Loading the file basically consists of loading a series of instructions and executing them. Now THAT sounds like a good idea!
I'm sorry, but how does this differ from any other vector-based graphics file format? Of course it's the instructions for how to draw the item. Of course they are executed. What else would you want them to do?
This is also how Postscript and PDF work. Actually post script is more than simple instructions, it is actually a programming language. This is part of why Apple/NeXT chose to use PDF for their native graphic format on OS X, rather than PS as they used for NeXTStep. One of their concerns was, theoretically, printing a file could execute code to do something nasty like reformatted your HD. The commands the PDF contains have more limited access to the environment.
This is also how the new MS Avalon (I think I've got the right code name) drawing engine works.
So the moral of the story is not that vector-, or instruction-based graphics formats are bad, but that only a limited set of commands is needed, along with some good sanity checks.
In Canada, just as in the US, the right to freedom of speech is not absolute. As the saying goes, "you have no constitutional right to yell fire in a crowded theatre."
The right to freedom of speech (or in this case, probably, more accurately, freedom of the press) is balanced, here, against the rights of an accused to a fair trial. And Canada has chosen a different balancing point than the US in this issue.
No one is being prevented from attending, no one is being prevented from talking about it, or writing to each other about it. The press are fully able to attend the inquiry. The only limitation is to hold off publishing/broadcasting about it until the trial has concluded.
This is another area where the difference between "Peace, Order and Good Government" and "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" lead to differences between the countries.
Now, if you wanted to jump on Canada for censorship, then there's plenty of material to choose from -- Ministirial "security certificates" through which a foreigner can be detained, indefiniately, on a Minister's say-so is a good one. Althouh there is judicial review, frequently neither the accused, nor his counsel, will get to hear the meat of the case against him.
So if you want to complain about Canadian government censorship, go ahead, but choose a different case.
Oh, yeah, and we still look down our nose at the US.
There is currently a royal inquiry going on into some mishandling of federal advertisement contracts. A royal inquiry is similar to congressional hearings in the US, except this one is not lead by congressmen, but by a retired judge. When finished he gets to report back to parliament on his findings.
Now, some of the people subpeonaed to give testimony at the inquiry are also being charged with crimes related to the events under discussion. They will go to court in the next several months on those charges.
The publication ban was put in place to ensure things that these people say at the inquiry will not affect their chances of a fair jury trial. (Compare this to the baseball hearings where they players wanted immunity for their testimony, for many of the same reasons.)
The ban will be ended after the jury has been sequestered, at which all that was said during the ban can be made public.
Note that this is only a publication ban -- it doesn't prevent people from actually going to the hearings to hear for themselves; it just attempts to limit what the jury pool will hear outside of the court case.
Publication bans are common in Canada, and typically have a similar duration and purpose -- to prevent the jury on high profile cases from getting the "facts" of the case from anywhere but the courtroom. The media typically fight the ban, and often win certain relaxations on the ban (you can report the events, but not identify the person giving testimony, etc.). In this case, Judge Gomery has said the media can ask at the end of each day what of that day's testimony can be released.
I'm generally in favour of such time limited bans, since they are designed to help ensure a fair trial. However, it looks like maintaining such bans is getting more and more difficult in the era of the Internet. Other cases where Canadian publication bans have been breached by American organizations include the Air India case (IIRC), and the Paul Bernardo case.
Clearly a specification error on the customer's behalf. You should have requested 8 (or so) fluid ounces of liquid caffeine-bearing (I assume!) sustenance produced by passing hot water through the ground, blended beans of particular coffee tree species, while supported in a paper (or copper, or gold. Again, assumptions!) filter.
Aha! I recognize you! You must be one of those marketing droids who can't tell the difference between specification and design.
Whether I decide to implement "coffee" by passing hot water through ground beans, or by extracting it from the sweat glands of the Amazonian coffee-fish is my decision as the architect/implementer. All you get to do is tell me what you want, not how I have to make it for you.
I have a little brother who is now 18 and still can not read or do basic math. At an early age he was diagnosed with a level 10 mental handicap.
He was diagnosed at an early age, and now you are looking for technological tools? I would expect that your brother's teachers, doctors, and social workers and your family's support groups would have suggested some tools to you by now if they thought they might be useful.
I have to agree with the majority of the other posters --
you haven't given us enough to go on, and
don't think that technology can solve every issue
Are you really expecting a better quality of answer from/. than from his existing support network? On the other hand, (and especially since we don't know the rest of the story) I suppose you should get some point for trying.
Yes we knew it was coming, but didn't know when, or how.
Some kind of spoiler alert would have been nice. Although I'm not sure how to do that. What is the headline? What's the lead paragraph? How do you attract people to the article without letting them know that tonight is the night?
Well, I've got two hours to think about answers to those questions (or is it questions for those answers?) before it airs.
The US is very large and its population is spread much more thin than in Asia.
Which might explain whey those Asian countries rank so high, but...
It's really hard for sparsely populated countries like the US to compete against those densely packed countries... like Canada.
(It is interesting to note that Canada also has much higher Cable usage rates than the US. I'm not sure if the high Canadian broadband rate is a result of this, or if both are effect of some other cause.)
I could fill this up on a backpacking expedition or vacation.
Actually having all that music along would be great for backpacking/camping... for the first 15 hours. After the battery runs out, well, I guess the ear buds look kinda like marshmellows, but I doubt they taste as good, so what are you going to do with that dead, and I mean dead, weight?
Actually, I just checked: Sony has 73 stores across Canada, heavily weighted to Vancouver and Toronto areas but also in medium sized communities like Sudbury and Barrie.
My impression is that the prices aren't any better than anywhere else (and actually you may be paying more, 'cause you're buying the "high-end" Sony brand, from a "high-end" Sony store).
However, they are sexy stores, and I have to go in every time I walk by -- that 60" flat screen showing Finding Nemo is just damn cute. I think the reason they work, is the impulse buyer (not a 60" screen, but maybe a set of headphones, or "hey, I'm here, might as well get that PDA"), and the fact that you can walk out of there with whatever you wanted, and don't have to wait for it to be built and shipped.
What common standards for a recount could there be? I thought 1, 2, 3, 4... was a pretty good, generally agreed upon standard. What other option is there? Something like "1, 2, 3... ooh, but the other guy is already at 8, hmm, ah, 12, yeah, 12, 13,..."
If the system used is open such different opinions of how to count (which I thought any kindergarten kid could handle), then perhaps you need to look at a new system.
Now I understand that there is some room for interpretation. For example, several years ago when Quebec held a so-called referendum (technically it was a plebicite, since they only asked people's preference and weren't bound by the results) to separate from the Rest of Canada, there was an unusual number of ballots from one side originally counted as spoiled, but reclassified during the recount. But really, when you start talking about "by every common standard" I just have to wonder what went wrong.
The other advantage of launching from south east US, is that if anything goes wrong, the craft is likely to crash into the ocean, rather than a populated area.
Although devoid of oceans, Saskatchewan is fortunately also devoid of populated areas too.
True enough but this is a traffic ticket to Bill Gates. Not a traffic ticket to you and me.
No actually it's pretty close to a traffic ticket for us mortals. If I compare a very stiff traffic ticket around here as a fraction of my annual income, is about the same as a US$600M fine on their US$32,000M annual income (2%).
Now I admit, I'm not going to declare bankruptcy over a single speeding ticket, but it is going to make me slow down, and I'll be a bit more careful next time. (I'll especially be careful around the damn corner they got me on/trying to bundle in the EU.)
Does that sound like something that would discuss issues like software licenses? No, it sounds like a legal soap opera. I don't think this will outlast a season
As much as we all hate to admit it, something that sounds like a legal soap opera has a much better chance of outlasting the season than something discussing software licences.
Surprisingly, whenever an icon was added to the desktop there was an outbreak of confusion and mass hysteria, and more training was required.
Icons causing mass hysteria? In Rome? Makes sense, I suppose -- last time that happened, we ended up with the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.
To fill Canadian content a "pop" stations have no choice but to add Rush and Celine Dion to it's program.
First off, it's not tax breaks -- CanCon is a condition of their broadcast license. Secondly, the CBC is a poor example since a large part of its mandate as the government public broadcaster is to support Canadian culture.
Finally... Come on, get serious for a second. There is more to Canadian music than Rush and Celine Dion.
A Canadian "true rock" station can also choose to fill it's CanCon with Barenaked Ladies, Nelly Furtado, Avril Lavigne, Big Sugar, Wide Mouth Mason, Matthew Good, Nickelback, Our Lady Peace, Great Big Sea, Sarah McLachlan, Sloan, Tal Bachman (and father Randy of BTO), Tea Party, Tragically Hip, Alanis Morissette, Bif Naked and more. And that's without having to go back into the "oldies" catalogue.
And plenty of time is still left for to generic American trash like Brittany - ooh, ooh, ooh, if only we didn't have CanCon rules, we could listen to even more of her, Christina, and NSync.
On the othe hand, I would like to apologize for all Canadians for foisting Anne Murray onto an unsuspecting world.
Maybe theyll change their domain name like M$ did to bastards.sco.com instead of sco.com/bastards
I wouldn't recommend that they do that.
I understand that tricks like that are illegal under patent law, and will attract the attention of Nizza's lawyers.
Ooooooh, hmmmm. wait a second, maybe somebody should recommend this to SCO. The thought of them duking it out over patent infringement is just to delicious to contemplate.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but how does this differ from any other vector-based graphics file format? Of course it's the instructions for how to draw the item. Of course they are executed. What else would you want them to do?
This is also how Postscript and PDF work. Actually post script is more than simple instructions, it is actually a programming language. This is part of why Apple/NeXT chose to use PDF for their native graphic format on OS X, rather than PS as they used for NeXTStep. One of their concerns was, theoretically, printing a file could execute code to do something nasty like reformatted your HD. The commands the PDF contains have more limited access to the environment.
This is also how the new MS Avalon (I think I've got the right code name) drawing engine works.
So the moral of the story is not that vector-, or instruction-based graphics formats are bad, but that only a limited set of commands is needed, along with some good sanity checks.
E.
and by "new," I assume, you mean "knew."
E.
Oh, man. Wait 'til the **AA hears about this.
(Just wanted to make sure this discussion remained firmly in /. territory, and didn't go and get all serious and religious on everybody.)
E.
E.
Well, it seems to be working for the US, so why shouldn't they give it a try? E.
The right to freedom of speech (or in this case, probably, more accurately, freedom of the press) is balanced, here, against the rights of an accused to a fair trial. And Canada has chosen a different balancing point than the US in this issue.
No one is being prevented from attending, no one is being prevented from talking about it, or writing to each other about it. The press are fully able to attend the inquiry. The only limitation is to hold off publishing/broadcasting about it until the trial has concluded.
This is another area where the difference between "Peace, Order and Good Government" and "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" lead to differences between the countries.
Now, if you wanted to jump on Canada for censorship, then there's plenty of material to choose from -- Ministirial "security certificates" through which a foreigner can be detained, indefiniately, on a Minister's say-so is a good one. Althouh there is judicial review, frequently neither the accused, nor his counsel, will get to hear the meat of the case against him.
So if you want to complain about Canadian government censorship, go ahead, but choose a different case.
Oh, yeah, and we still look down our nose at the US.
E.
There is currently a royal inquiry going on into some mishandling of federal advertisement contracts. A royal inquiry is similar to congressional hearings in the US, except this one is not lead by congressmen, but by a retired judge. When finished he gets to report back to parliament on his findings.
Now, some of the people subpeonaed to give testimony at the inquiry are also being charged with crimes related to the events under discussion. They will go to court in the next several months on those charges.
The publication ban was put in place to ensure things that these people say at the inquiry will not affect their chances of a fair jury trial. (Compare this to the baseball hearings where they players wanted immunity for their testimony, for many of the same reasons.) The ban will be ended after the jury has been sequestered, at which all that was said during the ban can be made public.
Note that this is only a publication ban -- it doesn't prevent people from actually going to the hearings to hear for themselves; it just attempts to limit what the jury pool will hear outside of the court case.
Publication bans are common in Canada, and typically have a similar duration and purpose -- to prevent the jury on high profile cases from getting the "facts" of the case from anywhere but the courtroom. The media typically fight the ban, and often win certain relaxations on the ban (you can report the events, but not identify the person giving testimony, etc.). In this case, Judge Gomery has said the media can ask at the end of each day what of that day's testimony can be released.
I'm generally in favour of such time limited bans, since they are designed to help ensure a fair trial. However, it looks like maintaining such bans is getting more and more difficult in the era of the Internet. Other cases where Canadian publication bans have been breached by American organizations include the Air India case (IIRC), and the Paul Bernardo case.
E.
Aha! I recognize you! You must be one of those marketing droids who can't tell the difference between specification and design.
Whether I decide to implement "coffee" by passing hot water through ground beans, or by extracting it from the sweat glands of the Amazonian coffee-fish is my decision as the architect/implementer. All you get to do is tell me what you want, not how I have to make it for you.
E.
The lack of editorializing is one of the ways you can tell blogs apart from mainstream media such as Fox News.
Oh wait, I mean...
E.
Don't you mean "As if a million voices cried out dans la agonie"? Non?
He was diagnosed at an early age, and now you are looking for technological tools? I would expect that your brother's teachers, doctors, and social workers and your family's support groups would have suggested some tools to you by now if they thought they might be useful.
I have to agree with the majority of the other posters --
you haven't given us enough to go on, and
don't think that technology can solve every issue
Are you really expecting a better quality of answer from /. than from his existing support network? On the other hand, (and especially since we don't know the rest of the story) I suppose you should get some point for trying.
E.
Yes we knew it was coming, but didn't know when, or how.
Some kind of spoiler alert would have been nice. Although I'm not sure how to do that. What is the headline? What's the lead paragraph? How do you attract people to the article without letting them know that tonight is the night?
Well, I've got two hours to think about answers to those questions (or is it questions for those answers?) before it airs.
Which might explain whey those Asian countries rank so high, but...
It's really hard for sparsely populated countries like the US to compete against those densely packed countries... like Canada.
(It is interesting to note that Canada also has much higher Cable usage rates than the US. I'm not sure if the high Canadian broadband rate is a result of this, or if both are effect of some other cause.)
E.
Actually, it's a sad day for 100% of the country -- the only thing is, 52% don't realize it yet.
Actually having all that music along would be great for backpacking/camping... for the first 15 hours. After the battery runs out, well, I guess the ear buds look kinda like marshmellows, but I doubt they taste as good, so what are you going to do with that dead, and I mean dead, weight?
My impression is that the prices aren't any better than anywhere else (and actually you may be paying more, 'cause you're buying the "high-end" Sony brand, from a "high-end" Sony store).
However, they are sexy stores, and I have to go in every time I walk by -- that 60" flat screen showing Finding Nemo is just damn cute. I think the reason they work, is the impulse buyer (not a 60" screen, but maybe a set of headphones, or "hey, I'm here, might as well get that PDA"), and the fact that you can walk out of there with whatever you wanted, and don't have to wait for it to be built and shipped.
I don't understand American elections.
What common standards for a recount could there be? I thought 1, 2, 3, 4... was a pretty good, generally agreed upon standard. What other option is there? Something like "1, 2, 3 ... ooh, but the other guy is already at 8, hmm, ah, 12, yeah, 12, 13, ..."
If the system used is open such different opinions of how to count (which I thought any kindergarten kid could handle), then perhaps you need to look at a new system.
Now I understand that there is some room for interpretation. For example, several years ago when Quebec held a so-called referendum (technically it was a plebicite, since they only asked people's preference and weren't bound by the results) to separate from the Rest of Canada, there was an unusual number of ballots from one side originally counted as spoiled, but reclassified during the recount. But really, when you start talking about "by every common standard" I just have to wonder what went wrong.
E.
Doesn't that just deserve a +1, Ironic?
E.
Although devoid of oceans, Saskatchewan is fortunately also devoid of populated areas too.
E.
No actually it's pretty close to a traffic ticket for us mortals. If I compare a very stiff traffic ticket around here as a fraction of my annual income, is about the same as a US$600M fine on their US$32,000M annual income (2%).
Now I admit, I'm not going to declare bankruptcy over a single speeding ticket, but it is going to make me slow down, and I'll be a bit more careful next time. (I'll especially be careful around the damn corner they got me on/trying to bundle in the EU.)
E.
As much as we all hate to admit it, something that sounds like a legal soap opera has a much better chance of outlasting the season than something discussing software licences.
E.
Icons causing mass hysteria? In Rome? Makes sense, I suppose -- last time that happened, we ended up with the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.
E.
First off, it's not tax breaks -- CanCon is a condition of their broadcast license. Secondly, the CBC is a poor example since a large part of its mandate as the government public broadcaster is to support Canadian culture.
Finally... Come on, get serious for a second. There is more to Canadian music than Rush and Celine Dion.
A Canadian "true rock" station can also choose to fill it's CanCon with Barenaked Ladies, Nelly Furtado, Avril Lavigne, Big Sugar, Wide Mouth Mason, Matthew Good, Nickelback, Our Lady Peace, Great Big Sea, Sarah McLachlan, Sloan, Tal Bachman (and father Randy of BTO), Tea Party, Tragically Hip, Alanis Morissette, Bif Naked and more. And that's without having to go back into the "oldies" catalogue.
And plenty of time is still left for to generic American trash like Brittany - ooh, ooh, ooh, if only we didn't have CanCon rules, we could listen to even more of her, Christina, and NSync.
On the othe hand, I would like to apologize for all Canadians for foisting Anne Murray onto an unsuspecting world.
E.
Don't Panic.
E.
I wouldn't recommend that they do that.
I understand that tricks like that are illegal under patent law, and will attract the attention of Nizza's lawyers.
Ooooooh, hmmmm. wait a second, maybe somebody should recommend this to SCO. The thought of them duking it out over patent infringement is just to delicious to contemplate.
Help me...who do I cheer for?
E.