But I didn't book my flight with the US government, so I don't really see why they need to know what my in-flight meal preference is.
European governments (excluding the UK, which is superglued to the US's hindquarters) have no particlular objection to data collection, it's the processing and transmission that usually causes the problems. The US would like, for example, the EU passenger data to be transmitted to agencies that strictly have nothing to do with passport control such as the FBI. Given that nowhere in Europe is nearer than five hours from the US, and the US gets manifests of all passengers before take-off to run off against the DHS big database of bad guys anyway, you could view the extra requirements as being invasive. In reverse: how many US tourist would be happy to know that their complete itinerary had been passed to the DST (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_de_la_surv eillance_du_territoire)?
The woman in question was not beaten and robbed. A youth stood in her way in a public park and demanded that she hit him. She did. So he hit her back. It is against the law in this country to assault people even if they ask you to, so she was arrested. She is not going to be prosecuted as the CPS has decided quite rightly that the public interest would not be served by prosecuting her. No doubt the entire incident could have been handled more sensitively but it isn't quite the world gone mad picture you seem to have formed.
As it appears that Trend Micro can't spot a forged FROM: header. They're having to "reanalyse" their data after it turned out they were wrong. The upshot is that this is a non-story, but an interesting one. The correct reading of it is that a security vendor has been caught out doing what we all suspect they do all the time anyway: spinnign research to make their IO-bound bloatware look useful.
Cripes. The awesome power of what you describe makes me shudder.
I think that if bunch of embassies did blow up, a human might make exactly the same judgment just as quickly. Quicker, in this precise instance, because they would have access to the embassy's staff and communications network and would be waiting for it to be reported.
On the other hand given that this expert system will presumably be trained by the incumbent US State Department if it did spot that, say a group of Saudi Arabians had flown aeroplanes into a US landmark in a plot backing by the Pakistan intelligence services, it would isntantly order an invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. GIGO, as we like to say in the computer business.
It still doesn't change the fact that Debian's "official" logo is decidedly non-free. I refer you to Steve Langasek's comments in the Debian list thread:
Mike Connor at Mozilla asks
>>
> Are the Debian logos and trademarks free?
>> and the gobsmacking response is...
No, the Debian logos are not free. This is considered a bug.
>>
Debian is also so anti-trademark that it filed one in 1997. Even dafter is the fact that the spat is (ostensibly) about the copyrightable nature of the Firefox logo and whether debian users could go off and use the logo in a different project. Given that it's part of the trademark this seems a little unfair, especially given that I (as a Debian user) am not allowed to use the Debian logo as *I* see fit without some sort of permission chit from Debian.
Reading on it gets more interesting. It looks like Debian have been cheerily patching Firefox without returning the code upstream, and ignoring other patches. Cross OS compatibility is of vital importance with something like Firefox: the growth of a sane web development environment depends on Firefox working the same no matter whether you're on Mac OS, Windows or one of the many versions of Linux. The patches aren't just to do with the trademark issue: there's UI in there too.
Having looked at both sides of the argument the worst that could be said of Mozilla is that they changed their minds and are guilty of being a little too slickly corporate. Debate are playing at silly buggers.
A strict reading the UN Outer Space treaty would suggest that any "spy" satellite is in contravention of the treaty on two counts: on the one hand it's clearly a military device, explicily banned. On the other, it contravenes the rules on remote sensing because the spy satellites operators are keeping the results of the satellite to themselves.
This might also be part of the motivation for the US government staying quiet. Damaging another state's satellite is clearly illegal, but if the satellite itself is legally dubious you wouldn'y have much of a case to bring.
>> Not that the intel is worthless, but as we saw in Iraq it's not as cut and dry as it used to be (it becomes much more useful in war - great ability to see troop buildup and movement).http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/02/05/sprj.ir q.powell.un/
One part of me wants to be reasonable and compare this to the natura evolution of data formats, like taking IFF files from teh Amiga and making them into SNDs for the Mac and then making those into AIFFs and then converting those to FLACS...
The other part wants to laugh like a pirate on nitrous oxide. And that's the part that's winning right now.
I think you've fallen for the bit/byte conversion there.
1.4Gb of data equals 400kbytes a second, or 3200kbits a second. Your calculations are right though. The 3-4Mbits speed is the sweet spot for MPEGII: judging by the crap on the screen I'd say Sky runs some of its channels way below that, but yes you'll need a fast connection to make broadcast streaming work, for very low values of broadcast.
As to iTunes movies being 640x480 - Apple has only rolled the service out in the US so far and 640x480 is NTSC. I expect we'd get something more appropriate in communist Europe. This is below HD, but then again 128kbps AAC is way below SACD and guess which format people buy. Availability beats quality over and over again in consumable media.
What excites me about iTV (and I will buy one) is that *anything* on my Mac ends up on the screen. Not just YouTube or porn. No need to burn stuff to DVD before watching it.
"Sounding French" isn't exactly a legal definition.
Oddly, if I type www.yahoo.fr into my browser I get redirected to fr.yahoo.com. Which is owned by some company in Sunnyvale, CA, USA. Zut Alors! Might yahoo.fr just be a shell to get around nic.fr's rather silly rules?
The NYT could get sued, but a more likely result in a case like this is that a conviction could be ruled unsafe even if all the evidence indicated that the (hypothetical) suspects were guilty. That's a fairly extreme thing to happen, and I can't think offhand of a conviction that has been overturned because of media intrusion, but the possibility exists in British law.
So the NYT has taken the eminently sensible decision to block access to UK readers. Americans get their freedom of speech, which apparently overrides all other rights in criminal cases; Brits get to look up anonymous proxies. (Yes, I have read the article. Yes, it's fantastically prejudicial. Hopefully having read it is enough to get me off Jury service.)
Interestingly, netcraft reveals that yahoo.fr is hosted here in the UK. And we don't have an anti-Nazi law. What definition would you like to use for presence?
Re:Hate them! Hate them! Hate them!
on
A New Kind of OS
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· Score: 1
Kai's Power Tools tried to do that automatically. As you used the program it would slowly add new features to the interface until you reached expert status. This was, of course, equally frustrating, especially after a fresh install.
The reason that adaptive algorithms (ala Microsoft's "where did my programs go" tool) fail is because the GUI is a way of organising things in a two dimensional space. You therefore learn how to do things by making a mental model of activities mapped to muscle movements: to Save a file move the mouse up and to the left, then click and move down a bit. This spatial location management is the reason GUIs are so effective. It's not a side issue. (Without wishing to come over Mac fanboy it's also the reason the Mac's fixed-to-the-top-of-the-screen Menu is much much better than the floating menus beloved of Windows and Linux apps - the common tools are always in the same place.)
Making the user stop and think about where something is a guaranteed way to slow the workflow down. This can be a power for good of course: there's a lot to be said for making destructive changes hard to get at. But in an everyday copy-paste-save-print type office app the user shouldn't have to go hunting for their command.
But you even got toasted by the countries that are *more* religious than you! Italy is 97.something percent catholic (only 90% of americans give a religion) and more italians believe in evolution than americans. Kansas must be a really big state.
And Christianity is an Abrahamic religion, if that's what you mean by "Children of Abraham", in that it accepts the laws of Abraham. Neither Christianity or Islam are religions based on ethinicity though, so if you're thinking of actual lineage, no such luck.
I think we can disregard the comments of the "part-time professional photographer" in TFA.
A pro photographer who is worried about quality will shoot RAW (or even film). A pro photographer who is interested in getting the picture out fast will shoot JPEG, because that's what the agencies and newspapers expect. Most will shoot both and run a JPEG out in the camera before emailing it back to the editorial office.
Also having lossy and lossless in one format isn't as useful as you might think. Lossy compression saves space and transmits faster (obviously) - you lose all those benefits if you then bind a lossless file to it.
I can't see what problem they're trying to solve: the three things that better lossy compression is supposed to help: storage, bandwidth and CPU cycles improve exponentially over time. It's a very very long time since I had to wait for Photoshop to open a JPEG (although RAW files still take an age).
Snore. And out come the free enterprise loonies. The only trouble with your argument is that free enterprise is already perfectly able to indulge in space exploration and, well, hasn't. You can rent time on a launch pad, you can rent space in a rocket. There are many excellent engineering companies who can build more or less any satellite or other space craft you want.
But there's no return on doing anything more ambitious than communications satellite. What exactly is the private sector going to do with a Mars probe, say? Sell ad hoardings on the side? (Didn't Beagle II do this?)
It's better to regard what NASA and ESA do as a public infrastructure project rather than as competition for private enterprise. The work NASA is doing (mostly competently) is more like building the channel tunnel than a profit-based business. We tried building the tunnel through the private sector, but Eurotunnel has been bailed out by the giovernment and the banks so many times that it's actually ended up costing us far more than it would have done if we'd done it the old fashioned way, even assuming the usual obscene project over-run costs of a public project.
In the case of terrorism the law's quite clear. Once you've suggested to someone that it might be a good idea to blow up a tube train, a crime has already been committed. In which case the existing laws are perfectly adequate in providing access to phone records, actual phone calls etc. The 7/7 report points to lack of resources in dealing with terrorist threats, not lack of information.
What the big data retention databases are about (and don't forget we also have the Police DNA database, the congestion charge DB, road tax database, soon to be enhanced with satellite tracking of all vehicles all conveniently linked together with the magic foreign key that the ID card will be) is data mining.
It's not about doing the things you describe, it's about uncovering other crimes in progress, automatically. Leaving aside the privacy argument, you have to wonder how many false positives the current data will come up with. Given that the average business-grade acceptable use email filter will block emails from Mister Titchfield and forbid mention of Scunthorpe, the possibility of being dumped in some Kafkaesque thoughtcrime hell is too great. Would you trust Capita to work out whether you were a criminal or not?
First, someone needs to initiate a change. Remeber that the "international community" is simply made up of sovereign countries. Treaties and agreements can be renegotiated.
I didn't say the situation was a good one, or insoluble. Just that there's nothing an individual country can control without shooting itself in the foot. Effectively all countries are gaininga bit of ex-Kyoto free growth by blaming their international obligations for the rise in air travel and passing the buck. If the Uk stepped out and unilaterally charged aviation fuel at the same rate as petrol then it would lose this growth. Even worse the beneficiaries would be the French!
I disagree. As I pointed out, not everyone can have a train station on their doorstep, or right next to their place of work. Not everyone can have a direct journey on a train or bus. And the trains or busses can only run so frequently. That doesn't make the system "broken", it's just reality.
Not strictly so. You could, for example, stop out of town office parks that weren't serviced by a rail link. The planning laws are there for a reason, but they're so abused that you end up with exactly the sort of situation you describe. I worked in one out of town office centre not so long ago, after an office relocation. What really rankled was that there was a bus shuttle service from the overflow car park, but not from the train station. The overflow car park was 200 yards from the office, the train station 20 minutes walk.
Putting businesses back into the centre of towns would be good for the local economies too. The town we were nominally based in is one of the South East's most deprived with a remarkable prevalence of drug problems. Every other shop front was boarded up.
10 minutes walk away was our office, housing several thousand highly paid people who could have been buoying up the local economy. Instead the company installed a shop, and a range of canteens to make sure you never actually had to go into town.
While quite a rosy picture is being painted by defra, it appears they have been forgetting to include boats and planes in their emmission counts. Oops.
They're not included because we can't do anything about them. Aviation treaties limit the amount of taxation you can apply to commercial air and boats tend to registered to other countries that don't give a hoot about the environment, or safety or anything much apart from their flag fee.
Both situations are clearly daft, but until the international community as a whole agrees to do something about it, you won't see any improvement.
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But I didn't book my flight with the US government, so I don't really see why they need to know what my in-flight meal preference is.
v eillance_du_territoire)?
European governments (excluding the UK, which is superglued to the US's hindquarters) have no particlular objection to data collection, it's the processing and transmission that usually causes the problems. The US would like, for example, the EU passenger data to be transmitted to agencies that strictly have nothing to do with passport control such as the FBI. Given that nowhere in Europe is nearer than five hours from the US, and the US gets manifests of all passengers before take-off to run off against the DHS big database of bad guys anyway, you could view the extra requirements as being invasive. In reverse: how many US tourist would be happy to know that their complete itinerary had been passed to the DST (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_de_la_sur
That is ever so slightly overstating the case:
The woman in question was not beaten and robbed. A youth stood in her way in a public park and demanded that she hit him. She did. So he hit her back. It is against the law in this country to assault people even if they ask you to, so she was arrested. She is not going to be prosecuted as the CPS has decided quite rightly that the public interest would not be served by prosecuting her. No doubt the entire incident could have been handled more sensitively but it isn't quite the world gone mad picture you seem to have formed.
Details here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/mid/5368900.stm
As it appears that Trend Micro can't spot a forged FROM: header. They're having to "reanalyse" their data after it turned out they were wrong. The upshot is that this is a non-story, but an interesting one. The correct reading of it is that a security vendor has been caught out doing what we all suspect they do all the time anyway: spinnign research to make their IO-bound bloatware look useful.
Cripes. The awesome power of what you describe makes me shudder. I think that if bunch of embassies did blow up, a human might make exactly the same judgment just as quickly. Quicker, in this precise instance, because they would have access to the embassy's staff and communications network and would be waiting for it to be reported. On the other hand given that this expert system will presumably be trained by the incumbent US State Department if it did spot that, say a group of Saudi Arabians had flown aeroplanes into a US landmark in a plot backing by the Pakistan intelligence services, it would isntantly order an invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. GIGO, as we like to say in the computer business.
Actually, 16 US citizens have won the Nobel Peace Prize. Which still means the US punching well above its weight.
But then again one of those was Henry Kissinger, in an event usually described as the "death of satire".
It still doesn't change the fact that Debian's "official" logo is decidedly non-free. I refer you to Steve Langasek's comments in the Debian list thread:
Mike Connor at Mozilla asks
>>
> Are the Debian logos and trademarks free?
>> and the gobsmacking response is...
No, the Debian logos are not free. This is considered a bug.
>>
Debian is also so anti-trademark that it filed one in 1997. Even dafter is the fact that the spat is (ostensibly) about the copyrightable nature of the Firefox logo and whether debian users could go off and use the logo in a different project. Given that it's part of the trademark this seems a little unfair, especially given that I (as a Debian user) am not allowed to use the Debian logo as *I* see fit without some sort of permission chit from Debian.
Reading on it gets more interesting. It looks like Debian have been cheerily patching Firefox without returning the code upstream, and ignoring other patches. Cross OS compatibility is of vital importance with something like Firefox: the growth of a sane web development environment depends on Firefox working the same no matter whether you're on Mac OS, Windows or one of the many versions of Linux. The patches aren't just to do with the trademark issue: there's UI in there too.
Having looked at both sides of the argument the worst that could be said of Mozilla is that they changed their minds and are guilty of being a little too slickly corporate. Debate are playing at silly buggers.
A strict reading the UN Outer Space treaty would suggest that any "spy" satellite is in contravention of the treaty on two counts: on the one hand it's clearly a military device, explicily banned. On the other, it contravenes the rules on remote sensing because the spy satellites operators are keeping the results of the satellite to themselves.
r q.powell.un/
This might also be part of the motivation for the US government staying quiet. Damaging another state's satellite is clearly illegal, but if the satellite itself is legally dubious you wouldn'y have much of a case to bring.
>> Not that the intel is worthless, but as we saw in Iraq it's not as cut and dry as it used to be (it becomes much more useful in war - great ability to see troop buildup and movement).http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/02/05/sprj.i
One part of me wants to be reasonable and compare this to the natura evolution of data formats, like taking IFF files from teh Amiga and making them into SNDs for the Mac and then making those into AIFFs and then converting those to FLACS...
The other part wants to laugh like a pirate on nitrous oxide. And that's the part that's winning right now.
I think you've fallen for the bit/byte conversion there.
1.4Gb of data equals 400kbytes a second, or 3200kbits a second. Your calculations are right though. The 3-4Mbits speed is the sweet spot for MPEGII: judging by the crap on the screen I'd say Sky runs some of its channels way below that, but yes you'll need a fast connection to make broadcast streaming work, for very low values of broadcast.
As to iTunes movies being 640x480 - Apple has only rolled the service out in the US so far and 640x480 is NTSC. I expect we'd get something more appropriate in communist Europe. This is below HD, but then again 128kbps AAC is way below SACD and guess which format people buy. Availability beats quality over and over again in consumable media.
What excites me about iTV (and I will buy one) is that *anything* on my Mac ends up on the screen. Not just YouTube or porn. No need to burn stuff to DVD before watching it.
Oddly, if I type www.yahoo.fr into my browser I get redirected to fr.yahoo.com. Which is owned by some company in Sunnyvale, CA, USA. Zut Alors! Might yahoo.fr just be a shell to get around nic.fr's rather silly rules?
So the NYT has taken the eminently sensible decision to block access to UK readers. Americans get their freedom of speech, which apparently overrides all other rights in criminal cases; Brits get to look up anonymous proxies. (Yes, I have read the article. Yes, it's fantastically prejudicial. Hopefully having read it is enough to get me off Jury service.)
Interestingly, netcraft reveals that yahoo.fr is hosted here in the UK. And we don't have an anti-Nazi law. What definition would you like to use for presence?
The reason that adaptive algorithms (ala Microsoft's "where did my programs go" tool) fail is because the GUI is a way of organising things in a two dimensional space. You therefore learn how to do things by making a mental model of activities mapped to muscle movements: to Save a file move the mouse up and to the left, then click and move down a bit. This spatial location management is the reason GUIs are so effective. It's not a side issue. (Without wishing to come over Mac fanboy it's also the reason the Mac's fixed-to-the-top-of-the-screen Menu is much much better than the floating menus beloved of Windows and Linux apps - the common tools are always in the same place.)
Making the user stop and think about where something is a guaranteed way to slow the workflow down. This can be a power for good of course: there's a lot to be said for making destructive changes hard to get at. But in an everyday copy-paste-save-print type office app the user shouldn't have to go hunting for their command.
But you even got toasted by the countries that are *more* religious than you! Italy is 97.something percent catholic (only 90% of americans give a religion) and more italians believe in evolution than americans. Kansas must be a really big state.
All of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam - Jesus is one of the prophets recognised by Islam as precursors of Muhammed.
And Christianity is an Abrahamic religion, if that's what you mean by "Children of Abraham", in that it accepts the laws of Abraham. Neither Christianity or Islam are religions based on ethinicity though, so if you're thinking of actual lineage, no such luck.
I think the clue's in the standard's name, there...
A pro photographer who is worried about quality will shoot RAW (or even film). A pro photographer who is interested in getting the picture out fast will shoot JPEG, because that's what the agencies and newspapers expect. Most will shoot both and run a JPEG out in the camera before emailing it back to the editorial office.
Also having lossy and lossless in one format isn't as useful as you might think. Lossy compression saves space and transmits faster (obviously) - you lose all those benefits if you then bind a lossless file to it.
I can't see what problem they're trying to solve: the three things that better lossy compression is supposed to help: storage, bandwidth and CPU cycles improve exponentially over time. It's a very very long time since I had to wait for Photoshop to open a JPEG (although RAW files still take an age).
No, the original JPEG standard did support Lossless compression. It just wasn't very good and not widely supported: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/jpeg-faq/part1/section-13 .html
Snore. And out come the free enterprise loonies. The only trouble with your argument is that free enterprise is already perfectly able to indulge in space exploration and, well, hasn't. You can rent time on a launch pad, you can rent space in a rocket. There are many excellent engineering companies who can build more or less any satellite or other space craft you want. But there's no return on doing anything more ambitious than communications satellite. What exactly is the private sector going to do with a Mars probe, say? Sell ad hoardings on the side? (Didn't Beagle II do this?) It's better to regard what NASA and ESA do as a public infrastructure project rather than as competition for private enterprise. The work NASA is doing (mostly competently) is more like building the channel tunnel than a profit-based business. We tried building the tunnel through the private sector, but Eurotunnel has been bailed out by the giovernment and the banks so many times that it's actually ended up costing us far more than it would have done if we'd done it the old fashioned way, even assuming the usual obscene project over-run costs of a public project.
What the big data retention databases are about (and don't forget we also have the Police DNA database, the congestion charge DB, road tax database, soon to be enhanced with satellite tracking of all vehicles all conveniently linked together with the magic foreign key that the ID card will be) is data mining.
It's not about doing the things you describe, it's about uncovering other crimes in progress, automatically. Leaving aside the privacy argument, you have to wonder how many false positives the current data will come up with. Given that the average business-grade acceptable use email filter will block emails from Mister Titchfield and forbid mention of Scunthorpe, the possibility of being dumped in some Kafkaesque thoughtcrime hell is too great. Would you trust Capita to work out whether you were a criminal or not?
Wanting to stop criminals before they commit a crime is an interesting position to take. Have you thought about that one very hard?
I didn't say the situation was a good one, or insoluble. Just that there's nothing an individual country can control without shooting itself in the foot. Effectively all countries are gaininga bit of ex-Kyoto free growth by blaming their international obligations for the rise in air travel and passing the buck. If the Uk stepped out and unilaterally charged aviation fuel at the same rate as petrol then it would lose this growth. Even worse the beneficiaries would be the French!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0 ,,1667595,00.html
Not strictly so. You could, for example, stop out of town office parks that weren't serviced by a rail link. The planning laws are there for a reason, but they're so abused that you end up with exactly the sort of situation you describe. I worked in one out of town office centre not so long ago, after an office relocation. What really rankled was that there was a bus shuttle service from the overflow car park, but not from the train station. The overflow car park was 200 yards from the office, the train station 20 minutes walk.
Putting businesses back into the centre of towns would be good for the local economies too. The town we were nominally based in is one of the South East's most deprived with a remarkable prevalence of drug problems. Every other shop front was boarded up.
10 minutes walk away was our office, housing several thousand highly paid people who could have been buoying up the local economy. Instead the company installed a shop, and a range of canteens to make sure you never actually had to go into town.
They're not included because we can't do anything about them. Aviation treaties limit the amount of taxation you can apply to commercial air and boats tend to registered to other countries that don't give a hoot about the environment, or safety or anything much apart from their flag fee.
Both situations are clearly daft, but until the international community as a whole agrees to do something about it, you won't see any improvement.