If you get an answer, can you ask the same people why you'd WANT a 0-day product with complete lack of public testing? That makes me more curious than anything else.
Hey, I have this great new game/car/house for you. Give me the full cost price of it and you can have it on the first day. Testing? Oh, no, sorry, not until you've paid for it. Other reviews? No, we bought them all and/or embargoed them to prevent the wrong kind of review getting out. Other users? There are none, you'll be our guinea pig.
Can't imagine why people think it's a good idea at all.
The UK did not want to give the vote to prisoners. They voted against it through to the EU courts.
The EU said they had to.
Now they have to.
Immigration is the one in the news at the moment. We pretty much have to allow any EU member's civilians (including the new members and future member) to settle in the country without question and it's ILLEGAL for us to impose immigration limits or demands on them (such as proving they have a skill / job / money / etc. like you often have to to live in foreign countries), because the EU say so.
I'm not saying I disagree or not (my girlfriend is European and wouldn't be in this country without that same rule, and at least it's kicked the whole "there are no jobs" arguments into touch as people are FLOCKING to our country to take up all the jobs that "don't exist".... and yet still our UK benefits scroungers use it as an excuse for sitting on their backside), but again the EU overrides our highest powers.
And, yes, technically somewhere, we've signed away that right to the EU so they can override things but that means nothing - the basic question is can the EU override individual member state's desires? Yes. They can. Because by joining the EU you tend to have agreed to them doing so.
And, if anything, the UK is the biggest exception to the rules as we fight them on an awful lot of issues and yet politicians keep discouraging us from leaving the EU while the UK public has asked for a vote on the discontinuance of EU membership many times. It's going to be the next election "big issue", that's for sure.
Then argue for mistrial. Argue for undue process. Argue for an unfair trial. Argue against the law that says you can't have one lawyer represent two people in a case (sorry, "class action lawsuit"? Why wouldn't you allow this unless there was a specific conflict of interest? And in this case, the "interest" is in bringing the same guy in both cases for the same crime. "Sorry, your honour, but my opponent can't have that lawyer as he once represented someone in a similar case?", no not unless there's a specific conflict of interest).
The problem is, all of those things - with even the crappiest lawyer in the world - can be argued against and changed. This is why court decisions get appealed all the time. Hell, leave them until after the trial and then call mistrial and they HAVE to do it all over again with changes made. But that's not what's happening.
Hell, if you did it properly, he could have had the trial already in his absence by appointing a lawyer. It's not unheard of. Fact is, he's not "on trial" yet. Because he's failed to even allow himself to be questioned. He's fallen at the first hurdle, which is why all the above suggestions of mine haven't happened - there's not yet any venue to argue that to.
And at the end of the day, he's hiding out in an embassy in a foreign country - who will charge him with skipping bail the second he emerges - in order to avoid even the questioning. The "trial" has not yet even started. You can be tried in court "in absentia" if their case was that cast-iron, but they haven't. Not because the case is that cast-iron but because they haven't even got close to doing anything but follow procedure - investigate allegations, get both sides of stories, see if charges are viable, press for them in a court.
He's in no worse a position than the guy that run off to Europe with a schoolgirl. No charges existed but they can still do the media talks, the police hunt, arrest him, question him. "Arrest" != "conviction" or even "charge". You arrest someone to investigate a potential crime and peruse the possibility that charges are necessary. Assange is avoiding ARREST. Which is, in itself, a criminal offence.
Not really. "Ireland" isn't part of the UK. It's not British either.
UK = United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (AN ENTIRELY SEPARATE THING!) GB = England, Wales, Scotland.
Ireland is Irish, uses Euros, has its own government, and is independent of the UK. That's part of what the whole historical Irish/UK problems were about - an independent Ireland free of UK interference and "giving back" Northern Ireland (AN ENTIRELY SEPARATE THING) to Ireland (Eire).
The Garda are Irish. It's the UK spying on the Irish. Which we've been doing since the 70's at least, after all the trouble with the IRA blowing up our buildings and killing our civilians (and, obviously in modern times, us doing things just as illegal back to them).
We just have an internationally-recognised agreement that we do not enter it without permission. It belongs to the UK. We even considered forcing the embassy out of OUR building so that he was no longer in "the embassy". It was legal, but it's dubious and probably immoral and we didn't do it.
But an embassy is the soil of the host nation. There's just an agreement that we won't enter without permission unless there are extraordinary circumstances (e.g. a fire).
Except when he'll rot in jail for a year or two and THEN get tortured by the CIA.
Point is, he's achieved nothing that puts people on his side, especially not the Brits who are paying to supervise the embassy, in trade negotiations with the embassy, and who'll have to charge him when he comes out, and then inevitably jail him BEFORE doing exactly what we were doing anyway (which, I'd like to point out, we followed through as much as legally possible, even refusing several extradition orders on the basis that they contained minor errors, etc.).
We did everything legally possible to help him. When it got to the point where he was having to go anyway, he screwed us. And is STILL costing me money. And will continue to for many years, most likely. And what's he achieved? From being "on the run", he's stuck in an embassy with no escape. Even the latest whistleblower who has REAL cause to worry did better than that and didn't cost me a penny and is currently in a country prepared to host him.
Assange is now just a verified criminal, in a confined space, under constant police surveillance, and going to go to court/jail AND be required to show up in Sweden. Before he was just required to show up in Sweden. I don't get how that's NOT stupid.
To answer the charge of skipping bail, contempt of court, etc. Then he can - LIKE HE ALWAYS COULD HAVE - argue that he should be legitimately put on trial in a "friendly" country. And he'll go through the legal system, same as anyone else. And then the legal system will decide if the law allows him to or not (I imagine it would be hard to argue UK jurisdiction over Swedish charges performed by an Australian, but it's not infeasible if enough prejudice could be proven).
Problem is, you didn't want to argue that several years ago. And you skipped bail, so we have no reason to believe it's not a delaying / avoidance tactic. So now you'll stand in a British court, probably be imprisoned by us for skipping bail for so long and so deliberately, and then WILL NOT ESCAPE our custody if they are required to hand you over to the Swedish anyway. Which they probably are, given the way EU law works.
Fact is, I'd have had much more respect if he'd done his play to cameras, and then just followed through the legal system properly. We would have all kept an eye on it to make sure suspicious things didn't happen, and at no point would you have broken the law.
But he didn't. He went through the courts and when he didn't get the answer he wanted, he skipped bail deliberately. So go rot in jail for a year or two FIRST and then you can come back to the original rape-charge issue and we'll think about it.
I totally, 100% believe in extra terrestrial life. The Drake equation and simple statistics says that there has to be some - even if it's just a scientist "hunch".
But I cannot fathom why people think they are visiting us in little spaceships that happen to look EXACTLY like the movie little space ships (yet, before movies, reports all looked like descriptions from popular sci-fi books, etc.).
I can't walk down a street without being caught on a thousand CCTV cameras. I wouldn't be able to send up a Chinese lantern without the local police coming to find out who did it. Hell, if someone comes in and is spotted by the military the first we're likely to know is from the fallout when they try to blow it out of the sky thinking it's an enemy deviating from their airspace.
Yet, somehow, these aliens with inter-system flight technology always seems to be "just" caught in blurry, out-of-focus, tiny image as just a fleeting dot and yet nobody else in the area notices anything at all. Until you ask them. Then they saw five guys in silver suits.
I believe in "U.F.O."'s (the unidentified object kind). The theories for what they are is absolute crap as they have only ever turned out to be aircraft, sunlight, camera aberrations, and hoax.
Hell, some bloke phoned 999 in the UK and reported a strange light in his garden hovering over him. Ten minutes later he called back to apologise as it was "The Moon". The clip plays on every "funny clip" show on TV. When you factor that into UFO reports, you really have to wonder how the human race manages to get to work in the mornings.
A determined idiot can be an almost unresolvable roadblock.
It doesn't mean we should stop beating sense into them, though. I find it much more scary that something like 50% of Americans believe that astrology has some effect on their life... at least these people are basing their prejudices on something that appeared (for a while, in a modern environment) scientifically plausible.
Sorry, but until we can eliminate the UFO-believers( and the astrologers and palm-readers and the conspiracy theorists, and whole swathes of others) we don't stand a chance of having no misinformation being spread by idiots about health-scares.
Go ask people about swimming on a full stomach. Then find out the truth (it makes no difference!). We're in the Misinformation Age.
How much did you get out of the Iceland banks when they failed? What about the banks rescued by the UK government? We had exactly the same things said and lots of people lost LOTS of money thinking their savings/pensions/life insurance/current account was actually worth something and would be rescued to that degree.
And government bailouts are NOT guaranteed. At least one such bank used by UK people was refused a government bailout. Such rules about how much a bank must hold in reserve are now stricter in the UK precisely BECAUSE ordinary people lost lots of money only a handful of years ago because everyone thought the banks were invincible and "couldn't fail". And they failed because someone scammed some OTHER rule about how to lump together bad debts.
Fact is, the "guarantee" comes out of your tax anyway. So you're still paying for it, just en-masse and in an insurance kind of way.
Again, it's not "unique". And "backed up to $100,000" means nothing if you can just print money, give you a $100,000 "note" and send you on your way. The fact that it's worth precisely zip afterwards is neither here nor there, apparently (see: Zimbabwe).
And a BitCoin exchange isn't a bank. It's an exchange. How much do you get back from the stock exchange or from your monetary exchange when the stock price drops or the Zimbabwean dollar goes bust? Same answer. Nothing.
The only thing I can find that's "unique" in your post is really the fact that there isn't a Bitcoin "bank" as such. But I'm not sure it's all that difficult to draw parallels between the banks and exchange because you yourself have done the same.
If you're anti-Bitcoin, fair enough. Nobody's forcing you.
But please explain how this is any different to "normal" banking, for example.
Just the other day several banks in the UK went out of action and you couldn't get to your money. It's so common that it barely merits a news story any more, except to warn people not to try to put things on their card that day etc.
I have real trouble finding what's *unique* about a perceived problem with Bitcoin, compared to anything else.
Source-address spoofing just shouldn't be happening. Whether on the smallest or largest networks, why would you let someone fabricate any IP address and pass it along as if it were part of your network?
First rule on almost all firewalls is to block all such "foreign" packets.
The big carriers are really the problem here - they should just turn off network access to anyone who provides traffic to/from systems that they are not registered in their AS for. After an hour of being offline, they'll soon push the message to clean up what IP's are talking out from your networks all the way down to individual leased line customers.
The whole argument is really a question of whether you're "renting" or "buying", not what you can do with it after. And it's hard to "buy" a copyrighted work of any kind without buying the FULL rights, which include the right to redistribute (i.e. selling the game as your own).
Games, movies, books are much closer to "renting" rights than an outright purchase. It's like trying to "sell" your leased car. The people with the lease agreement with you will come looking for their car and/or cash equivalent via the courts.
Except when a sale is a rental under a lease agreement, which is basically what the Steam EULA is.
The question is not "whether you own something you've bought" but "did you *buy* it, or just agree to a copyright-usage license?"
Pretty much, we know how the answer should go in law (the same way this article says they've gone). Yes, it would be lovely to "own" a game. But you don't. You don't own a movie, or many other things either.
Like the GPL, the law is only going to give one answer, it just takes several people with lots of money with ideas otherwise to actually make the courts bother to state it explicitly in certain cases.
Is it just me that sees ReactOS as a "lab" kind of software - it's theoretical and doesn't follow the outside reality.
I can't see how it can ever catch up to, say, a lightweight virtualised Linux with Wine for those people who want to avoid a Windows licensing fee. The overhead of a full Linux is absolutely minimal on modern hardware while the hardware support and control is phenomenal.
Sure, I imagine purists prefer a ReactOS but it's really only for the purists and always has been. Which is probably why Wine etc. get much more of a developer following.
"Some idiots will say to email the CEO, but if you're lucky, that will just get down to the lawyer, and the lawyer will already be miffed because you've piled more work on him from above. Better to go straight to the lawyer."
You think the CEO reads anything like a publicly-accessible email account? It all goes to "the right department" exclusively via some email-reading minion. You think emailing the CEO of Dell about a laptop return is going to make them go yell at a lawyer?
Email the company at head office and it will end up at the person they deem right to deal with it. If you yell a lot it might go to their line manager. It won't get close to an expensive lawyer (or even legal department) until you get a court order at the very least.
Welcome to the world of modern customer service, where "the boss" is the guy who was good at answering the phones last month, and you can never get hold of him anyway.
As someone who - in the past few months - has complained to Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (who demanded tax returns going back 6 years despite me not being required to file them any more), had their car insurance settle out of court after cancelling my contract - without notice - in breach of contract (and actually a shed-load of other laws), and have several companies referred to Trading Standards (some of which dragged on for months), I can tell you that not until there's a real, genuine threat of a lawsuit (i.e. a court paper coming through the post) will anyone even CLOSE to a legal professional get involved.
The first guy is always useless. Their boss is usually useless. But in any organisation of a decent size, there are dozens of layers in between. If you're really lucky, you'll get a letter signed "on behalf of" (P.P.) a qualified lawyer by his legal secretary who signs a pile of similar papers every day, from those people who bother to complain enough that they probably have a genuine cause but it's just not worth chasing to court.
People do not know how to complain. Of course, you address your letter to Head Office but if you think for a second that a corporate lawyer does more than flick the paper onto a pile for some underling to sort out, until an actual court-stamped paper comes to them, then you're sadly mistaken.
And, fuck email. In the UK - at least, I assume the US is similar - every company has to provide a postal address of their head office on demand. It's a legal requirement (and I've got a company fined for failing to do just that while I was complaining about something else). Emails go to an underling that sits in front of an inbox and spam folder all day. Letters are verifiable proof-of-receipt and instantly admissible in court and undeniable if you send by a recorded delivery.
They also get more attention because every idiot can send an email to complaints@ or headoffice@ but not every idiot will bother to send you a letter stating in black and white that you are wrong and these are the facts as they know them. And you have to READ THE DAMN THINGS. Emails you can scan for keywords and auto-reply from a standard template . Letters some git has to type up a reply to, print it out, address it and send it back to you.
I am a stick-in-the-mud. I admit it. But the very first time I got the Beta, I specifically hunted down how to turn it off BEFORE I had even read an article. It was unreadable not because of bugs or beta-ness (who here hasn't trialled beta software or written their own?). It was just poor in a multitude of ways that another month's work for your designers won't fix.
But that's not the problem. Half of people will love it, half will hate it. The problem I have is even the implication of "it'll go ahead anyway but maybe we'll tweak it to shut you up". You just don't have the userbase size or user attitude to pull that off.
You rolled out a beta site to PAID customers like me (I may not have given YOU money, but I voluntarily donated to your predecessors to get rid of adverts and stay on old shitty designs once already). Without asking. Without much of a hint that it was even on the horizon (I heard other commenters getting it). With option to turn off, buried under a UI I didn't know or want, but then you ploughed on and folded 25% of your users in.
And then didn't give a shit about the "Fuck off beta" cookie NEVER holding on any of my devices and requiring me to fuck it or the message off every visit. You didn't notice nor care as the boycott began. You let it build to spoil EVERY article before even an official comment, let alone an article. Even that crappy "hoodie" sales video didn't take that long to get a response.
You don't care. What I take from this official notice is that you are going to plough on ahead, and that crippling a quarter of your users for weeks on end is "necessary" (there I was thinking that running beta.slashdot.org separately until commenters were telling people to use it would be better, no?)
I think you forgot that your audience probably include people who roll out larger websites on a daily basis, and people who have survived any number of enforced OS and design changes by being able to fix broken shit for themselves. This is our leisure site. We don't want to, and won't, tolerate shit and excuses that exist to make your boss's site look like his golfing pal's, and you not wanting to admit that the redesign was TOTALLY blind, without user input at the critical stage (before you spend money), and would now make you look silly after spending $X on it to not roll it out anyway (what else would you put on your performance review?).
We don't give a shit about that. We're easy to satisfy. Post the articles that we submit and rate ourselves in a boring old unmaintained interface. How fucking hard is that?
Only if you believe that they have these almighty processing abilities anyway.
All I've seen is them putting blackboxes into ISP's, large content providers and forcibly inserting what could be bog-standard commercial hardware into transit links.
And yet, when something like decent encryption comes up they spend inordinate efforts to place really weak backdoors into it rather than attacking it (either brute-forcibly or by hiring the right brains).
The more I see, the less I believe the "acres of datacentre" crap, and I never really believed it in the first place.
They say "it doesn't affect your statutory rights" because they have to. You STILL have the 2 years. They just give you one year of some "premium warranty". But nowhere are they allowed to imply, state, or contest that they are actually giving you a free 2 year warranty for defects anyway - because they are required to by law, whether they say it or not.
And Apple had to run a message on its UK frontpage stating exactly that, by court order, when it tried to argue otherwise.
Don't believe them when they tell you. Just ask for it in writing that they aren't going to fix it and/or report them to trading standards if they don't.
There's a big difference between what they want you to think and what's actually true and only an idiot would actually fall for it.
Eclipse is my saviour. I needed a UI to program under and I haven't really been happy with one since the pre-.NET versions of Visual Basic (horrendous language, lovely development environment for me - I honestly think we lost something in not taking that UI further in open-source development environments).
Got back into C99 and Eclipse with CDT was phenomenal. Bit of faffing with the config at first but I was able to get a development environment consistent across platforms, with all the tools you could ever want.
The debug UI is fabulous, to me. The customisability of the workspace (get out of my damn way and let me code, oh except for that one REALLY useful feature that's earned the right to be there all the time, etc.). In a way, it's my development "Opera" - hugely customisable to my particular odd way of working.
Plug it into gcc in its various flavours (native Linux, MinGW, Cygwin, etc.) and it's quite happy. Move your program to a Linux VM for testing and you can take the development UI with you if need be.
Plug in every kind of tool imaginable, including fairly decent versioning management (not its strongest suit but more than capable). Upgrade simply by making a copy of the eclipse folder and then running the upgrade over the top.
And - at the end of the day - when you have to write that Android wrapper for your program, or the website or online documentation of your masterpiece, you can do without even having to come out of it.
Eclipse is what got me back into my programming and allowed me to push out several apps for my employers on a whim. None of the other programs managed that.
And, best of all, it's free and keeps moving onwards. All the people I've heard whinge about Eclipse (which I've only been using since before Galileo) complain about it being heavy/buggy. It's something I've honestly not experienced and, damn, my buggy programming must test it to the limit sometimes. If you're developing on a "light" machine, I can't see how you're helping yourself. But I'm not using a supercomputer here, just a handful of fairly decent laptops / desktops.
I think Eclipse is a little like Windows. Keep it clean, don't experiment too much with random third-party junk, and make backups of the working config (so easy in Eclipse that I have a folder of every named release that I've ever used just in case I needed to rollback) and it'll stay up and stay working. Mess about with it too much and it'll turn into an unmanaged piece of junk.
I can't honestly say that I've ever seen it crash, though. And we're talking Windows (XP / 7) / Linux (Slackware and Ubuntu, several versions), desktop / laptop, old clunker and shiny new machine, and quite a lot of stuff plugged in (CDT, Android SDK, several SVN connectors as they've changed over the years, Valgrind, etc.).
A "perfect" boss does not need to instruct workers to wear a badge, need to know who you talk to, how often, where or how energetically, need to track everything, need to know how often / fast you walk around an office, who (or indeed) how much you stop to talk to.
Because he doesn't hire fecking idiots who he thinks need to be babysat by metrics in order to do their job. And he trusts them as professionals. And only needs bother even investigate if there are specific allegations or failings that he becomes aware of (and he WILL become aware of them if he's any kind of decent boss).
It's shit like that that propagates that entire fake management crap.
If you ever consider any of these things metrics even WORTH bothering to measure, you're a fecking idiot of a boss.
Slashdot Mirror
If you get an answer, can you ask the same people why you'd WANT a 0-day product with complete lack of public testing? That makes me more curious than anything else.
Hey, I have this great new game/car/house for you. Give me the full cost price of it and you can have it on the first day. Testing? Oh, no, sorry, not until you've paid for it. Other reviews? No, we bought them all and/or embargoed them to prevent the wrong kind of review getting out. Other users? There are none, you'll be our guinea pig.
Can't imagine why people think it's a good idea at all.
Which of the thousand examples do you want?
The UK did not want to give the vote to prisoners. They voted against it through to the EU courts.
The EU said they had to.
Now they have to.
Immigration is the one in the news at the moment. We pretty much have to allow any EU member's civilians (including the new members and future member) to settle in the country without question and it's ILLEGAL for us to impose immigration limits or demands on them (such as proving they have a skill / job / money / etc. like you often have to to live in foreign countries), because the EU say so.
I'm not saying I disagree or not (my girlfriend is European and wouldn't be in this country without that same rule, and at least it's kicked the whole "there are no jobs" arguments into touch as people are FLOCKING to our country to take up all the jobs that "don't exist".... and yet still our UK benefits scroungers use it as an excuse for sitting on their backside), but again the EU overrides our highest powers.
And, yes, technically somewhere, we've signed away that right to the EU so they can override things but that means nothing - the basic question is can the EU override individual member state's desires? Yes. They can. Because by joining the EU you tend to have agreed to them doing so.
And, if anything, the UK is the biggest exception to the rules as we fight them on an awful lot of issues and yet politicians keep discouraging us from leaving the EU while the UK public has asked for a vote on the discontinuance of EU membership many times. It's going to be the next election "big issue", that's for sure.
"Could the EU override the decisions of a sovereign country on a political issue?"
You obviously don't live in the EU. The answer, unfortunately, is "yes".
If military intelligence are using IE 10 with Flash enabled, they really need to drop the last half of their name.
Then argue for mistrial.
Argue for undue process.
Argue for an unfair trial.
Argue against the law that says you can't have one lawyer represent two people in a case (sorry, "class action lawsuit"? Why wouldn't you allow this unless there was a specific conflict of interest? And in this case, the "interest" is in bringing the same guy in both cases for the same crime. "Sorry, your honour, but my opponent can't have that lawyer as he once represented someone in a similar case?", no not unless there's a specific conflict of interest).
The problem is, all of those things - with even the crappiest lawyer in the world - can be argued against and changed. This is why court decisions get appealed all the time. Hell, leave them until after the trial and then call mistrial and they HAVE to do it all over again with changes made. But that's not what's happening.
Hell, if you did it properly, he could have had the trial already in his absence by appointing a lawyer. It's not unheard of. Fact is, he's not "on trial" yet. Because he's failed to even allow himself to be questioned. He's fallen at the first hurdle, which is why all the above suggestions of mine haven't happened - there's not yet any venue to argue that to.
And at the end of the day, he's hiding out in an embassy in a foreign country - who will charge him with skipping bail the second he emerges - in order to avoid even the questioning. The "trial" has not yet even started. You can be tried in court "in absentia" if their case was that cast-iron, but they haven't. Not because the case is that cast-iron but because they haven't even got close to doing anything but follow procedure - investigate allegations, get both sides of stories, see if charges are viable, press for them in a court.
He's in no worse a position than the guy that run off to Europe with a schoolgirl. No charges existed but they can still do the media talks, the police hunt, arrest him, question him. "Arrest" != "conviction" or even "charge". You arrest someone to investigate a potential crime and peruse the possibility that charges are necessary. Assange is avoiding ARREST. Which is, in itself, a criminal offence.
For future reference:
http://howbritishareyou.com/wp...
Not really. "Ireland" isn't part of the UK. It's not British either.
UK = United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (AN ENTIRELY SEPARATE THING!)
GB = England, Wales, Scotland.
Ireland is Irish, uses Euros, has its own government, and is independent of the UK. That's part of what the whole historical Irish/UK problems were about - an independent Ireland free of UK interference and "giving back" Northern Ireland (AN ENTIRELY SEPARATE THING) to Ireland (Eire).
The Garda are Irish. It's the UK spying on the Irish. Which we've been doing since the 70's at least, after all the trouble with the IRA blowing up our buildings and killing our civilians (and, obviously in modern times, us doing things just as illegal back to them).
A common fallacy. He's on UK soil.
We just have an internationally-recognised agreement that we do not enter it without permission. It belongs to the UK. We even considered forcing the embassy out of OUR building so that he was no longer in "the embassy". It was legal, but it's dubious and probably immoral and we didn't do it.
But an embassy is the soil of the host nation. There's just an agreement that we won't enter without permission unless there are extraordinary circumstances (e.g. a fire).
Except when he'll rot in jail for a year or two and THEN get tortured by the CIA.
Point is, he's achieved nothing that puts people on his side, especially not the Brits who are paying to supervise the embassy, in trade negotiations with the embassy, and who'll have to charge him when he comes out, and then inevitably jail him BEFORE doing exactly what we were doing anyway (which, I'd like to point out, we followed through as much as legally possible, even refusing several extradition orders on the basis that they contained minor errors, etc.).
We did everything legally possible to help him. When it got to the point where he was having to go anyway, he screwed us. And is STILL costing me money. And will continue to for many years, most likely. And what's he achieved? From being "on the run", he's stuck in an embassy with no escape. Even the latest whistleblower who has REAL cause to worry did better than that and didn't cost me a penny and is currently in a country prepared to host him.
Assange is now just a verified criminal, in a confined space, under constant police surveillance, and going to go to court/jail AND be required to show up in Sweden. Before he was just required to show up in Sweden. I don't get how that's NOT stupid.
He'll stand in a British court.
To answer the charge of skipping bail, contempt of court, etc. Then he can - LIKE HE ALWAYS COULD HAVE - argue that he should be legitimately put on trial in a "friendly" country. And he'll go through the legal system, same as anyone else. And then the legal system will decide if the law allows him to or not (I imagine it would be hard to argue UK jurisdiction over Swedish charges performed by an Australian, but it's not infeasible if enough prejudice could be proven).
Problem is, you didn't want to argue that several years ago. And you skipped bail, so we have no reason to believe it's not a delaying / avoidance tactic. So now you'll stand in a British court, probably be imprisoned by us for skipping bail for so long and so deliberately, and then WILL NOT ESCAPE our custody if they are required to hand you over to the Swedish anyway. Which they probably are, given the way EU law works.
Fact is, I'd have had much more respect if he'd done his play to cameras, and then just followed through the legal system properly. We would have all kept an eye on it to make sure suspicious things didn't happen, and at no point would you have broken the law.
But he didn't. He went through the courts and when he didn't get the answer he wanted, he skipped bail deliberately. So go rot in jail for a year or two FIRST and then you can come back to the original rape-charge issue and we'll think about it.
Yep. This is what annoys me.
I totally, 100% believe in extra terrestrial life. The Drake equation and simple statistics says that there has to be some - even if it's just a scientist "hunch".
But I cannot fathom why people think they are visiting us in little spaceships that happen to look EXACTLY like the movie little space ships (yet, before movies, reports all looked like descriptions from popular sci-fi books, etc.).
I can't walk down a street without being caught on a thousand CCTV cameras. I wouldn't be able to send up a Chinese lantern without the local police coming to find out who did it. Hell, if someone comes in and is spotted by the military the first we're likely to know is from the fallout when they try to blow it out of the sky thinking it's an enemy deviating from their airspace.
Yet, somehow, these aliens with inter-system flight technology always seems to be "just" caught in blurry, out-of-focus, tiny image as just a fleeting dot and yet nobody else in the area notices anything at all. Until you ask them. Then they saw five guys in silver suits.
I believe in "U.F.O."'s (the unidentified object kind). The theories for what they are is absolute crap as they have only ever turned out to be aircraft, sunlight, camera aberrations, and hoax.
Hell, some bloke phoned 999 in the UK and reported a strange light in his garden hovering over him. Ten minutes later he called back to apologise as it was "The Moon". The clip plays on every "funny clip" show on TV. When you factor that into UFO reports, you really have to wonder how the human race manages to get to work in the mornings.
A determined idiot can be an almost unresolvable roadblock.
It doesn't mean we should stop beating sense into them, though. I find it much more scary that something like 50% of Americans believe that astrology has some effect on their life... at least these people are basing their prejudices on something that appeared (for a while, in a modern environment) scientifically plausible.
Sorry, but until we can eliminate the UFO-believers( and the astrologers and palm-readers and the conspiracy theorists, and whole swathes of others) we don't stand a chance of having no misinformation being spread by idiots about health-scares.
Go ask people about swimming on a full stomach. Then find out the truth (it makes no difference!). We're in the Misinformation Age.
How much did you get out of the Iceland banks when they failed? What about the banks rescued by the UK government? We had exactly the same things said and lots of people lost LOTS of money thinking their savings/pensions/life insurance/current account was actually worth something and would be rescued to that degree.
And government bailouts are NOT guaranteed. At least one such bank used by UK people was refused a government bailout. Such rules about how much a bank must hold in reserve are now stricter in the UK precisely BECAUSE ordinary people lost lots of money only a handful of years ago because everyone thought the banks were invincible and "couldn't fail". And they failed because someone scammed some OTHER rule about how to lump together bad debts.
Fact is, the "guarantee" comes out of your tax anyway. So you're still paying for it, just en-masse and in an insurance kind of way.
Again, it's not "unique". And "backed up to $100,000" means nothing if you can just print money, give you a $100,000 "note" and send you on your way. The fact that it's worth precisely zip afterwards is neither here nor there, apparently (see: Zimbabwe).
And a BitCoin exchange isn't a bank. It's an exchange. How much do you get back from the stock exchange or from your monetary exchange when the stock price drops or the Zimbabwean dollar goes bust? Same answer. Nothing.
The only thing I can find that's "unique" in your post is really the fact that there isn't a Bitcoin "bank" as such. But I'm not sure it's all that difficult to draw parallels between the banks and exchange because you yourself have done the same.
If you're anti-Bitcoin, fair enough. Nobody's forcing you.
But please explain how this is any different to "normal" banking, for example.
Just the other day several banks in the UK went out of action and you couldn't get to your money. It's so common that it barely merits a news story any more, except to warn people not to try to put things on their card that day etc.
I have real trouble finding what's *unique* about a perceived problem with Bitcoin, compared to anything else.
Yep.
Source-address spoofing just shouldn't be happening. Whether on the smallest or largest networks, why would you let someone fabricate any IP address and pass it along as if it were part of your network?
First rule on almost all firewalls is to block all such "foreign" packets.
The big carriers are really the problem here - they should just turn off network access to anyone who provides traffic to/from systems that they are not registered in their AS for. After an hour of being offline, they'll soon push the message to clean up what IP's are talking out from your networks all the way down to individual leased line customers.
Try it when you've leased your car, though.
The whole argument is really a question of whether you're "renting" or "buying", not what you can do with it after. And it's hard to "buy" a copyrighted work of any kind without buying the FULL rights, which include the right to redistribute (i.e. selling the game as your own).
Games, movies, books are much closer to "renting" rights than an outright purchase. It's like trying to "sell" your leased car. The people with the lease agreement with you will come looking for their car and/or cash equivalent via the courts.
Except when a sale is a rental under a lease agreement, which is basically what the Steam EULA is.
The question is not "whether you own something you've bought" but "did you *buy* it, or just agree to a copyright-usage license?"
Pretty much, we know how the answer should go in law (the same way this article says they've gone). Yes, it would be lovely to "own" a game. But you don't. You don't own a movie, or many other things either.
Like the GPL, the law is only going to give one answer, it just takes several people with lots of money with ideas otherwise to actually make the courts bother to state it explicitly in certain cases.
Is it just me that sees ReactOS as a "lab" kind of software - it's theoretical and doesn't follow the outside reality.
I can't see how it can ever catch up to, say, a lightweight virtualised Linux with Wine for those people who want to avoid a Windows licensing fee. The overhead of a full Linux is absolutely minimal on modern hardware while the hardware support and control is phenomenal.
Sure, I imagine purists prefer a ReactOS but it's really only for the purists and always has been. Which is probably why Wine etc. get much more of a developer following.
"Some idiots will say to email the CEO, but if you're lucky, that will just get down to the lawyer, and the lawyer will already be miffed because you've piled more work on him from above. Better to go straight to the lawyer."
You think the CEO reads anything like a publicly-accessible email account? It all goes to "the right department" exclusively via some email-reading minion. You think emailing the CEO of Dell about a laptop return is going to make them go yell at a lawyer?
Email the company at head office and it will end up at the person they deem right to deal with it. If you yell a lot it might go to their line manager. It won't get close to an expensive lawyer (or even legal department) until you get a court order at the very least.
Welcome to the world of modern customer service, where "the boss" is the guy who was good at answering the phones last month, and you can never get hold of him anyway.
As someone who - in the past few months - has complained to Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (who demanded tax returns going back 6 years despite me not being required to file them any more), had their car insurance settle out of court after cancelling my contract - without notice - in breach of contract (and actually a shed-load of other laws), and have several companies referred to Trading Standards (some of which dragged on for months), I can tell you that not until there's a real, genuine threat of a lawsuit (i.e. a court paper coming through the post) will anyone even CLOSE to a legal professional get involved.
The first guy is always useless. Their boss is usually useless. But in any organisation of a decent size, there are dozens of layers in between. If you're really lucky, you'll get a letter signed "on behalf of" (P.P.) a qualified lawyer by his legal secretary who signs a pile of similar papers every day, from those people who bother to complain enough that they probably have a genuine cause but it's just not worth chasing to court.
People do not know how to complain. Of course, you address your letter to Head Office but if you think for a second that a corporate lawyer does more than flick the paper onto a pile for some underling to sort out, until an actual court-stamped paper comes to them, then you're sadly mistaken.
And, fuck email. In the UK - at least, I assume the US is similar - every company has to provide a postal address of their head office on demand. It's a legal requirement (and I've got a company fined for failing to do just that while I was complaining about something else). Emails go to an underling that sits in front of an inbox and spam folder all day. Letters are verifiable proof-of-receipt and instantly admissible in court and undeniable if you send by a recorded delivery.
They also get more attention because every idiot can send an email to complaints@ or headoffice@ but not every idiot will bother to send you a letter stating in black and white that you are wrong and these are the facts as they know them. And you have to READ THE DAMN THINGS. Emails you can scan for keywords and auto-reply from a standard template . Letters some git has to type up a reply to, print it out, address it and send it back to you.
People just don't know how to complain any more.
They operate greylisting, from the look of it.
It bounces with "retry" errors several times and then finally accepts it but your mail server does have to keep retrying.
I am a stick-in-the-mud. I admit it. But the very first time I got the Beta, I specifically hunted down how to turn it off BEFORE I had even read an article. It was unreadable not because of bugs or beta-ness (who here hasn't trialled beta software or written their own?). It was just poor in a multitude of ways that another month's work for your designers won't fix.
But that's not the problem. Half of people will love it, half will hate it. The problem I have is even the implication of "it'll go ahead anyway but maybe we'll tweak it to shut you up". You just don't have the userbase size or user attitude to pull that off.
You rolled out a beta site to PAID customers like me (I may not have given YOU money, but I voluntarily donated to your predecessors to get rid of adverts and stay on old shitty designs once already). Without asking. Without much of a hint that it was even on the horizon (I heard other commenters getting it). With option to turn off, buried under a UI I didn't know or want, but then you ploughed on and folded 25% of your users in.
And then didn't give a shit about the "Fuck off beta" cookie NEVER holding on any of my devices and requiring me to fuck it or the message off every visit. You didn't notice nor care as the boycott began. You let it build to spoil EVERY article before even an official comment, let alone an article. Even that crappy "hoodie" sales video didn't take that long to get a response.
You don't care. What I take from this official notice is that you are going to plough on ahead, and that crippling a quarter of your users for weeks on end is "necessary" (there I was thinking that running beta.slashdot.org separately until commenters were telling people to use it would be better, no?)
I think you forgot that your audience probably include people who roll out larger websites on a daily basis, and people who have survived any number of enforced OS and design changes by being able to fix broken shit for themselves. This is our leisure site. We don't want to, and won't, tolerate shit and excuses that exist to make your boss's site look like his golfing pal's, and you not wanting to admit that the redesign was TOTALLY blind, without user input at the critical stage (before you spend money), and would now make you look silly after spending $X on it to not roll it out anyway (what else would you put on your performance review?).
We don't give a shit about that. We're easy to satisfy. Post the articles that we submit and rate ourselves in a boring old unmaintained interface. How fucking hard is that?
Only if you believe that they have these almighty processing abilities anyway.
All I've seen is them putting blackboxes into ISP's, large content providers and forcibly inserting what could be bog-standard commercial hardware into transit links.
And yet, when something like decent encryption comes up they spend inordinate efforts to place really weak backdoors into it rather than attacking it (either brute-forcibly or by hiring the right brains).
The more I see, the less I believe the "acres of datacentre" crap, and I never really believed it in the first place.
And get stung for it.
They say "it doesn't affect your statutory rights" because they have to. You STILL have the 2 years. They just give you one year of some "premium warranty". But nowhere are they allowed to imply, state, or contest that they are actually giving you a free 2 year warranty for defects anyway - because they are required to by law, whether they say it or not.
And Apple had to run a message on its UK frontpage stating exactly that, by court order, when it tried to argue otherwise.
Don't believe them when they tell you. Just ask for it in writing that they aren't going to fix it and/or report them to trading standards if they don't.
There's a big difference between what they want you to think and what's actually true and only an idiot would actually fall for it.
Eclipse is my saviour. I needed a UI to program under and I haven't really been happy with one since the pre-.NET versions of Visual Basic (horrendous language, lovely development environment for me - I honestly think we lost something in not taking that UI further in open-source development environments).
Got back into C99 and Eclipse with CDT was phenomenal. Bit of faffing with the config at first but I was able to get a development environment consistent across platforms, with all the tools you could ever want.
The debug UI is fabulous, to me. The customisability of the workspace (get out of my damn way and let me code, oh except for that one REALLY useful feature that's earned the right to be there all the time, etc.). In a way, it's my development "Opera" - hugely customisable to my particular odd way of working.
Plug it into gcc in its various flavours (native Linux, MinGW, Cygwin, etc.) and it's quite happy. Move your program to a Linux VM for testing and you can take the development UI with you if need be.
Plug in every kind of tool imaginable, including fairly decent versioning management (not its strongest suit but more than capable). Upgrade simply by making a copy of the eclipse folder and then running the upgrade over the top.
And - at the end of the day - when you have to write that Android wrapper for your program, or the website or online documentation of your masterpiece, you can do without even having to come out of it.
Eclipse is what got me back into my programming and allowed me to push out several apps for my employers on a whim. None of the other programs managed that.
And, best of all, it's free and keeps moving onwards. All the people I've heard whinge about Eclipse (which I've only been using since before Galileo) complain about it being heavy/buggy. It's something I've honestly not experienced and, damn, my buggy programming must test it to the limit sometimes. If you're developing on a "light" machine, I can't see how you're helping yourself. But I'm not using a supercomputer here, just a handful of fairly decent laptops / desktops.
I think Eclipse is a little like Windows. Keep it clean, don't experiment too much with random third-party junk, and make backups of the working config (so easy in Eclipse that I have a folder of every named release that I've ever used just in case I needed to rollback) and it'll stay up and stay working. Mess about with it too much and it'll turn into an unmanaged piece of junk.
I can't honestly say that I've ever seen it crash, though. And we're talking Windows (XP / 7) / Linux (Slackware and Ubuntu, several versions), desktop / laptop, old clunker and shiny new machine, and quite a lot of stuff plugged in (CDT, Android SDK, several SVN connectors as they've changed over the years, Valgrind, etc.).
A "perfect" boss does not need to instruct workers to wear a badge, need to know who you talk to, how often, where or how energetically, need to track everything, need to know how often / fast you walk around an office, who (or indeed) how much you stop to talk to.
Because he doesn't hire fecking idiots who he thinks need to be babysat by metrics in order to do their job. And he trusts them as professionals. And only needs bother even investigate if there are specific allegations or failings that he becomes aware of (and he WILL become aware of them if he's any kind of decent boss).
It's shit like that that propagates that entire fake management crap.
If you ever consider any of these things metrics even WORTH bothering to measure, you're a fecking idiot of a boss.