So when the next lawsuit comes up, it will not be Hollywood vs. one site that in itself isn't illegal, but Hollywood vs. a bunch of sites that taken together are claimed to be illegal. However, in order for this to work, there must be proof that the websites are really connected. That's what they're going for. My prediction: OpenBittorrent will be convicted.
Basically TPB had one huge problem during their defense, they knew both what was being shared (as per their torrent site) and who was sharing it (as per their tracker) and the information was all linkable in-house via the infohash they possessed. But in this case I would say that unless they've screwed up really bad, there'll be nothing formally binding TPB and OBT together. Even if there were, I'm sure a truly independent tracker would appear in no time.
The Pirate Bay hosts torrents still, but they are no longer willfully blind, they're truly blind. They have no knowledge of anyone connecting to the tracker and so no cases of primary infringement. At best they're materially contributing to preparing for copyright infringement, but it's getting on really shaky ground. Still, I would say getting another conviction here is their best shot.
OpenBitTorrent on the other hand has no knowledge of any content. They just have a hash and a list of peers interested in that hash. It's long been established that even though they could probably easily find out what the hash is for, they're not obliged to search torrent sites or Google or any other third party sites they don't have a contractual relationship with. Imagine what it means for the third party, they would have court-imposed traffic to their sites costing them money and possibly violating their ToS, it doesn't happen. There was some similar demands made against Rapidshare recently and they were utterly dismissed. This is pretty much standard fare all around the world.
My prediction: They can't touch OBT. They can try more games of whack-a-mole with torrent sites, but attacking the tracker will get them nowhere. I suspect this is more to conduct legal harassment than to actually win anything.
Ok so Apple doesn't close off things that were open to begin with like the kernel (BSD) and webkit (KHTML), but have they ever open sourced something significant they themselves have developed? My impression is no, everything Apple makes for itself is proprietary and closed source. They just see the advantage of working with a bigger community on a few components because it lowers their development costs, nothing more. If they had the economics of Microsoft to run their own huge in-house team I'm not so certain we'd see any source at all. And it may be open source, but can you run any changed code? That's a rather big one from practical user value to some code resource for other developers. The latter just isn't a consumer feature.
Anyhow, h.264 will be about as useful 15 years from now as Intel Indeo is right now.
If you look at the development of encoders from MPEG1 to Indeo to MPEG2 to MPEG4 ASP (DivX, Xvid) to H.264 you clearly see the rate of improvement is going down. There's a baseline of the minimum size a file can have even with perfect compression. I'm sure there'll be a H.265 with 20-30% better compression based on various smart things but we won't see BluRays compressed to DVD size without loss. That the best encoders start to look more and more alike is a sure sign the product is reaching maturity.
Also, it's not certain that difference will matter too much in 15 years. Just look at MP3s now, the difference between a 5MB MP3 and a 4MB AAC is next to nothing. I'll be very disappointed if I have less than 100 Mbit/s in 15 years. Just *last quarter* the average broadband speed in Norway increased from 5.7 Mbit/s to 5.9 Mbit/s, and the evolution will likely be higher than exponential because of the huge fiber rollouts. My guess it'll be like MP3, technically surpassed by AAC, Vorbis and probably a few more but still the domintant standard.
Enterprise distributions avoid kernel version upgrades for two distinct reasons: perceived stability and fixed API/ABI for third-party modules.
No, if it fixes 2% of your servers and breaks 1% it's more stable, but the reason they don't is because you don't break something that works. Oh sure, everybody will complain a little over things that have never worked, but the real anger comes when you get "I upgraded to $foo and now my sound/wireless/suspend/whatever is BROKEN!!!". That is pretty much the whole difference between service packs and an upgrade, if you have to start worry about your server breaking between upgrades then it's time to switch distro ASAP.
that they do not accept denominations over $20 (which are more susceptible to counterfeiting and also quickly reduce their change-making ability).
Near as I call tell the bigger the note, the better the protection so they're not more susceptible but getting away with 90$ in cash and 10$ in goods is much more worth than getting away with 10$ in cash and 10$ in goods and you have to deduct the cost of making the forgery which will be relatively less for big notes. So more commonly used yes, but not because it's inherently easier to make a 100$ bill than a 20$ bill.
People need to understand that in most western countries, the judiciary is a kind of priesthood utterly divorced from reality or common sense.
Having read quite a few court cases in my years on slashdot, I would say they tend to be by far the most reasoned voices I've heard from any of the three branches of power. Very often you just get flaming insults with zero reading of the actual verdict.
To take one example, I read a US Appeals court decision that upheld EULAs. I'm sure you can imagine the flame fest, they were retards who shouldn't have made it out of grade school. I read the verdict, and basically their main focus was if the same happened elsewhere, for example like buying a plane ticket over the phone - tons of terms and conditions apply but they're not all read over the phone. They listed many examples but I didn't memorize them, but they found that this was accepted practice many places, the customer had not been mislead, the terms were not unusual for the software and even the name said something like personal edition, the refund possibility was explicitly made clear and basically he just wanted to get out of the contract because if the "personal use" restriction of the EULA didn't apply he could make lots of money. Even I that am against EULAs had to agree he looked like a dirtbag and so the court said you walked into this with open eyes and we're not going to spring you.
By the way, the "terms were not unusual" part was also the cause for another flame fest, the slashdot spin was like "if you expect to get screwed, it's okay to be screwed?!". Uh, yes in pretty much every case the court will look at what people normally get. If it's customary to sell a car with wheels then you'd better put it in the contract if there are no wheels, even though people would still call it a car without them. On the other hand if you still had some belongings in the glove compartment they'd naturally not be there. This is just common sense, and yet it became another reason to bash the courts.
Another good example is the Grokster case. Basically the Appeals court granted summary motion like "No way you can be held guilty of anything". The Supreme court stepped in and said "Eh, if they can prove the defendants sold it like a tool to break the law and encouraged people to break the law, they might" and reversed it for regular trial. As a legal principle it made perfect sense, even if a gun is legal you can't go around selling it like a great murder weapon targeting people in bad divorces making overt suggestions. The question was if Grokster was guilty of anything like that but nothing was ever proven or sentenced because they folded and that was the end of it, but of course the courts got the blame. Even though the opposite would have been complete and utter nonsense.
Your average court is usually fucked two ways, the laws as written and that they have to listen to every absurd legal theory a lawyer can come up with, giving them every possibility to have their day in court - see SCO. Just to take one of your examples, children convicted of child sex abuse, it's a problem that is entirely in law and should be fixed in law. How is it a judiciary problem that Congress didn't exclude self-molestation (lol at the term) from the law? What kind of legal basis would you like them to use, when there's not an ounce of unclarity in the law? You want them to just say "We don't like the rules, so we're changing them"? And in pretty much any story we get one person who think vigilantism from the jury bench should rewrite the law, because that won't lead to injustice because people hate the victim or love the perpetrator.
By far some of the worst are those that would like the courts to invent some new standards of legal certainty or otherwise make it such an impossible process that people can't ever get convicted, as long as it works in favor of the side slashdot is cheering for. Most usually that involves petty copyright infringers who are never guilty even when they're caught
Owning a computer is like owning a boat. You're always jealous of the guy in the next slip who has one just a little bit better.
No, the problem with computers and the way they evolved was that you were always jealous of the guy with the fat yacht. And just when you thought you had bought a yacht, it lasted three seconds before it was a skiff. For a long time there, every computer was a big WOW. Sure, you're not running the hottest computer if you have one from 2005 but at least you don't feel like you belong in a technical museum anymore.
Censorship is not only morally wrong, it is ineffective. You chase your tail wasting time and money often to accomplish nothing. When will people learn?
History disagrees with you. As little as 20-30 years ago if you managed to stop it at the border, if you managed to kill off any organized operations, if you kept it out of the local communities it sure as hell worked. If you think those that control the mass media today are powerful, you don't know what they used to be.
Internet has completely and utterly changed that. Combined with digicams, digital video and multimedia phones the so-called "closed regimes" are leaking like a burst hose. It's not just the powers that be who still haven't really taken it in that nobody cares anymore, it's just as much the bible thumpers and their "local community standards". If you don't like it, go online and you get everything you want uncensored.
It will take a long, long time for everyone to adjust to it. Maybe in 50 years we will consider taht "natural" but right now I only think 20 year olds and younger consider this "normal". Certainly those in power don't.
Except the "anarchy" thing. It's like reading slashdot permalocked at -1, forget killfilters because people make tons of random identities. There is even less than that because there are no IP filters. Last I checked it was pretty much all overrun by SPAM. The only newsgroups I find useful are the "private" groups like qt-interest:
"Go to the info page for more information about the list, and to browse the archives. Additionally, the list is gatewayed to trolltech.qt-interest, a newsgroup on nntp.trolltech.com. This gateway is open for everyone, but requires registration for posting (this is to avoid spamming of the newsgroups and mailing lists). To register for posting access, go here."
It's a news server... but it's not a network, it's not a part of usenet. They control everything and nuke any destructive elements.
Sigh, I was not suggesting we should pull BluRays over one server. Don't carry the binary groups, nuke anything base64/uue/yEnc encoded or anything else that catches on. What you're left with of plain text as in real plain text should be very easy to host anywhere, particularly if you split it by group. And you can have redundancy, just not the random anarchy. All the comments on this story has lead me to believe this is just one of those parts where Slashdot is nuts. If you wanted to create a discussion-only server it'd be easy as snap but go blame the pirates. You're worse than the MAFIAA on this one...
But what exactly was the main point of Usenet? Well, that it was distributed and clients only go over the local link, because long distance bandwidth was precious. Today you spend the bandwidth of 100 usenet messages going half way around the world loading the front page of one online news site, so who really cares if your local ISP cuts it as long as "there are many nntp servers out there that offer text-only for free" according to you?
The whole concept of usenet is out of date, you can argue back and forth about the nntp protocol versus the http protocol but today it is far more practical to have one group on one server and have everybody access that. It guarantees that everybody sees all messages (not everything would propagate well), you can have captchas to prevent spam, moderators (without premoderation like usenet), search (without downloading everything) and so on. If people don't like a server, move the community to a different one.
Sure, it would be neat if you could standardize on a discussion protocol and use the tool of your choice but I think it'd be almost easier with a screen scraper than doing it by committee. There's honestly not that many different discussion board servers in common use.
Newzbin was never a usenet server, it was a usenet indexer and usenet client. And by that I don't mean anything like Google, but through a mix of automatic and hand indexed content made.nzb files which were sort of like torrents for usenet, a small file that let you pull all the parts of a huge file from binary groups. An overwhelming part of those binaries were copyright infringement, people who used it for discussion had no need of newzbin. They were rougly as subtle about what the site was about as The Pirate Bay...
So what exactly is flawed here? Maybe not everyone on the jury will be youngsters but certainly some, so even if you found no bias in others juries would be biased. Perhaps reducing the scope and time provoked a larger focus on looks, but that could only magnify a difference that was already there.
Personally I think this files under "doh". You know from movies and elsewhere that people have a concept of what villains and crooks should look like. I have no doubt that they have an easier time to convict if it follows that stereotype than goes against it.
It's called Gecko. But yes I think that one has been stretched more because it seems to be almost Mozilla only, the other users mentioned are quite marginal. WebKit is used by Google (Chrome), Apple (Safari), KDE and all the others you mentioned which tends to limit the amount of hackjobs you can do...
There's no doubt that the easiest way to be healthy is to stay healthy, they're running because they're in good shape and they're in good shape because they run. Obviously runners are more healthy than the general population because you've excluded everyone with hip/knee/foot injuries, heart conditions, lung conditions and whatnot that says they can't, shouldn't be or will have trouble running.
Many people choose the same circle in reverse, they're not exercising because they're in bad shape and they're in bad shape because they don't exercise. Using modern technology you can live almost without doing any manual labor without huge health problems, as long as you aren't also trying to eat yourself to death or whatever. I've tried both and being in good shape is better but it's an easy slip and a heavy climb.
Exercising when you're in bad shape is quite frankly mostly annoying and not very healthy beyond enabling you to exercise more. You're just not in the shape where you can keep up a decent calorie burn long enough for it to matter, your limbs are weak and more prone to injury under excessive weight. All you get in the beginning are aches and pains as you build muscles and joints to get real exercise done.
I took me about a month of two to three heavy sessions per week (for my shape) and light exercise every day before it started to make any real impact. Then I suddenly passed some kind of peak where the kilos started flowing off, the exercise got easier and easier to do and it was all steady sailing. But you have to be willing to do a real program and pass that peak, if I had given up after two weeks this would have been nothing but frustration and bad memories. So if you're committed to making a change in your life go for it but it's like "Aw alright, I'll take ONE exercise round and decide afterwards" then with 99% probability they will fail.
Fail, "postpone the decline" is not a correction of "prolong the decline".
If you previously lost some memory from 40 to 70 but with treatment lose the same memory from 40 to 90 you have prolonged the decline by 20 years. If you instead lose it from 60 to 90 you have postponed the decline by 20 years. In total given all the effects of aging, there will probably be some form of decline so the grandparent is likely more right than you too. Damn, I love zinging a grammar and spelling Nazi.
Congratulations, you are a power user, I'm sure a few percent always will be. But every time I have to run Firefox as it is out of the box I get annoyed, there's zero effort to get the most popular plug-ins into the default build. In a way I can understand that internally, Mozilla doesn't want to play favorites but externally it's not that great. It's okay that a car has accessories but when you start feeling the steering and gearbox are clumsy then knowing I can easily replace them is nice but hardly a turn-key solution. Particularly in any work environment where they don't give you administrator permissions and let you install plug-ins yourself getting Firefox on the desktop is only 1/10th of the way there. Even in general I think many people would rather just get the "package" from Chrome, which doesn't affect you but might lead the masses away from Firefox.
I think Mozilla would do wise to be very wary of Google. Google will probably keep up the search deal with Mozilla for the page hits, but they have no downsides from convincing Firefox users to switch to Chrome. I'm sure that with the 7% market share they have now the money they save on the Firefox deal is paying for the development and then some. When IE9 is released with HTML5 support don't be surprised if Google starts a push against Adobe with YouTube/HTML5 and Chrome users will do fine, Firefox users not so much. And there's Chromnium for the OSS purists too...
There are necessary resources and unnecessary resources. Very often it is a sign of a) poor code reuse leading to huge binaries or b) too much data being pulled to a high layer or too many layers and discarded leading to not only high memory usage but also much slower execution time. Like recently I rewrote a report at work, it used to take 13-14 minutes and the new version runs in 1.2 seconds. Why? Because the old one used some high end views leading to excessive joins, poor indexing and huge resource consumption. Of course by using the base tables we're now prone to application changes but still. I'm sure there are many cases where resources are simply wasted that completely dwarf any needed consumption.
Say he fired a cruise missile at the whitehouse from the UK should he be tried in the UK?
Obviously, yes.
So you think a US court should not prosecute murders of US citizens on US soil because they lack jurisdiction? Guess you'd better ask them to call off the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, according to you only the Taleban in Afghanistan can prosecute anything. Nobody can force a state to extradite its citizens but he ever went to the US or a country that has a deal with the US I'd say that is fair game. However, it should only apply if you specifically targetting the US. If it's on a web server anywhere in the world the person who "brings" it to the US by requesting it should carry the responsibility, the server should only respect local law.
Well, except for the part where the two cyborgs show up and duel it out. That part was totally made up. I'm hoping. Please tell me that doesn't happen at your prison?
Of course not, we sent another cyborg even further in the past to make sure it didn't happen.
I think the question is not that certain words are evil, but that profanity can be valuable. This value is lost from overuse.
What, you think they made a law so people wouldn't use up their quota? No, it basically boils down to what people should have the freedom to say/do versus what others should not unwillingly witness. Hearing swear words is similar to meeting a flasher, you get an unwanted sound instead of a sight. Why they don't like it is really irrelevant, it's just a personal opinion that sums up to community standards. Those standards are always changing, but nobody really doubts they're there - particularly if the "others" are minors you'll find 99%+ support for some laws.
In 1907 a woman was arrested for wearing a tightly fitting one-piece bathing suit, you can imagine what they'd think of G-string bikinis. There are still native tribes that don't consider full nudity offensive, there's nothing inherent in anything. Maybe in 100 years we've found that being naked is a natural right and western society is clothing optional, whoever can't stand it will have to build their own communities. Maybe in 100 years we've gone back to showing ankles as "raunchy". Maybe in 100 years there aren't any banned words or maybe there's many like the prophet *BEEEEEEEP*.
Hopefully freedom of speech will win out because it's overall designed to let you say everything that people don't like to hear, but this is not the simple world of "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me". This is what the Supreme Court said in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942):
There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or "fighting words" those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.
They've been narrowing it down, but there might be enough of it left to argue that swear words have no constitutional protection.
Because I've heard the exact same thing from people who actually believe it and have done it at their job. It is a comment made by a young, inexperienced person (I can't call them an administrator) who doesn't have the experience to understand the problems with doing this.
What, can't be. According to slashdot all Linux administrators are born as black belt Linux experts and Windows administrators are all people that got lucky bumbling through their MSCE exam. Usually in comparison where five incompetent Windows administrators could be replaced with one competent Linux administrator, even though you could probably replace five incompetents with one competent one in general.
Good question, but wrong project. The kernel is only responsible for initializing, suspending, resuming and lately modesetting of the hardware and it seems that is possible now. There probably needs to be some userspace code to pull information from one GPU and load it into the other but that's for the xorg server to do. They're probably working on it but it won't be in a Linux (the kernel) release announcement.
Slashdot Mirror
So when the next lawsuit comes up, it will not be Hollywood vs. one site that in itself isn't illegal, but Hollywood vs. a bunch of sites that taken together are claimed to be illegal. However, in order for this to work, there must be proof that the websites are really connected. That's what they're going for. My prediction: OpenBittorrent will be convicted.
Basically TPB had one huge problem during their defense, they knew both what was being shared (as per their torrent site) and who was sharing it (as per their tracker) and the information was all linkable in-house via the infohash they possessed. But in this case I would say that unless they've screwed up really bad, there'll be nothing formally binding TPB and OBT together. Even if there were, I'm sure a truly independent tracker would appear in no time.
The Pirate Bay hosts torrents still, but they are no longer willfully blind, they're truly blind. They have no knowledge of anyone connecting to the tracker and so no cases of primary infringement. At best they're materially contributing to preparing for copyright infringement, but it's getting on really shaky ground. Still, I would say getting another conviction here is their best shot.
OpenBitTorrent on the other hand has no knowledge of any content. They just have a hash and a list of peers interested in that hash. It's long been established that even though they could probably easily find out what the hash is for, they're not obliged to search torrent sites or Google or any other third party sites they don't have a contractual relationship with. Imagine what it means for the third party, they would have court-imposed traffic to their sites costing them money and possibly violating their ToS, it doesn't happen. There was some similar demands made against Rapidshare recently and they were utterly dismissed. This is pretty much standard fare all around the world.
My prediction: They can't touch OBT. They can try more games of whack-a-mole with torrent sites, but attacking the tracker will get them nowhere. I suspect this is more to conduct legal harassment than to actually win anything.
Ok so Apple doesn't close off things that were open to begin with like the kernel (BSD) and webkit (KHTML), but have they ever open sourced something significant they themselves have developed? My impression is no, everything Apple makes for itself is proprietary and closed source. They just see the advantage of working with a bigger community on a few components because it lowers their development costs, nothing more. If they had the economics of Microsoft to run their own huge in-house team I'm not so certain we'd see any source at all. And it may be open source, but can you run any changed code? That's a rather big one from practical user value to some code resource for other developers. The latter just isn't a consumer feature.
Anyhow, h.264 will be about as useful 15 years from now as Intel Indeo is right now.
If you look at the development of encoders from MPEG1 to Indeo to MPEG2 to MPEG4 ASP (DivX, Xvid) to H.264 you clearly see the rate of improvement is going down. There's a baseline of the minimum size a file can have even with perfect compression. I'm sure there'll be a H.265 with 20-30% better compression based on various smart things but we won't see BluRays compressed to DVD size without loss. That the best encoders start to look more and more alike is a sure sign the product is reaching maturity.
Also, it's not certain that difference will matter too much in 15 years. Just look at MP3s now, the difference between a 5MB MP3 and a 4MB AAC is next to nothing. I'll be very disappointed if I have less than 100 Mbit/s in 15 years. Just *last quarter* the average broadband speed in Norway increased from 5.7 Mbit/s to 5.9 Mbit/s, and the evolution will likely be higher than exponential because of the huge fiber rollouts. My guess it'll be like MP3, technically surpassed by AAC, Vorbis and probably a few more but still the domintant standard.
Enterprise distributions avoid kernel version upgrades for two distinct reasons: perceived stability and fixed API/ABI for third-party modules.
No, if it fixes 2% of your servers and breaks 1% it's more stable, but the reason they don't is because you don't break something that works. Oh sure, everybody will complain a little over things that have never worked, but the real anger comes when you get "I upgraded to $foo and now my sound/wireless/suspend/whatever is BROKEN!!!". That is pretty much the whole difference between service packs and an upgrade, if you have to start worry about your server breaking between upgrades then it's time to switch distro ASAP.
that they do not accept denominations over $20 (which are more susceptible to counterfeiting and also quickly reduce their change-making ability).
Near as I call tell the bigger the note, the better the protection so they're not more susceptible but getting away with 90$ in cash and 10$ in goods is much more worth than getting away with 10$ in cash and 10$ in goods and you have to deduct the cost of making the forgery which will be relatively less for big notes. So more commonly used yes, but not because it's inherently easier to make a 100$ bill than a 20$ bill.
People need to understand that in most western countries, the judiciary is a kind of priesthood utterly divorced from reality or common sense.
Having read quite a few court cases in my years on slashdot, I would say they tend to be by far the most reasoned voices I've heard from any of the three branches of power. Very often you just get flaming insults with zero reading of the actual verdict.
To take one example, I read a US Appeals court decision that upheld EULAs. I'm sure you can imagine the flame fest, they were retards who shouldn't have made it out of grade school. I read the verdict, and basically their main focus was if the same happened elsewhere, for example like buying a plane ticket over the phone - tons of terms and conditions apply but they're not all read over the phone. They listed many examples but I didn't memorize them, but they found that this was accepted practice many places, the customer had not been mislead, the terms were not unusual for the software and even the name said something like personal edition, the refund possibility was explicitly made clear and basically he just wanted to get out of the contract because if the "personal use" restriction of the EULA didn't apply he could make lots of money. Even I that am against EULAs had to agree he looked like a dirtbag and so the court said you walked into this with open eyes and we're not going to spring you.
By the way, the "terms were not unusual" part was also the cause for another flame fest, the slashdot spin was like "if you expect to get screwed, it's okay to be screwed?!". Uh, yes in pretty much every case the court will look at what people normally get. If it's customary to sell a car with wheels then you'd better put it in the contract if there are no wheels, even though people would still call it a car without them. On the other hand if you still had some belongings in the glove compartment they'd naturally not be there. This is just common sense, and yet it became another reason to bash the courts.
Another good example is the Grokster case. Basically the Appeals court granted summary motion like "No way you can be held guilty of anything". The Supreme court stepped in and said "Eh, if they can prove the defendants sold it like a tool to break the law and encouraged people to break the law, they might" and reversed it for regular trial. As a legal principle it made perfect sense, even if a gun is legal you can't go around selling it like a great murder weapon targeting people in bad divorces making overt suggestions. The question was if Grokster was guilty of anything like that but nothing was ever proven or sentenced because they folded and that was the end of it, but of course the courts got the blame. Even though the opposite would have been complete and utter nonsense.
Your average court is usually fucked two ways, the laws as written and that they have to listen to every absurd legal theory a lawyer can come up with, giving them every possibility to have their day in court - see SCO. Just to take one of your examples, children convicted of child sex abuse, it's a problem that is entirely in law and should be fixed in law. How is it a judiciary problem that Congress didn't exclude self-molestation (lol at the term) from the law? What kind of legal basis would you like them to use, when there's not an ounce of unclarity in the law? You want them to just say "We don't like the rules, so we're changing them"? And in pretty much any story we get one person who think vigilantism from the jury bench should rewrite the law, because that won't lead to injustice because people hate the victim or love the perpetrator.
By far some of the worst are those that would like the courts to invent some new standards of legal certainty or otherwise make it such an impossible process that people can't ever get convicted, as long as it works in favor of the side slashdot is cheering for. Most usually that involves petty copyright infringers who are never guilty even when they're caught
Owning a computer is like owning a boat. You're always jealous of the guy in the next slip who has one just a little bit better.
No, the problem with computers and the way they evolved was that you were always jealous of the guy with the fat yacht. And just when you thought you had bought a yacht, it lasted three seconds before it was a skiff. For a long time there, every computer was a big WOW. Sure, you're not running the hottest computer if you have one from 2005 but at least you don't feel like you belong in a technical museum anymore.
Censorship is not only morally wrong, it is ineffective. You chase your tail wasting time and money often to accomplish nothing. When will people learn?
History disagrees with you. As little as 20-30 years ago if you managed to stop it at the border, if you managed to kill off any organized operations, if you kept it out of the local communities it sure as hell worked. If you think those that control the mass media today are powerful, you don't know what they used to be.
Internet has completely and utterly changed that. Combined with digicams, digital video and multimedia phones the so-called "closed regimes" are leaking like a burst hose. It's not just the powers that be who still haven't really taken it in that nobody cares anymore, it's just as much the bible thumpers and their "local community standards". If you don't like it, go online and you get everything you want uncensored.
It will take a long, long time for everyone to adjust to it. Maybe in 50 years we will consider taht "natural" but right now I only think 20 year olds and younger consider this "normal". Certainly those in power don't.
You've just described Usenet.
Except the "anarchy" thing. It's like reading slashdot permalocked at -1, forget killfilters because people make tons of random identities. There is even less than that because there are no IP filters. Last I checked it was pretty much all overrun by SPAM. The only newsgroups I find useful are the "private" groups like qt-interest:
"Go to the info page for more information about the list, and to browse the archives. Additionally, the list is gatewayed to trolltech.qt-interest, a newsgroup on nntp.trolltech.com. This gateway is open for everyone, but requires registration for posting (this is to avoid spamming of the newsgroups and mailing lists). To register for posting access, go here."
It's a news server... but it's not a network, it's not a part of usenet. They control everything and nuke any destructive elements.
Sigh, I was not suggesting we should pull BluRays over one server. Don't carry the binary groups, nuke anything base64/uue/yEnc encoded or anything else that catches on. What you're left with of plain text as in real plain text should be very easy to host anywhere, particularly if you split it by group. And you can have redundancy, just not the random anarchy. All the comments on this story has lead me to believe this is just one of those parts where Slashdot is nuts. If you wanted to create a discussion-only server it'd be easy as snap but go blame the pirates. You're worse than the MAFIAA on this one...
But what exactly was the main point of Usenet? Well, that it was distributed and clients only go over the local link, because long distance bandwidth was precious. Today you spend the bandwidth of 100 usenet messages going half way around the world loading the front page of one online news site, so who really cares if your local ISP cuts it as long as "there are many nntp servers out there that offer text-only for free" according to you?
The whole concept of usenet is out of date, you can argue back and forth about the nntp protocol versus the http protocol but today it is far more practical to have one group on one server and have everybody access that. It guarantees that everybody sees all messages (not everything would propagate well), you can have captchas to prevent spam, moderators (without premoderation like usenet), search (without downloading everything) and so on. If people don't like a server, move the community to a different one.
Sure, it would be neat if you could standardize on a discussion protocol and use the tool of your choice but I think it'd be almost easier with a screen scraper than doing it by committee. There's honestly not that many different discussion board servers in common use.
Newzbin was never a usenet server, it was a usenet indexer and usenet client. And by that I don't mean anything like Google, but through a mix of automatic and hand indexed content made .nzb files which were sort of like torrents for usenet, a small file that let you pull all the parts of a huge file from binary groups. An overwhelming part of those binaries were copyright infringement, people who used it for discussion had no need of newzbin. They were rougly as subtle about what the site was about as The Pirate Bay...
So what exactly is flawed here? Maybe not everyone on the jury will be youngsters but certainly some, so even if you found no bias in others juries would be biased. Perhaps reducing the scope and time provoked a larger focus on looks, but that could only magnify a difference that was already there.
Personally I think this files under "doh". You know from movies and elsewhere that people have a concept of what villains and crooks should look like. I have no doubt that they have an easier time to convict if it follows that stereotype than goes against it.
It's called Gecko. But yes I think that one has been stretched more because it seems to be almost Mozilla only, the other users mentioned are quite marginal. WebKit is used by Google (Chrome), Apple (Safari), KDE and all the others you mentioned which tends to limit the amount of hackjobs you can do...
There's no doubt that the easiest way to be healthy is to stay healthy, they're running because they're in good shape and they're in good shape because they run. Obviously runners are more healthy than the general population because you've excluded everyone with hip/knee/foot injuries, heart conditions, lung conditions and whatnot that says they can't, shouldn't be or will have trouble running.
Many people choose the same circle in reverse, they're not exercising because they're in bad shape and they're in bad shape because they don't exercise. Using modern technology you can live almost without doing any manual labor without huge health problems, as long as you aren't also trying to eat yourself to death or whatever. I've tried both and being in good shape is better but it's an easy slip and a heavy climb.
Exercising when you're in bad shape is quite frankly mostly annoying and not very healthy beyond enabling you to exercise more. You're just not in the shape where you can keep up a decent calorie burn long enough for it to matter, your limbs are weak and more prone to injury under excessive weight. All you get in the beginning are aches and pains as you build muscles and joints to get real exercise done.
I took me about a month of two to three heavy sessions per week (for my shape) and light exercise every day before it started to make any real impact. Then I suddenly passed some kind of peak where the kilos started flowing off, the exercise got easier and easier to do and it was all steady sailing. But you have to be willing to do a real program and pass that peak, if I had given up after two weeks this would have been nothing but frustration and bad memories. So if you're committed to making a change in your life go for it but it's like "Aw alright, I'll take ONE exercise round and decide afterwards" then with 99% probability they will fail.
Fail, "postpone the decline" is not a correction of "prolong the decline".
If you previously lost some memory from 40 to 70 but with treatment lose the same memory from 40 to 90 you have prolonged the decline by 20 years. If you instead lose it from 60 to 90 you have postponed the decline by 20 years. In total given all the effects of aging, there will probably be some form of decline so the grandparent is likely more right than you too. Damn, I love zinging a grammar and spelling Nazi.
Congratulations, you are a power user, I'm sure a few percent always will be. But every time I have to run Firefox as it is out of the box I get annoyed, there's zero effort to get the most popular plug-ins into the default build. In a way I can understand that internally, Mozilla doesn't want to play favorites but externally it's not that great. It's okay that a car has accessories but when you start feeling the steering and gearbox are clumsy then knowing I can easily replace them is nice but hardly a turn-key solution. Particularly in any work environment where they don't give you administrator permissions and let you install plug-ins yourself getting Firefox on the desktop is only 1/10th of the way there. Even in general I think many people would rather just get the "package" from Chrome, which doesn't affect you but might lead the masses away from Firefox.
I think Mozilla would do wise to be very wary of Google. Google will probably keep up the search deal with Mozilla for the page hits, but they have no downsides from convincing Firefox users to switch to Chrome. I'm sure that with the 7% market share they have now the money they save on the Firefox deal is paying for the development and then some. When IE9 is released with HTML5 support don't be surprised if Google starts a push against Adobe with YouTube/HTML5 and Chrome users will do fine, Firefox users not so much. And there's Chromnium for the OSS purists too...
There are necessary resources and unnecessary resources. Very often it is a sign of a) poor code reuse leading to huge binaries or b) too much data being pulled to a high layer or too many layers and discarded leading to not only high memory usage but also much slower execution time. Like recently I rewrote a report at work, it used to take 13-14 minutes and the new version runs in 1.2 seconds. Why? Because the old one used some high end views leading to excessive joins, poor indexing and huge resource consumption. Of course by using the base tables we're now prone to application changes but still. I'm sure there are many cases where resources are simply wasted that completely dwarf any needed consumption.
Say he fired a cruise missile at the whitehouse from the UK should he be tried in the UK?
Obviously, yes.
So you think a US court should not prosecute murders of US citizens on US soil because they lack jurisdiction? Guess you'd better ask them to call off the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, according to you only the Taleban in Afghanistan can prosecute anything. Nobody can force a state to extradite its citizens but he ever went to the US or a country that has a deal with the US I'd say that is fair game. However, it should only apply if you specifically targetting the US. If it's on a web server anywhere in the world the person who "brings" it to the US by requesting it should carry the responsibility, the server should only respect local law.
Well, except for the part where the two cyborgs show up and duel it out. That part was totally made up. I'm hoping. Please tell me that doesn't happen at your prison?
Of course not, we sent another cyborg even further in the past to make sure it didn't happen.
No, active DP -> VGA converters are much cheaper than active DP -> DVI converters for some reason but passive adapters will do you no good.
I think the question is not that certain words are evil, but that profanity can be valuable. This value is lost from overuse.
What, you think they made a law so people wouldn't use up their quota? No, it basically boils down to what people should have the freedom to say/do versus what others should not unwillingly witness. Hearing swear words is similar to meeting a flasher, you get an unwanted sound instead of a sight. Why they don't like it is really irrelevant, it's just a personal opinion that sums up to community standards. Those standards are always changing, but nobody really doubts they're there - particularly if the "others" are minors you'll find 99%+ support for some laws.
In 1907 a woman was arrested for wearing a tightly fitting one-piece bathing suit, you can imagine what they'd think of G-string bikinis. There are still native tribes that don't consider full nudity offensive, there's nothing inherent in anything. Maybe in 100 years we've found that being naked is a natural right and western society is clothing optional, whoever can't stand it will have to build their own communities. Maybe in 100 years we've gone back to showing ankles as "raunchy". Maybe in 100 years there aren't any banned words or maybe there's many like the prophet *BEEEEEEEP*.
Hopefully freedom of speech will win out because it's overall designed to let you say everything that people don't like to hear, but this is not the simple world of "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me". This is what the Supreme Court said in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942):
There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or "fighting words" those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.
They've been narrowing it down, but there might be enough of it left to argue that swear words have no constitutional protection.
And the big all-rounder: WTF
Because I've heard the exact same thing from people who actually believe it and have done it at their job. It is a comment made by a young, inexperienced person (I can't call them an administrator) who doesn't have the experience to understand the problems with doing this.
What, can't be. According to slashdot all Linux administrators are born as black belt Linux experts and Windows administrators are all people that got lucky bumbling through their MSCE exam. Usually in comparison where five incompetent Windows administrators could be replaced with one competent Linux administrator, even though you could probably replace five incompetents with one competent one in general.
Good question, but wrong project. The kernel is only responsible for initializing, suspending, resuming and lately modesetting of the hardware and it seems that is possible now. There probably needs to be some userspace code to pull information from one GPU and load it into the other but that's for the xorg server to do. They're probably working on it but it won't be in a Linux (the kernel) release announcement.