Since you are allowed to look under the hood of your car, and are allowed to dismantle it, the car is effectively Open Source. You could go to any one of a thousand competing companies and get any modifications you like done for a fair price. This is not AT ALL like Microsoft and their software lock-in and forced-upgrade path.
If Western civil society had simply condemned the act, given the Taliban 30 days to deliver the criminals and been very careful to not kill a single innocent civilian, Al Quaeda would have been ostracised by their own support base.
What a wonderful planet you live on. Unfortunately back here on Earth it's been found that weakness only encourages terrorists.
I think every country faced with local terrorists has learnt through bitter experience that force does not solve this kind of problem. Dialogue and negotiation are always, finally, the only way to end the cycle of violence.
How on earth can you call an organisation that flew thousands of miles to commit an atrocity "local terrorists"? And there can be no dialogue or negotiation with a group whose sole aim is your destruction. As for comparing sectarian violence in Ireland with unhinged relegious extremists... well you obviously haven't got a clue what you are talking about.
Hard Drives make Noise. CD-Roms make noise. Floppies make noise. A noiseless computer is impossible because anything with a motor will make noise.
The Barracuda drives are supposed to be nearly silent. However for the living room I would definately go with netboot and no hard drive instead. btw you say anything with a motor will make a noise but wasn't there an article in Slashdot earlier with HD flash drives using IDE interface?
The general technology is called "In-Band, On-Channel." The implementation in the US is different from the the one in the rest of the world. In the USA, DAB technology is controlled by a company called iBiquity. It's incompatible with the world standard. In the rest of the world, the standard is Eureka 417.
I use emerge -p for doing this too, and I'm very cautious because I've read how this command can bork your system.
I use emerge -p to check what dependencies are being dragged in. It won't help to see if an upgrade will bork your system. If you do an emerge -u world and it borks your machine then don't try and fix it. The chances are it's borked a lot of machines and the first person to fix it will contribute it back to the maintainer who will put the patch back into portage. I've had an emerge -u world bork my machine a couple of times; I waited a couple of hours and then "emerge sync; emerge -u world" and it then worked fine.
I think that in the end, Microsoft is going to have to accept the fact that in today's global marketplace, Windows is overpriced. In the face of Linux and free open source software solutions, I really don't know what they can do other than lower the price of admission and add more value and true innovation.
Ah, nostalgia for the days of innovation over ligation. If Microsoft accepts the fact that Windows is overpriced in the same way that the RIAA accepts that CDs are overpriced, then we have a long battle on our hands.
Phillip.
Re:True inroads to the desktop market....
on
Linux vs. Windows
·
· Score: 1
Once someone learns to use a computer with {Win/Mac/Linux OS}, they will likely never change.
Bung on a copy of xpde and Windows users will hardly notice the difference. Linux users are used to using different display managers.
I'm sorry but where does the 1.1 billion come from in the link to ZDNET it quotes? The quoted article states WAP views have doubled to "22.5 million impressions". I quote: Figures released by the Mobile Data Association (MDA) show that use of the most popular mobile data services, including SMS, MMS and WAP, have all doubled over the past year and it expects WAP traffic to reach eight billion impressions by the end of 2004. (emphasis mine)
It hardly rates as a popular mobile service. In the UK alone 111 million SMS messages were sent just on New Years Eve. Here it states 2.1 billion text messages were sent last year in the UK alone. That makes WAP traffic seem pretty miniscule.
Basically WAP is rubbish and always has been. The decision to charge an obscene amount per minute killed it. Even if mobile operators offered free WAP (which they won't) and instead creamed profit off transactions, the stigma is so bad no-one will go near it. WAP is definately dead. Even before phones started getting powerful enough to have proper embedded web browsers.
Unless there is a case where someone has an overabundance of money, choices and compromises must be made. It's like when you have to pay $800 in rent, but you only have $500 in the bank account. It doesn't matter how nice that apartment is or how close it is to work.
Agreed you have to front more money and not every one has this, but if you do then you can afford to take a more long-term look.
What you failed to mention was that the VOS Pad costs £35,000 (about US$52,500). This is not practical. The return on investment would likely take the better part of your life -- if even that short.
You don't need to computer-control every light to 16.7M colours as they have. You can use ultra-bright white LEDs connected to a normal switch. The price of these LEDs will plummet as soon as volumes mount. That price also includes a number of sophisticated computer controlled lighting units.
Who cares if my electricity bill is reduced by half or even eliminated entirely if the initial cost in materials exceeds what I would pay in electricity for the next fifty years?
The idea is to get that break-even point down to somewhere worthwhile. For instance if breakeven occured after 10-12 years then I would consider it.
C.) Imagine if an ill-timed power outage wouldn't necessarily mean the building was affected.
This is the first thing that sprang to my mind for a flat. Connect the solar panels to a battery or fuel cell, and use this priority power source to power electric door locks and a small embedded computer connected to your alarm system and the phone line which can message you via email and SMS. This could keep vital systems alive indefinately unlike a UPS.
At first, I read it as 3.8kW and said, "Hunh? That's more than the Solar Constant, 1.367kW per square meter." Then I reread it and saw that it was simply 3.8W. This sounded much more reasonable... and small.
This means that a 60W light bulb would need almost 16 square feet to function. Well, that of course is a reason to move to compact flourescents or LED light bulbs. But my computer takes up a bit of power. So does a refridgerator. So does a washer/dryer.
Moving to LEDs will cut prices drastically. The VOS Pad is lit only by ultra-bright LEDs, around 400 LEDs grouped into 135 fittings that can show 16.7M colours, and only consumes 360W when every light is fully on. Computers are way over-powered for 90% of users and people could benefit by buying a less power-hungry machine (even a laptop, as their prices have dropped drastically).
Let's say that it is a television. What's the equivalent of a square foot display (asuming a 5:4 ratio)? About 13"? Can a 13" LCD display work with 3.8W of power? (I don't know. That's why I'm asking.)
New OLED technology should cut the power even of the LED display considerably as it no longer needs a back-light.
I'm not questioning whether it can give power. I'm questioning whether it can give sufficient power to offset the price. Or would the money be better spent elsewhere in green technologies to reduce the actual draw from the grid?
Wrong answer. The best thing is to attack it from both ends, the suppy and the demand. I don't understand some of the "it won't supply 100% of my needs" negativity by some people (not yourself). If someone came and showed me how I could lower my electricity bills by eg 50% then I'd be interested.
Try finding all mp3 by Brian Adams or Withney Houston on a 200Gb disk filled with 250'000 files with file and locate, you'll get the answer 10 minutes later.
Would it? Can someone try on their 200GB collection and post the results of: locate.mp3 | mp3info -p "%a" | grep "Brian Adams". Personally I think on any decent spec machine it should only take a few seconds.
ATM's are certainly great for when you need quick access to cash, particularly when you're travelling abroad, but an even better development has been the debit card. I find that I hardly ever carry cash anymore, as the debit card is not only convenient (no change jingling in your pocket), but also makes tracking much easier if you use something like Quicken or Money.
As a number of politicians have found to their embarassment.
Oh, come on. The Internet survived the US for decades, I doubt the UN (i.e. the good folks that brought us international telecommunications standardization) would kill it any time soon.
The UN did what? You may wish to give much credit to ETSI, which has nothing to do with the UN. Except that the US bypassed it unilaterally hence being practically the only country in the world that has mobiles not conforming to the GSM standard (and we've seen enough slashdot posts confirming what a bad move that was).
Universities work very much on a model of trust. If they can access from inside the LAN then I'm not surprised they can penetrate with minimal problems. The main defense the University has is that it can stomp on anyone that commits any kind of abuse. Back before the Internet was a free for all (*cough*AOL*cough*) email and Usenet were spam and abuse free. This is because any student that tried it got chewed out by the University and often their accounts suspended.
It's fun to be free and explore. Personally I think their punishment should be that if they think their security is so bad they should be made to secure the network. Educational and constructive at the same time.
Dynamic languages the future? Unlikely. The future of programming is more likely in code that isn't written, but rather "drawn".
This has been coming up regularly since the 80s. I've seen apps like this, and even tried writing my own version, and recently there was a fad for UML->code compilers. The fact is that it's not going to happen. It's far quicker to type than it is to draw. Also you can fit a lot of code on one page making it easier to debug, as opposed to scrolling through vast screens of visual representation. The saying may go "a picture is worth a thousand words" but it certainly doesn't apply to coding.
Just because someone works for a big company doesn't mean they know what their doing. The most likely reason for the speedup would have been an optimization in their own software, or their database schema. Followed by an improvement in the RDBM, and finally the OS.
I agree totally. I can't see there is any way changing a DB or an OS will change execution time by an order of magnitude such as that. My guess is that they rewrote the code since the system they were moving to is so different, and had smarter programmers that also learned from the mistakes of the previous creators. I would say they recreated the schema, eliminated useless joins, replaced loops with queries in with one single query using an IN, and the rest of the usual optimisations. I think rather than showing how fast the new system is, it showed how poor the old one had become.
If there's one thing that I couldn't fault IE on is the fact that it actually displays pages pretty fast.
For me it's far slower than Firefox. And every modern browser has gone backwards in my opinion from the original browsers which had progressive table rendering. I'm sick of waiting for ages for a page to render just because the designer put the whole page in one large table. It's not too difficult, even 10 years ago I've seen complex deeply nested tables rendering progressively in real-time... and this is on 10 year old hardware.
Now come on. You know very well that there's a huge difference between what is happening in America today and what the Soviets did. I don't know about you, but I do not have any fear of being woken up in the middle of the night, thrown into a van, and being shipped off to some Siberian gulag just because I surfed the wrong website last night.
If you are Dimitri Skylarov, you are a Soviet that is woken up in the middle of the night and thrown into an American jail for putting the wrong stuff up on your web site. It's amazing the gulf that has now grown between the rights of a European and an American. A simple phrase "Land of the free" that used to be said with pride even just a decade or two ago is now used more and more with cynicism. And that's sad.
I've said it a million times before here -- if you don't like the way things are going, do one of two things -- vote, or run for office.
Well that was one useless piece of advice said a million times too many. Your vote is one of millions that goes towards just one for the 420 politicians that voted, and they are listening more to their lobby groups than individual voters. The only hope is to form your own lobby group and get enough support behind it. And running for office simply isn't practical for most people.
*lol* That is hilarious. For those that don't live in the EU I'd better explain the jokes.
Don't talk rubbish. The bad people in this are representatives of National Governements: they are the Bad Council Ministers. The good people are representatives of the people: elected members of the European Parliament, not beholden to National Government interests.
Your personal interests are pretty beholden to your nation, the freedoms it gives and the wealth it generates and you partake in. In the EU no-one has no idea who their EU representative and vote for their EU candidate along national party lines (which makes it doubly funny).
The European Parliament wants to guarantee my software and business method freedom. The freedom to write and share my creative work. And they frame it in quite noble and clear language too, so the good intent isn't easily twisted. It means I am free to do the work I want and invent and share all my best ideas, as much or as little as I want. It's my choice, I'm free, so I'm happy.
The European Parliament not just voted for software patents, taking away our (techie) freedoms, but the 'creative' works can also refer to the EU talking about extending copyright pretty much indefinately like the USA. The noble and clear language is a dig at the pathetic failed attempts at creating an EU constitution. Unlike the clear and noble US constitution, the EU one is a botched long incomprehensible one with the introduction being a self-congratulatory note to those that wrote it.
The UK Government wants to take away my software and business method freedom, making it illegal for me to publish my own code on my own web site and making it even more illegal to sell my own code. If I come up with an improvement to an existing idea, I cannot safely share my improvements in public. I can be sued, and go to jail if I cannot pay massive fines.
The UK government is one of the only government that came out clearly against software patents. You don't go to jail in the UK if you can't pay massive fines, you just declare yourself bankrupt. I know it's meant as barb against the US DMCA, but the joke falls a little flat as publishing crypto in the UK is still a bit of a touchy subject.
I have no special interest in being a member of the EU. But when the European Parliament would guarantee my freedom, and UK government if it was totally independent would take away my freedom, then I must support the European Parliament on that issue. Wouldn't you?
Again, mildly funny but the joke falls flat with the UK talking about ID cards. This subject comes around once every decade, and always falls flat on its face, but this time with 9/11 it's gone a lot further than it has ever done before:-(
This may not seem like a lot, but multiply this charge by every major game publisher and pretty soon you've strangled the nascent cybercafe industry.
Nascent? Try cut-throat these days. They are pretty much for backpackers only down here in South of France since 2MB broadband can be had for 25euros/month, with no contract or installation fees.
First, its much less stressful to just pay your bills.
If they are yours and not those of the previous tenant. "Do I look like Miss C. Smith?"
I am required to have a license plate on my car, I have to show ID to do most anything. I certainly would never walk into a store or bank disguising my face, why is this acceptable with a phone call?
I thought the communist Soviet empire had collapsed? Where do you live?
Slashdot Mirror
Since you are allowed to look under the hood of your car, and are allowed to dismantle it, the car is effectively Open Source. You could go to any one of a thousand competing companies and get any modifications you like done for a fair price. This is not AT ALL like Microsoft and their software lock-in and forced-upgrade path.
Phillip.
> It's trivially easy to do.
> cp cedega-4.01.tgz cedega-4.01-backup.tgz &&
> dd bs=1 seek=16 count=19 if=/dev/zero of=cedega-4.01.tgz &&
> dd if=yay2.txtcedega-4.01-backupt.tgz of=cedega-4.01.tgz seek=36 bs=1
Linux is just like Windows! Linux is ready for the average user! Linux is easier than Windows!
dd - better to have it and not need it rather than need it and not have it.
Phillip.
If Western civil society had simply condemned the act, given the Taliban 30 days to deliver the criminals and been very careful to not kill a single innocent civilian, Al Quaeda would have been ostracised by their own support base.
What a wonderful planet you live on. Unfortunately back here on Earth it's been found that weakness only encourages terrorists.
I think every country faced with local terrorists has learnt through bitter experience that force does not solve this kind of problem. Dialogue and negotiation are always, finally, the only way to end the cycle of violence.
How on earth can you call an organisation that flew thousands of miles to commit an atrocity "local terrorists"? And there can be no dialogue or negotiation with a group whose sole aim is your destruction. As for comparing sectarian violence in Ireland with unhinged relegious extremists... well you obviously haven't got a clue what you are talking about.
Phillip.
Hard Drives make Noise. CD-Roms make noise. Floppies make noise. A noiseless computer is impossible because anything with a motor will make noise.
The Barracuda drives are supposed to be nearly silent. However for the living room I would definately go with netboot and no hard drive instead. btw you say anything with a motor will make a noise but wasn't there an article in Slashdot earlier with HD flash drives using IDE interface?
Phillip.
The general technology is called "In-Band, On-Channel." The implementation in the US is different from the the one in the rest of the world. In the USA, DAB technology is controlled by a company called iBiquity. It's incompatible with the world standard. In the rest of the world, the standard is Eureka 417.
s/DAB/mobile phone/
s/iBiquity/Qualcomm/
s/Eureka 417/GSM/
Phillip.
I use emerge -p for doing this too, and I'm very cautious because I've read how this command can bork your system.
I use emerge -p to check what dependencies are being dragged in. It won't help to see if an upgrade will bork your system. If you do an emerge -u world and it borks your machine then don't try and fix it. The chances are it's borked a lot of machines and the first person to fix it will contribute it back to the maintainer who will put the patch back into portage. I've had an emerge -u world bork my machine a couple of times; I waited a couple of hours and then "emerge sync; emerge -u world" and it then worked fine.
Phillip.
I think that in the end, Microsoft is going to have to accept the fact that in today's global marketplace, Windows is overpriced. In the face of Linux and free open source software solutions, I really don't know what they can do other than lower the price of admission and add more value and true innovation.
Ah, nostalgia for the days of innovation over ligation. If Microsoft accepts the fact that Windows is overpriced in the same way that the RIAA accepts that CDs are overpriced, then we have a long battle on our hands.
Phillip.
Once someone learns to use a computer with {Win/Mac/Linux OS}, they will likely never change.
Bung on a copy of xpde and Windows users will hardly notice the difference. Linux users are used to using different display managers.
Phillip.
I'm sorry but where does the 1.1 billion come from in the link to ZDNET it quotes? The quoted article states WAP views have doubled to "22.5 million impressions". I quote:
Figures released by the Mobile Data Association (MDA) show that use of the most popular mobile data services, including SMS, MMS and WAP, have all doubled over the past year and it expects WAP traffic to reach eight billion impressions by the end of 2004. (emphasis mine)
It hardly rates as a popular mobile service. In the UK alone 111 million SMS messages were sent just on New Years Eve. Here it states 2.1 billion text messages were sent last year in the UK alone. That makes WAP traffic seem pretty miniscule.
Basically WAP is rubbish and always has been. The decision to charge an obscene amount per minute killed it. Even if mobile operators offered free WAP (which they won't) and instead creamed profit off transactions, the stigma is so bad no-one will go near it. WAP is definately dead. Even before phones started getting powerful enough to have proper embedded web browsers.
Phillip.
Unless there is a case where someone has an overabundance of money, choices and compromises must be made. It's like when you have to pay $800 in rent, but you only have $500 in the bank account. It doesn't matter how nice that apartment is or how close it is to work.
Agreed you have to front more money and not every one has this, but if you do then you can afford to take a more long-term look.
What you failed to mention was that the VOS Pad costs £35,000 (about US$52,500). This is not practical. The return on investment would likely take the better part of your life -- if even that short.
You don't need to computer-control every light to 16.7M colours as they have. You can use ultra-bright white LEDs connected to a normal switch. The price of these LEDs will plummet as soon as volumes mount. That price also includes a number of sophisticated computer controlled lighting units.
Who cares if my electricity bill is reduced by half or even eliminated entirely if the initial cost in materials exceeds what I would pay in electricity for the next fifty years?
The idea is to get that break-even point down to somewhere worthwhile. For instance if breakeven occured after 10-12 years then I would consider it.
As for the rest, I see your point.
Phillip.
C.) Imagine if an ill-timed power outage wouldn't necessarily mean the building was affected.
This is the first thing that sprang to my mind for a flat. Connect the solar panels to a battery or fuel cell, and use this priority power source to power electric door locks and a small embedded computer connected to your alarm system and the phone line which can message you via email and SMS. This could keep vital systems alive indefinately unlike a UPS.
Phillip.
At first, I read it as 3.8kW and said, "Hunh? That's more than the Solar Constant, 1.367kW per square meter." Then I reread it and saw that it was simply 3.8W. This sounded much more reasonable... and small.
This means that a 60W light bulb would need almost 16 square feet to function. Well, that of course is a reason to move to compact flourescents or LED light bulbs. But my computer takes up a bit of power. So does a refridgerator. So does a washer/dryer.
Moving to LEDs will cut prices drastically. The VOS Pad is lit only by ultra-bright LEDs, around 400 LEDs grouped into 135 fittings that can show 16.7M colours, and only consumes 360W when every light is fully on. Computers are way over-powered for 90% of users and people could benefit by buying a less power-hungry machine (even a laptop, as their prices have dropped drastically).
Let's say that it is a television. What's the equivalent of a square foot display (asuming a 5:4 ratio)? About 13"? Can a 13" LCD display work with 3.8W of power? (I don't know. That's why I'm asking.)
New OLED technology should cut the power even of the LED display considerably as it no longer needs a back-light.
I'm not questioning whether it can give power. I'm questioning whether it can give sufficient power to offset the price. Or would the money be better spent elsewhere in green technologies to reduce the actual draw from the grid?
Wrong answer. The best thing is to attack it from both ends, the suppy and the demand. I don't understand some of the "it won't supply 100% of my needs" negativity by some people (not yourself). If someone came and showed me how I could lower my electricity bills by eg 50% then I'd be interested.
Phillip.
Try finding all mp3 by Brian Adams or Withney Houston on a 200Gb disk filled with 250'000 files with file and locate, you'll get the answer 10 minutes later.
.mp3 | mp3info -p "%a" | grep "Brian Adams". Personally I think on any decent spec machine it should only take a few seconds.
Would it? Can someone try on their 200GB collection and post the results of: locate
Phillip.
Reiser4 has a compression plugin coming.
What about encryption plug-in? That would be nice for those easy-to-lose USB keys.
Phillip.
ATM's are certainly great for when you need quick access to cash, particularly when you're travelling abroad, but an even better development has been the debit card. I find that I hardly ever carry cash anymore, as the debit card is not only convenient (no change jingling in your pocket), but also makes tracking much easier if you use something like Quicken or Money.
As a number of politicians have found to their embarassment.
Phillip.
It's put quite well one of those moments too?
Phillip.
Oh, come on. The Internet survived the US for decades, I doubt the UN (i.e. the good folks that brought us international telecommunications standardization) would kill it any time soon.
The UN did what? You may wish to give much credit to ETSI, which has nothing to do with the UN. Except that the US bypassed it unilaterally hence being practically the only country in the world that has mobiles not conforming to the GSM standard (and we've seen enough slashdot posts confirming what a bad move that was).
Phillip.
Universities work very much on a model of trust. If they can access from inside the LAN then I'm not surprised they can penetrate with minimal problems. The main defense the University has is that it can stomp on anyone that commits any kind of abuse. Back before the Internet was a free for all (*cough*AOL*cough*) email and Usenet were spam and abuse free. This is because any student that tried it got chewed out by the University and often their accounts suspended.
It's fun to be free and explore. Personally I think their punishment should be that if they think their security is so bad they should be made to secure the network. Educational and constructive at the same time.
Phillip.
Dynamic languages the future? Unlikely. The future of programming is more likely in code that isn't written, but rather "drawn".
This has been coming up regularly since the 80s. I've seen apps like this, and even tried writing my own version, and recently there was a fad for UML->code compilers. The fact is that it's not going to happen. It's far quicker to type than it is to draw. Also you can fit a lot of code on one page making it easier to debug, as opposed to scrolling through vast screens of visual representation. The saying may go "a picture is worth a thousand words" but it certainly doesn't apply to coding.
Phillip.
Just because someone works for a big company doesn't mean they know what their doing. The most likely reason for the speedup would have been an optimization in their own software, or their database schema. Followed by an improvement in the RDBM, and finally the OS.
I agree totally. I can't see there is any way changing a DB or an OS will change execution time by an order of magnitude such as that. My guess is that they rewrote the code since the system they were moving to is so different, and had smarter programmers that also learned from the mistakes of the previous creators. I would say they recreated the schema, eliminated useless joins, replaced loops with queries in with one single query using an IN, and the rest of the usual optimisations. I think rather than showing how fast the new system is, it showed how poor the old one had become.
Phillip.
If there's one thing that I couldn't fault IE on is the fact that it actually displays pages pretty fast.
For me it's far slower than Firefox. And every modern browser has gone backwards in my opinion from the original browsers which had progressive table rendering. I'm sick of waiting for ages for a page to render just because the designer put the whole page in one large table. It's not too difficult, even 10 years ago I've seen complex deeply nested tables rendering progressively in real-time... and this is on 10 year old hardware.
Phillip.
Now come on. You know very well that there's a huge difference between what is happening in America today and what the Soviets did. I don't know about you, but I do not have any fear of being woken up in the middle of the night, thrown into a van, and being shipped off to some Siberian gulag just because I surfed the wrong website last night.
If you are Dimitri Skylarov, you are a Soviet that is woken up in the middle of the night and thrown into an American jail for putting the wrong stuff up on your web site. It's amazing the gulf that has now grown between the rights of a European and an American. A simple phrase "Land of the free" that used to be said with pride even just a decade or two ago is now used more and more with cynicism. And that's sad.
I've said it a million times before here -- if you don't like the way things are going, do one of two things -- vote, or run for office.
Well that was one useless piece of advice said a million times too many. Your vote is one of millions that goes towards just one for the 420 politicians that voted, and they are listening more to their lobby groups than individual voters. The only hope is to form your own lobby group and get enough support behind it. And running for office simply isn't practical for most people.
Phillip.
*lol* That is hilarious. For those that don't live in the EU I'd better explain the jokes.
:-(
Don't talk rubbish. The bad people in this are representatives of National Governements: they are the Bad Council Ministers. The good people are representatives of the people: elected members of the European Parliament, not beholden to National Government interests.
Your personal interests are pretty beholden to your nation, the freedoms it gives and the wealth it generates and you partake in. In the EU no-one has no idea who their EU representative and vote for their EU candidate along national party lines (which makes it doubly funny).
The European Parliament wants to guarantee my software and business method freedom. The freedom to write and share my creative work. And they frame it in quite noble and clear language too, so the good intent isn't easily twisted. It means I am free to do the work I want and invent and share all my best ideas, as much or as little as I want. It's my choice, I'm free, so I'm happy.
The European Parliament not just voted for software patents, taking away our (techie) freedoms, but the 'creative' works can also refer to the EU talking about extending copyright pretty much indefinately like the USA. The noble and clear language is a dig at the pathetic failed attempts at creating an EU constitution. Unlike the clear and noble US constitution, the EU one is a botched long incomprehensible one with the introduction being a self-congratulatory note to those that wrote it.
The UK Government wants to take away my software and business method freedom, making it illegal for me to publish my own code on my own web site and making it even more illegal to sell my own code. If I come up with an improvement to an existing idea, I cannot safely share my improvements in public. I can be sued, and go to jail if I cannot pay massive fines.
The UK government is one of the only government that came out clearly against software patents. You don't go to jail in the UK if you can't pay massive fines, you just declare yourself bankrupt. I know it's meant as barb against the US DMCA, but the joke falls a little flat as publishing crypto in the UK is still a bit of a touchy subject.
I have no special interest in being a member of the EU. But when the European Parliament would guarantee my freedom, and UK government if it was totally independent would take away my freedom, then I must support the European Parliament on that issue. Wouldn't you?
Again, mildly funny but the joke falls flat with the UK talking about ID cards. This subject comes around once every decade, and always falls flat on its face, but this time with 9/11 it's gone a lot further than it has ever done before
Phillip.
This may not seem like a lot, but multiply this charge by every major game publisher and pretty soon you've strangled the nascent cybercafe industry.
Nascent? Try cut-throat these days. They are pretty much for backpackers only down here in South of France since 2MB broadband can be had for 25euros/month, with no contract or installation fees.
Phillip.
First, its much less stressful to just pay your bills.
If they are yours and not those of the previous tenant. "Do I look like Miss C. Smith?"
I am required to have a license plate on my car, I have to show ID to do most anything. I certainly would never walk into a store or bank disguising my face, why is this acceptable with a phone call?
I thought the communist Soviet empire had collapsed? Where do you live?
Phillip.