You've always had the ability to not store credit card numbers on Steam, or remove stored ones. You've also always had the possibility to pay by things like Paypal etc.
The US currently has enough warheads to destroy the world several hundred times over. It could easily be argued that this is a little excessive unless aliens invade that can survive 100 nuclear obliterations of the earth and still pose a threat to what's left of the US by then (hint: which would be ash and dust and a few scraps of metal).
There may be a need to hold some weapons as deterrent - nobody really argues that once they have the capability - but do you *really* need the ability to kill everyone on the planet, yourself included, several hundred times over? Hell, even just knocking it down to "twice over" is more than enough security and needs a nuclear budget only 1/50th of what it is now.
Even the UK has the power to obliterate the planet if it really came to it, and we only have something like 5% of the US arsenal still active.
Plus, a single nuclear detonation as an act of war will pretty much end the planet. That's *why* the US/UK still have nuclear weapons - to say "Try it, even against only one country in a small way, and we'll just take everyone out." - which puts the fear of Armageddon into any idiot that things their Northern/Southern neighbours don't respect them enough. There's only been two quite small nuclear bombs dropped as an act of aggression in the entire history of the planet - both on Japan - which ended WW2 almost instantaneously. The next one pretty much *starts* and *ends* WW3.
Nobody with a brain is saying "get rid of all nuclear weapons". They're saying "Why the hell do you need *THAT* many when just one might end the world and just 2% of your stockpile will guarantee the end of the world on its own?", especially when your taxes are PAYING for those things to be guarded in case someone rogue *does* steal them. The more of them that exist, the more chances of accidents, terrorism, thefts, rogue agents, etc. being successful. Scrap most of them safely and get on with life with the same assurance that you can eliminate all life that you had before.
Ring up all the credit-card companies and tell them that Facebook Inc. (or whatever company name does the handling for them) is not to be dealt with by European countries until they have settled their outstanding lawsuit for trading in the EU without complying with EU legislation.
Being in the EU, the banks, credit card companies, PayPal, etc. would be obliged to act on such court orders (which are really nothing more than seizing funds made and held in the EU until the EU courts are satisfied that everything is above-board) in the same way that they would be obliged to freeze accounts related to criminal activity which happens every day (for everything from local drug dealers to relatives of Gadaffi).
Facebook would lose ~50% of their direct income immediately and be racking up the fines required to actually release those funds every day.
People think that just because you're international you can't stop people trading. The point is that people who *trade* in the EU are making money from it, and you can stop that money directly without having to fight against DNS-bypassing clients. If they weren't trading in the EU, it probably would be a hundred times more difficult to stop but even then - you can make it extremely tricky for a large company like Facebook by doing things like applying for their CEO to be extradited on charges, freezing their accounts, convicting them in their absence (and thus preventing travel to an awful lot of countries), etc.
You're doing business in the EU. You can break EU law if you really want but the fact is that it's an incredibly stupid things to do and will come back on you ten times harder.
MS traded in the EU and broke our laws. We fined them millions of Euro's that they had to pay. If they'd refused (and they did put up a bit of a fight), you can just embargo their products, seize their European assets, and chase them through international courts because as soon as you do *business* in a country, you come under it's jurisdiction.
In the worst case, I'm sure that blocking DNS would be the last resort and a bit pointless. But they sure can deal you a lot worse problems before that happens, even if you don't have *permanent* assets in the country by stopping EU businesses like credit card companies, etc. from dealing with you or your subsidiaries.
And it's this sort of ignorance that is the cause of most unusable UI's. (Besides the fact that I was using a tabbed browser that used Ctrl-N before any other browser even HAD the feature, let alone had "standardised" on a key for it, and that "Ctrl-C, Ctrl-N, Ctrl-V" can be typed with two fingers without leaving the bottom row to open up a new tab on an address).
I want it because I do, because of the way I work. And it really doesn't matter one jot to the application whatsoever. It doesn't care. It isn't running out of hotkeys. It doesn't need to affect a single other user or be the default. It isn't at all difficult to customise keys to your heart's content (hell, games were letting you redefine keys back in the days of the Spectrum, ffs). And the application really has no more work to recognise Ctrl-N than Ctrl-T if it's been programmed with the user in mind (i.e. letting me have whatever keymaps I want). And the browser I use lets me do that and thus DOESN'T get in my way.
Now think of all the foreign users for where Ctrl-T makes no sense whatsoever. Or the ones with different keymaps where certain combinations can really break the flow. But, no, Ctrl-T MUST be the only way to open a new tab besides the fact that the computer is just comparing against a number in its keymap. It's that sort of blinkered response that causes UI to become unusable over time. The ones that "standardise" on a different key to the one I've been using for years, or even one I *don't* want, aren't helping ME, the user.
Early word-processors copied the Lotus shortcuts because "all word-processors have standardized" on them at the time. When MS Office came along, it was handy to be able to select Lotus-compatible shortcuts, and it really was ZERO work for the programmers of MS Office. It actually CAUSED more work to make those things hard-coded and/or remove them in later versions for the now "standard" MS shortcut keys.
It's the entire point of my post: I can either re-train myself at great time / effort / expense / cost of mistakes on my own, or you can bloody make a customisable UI (that actually saves you more work than trying to break people's habits) that I can make one simple change and work as I've always done and NOT HURT ANYONE ELSE. One shortcut key isn't a problem - but the shortcut key, and the whole host of options, and the theme I use, and the removal of middle-click functionality that I don't use and gets in my way, and the disabling of mouse gestures, and... and... and....
You can either make it so the user can customise the UI, or pretend that you know better for every user, every workflow, every computer. You have to be an arrogant ass, or head of Apple, to suggest that the last is a good option.
If it takes me longer to get used to an interface than the interface will save me during its lifetime, then it's pointless to use it. It doesn't matter who I am. Novice computer users may only run one or two programs, and those all from the desktop, but they will struggle if you change things. Advanced users might have 10 common programs and dozens of handy little programs and utilities and you can't put them all on the desktop. So the novice user will acclimatise at about the same pace to a new interface as an advanced user. First rule of UI: Don't piss off the established / advanced user, or cater only for them.
Similarly, if the interface costs me more in CPU, loading times, hunting-the-program times etc. then it's pointless. It's like defragging a modern laptop hard drive - the time I save in less seeks is VASTLY outweighed by the time it takes the damn thing to defrag. I really don't need or want fancy Aero-accelerated sidebars and clocks, thanks. No, honestly. No matter how cool they are they will get switched off as one of the first things I do.
Although there are obviously reasons for GUI's aimed at other uses, every machine I have is set up to do what I want as quickly as possible and no messing about. Fancy graphics are disabled. Stupid menu items are removed (Help on the Start Menu in XP? Just how often did ANYONE ever use that?). Timeouts for UI elements are set to their lowest (e.g. Start Menu flyouts in XP). Desktop elements that are unnecessary are removed (everything from screensavers to backgrounds to sounds to anything that tries to throw crap on my taskbar at all).
"Intelligent" menus that adjust to my usage are disabled (*I* can't predict what menu items I will need next, or most, so I'm *certain* that it can't either). Shortcut keys are used infinitely more than browsing through a menu for the right option (so even changing a keyboard shortcut to something new messes me up for almost all future versions of that UI - I still have to edit Opera's config so that Ctrl-N gives me a new tab and not a new window and it's been like that for about 5 versions now). Take note designers - no keyboard navigation from day one means I won't use it. If your desktop is too context-driven, keyboard navigation is impossible, nonsensical or too confusing.
Menu bars are flat colour. Window icons are simple and clean. Hell, give me a modern equivalent of the Windows 3.1 desktop (and by modern, I mean in what it can do, not what it looks like - I'm always scared of "Modern" themes and tend to stay on "Classic" themes for my entire usage of a computer) and I'll be more productive. "The desktop is a customisable programs window with subwindows" was always such a wonderful idea compared to "The desktop is a random dumping ground of whatever junk you or programs want".
I *will* happily spend some time customising a UI if you give me the option and most of those customisations will be to turn crap off. I don't want to do two clicks to get to a particular window of Office being open (Stupid task-bar "grouping" costs clicks and stops me finding the right file so I just Alt-Tab instead or turn it off). Is the Windows key or Ctrl-ESC REALLY the only option to open up the Start menu from the keyboard? How long would it take you to allow the user to customise that? Similarly, why isn't the Windows key the default to open menus in most Linuxes and why can't I even customise it to BE that key if I want?
What's quicker? Going into the Start menu using the mouse and waiting for menus to fly out and scroll down and search for the program I want, or just pressing the same keystrokes every time to get to it without having to explicitly suggest a keystroke for every program? (Hint: Start, P, I, O runs Opera for me unless I install another program starting with O into my Internet folder on my Start Menu - and YES - that categorisation is invaluable. From a clean desktop, I can start a handful of my programs quicker than they can load and sometimes quicker than the Start menu
For the police investigation on yourself that you weren't aware was in place? I don't think you *can* do that. You'd have to KNOW it was police property and KNOW it was part of an investigation and then wilfully destroy it JUST because it might incriminate you.
And after all, what you did was remove a suspicious unmarked device from your property that you didn't place there? You'd have to have one HELL of a lawyer to charge someone for interfering with a police investigation for them removing something that shouldn't have been on their personal property, that's like arresting someone for removing a deliberately-introduced virus on their machine that their AV picked up and charging them with interfering.
Personally, I'd just immediately phone the bomb squad and tell them I had a suspicious device attached to my car, get the street evacuated, get the news crews in and then let them explain what that suspicious device was. I bet you could get a thousand people and several fire crews to your house before someone could roll up to remove their device, especially if the car happened to be parked in a sensitive area, say the centre of a large city near your kids school.
But then, I live in London, and after the 80's and 90's with the IRA and the 00's with us inheriting America's terrorist paranoia, I bet I could cause more fuss that would immediately draw attention to dubious police practices in a matter of minutes than a post on Slashdot would do.
But more importantly: Have nothing to do with your drug-cartel cousin and anything connected with his activities or property. If you didn't notice the tracker, what else is stashed in that car, that's of interest to the police, that you also haven't yet noticed and couldn't explain away?
This relies on them even caring, the return address being even vaguely valid and them actually bothering to do more than just redirect incoming mail to/dev/null, let alone bothering to have someone on the payroll who will read emails from people they've spammed.
Because *OBVIOUSLY* it doesn't cost the service providers ANYTHING to go through all those DMCA notices, check the legal validity, ensure the content is on their systems, isolate it and remove, reply to the DMCA, handle appeals etc.
They make it sound like 100% of the burden is on the record companies, etc. when actually there's just as much hassle for everyone involved (courts included). What they've noticed is that there are JUST TOO MANY files out there that could be the valid subject of a legal DMCA notice but that neither they, the courts, or the service providers can really handle the sheer volume. So their complaint is to make someone else pay for it, in time, effort, money and liability when they get it wrong.
I don't think that stands up, really, as an argument. And it makes you wonder why they ever bothered at all. There are international users who will, just for mischief, repost anything that you don't like. And you'll struggle to take it down and will *never* legally stop them posting it somewhere else - or even the same place (it might not even be illegal in their country to "infringe" that copyright, for instance).
I don't think it's a valid response to the problems. Now, if you'd pushed for harsher sentences, greater fines, etc. to try to put people off repeat offending, then your argument would at least be consistent. PR suicide, but consistent. Their next step can really only be pushing for more punishment and harsher law (how they carries to international or anonymous users is left as an exercise to the user), or to realise that it was always a bit pointless to play Whack-a-mole over an MP3 that you're already making MILLIONS from.
The option "It's not working, so we want someone else to do our job and provide repercussions to people who pirate for us" isn't really sensible or logical.
"Polynomial time" does not necessarily mean "quicker than a computer" or even "quickly" or EVEN "slowly". It just means an amount of time proportional to the size of the stack to some power (squared, cubed, etc.)
Just because a human "can do it" doesn't mean that they did it in NP or even P. It just means they did it in a particular time for a particular example. The important thing is "What was that time compared to the size of the data"? I can handsort a stack of one cards just as fast as a computer. But when you get to 1,000,000 cards it's going to beat me. And when I get to 1,000,000,000 cards, I'll die before it even gets bored doing it. But that's not an answer.
The point is to find a way that tasks that currently take "size of problem to some power" time to complete can be done in significantly less than that (i.e. no powers, or even log time!) no matter how big the problem is scaled up to.
Humans lose at an awful lot of computational problems but only when they are scaled up. It's the scaling that concerns P=NP and the question itself is basically "can we STOP things that do that scaling faster than we could ever hope to catch up?" It's a way to do things that require n^26 operations to only need n, or log n, or some other non-polynomial time. The n itself doesn't matter one jot because that's only a SINGLE example of a particular type of that problem. If we crack how to remove those powers from the time taken, then any number of n won't really matter at all. But if we leave the powers try and try an n greater than a few dozen, we rapidly run into extreme amounts of trouble.
How do you stop a problem needing FOUR times the computing power just because you DOUBLED the size of the input? That's basically what P=NP solution finders are trying to answer.
Sorry, but the fact you just reduced the OP's entire personality to a four-letter acronym has just shown you up, more than the OP.
Hell, I'd be reluctant to work with you just on the basis that your first thought was "You sound like an INTJ". Do you do that when you interview people as well?
The simplest fool can ask a question that the greatest minds cannot answer. That, alone, makes it a poor hiring technique.
Those questions are not only petty, useless (because any idiot can "know" the answer without knowing a single other thing about programming, and yet someone who's programmed for 20+ years and is otherwise expert may still slip up and give a slightly "imperfect" answer that they would never actually write in a piece of production code if they were unsure) and out-of-date (seriously? XOR-swaps? Sort of thing people needed to do in the 70's when they ran out of registers but today? Just add another damn variable and make it easy to have your code read/ported by others, ffs. I had the answer, incidentally, but if I were replying to that question, 90% of my answer would be what a terrible, pointless question that was and show the million-and-one potential problems with the expected answer - non-portability for a start - when you could just add another variable at virtually zero-cost) but they provide absolutely no data to the interviewer at all.
An interview is there to weed out the wheat from the chaff. You can do it with tricksy questions, lateral thinking and riddles if you really want to but what you'll end up with are people who are good at answering tricksy questions, not seeing the obvious answer and who enjoy spending time solving riddles when they could take an easier, more sensible, path. It won't actually give you a good coder, necessarily, unless those attributes happen to collide in a single individual.
Personally, the guy who replies to those emails with "Sorry, but I don't see the point" (or doesn't reply at all) is more likely to have been a good coder than the guy who provides the pristine laterally-thought-out answer. That's never a good thing when it comes to job interviews because you're pushing away more good candidates than you're attracting. Can you seriously imagine a 40-year-experienced top-of-the-line mainframe coder stooping to answer silly questions like that as if they're the Holy Grail of interview technique? Would you make Dennis Ritchie or Linus Torvalds or Alan Cox or anyone of a million famous programmers go through that crap? *COULD* they even get past the first few rounds without just throwing it back in your face and working for your competitor instead? Does any decent cross-platform C source actually ever have to swap two variable's contents and if it does would anyone with a brain use a XOR-swap rather than an explicit one?
I think the principle of that interview technique is to look for the guy who provides the answers that nobody thought of but that's not necessarily what you want in a coder - it's much more of an executive exercise, as well as making MS/Google seem somehow elite ("Have you seen how cool/impossible/weird their hiring process is?" etc.).
It's like interviewing someone to be a meteorologist by giving them a pop-quiz on where the draughts are in your home and when Hurricane Albert hit in 1856 (or whatever). There might be someone who knows, but it doesn't make them good at their job.
British A-Level Computer Science papers included the question "Distinguish between batch and real-time processing" when I did it 15+ years ago. The answer? Batch is having all your records updated at a later date -for example, overnight (e.g. a bank's payment system for the day's transaction), real-time is doing the processing as the data arrives. Genuine CS-related question. Perfect CS-related answer that would get you top-marks on the paper at the time. Absolutely stone-cold useless when it comes to hiring 50 years ago, let alone today. Those interview questions are no different.
Now there is a difference between people who have studied / worked in a subject and those who KNOW the subject inside-out, but silly tangential quizzes are not the way to hire people unless you want silly tangential answers all the time. If I were managing Windows code, especially debug-testing code, and you put that XOR-trick in
So what do you do when the Windows bootloader has a bug that you can't fix, or sets up interrupt hooks for anything it likes (i.e. snooping on any data it wants without your OS being able to detect?), or fails to boot because it doesn't like a new piece of hardware etc.
That's not really a solution, more a temporary workaround, and of course we'd be able to get *something* working but that's not the point.
Most importantly, though, what if you DON'T HAVE an installation of Windows, don't want to buy one, bought the machine exclusively for Linux etc. If Windows 8 machines MUST have this secure boot thing to run Windows 8, does that mean we MUST boot Windows 8 on them even if we don't want to use it. That's the problem.
Sorry, but you're an idiot. If you dual-boot you can't be an idiot and have to be careful what tools you use to manage the disks. Letting disk corruption just sit there while you continue to use the system is not a "dual-boot" problem, but the problem of you not caring about your data's integrity.
"Grub wouldn't allow chkdsk to run"? Then you need to read the million-and-one articles on how to chkdsk your system when you're running GRUB and/or use the Windows boot CD as you're supposed to. This may involve reinstalling Grub but that's literally a two-minute job.
But apparently that's too much effort for the sake of your data integrity of a system that probably took 10-20 times as long for you to setup.
Dual-boot *isn't* the ideal choice for some. Nor is virtualisation. But if you are going to dual-boot you need to be more careful than just allowing disk corruption to build up, using the wrong tools, and not doing read/write disk checks that modify the MBR on the disk that you're booted from (at least without knowing so and being able to repair the MBR).
I'm sorry, but anyone that lets their Windows / internal servers be contacted by arbitrary packets from the Internet, or their systems allow execution by ordinary users of (at the very minimum, unscanned) email attachments, deserves everything they get.
This isn't news now and wasn't back 20 years ago. If you have to do more than just in a "just-in-case" firewall rule into your network equipment that automatically blocks this particular attack from local users (and which should be impossible to execute directly against the server remotely anyway), then you weren't really doing your job in the first place.
Next you'll be telling me that I shouldn't let filesharing ports open to the world.
As opposed to having to convict him in a foreign court in his absence where he'd be unable to put up any sort of defence if he didn't turn up? Because that's fair too.
Extradition has *ALWAYS* been allowed for suspected crimes. The problem is more whether the extradition arrangement takes account of whether the crime is able to be committed in both countries involved.
It's not like the UK are bowing down and throwing him to the Swedes in a game of catch - the UK police made them refile their order four times for inconsistencies and incompleteness and now the courts have ruled on what they do know. If the law says he has to be extradited, you can't break the law your country has signed up to - not without literally forcing through new laws just to handle this case. And it's *really* not important enough to worry about that.
At worst, a UK court could probably insist that Sweden can't let him be extradited anywhere else. They'd either have to agree or it would be somehow illegal for them to agree (i.e. they have treaties with the US that somehow override the EU rights granted to humans).
Nobody's throwing him to the wolves willingly, even if he cries like a boy that's sees one at every step. But then, when you deal in confidential military information, I'm more shocked that they haven't just put a bullet in his head quietly already. Nobody would really care or be surprised, especially if you brought out the "He was endangering the lives of 'Our Boys' with his antics" line.
Hell, the Russians did a lot worse to one of their former agents on UK soil in a crowded restaurant and we still haven't been able to do anything about that yet.
You can be extradited for a suspected crime - always have been able to. It's hard to only extradite convicted criminals without convicting them beforehand and in their absence, which is hardly fair.
I was once in an airport queue with an American friend who had, somehow, managed to bring a can of CS spray into a country where any sort of offensive weapon is illegal. CS spray is illegal for anything but police use over here. You will be arrested just for having it on you, whether you use it or not, whether it's for "self-defence" or not. It's just an instantaneous "arrest me".
They'd managed to bring it from the US, through all the "heightened" airport security post-9-11, onto a plane, into my country, through my airport security, carry it around London for several weeks in her handbag (including through museum entry security checks, public transport etc), and only because her friends spotted it when she opened her bag IN A LONDON AIRPORT as she headed home - specifically, the queue to security scanning - that anyone knew she'd had it.
In London, carrying CS spray is an instant arrest that would pretty much provoke an immediate armed response anyway, especially in an airport which is about the only place the average Brit would ever see live weapons in real-life (carried by the policemen).
We quietly and hastily had her dispose of it into the wheelie-bins used for over-size deodorants etc. (as you say, they're just a large, unchecked "trash can" full of material that you're NOT allowed to take on a plane because of it's contents or size, sitting in the middle of an airport foyer) and passed through the airport unhindered onto our destination.
God knows what happens in that bin. The incineration must be fabulous when they do it, because it could literally contain anything at all. And, as you point out, prime target to drop a couple of things in, along with a dozen or a thousand "innocent" items that your accomplices can put in there earlier in the day and be pretty much untraceable which one caused the explosion. Right by the entrance to a security queue which can take hours to pass through and contain thousands of passengers sounds pretty much perfect - and the risk is just that of dropping someone off at an airport and them dropping something in a bin designed for things to be dropped into anonymously, because those bins are not "airside".
- Install Opera. - Enable Opera Unite. - Configure the File Sharing Unite app (there's also ones designed for *exactly* what you are talking about, e.g. thumbnails, etc.) to point to your folder you want to share and allow the people you want / password you want. - Send them your Unite URL (they can open it from any browser) and stay online for as long as you want them to access your files.
You don't have to upload everything to a remote server. You don't have to do anything special. The tagging/comments would have to work in the Unite app but there's no reason that can't be done (or isn't already in some Unite apps) from what I can see.
But although you solve one problem, you don't really solve the problem that stops EVERYBODY doing this. 24/7 access is a pain. Bandwidth limits are a pain. People using your upload to look at your photos while you're online gaming is a pain (330,000 photos? Even someone browsing the thumbnails provided by your connection would make a huge dent in your ping) Managing access is a pain. Stopping people from blanket-downloading everything is a pain. Stopping them giving their crypto-signature to a friend who you then CAN'T distinguish from them is a pain.
You're really not proposing anything that isn't a) possible, b) out there already, c) couldn't be cobbled together in an afternoon by someone who can write shell-scripts and use freeware and d) not being used by anyone else for a number of reasons.
You've basically reiterated ideas present in the very first papers of the WWW, not to mention things like XML etc. Sure, you've slapped encryption into it but that's not different, technically, from handing someone a SSH key unique to them that only allows them access to their user's photos over SSH/SCP.
If people *needed* it, we could whip that up tomorrow, cover it in a commercial face, and bundle software that handled all the "SCP" side of things transparently. Fact is, few people would find it actually beneficial and those few would be the ones who would generally NOT want their upload flooded by their cousins downloading their wedding photos (home connections just aren't good for uploading, and if you have a server elsewhere, why not use it?!).
The option you REALLY miss is:
Use a remote dedicated server as a vital backup store that you really want to be using for those 1/3 of a million files anyway, and provide SCP and passwordless SSH keys to your friends so they can read-only access them as an added bonus.
Sure, it won't auto-thumbnail, but it would be a cinch with imagemagick utils and FUSE to make it auto-create thumbnails on-the-fly in particular folders and have some fancy bit of client software do automatic "Show the thumbnail folder first, show the real file if requested" but you can also do it manually - one folder named thumbnails that you tell them loads really quickly, one folder named "full-size" that you tell them should only be used for full-size image downloads.
(Hell, get them to plug-in one of those Windows-integrated SCP tools and they can map the server as a drive - one for thumbnails, one for full-size images - browse it in explorer and then just drag-drop the full-size ones they want to their own computer.)
It exists TODAY, NOW. You're just not using it. Those that are don't need anything particular, more complicated, fancy filesystems on their clients, upgraded OS concepts etc. A copy of WinSCP or a bit of freeware/shareware that maps SCP drives in Windows works perfectly. Hell, you could run the SSH server from your own machine if you were really sadistic and didn't care about your upload.
If it's such a ground-breaking, useful feature to you - why aren't you already doing it (given that you're on Slashdot, I'm presuming that doing - or finding someone to do - this sort of nerd-work is a walk in the park)?
"Everything is a file". That concept basically makes possible any number of extremely fancy ideas in an afternoon, especially if you can knock up scripts of a FUSE interface. And that's why most of those fancy ideas (e.g. WinFS) are virtually cancelled after billions in investment - because they rarely work better than something you can knock up in an afternoon after someone's explained what they want.
Herbal? The French word came from Latin (herba) originally, used by French without the h in the 12th century, the h got reinstated around the 15th century but the h got muted at that point until the 19th century. What you're claiming is more that the English stole the word solely from the French when actually it was more likely to have come from the Latin originally into both languages (given that Britain was under Roman and Anglo-Saxon rule long before we needed to pinch words from the French, and the latter from whom we get the language).
The Latin having an "h" on it means that the original pronunciation was not, in fact, h-less (because they pronounced their h's too), because the Latin was the original, not the French.
Similarly for "patent" which comes from "patentum" into both languages and pre-dates both English and French. But you may be *closer* on the ancient pronunciation of patent being "pah-tent" but then depends on finding someone who speaks fluent Ancient Latin and proves little (because I already said that both are accepted pronunciations).
And other comments on here from people working with other patent lawyers in the UK indicate the exact opposite in identical situations. Nothing to do with absolute pretension by any chance, borne on the back of one pronunciation being more "UK English", one being more "US English"?
You've made the classic mistake of thinking that anything in English is pronounced the same as anything that looks similar. Classic beginner's mistake.
(It may be a "minute" difference but it only takes a "minute" to spot that. *cough*)
Argh! Unpronounced "aitches" (and yes, that's the correct pronunciation of the letter H - don't put a "ha" on the beginning of it).
So annoying: "Would you like some erbal tea?"
1) I'm English. Get that crap out of my face. 2) Pronounce the damn word properly and not like you've had a mini-drop-out on your mobile phone while talking.
Both are accepted. I say "pay-tants", and I'm English. You'll probably find that "pa-tents" is the American English pronunciation. If you said "pa-tents", I'd assume you were American or heard the term from an American first, unless there were other signs that told me otherwise.
More importantly, you do realise that you're finding it shocking that the *original* language is pronounced differently to how you've been told to pronounce it yourself? Please go and look at how you pronounce aluminium, vehicle, and a host of other English words that had a perfectly accepted pronunciation until people started to "say them wrong".
Agreed. Any country that tolerates illegally-obtained evidence is only a step away from outright corruption.
In the UK, if your evidence was obtained illegally then not only do you suffer the appropriate sanctions for that, but ALL evidence gained that way is null and void when it comes to providing prosecutions - you basically wipe out the possibility of EVER prosecuting that person for whatever crime you had evidence of by doing anything illegal yourself. It's not good policing to wipe out all your evidence (including other, legally obtained, evidence) and provide your target with almost complete immunity from prosecution because you didn't get approval for your wiretaps etc.
Military things work differently in practice but even "officially" they are supposed to work the same way.
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You've always had the ability to not store credit card numbers on Steam, or remove stored ones. You've also always had the possibility to pay by things like Paypal etc.
The US currently has enough warheads to destroy the world several hundred times over. It could easily be argued that this is a little excessive unless aliens invade that can survive 100 nuclear obliterations of the earth and still pose a threat to what's left of the US by then (hint: which would be ash and dust and a few scraps of metal).
There may be a need to hold some weapons as deterrent - nobody really argues that once they have the capability - but do you *really* need the ability to kill everyone on the planet, yourself included, several hundred times over? Hell, even just knocking it down to "twice over" is more than enough security and needs a nuclear budget only 1/50th of what it is now.
Even the UK has the power to obliterate the planet if it really came to it, and we only have something like 5% of the US arsenal still active.
Plus, a single nuclear detonation as an act of war will pretty much end the planet. That's *why* the US/UK still have nuclear weapons - to say "Try it, even against only one country in a small way, and we'll just take everyone out." - which puts the fear of Armageddon into any idiot that things their Northern/Southern neighbours don't respect them enough. There's only been two quite small nuclear bombs dropped as an act of aggression in the entire history of the planet - both on Japan - which ended WW2 almost instantaneously. The next one pretty much *starts* and
*ends* WW3.
Nobody with a brain is saying "get rid of all nuclear weapons". They're saying "Why the hell do you need *THAT* many when just one might end the world and just 2% of your stockpile will guarantee the end of the world on its own?", especially when your taxes are PAYING for those things to be guarded in case someone rogue *does* steal them. The more of them that exist, the more chances of accidents, terrorism, thefts, rogue agents, etc. being successful. Scrap most of them safely and get on with life with the same assurance that you can eliminate all life that you had before.
Ring up all the credit-card companies and tell them that Facebook Inc. (or whatever company name does the handling for them) is not to be dealt with by European countries until they have settled their outstanding lawsuit for trading in the EU without complying with EU legislation.
Being in the EU, the banks, credit card companies, PayPal, etc. would be obliged to act on such court orders (which are really nothing more than seizing funds made and held in the EU until the EU courts are satisfied that everything is above-board) in the same way that they would be obliged to freeze accounts related to criminal activity which happens every day (for everything from local drug dealers to relatives of Gadaffi).
Facebook would lose ~50% of their direct income immediately and be racking up the fines required to actually release those funds every day.
People think that just because you're international you can't stop people trading. The point is that people who *trade* in the EU are making money from it, and you can stop that money directly without having to fight against DNS-bypassing clients. If they weren't trading in the EU, it probably would be a hundred times more difficult to stop but even then - you can make it extremely tricky for a large company like Facebook by doing things like applying for their CEO to be extradited on charges, freezing their accounts, convicting them in their absence (and thus preventing travel to an awful lot of countries), etc.
You're doing business in the EU. You can break EU law if you really want but the fact is that it's an incredibly stupid things to do and will come back on you ten times harder.
MS traded in the EU and broke our laws. We fined them millions of Euro's that they had to pay. If they'd refused (and they did put up a bit of a fight), you can just embargo their products, seize their European assets, and chase them through international courts because as soon as you do *business* in a country, you come under it's jurisdiction.
In the worst case, I'm sure that blocking DNS would be the last resort and a bit pointless. But they sure can deal you a lot worse problems before that happens, even if you don't have *permanent* assets in the country by stopping EU businesses like credit card companies, etc. from dealing with you or your subsidiaries.
And it's this sort of ignorance that is the cause of most unusable UI's. (Besides the fact that I was using a tabbed browser that used Ctrl-N before any other browser even HAD the feature, let alone had "standardised" on a key for it, and that "Ctrl-C, Ctrl-N, Ctrl-V" can be typed with two fingers without leaving the bottom row to open up a new tab on an address).
I want it because I do, because of the way I work. And it really doesn't matter one jot to the application whatsoever. It doesn't care. It isn't running out of hotkeys. It doesn't need to affect a single other user or be the default. It isn't at all difficult to customise keys to your heart's content (hell, games were letting you redefine keys back in the days of the Spectrum, ffs). And the application really has no more work to recognise Ctrl-N than Ctrl-T if it's been programmed with the user in mind (i.e. letting me have whatever keymaps I want). And the browser I use lets me do that and thus DOESN'T get in my way.
Now think of all the foreign users for where Ctrl-T makes no sense whatsoever. Or the ones with different keymaps where certain combinations can really break the flow. But, no, Ctrl-T MUST be the only way to open a new tab besides the fact that the computer is just comparing against a number in its keymap. It's that sort of blinkered response that causes UI to become unusable over time. The ones that "standardise" on a different key to the one I've been using for years, or even one I *don't* want, aren't helping ME, the user.
Early word-processors copied the Lotus shortcuts because "all word-processors have standardized" on them at the time. When MS Office came along, it was handy to be able to select Lotus-compatible shortcuts, and it really was ZERO work for the programmers of MS Office. It actually CAUSED more work to make those things hard-coded and/or remove them in later versions for the now "standard" MS shortcut keys.
It's the entire point of my post: I can either re-train myself at great time / effort / expense / cost of mistakes on my own, or you can bloody make a customisable UI (that actually saves you more work than trying to break people's habits) that I can make one simple change and work as I've always done and NOT HURT ANYONE ELSE. One shortcut key isn't a problem - but the shortcut key, and the whole host of options, and the theme I use, and the removal of middle-click functionality that I don't use and gets in my way, and the disabling of mouse gestures, and... and... and....
You can either make it so the user can customise the UI, or pretend that you know better for every user, every workflow, every computer. You have to be an arrogant ass, or head of Apple, to suggest that the last is a good option.
If it takes me longer to get used to an interface than the interface will save me during its lifetime, then it's pointless to use it. It doesn't matter who I am. Novice computer users may only run one or two programs, and those all from the desktop, but they will struggle if you change things. Advanced users might have 10 common programs and dozens of handy little programs and utilities and you can't put them all on the desktop. So the novice user will acclimatise at about the same pace to a new interface as an advanced user. First rule of UI: Don't piss off the established / advanced user, or cater only for them.
Similarly, if the interface costs me more in CPU, loading times, hunting-the-program times etc. then it's pointless. It's like defragging a modern laptop hard drive - the time I save in less seeks is VASTLY outweighed by the time it takes the damn thing to defrag. I really don't need or want fancy Aero-accelerated sidebars and clocks, thanks. No, honestly. No matter how cool they are they will get switched off as one of the first things I do.
Although there are obviously reasons for GUI's aimed at other uses, every machine I have is set up to do what I want as quickly as possible and no messing about. Fancy graphics are disabled. Stupid menu items are removed (Help on the Start Menu in XP? Just how often did ANYONE ever use that?). Timeouts for UI elements are set to their lowest (e.g. Start Menu flyouts in XP). Desktop elements that are unnecessary are removed (everything from screensavers to backgrounds to sounds to anything that tries to throw crap on my taskbar at all).
"Intelligent" menus that adjust to my usage are disabled (*I* can't predict what menu items I will need next, or most, so I'm *certain* that it can't either). Shortcut keys are used infinitely more than browsing through a menu for the right option (so even changing a keyboard shortcut to something new messes me up for almost all future versions of that UI - I still have to edit Opera's config so that Ctrl-N gives me a new tab and not a new window and it's been like that for about 5 versions now). Take note designers - no keyboard navigation from day one means I won't use it. If your desktop is too context-driven, keyboard navigation is impossible, nonsensical or too confusing.
Menu bars are flat colour. Window icons are simple and clean. Hell, give me a modern equivalent of the Windows 3.1 desktop (and by modern, I mean in what it can do, not what it looks like - I'm always scared of "Modern" themes and tend to stay on "Classic" themes for my entire usage of a computer) and I'll be more productive. "The desktop is a customisable programs window with subwindows" was always such a wonderful idea compared to "The desktop is a random dumping ground of whatever junk you or programs want".
I *will* happily spend some time customising a UI if you give me the option and most of those customisations will be to turn crap off. I don't want to do two clicks to get to a particular window of Office being open (Stupid task-bar "grouping" costs clicks and stops me finding the right file so I just Alt-Tab instead or turn it off). Is the Windows key or Ctrl-ESC REALLY the only option to open up the Start menu from the keyboard? How long would it take you to allow the user to customise that? Similarly, why isn't the Windows key the default to open menus in most Linuxes and why can't I even customise it to BE that key if I want?
What's quicker? Going into the Start menu using the mouse and waiting for menus to fly out and scroll down and search for the program I want, or just pressing the same keystrokes every time to get to it without having to explicitly suggest a keystroke for every program? (Hint: Start, P, I, O runs Opera for me unless I install another program starting with O into my Internet folder on my Start Menu - and YES - that categorisation is invaluable. From a clean desktop, I can start a handful of my programs quicker than they can load and sometimes quicker than the Start menu
For the police investigation on yourself that you weren't aware was in place? I don't think you *can* do that. You'd have to KNOW it was police property and KNOW it was part of an investigation and then wilfully destroy it JUST because it might incriminate you.
And after all, what you did was remove a suspicious unmarked device from your property that you didn't place there? You'd have to have one HELL of a lawyer to charge someone for interfering with a police investigation for them removing something that shouldn't have been on their personal property, that's like arresting someone for removing a deliberately-introduced virus on their machine that their AV picked up and charging them with interfering.
Personally, I'd just immediately phone the bomb squad and tell them I had a suspicious device attached to my car, get the street evacuated, get the news crews in and then let them explain what that suspicious device was. I bet you could get a thousand people and several fire crews to your house before someone could roll up to remove their device, especially if the car happened to be parked in a sensitive area, say the centre of a large city near your kids school.
But then, I live in London, and after the 80's and 90's with the IRA and the 00's with us inheriting America's terrorist paranoia, I bet I could cause more fuss that would immediately draw attention to dubious police practices in a matter of minutes than a post on Slashdot would do.
But more importantly: Have nothing to do with your drug-cartel cousin and anything connected with his activities or property. If you didn't notice the tracker, what else is stashed in that car, that's of interest to the police, that you also haven't yet noticed and couldn't explain away?
This relies on them even caring, the return address being even vaguely valid and them actually bothering to do more than just redirect incoming mail to /dev/null, let alone bothering to have someone on the payroll who will read emails from people they've spammed.
Because *OBVIOUSLY* it doesn't cost the service providers ANYTHING to go through all those DMCA notices, check the legal validity, ensure the content is on their systems, isolate it and remove, reply to the DMCA, handle appeals etc.
They make it sound like 100% of the burden is on the record companies, etc. when actually there's just as much hassle for everyone involved (courts included). What they've noticed is that there are JUST TOO MANY files out there that could be the valid subject of a legal DMCA notice but that neither they, the courts, or the service providers can really handle the sheer volume. So their complaint is to make someone else pay for it, in time, effort, money and liability when they get it wrong.
I don't think that stands up, really, as an argument. And it makes you wonder why they ever bothered at all. There are international users who will, just for mischief, repost anything that you don't like. And you'll struggle to take it down and will *never* legally stop them posting it somewhere else - or even the same place (it might not even be illegal in their country to "infringe" that copyright, for instance).
I don't think it's a valid response to the problems. Now, if you'd pushed for harsher sentences, greater fines, etc. to try to put people off repeat offending, then your argument would at least be consistent. PR suicide, but consistent. Their next step can really only be pushing for more punishment and harsher law (how they carries to international or anonymous users is left as an exercise to the user), or to realise that it was always a bit pointless to play Whack-a-mole over an MP3 that you're already making MILLIONS from.
The option "It's not working, so we want someone else to do our job and provide repercussions to people who pirate for us" isn't really sensible or logical.
Freshmeat is now called freecode.
"Polynomial time" does not necessarily mean "quicker than a computer" or even "quickly" or EVEN "slowly". It just means an amount of time proportional to the size of the stack to some power (squared, cubed, etc.)
Just because a human "can do it" doesn't mean that they did it in NP or even P. It just means they did it in a particular time for a particular example. The important thing is "What was that time compared to the size of the data"? I can handsort a stack of one cards just as fast as a computer. But when you get to 1,000,000 cards it's going to beat me. And when I get to 1,000,000,000 cards, I'll die before it even gets bored doing it. But that's not an answer.
The point is to find a way that tasks that currently take "size of problem to some power" time to complete can be done in significantly less than that (i.e. no powers, or even log time!) no matter how big the problem is scaled up to.
Humans lose at an awful lot of computational problems but only when they are scaled up. It's the scaling that concerns P=NP and the question itself is basically "can we STOP things that do that scaling faster than we could ever hope to catch up?" It's a way to do things that require n^26 operations to only need n, or log n, or some other non-polynomial time. The n itself doesn't matter one jot because that's only a SINGLE example of a particular type of that problem. If we crack how to remove those powers from the time taken, then any number of n won't really matter at all. But if we leave the powers try and try an n greater than a few dozen, we rapidly run into extreme amounts of trouble.
How do you stop a problem needing FOUR times the computing power just because you DOUBLED the size of the input? That's basically what P=NP solution finders are trying to answer.
Sorry, but the fact you just reduced the OP's entire personality to a four-letter acronym has just shown you up, more than the OP.
Hell, I'd be reluctant to work with you just on the basis that your first thought was "You sound like an INTJ". Do you do that when you interview people as well?
The simplest fool can ask a question that the greatest minds cannot answer. That, alone, makes it a poor hiring technique.
Those questions are not only petty, useless (because any idiot can "know" the answer without knowing a single other thing about programming, and yet someone who's programmed for 20+ years and is otherwise expert may still slip up and give a slightly "imperfect" answer that they would never actually write in a piece of production code if they were unsure) and out-of-date (seriously? XOR-swaps? Sort of thing people needed to do in the 70's when they ran out of registers but today? Just add another damn variable and make it easy to have your code read/ported by others, ffs. I had the answer, incidentally, but if I were replying to that question, 90% of my answer would be what a terrible, pointless question that was and show the million-and-one potential problems with the expected answer - non-portability for a start - when you could just add another variable at virtually zero-cost) but they provide absolutely no data to the interviewer at all.
An interview is there to weed out the wheat from the chaff. You can do it with tricksy questions, lateral thinking and riddles if you really want to but what you'll end up with are people who are good at answering tricksy questions, not seeing the obvious answer and who enjoy spending time solving riddles when they could take an easier, more sensible, path. It won't actually give you a good coder, necessarily, unless those attributes happen to collide in a single individual.
Personally, the guy who replies to those emails with "Sorry, but I don't see the point" (or doesn't reply at all) is more likely to have been a good coder than the guy who provides the pristine laterally-thought-out answer. That's never a good thing when it comes to job interviews because you're pushing away more good candidates than you're attracting. Can you seriously imagine a 40-year-experienced top-of-the-line mainframe coder stooping to answer silly questions like that as if they're the Holy Grail of interview technique? Would you make Dennis Ritchie or Linus Torvalds or Alan Cox or anyone of a million famous programmers go through that crap? *COULD* they even get past the first few rounds without just throwing it back in your face and working for your competitor instead? Does any decent cross-platform C source actually ever have to swap two variable's contents and if it does would anyone with a brain use a XOR-swap rather than an explicit one?
I think the principle of that interview technique is to look for the guy who provides the answers that nobody thought of but that's not necessarily what you want in a coder - it's much more of an executive exercise, as well as making MS/Google seem somehow elite ("Have you seen how cool/impossible/weird their hiring process is?" etc.).
It's like interviewing someone to be a meteorologist by giving them a pop-quiz on where the draughts are in your home and when Hurricane Albert hit in 1856 (or whatever). There might be someone who knows, but it doesn't make them good at their job.
British A-Level Computer Science papers included the question "Distinguish between batch and real-time processing" when I did it 15+ years ago. The answer? Batch is having all your records updated at a later date -for example, overnight (e.g. a bank's payment system for the day's transaction), real-time is doing the processing as the data arrives. Genuine CS-related question. Perfect CS-related answer that would get you top-marks on the paper at the time. Absolutely stone-cold useless when it comes to hiring 50 years ago, let alone today. Those interview questions are no different.
Now there is a difference between people who have studied / worked in a subject and those who KNOW the subject inside-out, but silly tangential quizzes are not the way to hire people unless you want silly tangential answers all the time. If I were managing Windows code, especially debug-testing code, and you put that XOR-trick in
So what do you do when the Windows bootloader has a bug that you can't fix, or sets up interrupt hooks for anything it likes (i.e. snooping on any data it wants without your OS being able to detect?), or fails to boot because it doesn't like a new piece of hardware etc.
That's not really a solution, more a temporary workaround, and of course we'd be able to get *something* working but that's not the point.
Most importantly, though, what if you DON'T HAVE an installation of Windows, don't want to buy one, bought the machine exclusively for Linux etc. If Windows 8 machines MUST have this secure boot thing to run Windows 8, does that mean we MUST boot Windows 8 on them even if we don't want to use it. That's the problem.
Sorry, but you're an idiot. If you dual-boot you can't be an idiot and have to be careful what tools you use to manage the disks. Letting disk corruption just sit there while you continue to use the system is not a "dual-boot" problem, but the problem of you not caring about your data's integrity.
"Grub wouldn't allow chkdsk to run"? Then you need to read the million-and-one articles on how to chkdsk your system when you're running GRUB and/or use the Windows boot CD as you're supposed to. This may involve reinstalling Grub but that's literally a two-minute job.
But apparently that's too much effort for the sake of your data integrity of a system that probably took 10-20 times as long for you to setup.
Dual-boot *isn't* the ideal choice for some. Nor is virtualisation. But if you are going to dual-boot you need to be more careful than just allowing disk corruption to build up, using the wrong tools, and not doing read/write disk checks that modify the MBR on the disk that you're booted from (at least without knowing so and being able to repair the MBR).
I'm sorry, but anyone that lets their Windows / internal servers be contacted by arbitrary packets from the Internet, or their systems allow execution by ordinary users of (at the very minimum, unscanned) email attachments, deserves everything they get.
This isn't news now and wasn't back 20 years ago. If you have to do more than just in a "just-in-case" firewall rule into your network equipment that automatically blocks this particular attack from local users (and which should be impossible to execute directly against the server remotely anyway), then you weren't really doing your job in the first place.
Next you'll be telling me that I shouldn't let filesharing ports open to the world.
As opposed to having to convict him in a foreign court in his absence where he'd be unable to put up any sort of defence if he didn't turn up? Because that's fair too.
Extradition has *ALWAYS* been allowed for suspected crimes. The problem is more whether the extradition arrangement takes account of whether the crime is able to be committed in both countries involved.
It's not like the UK are bowing down and throwing him to the Swedes in a game of catch - the UK police made them refile their order four times for inconsistencies and incompleteness and now the courts have ruled on what they do know. If the law says he has to be extradited, you can't break the law your country has signed up to - not without literally forcing through new laws just to handle this case. And it's *really* not important enough to worry about that.
At worst, a UK court could probably insist that Sweden can't let him be extradited anywhere else. They'd either have to agree or it would be somehow illegal for them to agree (i.e. they have treaties with the US that somehow override the EU rights granted to humans).
Nobody's throwing him to the wolves willingly, even if he cries like a boy that's sees one at every step. But then, when you deal in confidential military information, I'm more shocked that they haven't just put a bullet in his head quietly already. Nobody would really care or be surprised, especially if you brought out the "He was endangering the lives of 'Our Boys' with his antics" line.
Hell, the Russians did a lot worse to one of their former agents on UK soil in a crowded restaurant and we still haven't been able to do anything about that yet.
You can be extradited for a suspected crime - always have been able to. It's hard to only extradite convicted criminals without convicting them beforehand and in their absence, which is hardly fair.
Even better:
I was once in an airport queue with an American friend who had, somehow, managed to bring a can of CS spray into a country where any sort of offensive weapon is illegal. CS spray is illegal for anything but police use over here. You will be arrested just for having it on you, whether you use it or not, whether it's for "self-defence" or not. It's just an instantaneous "arrest me".
They'd managed to bring it from the US, through all the "heightened" airport security post-9-11, onto a plane, into my country, through my airport security, carry it around London for several weeks in her handbag (including through museum entry security checks, public transport etc), and only because her friends spotted it when she opened her bag IN A LONDON AIRPORT as she headed home - specifically, the queue to security scanning - that anyone knew she'd had it.
In London, carrying CS spray is an instant arrest that would pretty much provoke an immediate armed response anyway, especially in an airport which is about the only place the average Brit would ever see live weapons in real-life (carried by the policemen).
We quietly and hastily had her dispose of it into the wheelie-bins used for over-size deodorants etc. (as you say, they're just a large, unchecked "trash can" full of material that you're NOT allowed to take on a plane because of it's contents or size, sitting in the middle of an airport foyer) and passed through the airport unhindered onto our destination.
God knows what happens in that bin. The incineration must be fabulous when they do it, because it could literally contain anything at all. And, as you point out, prime target to drop a couple of things in, along with a dozen or a thousand "innocent" items that your accomplices can put in there earlier in the day and be pretty much untraceable which one caused the explosion. Right by the entrance to a security queue which can take hours to pass through and contain thousands of passengers sounds pretty much perfect - and the risk is just that of dropping someone off at an airport and them dropping something in a bin designed for things to be dropped into anonymously, because those bins are not "airside".
- Install Opera.
- Enable Opera Unite.
- Configure the File Sharing Unite app (there's also ones designed for *exactly* what you are talking about, e.g. thumbnails, etc.) to point to your folder you want to share and allow the people you want / password you want.
- Send them your Unite URL (they can open it from any browser) and stay online for as long as you want them to access your files.
You don't have to upload everything to a remote server. You don't have to do anything special. The tagging/comments would have to work in the Unite app but there's no reason that can't be done (or isn't already in some Unite apps) from what I can see.
But although you solve one problem, you don't really solve the problem that stops EVERYBODY doing this. 24/7 access is a pain. Bandwidth limits are a pain. People using your upload to look at your photos while you're online gaming is a pain (330,000 photos? Even someone browsing the thumbnails provided by your connection would make a huge dent in your ping) Managing access is a pain. Stopping people from blanket-downloading everything is a pain. Stopping them giving their crypto-signature to a friend who you then CAN'T distinguish from them is a pain.
You're really not proposing anything that isn't a) possible, b) out there already, c) couldn't be cobbled together in an afternoon by someone who can write shell-scripts and use freeware and d) not being used by anyone else for a number of reasons.
You've basically reiterated ideas present in the very first papers of the WWW, not to mention things like XML etc. Sure, you've slapped encryption into it but that's not different, technically, from handing someone a SSH key unique to them that only allows them access to their user's photos over SSH/SCP.
If people *needed* it, we could whip that up tomorrow, cover it in a commercial face, and bundle software that handled all the "SCP" side of things transparently. Fact is, few people would find it actually beneficial and those few would be the ones who would generally NOT want their upload flooded by their cousins downloading their wedding photos (home connections just aren't good for uploading, and if you have a server elsewhere, why not use it?!).
The option you REALLY miss is:
Use a remote dedicated server as a vital backup store that you really want to be using for those 1/3 of a million files anyway, and provide SCP and passwordless SSH keys to your friends so they can read-only access them as an added bonus.
Sure, it won't auto-thumbnail, but it would be a cinch with imagemagick utils and FUSE to make it auto-create thumbnails on-the-fly in particular folders and have some fancy bit of client software do automatic "Show the thumbnail folder first, show the real file if requested" but you can also do it manually - one folder named thumbnails that you tell them loads really quickly, one folder named "full-size" that you tell them should only be used for full-size image downloads.
(Hell, get them to plug-in one of those Windows-integrated SCP tools and they can map the server as a drive - one for thumbnails, one for full-size images - browse it in explorer and then just drag-drop the full-size ones they want to their own computer.)
It exists TODAY, NOW. You're just not using it. Those that are don't need anything particular, more complicated, fancy filesystems on their clients, upgraded OS concepts etc. A copy of WinSCP or a bit of freeware/shareware that maps SCP drives in Windows works perfectly. Hell, you could run the SSH server from your own machine if you were really sadistic and didn't care about your upload.
If it's such a ground-breaking, useful feature to you - why aren't you already doing it (given that you're on Slashdot, I'm presuming that doing - or finding someone to do - this sort of nerd-work is a walk in the park)?
"Everything is a file". That concept basically makes possible any number of extremely fancy ideas in an afternoon, especially if you can knock up scripts of a FUSE interface. And that's why most of those fancy ideas (e.g. WinFS) are virtually cancelled after billions in investment - because they rarely work better than something you can knock up in an afternoon after someone's explained what they want.
Herbal? The French word came from Latin (herba) originally, used by French without the h in the 12th century, the h got reinstated around the 15th century but the h got muted at that point until the 19th century. What you're claiming is more that the English stole the word solely from the French when actually it was more likely to have come from the Latin originally into both languages (given that Britain was under Roman and Anglo-Saxon rule long before we needed to pinch words from the French, and the latter from whom we get the language).
The Latin having an "h" on it means that the original pronunciation was not, in fact, h-less (because they pronounced their h's too), because the Latin was the original, not the French.
Similarly for "patent" which comes from "patentum" into both languages and pre-dates both English and French. But you may be *closer* on the ancient pronunciation of patent being "pah-tent" but then depends on finding someone who speaks fluent Ancient Latin and proves little (because I already said that both are accepted pronunciations).
And other comments on here from people working with other patent lawyers in the UK indicate the exact opposite in identical situations. Nothing to do with absolute pretension by any chance, borne on the back of one pronunciation being more "UK English", one being more "US English"?
You've made the classic mistake of thinking that anything in English is pronounced the same as anything that looks similar. Classic beginner's mistake.
(It may be a "minute" difference but it only takes a "minute" to spot that. *cough*)
Argh! Unpronounced "aitches" (and yes, that's the correct pronunciation of the letter H - don't put a "ha" on the beginning of it).
So annoying: "Would you like some erbal tea?"
1) I'm English. Get that crap out of my face.
2) Pronounce the damn word properly and not like you've had a mini-drop-out on your mobile phone while talking.
Both are accepted. I say "pay-tants", and I'm English. You'll probably find that "pa-tents" is the American English pronunciation. If you said "pa-tents", I'd assume you were American or heard the term from an American first, unless there were other signs that told me otherwise.
More importantly, you do realise that you're finding it shocking that the *original* language is pronounced differently to how you've been told to pronounce it yourself? Please go and look at how you pronounce aluminium, vehicle, and a host of other English words that had a perfectly accepted pronunciation until people started to "say them wrong".
Agreed. Any country that tolerates illegally-obtained evidence is only a step away from outright corruption.
In the UK, if your evidence was obtained illegally then not only do you suffer the appropriate sanctions for that, but ALL evidence gained that way is null and void when it comes to providing prosecutions - you basically wipe out the possibility of EVER prosecuting that person for whatever crime you had evidence of by doing anything illegal yourself. It's not good policing to wipe out all your evidence (including other, legally obtained, evidence) and provide your target with almost complete immunity from prosecution because you didn't get approval for your wiretaps etc.
Military things work differently in practice but even "officially" they are supposed to work the same way.