don't think its a bad thing that critical infrastructure like this be in public hands.
Here, Here. I think there is a very persuasive case to say that the implementation of the local loop and even to some extent trunk routes is a very close analogy to the utility distribution networks (electricity, gas and water). The state (or at least a state funded natural monopoly) provides the underlying infrastructure and then the service providers buy space on this infrastructure to provide their service to the customers for whom they can all compete.
Utah seems tro have realised this. How different is this to what happened with the first generation telecoms infrastructure, an infrastructure that was largely privately built and owned, well that is a good question. But I think the distinction is that the marginal cost of taking service from a new provider comapred to an incumbent is not zero, when the local loop has to be implemented by each provider. When the first generation was installed, they were laying the first road and so they were effectively implementing the natural monopoly that is the local loop and the consequences of that monopoly are well understood. Now that the markets are mature, it makes little sense to make the same mistake a second time.
I would think that there is a better principle for which Linus etc can stand and that is to use all these lawyers lining up to pro bono them (ooh er vicar) to defend them against completely ignoring these specious subpoena's and fighting the for the fact that they should never have been issued in the first place.
The act of issuing the subpoena in the way that SCO has is verging on vexatious and the problem is that when they get slaughtered, and they will, there will be nothing left on the corpse by which to compensate those who have suffered a loss as a result of all this bollox. Like those forced to deal with being subpoenaed to appear (or at least give evidence) before the court.
There are certain times when a judicious amount of contempt of court is important to correct the largess of the litigious.
One thing missing from all the other discussions on this topic is the primary reason to have a personal home page / web site. That is to collect together all the web resources you use regularly and make them accessible in one place from any computer that has a connection to the internet.
My personal website has a bunch of links that I use regularly and a few other handy tidbits that I find make my personal surfing experience better. I can access from my home machine, my work machine, the internet cafe, my friends house, even from my PDA via wifi if the connectivity is around.
I don't spout opinions there, nor do I have pictures of any pets/loved ones that I may or may not have.
To me this is the whole purpose of my web site and one that is as important to me as the issues raised by the original author.
With yet another mistake, does anyone trust electronic voting full stop?
Or as some of the American Electorate might say; "with yet another mistake does anyone trust voting full stop". I think the source of the problem is the perception by various interests in the US that there is some form of money to be made in these systems. This is wrong. Get the _process_ of electronic voting designed right (I mean imagine the first elections back in the year dot. All those who vote for Trevor stand to the left, all those for Dave to the right, all those for Ug, um well, you just stand where you are... No dave, stop killing the people voting for Trevor... What do you mean you don't want to vote for Ug, well ok then you just stand over there... No I don't care who you want to vote for they're not here. Oh fuck it, this is too hard). Then the implementation simply becomes a question of reducing cost. There is no "marginal" profit to be had and as such there is almost no way that private enterprise can fund the development of these systems better than the state. The argument for free software systems is equally persuasive.
Then there is the deployment of the hardware/infrastructure to actually deliver the voting functionality to the electorate (and that is something that can get better and better over time as well). It is very expensive and the only benefits compared to the counting of paper votes are accuracy and cost savings (for get speed, it's not like there is a power vacuum before the result. so what if it takes a few days). If you can give accuracy then get out of the game and the only way to reduce cost is to fund on a cost basis which means the state should fund the system not enterprise.
A nice graph would be Ah/g over time for the last 20 years. Or even Ah per AA cell over the last 20 years. I would be interested to see the shape of the graph. Unlikely to be exponential, but would it be logorithmic (ie diminishing returns). Or even Ah/$ from AA cell.
All of these metrics would show (I think) that batteries suck much less than they used to and they suck only marginally now. Sure the ideal world of never having to care about power is a way off yet, but things aren't so bad.
I don't think the sports stars should make that much money. Sometimes I even resent them. But for me to decree that they're "overpaid" means I think I have the right to prohibit thousands of people from purchasing sports tickets.
If it were the purchasing of tickets that funded the salaries I would agree with you but it is not. In this matter Europe and the US are very different beasts and I am talking about Europe. The salaries of footballers are insane. Real Madrid, for example, ran up a debt of about $100M, building a team to win the big competition. That amount of debt could never be serviced and the league organisers started talking about "solvency" criteria to allow sides to participate. So Madrid's council bought their traning ground off them for, hmmm, you guessed it $100M so every citizen subsidised the fsking football team. This is just one example.
The inherent problem is that the leagues use essentially illeagal techniques to arrange television deals that mean I have to pay an extra 300 quid a year to watch _non_ football pay tv when I don't even want to watch bloody football anyway. Just when we think the externalities are about to bite, some bloody Russian comes along and drops 200M of his questionably acquired assets into a side to keep them afloat. The one solace is that this will probably just postpone the inevitable collapse. But the leagues will begin to discover the same problems that the record industry is discovering now, that the thing they are selling has much less value than they think when the technology makes their artificial scarcity go away.
Fair enough on the "wrong reply" front. The public spaces you mention (rockerfella centre apart) are not quite in the european model. What I mean is that Central Park etc are really quite large open spaces where the public _go_. The difference in Europe is that there are many more public spaces servicing smaller areas, that are nearby where people _are_.
I spent a lot of time in NYC trying to find a place like the 100m sqaure on which my office in London is situated. The nearest other such square is only a few hundred metres away. I found nothing really comparable in midtown (50th - 55th between 2nd and 5th avenues) in Manhattan so I think that the difference between US cities and European cities is quite marked.
In the end, I think that we are probably in vehement agreement about the difference between US cities and European cities. As for the UK, yes the weather doesn't really suit and yet the spaces are still here to some extent (in central london at least). Must be a European thing:-)
On the contrary, you have an odd definition of "public space" which is not the same thing as open space. The original poster talked about the European model of using public spaces, whether they be more limited in area is more or less irrelevant, in urban areas more than they are used in the US. The cafe culture, the Piazza, the square, all examples of ideal Wifi access points, the equivalent of which is much harder to find in the US in general and US cities in particular.
Actually these are all variants of the "Spanish Prisoner" scam that has been around for decades. These in turn are really just a form of "advanced fee fraud" which is an area of varying legality in many different jurisdictions (all those sunday paper inserts with a scratch card when you are _guaranteed_ to win a prize are borderline advance fee fraud) but onme with a very rich history of fraudulent activity going back probably hundreds of years.
Even beyond TCO is the fact that any software developed or enhanced to meet Newhams needs would work just as well for any other of the hundreds of councils in the UK. Surely this is the killer argument. Every penny spent by Newham (or Council X) to get functionality they need is a penny that council Y no longer needs to spend. Microsoft cannont possibly compete in this utility model.
The answer may be utilitarian, but you have the cause ass about. By it's very nature when you publish something it _is_ in the public domain. The concession granted to the author to be able to "copyright" the material and hence "remove" the work from the public domain is the thing that is granted for utilitarian purposes. This grant is to "promote" the progress resulting from such works.
The flaw in the argument is so lost on those that believe in IP that I shan't even try to point it out here.
There are many things for which MS can be blamed, but one of the more powerful criticisms is that they have never done anything "truly wonderful" with all their power.
I think this File System idea is just another example. Everyone talks about a "new" file system as if adding a relational database (of some kind) or meta data for the existing concept of file is somehow revolutionary.
Why not try more radical ideas. We have a document style that is based on a generic "template" some of the document is the same but there are thousands of instances of the document that have different content. Why not when I save instance X does it not just split the document into "same as all other instances" and "different" and store these fragments either as formal records or as references to the original instance. The complexity of "how" to do this would be enormous, but the fragementation could be handled even better to allow content creators to "farm" content from their existing data without having to know about the formal nature of the whole entity from which the data comes.
Or a file system that does not use the concept of file as such but rather a whole CVS like "history" so that the entire change history of the entity can be managed, monitored and retrieved from any point in time. Then when one moves the entity one could move a sna[pshot or the whole thing.
Or a memory based file system where there is no distinction between physical memory and hard disk and the OS treats all data access as an access to memory and cachjes out to disk invisibly underneath.
Three simple ideas that are more interesting (in my view) than just adding an RDBS layer on top of the existing hierarchical FS concept to help manage meta data more easily. You still need to create the meta data, more pain to try and keep it up to date.
I disagree, the distinction is important because a failure of the ACCC to act according to the law has a remedy in Australian Law and a citizen can take such failures to variously, Ombudsman, Administrative Appeals Tribunals or perhaps even the judiciary.
What is important is that it is the application of the laws rather than the arbitrary action of the officials mandated with the power that separates "rule of law" societies from tyrranies. It is too easy to forget that if one lives in such a "rule of law" state, then we ought not to accept institutions where such arbitrary largess is possible and my point was just a reminder of this and the fact that capturing of regulators by the regulated is less of a problem when the law is the source of the power
The ACCC is the organisation established to administer the Trade Practices Act (and the prices surveillance act). The TPA is a remarkable piece of legislation conceived by one of the great legislators, a guy called Lionel Murphy, whose life was an extraordinary one. Amongst other things, Attorney General, High Court Judge, convicted criminal? He was responsible for ushering in the Family Law Act and the TPA in Australia in the 70's. Both of which were revolutionary.
The TPA was one of the first codifications of the rights of consumers anywhere and the powers established enable the ACCC to pierce through all the crap that anti-competitives put in the way of a realistic investigation into their behaviour. The power of the ACCC derives from the legislation and the rule of law not from the arbitrary exercise of power by the organisation itself.
The important thing is to remember that the power is in the law and not just the ACCC
Avoiding any and all responsibility for policing the content that travels over their connections is strongly in the best interest of any ISP
It may well be in their interests, but it _certainly_ is in mine. I love the idea that the telco is _not_ responsible for the content. The more that we have this kind of distinction the better our society becomes. It means that we can take their example an use it as a model for the next time someone declares that the content is the medium. Which is just absurd, and bad too (IMHO)
As another poster pointed out, "pants" is a generic term for bad in the UK however it is important to remember that "pants" in the UK specifically refers to underwear. Many a new arrival makes the faux pas of talking about trousers with the phrase pants. Many a giggle results. Hence referring to things as "pants" when they are bad.
The fact that temperature changes coincide with increasing levels of a known greenhouse forcing gas, is actually fairly pursuasive.
In the absence of other factors that may even be true but in the presence of factors like the percentage of reradiated wavelengths being absorbed by atmosphere being already at 100% for the wavelengths absorbable by CO2 mean that CO2 as cause is a poor explainer at best
Of course regulation is the answer. But the implications are horrible. Any doubt that we are living in the "wilds" of the post revolution expolosion just consider the issues of industrial safety immediately after the industrial revolution. It was a disaster, people were killed and maimed hourly. Look at software, thankfully few people are actually harmed but some of what we "professionals" produce is just crap.
Professionalism is an answer to nothing in this case. Regulation comes in many forms. Pick your jusrisdiction and even your industry and you will find a litany of standards and regulations to which a product must conform before it can be sold. Fire safety for clothes, building materials, Electrical safety standards etc etc etc. One recurring theme seems that most of these standards relate to safety, or to paraphrase to reduce the human cost of substandard products. Having never worked in the industry, I do not know, but I can imagine that the standards required for medical equipment software (pacemakers et al) and things like nuclear power stations are much higher. This is not a question of the qualifications of the people who do the work but opf the output of their work and that is regulation, plain and simple.
Personally I think that the market is the right tool for many of these regulations, but that requires better information and we all know how companies are about disclosing the true nature of their products at the moment, but I digress. The other point is that whilst I am comfortable with my ability to choose the prudent or safe product, I don't trust the vast majority of morons out there to do the same and if they drive a crappy car they can kill me, so I am happy to have regulated standards.
Software, ah yes software, well for starters with most software the worst thing a crash or defect will do is cost you money (or make you late for a date), so I am not so sure that I want so much regulation. Secondly, due to the nature of the process, software is more art than engineering, and that is nothing to do with the professionalism of the people writing it. Now, it is true that the baseline at which the process turns from art into engineering is increasingly high (I am comfortable relying on my compiler to turn my Arty C code into engineered machine language and that the hardware will interpret this in a way that is engineered, whereas thirty years ago that was not so much the case) and in future that boundry will be higher still, however it is not a question of the "capabilities" of the industry participants that currently determines that level and getting us to a point where it is will take a long time and a number of really astounding revolutions in the tools at our disposal.
Having said all that. I would love to see "BS01232 - Computer Operating Systems" that defined a minimum standard of performance, but such a thing is a logistical nightmare do define yet alone to actually implement, so in the mean time I will just run the OSes for which my tasks are best suited and grin and bear the pain.
This is a remarkable thing and, whilst somewhat disconcerting, I love the idea of creating these "breeders" for the creation of various substances like this (Axylotl tanks anyone?).
Having once been caught in the middle of an honest-to-God cattle stampede, I can tell you that a bunch of cows are scarier than a bunch of spiders any day of the week -- which, obviously, doesn't keep us from raising the critters.
You obviously ain't from Sydney, 'cause let me tell you th idea of a stampeding bunch of Funnell Webs is _way_ scarier than a bunch a dumb moo cows. It just freaks me out thinking about it!!! (Thankfully they don't make the right kind of silk probably. Hopefully!)
Your "cost centre" based taxation is problematic since it offers no form of "redistribution". Using the vehicle using public to fund the vehicle services (such as roads) means that those who do not use vehicles but get the benefit of them (transport of goods to retail for example) are "free loading" on the vehicle using public. Further there is a tendency for these models to ignore the "ability" to pay aspect of taxation. Roads are a very good example because the damage done to a raod by traffic is some power of axle load. So one big truck does exponentially more damage than one thousand cars on a road that is not engineered for the big truck. Should we tax the truck 1000 times more than the car even though the car gets the same amenity from the service (the road)?
Now don't get me wrong, I am actually opposed to regressigve taxation regimes, like sliding scale income taxes, but road tax based on the value of the car you drive, why not? A LAN tax, why not? Government needs X dollars per year, now we can all argue about how effectively they spend their money and so about the size of X, but whatever it's final value it has to come from somewhere. I favour demand side taxation, that is VAT, GST, Sales tax, whatever you want to call it. I favour that it should be universal and low. That way there are no exceptions and no loopholes. For those who are damaged by such a policy, work out how much and then bump up welfare expenditure (and thus X) by the necessary amount. Now my position is controversial and so I have no real expectation of seeing it any time soon, but in the mean time taxing resources that are used by those that can afford to pay is a good thing. If a LAN tax be such a tax then it ain't inherently wrong. Now whether it is such a thing is a good question and the one on which the judgement of this report should be based.
I agree wholeheartedly with your criticism of the original poster's position. One thing I would add though is the "brouhaha" that surrounds the BBC's internet presence. Many of the content providers in the UK are "concerned" that the BBC is subsidising it's internet presence with the License Fee payers money (for those that don't understand what that means, see the BBC web site somewhere) and thus distorting the profgitibility of web delivered content. I think their argument is a crock but it is a very interesting argument to have.
Personally I think that the BBC's approach to interactive TV, digital TV and internet content is a salutory lesson to all those that believe that there is no place for publically funded media organisations like the BBC. I think they are actually innovating and their TV/Web/participation programs (and no I don't mean Fame Fscking Academy) are truly extraordinary. And whether they are responding to or prompting some of the work of the other commercial channels in the Uk, there are some _excellent_ (ok mainly educationally focused) programs being produced.
Having access to all the clasic radio programs online is a delightful thought. Comedy alone is reason enought to be excited.
but he runs Deb on his laptop because it was "the best at the time." what fucking bullshit. if it's so important to you, switch distros right-fucking-now.
Look I have more issues with RMS than most, but I think you are going one step too far. It's not like he would have anything from the debian release that is not free on his machine. It's like,... building a house, at the time you built it the company you bought the wood from sold both old growth and plantation wood products. They didn't actively promote old growth wood, but they would get it if a customer demanded that particular wood, so they were the best "ethical" provider available at the time. However you only used plantation wood products in your house so you complied with your ethics. And now, if you were building again, there is this new company that offers no old growth wood at all, so you could use them even more comfortably, indeed you might recommend them at the expense of the former company. The situation with Debian and LinEx seems the same to me so there is no reason to switch distros for him in order to remain consistent with his stated ethical position.
Slashdot Mirror
don't think its a bad thing that critical infrastructure like this be in public hands.
Here, Here. I think there is a very persuasive case to say that the implementation of the local loop and even to some extent trunk routes is a very close analogy to the utility distribution networks (electricity, gas and water). The state (or at least a state funded natural monopoly) provides the underlying infrastructure and then the service providers buy space on this infrastructure to provide their service to the customers for whom they can all compete.
Utah seems tro have realised this. How different is this to what happened with the first generation telecoms infrastructure, an infrastructure that was largely privately built and owned, well that is a good question. But I think the distinction is that the marginal cost of taking service from a new provider comapred to an incumbent is not zero, when the local loop has to be implemented by each provider. When the first generation was installed, they were laying the first road and so they were effectively implementing the natural monopoly that is the local loop and the consequences of that monopoly are well understood. Now that the markets are mature, it makes little sense to make the same mistake a second time.
IIRC ignoring a subpoena is a contempt of court.
I would think that there is a better principle for which Linus etc can stand and that is to use all these lawyers lining up to pro bono them (ooh er vicar) to defend them against completely ignoring these specious subpoena's and fighting the for the fact that they should never have been issued in the first place.
The act of issuing the subpoena in the way that SCO has is verging on vexatious and the problem is that when they get slaughtered, and they will, there will be nothing left on the corpse by which to compensate those who have suffered a loss as a result of all this bollox. Like those forced to deal with being subpoenaed to appear (or at least give evidence) before the court.
There are certain times when a judicious amount of contempt of court is important to correct the largess of the litigious.
One thing missing from all the other discussions on this topic is the primary reason to have a personal home page / web site. That is to collect together all the web resources you use regularly and make them accessible in one place from any computer that has a connection to the internet.
My personal website has a bunch of links that I use regularly and a few other handy tidbits that I find make my personal surfing experience better. I can access from my home machine, my work machine, the internet cafe, my friends house, even from my PDA via wifi if the connectivity is around.
I don't spout opinions there, nor do I have pictures of any pets/loved ones that I may or may not have.
To me this is the whole purpose of my web site and one that is as important to me as the issues raised by the original author.
With yet another mistake, does anyone trust electronic voting full stop?
Or as some of the American Electorate might say; "with yet another mistake does anyone trust voting full stop". I think the source of the problem is the perception by various interests in the US that there is some form of money to be made in these systems. This is wrong. Get the _process_ of electronic voting designed right (I mean imagine the first elections back in the year dot. All those who vote for Trevor stand to the left, all those for Dave to the right, all those for Ug, um well, you just stand where you are... No dave, stop killing the people voting for Trevor... What do you mean you don't want to vote for Ug, well ok then you just stand over there... No I don't care who you want to vote for they're not here. Oh fuck it, this is too hard). Then the implementation simply becomes a question of reducing cost. There is no "marginal" profit to be had and as such there is almost no way that private enterprise can fund the development of these systems better than the state. The argument for free software systems is equally persuasive.
Then there is the deployment of the hardware/infrastructure to actually deliver the voting functionality to the electorate (and that is something that can get better and better over time as well). It is very expensive and the only benefits compared to the counting of paper votes are accuracy and cost savings (for get speed, it's not like there is a power vacuum before the result. so what if it takes a few days). If you can give accuracy then get out of the game and the only way to reduce cost is to fund on a cost basis which means the state should fund the system not enterprise.
A nice graph would be Ah/g over time for the last 20 years. Or even Ah per AA cell over the last 20 years. I would be interested to see the shape of the graph. Unlikely to be exponential, but would it be logorithmic (ie diminishing returns). Or even Ah/$ from AA cell.
All of these metrics would show (I think) that batteries suck much less than they used to and they suck only marginally now. Sure the ideal world of never having to care about power is a way off yet, but things aren't so bad.
I don't think the sports stars should make that much money. Sometimes I even resent them. But for me to decree that they're "overpaid" means I think I have the right to prohibit thousands of people from purchasing sports tickets.
If it were the purchasing of tickets that funded the salaries I would agree with you but it is not. In this matter Europe and the US are very different beasts and I am talking about Europe. The salaries of footballers are insane. Real Madrid, for example, ran up a debt of about $100M, building a team to win the big competition. That amount of debt could never be serviced and the league organisers started talking about "solvency" criteria to allow sides to participate. So Madrid's council bought their traning ground off them for, hmmm, you guessed it $100M so every citizen subsidised the fsking football team. This is just one example.
The inherent problem is that the leagues use essentially illeagal techniques to arrange television deals that mean I have to pay an extra 300 quid a year to watch _non_ football pay tv when I don't even want to watch bloody football anyway. Just when we think the externalities are about to bite, some bloody Russian comes along and drops 200M of his questionably acquired assets into a side to keep them afloat. The one solace is that this will probably just postpone the inevitable collapse. But the leagues will begin to discover the same problems that the record industry is discovering now, that the thing they are selling has much less value than they think when the technology makes their artificial scarcity go away.
Fair enough on the "wrong reply" front. The public spaces you mention (rockerfella centre apart) are not quite in the european model. What I mean is that Central Park etc are really quite large open spaces where the public _go_. The difference in Europe is that there are many more public spaces servicing smaller areas, that are nearby where people _are_.
:-)
I spent a lot of time in NYC trying to find a place like the 100m sqaure on which my office in London is situated. The nearest other such square is only a few hundred metres away. I found nothing really comparable in midtown (50th - 55th between 2nd and 5th avenues) in Manhattan so I think that the difference between US cities and European cities is quite marked.
In the end, I think that we are probably in vehement agreement about the difference between US cities and European cities. As for the UK, yes the weather doesn't really suit and yet the spaces are still here to some extent (in central london at least). Must be a European thing
On the contrary, you have an odd definition of "public space" which is not the same thing as open space. The original poster talked about the European model of using public spaces, whether they be more limited in area is more or less irrelevant, in urban areas more than they are used in the US. The cafe culture, the Piazza, the square, all examples of ideal Wifi access points, the equivalent of which is much harder to find in the US in general and US cities in particular.
Actually these are all variants of the "Spanish Prisoner" scam that has been around for decades. These in turn are really just a form of "advanced fee fraud" which is an area of varying legality in many different jurisdictions (all those sunday paper inserts with a scratch card when you are _guaranteed_ to win a prize are borderline advance fee fraud) but onme with a very rich history of fraudulent activity going back probably hundreds of years.
Even beyond TCO is the fact that any software developed or enhanced to meet Newhams needs would work just as well for any other of the hundreds of councils in the UK. Surely this is the killer argument. Every penny spent by Newham (or Council X) to get functionality they need is a penny that council Y no longer needs to spend. Microsoft cannont possibly compete in this utility model.
The answer may be utilitarian, but you have the cause ass about. By it's very nature when you publish something it _is_ in the public domain. The concession granted to the author to be able to "copyright" the material and hence "remove" the work from the public domain is the thing that is granted for utilitarian purposes. This grant is to "promote" the progress resulting from such works.
The flaw in the argument is so lost on those that believe in IP that I shan't even try to point it out here.
There are many things for which MS can be blamed, but one of the more powerful criticisms is that they have never done anything "truly wonderful" with all their power.
I think this File System idea is just another example. Everyone talks about a "new" file system as if adding a relational database (of some kind) or meta data for the existing concept of file is somehow revolutionary.
Why not try more radical ideas. We have a document style that is based on a generic "template" some of the document is the same but there are thousands of instances of the document that have different content. Why not when I save instance X does it not just split the document into "same as all other instances" and "different" and store these fragments either as formal records or as references to the original instance. The complexity of "how" to do this would be enormous, but the fragementation could be handled even better to allow content creators to "farm" content from their existing data without having to know about the formal nature of the whole entity from which the data comes.
Or a file system that does not use the concept of file as such but rather a whole CVS like "history" so that the entire change history of the entity can be managed, monitored and retrieved from any point in time. Then when one moves the entity one could move a sna[pshot or the whole thing.
Or a memory based file system where there is no distinction between physical memory and hard disk and the OS treats all data access as an access to memory and cachjes out to disk invisibly underneath.
Three simple ideas that are more interesting (in my view) than just adding an RDBS layer on top of the existing hierarchical FS concept to help manage meta data more easily. You still need to create the meta data, more pain to try and keep it up to date.
The distinction is meaningless in the real world.
I disagree, the distinction is important because a failure of the ACCC to act according to the law has a remedy in Australian Law and a citizen can take such failures to variously, Ombudsman, Administrative Appeals Tribunals or perhaps even the judiciary.
What is important is that it is the application of the laws rather than the arbitrary action of the officials mandated with the power that separates "rule of law" societies from tyrranies. It is too easy to forget that if one lives in such a "rule of law" state, then we ought not to accept institutions where such arbitrary largess is possible and my point was just a reminder of this and the fact that capturing of regulators by the regulated is less of a problem when the law is the source of the power
The ACCC is the organisation established to administer the Trade Practices Act (and the prices surveillance act). The TPA is a remarkable piece of legislation conceived by one of the great legislators, a guy called Lionel Murphy, whose life was an extraordinary one. Amongst other things, Attorney General, High Court Judge, convicted criminal? He was responsible for ushering in the Family Law Act and the TPA in Australia in the 70's. Both of which were revolutionary.
The TPA was one of the first codifications of the rights of consumers anywhere and the powers established enable the ACCC to pierce through all the crap that anti-competitives put in the way of a realistic investigation into their behaviour. The power of the ACCC derives from the legislation and the rule of law not from the arbitrary exercise of power by the organisation itself.
The important thing is to remember that the power is in the law and not just the ACCC
Avoiding any and all responsibility for policing the content that travels over their connections is strongly in the best interest of any ISP
It may well be in their interests, but it _certainly_ is in mine. I love the idea that the telco is _not_ responsible for the content. The more that we have this kind of distinction the better our society becomes. It means that we can take their example an use it as a model for the next time someone declares that the content is the medium. Which is just absurd, and bad too (IMHO)
As another poster pointed out, "pants" is a generic term for bad in the UK however it is important to remember that "pants" in the UK specifically refers to underwear. Many a new arrival makes the faux pas of talking about trousers with the phrase pants. Many a giggle results. Hence referring to things as "pants" when they are bad.
The fact that temperature changes coincide with increasing levels of a known greenhouse forcing gas, is actually fairly pursuasive.
In the absence of other factors that may even be true but in the presence of factors like the percentage of reradiated wavelengths being absorbed by atmosphere being already at 100% for the wavelengths absorbable by CO2 mean that CO2 as cause is a poor explainer at best
Actually the guy said it was a good way to beat "the congestion charge", he was being ever so slightly tonguw in cheek.
Are they Metric or Imperial elephants
You mean African or European?
I don't know! AAAAAAARRRRGGGH.....
Or should that be African or Indian?
Of course regulation is the answer. But the implications are horrible. Any doubt that we are living in the "wilds" of the post revolution expolosion just consider the issues of industrial safety immediately after the industrial revolution. It was a disaster, people were killed and maimed hourly. Look at software, thankfully few people are actually harmed but some of what we "professionals" produce is just crap.
Professionalism is an answer to nothing in this case. Regulation comes in many forms. Pick your jusrisdiction and even your industry and you will find a litany of standards and regulations to which a product must conform before it can be sold. Fire safety for clothes, building materials, Electrical safety standards etc etc etc. One recurring theme seems that most of these standards relate to safety, or to paraphrase to reduce the human cost of substandard products. Having never worked in the industry, I do not know, but I can imagine that the standards required for medical equipment software (pacemakers et al) and things like nuclear power stations are much higher. This is not a question of the qualifications of the people who do the work but opf the output of their work and that is regulation, plain and simple.
Personally I think that the market is the right tool for many of these regulations, but that requires better information and we all know how companies are about disclosing the true nature of their products at the moment, but I digress. The other point is that whilst I am comfortable with my ability to choose the prudent or safe product, I don't trust the vast majority of morons out there to do the same and if they drive a crappy car they can kill me, so I am happy to have regulated standards.
Software, ah yes software, well for starters with most software the worst thing a crash or defect will do is cost you money (or make you late for a date), so I am not so sure that I want so much regulation. Secondly, due to the nature of the process, software is more art than engineering, and that is nothing to do with the professionalism of the people writing it. Now, it is true that the baseline at which the process turns from art into engineering is increasingly high (I am comfortable relying on my compiler to turn my Arty C code into engineered machine language and that the hardware will interpret this in a way that is engineered, whereas thirty years ago that was not so much the case) and in future that boundry will be higher still, however it is not a question of the "capabilities" of the industry participants that currently determines that level and getting us to a point where it is will take a long time and a number of really astounding revolutions in the tools at our disposal.
Having said all that. I would love to see "BS01232 - Computer Operating Systems" that defined a minimum standard of performance, but such a thing is a logistical nightmare do define yet alone to actually implement, so in the mean time I will just run the OSes for which my tasks are best suited and grin and bear the pain.
This is a remarkable thing and, whilst somewhat disconcerting, I love the idea of creating these "breeders" for the creation of various substances like this (Axylotl tanks anyone?).
Having once been caught in the middle of an honest-to-God cattle stampede, I can tell you that a bunch of cows are scarier than a bunch of spiders any day of the week -- which, obviously, doesn't keep us from raising the critters.
You obviously ain't from Sydney, 'cause let me tell you th idea of a stampeding bunch of Funnell Webs is _way_ scarier than a bunch a dumb moo cows. It just freaks me out thinking about it!!! (Thankfully they don't make the right kind of silk probably. Hopefully!)
Your "cost centre" based taxation is problematic since it offers no form of "redistribution". Using the vehicle using public to fund the vehicle services (such as roads) means that those who do not use vehicles but get the benefit of them (transport of goods to retail for example) are "free loading" on the vehicle using public. Further there is a tendency for these models to ignore the "ability" to pay aspect of taxation. Roads are a very good example because the damage done to a raod by traffic is some power of axle load. So one big truck does exponentially more damage than one thousand cars on a road that is not engineered for the big truck. Should we tax the truck 1000 times more than the car even though the car gets the same amenity from the service (the road)?
Now don't get me wrong, I am actually opposed to regressigve taxation regimes, like sliding scale income taxes, but road tax based on the value of the car you drive, why not? A LAN tax, why not? Government needs X dollars per year, now we can all argue about how effectively they spend their money and so about the size of X, but whatever it's final value it has to come from somewhere. I favour demand side taxation, that is VAT, GST, Sales tax, whatever you want to call it. I favour that it should be universal and low. That way there are no exceptions and no loopholes. For those who are damaged by such a policy, work out how much and then bump up welfare expenditure (and thus X) by the necessary amount. Now my position is controversial and so I have no real expectation of seeing it any time soon, but in the mean time taxing resources that are used by those that can afford to pay is a good thing. If a LAN tax be such a tax then it ain't inherently wrong. Now whether it is such a thing is a good question and the one on which the judgement of this report should be based.
I agree wholeheartedly with your criticism of the original poster's position. One thing I would add though is the "brouhaha" that surrounds the BBC's internet presence. Many of the content providers in the UK are "concerned" that the BBC is subsidising it's internet presence with the License Fee payers money (for those that don't understand what that means, see the BBC web site somewhere) and thus distorting the profgitibility of web delivered content. I think their argument is a crock but it is a very interesting argument to have.
Personally I think that the BBC's approach to interactive TV, digital TV and internet content is a salutory lesson to all those that believe that there is no place for publically funded media organisations like the BBC. I think they are actually innovating and their TV/Web/participation programs (and no I don't mean Fame Fscking Academy) are truly extraordinary. And whether they are responding to or prompting some of the work of the other commercial channels in the Uk, there are some _excellent_ (ok mainly educationally focused) programs being produced.
Having access to all the clasic radio programs online is a delightful thought. Comedy alone is reason enought to be excited.
but he runs Deb on his laptop because it was "the best at the time." what fucking bullshit. if it's so important to you, switch distros right-fucking-now.
Look I have more issues with RMS than most, but I think you are going one step too far. It's not like he would have anything from the debian release that is not free on his machine. It's like,... building a house, at the time you built it the company you bought the wood from sold both old growth and plantation wood products. They didn't actively promote old growth wood, but they would get it if a customer demanded that particular wood, so they were the best "ethical" provider available at the time. However you only used plantation wood products in your house so you complied with your ethics. And now, if you were building again, there is this new company that offers no old growth wood at all, so you could use them even more comfortably, indeed you might recommend them at the expense of the former company. The situation with Debian and LinEx seems the same to me so there is no reason to switch distros for him in order to remain consistent with his stated ethical position.