Funny, I thought in a fair and just society everyone should be given the same rights. Where do you stop when removing basic human rights? Politicians? Judges? Lawyers? All Civil servants? All external contractors who work with the government? Suddenly you find yourself with a whole lot of people with no rights.
They sent death threats, they posted leaflets saying people were paedophiles, they phoned in bomb threats. This isn't just protesting, this is terrorism (and no that's not misusing the word, they're trying to achieve political goals by violence and spreading fear).
It's worth pointing out that this is not a simple freedom of speech issue.
SHAC members have been convicted of terrorism related offences. This wasn't a misuse of the law, it was justified. They threatened people with violence and otherwise intimidate people, they'd print out leaflets saying that contractors working with Huntington animal research were paedophiles and put them through their neighbours letter boxes, they called in bomb threats.
Although their range of targets aren't/weren't wide, they still were pursued a campaign of fear against individuals that went beyond protesting.
If this comment was a valid threat against a person or persons by a SHAC member, it deserves to be investigated. The linked to website provides a horribly biased picture of what SHAC do. I don't understand how they can defend this 'activists'.
Saw it at my local Cineworld. I thought it was a good film, enjoyable, creative and a great villian in Andy Serkis.
I'd say it's certainly worth at least 4 out of 5. Infinately better than bedtime stories (which has a different twist on the same concept). It's been largely been ignored over here though which is a shame. Got almost no marketing.
Why don't we all go back to using DOS? That was designed for systems with around 1/1000th the computing power of current systems! That should make things ultra fast!
People want better usability experiences. They want their system to do more and for their OS to organise things in a more managable way. Operating systems restrict hardware advancement. One of XP's biggest achievements was finally nailing the coffin of 16bit DOS applications. Now that applications are hitting the 4gb RAM limit, same needs to happen to 32bit. XP was not designed for 64bit, xp64 is a comprimise at best
There are other improvements that need additional resources. Vista adds an extra software layer for sound. 10 years ago the extra resources this used would've had an impact, with modern systems the effect is so tiny it's insignificant. However the advantages it gives involve more advanced sound functionality offered through the OS and much fewer major crashes due to bad drivers.
Badly composited windows that take way too many resources? Removal of receiving and sending faxes from the home (crippled user) version? Non-accelerated sound system? DRM system built in on the audio and video subsystems? Ram gobbler (2GB.. not enough)? 10GB install with no real apps (where did the space go)? yay solitaire.
1: opinion, I quite like the windows layout in Vista. Vista uses lots of resources as a whole, it's not down to the windows. Don't want your GPU being used for Aero? Disable it.
2: Are you serious? How many home users ever send a fax at all, let alone through their PC? I've not seen a PC built in the last 5+ years that had a fax modem.
3: That is one of the best features of Vista. Bad sound drivers were one of the main causes of blue screens in XP. Putting a software layer between the drivers and hardware prevents a lot of problems because manufacturers simply couldn't be trusted. I suppose the per application volume control and other benefits the Vista sound system brings are awful too?
4: I wish people would stop parroting this stupid point. The DRM Vista enables you to play things you otherwise couldn't play. You strip out the DRM and there's no difference except you can't play certain media types. Don't like DRM, don't buy protected media!
5: unused RAM is wasted RAM. So long as it frees up the RAM when a high priority application needs it, using spare RAM for caching can have huge benefits. Don't trot out the power usage argument. The difference in power between half full ram and full ram is miniscule
It would be a pretty bad way of stimulating the economy. If you're pouring billions of taxpayers money into developing software that's then provided for free. This would put a lot of small software houses out of business. Why should a company pay for your software when this government produced piece of software had 10 times the budget and is available for free?
If a supermarket that's vital for a community is struggling and at risk of closing, forcing it to cut back on staff, you wouldn't help things by opening a temporary, government subsidised store opposite that, thanks to the tax dollars behind it, can undercut the struggling store's prices.
The supermarket will close and the community will be left with the unviable government store that's chewing through the town's budget.
It's all well and good providing a vital service and short term employment but it has to be done in a way which won't drive other companies out of business.
It isn't self inflicted, it's a direct result of pursuing the case as should be expected. By that logic, you would never be able to get back legal expenses either.
He already has proof; the review and the fact he has hasn't been convicted of the things he's accused of. It would be up to the defendant to show that the review is either factual or there was enough evidence for him to leap to that conclusion fairly.
If you sue them, you create a lot of headlines (the streisand effect), causing much more damage to your reputation. If you win the case, nobody will care (the media is not interested in some random dude being wrong in a forum). If you lose, it's even worse.
This is the point of damages. Slashdot seems to love hyping up the Streisand effect but the more prominent and recognised it becomes, the more courts will take it into account awarding damages for these kinds of libel cases. For small businesses where the lost profits are unlikely to stretch past the $100,000 mark, they've a much higher chance of offsetting losses incurred through a court award, especially if it becomes known their good name has been restored.
There's a big danger in simplifying the issues here. It doesn't seem here that he's suing because it's a bad review, he's suing because he's essentially accusing him of fraud.
If he has proof to back that up, fair enough but to accuse someone of illegal practices like that when you've no proof is libel. It doesn't matter if it's done on a community site or not.
If I was running a business and a disgruntled customer posted a lie about me ("all of his PCs are built in his basement by chained up mexicans!") I would want to have some legal recourse. These kinds of lies can destroy a business, especially those on a site people are likely to visit for information on a business.
And didn't make it past the tutorial. It was long, boring and suffered from information overload. Couldn't be bothered with it all really. Also not a big fan of games that are 'ruled' by super guilds.
I think the problem isn't so much the learning curve as giving players the motivation and chance to learn. Take WoW, you're eased into skills, the early instances don't require you to be especially knowledgable of what spec you should be for your role (as at that stage there's little variation in talents and equiptment). These instances even teach you the basics about how to group (not to N on stuff you can't use or gems, how to avoid wipes etc.) FFXI lets you solo for about 8 levels before it gets into the forced grouping, there's a relatively early quest that forces you to tour the major cities.
There's nothing wrong with having complex MMOs but you've got to ease them into the various aspects of it one stage at a time. Even simple play mechanics can suffer if everything is forced on you at once. To use WoW again as an example, one of the critisisms of the new Death Knight class is that as you're given one at lv.55, you haven't been levelling with the class but have a huge number of abilities and loads of talent points. As people haven't learnt the class in that way, it can be surprisingly difficult to play it properly and people may not realise they've bad specs or itemisation until it's pointed out to them.
Ad Providers will simply come up with ways that are impossible to work around.
One solution : local caching. Have a php script download randomly named images or html files in a semi-randomly named folder. Can't see how it'd be possible to block the ads, especially if the html is put in a page via a php include. Obviously though it would require a fair bit of trust to give an ad provider write access to a folder on your server.
There are some problems with the method he's chosen. Most notably 7,9,1,3. It's pretty hard to configure the bias for diagonals so that people don't accidentally do a diagonal instead of a direction or vice versa. It may seem easy to do but when you're dealing with an inch of travel, a slight amount to the left or right can make a huge sifference to the angle. There are also issues with phone alignment in the hand.
I think Ultimately the best solution is embossed numbers on the phone or other tactile methods (for existing touch screen phones, put a sticker on the screen and supplement it with software). With phone numbers you want to make sure you've entered one correctly, you can do a confirmation for the number at the end but that's slow and cumbersome, far better than to minimise the chance of an incorrect number being entered.
The magna Carta is pretty much the fundamental guideline for our legal system. However it is just a guideline now.
There are lots of things in it which are horribly outdated and completely irrelevant to todays society (it was after all, designed for medieval peasantry). As such, it would be impossible to make it legally binding.
The law lords do have an active knowledge of it though and they do take it into account. One of the biggest obstacles to the increase in maximum detention time without being charged was actually the Magna Carta. Hopefully it's strong enough in their minds so that when it gets to them, they shoot it down.
And you got modded interesting for that inane comparison?
Compare running a single program that iterates an instruction 1M times to using a program that performs the same instruction once but running it a million times. That's the difference between sending it in a 3g data stream and sending the same amount of data in small texts
Likewise for your network example. Imagine sending each of those packets from a different network address rather than a single connection. Imagine the fun that would cause your server or router.
It is not the data in texts that costs, it's the establishing of a connection that takes up network capacity.
The problem with that 90% figure is it doesn't take into account the cost of people not sending texts. Someone who isn't sending texts is still pinging/polling/whatever term they use, the network to see if they've got any texts every minute or so. It would be hard to work out the costs for doing this but it must eat up connections, even if for fractions of a second.
Yes, how dare I voice my views on a subject! Truly I am the lowest of the low!
1. they can but not all networks and phones have full support for these kinds of texts. Do you really want to have to wonder if someone can get a text from you or not? Also, GPRS would have to keep pinging towers to check for messages. This would cost a fortune over a year at GPRS rates or you'd have to sign up for a monthly charge like with push email services.
2. It's still data that has to be handshaked at both ends. Establishing a data connection is the most costly part.
3. Amazingly enough, networks aren't free. There are costs for equipment, there are costs for staff, there are costs for licensing a radio frequency. The more data they have to process, the more expensive the equipment they have to have, the better quality transmissions they need to send and receive. The busier a network, the more money needs spending to maintain and upgrade.
4. Wow that totally refutes everything I said! Who needs a reasoned argument when you can say "that's stupid" and not say why. It's a metaphor to show how buying things in tiny quantities is expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, I thought in a fair and just society everyone should be given the same rights. Where do you stop when removing basic human rights? Politicians? Judges? Lawyers? All Civil servants? All external contractors who work with the government? Suddenly you find yourself with a whole lot of people with no rights.
They sent death threats, they posted leaflets saying people were paedophiles, they phoned in bomb threats. This isn't just protesting, this is terrorism (and no that's not misusing the word, they're trying to achieve political goals by violence and spreading fear).
It's worth pointing out that this is not a simple freedom of speech issue.
SHAC members have been convicted of terrorism related offences. This wasn't a misuse of the law, it was justified. They threatened people with violence and otherwise intimidate people, they'd print out leaflets saying that contractors working with Huntington animal research were paedophiles and put them through their neighbours letter boxes, they called in bomb threats.
Although their range of targets aren't/weren't wide, they still were pursued a campaign of fear against individuals that went beyond protesting.
If this comment was a valid threat against a person or persons by a SHAC member, it deserves to be investigated. The linked to website provides a horribly biased picture of what SHAC do. I don't understand how they can defend this 'activists'.
"SpackleMonkey" or a difficult to pronounce word from a long dead language.
"we shall call it ghoti!"
Saw it at my local Cineworld. I thought it was a good film, enjoyable, creative and a great villian in Andy Serkis.
I'd say it's certainly worth at least 4 out of 5. Infinately better than bedtime stories (which has a different twist on the same concept). It's been largely been ignored over here though which is a shame. Got almost no marketing.
Why don't we all go back to using DOS? That was designed for systems with around 1/1000th the computing power of current systems! That should make things ultra fast!
People want better usability experiences. They want their system to do more and for their OS to organise things in a more managable way. Operating systems restrict hardware advancement. One of XP's biggest achievements was finally nailing the coffin of 16bit DOS applications. Now that applications are hitting the 4gb RAM limit, same needs to happen to 32bit. XP was not designed for 64bit, xp64 is a comprimise at best
There are other improvements that need additional resources. Vista adds an extra software layer for sound. 10 years ago the extra resources this used would've had an impact, with modern systems the effect is so tiny it's insignificant. However the advantages it gives involve more advanced sound functionality offered through the OS and much fewer major crashes due to bad drivers.
And pray-tell, what real benefits are those?
Badly composited windows that take way too many resources?
Removal of receiving and sending faxes from the home (crippled user) version?
Non-accelerated sound system?
DRM system built in on the audio and video subsystems?
Ram gobbler (2GB.. not enough)?
10GB install with no real apps (where did the space go)? yay solitaire.
1: opinion, I quite like the windows layout in Vista. Vista uses lots of resources as a whole, it's not down to the windows. Don't want your GPU being used for Aero? Disable it.
2: Are you serious? How many home users ever send a fax at all, let alone through their PC? I've not seen a PC built in the last 5+ years that had a fax modem.
3: That is one of the best features of Vista. Bad sound drivers were one of the main causes of blue screens in XP. Putting a software layer between the drivers and hardware prevents a lot of problems because manufacturers simply couldn't be trusted. I suppose the per application volume control and other benefits the Vista sound system brings are awful too?
4: I wish people would stop parroting this stupid point. The DRM Vista enables you to play things you otherwise couldn't play. You strip out the DRM and there's no difference except you can't play certain media types. Don't like DRM, don't buy protected media!
5: unused RAM is wasted RAM. So long as it frees up the RAM when a high priority application needs it, using spare RAM for caching can have huge benefits. Don't trot out the power usage argument. The difference in power between half full ram and full ram is miniscule
If a supermarket that's vital for a community is struggling and at risk of closing, forcing it to cut back on staff, you wouldn't help things by opening a temporary, government subsidised store opposite that, thanks to the tax dollars behind it, can undercut the struggling store's prices.
The supermarket will close and the community will be left with the unviable government store that's chewing through the town's budget.
It's all well and good providing a vital service and short term employment but it has to be done in a way which won't drive other companies out of business.
It isn't self inflicted, it's a direct result of pursuing the case as should be expected. By that logic, you would never be able to get back legal expenses either.
He already has proof; the review and the fact he has hasn't been convicted of the things he's accused of. It would be up to the defendant to show that the review is either factual or there was enough evidence for him to leap to that conclusion fairly.
If you sue them, you create a lot of headlines (the streisand effect), causing much more damage to your reputation. If you win the case, nobody will care (the media is not interested in some random dude being wrong in a forum). If you lose, it's even worse.
This is the point of damages. Slashdot seems to love hyping up the Streisand effect but the more prominent and recognised it becomes, the more courts will take it into account awarding damages for these kinds of libel cases. For small businesses where the lost profits are unlikely to stretch past the $100,000 mark, they've a much higher chance of offsetting losses incurred through a court award, especially if it becomes known their good name has been restored.
If he has proof to back that up, fair enough but to accuse someone of illegal practices like that when you've no proof is libel. It doesn't matter if it's done on a community site or not.
If I was running a business and a disgruntled customer posted a lie about me ("all of his PCs are built in his basement by chained up mexicans!") I would want to have some legal recourse. These kinds of lies can destroy a business, especially those on a site people are likely to visit for information on a business.
If they only cared about dedicated, hardcore players they wouldn't go to great lengths to make the game as pretty as possible.
And didn't make it past the tutorial. It was long, boring and suffered from information overload. Couldn't be bothered with it all really. Also not a big fan of games that are 'ruled' by super guilds.
I think the problem isn't so much the learning curve as giving players the motivation and chance to learn. Take WoW, you're eased into skills, the early instances don't require you to be especially knowledgable of what spec you should be for your role (as at that stage there's little variation in talents and equiptment). These instances even teach you the basics about how to group (not to N on stuff you can't use or gems, how to avoid wipes etc.) FFXI lets you solo for about 8 levels before it gets into the forced grouping, there's a relatively early quest that forces you to tour the major cities.
There's nothing wrong with having complex MMOs but you've got to ease them into the various aspects of it one stage at a time. Even simple play mechanics can suffer if everything is forced on you at once. To use WoW again as an example, one of the critisisms of the new Death Knight class is that as you're given one at lv.55, you haven't been levelling with the class but have a huge number of abilities and loads of talent points. As people haven't learnt the class in that way, it can be surprisingly difficult to play it properly and people may not realise they've bad specs or itemisation until it's pointed out to them.
One solution : local caching. Have a php script download randomly named images or html files in a semi-randomly named folder. Can't see how it'd be possible to block the ads, especially if the html is put in a page via a php include. Obviously though it would require a fair bit of trust to give an ad provider write access to a folder on your server.
"Usually Microsoft"? Because Apple are known for being incredibly modest and underplaying any features in their products right?
I think Ultimately the best solution is embossed numbers on the phone or other tactile methods (for existing touch screen phones, put a sticker on the screen and supplement it with software). With phone numbers you want to make sure you've entered one correctly, you can do a confirmation for the number at the end but that's slow and cumbersome, far better than to minimise the chance of an incorrect number being entered.
Unfortunately that term results in "Who's libre?" responses.
His figures were clearly stupidly inaccurate. Thank you for showing people how the reality is so vastly different from the fantasy world he lives in!
There are lots of things in it which are horribly outdated and completely irrelevant to todays society (it was after all, designed for medieval peasantry). As such, it would be impossible to make it legally binding.
The law lords do have an active knowledge of it though and they do take it into account. One of the biggest obstacles to the increase in maximum detention time without being charged was actually the Magna Carta. Hopefully it's strong enough in their minds so that when it gets to them, they shoot it down.
Compare running a single program that iterates an instruction 1M times to using a program that performs the same instruction once but running it a million times. That's the difference between sending it in a 3g data stream and sending the same amount of data in small texts
Likewise for your network example. Imagine sending each of those packets from a different network address rather than a single connection. Imagine the fun that would cause your server or router.
It is not the data in texts that costs, it's the establishing of a connection that takes up network capacity.
Just because a process doesn't directly involve physical actions, that doesn't mean it doesn't cost
The problem with that 90% figure is it doesn't take into account the cost of people not sending texts. Someone who isn't sending texts is still pinging/polling/whatever term they use, the network to see if they've got any texts every minute or so. It would be hard to work out the costs for doing this but it must eat up connections, even if for fractions of a second.
1. they can but not all networks and phones have full support for these kinds of texts. Do you really want to have to wonder if someone can get a text from you or not? Also, GPRS would have to keep pinging towers to check for messages. This would cost a fortune over a year at GPRS rates or you'd have to sign up for a monthly charge like with push email services.
2. It's still data that has to be handshaked at both ends. Establishing a data connection is the most costly part.
3. Amazingly enough, networks aren't free. There are costs for equipment, there are costs for staff, there are costs for licensing a radio frequency. The more data they have to process, the more expensive the equipment they have to have, the better quality transmissions they need to send and receive. The busier a network, the more money needs spending to maintain and upgrade.
4. Wow that totally refutes everything I said! Who needs a reasoned argument when you can say "that's stupid" and not say why. It's a metaphor to show how buying things in tiny quantities is expensive.
And just imagine how much it would cost in bandwidth to handshake every minute through GPRS to check if there are any texts.