened with the server protocols - if MS were one of many players, it would be perfectly alright for it to keep its protocols closed and not share information. But because it has such a dominant position, it is forced to share some of its proprietary information for the common good.
Indeed. The fine is a percentage of the turnover of the company in question (small companies get relatively small fines, large companies relatively large - hence the size of the MS fine). It flows into the EU budget, which is also composed of contributions by EU member states. So basically, the fine adds 899 billion euros to the balance, which means that the member states need to pay less.
True, but the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights has not achieved the status of a treaty yet and will only do so once the current reform treaty has been ratified, since it incorporates the Charter. See here for more information. By the way, ALL EU member states have to accept EU treaties as formal law with direct vertical application, even if they don't normally do so with treaties (like the Netherlands does). At the European Court of Justice stated back in the sixties, this is inherent to the European legal order which was created by the establishment of what later became the EU.
That's a a very good and important point. However, the original document also refers to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which obviously is an EU document, albeit without any formal status (the Convention is a treaty). The Charter will become legally binding if the current Reform Treaty enters into force though, although the UK has opted out of it. It also has a provision on privacy.
Furthermore, the European Commission does have to ensure that anything it does complies with the Convention, since all member states of the EU are party to it. This means that any biometric ID checks and other things they have in store for the future need to comply to the Convention and the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights. This basically means that any measures need to be necessary and proportional to their aim, i.e. not infringe on people's right to privacy more than strictly necessary.
I'm not sure what the purpose of this article is other than to demonstrate possible use for the fonts. I do think the author has some trouble with the i key on his keyboard. Georgia is called "Georga" and Lucida is called "Lucidia"...
It's also not even complete. I just found a more comprehensive overview of all the new Vista fonts here. I have to say that the fonts do not really look dramatically better than the ones that they are supposed to replace.
In the end, the real problem is not whoever ends up in the cast, it's with the writers: Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. They also wrote the screenplays for Transformers and The Legend of Zorro. Based on their performance there, you can expect an overlong story with too much plot, adolescent humour, and paying just enough lip-service to longtime fans for them only to notice shortly after viewing the film that they have allowed themselves to be violated in some very uncomfortable places. A reboot of Star Trek sounds exactly like the kind of project they would take on and unless they have learned a thing or two in recent years, they are just going to rape a franchise again.
They are going to speak. They hired Peter Cullen, the original voice of Optimus Prime, to perform his voice in the film, and for a while also had Frank Welker, the actor who voiced Megatron, to reprise his role (which he is still doing in the video game; you can hear it in some clips on the site). You can hear some voicework on the official movie site. Cullen sounds a bit older, but still very much like Prime. On the video game site, you can hear that Welker's voice has changed a bit, which may be the reason why he was dropped for Hugo Weaving, which means Agent Smith is going to voice Megatron (see the IMDb entry).
There's a clear strategy behind the trailers so far: they reveal more and more to keep old fans aching for more information, and this new information comes out bit by bit. And I guess they want to leave some things obscured so people actually go and see the movie...
Looks like nobody caught the reference, even though I would've posted if it wasn't already there - it was the first thing that came to mind when reading this. Anyway, it's a quote from Airplane II, uttered by, yes, William Shatner. Kind of gives away your age...
It depends on who the user is. The different rendering engines behave differently and had different behaviour and different dialogue boxes. The IE engine was made the default engine for a number of sites. As a result, the browser would not behave in a consistent manner. This is not a problem for anyone who is aware of the existence of different rendering engines (the same can be done in Firefox on Windows with the IE Tab extension), but it is for someone who wants an application that behaves consistently. Moreover, it effectively made Netscape 8 vulnerable to both Mozilla and IE security holes. I don't think they ever made their minds up at Netscape who exactly Netscape 8 was aimed at - some features were clearly aimed at power users, but they would be turned off by the lack of customasibility elsewhere. So it's understandable to call the decision a disaster.
The real irony here is that Internet Explorer had superior UI customization from version 4 - it allowed you to move the menu bar, the toolbar, put all of them on one line and determine the place of every single icon yourself. This is one of the reasons why IE4 was superior to Netscape 4. In Mozilla, the UI was dictated by clueless Netscape marketing people, as a result of which its developers were only able to implement toolbar customization in Phoenix. One could argue that toolbar customization is one of the few innovations that Firefox ows to IE, and Firefox still does not allow you to put the entire UI on one line the way used to. Now Microsoft has voluntarily removed one of the few remaining strengths of IE from version 7, and I have heard similar complaints from people who wonder what has happened to the UI that they were familiar with.
In that case, you were updating a version lower than 1.5.0.3. If there is no incremental patch, the updater reverts to downloading and executing the full installer. I just updated 1.5.0.3, and the file it downloaded was quite small.
Incidentally, Mozilla Thunderbird has also been updated to 1.5.0.4.
Slashdot Mirror
Now here's a thought for people who want to visit Cuba, but still feel a bit guilty because of its repression. Take a bunch of USB sticks with you - they can be empty if you don't want to take any risks. Or maybe some flash memory, so you can claim it's for your camera, and a card reader. Hand them out to people there. And maybe you've made a small contribution to improving the human rights situation there...
Is it that inconceivable that a country can have excellent healthcare but at the same time severely limit its people's political freedoms?
"You know, there are real dictators in the world, who are truly evil, and are working to oppress their people." The removal of powers from elected parliaments, by devious method, to an unelected and undemocratic executive, Council of ministers, which holds its meetings in secret, unelected commissioners, and a very weak parliament that is bought and paid for by the latter.
Too bad that your prejudice has kept you from keeping track of recent developments. This criticism has been levelled at the EU for a long time and was to an extent justified, but guess what? They have actually done something about it. The European Parliament, which is directly elected and no longer as weak as it used to be, has received new powers with every treaty revision since 1992 and plays an integral role in EU law-making. Meetings of the Council of Ministers are not secret, as you can see on its website, which states: "All Council deliberations under the co-decision procedure are open to the public. The Council's first deliberations on legislative acts other than those adopted by co-decision are open to the public. The Council regularly holds public debates on important issues affecting the interests of the Union and its citizens, as well as policy debates on the Council's programmes." FYI, the co-decision procedure is the most commonly used procedure in EU legislation. Granted, institutional reform is slow, the EU still has work to do in terms of its accountability and communication with citizens, but that hardly makes it an evil oppressive dictatorship, which is the point that you were trying to make. Apart from Belarus, you will indeed not find oppressive dictatorships in Europe at this time, and the EU was established precisely to keep it this way, which brings me to your next point.
Yes, Europe has a fine tradition historically to be able to ignore history and repeat past mistakes yet again. Europe's ability for arrogance is only matched by its fantastic ability for creating evil, two world wars, and hundreds of millions of dead. How could I possibly not trust a European elite running out of control, and with a massive cavern where democratic due process should exist, but doesn't.
Please explain first who you mean by "Europe" and who exactly is being "arrogant". Is it Britain, Germany, Russia, France, Greece, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Sweden? Does every single one of this country have a "fine tradition to be able to ignore history and repeat past mistakes"? Last time I checked, Germans are still making up for the crimes of the nazis and not exactly preparing a second Holocaust. The Scandinavians no longer send out marauding bands of pirates to rob frightened people in coastal places. In Spain acknowledgment is slowly growing for the abuses and oppression of the Franco dictatorship, even on the political right. Italy does not seem eager to resurrect the Roman Empire. You may note that none of these examples has anything to do with the other, which illustrates that you can't generalise across an entire continent. I could even go on and argue that the one country which seemed unable to learn from history (notably European colonial history) in the last few years, with an elite running out of control causing millions of dead, does not lie in Europe, but I don't want to ignite another flamewar. In any case, as I mentioned before, the EU was established to prevent repetition of the mistakes of the past. It has been rather successful at that, considering that France and Germany are unlikely to go to war with each other at any point in the near future. It obviously does not have a perfect record, as was shown in the fall of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Still, I fail to see how you can see the current European elite as being "out of control" or suggest that it will cause millions of people to die any time soon.
This same EU that's failed 13 years of account audits?
What does failing 13
First of all, this case is not about Microsoft Office, but about bundling of Windows Media Player with Windows and about interoperability between Microsoft server systems and other servers. Second, the rationale behind anti-trust laws (both in the US and the EU in fact, it's just that in the case of Microsoft the EU has been more persistent in pursuing the company) is that if a player on the market achieves a certain dominance, regulators need to intervene to safeguard competition. So in theory, Microsoft could one day be forced to make MS Office interoperable if it had achieved such a dominance on the market that it stifled competition. That is what happened with the server protocols - if MS were one of many players, it would be perfectly alright for it to keep its protocols closed and not share information. But because it has such a dominant position, it is forced to share some of its proprietary information for the common good.
Indeed. The fine is a percentage of the turnover of the company in question (small companies get relatively small fines, large companies relatively large - hence the size of the MS fine). It flows into the EU budget, which is also composed of contributions by EU member states. So basically, the fine adds 899 billion euros to the balance, which means that the member states need to pay less.
True, but the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights has not achieved the status of a treaty yet and will only do so once the current reform treaty has been ratified, since it incorporates the Charter. See here for more information. By the way, ALL EU member states have to accept EU treaties as formal law with direct vertical application, even if they don't normally do so with treaties (like the Netherlands does). At the European Court of Justice stated back in the sixties, this is inherent to the European legal order which was created by the establishment of what later became the EU.
That's a a very good and important point. However, the original document also refers to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which obviously is an EU document, albeit without any formal status (the Convention is a treaty). The Charter will become legally binding if the current Reform Treaty enters into force though, although the UK has opted out of it. It also has a provision on privacy. Furthermore, the European Commission does have to ensure that anything it does complies with the Convention, since all member states of the EU are party to it. This means that any biometric ID checks and other things they have in store for the future need to comply to the Convention and the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights. This basically means that any measures need to be necessary and proportional to their aim, i.e. not infringe on people's right to privacy more than strictly necessary.
No, it's the other way around. Ha! Now you really can't tell my preferences, right?
Nigel Tufnel: Look... still has the old tag on, never even played it.
Marty DiBergi: [points his finger] You've never played...?
Nigel Tufnel: Don't touch it!
Marty DiBergi: We'll I wasn't going to touch it, I was just pointing at it.
Nigel Tufnel: Well... don't point! It can't be played.
Marty DiBergi: Don't point, okay. Can I look at it?
Nigel Tufnel: No. no. That's it, you've seen enough of that one.
I'm not sure what the purpose of this article is other than to demonstrate possible use for the fonts. I do think the author has some trouble with the i key on his keyboard. Georgia is called "Georga" and Lucida is called "Lucidia"... It's also not even complete. I just found a more comprehensive overview of all the new Vista fonts here. I have to say that the fonts do not really look dramatically better than the ones that they are supposed to replace.
In the end, the real problem is not whoever ends up in the cast, it's with the writers: Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. They also wrote the screenplays for Transformers and The Legend of Zorro. Based on their performance there, you can expect an overlong story with too much plot, adolescent humour, and paying just enough lip-service to longtime fans for them only to notice shortly after viewing the film that they have allowed themselves to be violated in some very uncomfortable places. A reboot of Star Trek sounds exactly like the kind of project they would take on and unless they have learned a thing or two in recent years, they are just going to rape a franchise again.
You're right, but I'm skeptical that this will decrease the number of people who understand what the submitter intended to say.
They are going to speak. They hired Peter Cullen, the original voice of Optimus Prime, to perform his voice in the film, and for a while also had Frank Welker, the actor who voiced Megatron, to reprise his role (which he is still doing in the video game; you can hear it in some clips on the site). You can hear some voicework on the official movie site. Cullen sounds a bit older, but still very much like Prime. On the video game site, you can hear that Welker's voice has changed a bit, which may be the reason why he was dropped for Hugo Weaving, which means Agent Smith is going to voice Megatron (see the IMDb entry).
There's a clear strategy behind the trailers so far: they reveal more and more to keep old fans aching for more information, and this new information comes out bit by bit. And I guess they want to leave some things obscured so people actually go and see the movie...
Looks like nobody caught the reference, even though I would've posted if it wasn't already there - it was the first thing that came to mind when reading this. Anyway, it's a quote from Airplane II, uttered by, yes, William Shatner. Kind of gives away your age...
Right-click message, "mark as read", done. Unless you're on an Apple, of course...
Thanks! Maybe by posting this, now I can get modded informative for no particular, real or special reason.
It depends on who the user is. The different rendering engines behave differently and had different behaviour and different dialogue boxes. The IE engine was made the default engine for a number of sites. As a result, the browser would not behave in a consistent manner. This is not a problem for anyone who is aware of the existence of different rendering engines (the same can be done in Firefox on Windows with the IE Tab extension), but it is for someone who wants an application that behaves consistently. Moreover, it effectively made Netscape 8 vulnerable to both Mozilla and IE security holes. I don't think they ever made their minds up at Netscape who exactly Netscape 8 was aimed at - some features were clearly aimed at power users, but they would be turned off by the lack of customasibility elsewhere. So it's understandable to call the decision a disaster.
The installer allows you to choose which components to install, so you can uncheck Mail & News.
The real irony here is that Internet Explorer had superior UI customization from version 4 - it allowed you to move the menu bar, the toolbar, put all of them on one line and determine the place of every single icon yourself. This is one of the reasons why IE4 was superior to Netscape 4. In Mozilla, the UI was dictated by clueless Netscape marketing people, as a result of which its developers were only able to implement toolbar customization in Phoenix. One could argue that toolbar customization is one of the few innovations that Firefox ows to IE, and Firefox still does not allow you to put the entire UI on one line the way used to. Now Microsoft has voluntarily removed one of the few remaining strengths of IE from version 7, and I have heard similar complaints from people who wonder what has happened to the UI that they were familiar with.
In that case, you were updating a version lower than 1.5.0.3. If there is no incremental patch, the updater reverts to downloading and executing the full installer. I just updated 1.5.0.3, and the file it downloaded was quite small. Incidentally, Mozilla Thunderbird has also been updated to 1.5.0.4.
Mod parent up. He's correct. "Doit" doesn't mean anything in Dutch.