This is so probably because the EU directive law process.
Basically, an EU directive sets certain limits, plus a deadline by which member states have to have a statute that implements the directive. Only in some cases, when the deadline is ignored by a member state, the EU directive can become directly applicable law.
So there is no EU-wide 2 years minimum warranty. But there is a directive that describes what is the minimum that has to apply in all member states.
Example, you are allowed to return mail order stuff for a full refund, but it's a 14 days period in Germany, and 7 days in Austria. Both regulations go back to an EU directive, but Austria/Germany implemented it slightly different.
Another thing here is that in the EU you usually have two different legal concepts:
-) defects liability (warranty by statute, "Gewährleistung") is basically a warranty provided by law, which is 2 years long, usually, and which cannot be reduced in contracts with consumers. (Actually it's not electrical goods here, it's "mobile goods", "stationary goods" usually have a much longer liability period. And there are strictly limited cases where even in business with a consumer you can limit it, like used goods, or parts that are used up during normal usage.) This is legal right that you've got against your contract partner, the retailer. And in AT/DE at least it's split, the first 6 months you've got an assumption that the defect was there on delivery, afterwards the assumption is turned, so you need to prove that the defect was there in the device as such.
-) warranty by the manufacturer. It's basically voluntary and it can contain all kinds of conditions. (E.g. your car need to be serviced regularly by an authorized work shop,...)
In practice that turns out usually as 6 months hard warranty, because the retailer would need to prove that the customer caused the defect, and usually followed by 1.5 years "soft" warranty, because the legal risk is (more) on the consumer, but usually consumer-friendly companies handle it without problems, only refusing in the most blatant cases where the consumer ruined the goods.
Now, where exactly puts that Apple on the "user-friendliness" axis. (E.g. you can charge all current mobiles on standardized Micro-USB chargers, wonder which company asked to be allowed to sell a special adaptor that you need to buy separately. Yes, you guessed it, Apple. Guess it would have been better to make that an EU directive, and not allow the industry to regulate itself, then Apple would have to produce iPhones with USB standard plugs:) )
Actually, by requiring the password of another user, one could argue that the supervisor (would access) accesses server systems without the consent of the system owner. Aren't there statutes on the book that make such a thing a felony already?
Because DUAL-SIM phones are at best not very good.
Most of the Multi-SIM phones come out of China and are designed for the internal Chinese market, hence offer no UMTS (as China is going it's own 3G path). Operating systems, display sizes, display quality,... => Everything not comparable to Single-SIM devices.
Furthermore it also depends on what you want to achieve => if you want to avoid passive roaming charges, you do not want your home SIM card enabled abroad, don't you?
Guys, devices that are not switchable to a different telco are such an Americanism/Anachronism. And cutting down on the size of the SIM sounds like a stupid thing to do too, the only devices where these couple of cubic-mm might be relevant would have to so tiny that their value as a "smartphone" (where battery, memory, and so on is relevant) would be strictly limited. And on devices of the size of the iPhone or bigger, this somehow trades of tinyiest % of volume for mechanical stability and user friendlyness.
No they are confiscating Chemistry books, and are considering to make it legal for international raids on libraries.
All of this tracking of chemicals that are toxic is rather pointless, similar to the overdone security theatre at airports. From my High School days Chemistry where I was an A+ student allowed to basically go into the teacher's lab and play myself, I've learned certain truths:
1.) Ecological products are seldom that. The then-current fad were phosphate-free detergents. Phosphate-free they were, but nobody asked what the substitutes were. (Let's say filling up rivers with phosphate would have been way nicer than that to the eco system)
2.) Toxic chemicals book keeping is a joke. So you do keep your book, and in the end you check how much "toxic waste" (which we in the school kept in huge dark glass bottles) you've got and fill it up to the expected amount with (purified) water. (Purified to avoid causing funny reactions inside)
3.) If you need some "dangerous" chemicals, take a little water, a little bit of salt, and a PSU, plugin the PSU into an outlet, put the DC side into the salt water. Now put that into your bedroom, close all windows, and good sleep, chlorine gas clearly make your corpse be very clean. Considering the fact that new "drugs" (and substitutes) are being created every day, the incredible many ways to create an explosive (or a precursor), the policy of licensing/forbidding access will obviously mean death by starvation (you can do dangerous stuff with food stuff, e.g. NaCl also called table salt), which is good because some stuff the human body produces can be dangerous (piss, gases,...), so the government will end up with a very dead and incredible secure country.
You mean like the $99 phone? You mean like an Archos media player tablet that comes with an Android app for your phone to remote control the Tablet if you want to use it via the HDMI connector? Basically Android is mobile/tablet operating system, and does that rather well (certainly better than say iOS? *g*). But for a general purpose desktop it's not very well suited. Add to this the price and you get a business failure?
(Philosophically a general purpose Linux computer with say Debian with 16-32GB speedy SSD onboard, Presenting a mass storage device that contains the necessary programs to interact with it from the host system (e.g. keyboard, mouse, display, and network, would be interesting if there are USB network devices where the driver comes with common OSes) would have a bigger audience. (As in people that have to be mobile from time to time, but usually happen to end up in a place with a PC))
Mentally unstable people are the problem, for everything.
Plus naturally the people backed into a corner, not seeing any chance to get their grief redressed in any sensible way?
(Hint: The Americans did prefer to go Terrorist instead of continuing to send letters to their King, their legal Sovereign at the time?)
Another piece of food for thought: The labels "Terrorist", "Rebel", "Partisan", "Freedom Fighter", "Hero" are applied by the party that wins. Before there is a winner, all these labels are while not exactly synonyms very overlapping. (Or to you think that the British of the time would have labeled the Americans Freedom Fighters?) Same thing applies the Civil War (to stay with American history), any number of European conflicts/wars. One interesting thing that I learned by attending a French school was that history is very "pov-dependant"; the same facts more or less were presented in history class. But the way of presentation painted many historic events quite differently. Philosophically, as German/French history books use the same facts (well, the selection could be slightly biased but in practice this seemed not a problem), so neither author did lie. But still they managed to present events in completely contrary fashion.
No actually British Christians wouldn't want a theocracy, certainly not 60% of them. But that is only because in most places (well exclude some bible fanatics).
Or to put it stronger, Christian fanatics might oppose say abortion. But they wouldn't want a state based on the Bible (Hint: the bible gives no framework for statehood.), but they would certainly like a law or even an amendment to forbid abortion.
As sad it is that people want to limit the choices for others, and some of them are murderers too, as a whole these guys are quite a bit more compatible with democratic western style societies.
Anyway, you are certainly trying to be more stupid and nonunderstanding yourself => muslims != Islam. Certainly a huge majority of the muslim population is pragmatic similar as many Christians. And these UK muslims are more a problem of the UK not be capable to assimilate them into society, so they keep their own identity linked to their religion. The only place that I know that works despite Immigrants keeping relative strong linkage to their birth society is Canada, where many Canadians continue to identify in a secondary way with their birth country. (But then this tolerant attitude is part of the culture). Normally, immigrants that get not assimilated and continue to form their own group are an issue (e.g. without knowing the local language their chances for a good job are strictly limited,...).
So Islam as a religion has a set of more aggressive scripture compared to most Christian religions (which differ somehow what parts of the Bible are holy and which translation is the correct one). Muslims as a population are usually similar to Christians (or whatever) as a population. One last observation, we do not have theocracies of the Christian ilk nowadays, we do have theocracies of the Islamic kind, and if the state whips up a frency, well then you've got a population that has a much higher percentage of fanatics.
Btw, Islam considers converting to some other religion to be a capital crime, and fanatics really might kill you. Christians do not that. Not that they have been always overly nice to heretics over the millenia.
Well, Chrisq referred to the religion, which in fact has a number of questionable rules in their holy scripture. You referred to the muslim population. Now most of these are pragmatic, as are most catholics, protestants, and so on. Just consider some places in the US that go by the nickname "Bible Belt" and what these fanatics extract out of the Bible. Now the Bible is clearly adult-only lecture (you've got descriptions all kind perverse kinky stuff inside, murder,..., every crazy behaviour you name is more or less depicted some where inside), but obviously the muslim scripture is a little bit more aggressive, so when fanatics extrapolate from it, the fanatism is a little bit more extreme.
Does not change the fact that 99% of muslim population are civil peaceful people (as are 99% of the Christian population).
Well, actually, there are persons that take a recipe from the cookbook (or the Internet), and cook it on an evening they've invited guests. So yes, you just to get the right person, which admittingly is not trivial in a government (no matter which country) sponsored project.
The problem with security is, that you usually cannot protect completely, you can only make the attack more expensive. (If the expense is more than the whole Earth can output in the next century, you can feel relatively secure, but the important thing that you need reevaluate your premises all the time, because new discoveries can cut the costs)
So keeping scientists (which are not engineers btw, and are the topic of the article) from selling out will make the physics book approach more competitive. And the presumption that you need to acquire the knowledge externally because redoing on your own is not economic is a dangerous assumption, when dealing with fanatics, dictatorships, and other extreme entities. (These entities often work with slightly different economical models.)
Well, but then you should not paint yourself as the side that follows ethical guidelines. Hypocrisy does not become politicians.
The fact is that if you took the foreign behaviour of the US, and anonymized it, you could easily identify as a member country of the "Axis of Evil".
Ever considered how many foreign civilians are killed by the US (bombs are usually not smart, and even smart bombs can kill civilians that happen to be where the bomb detonates)? How does that compare to all dead caused by foreign terrorists? In absolute numbers? In relative numbers?
How can ignoring local laws be okay (there are warrents for US agents in European countries)? And if local laws can be ignored sometimes, why does that exception not apply to the other side? And if the US is allowed to execute people without trial located in foreign countries, how come they are irritated with foreign terrorists, these guys are only their jobs, like US federal civil servants that are bombing civilians on the other side of the globe?
Basically, if it comes down to we are the good guys, because...., well it's our people, it's very hard to condemn the other side doing the same thing?
And to the poster above, your items basically legitimatizes terrorism. If it's only about what is good for us, then if it's good for us to bomb a couple of thousands of civilians, well, let's do it. It's also a blue print to explain why what the Iranian fanatics do is okay. And so on.
Well, actually Bush & Co claimed that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction. Nuke are just one kind of WMD, there are also biological and chemical WMDs, which were what Iraq was said to own. Despite the fact that even US intelligence services were not sure (their reports were more along the line "well, they might have some") and UN reports that Iraq has no such weapons, which were proven after the invasion that ended many years ago (rofl), politicians felt it necessary to do something. No matter that Iraqi and US citizens died during the liberation of Iraq. (And despite the fact the Saddam regime had a tendency to genocidal actions, one has to wonder how many Iraqis were killed per year under it, and how many during the liberation, and how many nowadays?)
Not exactly what the pirate party stands for. Downloading copyrighted material is at best a side issue.
But, assuming that it is the "platform", well compare it to more mainstream parties (in the US or the EU) and you'll notice that these have no recognizable party program at all?
So the studio owns the words? E.g. "Batman begins Parody", "Review of Batman Begins"? Or even worse for a crawler: "This page contains reviews of the following:" and 90% down the page "Batman begins" linked to a video review of the movie?
The DMCA seems to have an interesting wart, perhaps intended but still: Party A sends take down notice for content of Party B. Now Party B must claim that it has copyright or license to display the content. There are reasonable situations where might lack license or copyright (e.g. copyright owner gone missing), but under DMCA you are not capable to answer to a 3rd party that should have no standing what so ever. Furthermore it puts the burden of proof on the defendant, which is problematic in all the edge cases (e.g. fair use or not).
If a DMCA claim is mistakenly filed against you, what's your loss?
-) well, cost of legal representation to counterclaim?
But even more important are the issues for the society as whole, going around and accusing people of wrong doing based on automatically generated "proof" by "experts" (at cashing in, not exactly on the relevant technical subject matter), as it happens with DMCA and similar laws, does have a chilling effect on free speech, art (fair use),...
So yes, an analogy would be: "We've looked at the last 100 copyright infringers, calculated a profile using really modern scientific (cough) methods how infringers are looking, and now we programmed the self-driving Google cars so they check for persons that infringe, to stun them and call the police on location. Sorry for the dead one, we couldn't have known that he had a pacer, and the half-dozen guys we stunned and that spent a weekend in jail that did even own a computer or internet access, sorry, no harm done". Guess a weekend in the slammer for some peons is of no relevancy for the corporate overlords.
So while a fake DMCA take down notice (or a copyright suit because the IP addresses got matched up wrongly) is clearly no harm. It's the duty of every citizen to pay for his legal representation, which cost him more than he makes, while the corporate entity gets a rebate for bringing business and pays the legal expenses as deductible business expenses, actually a tiny part of their revenue?
Well, MS was not sued over filesystems. Not my Linux distributors. And walking around, and spreading FUD, without giving out specifics (which patents are being violated), well is just FUDish PR.
I guess you would be okay if somebody says "you are a criminal", but does not specify what your crime is? Guess it's easy to defend one if one is not knowing what one is accused of, right?
Actually, Apple is the bad guy here. They are using patents willfully without negotiating a license, which is obvious a very good reason to hold selling Apple products that use say UMTS (so everything beside PCs/Laptops and Ipods and Ipad Wifi-only gets banned), till this fuck up is cleaned up by Apple.
Well, "The parasite is Shamfung", you mean as in not being able to negotiate a FRAND license for these patents that are critical to UMTS, that Samsung co-developed? Let me know if I guess wrong, but Apple did not participate (in design, in costs,...) when GSM was created. They did not participate when UMTS was created. And while GSM was a primary European effort, UMTS was a more global effort. So Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Ericsson, Samsung,... all funded the UMTS standard so to say, they even gave it kind of a gift (that's what FRAND means, they cannot shutout a competitor, but the competitor has to pay, Apple does not) to the community. And now two late-comers, Apple and Google entered the market => Apple as the bully (What would an iPhone/iPad be without UMTS, remember the iPhone1?), that sues the old players over the look of gadgets (guess the worst that will happen is the Samsung gadgets start to look different, as outlined by the judges). Google OTOH while certainly not the Knight on the White Horse, is way more cooperative, with mobile producers, and with the opensource community.
Btw, first results are in on the legal war, Apple lost against a tiny Android tablet importer in Spain, and is being now sued for custom costs, lost profit,...
(And sorry, lawyers can be rather conservative, he would probably be not able to these plastic plates are tablet computers if it would not be implied by the context)
The issue with the hard subject matters is that while routine calculation can be delegated to a 3rd world country, you still need to grasp the limits. And for an university level education you should be able to explain why some random parameter can be from 10 to 150, not just know the limits. Knowing just the limits is more of a vocational training. Understanding why it's 10-150 is master-level (for some stuff bachelor level) knowledge, and researching how to increase the known limit might be PhD level stuff.
The issue at hand is political correctness. I mean gender equality is political correct. Despite the fact that it's obvious that the gender do not share the same plumbing system, nor the same hormone system, which is rather an important part of "us". There is also presumption that all students if they just want, can study math. Or CS. Or some other form of engineering. The issue is that probably (that's just an educated guesstimate) 10% or so of the population that have the mental requirements (e.g. 3D visualization, abstract thinking,...). That's why putting unemployed in programming courses don't yield you programmers, it yields quite a bit of people that know how to use an editor, understand the syntax of some programming language, but still cannot grasp the concept of nested loops. Other victims, the ones with the required level of abstract planning capability and some experience, take years to understand the point of UML (it's what people that cannot keep complex systems in the head use to notate the stuff you do without further thought).
So the first issue is, that only part of the population has the required mental capabilities.
The next issue is, well, quality evaluation in schooling. Basically if you stuff the courses with many many people that have troubles to grasp even the basics, and you still expect certain grade statistics, you basically lower the requirements. This and a number of other tiny things tend to water down, especially high school level maths, physics, chemistry iteratively. During my grammar school days, I've noticed that every generation of math books had less content, displayed in more colorful and kiddy way. E.g. around my age, proof via induction was dropped, and quadratic equations was moved down one year.
Now, after high school, at university, in technical courses, the profs are forced to expect a certain level of math knowledge. And don't take it wrong, all of these fields have more or even more intimate relations with maths. If you are lucky, there is one class that basically repeats the stuff your high school should have thought you. And because all the stuff somehow relies on the older stuff, you start to get in troubles when you try understand the later stuff without having understood the older stuff. So many of the tech students are basically dropping out as a side effect because your high school teachers wanted to have the right results for the school board.
The second item is that high school education (and other stuff, but high school is certainly the big item) is being watered down. You can either teach your student, which is hard work, or you can give out an A+ for the same level that gave you a B- a decade ago.
The third item is that it makes no economical sense to do the hard stuff. In the usual corporate setup a business degree might get you started at a lower income level than say an engineer, but you'll overtake him rather fast. As I mentioned the best tech students usually are quite capable of basic maths and especially are capable of analyzing their earning potential.
So, if politicians (did you notice that high level politicians tend to be lawyers?) want more engineers, they need to make it more attractive to be an engineer, they need to offer high school students, at least the interested one, to learn higher level maths.
You mean the port that means you always need a special cable? The port that proves that Apple's profit is way more important than user friendliness? Practically all other phones nowadays come with a MicroUSB connector. So MicroUSB charger are plugged in at strategic places at home, and anyone (visitors too) can just plug their phones in, for charging. Only Apple lusers need to remember to carry an adapter plug, how is that for user friendliness?
Well, actually, they can drink (non-hard) alcoholic beverages in most of the world. And there are places where 16 years old can vote, at least at a local level too.
Fuck on camera is a worse issue, it depends on the local standards what child pornography is.
And the fact that 14 years can be tried as adults is also rather specific to the US. In other places it tends to be the other way, e.g. young adults, when recommended by the child protection service can be tried as a children, if they are not yet adult in their behaviour.
Slashdot Mirror
This is so probably because the EU directive law process.
Basically, an EU directive sets certain limits, plus a deadline by which member states have to have a statute that implements the directive.
Only in some cases, when the deadline is ignored by a member state, the EU directive can become directly applicable law.
So there is no EU-wide 2 years minimum warranty. But there is a directive that describes what is the minimum that has to apply in all member states.
Example, you are allowed to return mail order stuff for a full refund, but it's a 14 days period in Germany, and 7 days in Austria. Both regulations go back to an EU directive, but Austria/Germany implemented it slightly different.
Another thing here is that in the EU you usually have two different legal concepts:
-) defects liability (warranty by statute, "Gewährleistung") is basically a warranty provided by law, which is 2 years long, usually, and which cannot be reduced in contracts with consumers. (Actually it's not electrical goods here, it's "mobile goods", "stationary goods" usually have a much longer liability period. And there are strictly limited cases where even in business with a consumer you can limit it, like used goods, or parts that are used up during normal usage.) This is legal right that you've got against your contract partner, the retailer. And in AT/DE at least it's split, the first 6 months you've got an assumption that the defect was there on delivery, afterwards the assumption is turned, so you need to prove that the defect was there in the device as such.
-) warranty by the manufacturer. It's basically voluntary and it can contain all kinds of conditions. (E.g. your car need to be serviced regularly by an authorized work shop, ...)
In practice that turns out usually as 6 months hard warranty, because the retailer would need to prove that the customer caused the defect, and usually followed by 1.5 years "soft" warranty, because the legal risk is (more) on the consumer, but usually consumer-friendly companies handle it without problems, only refusing in the most blatant cases where the consumer ruined the goods.
Now, where exactly puts that Apple on the "user-friendliness" axis. (E.g. you can charge all current mobiles on standardized Micro-USB chargers, wonder which company asked to be allowed to sell a special adaptor that you need to buy separately. Yes, you guessed it, Apple. Guess it would have been better to make that an EU directive, and not allow the industry to regulate itself, then Apple would have to produce iPhones with USB standard plugs :) )
Actually, by requiring the password of another user, one could argue that the supervisor (would access) accesses server systems without the consent of the system owner. Aren't there statutes on the book that make such a thing a felony already?
I don't need a cloud service for that, my home box can serve this role too.
Well, a good common cover for SIMs seem to be SD-Card plastic covers.
Because DUAL-SIM phones are at best not very good.
Most of the Multi-SIM phones come out of China and are designed for the internal Chinese market, hence offer no UMTS (as China is going it's own 3G path). Operating systems, display sizes, display quality, ... => Everything not comparable to Single-SIM devices.
Furthermore it also depends on what you want to achieve => if you want to avoid passive roaming charges, you do not want your home SIM card enabled abroad, don't you?
Guys, devices that are not switchable to a different telco are such an Americanism/Anachronism. And cutting down on the size of the SIM sounds like a stupid thing to do too, the only devices where these couple of cubic-mm might be relevant would have to so tiny that their value as a "smartphone" (where battery, memory, and so on is relevant) would be strictly limited. And on devices of the size of the iPhone or bigger, this somehow trades of tinyiest % of volume for mechanical stability and user friendlyness.
That was a good one ;)
That's simple, forget about the IT side, get yourself a good legal dept and some lobbying, and push liability onto your customers.
No they are confiscating Chemistry books, and are considering to make it legal for international raids on libraries.
All of this tracking of chemicals that are toxic is rather pointless, similar to the overdone security theatre at airports. From my High School days Chemistry where I was an A+ student allowed to basically go into the teacher's lab and play myself, I've learned certain truths:
1.) Ecological products are seldom that. The then-current fad were phosphate-free detergents. Phosphate-free they were, but nobody asked what the substitutes were. (Let's say filling up rivers with phosphate would have been way nicer than that to the eco system)
2.) Toxic chemicals book keeping is a joke. So you do keep your book, and in the end you check how much "toxic waste" (which we in the school kept in huge dark glass bottles) you've got and fill it up to the expected amount with (purified) water. (Purified to avoid causing funny reactions inside)
3.) If you need some "dangerous" chemicals, take a little water, a little bit of salt, and a PSU, plugin the PSU into an outlet, put the DC side into the salt water. Now put that into your bedroom, close all windows, and good sleep, chlorine gas clearly make your corpse be very clean. Considering the fact that new "drugs" (and substitutes) are being created every day, the incredible many ways to create an explosive (or a precursor), the policy of licensing/forbidding access will obviously mean death by starvation (you can do dangerous stuff with food stuff, e.g. NaCl also called table salt), which is good because some stuff the human body produces can be dangerous (piss, gases, ...), so the government will end up with a very dead and incredible secure country.
You mean like the $99 phone? You mean like an Archos media player tablet that comes with an Android app for your phone to remote control the Tablet if you want to use it via the HDMI connector? Basically Android is mobile/tablet operating system, and does that rather well (certainly better than say iOS? *g*). But for a general purpose desktop it's not very well suited. Add to this the price and you get a business failure?
(Philosophically a general purpose Linux computer with say Debian with 16-32GB speedy SSD onboard, Presenting a mass storage device that contains the necessary programs to interact with it from the host system (e.g. keyboard, mouse, display, and network, would be interesting if there are USB network devices where the driver comes with common OSes) would have a bigger audience. (As in people that have to be mobile from time to time, but usually happen to end up in a place with a PC))
Mentally unstable people are the problem, for everything.
Plus naturally the people backed into a corner, not seeing any chance to get their grief redressed in any sensible way?
(Hint: The Americans did prefer to go Terrorist instead of continuing to send letters to their King, their legal Sovereign at the time?)
Another piece of food for thought: The labels "Terrorist", "Rebel", "Partisan", "Freedom Fighter", "Hero" are applied by the party that wins. Before there is a winner, all these labels are while not exactly synonyms very overlapping. (Or to you think that the British of the time would have labeled the Americans Freedom Fighters?)
Same thing applies the Civil War (to stay with American history), any number of European conflicts/wars. One interesting thing that I learned by attending a French school was that history is very "pov-dependant"; the same facts more or less were presented in history class. But the way of presentation painted many historic events quite differently. Philosophically, as German/French history books use the same facts (well, the selection could be slightly biased but in practice this seemed not a problem), so neither author did lie. But still they managed to present events in completely contrary fashion.
No actually British Christians wouldn't want a theocracy, certainly not 60% of them. But that is only because in most places (well exclude some bible fanatics).
Or to put it stronger, Christian fanatics might oppose say abortion. But they wouldn't want a state based on the Bible (Hint: the bible gives no framework for statehood.), but they would certainly like a law or even an amendment to forbid abortion.
As sad it is that people want to limit the choices for others, and some of them are murderers too, as a whole these guys are quite a bit more compatible with democratic western style societies.
Anyway, you are certainly trying to be more stupid and nonunderstanding yourself => muslims != Islam. Certainly a huge majority of the muslim population is pragmatic similar as many Christians. And these UK muslims are more a problem of the UK not be capable to assimilate them into society, so they keep their own identity linked to their religion. The only place that I know that works despite Immigrants keeping relative strong linkage to their birth society is Canada, where many Canadians continue to identify in a secondary way with their birth country. (But then this tolerant attitude is part of the culture). Normally, immigrants that get not assimilated and continue to form their own group are an issue (e.g. without knowing the local language their chances for a good job are strictly limited, ...).
So Islam as a religion has a set of more aggressive scripture compared to most Christian religions (which differ somehow what parts of the Bible are holy and which translation is the correct one). Muslims as a population are usually similar to Christians (or whatever) as a population. One last observation, we do not have theocracies of the Christian ilk nowadays, we do have theocracies of the Islamic kind, and if the state whips up a frency, well then you've got a population that has a much higher percentage of fanatics.
Btw, Islam considers converting to some other religion to be a capital crime, and fanatics really might kill you. Christians do not that. Not that they have been always overly nice to heretics over the millenia.
Well, Chrisq referred to the religion, which in fact has a number of questionable rules in their holy scripture. You referred to the muslim population. Now most of these are pragmatic, as are most catholics, protestants, and so on. Just consider some places in the US that go by the nickname "Bible Belt" and what these fanatics extract out of the Bible. Now the Bible is clearly adult-only lecture (you've got descriptions all kind perverse kinky stuff inside, murder, ..., every crazy behaviour you name is more or less depicted some where inside), but obviously the muslim scripture is a little bit more aggressive, so when fanatics extrapolate from it, the fanatism is a little bit more extreme.
Does not change the fact that 99% of muslim population are civil peaceful people (as are 99% of the Christian population).
Well, actually, there are persons that take a recipe from the cookbook (or the Internet), and cook it on an evening they've invited guests. So yes, you just to get the right person, which admittingly is not trivial in a government (no matter which country) sponsored project.
The problem with security is, that you usually cannot protect completely, you can only make the attack more expensive. (If the expense is more than the whole Earth can output in the next century, you can feel relatively secure, but the important thing that you need reevaluate your premises all the time, because new discoveries can cut the costs)
So keeping scientists (which are not engineers btw, and are the topic of the article) from selling out will make the physics book approach more competitive. And the presumption that you need to acquire the knowledge externally because redoing on your own is not economic is a dangerous assumption, when dealing with fanatics, dictatorships, and other extreme entities. (These entities often work with slightly different economical models.)
Well, but then you should not paint yourself as the side that follows ethical guidelines. Hypocrisy does not become politicians.
The fact is that if you took the foreign behaviour of the US, and anonymized it, you could easily identify as a member country of the "Axis of Evil".
Ever considered how many foreign civilians are killed by the US (bombs are usually not smart, and even smart bombs can kill civilians that happen to be where the bomb detonates)? How does that compare to all dead caused by foreign terrorists? In absolute numbers? In relative numbers?
How can ignoring local laws be okay (there are warrents for US agents in European countries)? And if local laws can be ignored sometimes, why does that exception not apply to the other side? And if the US is allowed to execute people without trial located in foreign countries, how come they are irritated with foreign terrorists, these guys are only their jobs, like US federal civil servants that are bombing civilians on the other side of the globe?
Basically, if it comes down to we are the good guys, because ...., well it's our people, it's very hard to condemn the other side doing the same thing?
And to the poster above, your items basically legitimatizes terrorism. If it's only about what is good for us, then if it's good for us to bomb a couple of thousands of civilians, well, let's do it. It's also a blue print to explain why what the Iranian fanatics do is okay. And so on.
Well, actually Bush & Co claimed that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction. Nuke are just one kind of WMD, there are also biological and chemical WMDs, which were what Iraq was said to own. Despite the fact that even US intelligence services were not sure (their reports were more along the line "well, they might have some") and UN reports that Iraq has no such weapons, which were proven after the invasion that ended many years ago (rofl), politicians felt it necessary to do something. No matter that Iraqi and US citizens died during the liberation of Iraq. (And despite the fact the Saddam regime had a tendency to genocidal actions, one has to wonder how many Iraqis were killed per year under it, and how many during the liberation, and how many nowadays?)
Not exactly what the pirate party stands for. Downloading copyrighted material is at best a side issue.
But, assuming that it is the "platform", well compare it to more mainstream parties (in the US or the EU) and you'll notice that these have no recognizable party program at all?
So the studio owns the words? E.g. "Batman begins Parody", "Review of Batman Begins"? Or even worse for a crawler: "This page contains reviews of the following:" and 90% down the page "Batman begins" linked to a video review of the movie?
The DMCA seems to have an interesting wart, perhaps intended but still: Party A sends take down notice for content of Party B. Now Party B must claim that it has copyright or license to display the content. There are reasonable situations where might lack license or copyright (e.g. copyright owner gone missing), but under DMCA you are not capable to answer to a 3rd party that should have no standing what so ever. Furthermore it puts the burden of proof on the defendant, which is problematic in all the edge cases (e.g. fair use or not).
If a DMCA claim is mistakenly filed against you, what's your loss?
-) well, cost of legal representation to counterclaim?
But even more important are the issues for the society as whole, going around and accusing people of wrong doing based on automatically generated "proof" by "experts" (at cashing in, not exactly on the relevant technical subject matter), as it happens with DMCA and similar laws, does have a chilling effect on free speech, art (fair use), ...
So yes, an analogy would be: "We've looked at the last 100 copyright infringers, calculated a profile using really modern scientific (cough) methods how infringers are looking, and now we programmed the self-driving Google cars so they check for persons that infringe, to stun them and call the police on location. Sorry for the dead one, we couldn't have known that he had a pacer, and the half-dozen guys we stunned and that spent a weekend in jail that did even own a computer or internet access, sorry, no harm done". Guess a weekend in the slammer for some peons is of no relevancy for the corporate overlords.
So while a fake DMCA take down notice (or a copyright suit because the IP addresses got matched up wrongly) is clearly no harm. It's the duty of every citizen to pay for his legal representation, which cost him more than he makes, while the corporate entity gets a rebate for bringing business and pays the legal expenses as deductible business expenses, actually a tiny part of their revenue?
Well, MS was not sued over filesystems. Not my Linux distributors. And walking around, and spreading FUD, without giving out specifics (which patents are being violated), well is just FUDish PR.
I guess you would be okay if somebody says "you are a criminal", but does not specify what your crime is? Guess it's easy to defend one if one is not knowing what one is accused of, right?
Actually, Apple is the bad guy here. They are using patents willfully without negotiating a license, which is obvious a very good reason to hold selling Apple products that use say UMTS (so everything beside PCs/Laptops and Ipods and Ipad Wifi-only gets banned), till this fuck up is cleaned up by Apple.
They did not invent the graphical user interface either, and tried to sue Microsoft over that, some decades ago.
Well, "The parasite is Shamfung", you mean as in not being able to negotiate a FRAND license for these patents that are critical to UMTS, that Samsung co-developed? Let me know if I guess wrong, but Apple did not participate (in design, in costs, ...) when GSM was created. They did not participate when UMTS was created. And while GSM was a primary European effort, UMTS was a more global effort. So Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Ericsson, Samsung, ... all funded the UMTS standard so to say, they even gave it kind of a gift (that's what FRAND means, they cannot shutout a competitor, but the competitor has to pay, Apple does not) to the community. And now two late-comers, Apple and Google entered the market => Apple as the bully (What would an iPhone/iPad be without UMTS, remember the iPhone1?), that sues the old players over the look of gadgets (guess the worst that will happen is the Samsung gadgets start to look different, as outlined by the judges). Google OTOH while certainly not the Knight on the White Horse, is way more cooperative, with mobile producers, and with the opensource community.
Btw, first results are in on the legal war, Apple lost against a tiny Android tablet importer in Spain, and is being now sued for custom costs, lost profit, ...
(And sorry, lawyers can be rather conservative, he would probably be not able to these plastic plates are tablet computers if it would not be implied by the context)
Engineering Prof? He is half a MBA ;)
The issue with the hard subject matters is that while routine calculation can be delegated to a 3rd world country, you still need to grasp the limits. And for an university level education you should be able to explain why some random parameter can be from 10 to 150, not just know the limits. Knowing just the limits is more of a vocational training. Understanding why it's 10-150 is master-level (for some stuff bachelor level) knowledge, and researching how to increase the known limit might be PhD level stuff.
The issue at hand is political correctness. I mean gender equality is political correct. Despite the fact that it's obvious that the gender do not share the same plumbing system, nor the same hormone system, which is rather an important part of "us". There is also presumption that all students if they just want, can study math. Or CS. Or some other form of engineering. The issue is that probably (that's just an educated guesstimate) 10% or so of the population that have the mental requirements (e.g. 3D visualization, abstract thinking, ...). That's why putting unemployed in programming courses don't yield you programmers, it yields quite a bit of people that know how to use an editor, understand the syntax of some programming language, but still cannot grasp the concept of nested loops. Other victims, the ones with the required level of abstract planning capability and some experience, take years to understand the point of UML (it's what people that cannot keep complex systems in the head use to notate the stuff you do without further thought).
So the first issue is, that only part of the population has the required mental capabilities.
The next issue is, well, quality evaluation in schooling. Basically if you stuff the courses with many many people that have troubles to grasp even the basics, and you still expect certain grade statistics, you basically lower the requirements. This and a number of other tiny things tend to water down, especially high school level maths, physics, chemistry iteratively. During my grammar school days, I've noticed that every generation of math books had less content, displayed in more colorful and kiddy way. E.g. around my age, proof via induction was dropped, and quadratic equations was moved down one year.
Now, after high school, at university, in technical courses, the profs are forced to expect a certain level of math knowledge. And don't take it wrong, all of these fields have more or even more intimate relations with maths. If you are lucky, there is one class that basically repeats the stuff your high school should have thought you. And because all the stuff somehow relies on the older stuff, you start to get in troubles when you try understand the later stuff without having understood the older stuff. So many of the tech students are basically dropping out as a side effect because your high school teachers wanted to have the right results for the school board.
The second item is that high school education (and other stuff, but high school is certainly the big item) is being watered down. You can either teach your student, which is hard work, or you can give out an A+ for the same level that gave you a B- a decade ago.
The third item is that it makes no economical sense to do the hard stuff. In the usual corporate setup a business degree might get you started at a lower income level than say an engineer, but you'll overtake him rather fast. As I mentioned the best tech students usually are quite capable of basic maths and especially are capable of analyzing their earning potential.
So, if politicians (did you notice that high level politicians tend to be lawyers?) want more engineers, they need to make it more attractive to be an engineer, they need to offer high school students, at least the interested one, to learn higher level maths.
You mean the port that means you always need a special cable? The port that proves that Apple's profit is way more important than user friendliness? Practically all other phones nowadays come with a MicroUSB connector. So MicroUSB charger are plugged in at strategic places at home, and anyone (visitors too) can just plug their phones in, for charging. Only Apple lusers need to remember to carry an adapter plug, how is that for user friendliness?
Well, actually, they can drink (non-hard) alcoholic beverages in most of the world. And there are places where 16 years old can vote, at least at a local level too.
Fuck on camera is a worse issue, it depends on the local standards what child pornography is.
And the fact that 14 years can be tried as adults is also rather specific to the US. In other places it tends to be the other way, e.g. young adults, when recommended by the child protection service can be tried as a children, if they are not yet adult in their behaviour.