Yeah, it's more than just links to an outside server, it's links to an outside server that's close to you and has the data.
But, that's pretty damn obvious. Round-robin DNS for load-balancing is an old and obvious technology. Instead of spreading the load in strict order, or by load average, you'd instead uses a lookup table of IPs to physical locations.
And that's pretty trivial. I've seen MUDs in the 80s that knew where you were connecting from.
Caching is "hard", in that hairy issues exist, but simple enough to do what you describe. If a request isn't cached, tell the server to do so, ideally while it keeps the initial connection open to serve what the upstream request returns. Preemptively cache related content.
Sure, there are improvements over those basic strategies. Stick a bunch of smart people in a room and they'll come up with stuff all day. But the basics were all there years ago and none of this is really far out.
Do we really need to patent this? Are the people at Akamai so pathetic that without the government enforcing a monopoly, as in being willing to use force to shut down their competitors, that they don't stand a chance? If so, how pathetic. If not, then what the hell do they need a government granted monopoly for? Nothing, just that their competitors all have equally stupid patents and it would be discrimination not to allow Akamai after letting everyone else...
Yeah, I know you didn't mean to imply otherwise, I was meaning a societal 'we'. Many people are complicit in anything, but we pick a single scapegoat. The kid. Or SWAT.
I don't really care if it excuses anything, even if we gassed him for it some other drunk kid would try the same. It'll keep going on until you can't send a paramilitary team out on a raid without verified evidence. It should be safe to call SWAT to your mother's house. Either because they take precautions themselves, or because the situation is investigated in more detail before they get there.
What we need to realized is that it's possible for blame to be fully assigned to multiple people.
If he sent someone to your house and they shot you, he's guilty. But so is the person who shot you. You can't absolve the SWAT team of their responsibility to investigate fully and act safely just because they got a false tip.
It's their job to deal with false tips. If they can't, some criminal will do exactly this when they plan a crime across town.
Sure, the kid abused 911. Yeah yeah. But then lunatics with guns jumped in a van and rolled out like the A-Team, ready to kick down doors and apply liberal amounts of justice.
There's such a thing. The dirty cops even run it themselves. Cops Writing Cops
It's where an officer who commits a crime (speeding, reckless driving, failure to stop, and in some cases, worse) writes to complain about the officer who wrote him up, on the theory that cops should never 'write cops'. Other dirty cops then tell the first dirty cop that they understand how bad he must feel for having been talked down to by a cop who wouldn't listen to their excuse (they're always guilty, and merely want permission to continue) and fined some huge sum. Absolutely no connection with how everyone else feels when stopped by them, and fined, etc.
Basically it's a list of honest cops, compiled by the dirty cops. Put real names to the handles of complainers and you've got your list.
Frank Serpico will thank you, and the three other honest cops.
Glorification? Nah, he's just some idiot who learned one of a bunch of ways to disguise your caller ID info.
But to demonize him because the unaccountable cops with assault weapons might have killed someone over an unverified tip... That's too much.
Perhaps we should expect the police to use reasonable force. They don't know if the person who'd answer the door at the house is the alleged violent criminal or an innocent hostage so they need to respond with something other than an invasion.
Asshole prankster he is, but he's also the messenger that the system is seriously broken. Will shooting the messenger fix the system?
Yeah, there are plenty on non-innocent victims just waiting to be identified.
Find the homes of SWAT commanders in areas where the SWAT team has broken down the wrong door and killed someone, especially if they tried to plant evidence to hide their crime. Send them to the commander's house. For bonus points, call and tell him he's targeted by the mob and they're going to shoot him.
A van full of unidentified men in black who storm his house won't be intimidating or anything. And of course, there's no risk of him dying, even if he tried to lawfully defend himself against intruders, so it'd all be in good fun.
People who think that having a paramilitary police force is a good idea should get a front seat for a 'training' exercise.
Had the police not been armed with fully automatic weapons, given a shoot-first attitude, and been busting doors down, there wouldn't be any risk.
However, I agree that this prank isn't at all funny. Innocent victims are innocent. The world is full of people who deserve any given thing, a prank needs to be ironic or fitting.
It would only be funny if done to the chief of police, SWAT commander, judge who authorizes SWAT actions, etc.
The boy may indeed be a criminal, but that doesn't excuse the vans full of armed and unaccountable SWAT teams who bust don't ID themselves, bust down the wrong door, murder the occupant, and plant evidence of a crime to cover up their mistake. Kids with phones we could tolerate, armed thugs we can't.
You're three times dumber than you are rude, it's staggering.
People can be drafted into the army. People who join the army are stuck there. They had freedom. They no longer do. You're now in the army and will be shot if you try to leave. Have a nice day.
If you honestly believe that claptrap about it being any different than slavery, you've been sold a bridge. Even if 'relinquishing' your rights voluntarily made a difference, the armed forces routinely lies to people about the posting and duty they'll get, as well as our government lying about the reasons to go to war. People would take back their rights if they only relinquished them, when they found out they were lied to, and would go home. But they can't. Because whatever term you wish to wave around like some primitive totem, it's still the same lack of freedom.
And it's disgusting. If a country can't survive without the draft, it deserves to fall.
Your freedom to leave? To speak freely? Those certainly are taken away.
Yes, the piece of paper says something that people have twisted into justification, but does that actually address the question? No, not at all. How can we be free if the government can take our rights away for many different reasons?
The problem is that if he's not impeached, he gets away free. If he's impeached, and we fight this spying, then we'll let the next people know that they can't do this.
If we ignore this, not only will our next leaders continue it, but Bush will go unpunished.
He's by far the worst president the USA has ever had. Not just in what he's personally done, but in the lack of respect for law that he's instilled into the office and various three-letter-agencies.
If, on the other hand, he was stripped of power, even a day before the end, not allowed to pardon anyone, and made liable for criminal lawsuits... Ideally, he'll get tortured in Gitmo, that would be the ultimate payback for the sell-out.
Yeah, looking at it, it would seem like a win to standardize. But some companies felt otherwise, or saw a wider market, and wanted to ship multiple OSes. Microsoft punished these companies by canceling the standard volume discounts of up to 90%, effectively making the company pay retail - far more than its competitors.
In one world, paying everyone not to deal with your competitor is good business. In that world, his paying people to hunt near your house is justifiable as well.
We aim for a more civilized world. Where you can't just pay for the elimination of a competitor. Who cares if this is ultimately more free for business when we've discovered that it inevitably leads to abuse?
It's illegal to discriminate based on the color of an employee's skin. While this does restrict businesses and even no-doubt prevent some legitimate concerns like hiring to match the drapes, it's a value that society as a whole believes is worth enforcing. Monopoly-busting rules are the same. You're enjoying the protection of law (your competitor can't just kill you for interfering) but harming pretty much everyone else through blackmail (playing price games in a cornered market for essentials like food or housing is essentially blackmail) isn't something that law was intended to support.
Only if you deal with that company. If a consortium of banks paid the fee I could deal with them, or with a bank that had not and was either adopting new technology, fighting the patent, etc.
If we're taxed, we feel the burn regardless.
As for patents, they are *all* bad. Some are more abusive than others, but even the most inventive patent is still a government granted monopoly that disallows independent creation. (Unlike copyright.) There are arguments that many fields require this, but fuck them. Nobody has ever come to me and asked if it'd be easier to start a business if they disallowed my competition, nor would I ask. It's sick that we grant this to anyone.
It's not a restatement of the implied license, it's a restatement of copyright law. No license is required for any software.
However, some companies won't sell software contracting explicitly with the buyer. That may require the buyer limit usage of that copy, but failing to do so is a problem of the licensee, not the inadvertent user.
As for warranties, don't sell your software (or supply it as a service) and you can't be held liable for accidental damages, lost usability, etc.
Also, there's no way at all to disclaim liability from intentional damages or willful ignorance leading to damages. Despite any EULA, software that intentionally damaged your PC or data would be treated like a Trojan horse, as it is. 99% of the use of warranty disclaimers is to lie to customers who don't understand the protections offered by law. Everyone disclaims everything allowed, but that isn't much really. When you sell something you are required to provide what you promise.
One does not ordinarily have the "right" to "use" copyrighted works without permission. Not true at all. Copyright only covers copying. No license, implied or otherwise, is required in any fashion to use a work.
US Copyright law goes so far as to specifically allow required copies (installing to HD, running from RAM, writing to swap) of software. If you have to install it to use it, that copy is legal.
You only need a license if you're going to do something that would otherwise infringe. That's why you don't have to accept the GPL to use the software, but do to distribute it (because that's normally a copyright violation).
Moreover, if it's true that the GPL doesn't form a contract with end users... It forms a contract with whoever accepts it. However, users do not need to accept it to use the software.
you're potentially on the hook for warranty claims:... merchantability, etc. No. If it's not sold, there's no warranty, implied or otherwise. You have no dealings with the author so why would they be liable for something?
RedHat and other companies who sell a distribution of GPLed (or otherwise) software likely do have an obligation to provide what you paid for. They disclaim warranty on the individual software components (which they aren't selling - see the freely downloadable version of Redhat) but are responsible for making sure the CD they deliver won't ruin your CD drive, that it contains what they say it will, etc. You could sue RedHat for providing a blank CD, but not because Apache crashed.
They're totally different things. A Shrinkwrap EULA purports to change the nature of a preexisting sale, and is not voluntary. It further restricts access to the thing you purchased until you agree to be bound by additional restrictions.
Depriving someone of the ability to use the rights they legally have is actionable.
The GPL on the gripping hand, is a voluntary license offered for those who want extra rights. It acknowledges specifically that you do *not* need to even read the GPL to use the software.
Those flash drives are easily available, that autorun things. If an attacker wanted that feature, they'd buy that brand. As for picture frames, it seems easy to imagine the same process that puts the trojan on, at the factory, also flipping that bit.
Windows autoruns things that want to be autorun. You are right that there's a small roadblock in there, but obviously not much of one.
And most definitely you cannot tell by physically looking at the media, if it contains an autorun script.
Honestly, think about it. You aren't saying Windows doesn't have a gaping security flaw. You're merely saying that the attacker would need to find the right brand/model of drive. You're trying to imply that Windows is safer because of this. Really it's less secure because people have a false sense of security - most USB drives won't autorun, only the ones picked to contain trojans will.
You told people USB drives can't contain autorun scripts. You're wrong. You told people they're safe. They aren't.
Perhaps if you hadn't opened your message with "Bullshit" and closed with "more Slashdot FUD", and of course, been wrong in between, you wouldn't look so silly right now.
If you're unwilling to consider the actual security implications of trusting the foreign device to honestly self-report, you're just another "me too" guy towing the Microsoft line.
Thanks. As a Vancouverite, I appreciate you staying away from this boondoggle that was forced upon us.
The Olympics will be welcome when there's no special copyright protection. When they pay for the space they use, as any other event would, not with tax money.
Personally, I don't think an event counts as 'Olympic' unless it's in Greece, and you perform naked. I'd like to see a challenge to the name from a Greek group trying to hold an authentic Olympic event.
If the auction is going and going, with a five-minute extension per bid, then it's because the price is changing. How long could it go on, with twelve minimum increments per hour, without the price going crazy? Especially because the minimum is minimum, not maximum. It'd be much faster if someone entered a higher bid.
So you'd know, to an hour or two, when it'd be over. Seems reasonable for week-long auctions.
The sale price on eBay *should* approach bricks & mortar stores, minus something for delay, fraud, etc, as you mention. If not, there's a difference to be exploited.
It really is retarded to buy a currently made item on eBay, and face the 25% chance of being fucked over, than to go to a store and buy it. That's why much of eBay is people selling out-of-print crap, things you can't just go buy.
You've "helped" nobody except yourself. What's wrong with that? Nothing. But notice how every sniper on here does it, they claim, because it helps buyers, or sellers, or makes people happy about a stable price or something.
In other words, they know they're asses, and they try to make excuses.
I'm not protecting christians here, trust me. But that was then and this is now. It's possible to stir any crowd into a bloody rage. Concert goers, sports fans, etc.
But islam is practiced by a lot of people who advocate killing the unbelievers for small things like publishing a picture. There truly is a worse religion, it is Islam. Sure, there may be ones that were worse, or smaller ones that are worse, or non-religiously affiliated things that are worse, but for a current large organized religion, as practiced, islam is by far the most brutal.
Of course, religion is for people who've chosen to abdicate any responsibility for their actions for the most part, so they're all horrible things. Just not currently as horrible as islam is (to most followers) now.
Yeah, Gandhi really had to watch out for that too. Or actually, he didn't, because he didn't advocate slaughter at all.
A religion isn't just a book, it's the people who practice it. Enough of those people say islam is a way to justify killing. I think you were outvoted.
Of course, all religion is indicative of severe mental defect so christians aren't better, just less kill-someone-and-drag-his-headless-corpse-through-the-city-ish.
At times government oppression has been worse, but never before has the government had both the will and the ability to perform almost total surveillance. With speech-recognition scanning all of our phone calls, pretty soon listening in on public spaces, etc, it's going to be harder to do anything the government doesn't like. You know, like protest. Or vote for someone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's more than just links to an outside server, it's links to an outside server that's close to you and has the data.
But, that's pretty damn obvious. Round-robin DNS for load-balancing is an old and obvious technology. Instead of spreading the load in strict order, or by load average, you'd instead uses a lookup table of IPs to physical locations.
And that's pretty trivial. I've seen MUDs in the 80s that knew where you were connecting from.
Caching is "hard", in that hairy issues exist, but simple enough to do what you describe. If a request isn't cached, tell the server to do so, ideally while it keeps the initial connection open to serve what the upstream request returns. Preemptively cache related content.
Sure, there are improvements over those basic strategies. Stick a bunch of smart people in a room and they'll come up with stuff all day. But the basics were all there years ago and none of this is really far out.
Do we really need to patent this? Are the people at Akamai so pathetic that without the government enforcing a monopoly, as in being willing to use force to shut down their competitors, that they don't stand a chance? If so, how pathetic. If not, then what the hell do they need a government granted monopoly for? Nothing, just that their competitors all have equally stupid patents and it would be discrimination not to allow Akamai after letting everyone else...
Yeah, I know you didn't mean to imply otherwise, I was meaning a societal 'we'. Many people are complicit in anything, but we pick a single scapegoat. The kid. Or SWAT.
I don't really care if it excuses anything, even if we gassed him for it some other drunk kid would try the same. It'll keep going on until you can't send a paramilitary team out on a raid without verified evidence. It should be safe to call SWAT to your mother's house. Either because they take precautions themselves, or because the situation is investigated in more detail before they get there.
Regardless, he's not the one with the guns.
What we need to realized is that it's possible for blame to be fully assigned to multiple people.
If he sent someone to your house and they shot you, he's guilty. But so is the person who shot you. You can't absolve the SWAT team of their responsibility to investigate fully and act safely just because they got a false tip.
It's their job to deal with false tips. If they can't, some criminal will do exactly this when they plan a crime across town.
Sure, the kid abused 911. Yeah yeah. But then lunatics with guns jumped in a van and rolled out like the A-Team, ready to kick down doors and apply liberal amounts of justice.
There's such a thing. The dirty cops even run it themselves. Cops Writing Cops
It's where an officer who commits a crime (speeding, reckless driving, failure to stop, and in some cases, worse) writes to complain about the officer who wrote him up, on the theory that cops should never 'write cops'. Other dirty cops then tell the first dirty cop that they understand how bad he must feel for having been talked down to by a cop who wouldn't listen to their excuse (they're always guilty, and merely want permission to continue) and fined some huge sum. Absolutely no connection with how everyone else feels when stopped by them, and fined, etc.
Basically it's a list of honest cops, compiled by the dirty cops. Put real names to the handles of complainers and you've got your list.
Frank Serpico will thank you, and the three other honest cops.
Glorification? Nah, he's just some idiot who learned one of a bunch of ways to disguise your caller ID info.
But to demonize him because the unaccountable cops with assault weapons might have killed someone over an unverified tip... That's too much.
Perhaps we should expect the police to use reasonable force. They don't know if the person who'd answer the door at the house is the alleged violent criminal or an innocent hostage so they need to respond with something other than an invasion.
Asshole prankster he is, but he's also the messenger that the system is seriously broken. Will shooting the messenger fix the system?
Yeah, there are plenty on non-innocent victims just waiting to be identified.
Find the homes of SWAT commanders in areas where the SWAT team has broken down the wrong door and killed someone, especially if they tried to plant evidence to hide their crime. Send them to the commander's house. For bonus points, call and tell him he's targeted by the mob and they're going to shoot him.
A van full of unidentified men in black who storm his house won't be intimidating or anything. And of course, there's no risk of him dying, even if he tried to lawfully defend himself against intruders, so it'd all be in good fun.
People who think that having a paramilitary police force is a good idea should get a front seat for a 'training' exercise.
Had the police not been armed with fully automatic weapons, given a shoot-first attitude, and been busting doors down, there wouldn't be any risk.
However, I agree that this prank isn't at all funny. Innocent victims are innocent. The world is full of people who deserve any given thing, a prank needs to be ironic or fitting.
It would only be funny if done to the chief of police, SWAT commander, judge who authorizes SWAT actions, etc.
The boy may indeed be a criminal, but that doesn't excuse the vans full of armed and unaccountable SWAT teams who bust don't ID themselves, bust down the wrong door, murder the occupant, and plant evidence of a crime to cover up their mistake. Kids with phones we could tolerate, armed thugs we can't.
You're three times dumber than you are rude, it's staggering.
People can be drafted into the army. People who join the army are stuck there. They had freedom. They no longer do. You're now in the army and will be shot if you try to leave. Have a nice day.
If you honestly believe that claptrap about it being any different than slavery, you've been sold a bridge. Even if 'relinquishing' your rights voluntarily made a difference, the armed forces routinely lies to people about the posting and duty they'll get, as well as our government lying about the reasons to go to war. People would take back their rights if they only relinquished them, when they found out they were lied to, and would go home. But they can't. Because whatever term you wish to wave around like some primitive totem, it's still the same lack of freedom.
And it's disgusting. If a country can't survive without the draft, it deserves to fall.
Your freedom to leave? To speak freely? Those certainly are taken away.
Yes, the piece of paper says something that people have twisted into justification, but does that actually address the question? No, not at all. How can we be free if the government can take our rights away for many different reasons?
The problem is that if he's not impeached, he gets away free. If he's impeached, and we fight this spying, then we'll let the next people know that they can't do this.
If we ignore this, not only will our next leaders continue it, but Bush will go unpunished.
He's by far the worst president the USA has ever had. Not just in what he's personally done, but in the lack of respect for law that he's instilled into the office and various three-letter-agencies.
If, on the other hand, he was stripped of power, even a day before the end, not allowed to pardon anyone, and made liable for criminal lawsuits... Ideally, he'll get tortured in Gitmo, that would be the ultimate payback for the sell-out.
Yeah, looking at it, it would seem like a win to standardize. But some companies felt otherwise, or saw a wider market, and wanted to ship multiple OSes. Microsoft punished these companies by canceling the standard volume discounts of up to 90%, effectively making the company pay retail - far more than its competitors.
In one world, paying everyone not to deal with your competitor is good business. In that world, his paying people to hunt near your house is justifiable as well.
We aim for a more civilized world. Where you can't just pay for the elimination of a competitor. Who cares if this is ultimately more free for business when we've discovered that it inevitably leads to abuse?
It's illegal to discriminate based on the color of an employee's skin. While this does restrict businesses and even no-doubt prevent some legitimate concerns like hiring to match the drapes, it's a value that society as a whole believes is worth enforcing. Monopoly-busting rules are the same. You're enjoying the protection of law (your competitor can't just kill you for interfering) but harming pretty much everyone else through blackmail (playing price games in a cornered market for essentials like food or housing is essentially blackmail) isn't something that law was intended to support.
Only if you deal with that company. If a consortium of banks paid the fee I could deal with them, or with a bank that had not and was either adopting new technology, fighting the patent, etc.
If we're taxed, we feel the burn regardless.
As for patents, they are *all* bad. Some are more abusive than others, but even the most inventive patent is still a government granted monopoly that disallows independent creation. (Unlike copyright.) There are arguments that many fields require this, but fuck them. Nobody has ever come to me and asked if it'd be easier to start a business if they disallowed my competition, nor would I ask. It's sick that we grant this to anyone.
Capitalist countries don't have patents. Period.
It's not a restatement of the implied license, it's a restatement of copyright law. No license is required for any software.
However, some companies won't sell software contracting explicitly with the buyer. That may require the buyer limit usage of that copy, but failing to do so is a problem of the licensee, not the inadvertent user.
As for warranties, don't sell your software (or supply it as a service) and you can't be held liable for accidental damages, lost usability, etc.
Also, there's no way at all to disclaim liability from intentional damages or willful ignorance leading to damages. Despite any EULA, software that intentionally damaged your PC or data would be treated like a Trojan horse, as it is. 99% of the use of warranty disclaimers is to lie to customers who don't understand the protections offered by law. Everyone disclaims everything allowed, but that isn't much really. When you sell something you are required to provide what you promise.
US Copyright law goes so far as to specifically allow required copies (installing to HD, running from RAM, writing to swap) of software. If you have to install it to use it, that copy is legal.
You only need a license if you're going to do something that would otherwise infringe. That's why you don't have to accept the GPL to use the software, but do to distribute it (because that's normally a copyright violation). Moreover, if it's true that the GPL doesn't form a contract with end users
RedHat and other companies who sell a distribution of GPLed (or otherwise) software likely do have an obligation to provide what you paid for. They disclaim warranty on the individual software components (which they aren't selling - see the freely downloadable version of Redhat) but are responsible for making sure the CD they deliver won't ruin your CD drive, that it contains what they say it will, etc. You could sue RedHat for providing a blank CD, but not because Apache crashed.
They're totally different things. A Shrinkwrap EULA purports to change the nature of a preexisting sale, and is not voluntary. It further restricts access to the thing you purchased until you agree to be bound by additional restrictions.
Depriving someone of the ability to use the rights they legally have is actionable.
The GPL on the gripping hand, is a voluntary license offered for those who want extra rights. It acknowledges specifically that you do *not* need to even read the GPL to use the software.
EULA: Secret, withholds lawful rights, non-voluntary
GPL: voluntary, offers only additional rights, not secret
Shrinkwrap EULAs are not valid, the GPL is.
Those flash drives are easily available, that autorun things. If an attacker wanted that feature, they'd buy that brand. As for picture frames, it seems easy to imagine the same process that puts the trojan on, at the factory, also flipping that bit.
Windows autoruns things that want to be autorun. You are right that there's a small roadblock in there, but obviously not much of one.
And most definitely you cannot tell by physically looking at the media, if it contains an autorun script.
Honestly, think about it. You aren't saying Windows doesn't have a gaping security flaw. You're merely saying that the attacker would need to find the right brand/model of drive. You're trying to imply that Windows is safer because of this. Really it's less secure because people have a false sense of security - most USB drives won't autorun, only the ones picked to contain trojans will.
You told people USB drives can't contain autorun scripts. You're wrong. You told people they're safe. They aren't.
Perhaps if you hadn't opened your message with "Bullshit" and closed with "more Slashdot FUD", and of course, been wrong in between, you wouldn't look so silly right now.
If you're unwilling to consider the actual security implications of trusting the foreign device to honestly self-report, you're just another "me too" guy towing the Microsoft line.
Thanks. As a Vancouverite, I appreciate you staying away from this boondoggle that was forced upon us.
The Olympics will be welcome when there's no special copyright protection. When they pay for the space they use, as any other event would, not with tax money.
Personally, I don't think an event counts as 'Olympic' unless it's in Greece, and you perform naked. I'd like to see a challenge to the name from a Greek group trying to hold an authentic Olympic event.
Rare, are they?
And obviously, it'd be impossible to tinker with the firmware such that 'normal' USB drives self-reported as CDs...
You're obviously the one tossing around FUD. Shame on you.
If the auction is going and going, with a five-minute extension per bid, then it's because the price is changing. How long could it go on, with twelve minimum increments per hour, without the price going crazy? Especially because the minimum is minimum, not maximum. It'd be much faster if someone entered a higher bid.
So you'd know, to an hour or two, when it'd be over. Seems reasonable for week-long auctions.
The sale price on eBay *should* approach bricks & mortar stores, minus something for delay, fraud, etc, as you mention. If not, there's a difference to be exploited.
It really is retarded to buy a currently made item on eBay, and face the 25% chance of being fucked over, than to go to a store and buy it. That's why much of eBay is people selling out-of-print crap, things you can't just go buy.
In other words, they know they're asses, and they try to make excuses.
I'm not protecting christians here, trust me. But that was then and this is now. It's possible to stir any crowd into a bloody rage. Concert goers, sports fans, etc.
But islam is practiced by a lot of people who advocate killing the unbelievers for small things like publishing a picture. There truly is a worse religion, it is Islam. Sure, there may be ones that were worse, or smaller ones that are worse, or non-religiously affiliated things that are worse, but for a current large organized religion, as practiced, islam is by far the most brutal.
Of course, religion is for people who've chosen to abdicate any responsibility for their actions for the most part, so they're all horrible things. Just not currently as horrible as islam is (to most followers) now.
Yeah, Gandhi really had to watch out for that too. Or actually, he didn't, because he didn't advocate slaughter at all.
A religion isn't just a book, it's the people who practice it. Enough of those people say islam is a way to justify killing. I think you were outvoted.
Of course, all religion is indicative of severe mental defect so christians aren't better, just less kill-someone-and-drag-his-headless-corpse-through-the-city-ish.
Takes the psychology out of it? What's this?
Regardless, snipers are cheats. They're part of the eBay culture of fraud, where people post revenge feedback, etc. Anything goes.
Nearly the same price as a 5.25" floppy drive. And about as useful. They're so fragile that I wouldn't put anything I wanted on one...
So he could pay $20 (+s&h) to get a dongle-adapter. Or, he could go to gamecopyworld.com and get a dongle-remover for free. And no delivery delay.
At times government oppression has been worse, but never before has the government had both the will and the ability to perform almost total surveillance. With speech-recognition scanning all of our phone calls, pretty soon listening in on public spaces, etc, it's going to be harder to do anything the government doesn't like. You know, like protest. Or vote for someone else.