2) Did you know that according to the Brazilian constitution you can't be sentenced to more 30 years in jail for anything? Serial killers rejoice. In fact, Brazilian sentences are never more than 29 years because to give someone 30 involves an automatic appeal.
Absolute nonsense!
One of the conditions of EU membership is relinquishing the death penalty. The United Kingdom abolished it in 1965. In the UK, life imprisonment means a maximum of 25 years.
However, please take the time to realize that the obviously-in-your-eyes-soft-bellied-pinko-liberal UK has considerably LESS crime than the US. Most especially violent crime. This is true of ALL other Western Nations. Brazil is a very flawed nation in many ways, most of its citizens are to some degree or other afraid of its government - legal system or otherwise.
And as to:
3) Italians in particular (although the majority of the EU has the same problem) actually feel sorry for criminals
Please, seriously, take some time to read Plato's Republic. An Ancient Greek he may have been, but some of his 2,300 year old writings on Justice are more intelligent and enlightened than your "hang 'em high" überrightwing mentality. Just keep that Truthiness a-comin Bubba!
Face the facts - all aspects of the US legal system fail pretty much everyone who is not actually a lawyer, or rich enough to hire a rich lawyer.
They announced a few days ago that they were going to relaunch their China operation, due to the fact that this market has failed for them. Desperate measures. It's taking a little longer than Japan, but surely dying nonetheless. Pretty much every day since their Eachnet purchase they've been bleeding customers.
Their stock price is less today than it was the same time last year, which is less again than the same time the previous year. It is slowly and surely sliding downwards.
The talented Jeff Jordan is gone, Meg Whitman has seemingly been conspicuous by her absence from the media spotlight all year, and externally seems to have done very little to change the companies' fortunes. Growth overall is stagnant or negative, and this Express site is obviously just one more failure.
I think the fundamental issue is one of completely failing to either listen to, or even make a token attempt to understand the needs of customers. They've completely failed to address a number of fraudulent behaviors - especially of Power Sellers - in the name of profit. They're like the anti-Google. 1...2...3... let's do eVil!
Buying on eBay is relatively easy to accomplish technically. Of course, you have to hope and pray you've not sent money to a fraudster, and you are most likely going to be paying through the nose for shipping. But technically it's not too time consuming.
Selling, however... is by no means easy. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to sell one item. It can take an hour or two list something, and once you do, you will be paying eBay and Paypal a significant percentage for your hassle, so you'd either better be very dedicated, have no wholesale costs, or as forementioned, scam the buyer with extra shipping charges to cover the eBay fees. When something goes wrong, you are on your own.
Economies of scale and listing tools may help pro sellers, but are way too much hassle for someone that just wants to sell some old piece of crap they found in their garage. Selling on Amazon is considerably easier. Selling on Craigslist is easier. Selling is easier pretty much anywhere else.
Up until 2003 every Christmas period was one of fantastic growth and revenue for eBay. Their stock price shot up every quarter. Since there is still demand for Internet traded goods, the only explanation for their current predicament that any reasonable person can conclude is "Management Failure".
What happened to Google's Base thing? I've heard nothing about it for months. My feeling is that the only reason eBay (and actually Amazon and a few others) are still around is because: 1. we still have no good Internet Micropayments system, and 2. Search engine technology still has much room for improvement.
If I were an executive at Walmart, or Microsoft, or Google or one of the many other 452 Fortune 500 companies more successful than eBay, I'd be watching them closely. I'd expect these executives to be circling like sharks or vultures. eBay looks as though it is in trouble for sure, maybe not bottomed out yet, but thoroughly on their way down.
I think that is really the issue. I've had a Palm based PDA and a MS one. The Palm one certainly sucked less; was faster and easier to use, despite being a couple of years older.
But like everyone most else I no longer use a PDA. The simple reason being that for most tasks I needed it for - notes, calendar, addresses etc, a pencil and paper was faster, easier, and more convenient.
Stone age it may be but it's better technology for me.
I can't say that I agree with you. I'm not sure the precise percentages, so perhaps 99% is crap, however there are many US produced TV shows that are far superior to any produced in other countries.
Some examples out of many: My Name is Earl, Boston Legal, The West Wing, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Studio 60, Futurama, Veronica Mars, Firefly (may it rest in peace), Northern Exposure, Hill Street Blues, The Sopranos, St Elsewhere (barring the finale), M*A*S*H, Star Trek (well most franchises), Buffy, Babylon 5.... etc etc etc etc. One hour TV drama in the US is as tough as filmmaking gets - no other country can deliver that quality in that timeline season over season.
The BBC has a handful of shows since the beginning of time that come close to some of these. It's inconceivable that the BBC could ever fund a show to the point that delivered the innovation and quality of the opening titles tracking shot to Hill Street Blues. I was working as a cameraman at the time that show debuted and my colleagues and I talked of little else the next day, that shot was groundbreaking. Similarly, the editing in Boston Legal, pure genius, nothing like it anywhere. Schlamme's direction on the West Wing cast drive and energy into verbose scripts. Don't even get me started on Joss Whedon, and I could go on.
US TV is the best funded, has the best writers, the best performers, the best directors and the best crew. It's just the system for the most part that sucks, as Firefly proves.
Compare if you will the two versions of "The Office". Same writer, but the US version has vastly superior production values and much better performers and much better direction. It's not simply that Gervais had the opportunity to revisit some of the writing and polish it.
I think people who were not really watching what they were doing broker their TV and want someone else to pay for it.
And I wonder how many people suddenly had top of the range plasma TVs too... or a borrowed receipt for same.
The whole thing is first class ambulance chasing. The sad thing about it is that this kind of selfishness weakens the impact of legal action overall and toughens and trains the corporate legal depts for genuinely serious actions.
This CMP lot are part of the United Business Media Group. This is a very well connected little organization. The Directors' biographies read like a who's who of British Industry. Fingers into AOL, fingers into banks and big insurance companies, fingers into major Indian outsourcing companies etc etc etc.
Of course their reviews may be neutral and may uphold journalistic principles.
Adjust your tinfoil hats to maximum shield strength folks this publication looks like the Illuminati UK Branch IT Monthly.
And the opposite situation shows why this tool is a waste of time.
Imagine a tool where you could reliably return accurate and search results for images and video. Does this exist yet? No, as one who searches the web daily for pics and video for my own sordid uses, let me assure you that it most certainly does not yet exist.
And what an horrific waste to have such a tool - if it works - for policing content for copyright violations. Bearing in mind also that such "violations" are no such thing in some countries, regardless of the imperial arrogance of media companies.
As always, and tell your family and friends, only buy music directly from the artist or secondhand. It's the only way to win.
Logically it would rise. Google is currently 353rd on the Fortune 500 list. Time Warner is 40th, and most of the other big media groups are in the top 100.
And for those who are interested, Yahoo is 412th despite sooo many fingers in sooo many pies. Ditto for eBay at 458th. Microsoft is 48th, not 666th as many/.ers would naturally expect.
I have mixed feelings about this. Certainly moving TV services onto the Internet is generally a good thing - especially if it is easier for everyone to enter the market if their product is good enough.
However, since I live in a country (Germany) which has probably the worst TV I've ever seen anywhere (along with, by at least one order of magnitude, the worst Supermarkets on Earth - but that's a post for another day) I do not watch TV here at all, which has trained me to watch what I want, when I want - so long as it's already been released on DVD. I have neither time nor patience now to hang around to wait for a show I like to come on.
So rather than a new Internet TV station I really need a legal and free way of Video on Demand. I'm sure I'm not alone. There seems to be few details on what this new service is about, but I'm not sure how interested I'd be unless I have control of my viewing.
Also, my true concern would be that eBay is somewhere behind it. "Free" TV? Yeah, sure, but how really free and for how long?
Yep, looks like they had a Christmas works party and then all got together and wrote this article while considerably boozed up. Gawd knows what this article is really about.
Chlamydia from a computer? Erm, no. Those folks need to do a little reading.
For those few of you who usually read the full article, this time, do yourself a favor and don't. It just hurts your head.
And the really bad thing is that, if this was a post-party post, there's not a single scan of the secretary's ass from the photocopier. So, I guess the party sucked too.
The funny thing about the birds angle is that it is probably just being used by the RSPB as convenient publicity. Birds, and sea birds in particular, have two perfectly good eyes and are quite capable of avoiding great hulking windmills. It's not like they're transparent, and the blades don't move that fast.
I did read one study a few years ago - and apologies for not having any details of it - but someone looked into the actual evidence of bird kills and it was globally something like 6. No, not thousand, not hundred... six... just 6.
Probably they represented the avian equivalent of the Darwin Awards. Named after Darwin the Galapagos Finch who discovered scientists.
All in all, wind farms are hell of a lot better than oil slicks for our feathery friends.
IIRC, one of the original plans (in about 1998) was to use decommissioned oil rigs in the North Sea as wind farms. Not sure what happened after that, did the debacle of Greenpeace lying about Brent Spar possibly affect those plans?
ickkk... brown is bad enough, but the combination of yellow and the marketing verb "squirt" should never happen. "Squirt" is odious alone, yellow would be vomit inducing.
If the BBC is using Skype - and there seems to be some doubt about this - then someone should be asking serious questions about their charter. The BBC is forbidden from advertising and is directly funded by a license fee.
To the point where kids TV show "Blue Peter" would have handcraft items on making things out of old packaging, any branding or logos on the packaging had to be blacked out.
No way should the BBC be promoting skype - blatantly or otherwise. Brits, ask the BBC for your license fee back. Ask your MP why this is happening. If the BBC wants to be honest about their advertising then fine, scrap the license fee.
Of course, the BBC smuggles PR, payola, and viral marketing into news, tech and entertainment items all the time - and I'm sure someone somewhere gets a nice backhander for those. The News dept is the one most guilty of marketing products.
However, to be this blatant should result in someone being fired.
In Europe not all countries use the Bronze colored Euro Cent coins. Holland for example doesn't. In Germany where I live, the bronze coins are pretty much useless - I give mine to charity.
I think that perhaps Conde Nast being their parent company has something to do with it. It's all about selling the advertising space. It does have a few good writers though, or did. Bruce was certainly one of the better ones.
I appreciate that Craigslist is popular and a success in the US.
However, in Europe things are a little different. In most EU countries there isn't the volume of genuine users to make the flagging system work. Thus it's an ever decreasing spiral downward -> the site's full of spam, con artists, grey and black hats -> genuine advertisers don't post because of it -> no-one visits the site.
Take for example Craigslist Denmark as typical. there's about 1,000 posts on the site. Less than 10% are genuine. Which in some ways is nice, because the spammers are spamming scammers and vice versa. If anyone from Craigslist is reading this, please take some time to be utterly ashamed at the state of most of your EU pages. You have failed.
If you are looking for something illegal, Craigslist Europe IS the place to look - there's all sorts of stuff you can get listed there. Passports, fake degrees, protected species, illegal porn, drugs - prescription or otherwise, or alternatively you can get nicely screwed over by some Nigerians, a loan scam, a work from home scam, webcam and dating scams, etc etc etc etc.
What you pretty much can't do is use Craigslist as it was intended.
It's a gift to tabloid journalists and lawyers, and it's astounding that it hasn't got seriously bad press yet.
like its a gift to net-abusers like spammers, child porners, etc.
I hope they make sure that they get good ID of everyone who hosts stuff on their service and don't have some loophole where people can set up accounts with anonymous/fake ID.
Don't worry, they can use the wiki model here to address this. Get a gang of self-appointed zealots to bully folks they don't like the look of off their servers. I mean it works really really well for wikipedia.
Hmmm, Omidyar Network belongs to Pierre of the same name. He was the founder of eBay. So dubious...yep, could be, at some point down the line at least...
At least I would wonder how long free really means free. Omidyar is no Jeff Skoll. Sure looks like there's an undisclosed agenda here.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the conditions of EU membership is relinquishing the death penalty. The United Kingdom abolished it in 1965. In the UK, life imprisonment means a maximum of 25 years.
However, please take the time to realize that the obviously-in-your-eyes-soft-bellied-pinko-liberal UK has considerably LESS crime than the US. Most especially violent crime. This is true of ALL other Western Nations. Brazil is a very flawed nation in many ways, most of its citizens are to some degree or other afraid of its government - legal system or otherwise.
And as to: Please, seriously, take some time to read Plato's Republic. An Ancient Greek he may have been, but some of his 2,300 year old writings on Justice are more intelligent and enlightened than your "hang 'em high" überrightwing mentality. Just keep that Truthiness a-comin Bubba!
Face the facts - all aspects of the US legal system fail pretty much everyone who is not actually a lawyer, or rich enough to hire a rich lawyer.
It's interesting to watch eBay slowly die.
They announced a few days ago that they were going to relaunch their China operation, due to the fact that this market has failed for them. Desperate measures. It's taking a little longer than Japan, but surely dying nonetheless. Pretty much every day since their Eachnet purchase they've been bleeding customers.
Their stock price is less today than it was the same time last year, which is less again than the same time the previous year. It is slowly and surely sliding downwards.
The talented Jeff Jordan is gone, Meg Whitman has seemingly been conspicuous by her absence from the media spotlight all year, and externally seems to have done very little to change the companies' fortunes. Growth overall is stagnant or negative, and this Express site is obviously just one more failure.
I think the fundamental issue is one of completely failing to either listen to, or even make a token attempt to understand the needs of customers. They've completely failed to address a number of fraudulent behaviors - especially of Power Sellers - in the name of profit. They're like the anti-Google. 1...2...3... let's do eVil!
Buying on eBay is relatively easy to accomplish technically. Of course, you have to hope and pray you've not sent money to a fraudster, and you are most likely going to be paying through the nose for shipping. But technically it's not too time consuming.
Selling, however... is by no means easy. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to sell one item. It can take an hour or two list something, and once you do, you will be paying eBay and Paypal a significant percentage for your hassle, so you'd either better be very dedicated, have no wholesale costs, or as forementioned, scam the buyer with extra shipping charges to cover the eBay fees. When something goes wrong, you are on your own.
Economies of scale and listing tools may help pro sellers, but are way too much hassle for someone that just wants to sell some old piece of crap they found in their garage. Selling on Amazon is considerably easier. Selling on Craigslist is easier. Selling is easier pretty much anywhere else.
Up until 2003 every Christmas period was one of fantastic growth and revenue for eBay. Their stock price shot up every quarter. Since there is still demand for Internet traded goods, the only explanation for their current predicament that any reasonable person can conclude is "Management Failure".
What happened to Google's Base thing? I've heard nothing about it for months. My feeling is that the only reason eBay (and actually Amazon and a few others) are still around is because: 1. we still have no good Internet Micropayments system, and 2. Search engine technology still has much room for improvement.
If I were an executive at Walmart, or Microsoft, or Google or one of the many other 452 Fortune 500 companies more successful than eBay, I'd be watching them closely. I'd expect these executives to be circling like sharks or vultures. eBay looks as though it is in trouble for sure, maybe not bottomed out yet, but thoroughly on their way down.
"Buy it Then"...
I think that is really the issue. I've had a Palm based PDA and a MS one. The Palm one certainly sucked less; was faster and easier to use, despite being a couple of years older.
But like everyone most else I no longer use a PDA. The simple reason being that for most tasks I needed it for - notes, calendar, addresses etc, a pencil and paper was faster, easier, and more convenient.
Stone age it may be but it's better technology for me.
I'll hand in my Geek card on the way out shall I?
I can't say that I agree with you. I'm not sure the precise percentages, so perhaps 99% is crap, however there are many US produced TV shows that are far superior to any produced in other countries.
Some examples out of many: My Name is Earl, Boston Legal, The West Wing, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Studio 60, Futurama, Veronica Mars, Firefly (may it rest in peace), Northern Exposure, Hill Street Blues, The Sopranos, St Elsewhere (barring the finale), M*A*S*H, Star Trek (well most franchises), Buffy, Babylon 5.... etc etc etc etc. One hour TV drama in the US is as tough as filmmaking gets - no other country can deliver that quality in that timeline season over season.
The BBC has a handful of shows since the beginning of time that come close to some of these. It's inconceivable that the BBC could ever fund a show to the point that delivered the innovation and quality of the opening titles tracking shot to Hill Street Blues. I was working as a cameraman at the time that show debuted and my colleagues and I talked of little else the next day, that shot was groundbreaking. Similarly, the editing in Boston Legal, pure genius, nothing like it anywhere. Schlamme's direction on the West Wing cast drive and energy into verbose scripts. Don't even get me started on Joss Whedon, and I could go on.
US TV is the best funded, has the best writers, the best performers, the best directors and the best crew. It's just the system for the most part that sucks, as Firefly proves.
Compare if you will the two versions of "The Office". Same writer, but the US version has vastly superior production values and much better performers and much better direction. It's not simply that Gervais had the opportunity to revisit some of the writing and polish it.
I'm British by the way, not American.
The whole thing is first class ambulance chasing. The sad thing about it is that this kind of selfishness weakens the impact of legal action overall and toughens and trains the corporate legal depts for genuinely serious actions.
This CMP lot are part of the United Business Media Group. This is a very well connected little organization. The Directors' biographies read like a who's who of British Industry. Fingers into AOL, fingers into banks and big insurance companies, fingers into major Indian outsourcing companies etc etc etc.
Of course their reviews may be neutral and may uphold journalistic principles.
Adjust your tinfoil hats to maximum shield strength folks this publication looks like the Illuminati UK Branch IT Monthly.
And the opposite situation shows why this tool is a waste of time.
Imagine a tool where you could reliably return accurate and search results for images and video. Does this exist yet? No, as one who searches the web daily for pics and video for my own sordid uses, let me assure you that it most certainly does not yet exist.
And what an horrific waste to have such a tool - if it works - for policing content for copyright violations. Bearing in mind also that such "violations" are no such thing in some countries, regardless of the imperial arrogance of media companies.
As always, and tell your family and friends, only buy music directly from the artist or secondhand. It's the only way to win.
Logically it would rise. Google is currently 353rd on the Fortune 500 list. Time Warner is 40th, and most of the other big media groups are in the top 100.
/.ers would naturally expect.
And for those who are interested, Yahoo is 412th despite sooo many fingers in sooo many pies. Ditto for eBay at 458th. Microsoft is 48th, not 666th as many
I have mixed feelings about this. Certainly moving TV services onto the Internet is generally a good thing - especially if it is easier for everyone to enter the market if their product is good enough.
However, since I live in a country (Germany) which has probably the worst TV I've ever seen anywhere (along with, by at least one order of magnitude, the worst Supermarkets on Earth - but that's a post for another day) I do not watch TV here at all, which has trained me to watch what I want, when I want - so long as it's already been released on DVD. I have neither time nor patience now to hang around to wait for a show I like to come on.
So rather than a new Internet TV station I really need a legal and free way of Video on Demand. I'm sure I'm not alone. There seems to be few details on what this new service is about, but I'm not sure how interested I'd be unless I have control of my viewing.
Also, my true concern would be that eBay is somewhere behind it. "Free" TV? Yeah, sure, but how really free and for how long?
Yep, looks like they had a Christmas works party and then all got together and wrote this article while considerably boozed up. Gawd knows what this article is really about.
Chlamydia from a computer? Erm, no. Those folks need to do a little reading.
For those few of you who usually read the full article, this time, do yourself a favor and don't. It just hurts your head.
And the really bad thing is that, if this was a post-party post, there's not a single scan of the secretary's ass from the photocopier. So, I guess the party sucked too.
I, for one, welcome our new invisible overlords... wherever you are...
The funny thing about the birds angle is that it is probably just being used by the RSPB as convenient publicity. Birds, and sea birds in particular, have two perfectly good eyes and are quite capable of avoiding great hulking windmills. It's not like they're transparent, and the blades don't move that fast.
I did read one study a few years ago - and apologies for not having any details of it - but someone looked into the actual evidence of bird kills and it was globally something like 6. No, not thousand, not hundred... six... just 6.
Probably they represented the avian equivalent of the Darwin Awards. Named after Darwin the Galapagos Finch who discovered scientists.
All in all, wind farms are hell of a lot better than oil slicks for our feathery friends.
IIRC, one of the original plans (in about 1998) was to use decommissioned oil rigs in the North Sea as wind farms. Not sure what happened after that, did the debacle of Greenpeace lying about Brent Spar possibly affect those plans?
ickkk... brown is bad enough, but the combination of yellow and the marketing verb "squirt" should never happen. "Squirt" is odious alone, yellow would be vomit inducing.
Obligatory.
In Korea only old people use Digg.
If the BBC is using Skype - and there seems to be some doubt about this - then someone should be asking serious questions about their charter. The BBC is forbidden from advertising and is directly funded by a license fee.
To the point where kids TV show "Blue Peter" would have handcraft items on making things out of old packaging, any branding or logos on the packaging had to be blacked out.
No way should the BBC be promoting skype - blatantly or otherwise. Brits, ask the BBC for your license fee back. Ask your MP why this is happening. If the BBC wants to be honest about their advertising then fine, scrap the license fee.
Of course, the BBC smuggles PR, payola, and viral marketing into news, tech and entertainment items all the time - and I'm sure someone somewhere gets a nice backhander for those. The News dept is the one most guilty of marketing products.
However, to be this blatant should result in someone being fired.
Can't put widgets on the Desktop? Um, you can actually - but you need a widget to do it. The Devmode widget for one.
And that solves the whole "no date on the desktop" one - and probably some of the others too.
In Europe not all countries use the Bronze colored Euro Cent coins. Holland for example doesn't. In Germany where I live, the bronze coins are pretty much useless - I give mine to charity.
I think that perhaps Conde Nast being their parent company has something to do with it. It's all about selling the advertising space. It does have a few good writers though, or did. Bruce was certainly one of the better ones.
I read it that way too - I'm thinking that experimental animals are kind of like Robot Chicken???
I appreciate that Craigslist is popular and a success in the US.
However, in Europe things are a little different. In most EU countries there isn't the volume of genuine users to make the flagging system work. Thus it's an ever decreasing spiral downward -> the site's full of spam, con artists, grey and black hats -> genuine advertisers don't post because of it -> no-one visits the site.
Take for example Craigslist Denmark as typical. there's about 1,000 posts on the site. Less than 10% are genuine. Which in some ways is nice, because the spammers are spamming scammers and vice versa. If anyone from Craigslist is reading this, please take some time to be utterly ashamed at the state of most of your EU pages. You have failed.
If you are looking for something illegal, Craigslist Europe IS the place to look - there's all sorts of stuff you can get listed there. Passports, fake degrees, protected species, illegal porn, drugs - prescription or otherwise, or alternatively you can get nicely screwed over by some Nigerians, a loan scam, a work from home scam, webcam and dating scams, etc etc etc etc.
What you pretty much can't do is use Craigslist as it was intended.
It's a gift to tabloid journalists and lawyers, and it's astounding that it hasn't got seriously bad press yet.
At least I would wonder how long free really means free. Omidyar is no Jeff Skoll. Sure looks like there's an undisclosed agenda here.