Open but not "lying in the open" access to information is an important concept. In the United States, many privacy-related things are left lying in the open - who's in prison, who's been arrested, the declared value of your home with the municipality. These can all be viewed online. In Canada, these are generally considered public information as well, but you can't access them that easily. They're not in a public database on the web. You have to write a letter or fill out a form and mail it in.
Although information in court records is considered public, it has in every practical sense stayed obscure until fairly recently, because few people besides reporters would wander into a courthouse basement to read it, Stoddart said.
There is a difference between in a basement in the public archives and online. When you make it easier to access a person's private information, you're more likely to have people doing look-ups for trivial/unjustifiable reasons. An employer doing a search on Google for an employee's name now might find a court appearance of the employee from several years ago for drug possession. The employee may have been acquitted, but that's still going to tarnish the employer's reputation of the employee. That's important, especially when discriminating based on arrest or court appearance record is illegal in Canada.
The Canadian legal system generally recognizes that access to such information in certain cases is extremely important. It is also recognized that publishing such information online in an easily accessible form could cause a lot of harm to a person's right to privacy. If it's important enough you need to know, it should be important enough for you to haul your butt to the local archives or paying the fee to have a copy mailed to you.
I'm sure to many Americans it would seem a bit nutty, the idea of making it "sorta" hard to access public personal information, but it fits in well with previous thought on privacy in Canada.
Apparently, I am watching a live stream in moderate resolution at full frame rate from the roof of a building in the Netherlands.
It works.
I cannot even begin to imagine the ramifications of this if it is adopted by the "pirate" scene. I know its been done with closed source software before, but none of them work as fluently as this trial is. Live streaming television of any channel in the world, or at least, anyone who wants to hook up a capture card, for starters.
I think we're watching the Internet change, fundamentally and dramatically, before our very eyes.
As a Canadian, I have had French education since a fairly young age, and despite the general uselessness of French elsewhere in the world (besides France), speaking French is actually useful in Canada, it opens up certain jobs in businesses, government, etc. which are otherwise closed to monolingual speakers. Hell, in Ottawa or Montreal, bilingualism can secure you a job you might not otherwise get at McDonalds!
And so I recommend Spanish for Americans. It's one of the "easiest" languages for a native English speaker to learn. Over 10% of Americans speak it natively. It opens up doors in some State government positions and businesses. Did I mention it's easier to learn? There's considerable exposure to Spanish in American culture, which makes learning easier. How many Russian TV channels do you get from your cable provider?
Which language to pick will ultimately depend on exactly why you want to learn it. If you want to learn because it's fun, for "cognitive exercise", etc., then pick whichever one suits your fancy. If you want to learn a language so as to be able to speak it competently, remember: learning a language is an incredible amount of hard work, especially something like Mandarin or Russian which are quite wildly different from English.
Finally, on language difficulty, the United States government has some useful information on results from its language education programs.
How much disinformation do we need on this issue? Let me clear up some of this.
British Columbia now bans all words and images "likely to expose a person... to hatred or contempt" because of race, religion, age, disability, sex, marital status or sexual orientation.
No, British Columbia doesn't. British Columbia can't, as that would be a criminal law, which is of federal jurisdiction. It is a federal law which establishes the Human Rights Tribunals and it is federal law which bans hate speech, see the criminal code http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/showdoc/cs/C-46/bo-ga:l_VIII-gb:s_318//en#anchorbo-ga:l_VIII-gb:s_318. While there have been somewhat questionable cases before, it is usually the ilk of white supremacists and neo-Nazis who run afoul of hate speech laws, generic criticism of Islam without advocating, for example, the expulsion of Muslims from Canada, has generally not been found of a criminal nature by the courts of Canada.
Human Rights Tribunals, for the most part, are for discrimination complaints in housing and employment and the provision of government services.
This particular issue has come up before with Mark Steyn's articles (including an excerpt from his book America Alone to Maclean's magazine, a leading news magazine in Canada. Complaints were lodged with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal and the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. The Ontario Humans Rights Tribunal issued a statement in April of 2008 condemning Maclean's publication of the work, but acknowledged that material printed by private citizens is outside of its jurisdiction and dismissed the casehttp://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=433915.
In addition, while the Humans Rights Tribunals are easily abused and perhaps too quick to jump to censorship, their rulings may be appealed to proper federal courts, all the way to the Supreme Court, should they deign to hear the case.
The limits of free speech in these matters is hardly a settled matter in Canadian law and until superior courts or the Supreme Court give guidelines on the matter, it is probable that a variety of conflicting rulings will come out of the lower courts and tribunals.
This is for people who are making a sizeable chunk of income from selling services. This is no different from a tax collector walking into some sort of shady store in a back alley which doesn't file taxes and auditing it. When you post something online on a site like eBay, you would expect everyone to see it, after all, wouldn't you?
Then again, there isn't much of a pressing need nor want for electronic voting in most Canadian elections. Our electoral system is set up in such a manner that most elections can be performed easily with a list of options on a simple paper ballot. My understanding is that the Americans want electronic voting machines due to the complexity of American elections, with party affiliations, multiple offices, and so on being voted for simultaneously. For now, paper voting, at least for simple electoral systems such as used in most of Canada's elections, seems to be perfectly reasonable. It's easy to understand, it leaves a paper trail, it's difficult to tamper with and it allows for an easy recount.
So yes, I would agree with the ruling, that, at least for now, there is no point in implementing e-voting machines considering the complexities of security involved.
Well, the last news actually about Enlightenment (the window manager) was in Aug. 2005, more than a year ago, why not just recycle this category for new use? (Though by the time you changed the icon and everything, it'd probably be easier to just make a new category.)
Charles Darwin, should, regardless of your personal belief of the veracity of evolutionary theory, be regarded as on of the greatest men to have ever lived. He, in the face of tremendous religious and scientific adversity, put forth an astounding scientific theory worked out through great diligence.
In the Origin of Species, with relentless precision he works his way through the variation of domesticated and wild animals and plants, and eventually culminates in a very strongly supported theory which is almost elegant in its simplicity. He even anticipates many challenges to his theory, in the aptly named chapter, Difficulties on theory. Darwin's accomplishment is perhaps even more impressive when you take into account that he had no knowledge of genetics or the mechanism of inheritance, and was most certainly not aware of anything such as DNA. His writing is precise and lively; even today, 150 years later, the Origin of Species is easily followed by a layman.
This site is an honour to Darwin's efforts and I hope it will inspire some people to read his works.
The issue is that most people infected with HIV are not in developed nations which can afford to treat them.
And besides, type I diabetes is indeed a fatal disease for people without access to insulin (read, many people in poor nations.). Aditionally, I have one friend who has had significant side effects from his diabetes, although he is only in his 20s. He considers it to be a fatal disease and expects to die of the complications from it.
Unless/until we raise the entire standard of living of the whole world to something decent, HIV, diabetes, etc. will all be managable for some people, but lethal and horrifically dehabilitating for most.
My ISP, Rogers Communications has all sorts of bandwidth shaping and usage restrictions in place. This is, from what I've read, apparently so they can have the bandwidth available for their VoIP and on-demand streaming TV services.
They need to get their act together or they'll start to lose customers. They have a 60 GB/month usage limit. What good is a 8 Mbit/s line when you can hit your bandwidth cap in a single day?
Who says older folks don't play games?
on
Gaming When We're 64
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Since when don't older people play video games?
I may be a young whippersnapper and know nothing about being "old", but my parents and grandmother play computer games. My mother loves Simcity. Do the big console companies not realize that the over-30 market is...well, huge? Back in the NES days, adults would actually play the console games. Maybe its just my experience, but that doesn't seem to be the case any more.
I don't know why that is, but I have a feeling the complexity of modern games and the reliance of so many games on reflexes (read first person shooters) puts a lot of would be casual gamers; I believe most people over thirty could be classified as the casual gamer type. Whatever happened to the trivia, puzzle and strategy games adults seem to love?
Maybe Nintendo's Wii will work its way into this market.
I've got to say no to this. Yes, when you search for something, you get the most popular results. But not everyone uses the same search terms, and even if you only go for the first three pages of results, you've still got 20 - 30 different sources of information, each different but similar query returning a slightly different set.
Well, with Kubuntu (Ubuntu w/ KDE) it was simple for me. Plug my iPod in and amaroK automatically recognized it. I was actually surprised, but it works! It's still not flawless though. If you remove the device (physically) without "eject"ing it (how logical is that?) You'll lose your itunesdb and have to recreate that, which I'm sure would really throw off a newbie...
Once we work out these small flaws, it should all be smooth sailing, at least for music... Video is a whole other matter.
Parent may be moded funny but it's almost plausible.
In 2010, will all passengers be required to change into airliner provided jumpsuits with no pockets to hide things and little paper slippers for footwear? No carry on luggage; sorry sir, you'll just have to risk hypoglycemia, no insulin allowed?
How about a rectal search while were at it. You could probably fit enough explosive in there to take down a plane, or a ceramic knife (in some sort of container). Lots of possibilities.
So how far do we take it?
See, technically the government (of the United States, anyway) does not regulate movies (except if they're obscence, which is a much stricter definition than even NC-17). The MPAA does, movie ratings are a "voluntary" industry effort, the government is not involved. In fact, the government isn't involved in the rating of any media, really. About the only example I can think of is broadcast TV/radio regulations.
I've not had the displeasure of sitting through this; they aim it at the younger grades (14, 15 years old). While the website for "Captain Copyright" emphasizes intellectual property rights, the in-class indoctrination mostly talks about not plagarizing, so at least at my school, I think fairly little harm is being done.
Even better, I have heard many of my peers mocking "Captain Copyright" and many seemed quite well informed about the law concerning fair dealing and had strong opinions on why the current copyright system is wrong or broken (at least according to them, who seem to want to justify the downloading of music.)
As to aiming copyright law indoctrination at young children, well, thats just plain wrong. Private industry should not attempt to sugar-coat something like this as an educational aid and offer free material to teachers; nor should those teachers fall for such easy tricks! In a world where from every angle comes marketing ploy for corporations, is there nothing left sacred? Even a child's education? We should teach our children to be critical of everything they receive, I hope this material is being portrayed in such a light at school, instead of being force-fed to the students.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, because the only thing people ever use LANs for is Internet access!
Open but not "lying in the open" access to information is an important concept. In the United States, many privacy-related things are left lying in the open - who's in prison, who's been arrested, the declared value of your home with the municipality. These can all be viewed online. In Canada, these are generally considered public information as well, but you can't access them that easily. They're not in a public database on the web. You have to write a letter or fill out a form and mail it in.
Although information in court records is considered public, it has in every practical sense stayed obscure until fairly recently, because few people besides reporters would wander into a courthouse basement to read it, Stoddart said.
There is a difference between in a basement in the public archives and online. When you make it easier to access a person's private information, you're more likely to have people doing look-ups for trivial/unjustifiable reasons. An employer doing a search on Google for an employee's name now might find a court appearance of the employee from several years ago for drug possession. The employee may have been acquitted, but that's still going to tarnish the employer's reputation of the employee. That's important, especially when discriminating based on arrest or court appearance record is illegal in Canada.
The Canadian legal system generally recognizes that access to such information in certain cases is extremely important. It is also recognized that publishing such information online in an easily accessible form could cause a lot of harm to a person's right to privacy. If it's important enough you need to know, it should be important enough for you to haul your butt to the local archives or paying the fee to have a copy mailed to you.
I'm sure to many Americans it would seem a bit nutty, the idea of making it "sorta" hard to access public personal information, but it fits in well with previous thought on privacy in Canada.
Apparently, I am watching a live stream in moderate resolution at full frame rate from the roof of a building in the Netherlands.
It works.
I cannot even begin to imagine the ramifications of this if it is adopted by the "pirate" scene. I know its been done with closed source software before, but none of them work as fluently as this trial is. Live streaming television of any channel in the world, or at least, anyone who wants to hook up a capture card, for starters.
I think we're watching the Internet change, fundamentally and dramatically, before our very eyes.
As a Canadian, I have had French education since a fairly young age, and despite the general uselessness of French elsewhere in the world (besides France), speaking French is actually useful in Canada, it opens up certain jobs in businesses, government, etc. which are otherwise closed to monolingual speakers. Hell, in Ottawa or Montreal, bilingualism can secure you a job you might not otherwise get at McDonalds!
And so I recommend Spanish for Americans. It's one of the "easiest" languages for a native English speaker to learn. Over 10% of Americans speak it natively. It opens up doors in some State government positions and businesses. Did I mention it's easier to learn? There's considerable exposure to Spanish in American culture, which makes learning easier. How many Russian TV channels do you get from your cable provider?
Which language to pick will ultimately depend on exactly why you want to learn it. If you want to learn because it's fun, for "cognitive exercise", etc., then pick whichever one suits your fancy. If you want to learn a language so as to be able to speak it competently, remember: learning a language is an incredible amount of hard work, especially something like Mandarin or Russian which are quite wildly different from English.
Finally, on language difficulty, the United States government has some useful information on results from its language education programs.
How much disinformation do we need on this issue? Let me clear up some of this.
British Columbia now bans all words and images "likely to expose a personNo, British Columbia doesn't. British Columbia can't, as that would be a criminal law, which is of federal jurisdiction. It is a federal law which establishes the Human Rights Tribunals and it is federal law which bans hate speech, see the criminal code http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/showdoc/cs/C-46/bo-ga:l_VIII-gb:s_318//en#anchorbo-ga:l_VIII-gb:s_318. While there have been somewhat questionable cases before, it is usually the ilk of white supremacists and neo-Nazis who run afoul of hate speech laws, generic criticism of Islam without advocating, for example, the expulsion of Muslims from Canada, has generally not been found of a criminal nature by the courts of Canada.
Human Rights Tribunals, for the most part, are for discrimination complaints in housing and employment and the provision of government services.
This particular issue has come up before with Mark Steyn's articles (including an excerpt from his book America Alone to Maclean's magazine, a leading news magazine in Canada. Complaints were lodged with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal and the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. The Ontario Humans Rights Tribunal issued a statement in April of 2008 condemning Maclean's publication of the work, but acknowledged that material printed by private citizens is outside of its jurisdiction and dismissed the case http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=433915.
In addition, while the Humans Rights Tribunals are easily abused and perhaps too quick to jump to censorship, their rulings may be appealed to proper federal courts, all the way to the Supreme Court, should they deign to hear the case.
The limits of free speech in these matters is hardly a settled matter in Canadian law and until superior courts or the Supreme Court give guidelines on the matter, it is probable that a variety of conflicting rulings will come out of the lower courts and tribunals.
This is for people who are making a sizeable chunk of income from selling services. This is no different from a tax collector walking into some sort of shady store in a back alley which doesn't file taxes and auditing it. When you post something online on a site like eBay, you would expect everyone to see it, after all, wouldn't you?
Yes, but this is Europe. They HAVE gone after Microsoft for it's activities before...
Then again, there isn't much of a pressing need nor want for electronic voting in most Canadian elections. Our electoral system is set up in such a manner that most elections can be performed easily with a list of options on a simple paper ballot. My understanding is that the Americans want electronic voting machines due to the complexity of American elections, with party affiliations, multiple offices, and so on being voted for simultaneously. For now, paper voting, at least for simple electoral systems such as used in most of Canada's elections, seems to be perfectly reasonable. It's easy to understand, it leaves a paper trail, it's difficult to tamper with and it allows for an easy recount.
So yes, I would agree with the ruling, that, at least for now, there is no point in implementing e-voting machines considering the complexities of security involved.
Well, the last news actually about Enlightenment (the window manager) was in Aug. 2005, more than a year ago, why not just recycle this category for new use? (Though by the time you changed the icon and everything, it'd probably be easier to just make a new category.)
Charles Darwin, should, regardless of your personal belief of the veracity of evolutionary theory, be regarded as on of the greatest men to have ever lived. He, in the face of tremendous religious and scientific adversity, put forth an astounding scientific theory worked out through great diligence.
In the Origin of Species, with relentless precision he works his way through the variation of domesticated and wild animals and plants, and eventually culminates in a very strongly supported theory which is almost elegant in its simplicity. He even anticipates many challenges to his theory, in the aptly named chapter, Difficulties on theory. Darwin's accomplishment is perhaps even more impressive when you take into account that he had no knowledge of genetics or the mechanism of inheritance, and was most certainly not aware of anything such as DNA. His writing is precise and lively; even today, 150 years later, the Origin of Species is easily followed by a layman.
This site is an honour to Darwin's efforts and I hope it will inspire some people to read his works.
The issue is that most people infected with HIV are not in developed nations which can afford to treat them.
And besides, type I diabetes is indeed a fatal disease for people without access to insulin (read, many people in poor nations.). Aditionally, I have one friend who has had significant side effects from his diabetes, although he is only in his 20s. He considers it to be a fatal disease and expects to die of the complications from it.
Unless/until we raise the entire standard of living of the whole world to something decent, HIV, diabetes, etc. will all be managable for some people, but lethal and horrifically dehabilitating for most.
My ISP, Rogers Communications has all sorts of bandwidth shaping and usage restrictions in place. This is, from what I've read, apparently so they can have the bandwidth available for their VoIP and on-demand streaming TV services.
They need to get their act together or they'll start to lose customers. They have a 60 GB/month usage limit. What good is a 8 Mbit/s line when you can hit your bandwidth cap in a single day?
Since when don't older people play video games?
I may be a young whippersnapper and know nothing about being "old", but my parents and grandmother play computer games. My mother loves Simcity. Do the big console companies not realize that the over-30 market is...well, huge? Back in the NES days, adults would actually play the console games. Maybe its just my experience, but that doesn't seem to be the case any more.
I don't know why that is, but I have a feeling the complexity of modern games and the reliance of so many games on reflexes (read first person shooters) puts a lot of would be casual gamers; I believe most people over thirty could be classified as the casual gamer type. Whatever happened to the trivia, puzzle and strategy games adults seem to love?
Maybe Nintendo's Wii will work its way into this market.
I've got to say no to this. Yes, when you search for something, you get the most popular results. But not everyone uses the same search terms, and even if you only go for the first three pages of results, you've still got 20 - 30 different sources of information, each different but similar query returning a slightly different set.
Once we work out these small flaws, it should all be smooth sailing, at least for music... Video is a whole other matter.
Parent may be moded funny but it's almost plausible. In 2010, will all passengers be required to change into airliner provided jumpsuits with no pockets to hide things and little paper slippers for footwear? No carry on luggage; sorry sir, you'll just have to risk hypoglycemia, no insulin allowed? How about a rectal search while were at it. You could probably fit enough explosive in there to take down a plane, or a ceramic knife (in some sort of container). Lots of possibilities. So how far do we take it?
See, technically the government (of the United States, anyway) does not regulate movies (except if they're obscence, which is a much stricter definition than even NC-17). The MPAA does, movie ratings are a "voluntary" industry effort, the government is not involved. In fact, the government isn't involved in the rating of any media, really. About the only example I can think of is broadcast TV/radio regulations.
I've not had the displeasure of sitting through this; they aim it at the younger grades (14, 15 years old). While the website for "Captain Copyright" emphasizes intellectual property rights, the in-class indoctrination mostly talks about not plagarizing, so at least at my school, I think fairly little harm is being done.
Even better, I have heard many of my peers mocking "Captain Copyright" and many seemed quite well informed about the law concerning fair dealing and had strong opinions on why the current copyright system is wrong or broken (at least according to them, who seem to want to justify the downloading of music.)
As to aiming copyright law indoctrination at young children, well, thats just plain wrong. Private industry should not attempt to sugar-coat something like this as an educational aid and offer free material to teachers; nor should those teachers fall for such easy tricks! In a world where from every angle comes marketing ploy for corporations, is there nothing left sacred? Even a child's education? We should teach our children to be critical of everything they receive, I hope this material is being portrayed in such a light at school, instead of being force-fed to the students.