Right, right. Apparently, they're called "witness summons" now for people, though I have no idea what you call subpoena duces tecum nowadays. I'm sure that you have some procedure for compelling potential witnesses to a crime to appear and present documents -- like this data. The presenting of data which was legally gained to a court of law is not an invasion of privacy. There's nothing personally identifiable in the data they've collected, so it would be challenging to actually link this to a potential crime.
While two university students don't represent your whole population, the tolerance you people have of being watched by cameras all day does. Frankly, I find your countrymen somewhat distubring for supporting 24/7 pervasive surveillance. Good combination of exagerration and an absolutely ridiculous generalisation that isn't substantiated by a single fact. I'm going to hazard a guess that you only get your information about the UK and security issues from Slashdot articles, which is a pretty sure-fire way of getting overblown and inaccurate information.
And it's not a non-issue. It's a demonstration of a technique to track the coming and goings of non-criminal citizens for the purpose of determining who they associate with. So what if they claim the ultimate goal is tracking actual prisoners? They've demonstrated a far more useful purpose for it for a nanny state. Can you not imagine the utility this would have in tracking down members of protest groups? This is so much easier to sort through than video footage. Wow, you've worked out a tool that can be used for good can also be used for evil and that it all depends on who is doing the work. You're so caught up in your default attitude of hostility that you can't see past the end of your own nose.
In all this you forget that if the government really wants to track citizens to that level, it's trivial to triangulate someone's cellphone position even if they're not using it using existing technology, not to mention that recording someone's phone calls is far more useful than collating encrypted Bluetooth data and trying to work out who is saying what.
There were so many things wrong with that comment that I'm struggling to pick a place to start.
Let's start with the fact that you subpeonas don't exist in the UK, to the fact that the research was carried about by students and not the government. We'll then move on to the fact that the ideas of 2 non-entity university students does not represent the opinions of 60 million British citizens as you seem to think. Then, we'll finish with the assertion that your comment is a nonsensical knee-jerk reaction to a complete non-issue.
Wow. After over a year of believing that Vista is more than adequate, yours is finally the argument that sways me.
You're absolutely right! With the mountains of evidence you provided to back up that insightful remark, I have finally seen the light! Vista is shit, Microsoft are evil and you're a genius. Not only that, but everybody on the planet agrees!
I would start a parade in your honour, my good man, except that you are clearly so full of shit that an Alabama farmer could squeeze you for a decade and still have plenty of manure left.
The same way everyone knows vista sucks. So, everyone 'knows' it on Slashdot but the rest of the world either disagrees or doesn't care? I think that's pretty much what GP was saying.
I said come back when you'd stopped being a moron, not keep blabbering away and making yourself look even more stupid.
If you don't understand how two entirely different cultures can have two police forces that react differently to violent situations, especially when the armaments of those forces vary wildly, then I'm not going to sit here and explain it to you at length.
I will give you a hint though - in Britain, they don't give every PC Tom, Dick and WPC Harriet a firearm to wave in the face of criminals, and they're also taught to practise restraint.
If this seems rather rude of me, that's because I haven't been taught to practise restraint, and also I get pissy when I have someone crash my browser to make a largely irrelevant point.
Well, initially I couldn't get on your link because it crashed Opera when I tried to load it.
So, I switched to Firefox just to humour you and wish I hadn't bothered - why don't you try reading the part that says BRITISH police and come back when you're not a moron.
Maybe I lived the sheltered life down in Devon, but neither of those things are exactly common occurences.
If you're referring to the fact that the police are actually fallible, meaning they aren't criminal-catching robot people who get it right 100% of the time, then I think you're the one with the problem here, not them.
Mistakes are made, things happen, and sometimes it's really, really shit and someone dies because of it. However, to pretend that the few mistakes they make cancel out the incredible amount of solved crimes they manage, even under the incredible crippling that the Labour government has inflicted on them with their target-based performance system, is disingenuous.
No wonder the general public is so hacked off - when police stats. show that they spend less than 13% of their time actually out of the police station, catching criminals. This isn't really the police's fault. Government 'targets' are set in the most meaningless fashion possible to ensure that real crimes remain unsolved and less policeman have time to actually go out and arrest criminals. When they do, it's worth just as much to them to give a guy a caution for having weed on them, as it is to stop a pub brawl or prevent a murder.
The damage needs to be repaired at the source before the police can finally prioritise to doing real work.
And yes, I agree this idea is useless and shortlived, but it is certainly not an invasion of privacy.
Well, the comment above me was clearly flamebait but absolutely spot on. You can't get worked up over every little thing some quasi-famous turd on the internet says just because it doesn't agree with what you believe.
I'm gay. If I did that, I would have had a brain aneurysm by now, and I think that goes for a lot of 'minorities' (god I hate that word, but I couldn't avoid it).
Thank you for being the only person who responded to provide me with a link to some 'evidence', even if that evidence was that Sweden abstained for reasons that they specifically didn't say was related to Microsoft at all. Here I ask another question - the most prevalent argument that I hear is that a lot of Microsoft partners joined the process in order to vote in favour.
Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
Surely, national bodies are supposed to get the opinion of the companies in the country they represent, and the more companies the better? As it costs money to join the process, there must be a reason for these companies to fork out to have their say, and the most simple reason would be that it's in their best interests. A lot of companies rely on Microsoft to make a living, and those companies will appreciate OOXML being open because it will widen their customer base.
After all the backroom dealing that was involved in getting OOXML standardized, a lot of people are going to be bitter. All this reminds me of the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 - an awful lot of coincidence and not a lot of fact.
Despite the bevy of rational explanations, with official bodies denying, often with proof, that no 'backroom dealing' occurred, it's still not enough for people to realise that the ISO process may actually be working fine. Just because people didn't get the result they want, they go out of their way to find as much completely circumstantial and unprovable 'evidence' as possible that the system is broken.
It's actually kind of amusing to see people get so worked up. ODF is still a standard, and OOXML becoming one doesn't actually change that.
Twitter's not my type - he has a wife and child and I prefer honest guys.
Anyway, Slashdot doesn't seem to give a shit that someone is lying to their faces, so what's the point in me telling you? Hence why I haven't bothered posting a response to anything he's said in a week, and it's highly unlikely that I will in future. You can sort it out yourselves, not that people here seem to have the wherewithal to do so.
That's not what they're releasing.
On show for the first time in public are underlying protocols for Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. This isn't a list of 'secret APIs' for Windows. This is the stuff that glues their Office system together and they were going to keep a hold of as long as possible. It's completely seperate to the anti-trust concerns you're referencing, but they do seem to be using it as a bargaining chip against the EU investigations. It remains to be seen whether that will work or not.
Just one letter, nothing big:
Ten years ago this week, the Free Software Summit arguably marked the beginning of today's FOSS movement. Considering the BSD license was published about 8 years before that, I think the only thing the summit marked was the politicisation of the Open Source Software movement, not it's creation.
The link you provided actually shows photos that you can't get from Google any more. I tried to move up the road but got a black picture and "this image is no longer available".
So, no, they didn't take it from the public road. They took it from the end of the private road and have now removed it.
I'm not arguing the law, because I'm not a lawyer. I'm saying it's morally wrong for a company to take photos of someone else's clearly marked private property and then use them to improve revenue to their website by publishing them for everyone in the world to see.
I'm all for not having an expectation of privacy in public areas, but that area clearly isn't public.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to go with the hidden 4th option - people who post on Slashdot with that clever little "M$" thing.
I know it gives me the willies just thinking about them.
In all this you forget that if the government really wants to track citizens to that level, it's trivial to triangulate someone's cellphone position even if they're not using it using existing technology, not to mention that recording someone's phone calls is far more useful than collating encrypted Bluetooth data and trying to work out who is saying what.
There were so many things wrong with that comment that I'm struggling to pick a place to start.
Let's start with the fact that you subpeonas don't exist in the UK, to the fact that the research was carried about by students and not the government. We'll then move on to the fact that the ideas of 2 non-entity university students does not represent the opinions of 60 million British citizens as you seem to think. Then, we'll finish with the assertion that your comment is a nonsensical knee-jerk reaction to a complete non-issue.
How did I do?
Wow. After over a year of believing that Vista is more than adequate, yours is finally the argument that sways me.
You're absolutely right! With the mountains of evidence you provided to back up that insightful remark, I have finally seen the light! Vista is shit, Microsoft are evil and you're a genius. Not only that, but everybody on the planet agrees!
I would start a parade in your honour, my good man, except that you are clearly so full of shit that an Alabama farmer could squeeze you for a decade and still have plenty of manure left.
Is that not a valid complaint?
Wow. For a start, I'm not clicking your link again, I've learned my lesson from last time. Let's make this to the point:
- Getting an idea or two from someone is completely different from acting the same way all the time.
- I didn't say our policeforce is immune to dickery, but they're significantly less dickish than the US police.
- I didn't say no policeman in the UK has guns, I said that they aren't given to every officer.
- You're the moron who pulled this entire fucking thing off-topic, not me.
You are completely unable to distinguish the grey areas between black and white.
I said come back when you'd stopped being a moron, not keep blabbering away and making yourself look even more stupid.
If you don't understand how two entirely different cultures can have two police forces that react differently to violent situations, especially when the armaments of those forces vary wildly, then I'm not going to sit here and explain it to you at length.
I will give you a hint though - in Britain, they don't give every PC Tom, Dick and WPC Harriet a firearm to wave in the face of criminals, and they're also taught to practise restraint.
If this seems rather rude of me, that's because I haven't been taught to practise restraint, and also I get pissy when I have someone crash my browser to make a largely irrelevant point.
Well, initially I couldn't get on your link because it crashed Opera when I tried to load it.
So, I switched to Firefox just to humour you and wish I hadn't bothered - why don't you try reading the part that says BRITISH police and come back when you're not a moron.
Actually, I do keep a tabs on the rate for my local force, and the figures look far, far better than that.
YMMV of course depending on the area you live in.
Maybe I lived the sheltered life down in Devon, but neither of those things are exactly common occurences.
If you're referring to the fact that the police are actually fallible, meaning they aren't criminal-catching robot people who get it right 100% of the time, then I think you're the one with the problem here, not them.
Mistakes are made, things happen, and sometimes it's really, really shit and someone dies because of it. However, to pretend that the few mistakes they make cancel out the incredible amount of solved crimes they manage, even under the incredible crippling that the Labour government has inflicted on them with their target-based performance system, is disingenuous.
The damage needs to be repaired at the source before the police can finally prioritise to doing real work.
And yes, I agree this idea is useless and shortlived, but it is certainly not an invasion of privacy.
Well, the comment above me was clearly flamebait but absolutely spot on. You can't get worked up over every little thing some quasi-famous turd on the internet says just because it doesn't agree with what you believe.
I'm gay. If I did that, I would have had a brain aneurysm by now, and I think that goes for a lot of 'minorities' (god I hate that word, but I couldn't avoid it).
That one's definitely twitter. I'm Macthorpe, and so's my wife! :D
Thank you for being the only person who responded to provide me with a link to some 'evidence', even if that evidence was that Sweden abstained for reasons that they specifically didn't say was related to Microsoft at all. Here I ask another question - the most prevalent argument that I hear is that a lot of Microsoft partners joined the process in order to vote in favour.
Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
Surely, national bodies are supposed to get the opinion of the companies in the country they represent, and the more companies the better? As it costs money to join the process, there must be a reason for these companies to fork out to have their say, and the most simple reason would be that it's in their best interests. A lot of companies rely on Microsoft to make a living, and those companies will appreciate OOXML being open because it will widen their customer base.
So, foul play or sour grapes?
Despite the bevy of rational explanations, with official bodies denying, often with proof, that no 'backroom dealing' occurred, it's still not enough for people to realise that the ISO process may actually be working fine. Just because people didn't get the result they want, they go out of their way to find as much completely circumstantial and unprovable 'evidence' as possible that the system is broken.
It's actually kind of amusing to see people get so worked up. ODF is still a standard, and OOXML becoming one doesn't actually change that.
On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog.
Well, you know what they say - sometimes patent law is just a game of give and take.
Twitter's not my type - he has a wife and child and I prefer honest guys.
Anyway, Slashdot doesn't seem to give a shit that someone is lying to their faces, so what's the point in me telling you? Hence why I haven't bothered posting a response to anything he's said in a week, and it's highly unlikely that I will in future. You can sort it out yourselves, not that people here seem to have the wherewithal to do so.
Peace out.
Of course, when I said title, I meant summary. That'll teach me not to preview.
If you boil society down to 'collecting human beings', sure, gaming is apparently anti-social.
Unfortunately for you, society is a fuck of a lot more complicated than that, which is why we have multiplayer games and PAX.
The link you provided actually shows photos that you can't get from Google any more. I tried to move up the road but got a black picture and "this image is no longer available".
So, no, they didn't take it from the public road. They took it from the end of the private road and have now removed it.
I'm not arguing the law, because I'm not a lawyer. I'm saying it's morally wrong for a company to take photos of someone else's clearly marked private property and then use them to improve revenue to their website by publishing them for everyone in the world to see.
I'm all for not having an expectation of privacy in public areas, but that area clearly isn't public.