Let's not forget that free speech unchecked led the continent to ruin in the 1930s/40s.
Actually - and we should NEVER forget, it was 5.7 million Jews, and about 13.5 million Europeans in Total. The holocaust was truly awful, but it is still only a part of the true evil that Germany protracted in the 1930's and 1940's. (you can add in another 10 million if you want to include the American, and Pacific related deaths which Germany is either directly or indirectly responsible for)
Having spent some time living in Germany, and more than a little touched by the horrific things the Nazis did myself, let me point out that freedom of speech in the 1930 and 1940's did NOT do that.
It was simply a streak of evil that ran through the Axis, and one that is still not fully resolved today. That streak was exploited by the DDR for example - freedom of speech was not something East Germans knew about, but murder, torture and discrimination were still common right up to 1989.
Today Nazism is rampant in the former Eastern German states (nearly 1.8 million votes at the last election) and the current policy on banning free speech in Germany disguises what a truly significant and growing problem it really is.
Laws like this make it clear that Europe has learned NOTHING from the lessons of the Nazis or Stalin.
Most of the countries pushing for this are, in fact, the countries that were indeed run by Nazis or Stalin - interestingly the UK and many of the Scandinavian countries are completely opposed to it.
hate will grow as a result. This is a common human trait : when something is forbidden, people are attracted by it. Just ask any teenager smoking a cigarette in hiding.
That's exactly what is happening. Germany is one of the countries where hate speech is prohibited. Neo-Nazism in Germany is growing stronger every day - but it's hidden from Government view by being restricted. Thus Government thinks it isn't as serious a problem as it really is.
I agree, I found Wordpress very easy to install, and it's easy to change templates and settings.
I also use their free online blogs too, and they're the best there is in my opinion (doesn't run Adsense of course - but I see that as an advantage, cos Adsense is responsible for more blackhat SEO crap than anything else.). I was a bit puzzled when Blogger came out of Beta, because it feels less stable and has less features than Wordpress - Blogger seems more like a beta than anything else Google has out there.
Joomla itself I found fine, it's well documented. However, I've had various issues with Joomla components. Usually these come down to not so much the actual coding, but the documentation. It seems to me that the majority of Joomla developers are from central Europe, and that English isn't their first or even second language. So most of the documentation is written in language that is very close to - but not quite - English. Far enough away to make it very very difficult for a native English speaker to understand.
phpBB I gave up on - it was far too messy and fiddly. I'm finding the new Fireboard BB for Joomla to be pretty good so far.
You, Sir, have missed the point. Blogs aren't about writing new and interesting ideas, they're about linking to and excerpting from other blogs, thereby getting a higher ranking at Technorati.
Ah, if only that was not sooo true. Of course this isn't the fault of (most) Bloggers, nor of Technorati - fundamentally this is a Google flavored problem. In the days before Google it was meta-tag spamming. Now that we have Web 2.0 (whatever that may be) we have link spam, and tag spam.
For my own blog I try to avoid doing anything like that - however I am conscious that I do sometimes edit a subject line to make it more search engine friendly, even though the original was more poetic. If it helps, it makes me feel like a cheap whore when I do it. Incidentally - does anyone ever visit Technorati who isn't actually a blogger themselves? Sometimes I think we are just all blogging at each other.
And these days it's harder and harder to find anything you want. We really need a new idea in Internet search (somehow... I know that's not easy). I think it would also be healthy for everyone if Google had stronger competition - I want to believe they are still not evil, but I'm finding it harder and harder to do so.
So... (of course, I will get modded down for this...doesn't make it less true)
I, for one, have never doubted that Wikipedia has a different motive from their stated objectives. Here you see further evidence of their "altruism".
To those of you who contributed to Wikipedia - did you expect that your work would be exploited for commercial gain, while you yourself will get nothing but nice karma. Oh, and incidentally this isn't this first time Wikipedia content has been sold - they've been flogging it to a variety of websites for many months now.
Wikipedia is a manipulative insidious organisation that's poisoning truth for profit. That's not a tin foil hat based statement. There's plenty of evidence.
Because the members are actors, they do not remain together touring and recording albums, but they get together from time to time for things like this.
Almost, but not quite. They do work together regularly as part of a large ensemble, just not as Spinal Tap. See for example: "The Mighty Wind", "Best In Show", "Waiting for Guffman", and recently "For Your Consideration"
I agree, the parent is valid criticism - not flamebait. Please mod parent up.
I too use TB. But honestly the only reason I do is because I have a certain sense of loyalty to Mozilla, and I want to believe that TB will be the app for mail.
However, I'm not sure how deluded that idea is. I converted to Firefox because it just was so intuitive as to the way I needed to browse. The extensions helped that even more. It was a night and day epiphany in browsing for me. It offered me more (much more) that I was getting with Safari and IE.
TB is a different story - it has less features than most of its competition. It is of little use in small business environment. It is slow, it is volatile, is even worse on a Mac, and I find the whole filter UI experience to be unintuitive and prohibitive. To work out strong filters on TB you need to pretty much sit down and plan with a piece of paper first. (and why no ability to filter out attachments?)
Extensions, and the choice of which, seem to be the least priority with TB. Seems that many of the extensions available are essentially adding features that are common in most other programs.
Sorry to bitch Mozilla chaps, I do intend to continue to use TB. I do think there's talented people at Mozilla and that TB's shortcomings are understood. I hope you get there in the end. You just have to understand that right now it's a frustrating piece of software. Extensions aren't going to that fix anytime soon.
They have significantly improved Firefox on the Mac as time goes on.
I found I had to be very dedicated to use Firefox 1.5 - that release just plain sucked, especially with regard to stability, favicon use, bookmarks, and I found the search bar crashed the app more often than not.
However, since v2.0 things have got better, it seems to be overall more stable and they have addressed the favicon issue up to a point. Bookmark control still leaves a lot to be desired. (Though that has room for improvement in the Windows version too - and I know that's being addressed for v3.0).
I seem to remember reading that for v2.0 they had a deliberate policy of a "Firefox look" across platforms, thus moved away from an OS X looking application. I'm not sure if that is the right decision. Firefox does look odd on a Mac. (And for the inevitable reply that says "but you can use a theme to make it look like OS X" - I'd rather not even try, themes can be very unstable and hog resources.)
It's a tough market - Safari is a great browser, the only real reason to use Firefox is the extensions (which is a great reason, and the one that keeps me loyal to the Fox. You'll only prise Flashblock and Adblock from my cold dead mouse hand)
I can't understand people who think that to find life on other planets we have to look for conditions similar to Earth.
I guess the simple reason is that people's imaginations have been constrained by TV budgets. Earthlike is cheaper to produce and design, being the reason why the aliens in ST TOS all kind of looked a bit Middle Eastern, and in ST TNG they all had funny foreheads.
Hi-rez imaging of the planet shows that there's already three Starbucks stores, a bridge project sponsored by Ted Stephens, and fourteen RIAA lawyers looking for copyright infringers.
10 out of 10 laws, good and bad, fail to take into account that these laws have no jurisdiction in other countries.
I know this isn't news to anyone on slashdot, but as an European it never ceases to amaze me how American lawyers and politicians are misguided in over-thinking their importance.
Pass dumb law in the US, and for the most part those of us outside your borders just point and laugh. The DMCA (as one example) is of no interest nor value to 90% of the World, and why it should be so absorbing to the other 10% is difficult to understand.
There's not really any such thing as a sensible Internet law. Since for a law to be sensible it needs to be internationally enforceable - there are no laws whatsoever that currently meet that criteria.
The only thing that going to work is adoption of something similar to International Marine Law.
Broadway musicals and opera need a more mythical story than Spiderman to work with.
Um, not sure if you are familiar with opera - the theater genre, as opposed to the browser. Mythical? While many of the best modern, baroque and classical operas from Monteverdi and Purcell onwards do have mythical themes, most of the works popularly shown today have far from mythical themes. La Boheme - for example (or "Rent" in it's even more dumbed down and mundane than the original form) is just a tragic love story. Nothing mythical about it. Nothing even very interesting about it. It's just one example, there are many more.
While I'm inclined to agree with you that, you know, a decent story would help considerably, the evidence - sadly - is that mythical just isn't as popular as love and tragedy to that audience.
In my opinion, the story of Peter Parker is complex convoluted high art compared with La Boheme. Not sure that's a good enough reason to put it on a theatre stage though.
If he tries to sue enough people, then they could band together and countersue as a class action suit. (assuming Canada has class-action lawsuits)
Conversely, he could garner support and create a class action of his own. After all, the number of people unjustly negatively affected by Wikipedia must be considerable, and those people are for the most part successful.
It amazes me that no-one's gone after Wikipedia in a big way before now, it's a site that has been begging for it for some time.
10 years ago during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Edinburgh, there was a real airship - (a Skyship, IIRC) brought in to patrol the skies for security reasons. Anyway, any airship pales into insignificance in contemporary Britain, where there are more than 4.5 million security cameras.
It's not so much that we have a totalitarian government (although, to a degree we have) we simply have a fat, lazy, apathetic population, who are fine as long as their reality shows are on TV.
If you don't like a airline that supports cell phone use, you are free to take your business elsewhere.
Who on earth modded you insightful for this statement? In theory maybe what you say is true, but in practice the world just doesn't work like that. In fact rather than insightful, I find your post arrogant and naive.
1. Since when have airlines (or any companies, in any industry) offered radically different services, unless there was a significant difference in price. If one of the does something, usually they all do it.
2. You are limited to route AND carrier. Sure, capital city to capital city you might get competition, outside of that... not so much choice, if any at all.
Take your business elsewhere? Yeah, sure - good luck with that...
Nice piece of (accidental?) portmanteau-ism! Symantec, is most surely bloathed.
Re:Don't Know What They're Spending it On
on
IT's Big Spenders
·
· Score: 1
Well, I can't fathom what Microsoft are spending $6.58 billion dollars on, especially with regard to Vista(!?)
Lobbying, marketing (including wholesale sock puppet purchases), legal fees, purchases of souls, fresh kittens for their grinders... just the usual stuff...
Yes, but my guess is that there are considerably more every day cases of auction fraud that do not get reported. So, I agree it's skewed, but in a way that under-reports the extent of the problem.
Even so, I don't believe Adobe has been convicted of (or charged with) illegally abusing their monopoly.
While that's true... Ask an Adobe customer whether they feel they be charged for Adobe abusing their monopoly and you'll get an affirmative answer.
It's about to get worse with CS3 too, it's split into Vista style packages so now you have to really pay a lot of money to get the programs you need to do business as a professional in the creative industry.
Probably the only exception to this is Premiere, cos few - if any - professionals use that. Otherwise, there's absolutely no alternative to Adobe products. (Yes, technically GIMP etc exists, but they aren't industry standard so professionals have no chance of using them.)
80% of my work is done on Adobe products and I really would like to change that.
It'll have to sift through the tags and descriptions put there by the uploader, or possibly contextual data from sites that later embed the clip.
Aha! There's the first point of failure for this tech then. Seems to me that much of the content on YouTube is already tag spammed. So even if it does contain a Captain Picard piece to camera from ST-TNG, it'll still be often tagged as "strip", "nude", "NSFW", "boobs", "booty" etc.
Come to think of it, there could be an upside to this filtering malarkey...
Slashdot Mirror
Having spent some time living in Germany, and more than a little touched by the horrific things the Nazis did myself, let me point out that freedom of speech in the 1930 and 1940's did NOT do that.
It was simply a streak of evil that ran through the Axis, and one that is still not fully resolved today. That streak was exploited by the DDR for example - freedom of speech was not something East Germans knew about, but murder, torture and discrimination were still common right up to 1989.
Today Nazism is rampant in the former Eastern German states (nearly 1.8 million votes at the last election) and the current policy on banning free speech in Germany disguises what a truly significant and growing problem it really is.
Sound familiar?
I agree, I found Wordpress very easy to install, and it's easy to change templates and settings.
I also use their free online blogs too, and they're the best there is in my opinion (doesn't run Adsense of course - but I see that as an advantage, cos Adsense is responsible for more blackhat SEO crap than anything else.). I was a bit puzzled when Blogger came out of Beta, because it feels less stable and has less features than Wordpress - Blogger seems more like a beta than anything else Google has out there.
Joomla itself I found fine, it's well documented. However, I've had various issues with Joomla components. Usually these come down to not so much the actual coding, but the documentation. It seems to me that the majority of Joomla developers are from central Europe, and that English isn't their first or even second language. So most of the documentation is written in language that is very close to - but not quite - English. Far enough away to make it very very difficult for a native English speaker to understand.
phpBB I gave up on - it was far too messy and fiddly. I'm finding the new Fireboard BB for Joomla to be pretty good so far.
For my own blog I try to avoid doing anything like that - however I am conscious that I do sometimes edit a subject line to make it more search engine friendly, even though the original was more poetic. If it helps, it makes me feel like a cheap whore when I do it. Incidentally - does anyone ever visit Technorati who isn't actually a blogger themselves? Sometimes I think we are just all blogging at each other.
And these days it's harder and harder to find anything you want. We really need a new idea in Internet search (somehow... I know that's not easy). I think it would also be healthy for everyone if Google had stronger competition - I want to believe they are still not evil, but I'm finding it harder and harder to do so.
So... (of course, I will get modded down for this...doesn't make it less true)
I, for one, have never doubted that Wikipedia has a different motive from their stated objectives. Here you see further evidence of their "altruism".
To those of you who contributed to Wikipedia - did you expect that your work would be exploited for commercial gain, while you yourself will get nothing but nice karma. Oh, and incidentally this isn't this first time Wikipedia content has been sold - they've been flogging it to a variety of websites for many months now.
Wikipedia is a manipulative insidious organisation that's poisoning truth for profit. That's not a tin foil hat based statement. There's plenty of evidence.
I agree, the parent is valid criticism - not flamebait. Please mod parent up.
I too use TB. But honestly the only reason I do is because I have a certain sense of loyalty to Mozilla, and I want to believe that TB will be the app for mail.
However, I'm not sure how deluded that idea is. I converted to Firefox because it just was so intuitive as to the way I needed to browse. The extensions helped that even more. It was a night and day epiphany in browsing for me. It offered me more (much more) that I was getting with Safari and IE.
TB is a different story - it has less features than most of its competition. It is of little use in small business environment. It is slow, it is volatile, is even worse on a Mac, and I find the whole filter UI experience to be unintuitive and prohibitive. To work out strong filters on TB you need to pretty much sit down and plan with a piece of paper first. (and why no ability to filter out attachments?)
Extensions, and the choice of which, seem to be the least priority with TB. Seems that many of the extensions available are essentially adding features that are common in most other programs.
Sorry to bitch Mozilla chaps, I do intend to continue to use TB. I do think there's talented people at Mozilla and that TB's shortcomings are understood. I hope you get there in the end. You just have to understand that right now it's a frustrating piece of software. Extensions aren't going to that fix anytime soon.
They have significantly improved Firefox on the Mac as time goes on.
I found I had to be very dedicated to use Firefox 1.5 - that release just plain sucked, especially with regard to stability, favicon use, bookmarks, and I found the search bar crashed the app more often than not.
However, since v2.0 things have got better, it seems to be overall more stable and they have addressed the favicon issue up to a point. Bookmark control still leaves a lot to be desired. (Though that has room for improvement in the Windows version too - and I know that's being addressed for v3.0).
I seem to remember reading that for v2.0 they had a deliberate policy of a "Firefox look" across platforms, thus moved away from an OS X looking application. I'm not sure if that is the right decision. Firefox does look odd on a Mac. (And for the inevitable reply that says "but you can use a theme to make it look like OS X" - I'd rather not even try, themes can be very unstable and hog resources.)
It's a tough market - Safari is a great browser, the only real reason to use Firefox is the extensions (which is a great reason, and the one that keeps me loyal to the Fox. You'll only prise Flashblock and Adblock from my cold dead mouse hand)
Dunno... you know, there are days when I look at MySpace and think, "today would be a good day for a cataclysm".
If sheeple aren't in the cycle, how do we get them in?
Pass dumb law in the US, and for the most part those of us outside your borders just point and laugh. The DMCA (as one example) is of no interest nor value to 90% of the World, and why it should be so absorbing to the other 10% is difficult to understand.
There's not really any such thing as a sensible Internet law. Since for a law to be sensible it needs to be internationally enforceable - there are no laws whatsoever that currently meet that criteria.
The only thing that going to work is adoption of something similar to International Marine Law.
In my opinion, the story of Peter Parker is complex convoluted high art compared with La Boheme. Not sure that's a good enough reason to put it on a theatre stage though.
It amazes me that no-one's gone after Wikipedia in a big way before now, it's a site that has been begging for it for some time.
Is that the entrance to one of the series of tubes?
This isn't new.
10 years ago during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Edinburgh, there was a real airship - (a Skyship, IIRC) brought in to patrol the skies for security reasons. Anyway, any airship pales into insignificance in contemporary Britain, where there are more than 4.5 million security cameras.
It's not so much that we have a totalitarian government (although, to a degree we have) we simply have a fat, lazy, apathetic population, who are fine as long as their reality shows are on TV.
1. Since when have airlines (or any companies, in any industry) offered radically different services, unless there was a significant difference in price. If one of the does something, usually they all do it.
2. You are limited to route AND carrier. Sure, capital city to capital city you might get competition, outside of that... not so much choice, if any at all.
Take your business elsewhere? Yeah, sure - good luck with that...
Bloathed - Bloated and loathed?
Nice piece of (accidental?) portmanteau-ism! Symantec, is most surely bloathed.
Can they be made really small?
Won't anyone think of the bees?
Yes, but my guess is that there are considerably more every day cases of auction fraud that do not get reported. So, I agree it's skewed, but in a way that under-reports the extent of the problem.
It's about to get worse with CS3 too, it's split into Vista style packages so now you have to really pay a lot of money to get the programs you need to do business as a professional in the creative industry.
Probably the only exception to this is Premiere, cos few - if any - professionals use that. Otherwise, there's absolutely no alternative to Adobe products. (Yes, technically GIMP etc exists, but they aren't industry standard so professionals have no chance of using them.)
80% of my work is done on Adobe products and I really would like to change that.
Come to think of it, there could be an upside to this filtering malarkey...