The registry protects kids and only prevents them from getting jobs that involve kids.
And this is only done for sex crimes. Especially one's against children.
And besides, companies already can find out if you've been convicted of a felony which a sex crime is.
People need to get over the fact that some actions prevent you from being a "normal" member of society. When you abuse children in such a way you've just earned the distrust of society and it will rightfully take a very long time to earn that trust back. And there's no reason for society as a whole to trust you.
If some people refuse to ever trust you again, tough. Find people that do and make damn sure you never break that trust again.
Depending on the nature of the crime it's often the case that sex offenders can't be rehabilitated. Those who know what they're doing is wrong but do it anyway, can be rehabilitated and are. Those who think what they're doing is perfectly natural, can't be. Many crimes are the same way.
So yes, it is often a lifetime long crime. The idea of the registry is to make people aware so they can take precautions. You wouldn't want to send your kids over to play at such a person's house unsupervised. "Done their time" or not. Just because someone did their time doesn't mean they're cured. It just means they appear to be cured or the state just can't legally hold them any longer for the crime they were convicted for. It has no direct corelation to not repeating the crime.
If people take that information and use it as a hit list they need to be checked into their local prison as well for a very long time.
The benefits of such a list greatly outweigh the risks. Especially considering there are no exemptions to vigilante violence against anyone for any reason.
The law doesn't care if he looked at you funny or you got his name off a list, you don't get to beat the crap out of him or worse.
"It is unclear why an exploit was made public before Apple resolved the problem."
Is Apple supposedly exempt from hackers (crackers for the symantically inclined) finding exploits and making them known publically before notifying the company?
Let's try to name another company that never got outted on an exploit before a patch was available. Besides the fact that the workaround IS publically available which will work just as well as a patch.
And how much crap did MS get for a root exploit that DID HAVE a patch available over a month in advance?
Maybe the editor thought it would be better to just pretend Apple was secure so users could just magically have their machines screw up with no way to know how to fix it.
Fortunatly the security advisors had more sense. Word got out and a bandaid is available so they did the smart thing and told everyone how to apply the bandaid while Apple worked on healing the wound.
If you have such a domain name, Google makes a high assumption that your site is all about what the domain name says. This is what led to many creativly descriptive domain names like the above.
I have a huge collection of drivers and other files on my site. Looking for one of those files generally results in my site being at the top of the search results.
If somebody e-mails me looking for a file on my site my first stop is Google and I've yet to not find it on my site from the first page. Sometimes I just browse through to find it but with 500,000+ files it's a bit of an undertaking.
Writing a hugely successful epic screenplay from scratch?
Or
Writing a hugely successful epic screenplay from an existing hugely successful epic novel?
Jackson had a model to work by. The Wacowski bros didn't.
"I'm not so arrogant that I can't admit that."
That's amazing. Jesus would be proud.
I'm merely comparing what the Wacowski bros attempted to do with what Jackson has done. I'm just saying the Wacowshi bros attempted something far more difficult. Them failing is therefore more forgivable and understandable than Jackson failing.
With Lord of the Rings everything they needed was handed to them on a silver plater storywise.
Matrix had to get from point A to point B with (apparently) no clue where point B was. And that's why it kinda sucked. After the first movie, they had absolutly no direction.
Jackson had to get from point A to point B given exactly what those points were. There was no point where Jackson wasn't told what the next waypoint was and how the characters get there in an interesting way. He just had to decide how to describe it in the alloted time.
My point is, yes it takes talent to get from point A to point B in X hours instead of thousands of pages. But it takes more talent to get a great story with a point A and point B with nothing to work off of.
It's far easier and more expected to fall flat on your face when you don't know the path. Jackson knew the road he was travelling. He just had to make a reader's digest account of the journey that was already fully logged and proven a solid story.
If the bros had spent a decade or two getting familiar with philosophy and working out details on the story like Tolkien had with his, I think they could have had a full classic.
It's the same with the Harry Potter series. I don't expect any of the movies to suck because the author is right there to get the screenwriters from point A to point B in the alloted time in the best possible way.
Simply put, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings have a crutch that the Wacowski brothers didn't. The Matrix was an epic tale that needed a lot more time before it was ready to be told.
I think they deserve some credit for pulling it off as well as they did with what they had. I wouldn't be surprised if down the road someone took the ideas in the Matrix and made a solid set of movies out of them.
Jackson should get tons of credit for not blowing the trilogy the second time around. I don't expect another remake of that story for the theatre any time soon.
Matrix was made from scratch. Not only was visual and cinematic talent required but also literary talent and philisophical skill on top of that.
Jackson already had the full script available from the start. Very little creative talent in the story area required.
We can forgive the Wachowski bros for not knowing interesting answers to the interesting questions. It'd be a little harder to forgive Jackson for messing up the plot of a movie when all he had to do was NOT change the given story.
For what the Wachowski bros had available they did quite a good job on their series. For what Jackson has available he's also doing a fantastic job.
Some corporate lady stopped by the kid's pizza place I used to work at and asked me to grab her a salad. I made some comment about being a corporate slave which she didn't find funny.
My boss told me that his boss wanted to talk to me. He told me to be a good little slave and keep my jokes to myself.
Personally my view is that I'll be happy to be a slave for a good King. However society has deemed that "slave" is necessarily a bad word so oh well.
We got "bling" and "shiznit" in the dictionary so we're still on par if we lose "master" and "slave."
Other sites that utilize moderation in a Slashdot style fashion?
If so, name an example. www.kuro5hin.org doesn't allow post editing.
There is no perfect solution for everything because boards vary. Slashdot has factored in all the variables for this board and yes, not being able to edit posts is the perfect solution.
The only way Slashdot could possibly allow post editing is prior to any moderation. But that's pointless. It's what the preview button is for. Think before you post.
The only boards I'm aware of that allow post editing are ones that don't use moderation points. There's no moderation points to be abused by post editing on such forums.
"That having been said, getting around the issues you (and several others) have mentioned is a no-brainer."
Yet you provide no reasons for your view and no real world examples. You just say they exist and pretend everyone is just going to take your word for it.
Slashdot style moderation points and post editing don't go together. Sites may try it but they're just asking to be abused.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not the perfect solution. Some people will find fault with anything. Even if that fault isn't warrented.
You can scream at me that a duck is a horse all day long but that duck will not be anything but a duck.
The reason you can't edit posts is because posts are modorated.
You'd have people getting a highly moderated post and then changing it to something that wasn't what it was moderated for. Our friend the old bait and switch.
Tell people what they want to hear, let it be moderated up, tell people what you actually wanted to say. Or post some questionable ascii art.
Best case is they allow you to edit posts before any moderation is done. But, that's what the preview button is for. The idea is that you think about what you're going to say before you post. If people could edit posts there would be a lot more knee jerk reactions.
So no, it has nothing to do with the year we live in. It has to do with encouraging better posting practices and keeping the trolls at bay. The wheel was invented thousands of years ago, we're not giving up on that one any time soon are we?
There's a difference between breeding which requires two animals that can naturally have sex with each other to mix genes naturally...
(Two people of a different race having children isn't genetic engineering.)
And genetic engineering which completely removes the neccessity for having two creatures have sex to mix the genes. The entire process is dependent on human intervention.
The former is natural selection. The latter is intelligent design.
This fish was given genes from a species it could never naturally mate with. Dogs were mated with other dogs they could naturally mate with.
There are tons of services that do anonymous e-mailing for you. I'm thinking of setting up such a service on my own site but I have to figure out a way to avoid it being used to anonymously send out massive amounts of spam first.
And also any legal things I should know about liability.
Doesn't matter if you find it useful or not. If it's commericial and you didn't ask for it, and it's in your inbox, it's spam and you have a right (in some places) to sue.
Laws have two parts, the law and the punishment. Just because you choose not to seek punishment when someone breaks the law doesn't mean they didn't break the law.
If you find a piece of spam useful and choose not to sue if you could, that doesn't mean a crime wasn't committed by the company sending you unsolicited commercial e-mail. Just because you don't care doesn't mean the law doesn't care and that no one else can care.
Most people didn't sue telemarketers either when they broke the law but that didn't mean they didn't break the law.
"useful" and "I don't mind" have absolutly nothing to do with defining what is spam.
Yes it's terrible some of these things happened but it would be even more tragic if we refused to gleam some good out of it. They would have been tortured and murdered purly for evil. Many people died in horrific ways but because of the information many more are saved. If I'm going to be tortured I'd certainly hope something good and useful was learned in the process.
I'd roll in my grave if the cure to cancer was found by committing some horrific experiments on me and society refused to take advantage of it. I'd also roll in my grave if those who committed the horrific acts (and those who encouraged them) weren't seriously punished and denied any and all financial reward from their discoveries.
There's nothing hypocritical about it.
I'd be more surprised if the RIAA wasn't trying to get something good out of this situation.
It has exactly zero to do with condoning the rampant piracy.
There's nothing wrong with making the best of a bad situation. There's something seriously wrong with you if something bad happens and you just whine about it and play helpless victim.
Sites would put up paying ads and then flood the company with bogus click-thrus to rack up commissions.
The result:
No more pay per click companies. Those who "pay you to surf the net", have a pool from the advertisers. The pool is then divided amongst participates. You can then only screw over other participants if you don't get caught. Advertisers get the same amount of legitimate click thrus without having to pay out the ass for bogus ones.
If on-line advertising has taught us anything, it's that trying to screw over the advertisers lowers the profit which results in more agressive advertising to make up the difference.
Hence pop-ups, pop-unders, flash ads and click thru ad pages. All in an effort to make up for lower per ad view commissions.
It sounds like a marvelous idea but it will most likely end up biting everyone in the ass.
I realize this was at the end of the article and reading the article at all is something not done much around here so:
"When a virus or worm is detected, the system can either silently drop the malicious traffic or generate a pop-up message on an end-user's computer. An administrator uses a web-based interface to control and configure the system."
So no, you don't have to worry about false positives making you miss something unless you tell it to not warn you before doing something.
I'm sure all those millions who were murdered in mass graves don't think he's evil.
And Al Queda just goes around blowing people (including themselves) up. I bet all the victims think he's deep down just got a "different perspective" and they accept that.
And Hitler. All the school girls loved him. Just ignore all the millions of Jews and others he slaughtered. Focus on the little school girls who loved him. Since *they* loved him, everyone must! And he therefore can't possibly be evil.
"If you believe you're good, then you are"
This is what happens when subjectivity is used to replace actual coherant thought.
If I told you I was George Bush the President of the United States, you'd probably believe me. After all, *I* (hypothetically) believe it's true therefore it must be.
And who are you to use your brain and question *my* reality?
The only people who can't admit Saddam is evil and needed to go are Liberal wackjobs that can't accept that Bush had even one good reason to go to Iraq.
Only in your imaginary LSD filled fantasy world does no one outside the US think Saddam is evil.
The argument isn't "does Saddam need to go?" it's "were we justified in the means we used to do it?"
And the Bush administration used the fact he was evil as a reason to get him out of power from the beginning. If he wasn't evil there would be no point in disarming him.
I bet this joke of a business plan won't be around much more than 3 years. By keeping the subscription length low they can stop accepting submissions and then sell off what crippled remains they have left while they shut down operations without risking lawsuits from customers while their subscriptions run out.
The sole "challenge" to this business is getting MySQL to have a database of the subscribers e-mail, all their intended recipients, and the letter itself. And then writting a PHP script to fire off the e-mails when it's time.
As far as hosting concerns, all you need is a 256K DSL line that doesn't block port 25. I can't imagine they'll be sending more than 60GB worth of e-mails a month.
Considering only 24 people are ranked for Sweden and over 1300 for the US, it's not surprising we're ranked lower. We've got a lot more people trying (and failing) which lowers the overall score.
It'd be interesting to see how our top X compare to another country's top X or just who has the top coder over all.
The statistics as they are, are pretty much meaningless.
People try to make up for having a crap site by bloating it with "features."
Maddox just speaks his mind, purposfully uses large obnoxious text with terrible graphics, etc and get more visitors than most corporate sites. All without spending a penny on advertising.
With my site, content comes first. Then I worry about making it pretty. Most people go the other way.
The proof is you "sharing" it which is illegal and why you'll be thrown in jail.
If they find you illegally aquired it to begin with, that's just more frosting on top of your file.
In case you missed it, it doesn't matter if you bought the DVD and have it on your shelf. It is ILLEGAL to redistribute it unless you don't retain a copy for yourself.
If Kazaa et al allowed only a single user to download a copy of your files and deleted your copy when they were done, then it'd somewhat resemble being legal. Kazaa et al then wouldn't be responsible for you retaining a copy. It'd also make it more difficult for the RIAA to prosecute. They'd have to download the same file from your computer twice to prove you retained a copy.
People who are given screeners sign little pieces of paper which says they won't allow others to see it.
Perhaps you've heard of such pieces of paper. They're called NDA's.
The levels of illegalness are quite plentiful in your little example of "guilty until proven innocent."
If you're sharing a file that's not legal to share you're committing a crime. When you're doing it publically it's pretty hard to claim you're innocent when the whole world can see you're not.
Nobody ever claimed to own anything until they were sitting on it or they purchased it from those who were sitting on it.
That's how it works. If you wanted to own land in the New World, you got yourself a ship and shipped your ass over there to stake your claim and sit on it. Or you got yourself a wagon and rolled across the country to settle on unclaimed land.
As soon as this wackjob builds himself a ship, lands on the asteroid and lives there, then he can claim it's his.
Until then, any sensibile judge should just dismiss his case and fine him for wasting everyone's time.
"I saw it first so it's mine!"
What a two year old. I can just imagine someone sitting on their ass in Spain claiming that California was theirs while making no effort to go there or send anyone there on their behalf.
This has nothing to do with government vs private entity. He has nothing but armchair dillusions either way. When he lands on the asteroid, then he can stake a claim just as NASA could do if they weren't government.
Slashdot Mirror
The registry protects kids and only prevents them from getting jobs that involve kids.
And this is only done for sex crimes. Especially one's against children.
And besides, companies already can find out if you've been convicted of a felony which a sex crime is.
People need to get over the fact that some actions prevent you from being a "normal" member of society. When you abuse children in such a way you've just earned the distrust of society and it will rightfully take a very long time to earn that trust back. And there's no reason for society as a whole to trust you.
If some people refuse to ever trust you again, tough. Find people that do and make damn sure you never break that trust again.
Ben
Depending on the nature of the crime it's often the case that sex offenders can't be rehabilitated. Those who know what they're doing is wrong but do it anyway, can be rehabilitated and are. Those who think what they're doing is perfectly natural, can't be. Many crimes are the same way.
So yes, it is often a lifetime long crime. The idea of the registry is to make people aware so they can take precautions. You wouldn't want to send your kids over to play at such a person's house unsupervised. "Done their time" or not. Just because someone did their time doesn't mean they're cured. It just means they appear to be cured or the state just can't legally hold them any longer for the crime they were convicted for. It has no direct corelation to not repeating the crime.
If people take that information and use it as a hit list they need to be checked into their local prison as well for a very long time.
The benefits of such a list greatly outweigh the risks. Especially considering there are no exemptions to vigilante violence against anyone for any reason.
The law doesn't care if he looked at you funny or you got his name off a list, you don't get to beat the crap out of him or worse.
Ben
Now kids have one more reason to give a begger a few bucks.
Ben
is a spoiler.
Rice-Box(tm)
Ben
"It is unclear why an exploit was made public before Apple resolved the problem."
Is Apple supposedly exempt from hackers (crackers for the symantically inclined) finding exploits and making them known publically before notifying the company?
Let's try to name another company that never got outted on an exploit before a patch was available. Besides the fact that the workaround IS publically available which will work just as well as a patch.
And how much crap did MS get for a root exploit that DID HAVE a patch available over a month in advance?
Maybe the editor thought it would be better to just pretend Apple was secure so users could just magically have their machines screw up with no way to know how to fix it.
Fortunatly the security advisors had more sense. Word got out and a bandaid is available so they did the smart thing and told everyone how to apply the bandaid while Apple worked on healing the wound.
There is nothing unclear about it.
Ben
domain, directory, files, content
If you have such a domain name, Google makes a high assumption that your site is all about what the domain name says. This is what led to many creativly descriptive domain names like the above.
I have a huge collection of drivers and other files on my site. Looking for one of those files generally results in my site being at the top of the search results.
If somebody e-mails me looking for a file on my site my first stop is Google and I've yet to not find it on my site from the first page. Sometimes I just browse through to find it but with 500,000+ files it's a bit of an undertaking.
Ben
What takes more talent?
Writing a hugely successful epic screenplay from scratch?
Or
Writing a hugely successful epic screenplay from an existing hugely successful epic novel?
Jackson had a model to work by. The Wacowski bros didn't.
"I'm not so arrogant that I can't admit that."
That's amazing. Jesus would be proud.
I'm merely comparing what the Wacowski bros attempted to do with what Jackson has done. I'm just saying the Wacowshi bros attempted something far more difficult. Them failing is therefore more forgivable and understandable than Jackson failing.
Ben
With Lord of the Rings everything they needed was handed to them on a silver plater storywise.
Matrix had to get from point A to point B with (apparently) no clue where point B was. And that's why it kinda sucked. After the first movie, they had absolutly no direction.
Jackson had to get from point A to point B given exactly what those points were. There was no point where Jackson wasn't told what the next waypoint was and how the characters get there in an interesting way. He just had to decide how to describe it in the alloted time.
My point is, yes it takes talent to get from point A to point B in X hours instead of thousands of pages. But it takes more talent to get a great story with a point A and point B with nothing to work off of.
It's far easier and more expected to fall flat on your face when you don't know the path. Jackson knew the road he was travelling. He just had to make a reader's digest account of the journey that was already fully logged and proven a solid story.
If the bros had spent a decade or two getting familiar with philosophy and working out details on the story like Tolkien had with his, I think they could have had a full classic.
It's the same with the Harry Potter series. I don't expect any of the movies to suck because the author is right there to get the screenwriters from point A to point B in the alloted time in the best possible way.
Simply put, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings have a crutch that the Wacowski brothers didn't. The Matrix was an epic tale that needed a lot more time before it was ready to be told.
I think they deserve some credit for pulling it off as well as they did with what they had. I wouldn't be surprised if down the road someone took the ideas in the Matrix and made a solid set of movies out of them.
Jackson should get tons of credit for not blowing the trilogy the second time around. I don't expect another remake of that story for the theatre any time soon.
Ben
Matrix was made from scratch. Not only was visual and cinematic talent required but also literary talent and philisophical skill on top of that.
Jackson already had the full script available from the start. Very little creative talent in the story area required.
We can forgive the Wachowski bros for not knowing interesting answers to the interesting questions. It'd be a little harder to forgive Jackson for messing up the plot of a movie when all he had to do was NOT change the given story.
For what the Wachowski bros had available they did quite a good job on their series. For what Jackson has available he's also doing a fantastic job.
Ben
Some corporate lady stopped by the kid's pizza place I used to work at and asked me to grab her a salad. I made some comment about being a corporate slave which she didn't find funny.
My boss told me that his boss wanted to talk to me. He told me to be a good little slave and keep my jokes to myself.
Personally my view is that I'll be happy to be a slave for a good King. However society has deemed that "slave" is necessarily a bad word so oh well.
We got "bling" and "shiznit" in the dictionary so we're still on par if we lose "master" and "slave."
The english language is getting too bloated.
Ben
Other sites that utilize moderation in a Slashdot style fashion?
If so, name an example. www.kuro5hin.org doesn't allow post editing.
There is no perfect solution for everything because boards vary. Slashdot has factored in all the variables for this board and yes, not being able to edit posts is the perfect solution.
The only way Slashdot could possibly allow post editing is prior to any moderation. But that's pointless. It's what the preview button is for. Think before you post.
The only boards I'm aware of that allow post editing are ones that don't use moderation points. There's no moderation points to be abused by post editing on such forums.
"That having been said, getting around the issues you (and several others) have mentioned is a no-brainer."
Yet you provide no reasons for your view and no real world examples. You just say they exist and pretend everyone is just going to take your word for it.
Slashdot style moderation points and post editing don't go together. Sites may try it but they're just asking to be abused.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not the perfect solution. Some people will find fault with anything. Even if that fault isn't warrented.
You can scream at me that a duck is a horse all day long but that duck will not be anything but a duck.
Ben
The reason you can't edit posts is because posts are modorated.
You'd have people getting a highly moderated post and then changing it to something that wasn't what it was moderated for. Our friend the old bait and switch.
Tell people what they want to hear, let it be moderated up, tell people what you actually wanted to say. Or post some questionable ascii art.
Best case is they allow you to edit posts before any moderation is done. But, that's what the preview button is for. The idea is that you think about what you're going to say before you post. If people could edit posts there would be a lot more knee jerk reactions.
So no, it has nothing to do with the year we live in. It has to do with encouraging better posting practices and keeping the trolls at bay. The wheel was invented thousands of years ago, we're not giving up on that one any time soon are we?
Ben
There's a difference between breeding which requires two animals that can naturally have sex with each other to mix genes naturally...
(Two people of a different race having children isn't genetic engineering.)
And genetic engineering which completely removes the neccessity for having two creatures have sex to mix the genes. The entire process is dependent on human intervention.
The former is natural selection. The latter is intelligent design.
This fish was given genes from a species it could never naturally mate with. Dogs were mated with other dogs they could naturally mate with.
Ben
There are tons of services that do anonymous e-mailing for you. I'm thinking of setting up such a service on my own site but I have to figure out a way to avoid it being used to anonymously send out massive amounts of spam first.
And also any legal things I should know about liability.
Ben
unsolicited commercial e-mail
Doesn't matter if you find it useful or not. If it's commericial and you didn't ask for it, and it's in your inbox, it's spam and you have a right (in some places) to sue.
Laws have two parts, the law and the punishment. Just because you choose not to seek punishment when someone breaks the law doesn't mean they didn't break the law.
If you find a piece of spam useful and choose not to sue if you could, that doesn't mean a crime wasn't committed by the company sending you unsolicited commercial e-mail. Just because you don't care doesn't mean the law doesn't care and that no one else can care.
Most people didn't sue telemarketers either when they broke the law but that didn't mean they didn't break the law.
"useful" and "I don't mind" have absolutly nothing to do with defining what is spam.
Spam: Unsolicited Commerical E-mail
Now you know.
Ben
making the best of a bad situation.
Yes it's terrible some of these things happened but it would be even more tragic if we refused to gleam some good out of it. They would have been tortured and murdered purly for evil. Many people died in horrific ways but because of the information many more are saved. If I'm going to be tortured I'd certainly hope something good and useful was learned in the process.
I'd roll in my grave if the cure to cancer was found by committing some horrific experiments on me and society refused to take advantage of it. I'd also roll in my grave if those who committed the horrific acts (and those who encouraged them) weren't seriously punished and denied any and all financial reward from their discoveries.
There's nothing hypocritical about it.
I'd be more surprised if the RIAA wasn't trying to get something good out of this situation.
It has exactly zero to do with condoning the rampant piracy.
There's nothing wrong with making the best of a bad situation. There's something seriously wrong with you if something bad happens and you just whine about it and play helpless victim.
Ben
Sites would put up paying ads and then flood the company with bogus click-thrus to rack up commissions.
The result:
No more pay per click companies. Those who "pay you to surf the net", have a pool from the advertisers. The pool is then divided amongst participates. You can then only screw over other participants if you don't get caught. Advertisers get the same amount of legitimate click thrus without having to pay out the ass for bogus ones.
If on-line advertising has taught us anything, it's that trying to screw over the advertisers lowers the profit which results in more agressive advertising to make up the difference.
Hence pop-ups, pop-unders, flash ads and click thru ad pages. All in an effort to make up for lower per ad view commissions.
It sounds like a marvelous idea but it will most likely end up biting everyone in the ass.
Ben
I realize this was at the end of the article and reading the article at all is something not done much around here so:
"When a virus or worm is detected, the system can either silently drop the malicious traffic or generate a pop-up message on an end-user's computer. An administrator uses a web-based interface to control and configure the system."
So no, you don't have to worry about false positives making you miss something unless you tell it to not warn you before doing something.
Ben
Nobody thinks Saddam Hussain is evil?
I'm sure all those millions who were murdered in mass graves don't think he's evil.
And Al Queda just goes around blowing people (including themselves) up. I bet all the victims think he's deep down just got a "different perspective" and they accept that.
And Hitler. All the school girls loved him. Just ignore all the millions of Jews and others he slaughtered. Focus on the little school girls who loved him. Since *they* loved him, everyone must! And he therefore can't possibly be evil.
"If you believe you're good, then you are"
This is what happens when subjectivity is used to replace actual coherant thought.
If I told you I was George Bush the President of the United States, you'd probably believe me. After all, *I* (hypothetically) believe it's true therefore it must be.
And who are you to use your brain and question *my* reality?
The only people who can't admit Saddam is evil and needed to go are Liberal wackjobs that can't accept that Bush had even one good reason to go to Iraq.
Only in your imaginary LSD filled fantasy world does no one outside the US think Saddam is evil.
The argument isn't "does Saddam need to go?" it's "were we justified in the means we used to do it?"
And the Bush administration used the fact he was evil as a reason to get him out of power from the beginning. If he wasn't evil there would be no point in disarming him.
Revisionist history at it's finest.
Ben
I bet this joke of a business plan won't be around much more than 3 years. By keeping the subscription length low they can stop accepting submissions and then sell off what crippled remains they have left while they shut down operations without risking lawsuits from customers while their subscriptions run out.
The sole "challenge" to this business is getting MySQL to have a database of the subscribers e-mail, all their intended recipients, and the letter itself. And then writting a PHP script to fire off the e-mails when it's time.
As far as hosting concerns, all you need is a 256K DSL line that doesn't block port 25. I can't imagine they'll be sending more than 60GB worth of e-mails a month.
So really, the only challenge is marketing.
Ben
Considering only 24 people are ranked for Sweden and over 1300 for the US, it's not surprising we're ranked lower. We've got a lot more people trying (and failing) which lowers the overall score.
It'd be interesting to see how our top X compare to another country's top X or just who has the top coder over all.
The statistics as they are, are pretty much meaningless.
Ben
People try to make up for having a crap site by bloating it with "features."
Maddox just speaks his mind, purposfully uses large obnoxious text with terrible graphics, etc and get more visitors than most corporate sites. All without spending a penny on advertising.
With my site, content comes first. Then I worry about making it pretty. Most people go the other way.
Ben
but there is no legitimate reason to "share" it.
The proof is you "sharing" it which is illegal and why you'll be thrown in jail.
If they find you illegally aquired it to begin with, that's just more frosting on top of your file.
In case you missed it, it doesn't matter if you bought the DVD and have it on your shelf. It is ILLEGAL to redistribute it unless you don't retain a copy for yourself.
If Kazaa et al allowed only a single user to download a copy of your files and deleted your copy when they were done, then it'd somewhat resemble being legal. Kazaa et al then wouldn't be responsible for you retaining a copy. It'd also make it more difficult for the RIAA to prosecute. They'd have to download the same file from your computer twice to prove you retained a copy.
People who are given screeners sign little pieces of paper which says they won't allow others to see it.
Perhaps you've heard of such pieces of paper. They're called NDA's.
The levels of illegalness are quite plentiful in your little example of "guilty until proven innocent."
If you're sharing a file that's not legal to share you're committing a crime. When you're doing it publically it's pretty hard to claim you're innocent when the whole world can see you're not.
Ben
when he's sitting on it.
Nobody ever claimed to own anything until they were sitting on it or they purchased it from those who were sitting on it.
That's how it works. If you wanted to own land in the New World, you got yourself a ship and shipped your ass over there to stake your claim and sit on it. Or you got yourself a wagon and rolled across the country to settle on unclaimed land.
As soon as this wackjob builds himself a ship, lands on the asteroid and lives there, then he can claim it's his.
Until then, any sensibile judge should just dismiss his case and fine him for wasting everyone's time.
"I saw it first so it's mine!"
What a two year old. I can just imagine someone sitting on their ass in Spain claiming that California was theirs while making no effort to go there or send anyone there on their behalf.
This has nothing to do with government vs private entity. He has nothing but armchair dillusions either way. When he lands on the asteroid, then he can stake a claim just as NASA could do if they weren't government.
Ben
"a lesson some americans need to learn."
What lesson would that be?
War results in bad things happening so we should cower in a corner instead of fight? Maybe you think it's nobel to be a coward.
War results in bad things happening so we should try to minimize the bad things and maximize the good things?
But then nothing good ever came out of war huh? Nothing but our country, the end of slavery, ad nauseum.
Grab a clue, troll. America is quite aware what war is about and we went anyway. I know it's impossible to wrap your mind around.
This is your flawed line of reasoning,
"How could anyone go to war if they knew what happens there?"
Lots of people. War is ugly but war is sometimes necessary. If you don't like it, feel free to surrender when the time comes.
Ben