Conversely, have you seen some of the absurdities they get up to in hardcore porn these days? Catering to private fantasies is one thing, but the amount of violence contaminating the general pool of smut at this point is pretty unsettling.
Yes and no, the market for porn is getting completely saturated. If you just want amateur porn there's tons on xHamster and RedTube and PornHub. If you want professional porn then HD only made the porn skanks go away, there's plenty girls that look stunning in 1080p. For $10/month you can get 100-200 GB of new "mainstream" porn in 30 categories each month at Brazzers (not affiliated, just to take an example). If you just want to download there's enormous siterips with more porn than you could ever get around to watching. If you're not adding anything unique to the pool, then your standard porn flick adds about 0.02$ of value.
Because of that, sites specialize. If you want just erotic pictures go to Met-Art. If you want porn but still stylish go to X-Art. If you want movie with a story get movies like Pirates,. Pirates II, The 8th Day and many more. If you have a fetish, there's probably a site dedicated to you, whether it's redheads or girls with glasses or interracial or midgets or bukkake, hell there's probably one for redhead midgets with glasses doing interracial bukkake too. Obviously somebody is going to try out just how far you can take pain/violence/BDSM too, but it's not going mainstream. They just have to make it more extreme to provide something new, like giving an addict an even stronger drug to get a new kick.
I suspect that in not that long these niches will start to saturate too, that yes we've now done pretty much everything imaginable while having sex and there's tons of videos out there already. Here in Norway some production companies did Norwegian porn for a few years when they lifted the ban like 2004-2008, today they're all shut down. Not because of legal or political reasons but simply because there's so much free porn the niche "Norwegian porn" no longer is a viable business. Not that I'm doing anything silly like predicting the death of the porn industry, but I think it'll be in decline for some time.
Meh, unless it's a newsletter or mailing list I specifically signed up for and not a hidden away pre-checked checkbox somewhere then per my definition it is spam and the spam button it is. I don't care if you got my "consent", if you tricked me into it then this is my fuck you too.
I wonder if that's like here in Norway, they outlawed buying prostitutes here as well. It got rid of the real problem many people wanted to get rid of, street hookers bothering a lot of people and standing around in slutty outfits making the streets look trashy, people having sex in public parks nearby after dark and all sorts of public nuisance. The market simply moved out of the public eye into apartments and getting contact over the Internet. You can still find them very easy, in fact some say the market is back to where it was or even bigger. But out of sight, out of mind.
Personally, I wouldn't want the IT department to waste their time on it either. If you permit other browsers, my support routine would be:
1. Start over from scratch using "Internet Explorer", the one with the blue "e" icon. 2. Try whatever you were doing again. 3. If it works, keep doing it from IE. If it doesn't, only then contact us for help.
We have intranet systems that only work in IE, when I run into them I switch to IE. IE is the only supported browser. If it works in IE, then per definition there is no problem. Now I hope someone in intranet acquisitions or development has requirements for new development, but until further notice that is how it is. Doesn't stop me from browsing the web in Chrome or Firefox though, just don't expect any support on it.
This is gonna sound like a weird question, but are you required by law to take a lunch break when you telecommute?
Your jurisdiction may vary, but technically probably yes. At least here in Norway I couldn't find any exception for telecommuting, so normal rules apply. Though I've never had a practical problem with working through lunch and leaving half an hour early either at work or when telecommuting.
If you aren't directly managing employees and/or it isn't necessary for you to have physical access to equipment, there is no reason why working from home won't work.
If the people you're supposed to manage aren't at the office either, it hardly matters.
And as far as the time-worn fears of slacking are concerned, honestly I have too much to do to slack off - any supervising manager would be able to tell pretty quickly whether or not their subordinates are abusing the privilege.
Just wait until there's a quiet period, you'd be surprised how quickly you get used to not working a full day and/or being able to do everything else in between work. Sure if I was grossly slacking my manager would notice but I've never had a boss yet who knew exactly how hard the assignment he gave me was and even if he did, there's a good variance on whether I've done something similar/exactly like this before and any ad hoc issues that might turn up. Hell, even the same person in the same job changes over time when new versions come that make everything easier or harder. Maybe if I was consistently on the poorer side of his estimates over time, but I'd just as easily wager his expectations would be lowered instead. The effect is less if you're at the office during business hours whether there's much work or not.
Also there's another effect I've seen, it's cramming as much work as possible into your working days which obviously impacts quality to do as little as possible during your days at home, sending out yesterday's work as today's. The derogatory term for it here in Norway is "gjemmekontor" instead of "hjemmekontor" - literally translated "hiding office" instead of "home office". Oh sure they usually can't be completely unreachable as that would give it away but they're always conveniently running a quick errand or was putting on a washing machine or some other reason for not answering right away. Of course people do some minor personal stuff at work too, but not all day long. Okay so people don't do it during crunch time but it's a way to get "days off" without taking the financial penalty during normal times.
You don't have to be a slacker to see how the slackers exploit the system. Some people are simply there that they want to deliver an adequate to below average work performance knowing they get an okay pay with a minimum of effort and yet aren't so horrible they'll get fired. And if they put that cleverness into doing their jobs instead of working the system, they'd be very good employees but they don't find there's enough incentive. It's actually very hard to find out whether your employees are really working their best or not. Of course slackers slack at work too, but it's not that enticing there.
You aren't going to out Facebook Facebook or out Google Google.
No, but Facebook beat a lot of other competing social networks and Google beat a lot of other search engines. In retrospect it's easy but it was not at all obvious that Facebook would ever become anything more than a glorified student directory. And Google pretty much out-Yahooed Yahoo among others, they hit them dead center with better search algorithms - exactly the thing you claim they can't do. There's no one good answer to this, sometimes you can take them on head on and then you should. Sometimes you should dodge and find yourself a niche. Sometimes you should leap and go find something else (Apple comes to mind, Macs is still a niche computer). The right answer is "Pick the battles you can win." and the $100 billion dollar question "Well, how do I do that?"
Probably not. The closest living relative would be the elephant, and a quick googling suggests that tastes more like moose/elk or buffalo and not like chicken at all. But even being in the deep freezer I think 10,000 years is a little past the "best before" date...
+1 to everything you said, I wish I had mod points. Ask the Iraqis or the Vietnamese or the Afghans if they were in a war and I think you'd see unanimous agreement. Maybe not a war that threatens US territory or require any wartime means within US borders, but obviously a war. Even the President agrees with this, here's a few quotes from his Nobel Prize speech:
But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. (...) Still, we are at war, and I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land.
Invading foreign countries in an act of war, and action speaks louder than words. It is a war whether Congress signs off on it or not, I think the GP is the only one to "resolve" this constitutional issue by concluding that since no war is declared there can't be a war.
This is just Google's way of destroying Qt. Just like Microsoft did to javascript(javascript, j++, j#) which still hasn't recovered. The funny thing is Google is trying to use their bastard version of javascript to destroy the competition just like Microsoft. Javascript needs to be treated like the virus it is. Fuck Google(spying cocksuckers).
You need either more or less drugs, I'm not sure which. Google doesn't have anything to do with Qt...
If it got on the plane, someone checked it somewhere and gave it a thumbs-up. That makes it more likely to be a toy, just like it looked.
What's to say that when it passed through security it wasn't a cell phone, an RC car and wires with plugs on them - in different bags and/or from different people? I hate to be defending the TSA, but in this case I think it was perfectly reasonable to suspect this could be an airport/airplane assembled bomb. "Forgetting" it on board might be a way to make it blow up on the next flight rather than become a suicide bomber, honestly I have a hard time finding fault with suspected terrorist bombers being cuffed. Yeah of course it sucks for everyone affected when it turns out to be an innocent mistake but if they didn't react to this, what do you expect them to react to?
I wouldn't put too much faith in that agreement if it came down to hostilities, as long as there's one "important" release each year which Nokia claims is good enough and the qt foundation isn't and then put a lawyer on it to drag it out it'll be tied up for years. Also it explicitly says "For the avoidance of doubt, the aforementioned definition does not cover the Qt toolkit for other platforms (e.g. MS Windows, Macintosh, Symbian)" so they can strip out many platform-specific files. Most likely there'll just be a LGPL fork which you can do at any time - even now - and the KDE core libraries are under the LGPL too. It was a much bigger deal when Qt was only under the GPL+commercial license, not LGPL.
Well, they say it's a sub-task. Many places allow anyone older than 13 (or rather, who say they're 13 due to COPPA) to sign up. Identifying who is trying to solicit sexual favors from self-identified minors - particularly by self-identified adults - and yes people are that stupid - doesn't sound that unreasonable. Of course if the kids lie and say they're 18+ instead that might be different...
Try playing a chess AI that isn't based on a books of known games. They can be smart when having the knowledge from all the best chess games by the best human players, but are still retarded when playing without a database of known games and openings.
Some of the chess engines will actually let you try this. Do it and let us know how "retarded" they are...
Yep, for example all evidence suggest that chess is either a draw or a win for white. However, there's no proof that black can't win. In theory, all of the 20 opening moves (8x2 pawn moves and 2x2 knight moves) could expose a subtle weakness in white's defense that black could use to force checkmate with perfect play. That's a 0.00000001% chance but until it's proven otherwise, it's still possible.
This is just telling you that you'd lose against Rybka. But then, unless you're a top grandmaster having a good day, you already knew that.
They lose too and hardly anyone bothers anymore because it's like asking whether a human or a dragster would win the 100m dash. Even a mobile phone plays at a grandmaster level these days, with a regular desktop humans would occasionally make a draw and if you made a dedicated supercomputer again like Deep Blue they'd lose every game. The last recorded human win without handicap I could find was back in 2004 when Karjakin beat Deep Junior. Everyone would know the competition would be like "if we just let the dragster fire on one cylinder and drag a 100kg rock after it, it'll be an even match".
Apparently this was considered a good idea for a long time, though I (a mediocre-at-best player) don't see how it could work.
For a long time declining a gambit was not considered very good sportsmanship, if the opponent offered you to go on a roller coaster ride you were supposed to take it. Go through The Immortal Game and see what they considered a masterpiece in 1851. Oh and as relevant to the story - it's King's Gambit Accepted and won by white.
Hire competent programmers or hire cheap programmers and install a database firewall instead. Some companies are going to opt for the cheap programmers.
Very many companies will actually, the problem is that all these cheap developers are likely to do all the crazy stuff that triggers the firewall, not to mention fail spectacularly when it's blocked by the firewall. If there's one execution path that may work in cheap software it's the "all is well, no problems encountered" path. So you don't trust them to handle SQL injection, but you do trust them to use transactions correctly and fail gracefully when a firewall blocks statements at random?
Okay not at random but I'm guessing it looks at the arguments too looking for anyone trying to pull a little bobby tables on your database. But if you're looking at anything other than the statement structure, then you're going to run into funny things on production data when "Andy O'Donnell" tries to register for your site that the developers didn't see in testing. Or when someone here on slashdot makes a comment with an SQL snippet, is that someone trying to execute it via some as-yet-unknown exploit? It's just not a good place to put your security.
The best April Fools stories are those that border between the outrageous and the plausible. I fell for one this year, usually I don't because a friend of mine has his birthday on March 31st but I had a good hangover and forgot. It got me to anger, then to rage, then to "damnit, got me" and was well played. The rest of the day is kind of a waste though. Actually what I found funniest was the reverse April Fools, our version of AP or Reuters called NTB sent out a press message listing the various jokes, except one of those news stories was real. So they had to send out a fairly embarrassing retraction correcting themselves. Then you have all the laughs at other people who did fall for something, not to mention the smugness of not falling for it. Overall lighten up a bit, the world needs one less than serious day a year.
The legal case against Megaupload hinged on a technicality: They took the files down on request, but didn't also take down duplicates of the same file uploaded by someone else, even though they could (as they used file-level dedupe) have done so trivially.
If you take MegaUpload's definition I simply have to have a dynamic link generator, oh I took down the last link but you can push "generate download link" and get a different URL to the same file and that's legal until we get a DMCA takedown for that. Everybody understands that's not how it's supposed to work and the law isn't that into the details as URLs. It simply says "(ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed". "The file accessible at URL: $foo" is identification, but it's not the literal URL that is infringing but the file it points to. I think the prosecution will argue pretty hard that after that you're aware of the file and fail the "(i) does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing;" condition, meaning you're no longer protected from liability.
It's still ridiculous because it makes little sense. Not just because of the notion that you wouldn't actually set afoot in said territory, but because the few cases in which you might (such as an emergency requiring diverting to one of that nation's airports) also apply to many other routes that don't cross that airspace but still come close enough for the pilots to decide to, or be forced to, land there - security clearance issues or no security clearance issues.
To push it to a point, would you allow a foreign fighter/bomber jet to invade your airspace? No. Then you've pretty much agreed that each nation control their airspace. During an emergency, well they should be afforded all the privileges of non-combatants under the Geneva convention - which is not that much, but it's basic protections against torture and other inhumane conditions. There's not really any other guarantee you have.
Rapidshare banning files that have a referer from a URL shortener site has what to do with Twitter?
I don't know if you're trolling but I'll assume you've been living under a rock and it's a genuine question. Twitter is made for SMS (also known as texting) where you have a 160 character limit - unless you do multi-part texting. For that reason people don't generally want to paste long URLs.- like the link to this comment is 95 characters. So you use shorteners like bit.ly/SDGGV6FASD -10-15 characters instead.
The day it reads "Adobe kills Flash" I'll pop the champagne, "for Linux" just means support is going backwards for Linux. No matter how much you hate Flash the effect will be "That doesn't work on Linux/Firefox, use Windows/Chrome." because despite it being supported I bet once Flash 12 comes out most sites will reply "your version of flash is not supported, please upgrade" anyway. Anyone know if this support will be in Chromium too or if it's another Chrome-only feature like H.264?
Slashdot Mirror
If they're applying for a patent, it means that they must have some sufficiently viable method of producing the tech.
Why? Patent trolls certainly don't...
Conversely, have you seen some of the absurdities they get up to in hardcore porn these days? Catering to private fantasies is one thing, but the amount of violence contaminating the general pool of smut at this point is pretty unsettling.
Yes and no, the market for porn is getting completely saturated. If you just want amateur porn there's tons on xHamster and RedTube and PornHub. If you want professional porn then HD only made the porn skanks go away, there's plenty girls that look stunning in 1080p. For $10/month you can get 100-200 GB of new "mainstream" porn in 30 categories each month at Brazzers (not affiliated, just to take an example). If you just want to download there's enormous siterips with more porn than you could ever get around to watching. If you're not adding anything unique to the pool, then your standard porn flick adds about 0.02$ of value.
Because of that, sites specialize. If you want just erotic pictures go to Met-Art. If you want porn but still stylish go to X-Art. If you want movie with a story get movies like Pirates,. Pirates II, The 8th Day and many more. If you have a fetish, there's probably a site dedicated to you, whether it's redheads or girls with glasses or interracial or midgets or bukkake, hell there's probably one for redhead midgets with glasses doing interracial bukkake too. Obviously somebody is going to try out just how far you can take pain/violence/BDSM too, but it's not going mainstream. They just have to make it more extreme to provide something new, like giving an addict an even stronger drug to get a new kick.
I suspect that in not that long these niches will start to saturate too, that yes we've now done pretty much everything imaginable while having sex and there's tons of videos out there already. Here in Norway some production companies did Norwegian porn for a few years when they lifted the ban like 2004-2008, today they're all shut down. Not because of legal or political reasons but simply because there's so much free porn the niche "Norwegian porn" no longer is a viable business. Not that I'm doing anything silly like predicting the death of the porn industry, but I think it'll be in decline for some time.
Meh, unless it's a newsletter or mailing list I specifically signed up for and not a hidden away pre-checked checkbox somewhere then per my definition it is spam and the spam button it is. I don't care if you got my "consent", if you tricked me into it then this is my fuck you too.
I wonder if that's like here in Norway, they outlawed buying prostitutes here as well. It got rid of the real problem many people wanted to get rid of, street hookers bothering a lot of people and standing around in slutty outfits making the streets look trashy, people having sex in public parks nearby after dark and all sorts of public nuisance. The market simply moved out of the public eye into apartments and getting contact over the Internet. You can still find them very easy, in fact some say the market is back to where it was or even bigger. But out of sight, out of mind.
Personally, I wouldn't want the IT department to waste their time on it either. If you permit other browsers, my support routine would be:
1. Start over from scratch using "Internet Explorer", the one with the blue "e" icon.
2. Try whatever you were doing again.
3. If it works, keep doing it from IE. If it doesn't, only then contact us for help.
We have intranet systems that only work in IE, when I run into them I switch to IE. IE is the only supported browser. If it works in IE, then per definition there is no problem. Now I hope someone in intranet acquisitions or development has requirements for new development, but until further notice that is how it is. Doesn't stop me from browsing the web in Chrome or Firefox though, just don't expect any support on it.
This is gonna sound like a weird question, but are you required by law to take a lunch break when you telecommute?
Your jurisdiction may vary, but technically probably yes. At least here in Norway I couldn't find any exception for telecommuting, so normal rules apply. Though I've never had a practical problem with working through lunch and leaving half an hour early either at work or when telecommuting.
If you aren't directly managing employees and/or it isn't necessary for you to have physical access to equipment, there is no reason why working from home won't work.
If the people you're supposed to manage aren't at the office either, it hardly matters.
And as far as the time-worn fears of slacking are concerned, honestly I have too much to do to slack off - any supervising manager would be able to tell pretty quickly whether or not their subordinates are abusing the privilege.
Just wait until there's a quiet period, you'd be surprised how quickly you get used to not working a full day and/or being able to do everything else in between work. Sure if I was grossly slacking my manager would notice but I've never had a boss yet who knew exactly how hard the assignment he gave me was and even if he did, there's a good variance on whether I've done something similar/exactly like this before and any ad hoc issues that might turn up. Hell, even the same person in the same job changes over time when new versions come that make everything easier or harder. Maybe if I was consistently on the poorer side of his estimates over time, but I'd just as easily wager his expectations would be lowered instead. The effect is less if you're at the office during business hours whether there's much work or not.
Also there's another effect I've seen, it's cramming as much work as possible into your working days which obviously impacts quality to do as little as possible during your days at home, sending out yesterday's work as today's. The derogatory term for it here in Norway is "gjemmekontor" instead of "hjemmekontor" - literally translated "hiding office" instead of "home office". Oh sure they usually can't be completely unreachable as that would give it away but they're always conveniently running a quick errand or was putting on a washing machine or some other reason for not answering right away. Of course people do some minor personal stuff at work too, but not all day long. Okay so people don't do it during crunch time but it's a way to get "days off" without taking the financial penalty during normal times.
You don't have to be a slacker to see how the slackers exploit the system. Some people are simply there that they want to deliver an adequate to below average work performance knowing they get an okay pay with a minimum of effort and yet aren't so horrible they'll get fired. And if they put that cleverness into doing their jobs instead of working the system, they'd be very good employees but they don't find there's enough incentive. It's actually very hard to find out whether your employees are really working their best or not. Of course slackers slack at work too, but it's not that enticing there.
You aren't going to out Facebook Facebook or out Google Google.
No, but Facebook beat a lot of other competing social networks and Google beat a lot of other search engines. In retrospect it's easy but it was not at all obvious that Facebook would ever become anything more than a glorified student directory. And Google pretty much out-Yahooed Yahoo among others, they hit them dead center with better search algorithms - exactly the thing you claim they can't do. There's no one good answer to this, sometimes you can take them on head on and then you should. Sometimes you should dodge and find yourself a niche. Sometimes you should leap and go find something else (Apple comes to mind, Macs is still a niche computer). The right answer is "Pick the battles you can win." and the $100 billion dollar question "Well, how do I do that?"
Probably not. The closest living relative would be the elephant, and a quick googling suggests that tastes more like moose/elk or buffalo and not like chicken at all. But even being in the deep freezer I think 10,000 years is a little past the "best before" date...
+1 to everything you said, I wish I had mod points. Ask the Iraqis or the Vietnamese or the Afghans if they were in a war and I think you'd see unanimous agreement. Maybe not a war that threatens US territory or require any wartime means within US borders, but obviously a war. Even the President agrees with this, here's a few quotes from his Nobel Prize speech:
But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. (...) Still, we are at war, and I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land.
Invading foreign countries in an act of war, and action speaks louder than words. It is a war whether Congress signs off on it or not, I think the GP is the only one to "resolve" this constitutional issue by concluding that since no war is declared there can't be a war.
This is just Google's way of destroying Qt. Just like Microsoft did to javascript(javascript, j++, j#) which still hasn't recovered. The funny thing is Google is trying to use their bastard version of javascript to destroy the competition just like Microsoft. Javascript needs to be treated like the virus it is. Fuck Google(spying cocksuckers).
You need either more or less drugs, I'm not sure which. Google doesn't have anything to do with Qt...
If it got on the plane, someone checked it somewhere and gave it a thumbs-up. That makes it more likely to be a toy, just like it looked.
What's to say that when it passed through security it wasn't a cell phone, an RC car and wires with plugs on them - in different bags and/or from different people? I hate to be defending the TSA, but in this case I think it was perfectly reasonable to suspect this could be an airport/airplane assembled bomb. "Forgetting" it on board might be a way to make it blow up on the next flight rather than become a suicide bomber, honestly I have a hard time finding fault with suspected terrorist bombers being cuffed. Yeah of course it sucks for everyone affected when it turns out to be an innocent mistake but if they didn't react to this, what do you expect them to react to?
I wouldn't put too much faith in that agreement if it came down to hostilities, as long as there's one "important" release each year which Nokia claims is good enough and the qt foundation isn't and then put a lawyer on it to drag it out it'll be tied up for years. Also it explicitly says "For the avoidance of doubt, the aforementioned definition does not cover the Qt toolkit for other platforms (e.g. MS Windows, Macintosh, Symbian)" so they can strip out many platform-specific files. Most likely there'll just be a LGPL fork which you can do at any time - even now - and the KDE core libraries are under the LGPL too. It was a much bigger deal when Qt was only under the GPL+commercial license, not LGPL.
Well, they say it's a sub-task. Many places allow anyone older than 13 (or rather, who say they're 13 due to COPPA) to sign up. Identifying who is trying to solicit sexual favors from self-identified minors - particularly by self-identified adults - and yes people are that stupid - doesn't sound that unreasonable. Of course if the kids lie and say they're 18+ instead that might be different...
Try playing a chess AI that isn't based on a books of known games. They can be smart when having the knowledge from all the best chess games by the best human players, but are still retarded when playing without a database of known games and openings.
Some of the chess engines will actually let you try this. Do it and let us know how "retarded" they are...
Yep, for example all evidence suggest that chess is either a draw or a win for white. However, there's no proof that black can't win. In theory, all of the 20 opening moves (8x2 pawn moves and 2x2 knight moves) could expose a subtle weakness in white's defense that black could use to force checkmate with perfect play. That's a 0.00000001% chance but until it's proven otherwise, it's still possible.
This is just telling you that you'd lose against Rybka. But then, unless you're a top grandmaster having a good day, you already knew that.
They lose too and hardly anyone bothers anymore because it's like asking whether a human or a dragster would win the 100m dash. Even a mobile phone plays at a grandmaster level these days, with a regular desktop humans would occasionally make a draw and if you made a dedicated supercomputer again like Deep Blue they'd lose every game. The last recorded human win without handicap I could find was back in 2004 when Karjakin beat Deep Junior. Everyone would know the competition would be like "if we just let the dragster fire on one cylinder and drag a 100kg rock after it, it'll be an even match".
Apparently this was considered a good idea for a long time, though I (a mediocre-at-best player) don't see how it could work.
For a long time declining a gambit was not considered very good sportsmanship, if the opponent offered you to go on a roller coaster ride you were supposed to take it. Go through The Immortal Game and see what they considered a masterpiece in 1851. Oh and as relevant to the story - it's King's Gambit Accepted and won by white.
Hire competent programmers or hire cheap programmers and install a database firewall instead. Some companies are going to opt for the cheap programmers.
Very many companies will actually, the problem is that all these cheap developers are likely to do all the crazy stuff that triggers the firewall, not to mention fail spectacularly when it's blocked by the firewall. If there's one execution path that may work in cheap software it's the "all is well, no problems encountered" path. So you don't trust them to handle SQL injection, but you do trust them to use transactions correctly and fail gracefully when a firewall blocks statements at random?
Okay not at random but I'm guessing it looks at the arguments too looking for anyone trying to pull a little bobby tables on your database. But if you're looking at anything other than the statement structure, then you're going to run into funny things on production data when "Andy O'Donnell" tries to register for your site that the developers didn't see in testing. Or when someone here on slashdot makes a comment with an SQL snippet, is that someone trying to execute it via some as-yet-unknown exploit? It's just not a good place to put your security.
The best April Fools stories are those that border between the outrageous and the plausible. I fell for one this year, usually I don't because a friend of mine has his birthday on March 31st but I had a good hangover and forgot. It got me to anger, then to rage, then to "damnit, got me" and was well played. The rest of the day is kind of a waste though. Actually what I found funniest was the reverse April Fools, our version of AP or Reuters called NTB sent out a press message listing the various jokes, except one of those news stories was real. So they had to send out a fairly embarrassing retraction correcting themselves. Then you have all the laughs at other people who did fall for something, not to mention the smugness of not falling for it. Overall lighten up a bit, the world needs one less than serious day a year.
Plus there are still appeals in the pipeline.
No, the supreme court refused to hear it about two months ago so it is final.
The legal case against Megaupload hinged on a technicality: They took the files down on request, but didn't also take down duplicates of the same file uploaded by someone else, even though they could (as they used file-level dedupe) have done so trivially.
If you take MegaUpload's definition I simply have to have a dynamic link generator, oh I took down the last link but you can push "generate download link" and get a different URL to the same file and that's legal until we get a DMCA takedown for that. Everybody understands that's not how it's supposed to work and the law isn't that into the details as URLs. It simply says "(ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed". "The file accessible at URL: $foo" is identification, but it's not the literal URL that is infringing but the file it points to. I think the prosecution will argue pretty hard that after that you're aware of the file and fail the "(i) does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing;" condition, meaning you're no longer protected from liability.
It's still ridiculous because it makes little sense. Not just because of the notion that you wouldn't actually set afoot in said territory, but because the few cases in which you might (such as an emergency requiring diverting to one of that nation's airports) also apply to many other routes that don't cross that airspace but still come close enough for the pilots to decide to, or be forced to, land there - security clearance issues or no security clearance issues.
To push it to a point, would you allow a foreign fighter/bomber jet to invade your airspace? No. Then you've pretty much agreed that each nation control their airspace. During an emergency, well they should be afforded all the privileges of non-combatants under the Geneva convention - which is not that much, but it's basic protections against torture and other inhumane conditions. There's not really any other guarantee you have.
Rapidshare banning files that have a referer from a URL shortener site has what to do with Twitter?
I don't know if you're trolling but I'll assume you've been living under a rock and it's a genuine question. Twitter is made for SMS (also known as texting) where you have a 160 character limit - unless you do multi-part texting. For that reason people don't generally want to paste long URLs .- like the link to this comment is 95 characters. So you use shorteners like bit.ly/SDGGV6FASD -10-15 characters instead.
The day it reads "Adobe kills Flash" I'll pop the champagne, "for Linux" just means support is going backwards for Linux. No matter how much you hate Flash the effect will be "That doesn't work on Linux/Firefox, use Windows/Chrome." because despite it being supported I bet once Flash 12 comes out most sites will reply "your version of flash is not supported, please upgrade" anyway. Anyone know if this support will be in Chromium too or if it's another Chrome-only feature like H.264?