That's how many they lost, it doesn't cover all the other users that were just angry, annoyed or lost trust in Facebook and use it less. Nor does it cover the loss of reputation that they had with the user base in general or potential new users. Those were 4500 disgruntled users who'd probably tell ten times as many to stay away. Maybe the damages are not $360 million but they're probably bigger than you think.
Anyway, so what if he can't pay? Does it matter if that's the actual damage you've caused? For example I read one case here recently, it was a woman who'd gone to a restaurant and ordered a big wedding party. On the way out she had to borrow money for the train because she had forgot her purse, of course the restaurant was helpful and borrowed her 500 NOK since after all she just made a huge order and was a sweet talker. By the time it was clear this was a scam it was too late to hire out to anyone else and they lost an estimated 45000 NOK, all to get that "train" money. Now of course she's the kind that isn't going to pay anything but I think it's perfectly fair to charge her for the full 45500 NOK worth of damage she caused. Because it's real no matter how much or little she can actually pay.
I'm not a big expert on nutbag ideology but after all the person goes out there in the crowd wearing or carrying the damn thing. Perhaps by the bomber not knowing when the bomb will go off and the handler not knowing exactly where the bomber is think this is more like fate, that it's Allah's will who lives and dies? Or they see themselves more like soldiers, they're willing to sacrifice their lives and so it is "valid" but it doesn't mean they have to commit suicide. In any case, you're trying to apply logic to a religious fundamentalist terrorist. Maybe the voices in his head told him, or the sect leader that he trust implicitly said it was fine, they call it blind faith for a reason. And ultimately if you could understand it would only be like watching into the mind of a serial killer, the wires just go different than in everybody else.
I thought we all learned a long time ago to assume that our conversations (and data) are stored somewhere by someone. Twenty years ago there were cases of private e-mails being read and distributed among office workers. People were even getting fired and sometimes divorced over it. That established what our expectations of "electronic privacy" should be. Now it's no different. In fact, joining a SOCIAL network, you should expect information is going to be shared. That's what a social network is.
LIFE is a social network. I guess you should just set yourself up like some new JenniCam, since you seem to have abandoned any expectation of privacy already, but the rest of us haven't. In particular that there's such a thing as private communication. In your fucked up world there's no such thing, since every communication requires more than one party. If you've told one, you've told the world. If one person has seen a private photo of you, then everyone has.
That said, properly issued warrants have always taken precedence over privacy. With them they can search you, your house, papers, effects and everything else the fourth amendment normally protects. The difference is that lots of things that used to be ephemeral are now preserved as bits and bytes on a computer somewhere.
Yes well, except there's a third party that you don't normally consider that is storing all those whispers. If I send a SMS, the phone company doesn't keep a copy. If you call someone, the phone company doesn't keep a recording of it. At least before when I downloaded mail the server didn't keep it, that's less relevant now though since I use a webmail host. But if you message someone on Facebook, they do keep a copy forevermore. Or at least until the recipient deletes it, which may be never.
The KDE team was doing an awful lot of doublespeak. Of course a x.0 release isn't as stable as a x.5 release that is the very last of a long series, but you still expect it to be as stable as is commonly accepted for x.0 releases. They pretend they gave a warning, but in reality they didn't because that's what everyone says even when there's just minor kinks to work out. It's exactly the same as moving from the last SP on one Windows release to the first release of the next Windows version, and that was never this bad. Even if you compare it to Vista pre-SP1 (Windows 6.0) it fell rather flat on its face. And I think most consider that launch a failure on Microsoft's part, a good launch would be competing with XP or Windows 7. Apple has been on the 10.x series now a long time but you could try imagining what would be acceptable for a 11.0 release. The only way you could possibly justify the 4.0 release is to make up a completely different standard than anything it's likely to be compared to.
I think it's sad because I'm very impressed with Qt as a toolkit and think it grew in leaps and bounds moving from Qt3 to Qt4. KDE 4.0 was a giant sign saying "go away" beating everyone who tried it in the head. It was bad. KDE 4.1 was bad. KDE 4.2 was bad. Somewhere in the KDE 4.3 cycle they fixed the nastiest issues I had, but it was more than a year of "it's not that bad" when it was.
In theory, but then look at practical reality... our fastest space probes would take something like 70000 years to reach the nearest star. We don't have a clue how to build machinery that lasts that long, any interstellar craft is still on the highly speculative "if we get a fusion / anti-matter drive" level. It doesn't matter how long time we have on us, today's Earth tech couldn't do it even if we accepted that travel time.
There's zero economic incentive of doing it, the chances that an interstellar colony would produce anything valuable for earth is extremely unlikely. At best it's information if we managed to establish cutting edge science somewhere, but the round trip on any communication is a decade or more.
Seriously, ask yourself how far humanity would have to advance before we'd actually start doing it - not just in the theoretical "if we throw all our resources at it we might" but in practical terms would. I mean we haven't even been to the moon in ages. We know Mars is probably within reach if we spend billions. But we don't, and neither would we spend trillions to colonize some rock 1000 years down the road.
The point is getting communication established, that they know we're there and we know they're there. For this say a simple prime sequence should be enough (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29 beeps). Clearly not natural, invariant of the base system used (primes are primes in binary, octal, hex, whatever) - any civilization with math should recognize it.
Between two prime sequences I'd go with simple binary pictograms first sending width length then pixels. As you get a bunch of them it'll be easy to see the pattern that you get 11111110111110[35 bits] = (7)(5)(35 bits of data), (10)(8)(80 bits of data) before we start the prime series again.
What you put in the pictogram is of lesser value, you could have thousands of them on a cycle years long with things like math, alphabet, physics, chemistry, solar system, drawings of humans, take your pick. If first a civilization picks it up they can grab all of them until they get a full loop.
It should be very obvious that if you make the 2x2 matrix of (Lazy, Hard-working) and (Stupid, Smart) then (Lazy, Stupid) comes out on the bottom and (Hard-working, Smart) comes out on top. But does (Hard-working, Stupid) beat (Lazy, Smart)? It would be nice to answer yes, it's obviously the PC answer that you can be whatever you want to be and so on. Answering no is more of a surrender that you're only this smart, so you'll never get further than this in life.
But the hard fact is that I think the answer is for the most part no. I know people that struggled in school and worked much harder than me but couldn't get the same grades. I see the same at work, some work much harder than me but they still don't deliver equal to me. Sometimes I deliver in two hours what they spend two days on. And some of them I think just sacrifice too much to do it. Sure if you study much harder, work much harder you'll do better. But if you turn yourself into a workaholic just to keep up with a position that's several sizes to big for you, then you're going to miss out on a lot of life.
I work 40 hours a week including lunch break and that is plenty. I work to live, not live to work. Could I have reached even further? Probably. But there's more to life than work and I'm already making a six-figure pay. I don't need to work 80 hour weeks and stretch for seven. Maybe I would if I came up with a killer idea and really wanted to run with it, but not just to climb the corporate ladder. For that my time is too valuable to me.
LOL if you take that tone perhaps YOU should have a clue what you're talking about? Hashes as used in hash tables are small and fast to give performance. Secure hashes like those used in cryptography are 160 - 512 bits long and for the longest you could assign an ID to every atom in the universe and almost certainly still not have a collision, despite the birthday paradox.
Bahnhof has fought for their customer at every step of the way, even when there's been no direct economic gain. They probably don't want to officially go out as some sort of "referee" saying who they think is right and who they think is wrong, but they've really done everything you could ask for. I don't know what it is you want, to announce themselves as the lawless ISP or the pirate ISP or anything like that would only be foolish in so many ways.
Yeah, sounds like they found the 2011 version of aXXo which was reposting torrents from all over the place. Anyone who thinks he actually made 1/3rd of the downloads on Mininova is seriously deluded.
Non-executables can exploit flaws in the decoder, for example if it has a buffer overflow letting you overwrite the application code. Perhaps the most famous is the GDI+ exploit in Windows where your computer could be taken over simply by watching a malicious JPEG.
For example the VLC project has a list of security advisories related to flaws in video files (videc codecs, audio codecs, demuxers+++). There are typically a few each year, not many but they're oh so ugly when it happens.
Just take one of the space rockets that the US, Russia, China, ESA, India +++ has and add a nuke as payload. Or hell just send it to impact on the base, should be plenty. Bye-bye moon base. Unless you're going to bring a missile shield up there too, but that will probably set of a space arms race to ensure MAD is sustained.
As for rare earth minerals, they're not that rare. Even the most expensive minerals only cost about $100k/kilo, meaning a $100 million dollar expedition - not even a Mars Rover - would have to bring back a ton in 100% pure form. And that needs to cover a full excavation, processing and launch system plus operating costs of such.
Something like gold is only $3k/kilo, so more like 300+ tons. It's doubtful you could turn a profit even if there were 24 carat gold bars lying on the moon surface waiting to be picked up. Maybe someday in the future we will become far more desperate for this, but most likely it's cheaper to exploit every vein, dig up every land fill and recycle every last gram rather than try getting it from space.
If people start voting their principles, then third parties may only get 5% this year, but that makes it easier to get 6% next year. When people see it's rising, more people vote for it. Then you've got 7%, which encourages more people to vote. Then one year, you wake up and you've changed things.
Or they fall apart as people realize their actions unintentionally put someone even worse in charge. Or there's some kind of compromise/unification thing that brings the old baggage. But even if we assume it succeeds things only change if you assume the third party will actually go through with election reform, for which they'll need a two thirds majority in both houses to pass a constitutional amendment then have three fourths of the states ratify it. Otherwise you have only created a new two party lock, meet the new party same as the old party. I suspect both that such a supermajority is near impossible to reach and that even if they did by then the power would have corrupted them too much to actually do it. Even if both those near-impossibles became true, I figure the opposing side would still manage to block it in 25% of the state legislatures. I figure the chance of winning the lottery two weeks in a row is bigger than this one.
I can understand someone creating spam pages for popular search terms but I've never understood quite how they manage to come up with really obscure shit, like if I type in "three inch frange demodulator" and there's the first hit proudly declaring "Internet's leader for three inch frange demodulators!" I just made that term up two seconds ago. How do they get that cached into google?
Well I don't know how they get them on google, but on P2P it's trivial as you just parse the request and return a fake result using the "Unreleased [search] pics.zip". Same with any "warez search" where they control the search engine and just send you link-chasing through 5 pages of ads before finally hitting a paywall. I don't really understand what you're on about about google though, because if I search for "three inch frange demodulator" the closest it came up with was "Ecoplus 4 inch Flange Kit" and a page full of otherwise legitimate hits. I figure some just link farm everything everyone has ever searched for ever and just made a page for it for google to index.
Considering that I have not once downloaded a fake on TBP in the past 10 years or so that I have been using it, I think that either the "researcher" is fiddling with the numbers or has no idea how to download something.
That, and the fact that including any URL anywhere is a sign of "financial profit". Who cares if it's called "Some.Popular.TV.Show.S02E23.x264-L4M3.[btjunkies.com].torrent"? As long as they deliver who cares? And particularly trying to lump those together with the relatively few that try propagating malware - for example unheard of in movies, tv, music and a bunch of other categories. Yes, downloading random executables off the Internet is still a bad idea but not hardly as big a problem as this makes it sound.
Are you sure you're not mixing bits and bytes? I have a 25 Mbit connection and the highest actual I've seen is 2.9 MB/s = 23.2 Mbit/s. Up I'm supposed to have 5 Mbit/s but in practice it tops out around 480 kB/s = 3.84 Mbit.
(A) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a), unless authorized by the owners of copyright in the sound recording (...) neither the owner of a particular phonorecord (nor...) may, for the purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage, dispose of, or authorize the disposal of, the possession of that phonorecord (...) by rental, lease, or lending (...).
Seems to me like a bought special interest law, but by now a fairly old and established one...
I think religion as a concept is almost like evolution, evolution only cares what genes survive not if they're "good" or "bad" and religion only cares what beliefs survive not if they're "good" or "bad". Where's the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Norse and who knows how many other religions? Extinct. Christianity is what it is because it's a religion that spread instead of diminished. A religion that conquered instead of being conquered. A religion that promoted greater growth - "be fruitful and multiply". Any religion that doesn't try to convert people from other religions, any religion that doesn't in some way say that their religion is the Right Way and everyone else's way is the Wrong Way has probably been overrun by a religion that did.
The rise and fall of religions has not depended on personal belief but rather the structure to convert and raise more people in that religion. Kings and lords has ordered churches and monasteries built and the population goaded into attending. Through missionaries children were educated and helped but also converted into the Christian religion. I think many look at Christianity today and say "But religion is a personal matter. Just accept Jesus into your heart and let's all sing Kumbaya." but the reality is that if that was how Christianity had started it probably would have died a quick and insignificant death long before the Roman empire fell. People should not be so naive to think that this institutionalized drive to expand and conquer has simply vanished just because it has become less and less accepted in the Christian world.
If progress means your high profit industry is turning into a low profit industry or a no profit industry then of course they'll do everything to block progress. Nobody except a few socialist idealists think people will take pay cuts or give up their livelihood for "the good of society". It's the rest of society that has to tell them "tough luck, find something else to do" and if you don't they'll just keep going. For example take the whole ambassador thing, they were very important as long as that was the person kings and statesmen would interact with and messages had to go by mail or courier back and forth with the home government. Today Obama could pick up the phone and call Putin just as easily - probably easier - than relaying stuff through the Russian ambassador. Or for lesser things, just a liason to the United States back in Moscow. And yet these people are in the highest circles of society, highest pay grade and live in extremely luxurious estates on prime locations with diplomatic immunity. Embassies serve more purposes which are still useful, but ambassadors must be the world's most glorified delivery boys.
The problem with this argument is that if the code was GPLed the source has to be freely available. In which case Google is not in violation of distributing the source code.
No, the source code is available under the terms of the GPL. If they have distributed it with an Apache license that is compliant with the GPL and a clear copyright violation.
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That's how many they lost, it doesn't cover all the other users that were just angry, annoyed or lost trust in Facebook and use it less. Nor does it cover the loss of reputation that they had with the user base in general or potential new users. Those were 4500 disgruntled users who'd probably tell ten times as many to stay away. Maybe the damages are not $360 million but they're probably bigger than you think.
Anyway, so what if he can't pay? Does it matter if that's the actual damage you've caused? For example I read one case here recently, it was a woman who'd gone to a restaurant and ordered a big wedding party. On the way out she had to borrow money for the train because she had forgot her purse, of course the restaurant was helpful and borrowed her 500 NOK since after all she just made a huge order and was a sweet talker. By the time it was clear this was a scam it was too late to hire out to anyone else and they lost an estimated 45000 NOK, all to get that "train" money. Now of course she's the kind that isn't going to pay anything but I think it's perfectly fair to charge her for the full 45500 NOK worth of damage she caused. Because it's real no matter how much or little she can actually pay.
I'm not a big expert on nutbag ideology but after all the person goes out there in the crowd wearing or carrying the damn thing. Perhaps by the bomber not knowing when the bomb will go off and the handler not knowing exactly where the bomber is think this is more like fate, that it's Allah's will who lives and dies? Or they see themselves more like soldiers, they're willing to sacrifice their lives and so it is "valid" but it doesn't mean they have to commit suicide. In any case, you're trying to apply logic to a religious fundamentalist terrorist. Maybe the voices in his head told him, or the sect leader that he trust implicitly said it was fine, they call it blind faith for a reason. And ultimately if you could understand it would only be like watching into the mind of a serial killer, the wires just go different than in everybody else.
I thought we all learned a long time ago to assume that our conversations (and data) are stored somewhere by someone. Twenty years ago there were cases of private e-mails being read and distributed among office workers. People were even getting fired and sometimes divorced over it. That established what our expectations of "electronic privacy" should be. Now it's no different. In fact, joining a SOCIAL network, you should expect information is going to be shared. That's what a social network is.
LIFE is a social network. I guess you should just set yourself up like some new JenniCam, since you seem to have abandoned any expectation of privacy already, but the rest of us haven't. In particular that there's such a thing as private communication. In your fucked up world there's no such thing, since every communication requires more than one party. If you've told one, you've told the world. If one person has seen a private photo of you, then everyone has.
That said, properly issued warrants have always taken precedence over privacy. With them they can search you, your house, papers, effects and everything else the fourth amendment normally protects. The difference is that lots of things that used to be ephemeral are now preserved as bits and bytes on a computer somewhere.
Yes well, except there's a third party that you don't normally consider that is storing all those whispers. If I send a SMS, the phone company doesn't keep a copy. If you call someone, the phone company doesn't keep a recording of it. At least before when I downloaded mail the server didn't keep it, that's less relevant now though since I use a webmail host. But if you message someone on Facebook, they do keep a copy forevermore. Or at least until the recipient deletes it, which may be never.
The KDE team was doing an awful lot of doublespeak. Of course a x.0 release isn't as stable as a x.5 release that is the very last of a long series, but you still expect it to be as stable as is commonly accepted for x.0 releases. They pretend they gave a warning, but in reality they didn't because that's what everyone says even when there's just minor kinks to work out. It's exactly the same as moving from the last SP on one Windows release to the first release of the next Windows version, and that was never this bad. Even if you compare it to Vista pre-SP1 (Windows 6.0) it fell rather flat on its face. And I think most consider that launch a failure on Microsoft's part, a good launch would be competing with XP or Windows 7. Apple has been on the 10.x series now a long time but you could try imagining what would be acceptable for a 11.0 release. The only way you could possibly justify the 4.0 release is to make up a completely different standard than anything it's likely to be compared to.
I think it's sad because I'm very impressed with Qt as a toolkit and think it grew in leaps and bounds moving from Qt3 to Qt4. KDE 4.0 was a giant sign saying "go away" beating everyone who tried it in the head. It was bad. KDE 4.1 was bad. KDE 4.2 was bad. Somewhere in the KDE 4.3 cycle they fixed the nastiest issues I had, but it was more than a year of "it's not that bad" when it was.
In theory, but then look at practical reality... our fastest space probes would take something like 70000 years to reach the nearest star. We don't have a clue how to build machinery that lasts that long, any interstellar craft is still on the highly speculative "if we get a fusion / anti-matter drive" level. It doesn't matter how long time we have on us, today's Earth tech couldn't do it even if we accepted that travel time.
There's zero economic incentive of doing it, the chances that an interstellar colony would produce anything valuable for earth is extremely unlikely. At best it's information if we managed to establish cutting edge science somewhere, but the round trip on any communication is a decade or more.
Seriously, ask yourself how far humanity would have to advance before we'd actually start doing it - not just in the theoretical "if we throw all our resources at it we might" but in practical terms would. I mean we haven't even been to the moon in ages. We know Mars is probably within reach if we spend billions. But we don't, and neither would we spend trillions to colonize some rock 1000 years down the road.
The point is getting communication established, that they know we're there and we know they're there. For this say a simple prime sequence should be enough (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29 beeps). Clearly not natural, invariant of the base system used (primes are primes in binary, octal, hex, whatever) - any civilization with math should recognize it.
Between two prime sequences I'd go with simple binary pictograms first sending width length then pixels. As you get a bunch of them it'll be easy to see the pattern that you get 11111110111110[35 bits] = (7)(5)(35 bits of data), (10)(8)(80 bits of data) before we start the prime series again.
What you put in the pictogram is of lesser value, you could have thousands of them on a cycle years long with things like math, alphabet, physics, chemistry, solar system, drawings of humans, take your pick. If first a civilization picks it up they can grab all of them until they get a full loop.
Personally, I would ban D&D for the obviousness of using 12 and 20 sided die in gambling, and that it could also lead to the purchasing of Magic The Gathering card games. Or worse; Pokémon!
Would that be a bit like going from heroin to pot, except less likely? Going from D&D to Pokémon sounds about as likely as Bjarne Stroustrup declaring C++ was a mistake and we should all go use Visual Basic.
It should be very obvious that if you make the 2x2 matrix of (Lazy, Hard-working) and (Stupid, Smart) then (Lazy, Stupid) comes out on the bottom and (Hard-working, Smart) comes out on top. But does (Hard-working, Stupid) beat (Lazy, Smart)? It would be nice to answer yes, it's obviously the PC answer that you can be whatever you want to be and so on. Answering no is more of a surrender that you're only this smart, so you'll never get further than this in life.
But the hard fact is that I think the answer is for the most part no. I know people that struggled in school and worked much harder than me but couldn't get the same grades. I see the same at work, some work much harder than me but they still don't deliver equal to me. Sometimes I deliver in two hours what they spend two days on. And some of them I think just sacrifice too much to do it. Sure if you study much harder, work much harder you'll do better. But if you turn yourself into a workaholic just to keep up with a position that's several sizes to big for you, then you're going to miss out on a lot of life.
I work 40 hours a week including lunch break and that is plenty. I work to live, not live to work. Could I have reached even further? Probably. But there's more to life than work and I'm already making a six-figure pay. I don't need to work 80 hour weeks and stretch for seven. Maybe I would if I came up with a killer idea and really wanted to run with it, but not just to climb the corporate ladder. For that my time is too valuable to me.
LOL if you take that tone perhaps YOU should have a clue what you're talking about? Hashes as used in hash tables are small and fast to give performance. Secure hashes like those used in cryptography are 160 - 512 bits long and for the longest you could assign an ID to every atom in the universe and almost certainly still not have a collision, despite the birthday paradox.
Bahnhof has fought for their customer at every step of the way, even when there's been no direct economic gain. They probably don't want to officially go out as some sort of "referee" saying who they think is right and who they think is wrong, but they've really done everything you could ask for. I don't know what it is you want, to announce themselves as the lawless ISP or the pirate ISP or anything like that would only be foolish in so many ways.
Yeah, sounds like they found the 2011 version of aXXo which was reposting torrents from all over the place. Anyone who thinks he actually made 1/3rd of the downloads on Mininova is seriously deluded.
Non-executables can exploit flaws in the decoder, for example if it has a buffer overflow letting you overwrite the application code. Perhaps the most famous is the GDI+ exploit in Windows where your computer could be taken over simply by watching a malicious JPEG.
For example the VLC project has a list of security advisories related to flaws in video files (videc codecs, audio codecs, demuxers+++). There are typically a few each year, not many but they're oh so ugly when it happens.
Whoops... the site I was looking at chopped the first digit so more like $43k/kilo than $3k/kilo.
Just take one of the space rockets that the US, Russia, China, ESA, India +++ has and add a nuke as payload. Or hell just send it to impact on the base, should be plenty. Bye-bye moon base. Unless you're going to bring a missile shield up there too, but that will probably set of a space arms race to ensure MAD is sustained.
As for rare earth minerals, they're not that rare. Even the most expensive minerals only cost about $100k/kilo, meaning a $100 million dollar expedition - not even a Mars Rover - would have to bring back a ton in 100% pure form. And that needs to cover a full excavation, processing and launch system plus operating costs of such.
Something like gold is only $3k/kilo, so more like 300+ tons. It's doubtful you could turn a profit even if there were 24 carat gold bars lying on the moon surface waiting to be picked up. Maybe someday in the future we will become far more desperate for this, but most likely it's cheaper to exploit every vein, dig up every land fill and recycle every last gram rather than try getting it from space.
I've used the D1 system and today everything changed anyway. Sigh, I should just quit slashdot anyway it's the closest thing I got to an addiction.
If people start voting their principles, then third parties may only get 5% this year, but that makes it easier to get 6% next year. When people see it's rising, more people vote for it. Then you've got 7%, which encourages more people to vote. Then one year, you wake up and you've changed things.
Or they fall apart as people realize their actions unintentionally put someone even worse in charge. Or there's some kind of compromise/unification thing that brings the old baggage. But even if we assume it succeeds things only change if you assume the third party will actually go through with election reform, for which they'll need a two thirds majority in both houses to pass a constitutional amendment then have three fourths of the states ratify it. Otherwise you have only created a new two party lock, meet the new party same as the old party. I suspect both that such a supermajority is near impossible to reach and that even if they did by then the power would have corrupted them too much to actually do it. Even if both those near-impossibles became true, I figure the opposing side would still manage to block it in 25% of the state legislatures. I figure the chance of winning the lottery two weeks in a row is bigger than this one.
I can understand someone creating spam pages for popular search terms but I've never understood quite how they manage to come up with really obscure shit, like if I type in "three inch frange demodulator" and there's the first hit proudly declaring "Internet's leader for three inch frange demodulators!" I just made that term up two seconds ago. How do they get that cached into google?
Well I don't know how they get them on google, but on P2P it's trivial as you just parse the request and return a fake result using the "Unreleased [search] pics.zip". Same with any "warez search" where they control the search engine and just send you link-chasing through 5 pages of ads before finally hitting a paywall. I don't really understand what you're on about about google though, because if I search for "three inch frange demodulator" the closest it came up with was "Ecoplus 4 inch Flange Kit" and a page full of otherwise legitimate hits. I figure some just link farm everything everyone has ever searched for ever and just made a page for it for google to index.
Considering that I have not once downloaded a fake on TBP in the past 10 years or so that I have been using it, I think that either the "researcher" is fiddling with the numbers or has no idea how to download something.
That, and the fact that including any URL anywhere is a sign of "financial profit". Who cares if it's called "Some.Popular.TV.Show.S02E23.x264-L4M3.[btjunkies.com].torrent"? As long as they deliver who cares? And particularly trying to lump those together with the relatively few that try propagating malware - for example unheard of in movies, tv, music and a bunch of other categories. Yes, downloading random executables off the Internet is still a bad idea but not hardly as big a problem as this makes it sound.
Are you sure you're not mixing bits and bytes? I have a 25 Mbit connection and the highest actual I've seen is 2.9 MB/s = 23.2 Mbit/s. Up I'm supposed to have 5 Mbit/s but in practice it tops out around 480 kB/s = 3.84 Mbit.
I don't know the why-why, but there's a specific paragraph for phonorecords and computer software.
(A) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a), unless authorized by the owners of copyright in the sound recording (...) neither the owner of a particular phonorecord (nor ...) may, for the purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage, dispose of, or authorize the disposal of, the possession of that phonorecord (...) by rental, lease, or lending (...).
Seems to me like a bought special interest law, but by now a fairly old and established one...
I think religion as a concept is almost like evolution, evolution only cares what genes survive not if they're "good" or "bad" and religion only cares what beliefs survive not if they're "good" or "bad". Where's the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Norse and who knows how many other religions? Extinct. Christianity is what it is because it's a religion that spread instead of diminished. A religion that conquered instead of being conquered. A religion that promoted greater growth - "be fruitful and multiply". Any religion that doesn't try to convert people from other religions, any religion that doesn't in some way say that their religion is the Right Way and everyone else's way is the Wrong Way has probably been overrun by a religion that did.
The rise and fall of religions has not depended on personal belief but rather the structure to convert and raise more people in that religion. Kings and lords has ordered churches and monasteries built and the population goaded into attending. Through missionaries children were educated and helped but also converted into the Christian religion. I think many look at Christianity today and say "But religion is a personal matter. Just accept Jesus into your heart and let's all sing Kumbaya." but the reality is that if that was how Christianity had started it probably would have died a quick and insignificant death long before the Roman empire fell. People should not be so naive to think that this institutionalized drive to expand and conquer has simply vanished just because it has become less and less accepted in the Christian world.
If progress means your high profit industry is turning into a low profit industry or a no profit industry then of course they'll do everything to block progress. Nobody except a few socialist idealists think people will take pay cuts or give up their livelihood for "the good of society". It's the rest of society that has to tell them "tough luck, find something else to do" and if you don't they'll just keep going. For example take the whole ambassador thing, they were very important as long as that was the person kings and statesmen would interact with and messages had to go by mail or courier back and forth with the home government. Today Obama could pick up the phone and call Putin just as easily - probably easier - than relaying stuff through the Russian ambassador. Or for lesser things, just a liason to the United States back in Moscow. And yet these people are in the highest circles of society, highest pay grade and live in extremely luxurious estates on prime locations with diplomatic immunity. Embassies serve more purposes which are still useful, but ambassadors must be the world's most glorified delivery boys.
The problem with this argument is that if the code was GPLed the source has to be freely available. In which case Google is not in violation of distributing the source code.
No, the source code is available under the terms of the GPL. If they have distributed it with an Apache license that is compliant with the GPL and a clear copyright violation.