I routinely use Stereo Mix to save my voicemail to mp3 files. This is completely legitimate use that I find extremely important and the alternative is to dish out hundreds of dollars to shady "phone recorder" sellers.
RIAA can stuff it. I don't pirate music because frankly I don't like listening to it. Why should I have to pay a levy on CD sales (in Canada) and lose Stereo Mix when I rarely listen to music?
The open-source crowd always plans the same cynical game: "I will boycott your product publicly until you open-source it. How *dare* you keep it closed-source?!... what? You open-sourced it?... hmm, well it doesn't really matter anymore, I'd rather use something else".
Do me a favor, stop telling the world that the only reason people don't use X is because it's not open-source. Open-source is only a tiny fragment of what matters. This melodramatic fan-boy attitude ensure no one takes open-source advocates seriously.
That's a kind of funny comment seeing how bikers were busy running down pedestrians before they were pushed into the roads. I guess pedestrians are nazis too eh?
There is a time and a place for cars, bikes, and pedestrians. The current arrangement is very poorly planned and makes everyone pretty miserable but I guess that is consistent with Montreal's "great" road-planning, where the same road gets paved 2-3 times the same year while somehow developing 10x more pot holes than any surrounding province and state.
Let's be honest here: Quebec's government is corrupt. They are creating blue-collar work in order to keep unemployment figures low at the cost of millions of dollars of unnecessary construction projects and using poor construction materials everywhere.
And by the way, Montreal's parking meters are more expensive than New York's, if you can imagine such a thing. It makes no sense by any stretch of one's imagination.
Having lived in Montreal for many years I can tell you their so-called great system sucks.
The average road size in downtown Montreal is two lanes plus one parking lane. Parking is already impossible to find and one out of the two driving lanes is almost always blocked by construction, delivery trucks or some driver taking a left turn. So you're already down to one usable lane.
Now these idiots come along and pave *permanent* bike lanes (enforced with a concrete separator) in a country that sees Winter 3/4th of the year. Goodbye parking space, goodbye driving space. To make matters worse I've seen quite a few bikers continuing to use the roads and avoiding the biking lane altogether.
This is one of the dumbest idea I've heard of in a long while!
"At the end of the day, the wholesale ISPs are our customers and we generate revenue [from them], so we want to make sure we're serving them to the best of our ability as well."
I call bullshit. They make more money from selling the service directly to customers with extra caps. Independent ISPs provide much better (and less) restrictive service than Bell which is why it is against their interest to have people use them. If Bell really want us to believe this they should cease offering internet service altogether and only let independent ISPs do so.
How can one publish editorials about Muslim extremists without being told you're inciting hate against all Muslims? This is even more difficult if you are publishing editorial cartoons.
We are in the midst of an ideological war with extremist Muslims, yet mainstream Muslims seem to be uncomfortably silent in that fight. The only time one hears a Muslim group getting involved is when one of those extremists goes on air to express support for said terrorist groups. This has happened numerous times in the US and Canada with various groups expressing support for Hamas and Hezbollah.
If they can openly express support for groups who incite violence against us why is it not fair to incite violence against those extremists?
The problem with giving China access to key technologies (such as Google) without getting human rights improvements in return is that as a rising superpower they are impacting our society negatively.
Our economic and human rights standards are going down the drain because "well, if you don't do it I'll just take my business to China where they let me abuse my employees". If China was still a backward country (because they lacked key technologies) then they'd only be hurting themselves.
China would likely prefer that Google pull out, as it would aid the Chinese economy and growth of Baidu. In that regard, I can certainly understand why Google feels it is better to create inroads. Bull. If the government wanted them out they wouldn't have let them in in the first place and nothing prevents them from kicking Google out at any time they wish.
Google is in China because China wants them there. Google is guilty of sacrificing its morales for money.
I just want you to think, what benefit does nuking Israel which guarantees a much much harsher reaction from Israel bring to these ruling businessmen? See, that's why Iran, even with nukes is no threat at all to any other country?
All that matters to these people is survival of their business, they are not religious zealots, they don't believe in the second coming or afterlife or crap like what they preach to people. If a day comes where wiping their asses with pages of Quran helps them keep control of their business, then that's what they WILL HAPPILY DO. Bullshit.
1) They oppress their own people without any relation to your so-called "business interests". They beat women who refuse to cover up in public and a few years ago beat and raped a Canadian journalist to death: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/kazemi/
Some key highlights from that event:
* Evidence of a very brutal rape. * A skull fracture, two broken fingers, missing fingernails, a crushed big toe and a broken nose. * Severe abdominal bruising, swelling behind the head and a bruised shoulder. * Deep scratches on the neck and evidence of flogging on the legs.
This is "business as usual" for Iran. They've done this many times to their own people as well as their enemies.
2) They threaten Israel because they are religious fundamentalists. They want to hold the threat of nuclear weapons over Israel and other Arab countries which they hate such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They already spend millions of dollars every year training, supplying and funding terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Nuclear weapons are just the next item on the list.
Key quote: "At 2006 rates of production, Iran's oil reserves would last 98 years if no new oil was found."
4) Iran has *said* they wish to wipe Israel off the map. Iran has *acted* on this threat by funding terrorist attacks against Israel for over a decade. Israel has *developed* its nuclear program in secret over the past decade. What more proof do you need?!
The above points should throw up warning lights for any sane human beings.
That's bullshit. I had a client that had to invest thousands of dollars in an email archiving system because the SEC mandated it. They were a four person "broker/dealer" that dealt with investments. You expect me to believe that the government can make demands of the private sector and then expect slack when they can't even do themselves what they ask others to do? That's right. It happens on a daily basis. You can thank your local union for the iron-clad tenures these people have.
Ahh yes, the "shit happens" defense. Wonder if that would get our company off if we fail to retain our email records as the law requires. Seriously, people refusing to hold the government accountable is the reason things are as fucked up as they are now. With all due respect, I think governments (not just in the US) suck on many different fronts, many of them having nothing to do with backup systems. This screwup is just an extension of what is fundamentally wrong with all governments out there: lack of accountability.
It is very difficult or impossible to fire government employees. As a result everything gets done poorly and slowly. Getting back to my original point: this screwup isn't malicious in nature (so put down your tinfoil hats) but rather "business as usual" in the government.
We're talking about archived emails (i.e. years old), not the thousands of email you have in your inbox folder which are at most one year old.
Statistically speaking, these emails are rarely ever accessed again. I doubt anyone would get fired for losing them. I doubt anyone would even notice.
Yes they should have backed up before making such a large upgrade but "shit happens", especially in large organizations. As an example of that, you should see how often Government of Canada websites either go down, lose your personal information or get hacked by outsiders. It happens all the time. I would say that about 25% of the time I try using their websites for an online service it fails with some internal error.
Governments are inefficient and full of stupidity. That doesn't make them malicious or extra incompetent. They're all like that.
This being Slashdot, everyone and their grandmother is tripping over each other trying to:
a) laugh at the government b) laugh at Microsoft c) insist that wiping out the emails was a conspiracy
It's funny how when this happens to thousands of companies around the world it's normal but when it happens to the government it's a conspiracy and/or major incompetence. With all due respect, it's perfectly normal. People who apply double standards and claim that this doesn't happen to large organizations on a daily basis should really sit this one out because you're not being honest.
We have these things called checks and balances for a reason. The police can try to arrest anybody they want so long as they subpoena that footage properly. Better tell that to the journalists. History is full of them rejecting subpoenas and choosing to go to jail.
It's also common sense that every black is a criminal and every muslm is a terrorist? You want to live in a society like that? The problem is you are trying to outlaw thought crimes. You can't make someone a criminal because of what they feel or how they think. That's not what I said. What I said was that it is reasonable to investigate people with motive or prior history when a crime occur. You seem to imply that all things being equal some guy who is sexually attracted to children is just as likely to have raped one as someone who is not. That is simply not true. I am not saying you convict people for being sexually attracted to children (I already wrote that in a prior post) but rather that it quite logical to investigate them as potential suspects when a crime occurs. Put another way, if the girl was in contact with 100 people over the past month and 90% of them were under the age of 10 then it makes good sense to investigate the other 10% a lot harsher. That's because probability-wise they are far more likely to have committed the crime. You can't convict someone of a crime based on their thoughts, but you better damn well investigate them on such because that's how *motive* works.
Personally I wonder how big this pedophile bogeyman really is. From what I read there is one under every rock. I also have to ask if some sicko's are trading 40 year old picture of naked kids online, as long as they are not actually hurting kids, who gives a fuck? Right, except that:
1) By generating money for people who produce such photos you support the actual molestation of children.
2) Statistically speaking it seems that people who are attracted to children are extremely likely to act on it, and re-offend in the future once released from jail. I didn't create human beings or these statistics but unfortunately it seems that's how we're wired.
My point (again) isn't that we should convict them based on their thoughts but rather take those thoughts into consideration when investigating relevant crimes.
I think the term for Sun's former Java situation should be something like "source available" for the "look but don't touch" license conditions. However, left with the choice between open and closed source I'd definitely label it as closed source. They should just renamed open-source to community-source because frankly their choice of names has been rather poor;) First they hijacked the word "free", now they are hijacking the word "open". Granted "open" (as in "transparent") is much closer to what they mean but "community" would have been far clearer in my opinion.
In that case, there is a crime. You want to take action before any crime has been committed (and where none might be committed at all), which is a different kettle of fish. If you read the article it states that a crime *has* been committed. Over 50,000 of them actually, and 90% of them are alleged to be related to Orkut. It's not as if police approached Orkut out of the blue and demanded private information.
As a result, Java was already enjoying the vast majority of the benefits associated with open-source with free of its risks. Except the ones like distros being able to distribute their own versions of the jvm and take over the task of properly configuring java packages for their own systems instead of having sun try to properly package java for a zillion different linux systems.
There are very practical advantages to allowing re-distribution and I'd bet we see a lot more java on the linux desktop if they had. Fair enough, but that's what Sun preferred ten years ago, as was their right. My point is that this was a far cry from Java being closed-source as slashdot posters like to imply.
This is precisely the reasoning in search warrants. When you have a warrant or probable cause, then up-holding laws at that moment trumps the privacy of the suspect.
Honestly I will be alarmed and concerned when Google hands over data of every user in Brazil as a means to catch a small group of pedophiles. Key quote from article:
"The state prosecutor for Sao Paulo, Sergio Suiama, last month said 90 percent of the 56,000 pedophilia allegations received in the past few years related to Orkut."
Sounds like probable cause to me. I suspect the reason they couldn't seek a warrant is that the data servers are located outside their jurisdiction (as if often the case with websites). I don't believe there is a legal mechanism which allows local police officers to seek such an "online warrant", but there clearly should be.
After all, they weren't cracking down on the pedophiles because the way they look or because of their personal beliefs, rather they did this because some of these people actually went out and abused children!
Note your words "some of". Should the rest of them be punished for what some of them did?
This isn't about protecting criminals. It's about protecting innocents, because it does happen that innocent people become suspects. That's why they're called suspects, and not criminals. Except by the lynch mob who want to string people up first, and ask questions later. I'm not advocating the lynching of anyone who is sexually attracted to children but does not act on it. What I *am* advocating is that anyone with said attraction be kept away from children. If a pedophile does not keep their distance and a child they had communication with *does* get abused then they're fair game for investigation. That's not abuse of their rights, it's common sense. Similarly if person A lusts the wife of person B and person B ends up dead you can be sure the police will investigate person A as a possible suspect.
If they have a reasonable lead and take it to a judge then I really fail to see your line of reasoning here.
If there *is* a strong suspicion that someone is involved in murder or terrorism (whether through physical evidence or witness testimony) and a judge clears this then I hope to heck they don't pussyfoot around the guy's privacy.
In the old days we had these things called phone *wiretaps*. Someone would *suspect* someone was distributing crack in the local neighborhood. They'd then ask a judge to wiretap their line, thereby infringing on that sacred privacy you mentioned, and collect enough evidence to convict them.
That's how the world works. There is no such thing as unlimited rights, nor should there be.
If some girl with a profile on MySpace arranges to meet with some guy and subsequently gets raped without seeing her attacker then police have very good reason to want to look into that online profile's private information and search the guy's house for evidence.
Stop bending over backward trying to defend criminals. There isn't any sort of discrimination going on here against a person's beliefs, rather it is their harmful *actions* we are talking about.
It's funny how everyone bends over backward to prevent companies from doing the right thing and then at the end of the day they wonder why our society is going to hell in a hand-basket.
The other day some local journalists were very upset because police used their unedited film footage to identify and arrest store looters (rioting occurred after a local hockey game).
I mean, the *nerve* of that police! How dare they try to arrest looters? Today they're using the footage to arrest looters, tomorrow they'll use it to arrest rapists! What's next?!
Do everyone a favor and reserve your complaints to when the government cracks down on people that do *not* cause want-on harm to society. After all, they weren't cracking down on the pedophiles because the way they look or because of their personal beliefs, rather they did this because some of these people actually went out and abused children!
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I routinely use Stereo Mix to save my voicemail to mp3 files. This is completely legitimate use that I find extremely important and the alternative is to dish out hundreds of dollars to shady "phone recorder" sellers.
RIAA can stuff it. I don't pirate music because frankly I don't like listening to it. Why should I have to pay a levy on CD sales (in Canada) and lose Stereo Mix when I rarely listen to music?
The open-source crowd always plans the same cynical game: "I will boycott your product publicly until you open-source it. How *dare* you keep it closed-source?! ... what? You open-sourced it? ... hmm, well it doesn't really matter anymore, I'd rather use something else".
Do me a favor, stop telling the world that the only reason people don't use X is because it's not open-source. Open-source is only a tiny fragment of what matters. This melodramatic fan-boy attitude ensure no one takes open-source advocates seriously.
That's a kind of funny comment seeing how bikers were busy running down pedestrians before they were pushed into the roads. I guess pedestrians are nazis too eh?
There is a time and a place for cars, bikes, and pedestrians. The current arrangement is very poorly planned and makes everyone pretty miserable but I guess that is consistent with Montreal's "great" road-planning, where the same road gets paved 2-3 times the same year while somehow developing 10x more pot holes than any surrounding province and state.
Let's be honest here: Quebec's government is corrupt. They are creating blue-collar work in order to keep unemployment figures low at the cost of millions of dollars of unnecessary construction projects and using poor construction materials everywhere.
And by the way, Montreal's parking meters are more expensive than New York's, if you can imagine such a thing. It makes no sense by any stretch of one's imagination.
Having lived in Montreal for many years I can tell you their so-called great system sucks.
The average road size in downtown Montreal is two lanes plus one parking lane. Parking is already impossible to find and one out of the two driving lanes is almost always blocked by construction, delivery trucks or some driver taking a left turn. So you're already down to one usable lane.
Now these idiots come along and pave *permanent* bike lanes (enforced with a concrete separator) in a country that sees Winter 3/4th of the year. Goodbye parking space, goodbye driving space. To make matters worse I've seen quite a few bikers continuing to use the roads and avoiding the biking lane altogether.
This is one of the dumbest idea I've heard of in a long while!
More amazing technologies out of the world's hi-tech leader ;)
"At the end of the day, the wholesale ISPs are our customers and we generate revenue [from them], so we want to make sure we're serving them to the best of our ability as well."
I call bullshit. They make more money from selling the service directly to customers with extra caps. Independent ISPs provide much better (and less) restrictive service than Bell which is why it is against their interest to have people use them. If Bell really want us to believe this they should cease offering internet service altogether and only let independent ISPs do so.
How can one publish editorials about Muslim extremists without being told you're inciting hate against all Muslims? This is even more difficult if you are publishing editorial cartoons.
We are in the midst of an ideological war with extremist Muslims, yet mainstream Muslims seem to be uncomfortably silent in that fight. The only time one hears a Muslim group getting involved is when one of those extremists goes on air to express support for said terrorist groups. This has happened numerous times in the US and Canada with various groups expressing support for Hamas and Hezbollah.
If they can openly express support for groups who incite violence against us why is it not fair to incite violence against those extremists?
The problem with giving China access to key technologies (such as Google) without getting human rights improvements in return is that as a rising superpower they are impacting our society negatively.
Our economic and human rights standards are going down the drain because "well, if you don't do it I'll just take my business to China where they let me abuse my employees". If China was still a backward country (because they lacked key technologies) then they'd only be hurting themselves.
Google is in China because China wants them there. Google is guilty of sacrificing its morales for money.
All that matters to these people is survival of their business, they are not religious zealots, they don't believe in the second coming or afterlife or crap like what they preach to people. If a day comes where wiping their asses with pages of Quran helps them keep control of their business, then that's what they WILL HAPPILY DO. Bullshit.
1) They oppress their own people without any relation to your so-called "business interests". They beat women who refuse to cover up in public and a few years ago beat and raped a Canadian journalist to death: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/kazemi/
Some key highlights from that event:
* Evidence of a very brutal rape.
* A skull fracture, two broken fingers, missing fingernails, a crushed big toe and a broken nose.
* Severe abdominal bruising, swelling behind the head and a bruised shoulder.
* Deep scratches on the neck and evidence of flogging on the legs.
This is "business as usual" for Iran. They've done this many times to their own people as well as their enemies.
2) They threaten Israel because they are religious fundamentalists. They want to hold the threat of nuclear weapons over Israel and other Arab countries which they hate such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They already spend millions of dollars every year training, supplying and funding terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Nuclear weapons are just the next item on the list.
3) Iran has the second richest oil supply in the world. They have no need for alternate energy in the foreseeable future. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves#Iran
Key quote: "At 2006 rates of production, Iran's oil reserves would last 98 years if no new oil was found."
4) Iran has *said* they wish to wipe Israel off the map. Iran has *acted* on this threat by funding terrorist attacks against Israel for over a decade. Israel has *developed* its nuclear program in secret over the past decade. What more proof do you need?!
The above points should throw up warning lights for any sane human beings.
It is very difficult or impossible to fire government employees. As a result everything gets done poorly and slowly. Getting back to my original point: this screwup isn't malicious in nature (so put down your tinfoil hats) but rather "business as usual" in the government.
Last time I heard of an employee getting fired from the government was.... wait... I've never heard of such a thing :)
We're talking about archived emails (i.e. years old), not the thousands of email you have in your inbox folder which are at most one year old.
Statistically speaking, these emails are rarely ever accessed again. I doubt anyone would get fired for losing them. I doubt anyone would even notice.
Yes they should have backed up before making such a large upgrade but "shit happens", especially in large organizations. As an example of that, you should see how often Government of Canada websites either go down, lose your personal information or get hacked by outsiders. It happens all the time. I would say that about 25% of the time I try using their websites for an online service it fails with some internal error.
Governments are inefficient and full of stupidity. That doesn't make them malicious or extra incompetent. They're all like that.
This being Slashdot, everyone and their grandmother is tripping over each other trying to:
a) laugh at the government
b) laugh at Microsoft
c) insist that wiping out the emails was a conspiracy
It's funny how when this happens to thousands of companies around the world it's normal but when it happens to the government it's a conspiracy and/or major incompetence. With all due respect, it's perfectly normal. People who apply double standards and claim that this doesn't happen to large organizations on a daily basis should really sit this one out because you're not being honest.
1) By generating money for people who produce such photos you support the actual molestation of children.
2) Statistically speaking it seems that people who are attracted to children are extremely likely to act on it, and re-offend in the future once released from jail. I didn't create human beings or these statistics but unfortunately it seems that's how we're wired.
My point (again) isn't that we should convict them based on their thoughts but rather take those thoughts into consideration when investigating relevant crimes.
There are very practical advantages to allowing re-distribution and I'd bet we see a lot more java on the linux desktop if they had. Fair enough, but that's what Sun preferred ten years ago, as was their right. My point is that this was a far cry from Java being closed-source as slashdot posters like to imply.
Honestly I will be alarmed and concerned when Google hands over data of every user in Brazil as a means to catch a small group of pedophiles. Key quote from article:
"The state prosecutor for Sao Paulo, Sergio Suiama, last month said 90 percent of the 56,000 pedophilia allegations received in the past few years related to Orkut."
Sounds like probable cause to me. I suspect the reason they couldn't seek a warrant is that the data servers are located outside their jurisdiction (as if often the case with websites). I don't believe there is a legal mechanism which allows local police officers to seek such an "online warrant", but there clearly should be.
Note your words "some of". Should the rest of them be punished for what some of them did?
This isn't about protecting criminals. It's about protecting innocents, because it does happen that innocent people become suspects. That's why they're called suspects, and not criminals.
Except by the lynch mob who want to string people up first, and ask questions later. I'm not advocating the lynching of anyone who is sexually attracted to children but does not act on it. What I *am* advocating is that anyone with said attraction be kept away from children. If a pedophile does not keep their distance and a child they had communication with *does* get abused then they're fair game for investigation. That's not abuse of their rights, it's common sense. Similarly if person A lusts the wife of person B and person B ends up dead you can be sure the police will investigate person A as a possible suspect.
If they have a reasonable lead and take it to a judge then I really fail to see your line of reasoning here.
If there *is* a strong suspicion that someone is involved in murder or terrorism (whether through physical evidence or witness testimony) and a judge clears this then I hope to heck they don't pussyfoot around the guy's privacy.
Wow... what a shocker.
In the old days we had these things called phone *wiretaps*. Someone would *suspect* someone was distributing crack in the local neighborhood. They'd then ask a judge to wiretap their line, thereby infringing on that sacred privacy you mentioned, and collect enough evidence to convict them.
That's how the world works. There is no such thing as unlimited rights, nor should there be.
If some girl with a profile on MySpace arranges to meet with some guy and subsequently gets raped without seeing her attacker then police have very good reason to want to look into that online profile's private information and search the guy's house for evidence.
Stop bending over backward trying to defend criminals. There isn't any sort of discrimination going on here against a person's beliefs, rather it is their harmful *actions* we are talking about.
It's funny how everyone bends over backward to prevent companies from doing the right thing and then at the end of the day they wonder why our society is going to hell in a hand-basket.
The other day some local journalists were very upset because police used their unedited film footage to identify and arrest store looters (rioting occurred after a local hockey game).
I mean, the *nerve* of that police! How dare they try to arrest looters? Today they're using the footage to arrest looters, tomorrow they'll use it to arrest rapists! What's next?!
Do everyone a favor and reserve your complaints to when the government cracks down on people that do *not* cause want-on harm to society. After all, they weren't cracking down on the pedophiles because the way they look or because of their personal beliefs, rather they did this because some of these people actually went out and abused children!