Sod contests for old games. We have popularity contests beamed to your own personal section of the planet so you can judge people remotely using buttons without having to get out of the chair. We have people who've never touched soil eating nutritional balanced, rich, processed food every single day. We have people who spend most of their time tapping buttons to post ignored opinions on global virtual messageboards that nobody ever reads again.
There are any number of ways of not being productive. The better we are at doing things like growing food and producing things that save time, the more time we have to deliberately do nothing at all. 100 years ago, nobody had TIME to spend 8 hours a day updating their friends about what they did that day, even if those friends lived in the same house.
People doing nothing is actually a sign of how easy it is to stay alive with modern equipment and infrastructure and how little knowledge is required to survive in that atmosphere (I have absolutely no idea/experience about how to grow enough food to feed my family... do you?).
That said, I do think that this is hardly "news" even for a geek. So the guy got a new highscore in an old game. Good for him. And he probably spent months dreaming about the damn game, destroying his muscles and turning his mind to mush in order to achieve that "fame". That's his problem. In my entire life, I can't imagine it ever taking more than a second to acknowledge, even if I *was* interested in the exact area we're discussing. But yet I can afford five minutes to say what a waste of time it is. Modern life, eh? Truly wonderful.:-)
Erm, the evidence points to the contrary in that T-Mobile Germany (same company, different country) just did the exact OPPOSITE.
However, if that really is the case, and they want to make it more expensive to download a STUPIDLY TINY amount (Seriously? Accounting in Megabytes? Outside mobile telecoms the last time I saw that was on dial-up), with things like the Blackberry tablet on the market supporting speeds up to 100Mbit download (25Mbps is the fastest you can get "in real life" at the moment), it's an incredibly stupid thing to do, overloaded or not. Don't cut the limit, build the capacity and thereby gain customers instead.
Seriously - QoS on the radio channels (should be done anyway or emergency calls get swamped by idiots texting home, etc.) and then join the base station to a cheap business ADSL connection. I don't really care if I get 8Mbps or 0.5Mbps but if I buy a) a smartphone or b) a "broadband" dongle from a telecoms company, I expect them to support its ordinary use. Hell, I can do 30Gb a month on ADSL just browsing as much as I do. 500Mb? My dad could piss through that in one click online. Every other country in the world doesn't have problems with this - they are all capable of supplying broadband speeds in the most crowded of cities to multiple mobile users simultaneously. It's purely a "pay through the nose" venture to make profit. And some people are idiots enough to join in.
"You can run away from T-Mobile now but the others will adopt until there is no where to go to." - fine. Then I stop using mobile broadband or smartphones, like I completed avoided ever using GPRS (again, they accounted in Mb) - when you can't charge sensibly for a half-decent service, I won't tolerate it just because it's the only thing available. I'll just adjust so that I don't NEED it. In this case, and in my entire life, that means I carry a cheap, shitty £10 PAYG phone for calling people (and thus you make almost zero off me because I only pay for a call or two a month, if that, and mostly people call me, and I no longer have a contract, a device, or a mobile internet package with the telecoms company) and if I need internet access I *did* have a T-Mobile dongle. Now that my usage has just been chopped in at least quarters, that just means I throw the dongle away and use Wifi instead. Hell, it's free and I live in London so it's never hard to find a legitimate connection. I'd happily give my money to something like The Cloud now because they do wifi in London that you can always find if you need it. Or do without Internet on the move like I have for pretty much the entirety of my life.
It's only idiots that buy smartphones and MUST USE THEM so much that they will pay stupid money, or tolerate crappy limits, that are the problem. Fortunately, not *my* problem. But my employer will probably re-think all their mobile comms now because they were reliant on Blackberries over a T-Mobile connection for certain things. 500Mb? Hell, you can hit that just browsing.
If you don't want people to use it like broadband, don't call it mobile broadband and sell mobile broadband dongles (which is what I bought from them, and is also affected by their stupid limits - smartphones are the owner's fault, but a mobile broadband dongle? The clue is in the name and the usage pattern). If you don't want people to download lots, limit the speed to a sensible value instead of cutting off internet for the rest of the month (stupid idea). And if you want to be a cutting-edge telecoms firm formed by a merger of the two largest UK mobile telecoms firms (Orange and T-Mobile are now the same company in the UK), don't cut off your highest-paying customers for the rest of the month, in the middle of a smartphone boom, just weeks after merging, for downloading a pitiful amount of data. Idiots. Anyway want to buy a Hauwei E660 dongle?
But flying under the banner of a group by your own admission (as many people do) is basically adjoining yourself to that group and (partly) condoning their actions and (certainly) being tarred with the same brush as everyone else in the group.
I don't support Anonymous because (apart from the fact that I think they are all idiots and follow pretty much only idiotic causes) if, tomorrow, they all decide that the issue of the moment is that nobody should have central heating, and they start DDoS'ing my energy provider, then that's not something I agree with. With a changeable "group" such as Anonymous, condoning ONE of their actions is pretty much condoning the others too (or you'd be forming a splinter group that *DOESN'T* DDoS those people you don't want to, and thus supporting THAT group instead of Anonymous).
The fact that different people who BOTH claim membership of the group can do two opposing things isn't my problem. It's just a convenient banner, then, to hide under whenever you do something, no matter what that is and whether the rest of the group condone your actions. But *joining* that group or *condoning* that group (or even acknowledging it's existence as anything other than a vague moniker under which to attack people) is *recognising* that group and thus agreeing with its policies and actions to some extent.
If people don't want to be associated with those actions, they would be handing in their "membership" of such a group, or clarifying exactly where the boundaries of the group lie - every group has extremists who want to use it to stamp on the good name (just look at certain Muslim extremists) but their actions are always condoned and the separation between "Muslims" and "Nutters who want to blow people up in the name of Islam" is always made clear.
Anonymous isn't a group. They don't have a cause. They don't have an agenda. They don't really have "members". It's just like saying "God made me do it" or "*THEY* made me do it". And just as convincing.
Any group that's too shy to name it's member (e.g. British National Party), too scared to disown its own member when they do wrong, or in which ANY action is tolerated isn't a "group" at all. It's just a convenient moniker for doing shit that you want to hide.
The "Like" thing is usually true, or they just want to see the hidden picture / enter the competition that requires them to "like" it first. However, the "this sucks" portion is generally not true. If someone says something sucks on such sites, they *normally* think it does.
However, the MUCH bigger question - what idiot listens to their Facebook/Twitter friend's opinion when they are buying something for themselves, without at least asking *WHY* it sucks? People always tell me that X sucks but with no explanation. People still can't explain to me why, all of a sudden, Windows XP sucks. Or OpenOffice sucks. Or Opera sucks. If they provide reasons, those reasons are usually exactly WHY I want to use it (i.e. Opera has a built-in mail client and doesn't execute ActiveX). They normally don't like it, or it's not suited to their way of working, or it has problems they don't like, or (infinitely more likely) they haven't *really* given it a fair chance and it's fashionable to say anything non-standard sucks. That's *their* opinion and doesn't automatically mean that everyone works the same or, even if they do, that they will find it as sucky.
There are friends I have that, if they HATE a movie, I'm almost guaranteed to like it and vice versa. There are friends who piss their money away on gadgets that I think are useless or that don't suit my method of working at all. There is no point in me owning a machine that I can't easily write my own software for, for example - so their iPods and iPhones and iBooks are effectively a "games console" computer in my opinion, whereas my old XP image that's followed me onto four different laptops is much better AND plays all the games I want. They don't see it that way so my "old, sucky" laptop whose efficiency and speed WOULD be destroyed within a few months of *their* use of the same machine through mismanagement is actually perfect for me.
We bought the head of the school I work at an iPad when he retired. He was an old-school computing guy, though, so he sold it on eBay shortly afterwards. But the 600MHz Mini-ITX with triple boot DOS, Linux and Windows XP that I built for him, with built-in Soundblaster compatibility, was a million times more suitable and he took it with him to his house in the South of France. To anyone else, it probably "sucked", but for him it was perfect. I have friends that only buy Sony. I have friends that spend money on Farmville. I have friends that live by their iPhone and yet can't work out how to use 1% of it's functions. I have friends that can't operate my laptop because the touchpad (again, personal preference) is slightly offset to the left and doesn't have a defined scroll area, but it's perfect for me, because Autoplay is completely disable, and because to play a DVD you have to load VLC manually. I have a friend who only buys whatever Which magazine tells him to buy.
"Suckiness" is dependent on the user. Opinions matter but only of those people whose opinions matter to me. The chances of random "Yeah, this is cool" or "This sucks" actually affecting *ANYTHING* I do are incredibly minimal unless it's backed up by reasoning, experience and trust. You have to weight each opinion by those factors and if you do that, any astroturfing will actually end up on the bottom of the pile rather than the top. And even among the people I speak to the most, there are some where I wouldn't *touch* anything they recommended because they are inherently different to me. The person I know who works at Rackspace has been brainwashed, so I instantly discredit their opinion on hosting and network hardware because they try to simulate the datacentre they work in inside everyone's house including their own - it's *not* suitable for the majority of cases and even when it *is* suitable, I happen to think that Rackspace suck and most of what they do internally sucks. If I didn't discredit their opinion, I'd basically be up to my nose in overly expensive Cisco hardware and yet have substandard capabilities compared to what I hav
Actually, the GPL does have provisions about providing all necessary headers and working environment in order to reproduce the binary. So it's not as simple as "the GPL doesn't care". It goes to specific lengths to ensure that the build does not depend on external files. The binary produced may or may not include parts of the Apple code / code signing in order to build that particular executable and none of them would be redistributable. Does that binary load on it's own, without the aid of Apple Store?
Does the Apple Store license do anything to modify terms of distribution (YES IT DOES, even if it's only an additional indemnity waiver, but it also says lots of other stuff concerning redistribution). As such, it extends the terms of GPL (i.e. it's like me saying I'm distributing this GPL software, but the license I'm doing it under prohibits you from giving it to anyone else, and/or means you can't sue Jack either - by extension I've overrode the GPL and without all the copyright holders consent, that's illegal). You could DUAL-license it (one under the Apple Store licence and one under the GPL) but that means copyright holders have to do that, not any random joe, and you can't just take GPL code and "add extra terms" (Section 7 of the GPL) without being the author / copyright holder.
This is the thing that stopped this particular instance, and this is also the thing that EVERYONE knew would stop it. Apple has clauses related to its DRM (i.e. don't circumvent it, don't let other people have that particular binary, etc.) and that's what is contrary to the GPL. It doesn't matter that A binary can be put onto another iPhone or whatever - it has to be THAT binary, or any binary made from the GPL code. AIn fact, it's absolutely amazing that Apple ever let themselves get that deep because they should have KNOWN it would provide a legal avenue for trouble. They are lucky that it hasn't ended up before the courts, but only because the VLC team haven't taken that much interest in doing so. It takes a single copyright holder, with a single line of code / documentation / image in VLC for someone to force it to go to court. And Section 7 would be my prime candidate to concentrate on and I assure you, I could get it past any court's viability tests and have it actually come to trial quite easily.
If a license is incompatible, it's incompatible. The bit people miss is that the Apple Store licence is incompatible with the GPL. Completely. As in you can't mix the two. Never could. This was "overlooked" until one of the authors challenged it. It always was actually illegal to distribute it in that fashion. Doesn't matter if everyone in the world wants it - unless copyright licensing laws change globally, or every VLC contributor allows their contribution to be licensed under a non-GPL licence, it can't happen.
The second you filter, you become responsible for what passing through the filter. Ask ISP's in restrictive countries and almost any modern legal system. If you claim to have a "safe web filter" and then someone gets a dodgy site from it, you are deemed partly responsible because "why didn't your filter catch it"? I work in schools, so I know this problem well. This is why ISP's don't WANT to filter stuff, or people don't WANT to run cybercafes in restrictive countries, or why wikipedia DOESN'T moderate every edit you do. As soon as you say "we're filtering", *EVERYONE* with a stake wants to be on your filter, and have it be perfectly accurately implemented for them alone. You filter MGM's films - okay, I'm an independent film producer, filter me too. Why not? Is piracy against me "allowed" just because I'm not part of the big studios? And by extension ten years later every website publishes nothing because nothing passes their 7 million filters in under an hour, and what does is deliberately chosen by malicious people to step on the toes of the one company that *doesn't* have a filter with you yet.
1 kid can probably do several hundred files a day if you pushed them (you say yourself, only 150 unique users). We're talking several MILLION a day. That means 1000 kids, probably more than the entire RapidShare workforce, just to do a simple screen, not even a legally-binding one. Automated, on 24-hour shifts, with human-delays in between every upload.
A publisher is putting money to put that content into presses and sell it on. RapidShare doesn't. It also has a run of several million in their entire life from a SINGLE master. So they have to check ONE book - not a million. It's not that it's impossible - it's just ridiculous to expect it. A paper is responsible for every word it prints because it only take 10 minutes to read a paper and then maybe an few dozens hours or two to check and ensure it's accuracy - with a newspaper's workforce, that's nothing. A filehost, however, or a web host, or a search engine, or a popular online auction site, has several MILLION things to check each day, each taking several hours (or even days) to verify. That's completely outside the bounds of credulity to suggest it's possible. Yes, they could JUST have one or two hundred files / pages / auctions each day visible but then Google, YouTube, RapidShare, eBay, Amazon (gotta check those reviews for copyright infringement!), and a million other websites would be dead overnight.
It's ENIRELY unreasonable to expect a large website to do anywhere near that - especially when only other people can KNOW if a file is infringing - millions of files would slip past the door every day even with the best checks because copyright licensing isn't as simple as "you can do it" or "not" (e.g. Open Source licensing, public domain, expired copyright, multiple rightsholders and licencees etc.). That means that every upload you have to determine the original author before you can get any further and that means comparing against every known copyright text in the world.
Yet a book publisher only has to check their book once. You only had to check a couple of dozen files a day for nothing more than OBVIOUSLY infringing stuff (and I bet that an awful lot of copyrighted stuff passed you by with your own permission - did you seriously, and to a legal standard, check the origins and licensing of EVERY text that you posted, every photo that you uploaded, every shareware ZIP file, everything contained inside every shareware ZIP file - and then check that the originator had a valid license from said copyright holder? With valid jurisdications and licensing rights in all countries involved (i.e. theirs and yours and those of your consumers) Yes? I call bullshit, then, before you even try to back that up). A cursive glance can tell you if or not a file is *likely* to be infringing but nobody can ever really say for sure without at least going to court. And a million cursive glances means multiplying the number of staff employed by about 10 and training them to a defined standard to sit in a box and click Yes or No all day.
It's bollocks. Which is why the court recognised such. And why Google, eBay, Amazon and a million and one other places can ONLY act on reported material. The volume is just too huge and does NOT compare to some publisher, say, printing recipes that were downloaded from the net without permission. One requires a single check inside months or years of other work, the other requires months or years of checking every second that you're working.
You haven't read the article (or the many others around on LWN.net on the same topic). Basically, large buffers in networking gear, from DSL routers on your home network through to ISP's, mean that interactivity is *shite*. You might download Gb's but in terms of interactive applications it's useless and we're facing ever-increasing latency and problems through wanting to cope too much with errors and delays (e.g. huge buffers to keep resending instead of just letting packets drop and having TCP sort it out by retransmission). TCP windows never shrink because errors and buffered and retried so much from intermediate devices that any sort of window scaling is worthless because it doesn't *see* any packet-loss.
Same devices, smaller buffers, everything works fine and "faster" / "more responsive" all around. It actually would *save* money on new devices because you don't need some huge artificial buffer, you can just drop the occasional packet. But the problem is so deeply embedded into run-of-the-mill hardware that it's almost impossible to escape at the moment and thus EVERYONE from large businesses to home users are running on a completely sub-optimal setup because of it. Almost every networking device made in the last few years has buffers so large that they cause problems with interactivity, bandwidth control, QoS, etc. It's NOT just that a "faster connection" solves the problem - we are getting a percentage of optimal service that's steadily decreasing as buffers increase even though we're improving all the time. That's the point. And it *is* caused by memory prices because memory is so cheap that a huge thoughtless buffer costs no more than a tiny, thought-out buffer.
So not only must Rapidshare know the name of every film, book and video game in existence (and in copyright) but they also have to filter anything that sounds even vaguely like them, has characters added, uses "l33t" spelling, etc. so that they don't accidentally host them? And not only that, but they have to go by the filename, so if I upload 2.7 millions movie clips all called "Aliens", they have to take every single one of them off despite not a single one of them actually having any copyrighted material in them?
Yes, it's obvious that it's easy to circumvent. It's also immediately obvious that, even if a court orders it, they can't *stop* that no matter how many people they hire, checks they make, or copyright holders they work with. Thus it's a pointless exercise to try to pretend they can. All they NEED to do is react to reports of copyright infringement, the same as anyone else. If you don't react, you are basically hindering copyright holders from stamping out infringement. If you DO react, you're not getting in their way even if you do end up inadvertantly hosting some of their content - but you can at least say "it wasn't us, this guy gave us that file" and so trace it back to an individual that CAN be prosecuted (and refusing to identify users etc. will get you into the same trouble with courts as not taking off the files when asked to by a validated copyright holder).
Additionally, I'm a copyright holder. I have written software, written books, drawn images, filmed videos and all manner of things. Thus if I ask, they have to take stuff down if I believe it's mine. That means they have to have some kinds of primitive checks to ensure I *am* a valid copyright owner and have NOT given my permission (there are some genuine software authors that willingly use RapidShare to save their bandwidth, for example), even for the most obscure and nonsensical things that get uploaded to their service. So even investigating every copyright infringement *report* is a huge burden, let alone every *potential* copyright infringement (which basically means performing those checks for EVERY file).
RapidShare might be a hive of illegal content, but when reported it gets removed. So is eBay a hive of illegal content, but when you report it, it gets removed - whether that's because you're selling Nazi memorabilia in France, a baby, or just unlicensed software. It's RIDICULOUS to expect a host to pre-screen absolutely everything they put onto a download website or even a busy auction site. (Almost) Every court in the world recognises that and only expects them to co-operate fully when things ARE reported.
Er... yeah, if you measure, say, a drop in temperature, what exactly do you intend to conclude? A ghost, or that there's a draught? Both will make people think they "feel" something too. Amazing how it's always the old draughty, disrepair, abandoned houses that "make people shiver" and "have shivers up their spine" and "get a sudden cold feeling" and "feel the air move as something moves past them". Ever walked through an old school alone at night? Shit, that could scare anyone and that's just a fairly recent building.
Don't try to "disprove" anything, because that's immediately a bias. Just go to the place, let other people say what *they* think is true and then compare to a "control" house or two that you give some similar bullshit story about, see if it's just the placebo effect in action. My bet is that it will be. A relative of mine lives in a house that is in ALL the guidebooks for her area as a haunted house. There's about 20 stories about it, it's been there hundreds of years, it's even part of the "haunting" guided tours (but they obviously won't let such tours inside because it's a private dwelling and you don't want 50 strangers traipsing through it twice a day / night). They have little stories of "strange" things, but that's it. Nothing anywhere near concrete. I spent a lot of time in it, some alone, for weeks at a time. Nothing. It's just a house.
Being in the dark makes your eyes produce images and patterns. I can *make* my eyes produce an array of perfect spirals if I just stand in a completely dark room and convince myself that's what I'm seeing - I used to do it as a child (yeah, I know, but odd children are everywhere). You can even get any shape going if your imagination is good enough and you will "see" it. Thing is, that lots of those random dots and shapes you "see" in a dark room are just a product of the mind triggered by random activations of the retinal cells - sometimes even high levels of radiation can be "seen" just by closing your eyes in a dark room (some of the nuclear testing people and Chernobyl workers could often see tiny flecks of light when they closed their eyes in a high-radiation area, sort of like a visual Geiger-counter as the alpha-particles interact with your retina).
Being in a room with air movement from other people, draughts, etc. sometimes makes you *think* someone is close to you, especially if you have your eyes closed and the sound is attenuated strangely (mostly our "feel" of people near us is sound / pressure). About twice a year, I *swear* that I can hear a police siren while asleep or driving that goes on for HOURS but it corresponds to no actual siren. I often "hear" my phone go off when it doesn't.
Hell, my house makes noises at night that would scare the life out of you if you didn't know it was the laminate flooring settling, the radiator pipe moving underneath the floorboards, the garden gate outside (which REALLY sounds like it's above your head when you sleep in the room next to it), that "crick" that's the window-pane settling into position during a cold spell. I spent four days once tracking down a sound in my mother-in-law's house that only me and my wife could hear and it turned out to be a radiator pipe rubbing against a floorboard UNDERNEATH the house even when the heating wasn't on and the floorboard was in an empty room. It was impossible to tell where it was coming from and what the sound was without spending hours listening for it. And the people who lived there didn't even notice it was happening at all.
Electromagnetic events are unlikely to be detected by humans at all. We don't receive radio, our radiation detection is limited and very strange (e.g. specks visible in your vision) and most other things are pretty obvious (light, for example). Measuring it is pretty pointless because we can't even prove that kilowatts of it coming from the building opposite or milliwatts RIGHT NEXT TO YOUR HEAD actually do anything at all (e.g. mobile phones).
I'd be extremely surprised if ANY mass vaccination campaign and/or medical procedure didn't produce adverse symptoms in at least 1% of people. To put that in context, 1% of people have bodies that, in intersex terms, "differ from standard male or female" - i.e. are of indiscriminate sex. Hell, paracetamol has a higher rate of problems than that in any reasonably effective dose. Unfortunately, it's impossible to take you seriously because:
1) You're anonymous. 2) Your daughter visited ER. No mention of treatment, symptoms, cause, etc. I've seen people visit ER for a cold. Sometimes it's something more serious, usually they are discharged without anything but placebo treatment. What was done about your daughter's visit and how serious were her symptoms? What did the *doctor's* say about letting have the MMR booster? What was their reasoning? Was it just that it was likely to provoke a reaction or that it would "give her autism" as this paper used to try to claim? 3) She may have fallen sick. Apart from the million and one other factors, the MMR could have made her sick. It's not unusual and is completely expected. A percentage of patients are admitted to hospital for ANY vaccination whatsoever. That's why they ask all those silly questions about "are you allergic to eggs" etc. for certain vaccines. It's a known factor in having an adverse reaction. Your daughter, I'm assuming, does not now have regressive autism where she didn't before, though, which is what the doctor in question was claiming. There's a big difference between "that injection made me feel/be sick/taken to hospital" and "that injection gave me a serious, non-reversible neural disorder". 4) The doctors probably don't take records of correlation specifically. That's not a doctor's job, they are just there to treat symptoms that they see. However, her medical records will almost CERTAINLY contain mention of every confirmed symptom, existing condition, existing treatment and administered treatment and be available for anyone performing these kinds of analyses if they really need to know them. Also, just because your daughter's records don't show something, doesn't mean a statistical trend wouldn't be noticed. 5) There is no evidence of autism emanating from MMR vaccination. Correct. There is, however, outstanding evidence to the contrary, and outstanding evidence that MMR is not significantly different to any other vaccination in terms of adverse side effects, their incidences and severity. 6) This man IS a fraud. And we have ways of knowing because we found him. Read the medical journals that trounce his "evidence" into the ground and propose firm evidence to the contrary. 7) The public health authorities have a requirement to want to know, that's why his report was taken so seriously and allowed to make headlines. Turns out it was complete bollocks, though, and made them look like fools and put many more people at significantly more risk (whether of falling ill, or just costing them more money for no gain if you believe they only have their own interests at heart) by allowing them to avoid MMR vaccination.
Your daughter got ill after having several live virii pumped into her body on purpose to deliberately trigger an immune reaction. That's unfortunate and regrettable. But if she got rubella, she would get MUCH more ill and be a risk to a lot more people, possibly with permanent undesired side-effects (e.g. miscarriage).
And this story has ONLY ever concerned the combined MMR vaccine. You're an idiot if you're applying a) vague knowledge of a long-discredited made-up biased paper studying 12 patients and utterly discredited potential links between a particular vaccine and autism with your daughter to b) EVERY MMR vaccine and a reaction to a vaccine that's doesn't include autism. At the very least, you should have insisted on having the "separate" MMR vaccinations, because they have been perfectly "safe" (i.e. adverse reactions are safely within expected parameters) for decades.
Use a netbook, or a laptop. God, I wouldn't want to think what tab completion and a dodgy touchscreen keyboard on a critical server could do to a shell.
If the machine is up enough to SSH in, it's not an emergency. If you truly are the only person who can log into it (locally or remotely) to fix the problem, please don't do it from a smartphone. Actually log in, take your time and fix the problem rather than bashing out commands in some substandard SSH client that will probably be insecure.
It's 2011. I'm never more than a couple of hundred yards from a Wifi connection, never more than a few hundred yards from a computer that I can use if I really have nothing at all and rarely without some sort of computer access unless (and this is important) I don't want to be disturbed and will not fix the machine then anyway (i.e. holiday or weekends when I'm not being paid to do that). If some major emergency crops up, chances are that I need to be there, or that someone else is already there to notice and fix the problem with barely a hint as to the correct command. Anything else *CAN* wait until I can get on a proper terminal and/or until I actually stand in front of the machine.
I honestly can't think of a scenario that would demand SSH access from a single person, on the fly, such that they don't get time to go to a computer or arrive at the physical location of the computer in question, that doesn't hint at poor IT management anyway.
They failed that one of your hurdles - they didn't do a proper analysis on their data. Basically, their data conclusively shows that the chances of pre-cog existed COMPARED TO it not existing is extremely minimal (actually quite strongly in favour of it not existing). But they specifically chose only certain analyses to conclude that it *did* exist.
There are many rebuttals at the moment, most linked to in these comments, that you can read but basically - to remove all statistical jargon - they didn't bother to take account of how probable their data was by pure chance. Their "error margin" is actually vastly larger than their data could even escape, so they can't really make any firm conclusions and certainly NOT in the direction they did. Statistics is a dangerous field, and whoever wrote and reviewed that paper didn't have a DEEP grasp of it, just a passing one.
If you calculate the *chance* that their paper is correct versus their paper being absolute nonsense, not even taking into account anything to do with their methods or that their data might be biased, their data can ONLY mathematically support a vague conclusion that their paper is nonsense. To do the test properly and get a statistically significant result (not even a *conclusive* result, just one that people will go "Oh, that's odd") they would have to do 20 times as many experiments (and then prove that they were fair, unbiased etc.).
It's like rolling three sixes on a die and concluding that the particular die you rolled can only possibly roll a six. It's nearly as bas as claiming that so can every other die on the planet.
Ouch. Taken down by two Bayesian tests on whether it's more likely that the paper is true or not. They didn't even need to get out of bed or dig out a big maths book to basically disprove the entire premise of the original paper using its own data.
As they hint at in that rebuttal - As a mathematician and someone of a scientific mind, I would just like to see *ONE* good test that conclusively shuts people up. Trouble is, no good test will report a false result and thus you'll never get the psychic / UFO / religion factions to even participate, let alone agree on the method of testing because they would have to accept its findings.
Never dabble in statistics - the experts will roundly berate you and correct you even if you *THINK* you're doing everything right. When PhD's can't even work out things like the Monty Hall Problem properly, you just know it's not something you can throw an amateur towards.
Is that the same Office as I get on my desktop installation CD? No? So it's a Microsoft-only product that's been ported by Microsoft to a Microsoft architecture? Windows "runs" on Alpha too. Office "runs" on Mac by that definition. What you're actually doing is BUYING another version of Office written specifically for that particular "Windows" port by the authors of the software who also happen to be the authors of the OS. How many *other* companies do you think stand a chance in hell of doing that, even with MS's co-operation, and having it work, let alone actually making money on the idea?
It's "Office-like" or even an "Office-port" but it's not "Office". Office ports have run on MacOS for decades. Office can run under Linux if you use WINE. It doesn't mean that "Office is on Linux" or that it's supported (no support = no business use). Also doesn't mean that even 1% of the apps that a business runs or plugs into Office will work on Mac or this or anything else.
There is a new version of Office - that's the news - that can run on ARM and open standard Office docs. The whole "Windows on ARM" thing is a load of misleading marketing nonsense. That's *not* Windows on ARM, and certainly not any other primarily-Windows application on ARM (probably ever). It's a program that normally works on x86 architectures being ported to work on one other architecture and then claimed as being a "Windows on ARM". I bet it gets all the feature parity, updates, support, combined licensing that Pocket Word does (that's "Office on Windows CE", right? (sarcasm) ) or even Office on Mac (no ActiveX integration - how would they? -, no RTF emails, no ODF support, etc. etc. etc.).
*This* Office is not a Windows application. That's entirely my point. It's an ARM application. Running an ARM application on an ARM OS is no shocker. Running a *Windows* (and hence suggesting x86) application on an ARM OS *would be*.
Fishville, YoVille,.... the list goes on. Although it's partly Facebook's fault (that you can't block a publisher, or categories like "Games"), and partly people's fault (I really don't give a shit, so stop pressing the button to "Share" just so you get some in-game item), there's no need for them ALL to, by default, push to your friends pages, or for them to all run off a unique application page. And everytime they bring out a new game I have to block that too. And then I have the *other* publishers to deal with.
Zygna do it partly deliberately to gain exposure and I can completely understand that and they're doing nothing "wrong" by Facebook's terms, or by circumventing requiring human interaction. It's just that I don't filter my spam by individually removing single people from a list. I really don't care about games, or Zygna games in particular, postings on my friend's Facebook pages. But I can't do anything so general as block just those categories. Zygna and/or Facebook should really be pushing to implement a "don't piss me off" category for either individual publishers or specific types of application. If someone is turning you off anyway, they are NOT a potential customer, so at least stop pissing them off further.
Office on ARM is a million times more important - for a start, that suggests you can open your documents on another new platform without having to worry about export filters and binary compatibility. But hey, I'm afraid OpenOffice and suchlike beat you to it.
The problem with Windows on ARM is that no currently existing Windows program will run on it. It's a new architecture without binary compatibility, like Windows CE was. Sure you can port things over but you can do that anyway and few have bothered. Things like the NET framework are "supposed" to be cross-platform but you can be assured than anything vital that you have to use and that you have no control over development of (e.g. business apps) requires an x86 binary at some point, or isn't supported on ARM. So even your programs that are written in NET need to be ported (which usually means it'll never happen).
Telling people that Windows now runs on ARM is misleading - they will think that everything from Half-Life 2 to Sage should work on it without touching anything. What you mean is that there is now an official OS for ARM that looks and works a bit like Windows. Like Windows CE was. But then, what ARM? There are hundreds of ARM variations and not all of them can be catered to, so you're back to it only working on select platforms that have been especially designed for it - like, erm, Windows CE was. Can I join a domain and run my existing business apps? No? Then it's actually just the Windows *GUI* that's consistent across platforms, not the OS.
Even if the next-gen of Windows 8 can be almost identical on PC or other devices, you're then into the problem that it's not the OS that matters (and that pretty much *does* have to be changed for every hardware variation) but the applications. And "Windows on ARM" will make people think they can install Steam on it and just run everything. That's not the case and never will be.
Windows on ARM is a response to Android, to try to pretend to be as cross-platform. Same as OpenXML was a response to ODF, to try to pretend to be platform-independent. In reality, the headline will grab eyes and then the reality will disappoint. But in the meantime, you've sold a "portable Windows" license to some mobile-carrier who has to repeatedly explain that "desktop Windows" isn't the same as "mobile Windows".
It's just Windows CE. Remember trying to explain to people that Pocket Word wasn't the same as desktop Word? Same thing over again.
Nobody forces you to play a game. Zynga have made a lot of money by giving people games that they voluntarily want to play and, in some cases, buy. Just because it's not *your* (or my) type of game, doesn't mean they are somehow inherently the antithesis of gaming. I don't understand people that pay monthly subscriptions to play crappy click-fest MMORPG's just to get to the next "virtual" level but it's hard to say that they are the "bane" of gaming.
I spent a small fortune on Steam over Christmas, on an already bursting-at-the-seams account. I got 75 new games for less than the price of a Wii. Do you know what I ended up playing the most (without intending to) and what I ended up gifting to friends who also wouldn't get off it? Flight Control HD. It's a flash-like game where you draw flight-paths for cartoon planes to have them land at their relevant airport runway without hitting each other. I could write it in a few hours in any programming language that lets you manipulate pixels or draw bitmaps. Thing is, I have extracted more gaming value from that than expensive, new, 3D, top-range FPS with advanced physics, realistic graphics and online gaming. If you go by hours-of-entertainment-per-price, it rates extremely highly. My previous big-value-purchase? Altitude. Fly a little 2D plane around while shooting other people doing the same. (And no, I'm not plane-obsessed in any way - they just happen to both be fun games). It cost me £3 and I've played 200+ hours and even set up my own server for it. Grand Theft Auto IV? I got it on the Steam Christmas sales because it worked out to be about 3 pounds, but even GTA 3 was only 10-15 hours of play for me and cost about £30 at the time (I didn't even buy GTA 3, someone else gifted it to me). I haven't even bothered to download it yet - I'll leave it until I'm bored of the other 74 games I bought this Christmas and have nothing else to play. There are *very* few big name, "complex" games that can give me value anywhere near a little mess-around game. And if that value is present, even when I *can* see it (e.g. Half-Life 2 when it first came out) it has to work REALLY hard to get me to part with my money.
I don't think I played any Zygna titles except for Farmville and that was mostly to see what the fuss was about (I was late to Facebook but eventually succumbed to using it as an online photo gallery, and - mainly to prove a point - in a week of playing Farmville for free for 10 minutes a day I had something valued about 10 times what my closest "obsessive" friends had managed in years with their DLC purchases... it was just a matter of seeing what provided the greatest return on investment without actually spending *real* money to buy things). I don't play their games, I find them a bit too simplistic and boring and aimed towards making profit. But hell, I've played many more worse games that cost lots of *real* money.
Zygna are making money from people who are willingly parting with cash and giving it to them rather than to companies like Valve - there's a reason for that. Without Zygna, they *wouldn't* be giving their money to Valve or other high-end-gaming producers anyway. They haven't *ruined* gaming, they've just found a niche that most people who consider themselves serious gamers (if ever there was a contradiction in terms, that's it) don't like. Good luck to them - they aren't hurting anyone. But if they could stop everyone else from spamming my Facebook page with crap by default, that would be nice too.
It could certainly go against them to choose not to initiate lawsuits on similar violations that they were (or reasonably should have been) aware of. It's not as cast-iron as trademark law (where not defending your mark means you can lose your rights to it) but it's certainly something that would need explanation if there was a hint of deliberate action in that respect.
That said, it will still cost thousands to even get to that point and the worst that would happen is probably the case would just get thrown out, they'd go bankrupt and you'd never recoup your legal costs from the administrators.
And this is the problem with even doing business in a country that allows such abstract "patents", especially software patents. You don't need to be in the patent business, or invention, or even be in an area where you expect to have to research patents for running a business, and you don't even need to actually violate any valid patent - you can still sued out of existence if you're not big enough to fend such things off.
It's not the "yet-another-big-company-sued-for-obviousness" stories that are the problem - how many tiny little outfits just settled out of court instead of fight something they *know* they should win? You don't point at Google first, you take lots of small companies and get their settlements in order to provide you with some authenticity and then go for the big boys, and you'll never hear about those small-fry that feel they have to pay up because it's too costly for them to annoy the patent-holders or defend against them in court.
Seriously - stop doing business in places that have software patents. It's a gamble that is going to cost you big if you are unlucky enough to step on a patent-troll's foot. I hereby patent "method to determine if a user of a game is in a country subject to software patent laws for the purpose of denial of access to such users", by the way.
And you've made the classic mistake - "want most" does not equal "good idea". That's the part that's *really* hard to understand until you actually are on the other end of it. Most of those suggestions would end up completing unbalancing games and basically turning things into click-fests or making them too complicated.
You're only thinking ADSL - and, yes, 90% of the ADSL out there is over BT-owned copper. There are some phone companies that do LLU so although it uses original BT copper, it's literally only using the *copper* and actually connected to non-BT equipment in the exchange, hence BT has no say over it. Bulldog used to do this but they are only available in limited areas, for obvious reasons (where they can make money by pulling enough people off BT equipment and taking the "risk" themselves).
However, over other methods BT aren't involved at all - Virgin Media fibre is totally independent of BT, for instance, and they offer just as good a business deal (even pay-TV, telephone and Internet over the same fibre cable). But again, only where they (or their predecessor cable companies) bothered to cable. In London you can get a non-BT line very easily, and most of the time it's just a matter of switching on the fibre that already runs to the end of your garden. Outside that, I don't know but while it's true that MOST places are BT, it's certainly not true that you can't reasonably get anything else, and I'm not entirely sure that rival ISP's, even if they use BT as backhaul, will be at all happy to be associated with this - Phorm was a PR disaster, this could easily turn out the same.
The laws against driving while completely legally blind are also predicated upon probability. What's to say he *won't* make it home even though he can't see anything and his buddy is giving him audible directions (an ACTUAL case, repeated in several countries)? Don't be an idiot. Driving while drunk is *INCREDIBLY* dangerous. If you drive drunk and I know about it, I *WILL* report you to the police even if that means tailing you for 30 minutes before they can get to us. I will remove a friends car keys if I think he's planning to drive home drunk. Barmen across the country do the same and call police pre-emptively if they think you're going to do the same.
Second, drunk driving has *catastrophic* consequences on a (admittedly) chance event. The risk is still there though, and you can *easily* take out an entire family in less than a second just by being a macho dick. It doesn't matter if it's one family or one hundred, that's not something to be proud of risking. Walk home drunk and the only person you'll hurt is yourself.
On the use of police time? I think 10 officers is an exaggeration (in the UK it's rarely more than three or four at the side of the road even on organised "we'll have anything that look dodgy" pull-overs). And that's the point - if they stop two cars it can take that many officers to organise that many drunks without them being a hazard to themselves, the police or other road users, and to cart the cars off (over here cars are often seized on DUI offences) and to keep traffic moving and keep eyes out for other suspicious drivers. Even before being pulled over, they're not JUST looking for DUI - they're probably looking for *anything* suspicious (people who get nervous at traffic stops often have something to be nervous about, even if it's just a bald tyre) and (mostly I imagine) making people aware on their way TO an event that they police will be around AFTER the event too, acting as an immediate deterrent even to idiots that think they can drive home because they "only had a couple".
I don't see the problem. If an officer stops me, even just to ask me the time, he can pick me up on any *CRIME* that I've committed even if he doesn't notice it until my car has stopped (e.g. faulty rear light). It's a crime. That's his job. If he pulls me over because my car is a type often used by boy racers, so what? It won't always pay off but he's putting knowledge of the area, local criminals and likely activity to work in order to cut crime. That's his *job*. I happen to own such a car - the cheapest, shittest wreck money can buy but it goes fast and can be made to look quite sleek - I get pulled over on random stops and customs inspections all the time. I don't care because they never inconvenience me once they have (quickly) checked that I'm not doing anything illegal. I even thank them when I leave, because I wouldn't want their thankless job.
And pulling over even random people to check road tax, insurance, MOT, licence, roadworthiness, speed, sobriety, etc. is perfectly acceptable in a modern society - you don't need "probable cause" in my country and that's only ever mentioned because people moan if you pull over, say, 90% black people in a 90% black area of the country (they say it's unfairly picking on the minorities, thus showing their lack of a grasp of simple statistics). And without such checks nobody would bother with ANY of those things (look at speeds on an unmonitored road, look at speeds on a monitored road - people only obey the law when there's a chance they will get caught if they don't). It's not some conspiracy to enslave the masses, it's stopping people who don't see the problem with driving drunk from being on the roads.
Conspiracies to enslave the masses would have to be a LOT better than that to have any effect whatsoever. Either that or you have an INCREDIBLY dumb populace that can't tell the difference between 1984 and a traffic stop.
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Sod contests for old games. We have popularity contests beamed to your own personal section of the planet so you can judge people remotely using buttons without having to get out of the chair. We have people who've never touched soil eating nutritional balanced, rich, processed food every single day. We have people who spend most of their time tapping buttons to post ignored opinions on global virtual messageboards that nobody ever reads again.
There are any number of ways of not being productive. The better we are at doing things like growing food and producing things that save time, the more time we have to deliberately do nothing at all. 100 years ago, nobody had TIME to spend 8 hours a day updating their friends about what they did that day, even if those friends lived in the same house.
People doing nothing is actually a sign of how easy it is to stay alive with modern equipment and infrastructure and how little knowledge is required to survive in that atmosphere (I have absolutely no idea/experience about how to grow enough food to feed my family... do you?).
That said, I do think that this is hardly "news" even for a geek. So the guy got a new highscore in an old game. Good for him. And he probably spent months dreaming about the damn game, destroying his muscles and turning his mind to mush in order to achieve that "fame". That's his problem. In my entire life, I can't imagine it ever taking more than a second to acknowledge, even if I *was* interested in the exact area we're discussing. But yet I can afford five minutes to say what a waste of time it is. Modern life, eh? Truly wonderful. :-)
Erm, the evidence points to the contrary in that T-Mobile Germany (same company, different country) just did the exact OPPOSITE.
However, if that really is the case, and they want to make it more expensive to download a STUPIDLY TINY amount (Seriously? Accounting in Megabytes? Outside mobile telecoms the last time I saw that was on dial-up), with things like the Blackberry tablet on the market supporting speeds up to 100Mbit download (25Mbps is the fastest you can get "in real life" at the moment), it's an incredibly stupid thing to do, overloaded or not. Don't cut the limit, build the capacity and thereby gain customers instead.
Seriously - QoS on the radio channels (should be done anyway or emergency calls get swamped by idiots texting home, etc.) and then join the base station to a cheap business ADSL connection. I don't really care if I get 8Mbps or 0.5Mbps but if I buy a) a smartphone or b) a "broadband" dongle from a telecoms company, I expect them to support its ordinary use. Hell, I can do 30Gb a month on ADSL just browsing as much as I do. 500Mb? My dad could piss through that in one click online. Every other country in the world doesn't have problems with this - they are all capable of supplying broadband speeds in the most crowded of cities to multiple mobile users simultaneously. It's purely a "pay through the nose" venture to make profit. And some people are idiots enough to join in.
"You can run away from T-Mobile now but the others will adopt until there is no where to go to." - fine. Then I stop using mobile broadband or smartphones, like I completed avoided ever using GPRS (again, they accounted in Mb) - when you can't charge sensibly for a half-decent service, I won't tolerate it just because it's the only thing available. I'll just adjust so that I don't NEED it. In this case, and in my entire life, that means I carry a cheap, shitty £10 PAYG phone for calling people (and thus you make almost zero off me because I only pay for a call or two a month, if that, and mostly people call me, and I no longer have a contract, a device, or a mobile internet package with the telecoms company) and if I need internet access I *did* have a T-Mobile dongle. Now that my usage has just been chopped in at least quarters, that just means I throw the dongle away and use Wifi instead. Hell, it's free and I live in London so it's never hard to find a legitimate connection. I'd happily give my money to something like The Cloud now because they do wifi in London that you can always find if you need it. Or do without Internet on the move like I have for pretty much the entirety of my life.
It's only idiots that buy smartphones and MUST USE THEM so much that they will pay stupid money, or tolerate crappy limits, that are the problem. Fortunately, not *my* problem. But my employer will probably re-think all their mobile comms now because they were reliant on Blackberries over a T-Mobile connection for certain things. 500Mb? Hell, you can hit that just browsing.
If you don't want people to use it like broadband, don't call it mobile broadband and sell mobile broadband dongles (which is what I bought from them, and is also affected by their stupid limits - smartphones are the owner's fault, but a mobile broadband dongle? The clue is in the name and the usage pattern). If you don't want people to download lots, limit the speed to a sensible value instead of cutting off internet for the rest of the month (stupid idea). And if you want to be a cutting-edge telecoms firm formed by a merger of the two largest UK mobile telecoms firms (Orange and T-Mobile are now the same company in the UK), don't cut off your highest-paying customers for the rest of the month, in the middle of a smartphone boom, just weeks after merging, for downloading a pitiful amount of data. Idiots. Anyway want to buy a Hauwei E660 dongle?
But flying under the banner of a group by your own admission (as many people do) is basically adjoining yourself to that group and (partly) condoning their actions and (certainly) being tarred with the same brush as everyone else in the group.
I don't support Anonymous because (apart from the fact that I think they are all idiots and follow pretty much only idiotic causes) if, tomorrow, they all decide that the issue of the moment is that nobody should have central heating, and they start DDoS'ing my energy provider, then that's not something I agree with. With a changeable "group" such as Anonymous, condoning ONE of their actions is pretty much condoning the others too (or you'd be forming a splinter group that *DOESN'T* DDoS those people you don't want to, and thus supporting THAT group instead of Anonymous).
The fact that different people who BOTH claim membership of the group can do two opposing things isn't my problem. It's just a convenient banner, then, to hide under whenever you do something, no matter what that is and whether the rest of the group condone your actions. But *joining* that group or *condoning* that group (or even acknowledging it's existence as anything other than a vague moniker under which to attack people) is *recognising* that group and thus agreeing with its policies and actions to some extent.
If people don't want to be associated with those actions, they would be handing in their "membership" of such a group, or clarifying exactly where the boundaries of the group lie - every group has extremists who want to use it to stamp on the good name (just look at certain Muslim extremists) but their actions are always condoned and the separation between "Muslims" and "Nutters who want to blow people up in the name of Islam" is always made clear.
Anonymous isn't a group. They don't have a cause. They don't have an agenda. They don't really have "members". It's just like saying "God made me do it" or "*THEY* made me do it". And just as convincing.
Any group that's too shy to name it's member (e.g. British National Party), too scared to disown its own member when they do wrong, or in which ANY action is tolerated isn't a "group" at all. It's just a convenient moniker for doing shit that you want to hide.
The "Like" thing is usually true, or they just want to see the hidden picture / enter the competition that requires them to "like" it first. However, the "this sucks" portion is generally not true. If someone says something sucks on such sites, they *normally* think it does.
However, the MUCH bigger question - what idiot listens to their Facebook/Twitter friend's opinion when they are buying something for themselves, without at least asking *WHY* it sucks? People always tell me that X sucks but with no explanation. People still can't explain to me why, all of a sudden, Windows XP sucks. Or OpenOffice sucks. Or Opera sucks. If they provide reasons, those reasons are usually exactly WHY I want to use it (i.e. Opera has a built-in mail client and doesn't execute ActiveX). They normally don't like it, or it's not suited to their way of working, or it has problems they don't like, or (infinitely more likely) they haven't *really* given it a fair chance and it's fashionable to say anything non-standard sucks. That's *their* opinion and doesn't automatically mean that everyone works the same or, even if they do, that they will find it as sucky.
There are friends I have that, if they HATE a movie, I'm almost guaranteed to like it and vice versa. There are friends who piss their money away on gadgets that I think are useless or that don't suit my method of working at all. There is no point in me owning a machine that I can't easily write my own software for, for example - so their iPods and iPhones and iBooks are effectively a "games console" computer in my opinion, whereas my old XP image that's followed me onto four different laptops is much better AND plays all the games I want. They don't see it that way so my "old, sucky" laptop whose efficiency and speed WOULD be destroyed within a few months of *their* use of the same machine through mismanagement is actually perfect for me.
We bought the head of the school I work at an iPad when he retired. He was an old-school computing guy, though, so he sold it on eBay shortly afterwards. But the 600MHz Mini-ITX with triple boot DOS, Linux and Windows XP that I built for him, with built-in Soundblaster compatibility, was a million times more suitable and he took it with him to his house in the South of France. To anyone else, it probably "sucked", but for him it was perfect. I have friends that only buy Sony. I have friends that spend money on Farmville. I have friends that live by their iPhone and yet can't work out how to use 1% of it's functions. I have friends that can't operate my laptop because the touchpad (again, personal preference) is slightly offset to the left and doesn't have a defined scroll area, but it's perfect for me, because Autoplay is completely disable, and because to play a DVD you have to load VLC manually. I have a friend who only buys whatever Which magazine tells him to buy.
"Suckiness" is dependent on the user. Opinions matter but only of those people whose opinions matter to me. The chances of random "Yeah, this is cool" or "This sucks" actually affecting *ANYTHING* I do are incredibly minimal unless it's backed up by reasoning, experience and trust. You have to weight each opinion by those factors and if you do that, any astroturfing will actually end up on the bottom of the pile rather than the top. And even among the people I speak to the most, there are some where I wouldn't *touch* anything they recommended because they are inherently different to me. The person I know who works at Rackspace has been brainwashed, so I instantly discredit their opinion on hosting and network hardware because they try to simulate the datacentre they work in inside everyone's house including their own - it's *not* suitable for the majority of cases and even when it *is* suitable, I happen to think that Rackspace suck and most of what they do internally sucks. If I didn't discredit their opinion, I'd basically be up to my nose in overly expensive Cisco hardware and yet have substandard capabilities compared to what I hav
Actually, the GPL does have provisions about providing all necessary headers and working environment in order to reproduce the binary. So it's not as simple as "the GPL doesn't care". It goes to specific lengths to ensure that the build does not depend on external files. The binary produced may or may not include parts of the Apple code / code signing in order to build that particular executable and none of them would be redistributable. Does that binary load on it's own, without the aid of Apple Store?
Does the Apple Store license do anything to modify terms of distribution (YES IT DOES, even if it's only an additional indemnity waiver, but it also says lots of other stuff concerning redistribution). As such, it extends the terms of GPL (i.e. it's like me saying I'm distributing this GPL software, but the license I'm doing it under prohibits you from giving it to anyone else, and/or means you can't sue Jack either - by extension I've overrode the GPL and without all the copyright holders consent, that's illegal). You could DUAL-license it (one under the Apple Store licence and one under the GPL) but that means copyright holders have to do that, not any random joe, and you can't just take GPL code and "add extra terms" (Section 7 of the GPL) without being the author / copyright holder.
This is the thing that stopped this particular instance, and this is also the thing that EVERYONE knew would stop it. Apple has clauses related to its DRM (i.e. don't circumvent it, don't let other people have that particular binary, etc.) and that's what is contrary to the GPL. It doesn't matter that A binary can be put onto another iPhone or whatever - it has to be THAT binary, or any binary made from the GPL code. AIn fact, it's absolutely amazing that Apple ever let themselves get that deep because they should have KNOWN it would provide a legal avenue for trouble. They are lucky that it hasn't ended up before the courts, but only because the VLC team haven't taken that much interest in doing so. It takes a single copyright holder, with a single line of code / documentation / image in VLC for someone to force it to go to court. And Section 7 would be my prime candidate to concentrate on and I assure you, I could get it past any court's viability tests and have it actually come to trial quite easily.
If a license is incompatible, it's incompatible. The bit people miss is that the Apple Store licence is incompatible with the GPL. Completely. As in you can't mix the two. Never could. This was "overlooked" until one of the authors challenged it. It always was actually illegal to distribute it in that fashion. Doesn't matter if everyone in the world wants it - unless copyright licensing laws change globally, or every VLC contributor allows their contribution to be licensed under a non-GPL licence, it can't happen.
The second you filter, you become responsible for what passing through the filter. Ask ISP's in restrictive countries and almost any modern legal system. If you claim to have a "safe web filter" and then someone gets a dodgy site from it, you are deemed partly responsible because "why didn't your filter catch it"? I work in schools, so I know this problem well. This is why ISP's don't WANT to filter stuff, or people don't WANT to run cybercafes in restrictive countries, or why wikipedia DOESN'T moderate every edit you do. As soon as you say "we're filtering", *EVERYONE* with a stake wants to be on your filter, and have it be perfectly accurately implemented for them alone. You filter MGM's films - okay, I'm an independent film producer, filter me too. Why not? Is piracy against me "allowed" just because I'm not part of the big studios? And by extension ten years later every website publishes nothing because nothing passes their 7 million filters in under an hour, and what does is deliberately chosen by malicious people to step on the toes of the one company that *doesn't* have a filter with you yet.
1 kid can probably do several hundred files a day if you pushed them (you say yourself, only 150 unique users). We're talking several MILLION a day. That means 1000 kids, probably more than the entire RapidShare workforce, just to do a simple screen, not even a legally-binding one. Automated, on 24-hour shifts, with human-delays in between every upload.
A publisher is putting money to put that content into presses and sell it on. RapidShare doesn't. It also has a run of several million in their entire life from a SINGLE master. So they have to check ONE book - not a million. It's not that it's impossible - it's just ridiculous to expect it. A paper is responsible for every word it prints because it only take 10 minutes to read a paper and then maybe an few dozens hours or two to check and ensure it's accuracy - with a newspaper's workforce, that's nothing. A filehost, however, or a web host, or a search engine, or a popular online auction site, has several MILLION things to check each day, each taking several hours (or even days) to verify. That's completely outside the bounds of credulity to suggest it's possible. Yes, they could JUST have one or two hundred files / pages / auctions each day visible but then Google, YouTube, RapidShare, eBay, Amazon (gotta check those reviews for copyright infringement!), and a million other websites would be dead overnight.
It's ENIRELY unreasonable to expect a large website to do anywhere near that - especially when only other people can KNOW if a file is infringing - millions of files would slip past the door every day even with the best checks because copyright licensing isn't as simple as "you can do it" or "not" (e.g. Open Source licensing, public domain, expired copyright, multiple rightsholders and licencees etc.). That means that every upload you have to determine the original author before you can get any further and that means comparing against every known copyright text in the world.
Yet a book publisher only has to check their book once. You only had to check a couple of dozen files a day for nothing more than OBVIOUSLY infringing stuff (and I bet that an awful lot of copyrighted stuff passed you by with your own permission - did you seriously, and to a legal standard, check the origins and licensing of EVERY text that you posted, every photo that you uploaded, every shareware ZIP file, everything contained inside every shareware ZIP file - and then check that the originator had a valid license from said copyright holder? With valid jurisdications and licensing rights in all countries involved (i.e. theirs and yours and those of your consumers) Yes? I call bullshit, then, before you even try to back that up). A cursive glance can tell you if or not a file is *likely* to be infringing but nobody can ever really say for sure without at least going to court. And a million cursive glances means multiplying the number of staff employed by about 10 and training them to a defined standard to sit in a box and click Yes or No all day.
It's bollocks. Which is why the court recognised such. And why Google, eBay, Amazon and a million and one other places can ONLY act on reported material. The volume is just too huge and does NOT compare to some publisher, say, printing recipes that were downloaded from the net without permission. One requires a single check inside months or years of other work, the other requires months or years of checking every second that you're working.
You haven't read the article (or the many others around on LWN.net on the same topic). Basically, large buffers in networking gear, from DSL routers on your home network through to ISP's, mean that interactivity is *shite*. You might download Gb's but in terms of interactive applications it's useless and we're facing ever-increasing latency and problems through wanting to cope too much with errors and delays (e.g. huge buffers to keep resending instead of just letting packets drop and having TCP sort it out by retransmission). TCP windows never shrink because errors and buffered and retried so much from intermediate devices that any sort of window scaling is worthless because it doesn't *see* any packet-loss.
Same devices, smaller buffers, everything works fine and "faster" / "more responsive" all around. It actually would *save* money on new devices because you don't need some huge artificial buffer, you can just drop the occasional packet. But the problem is so deeply embedded into run-of-the-mill hardware that it's almost impossible to escape at the moment and thus EVERYONE from large businesses to home users are running on a completely sub-optimal setup because of it. Almost every networking device made in the last few years has buffers so large that they cause problems with interactivity, bandwidth control, QoS, etc. It's NOT just that a "faster connection" solves the problem - we are getting a percentage of optimal service that's steadily decreasing as buffers increase even though we're improving all the time. That's the point. And it *is* caused by memory prices because memory is so cheap that a huge thoughtless buffer costs no more than a tiny, thought-out buffer.
So not only must Rapidshare know the name of every film, book and video game in existence (and in copyright) but they also have to filter anything that sounds even vaguely like them, has characters added, uses "l33t" spelling, etc. so that they don't accidentally host them? And not only that, but they have to go by the filename, so if I upload 2.7 millions movie clips all called "Aliens", they have to take every single one of them off despite not a single one of them actually having any copyrighted material in them?
Yes, it's obvious that it's easy to circumvent. It's also immediately obvious that, even if a court orders it, they can't *stop* that no matter how many people they hire, checks they make, or copyright holders they work with. Thus it's a pointless exercise to try to pretend they can. All they NEED to do is react to reports of copyright infringement, the same as anyone else. If you don't react, you are basically hindering copyright holders from stamping out infringement. If you DO react, you're not getting in their way even if you do end up inadvertantly hosting some of their content - but you can at least say "it wasn't us, this guy gave us that file" and so trace it back to an individual that CAN be prosecuted (and refusing to identify users etc. will get you into the same trouble with courts as not taking off the files when asked to by a validated copyright holder).
Additionally, I'm a copyright holder. I have written software, written books, drawn images, filmed videos and all manner of things. Thus if I ask, they have to take stuff down if I believe it's mine. That means they have to have some kinds of primitive checks to ensure I *am* a valid copyright owner and have NOT given my permission (there are some genuine software authors that willingly use RapidShare to save their bandwidth, for example), even for the most obscure and nonsensical things that get uploaded to their service. So even investigating every copyright infringement *report* is a huge burden, let alone every *potential* copyright infringement (which basically means performing those checks for EVERY file).
RapidShare might be a hive of illegal content, but when reported it gets removed. So is eBay a hive of illegal content, but when you report it, it gets removed - whether that's because you're selling Nazi memorabilia in France, a baby, or just unlicensed software. It's RIDICULOUS to expect a host to pre-screen absolutely everything they put onto a download website or even a busy auction site. (Almost) Every court in the world recognises that and only expects them to co-operate fully when things ARE reported.
Er... yeah, if you measure, say, a drop in temperature, what exactly do you intend to conclude? A ghost, or that there's a draught? Both will make people think they "feel" something too. Amazing how it's always the old draughty, disrepair, abandoned houses that "make people shiver" and "have shivers up their spine" and "get a sudden cold feeling" and "feel the air move as something moves past them". Ever walked through an old school alone at night? Shit, that could scare anyone and that's just a fairly recent building.
Don't try to "disprove" anything, because that's immediately a bias. Just go to the place, let other people say what *they* think is true and then compare to a "control" house or two that you give some similar bullshit story about, see if it's just the placebo effect in action. My bet is that it will be. A relative of mine lives in a house that is in ALL the guidebooks for her area as a haunted house. There's about 20 stories about it, it's been there hundreds of years, it's even part of the "haunting" guided tours (but they obviously won't let such tours inside because it's a private dwelling and you don't want 50 strangers traipsing through it twice a day / night). They have little stories of "strange" things, but that's it. Nothing anywhere near concrete. I spent a lot of time in it, some alone, for weeks at a time. Nothing. It's just a house.
Being in the dark makes your eyes produce images and patterns. I can *make* my eyes produce an array of perfect spirals if I just stand in a completely dark room and convince myself that's what I'm seeing - I used to do it as a child (yeah, I know, but odd children are everywhere). You can even get any shape going if your imagination is good enough and you will "see" it. Thing is, that lots of those random dots and shapes you "see" in a dark room are just a product of the mind triggered by random activations of the retinal cells - sometimes even high levels of radiation can be "seen" just by closing your eyes in a dark room (some of the nuclear testing people and Chernobyl workers could often see tiny flecks of light when they closed their eyes in a high-radiation area, sort of like a visual Geiger-counter as the alpha-particles interact with your retina).
Being in a room with air movement from other people, draughts, etc. sometimes makes you *think* someone is close to you, especially if you have your eyes closed and the sound is attenuated strangely (mostly our "feel" of people near us is sound / pressure). About twice a year, I *swear* that I can hear a police siren while asleep or driving that goes on for HOURS but it corresponds to no actual siren. I often "hear" my phone go off when it doesn't.
Hell, my house makes noises at night that would scare the life out of you if you didn't know it was the laminate flooring settling, the radiator pipe moving underneath the floorboards, the garden gate outside (which REALLY sounds like it's above your head when you sleep in the room next to it), that "crick" that's the window-pane settling into position during a cold spell. I spent four days once tracking down a sound in my mother-in-law's house that only me and my wife could hear and it turned out to be a radiator pipe rubbing against a floorboard UNDERNEATH the house even when the heating wasn't on and the floorboard was in an empty room. It was impossible to tell where it was coming from and what the sound was without spending hours listening for it. And the people who lived there didn't even notice it was happening at all.
Electromagnetic events are unlikely to be detected by humans at all. We don't receive radio, our radiation detection is limited and very strange (e.g. specks visible in your vision) and most other things are pretty obvious (light, for example). Measuring it is pretty pointless because we can't even prove that kilowatts of it coming from the building opposite or milliwatts RIGHT NEXT TO YOUR HEAD actually do anything at all (e.g. mobile phones).
And in a dark room, you can "see" all so
I'd be extremely surprised if ANY mass vaccination campaign and/or medical procedure didn't produce adverse symptoms in at least 1% of people. To put that in context, 1% of people have bodies that, in intersex terms, "differ from standard male or female" - i.e. are of indiscriminate sex. Hell, paracetamol has a higher rate of problems than that in any reasonably effective dose. Unfortunately, it's impossible to take you seriously because:
1) You're anonymous.
2) Your daughter visited ER. No mention of treatment, symptoms, cause, etc. I've seen people visit ER for a cold. Sometimes it's something more serious, usually they are discharged without anything but placebo treatment. What was done about your daughter's visit and how serious were her symptoms? What did the *doctor's* say about letting have the MMR booster? What was their reasoning? Was it just that it was likely to provoke a reaction or that it would "give her autism" as this paper used to try to claim?
3) She may have fallen sick. Apart from the million and one other factors, the MMR could have made her sick. It's not unusual and is completely expected. A percentage of patients are admitted to hospital for ANY vaccination whatsoever. That's why they ask all those silly questions about "are you allergic to eggs" etc. for certain vaccines. It's a known factor in having an adverse reaction. Your daughter, I'm assuming, does not now have regressive autism where she didn't before, though, which is what the doctor in question was claiming. There's a big difference between "that injection made me feel/be sick/taken to hospital" and "that injection gave me a serious, non-reversible neural disorder".
4) The doctors probably don't take records of correlation specifically. That's not a doctor's job, they are just there to treat symptoms that they see. However, her medical records will almost CERTAINLY contain mention of every confirmed symptom, existing condition, existing treatment and administered treatment and be available for anyone performing these kinds of analyses if they really need to know them. Also, just because your daughter's records don't show something, doesn't mean a statistical trend wouldn't be noticed.
5) There is no evidence of autism emanating from MMR vaccination. Correct. There is, however, outstanding evidence to the contrary, and outstanding evidence that MMR is not significantly different to any other vaccination in terms of adverse side effects, their incidences and severity.
6) This man IS a fraud. And we have ways of knowing because we found him. Read the medical journals that trounce his "evidence" into the ground and propose firm evidence to the contrary.
7) The public health authorities have a requirement to want to know, that's why his report was taken so seriously and allowed to make headlines. Turns out it was complete bollocks, though, and made them look like fools and put many more people at significantly more risk (whether of falling ill, or just costing them more money for no gain if you believe they only have their own interests at heart) by allowing them to avoid MMR vaccination.
Your daughter got ill after having several live virii pumped into her body on purpose to deliberately trigger an immune reaction. That's unfortunate and regrettable. But if she got rubella, she would get MUCH more ill and be a risk to a lot more people, possibly with permanent undesired side-effects (e.g. miscarriage).
And this story has ONLY ever concerned the combined MMR vaccine. You're an idiot if you're applying a) vague knowledge of a long-discredited made-up biased paper studying 12 patients and utterly discredited potential links between a particular vaccine and autism with your daughter to b) EVERY MMR vaccine and a reaction to a vaccine that's doesn't include autism. At the very least, you should have insisted on having the "separate" MMR vaccinations, because they have been perfectly "safe" (i.e. adverse reactions are safely within expected parameters) for decades.
Do you dabble? :-)
Use a netbook, or a laptop. God, I wouldn't want to think what tab completion and a dodgy touchscreen keyboard on a critical server could do to a shell.
If the machine is up enough to SSH in, it's not an emergency. If you truly are the only person who can log into it (locally or remotely) to fix the problem, please don't do it from a smartphone. Actually log in, take your time and fix the problem rather than bashing out commands in some substandard SSH client that will probably be insecure.
It's 2011. I'm never more than a couple of hundred yards from a Wifi connection, never more than a few hundred yards from a computer that I can use if I really have nothing at all and rarely without some sort of computer access unless (and this is important) I don't want to be disturbed and will not fix the machine then anyway (i.e. holiday or weekends when I'm not being paid to do that). If some major emergency crops up, chances are that I need to be there, or that someone else is already there to notice and fix the problem with barely a hint as to the correct command. Anything else *CAN* wait until I can get on a proper terminal and/or until I actually stand in front of the machine.
I honestly can't think of a scenario that would demand SSH access from a single person, on the fly, such that they don't get time to go to a computer or arrive at the physical location of the computer in question, that doesn't hint at poor IT management anyway.
They failed that one of your hurdles - they didn't do a proper analysis on their data. Basically, their data conclusively shows that the chances of pre-cog existed COMPARED TO it not existing is extremely minimal (actually quite strongly in favour of it not existing). But they specifically chose only certain analyses to conclude that it *did* exist.
There are many rebuttals at the moment, most linked to in these comments, that you can read but basically - to remove all statistical jargon - they didn't bother to take account of how probable their data was by pure chance. Their "error margin" is actually vastly larger than their data could even escape, so they can't really make any firm conclusions and certainly NOT in the direction they did. Statistics is a dangerous field, and whoever wrote and reviewed that paper didn't have a DEEP grasp of it, just a passing one.
If you calculate the *chance* that their paper is correct versus their paper being absolute nonsense, not even taking into account anything to do with their methods or that their data might be biased, their data can ONLY mathematically support a vague conclusion that their paper is nonsense. To do the test properly and get a statistically significant result (not even a *conclusive* result, just one that people will go "Oh, that's odd") they would have to do 20 times as many experiments (and then prove that they were fair, unbiased etc.).
It's like rolling three sixes on a die and concluding that the particular die you rolled can only possibly roll a six. It's nearly as bas as claiming that so can every other die on the planet.
Ouch. Taken down by two Bayesian tests on whether it's more likely that the paper is true or not. They didn't even need to get out of bed or dig out a big maths book to basically disprove the entire premise of the original paper using its own data.
As they hint at in that rebuttal - As a mathematician and someone of a scientific mind, I would just like to see *ONE* good test that conclusively shuts people up. Trouble is, no good test will report a false result and thus you'll never get the psychic / UFO / religion factions to even participate, let alone agree on the method of testing because they would have to accept its findings.
Never dabble in statistics - the experts will roundly berate you and correct you even if you *THINK* you're doing everything right. When PhD's can't even work out things like the Monty Hall Problem properly, you just know it's not something you can throw an amateur towards.
Is that the same Office as I get on my desktop installation CD? No? So it's a Microsoft-only product that's been ported by Microsoft to a Microsoft architecture? Windows "runs" on Alpha too. Office "runs" on Mac by that definition. What you're actually doing is BUYING another version of Office written specifically for that particular "Windows" port by the authors of the software who also happen to be the authors of the OS. How many *other* companies do you think stand a chance in hell of doing that, even with MS's co-operation, and having it work, let alone actually making money on the idea?
It's "Office-like" or even an "Office-port" but it's not "Office". Office ports have run on MacOS for decades. Office can run under Linux if you use WINE. It doesn't mean that "Office is on Linux" or that it's supported (no support = no business use). Also doesn't mean that even 1% of the apps that a business runs or plugs into Office will work on Mac or this or anything else.
There is a new version of Office - that's the news - that can run on ARM and open standard Office docs. The whole "Windows on ARM" thing is a load of misleading marketing nonsense. That's *not* Windows on ARM, and certainly not any other primarily-Windows application on ARM (probably ever). It's a program that normally works on x86 architectures being ported to work on one other architecture and then claimed as being a "Windows on ARM". I bet it gets all the feature parity, updates, support, combined licensing that Pocket Word does (that's "Office on Windows CE", right? (sarcasm) ) or even Office on Mac (no ActiveX integration - how would they? -, no RTF emails, no ODF support, etc. etc. etc.).
*This* Office is not a Windows application. That's entirely my point. It's an ARM application. Running an ARM application on an ARM OS is no shocker. Running a *Windows* (and hence suggesting x86) application on an ARM OS *would be*.
Block FarmVille.
Block FrontierVille.
Block CityVille.
Block MafiaWars.
Block PetVille.
Fishville, YoVille, .... the list goes on. Although it's partly Facebook's fault (that you can't block a publisher, or categories like "Games"), and partly people's fault (I really don't give a shit, so stop pressing the button to "Share" just so you get some in-game item), there's no need for them ALL to, by default, push to your friends pages, or for them to all run off a unique application page. And everytime they bring out a new game I have to block that too. And then I have the *other* publishers to deal with.
Zygna do it partly deliberately to gain exposure and I can completely understand that and they're doing nothing "wrong" by Facebook's terms, or by circumventing requiring human interaction. It's just that I don't filter my spam by individually removing single people from a list. I really don't care about games, or Zygna games in particular, postings on my friend's Facebook pages. But I can't do anything so general as block just those categories. Zygna and/or Facebook should really be pushing to implement a "don't piss me off" category for either individual publishers or specific types of application. If someone is turning you off anyway, they are NOT a potential customer, so at least stop pissing them off further.
Windows on ARM? That doesn't matter.
Office on ARM is a million times more important - for a start, that suggests you can open your documents on another new platform without having to worry about export filters and binary compatibility. But hey, I'm afraid OpenOffice and suchlike beat you to it.
The problem with Windows on ARM is that no currently existing Windows program will run on it. It's a new architecture without binary compatibility, like Windows CE was. Sure you can port things over but you can do that anyway and few have bothered. Things like the NET framework are "supposed" to be cross-platform but you can be assured than anything vital that you have to use and that you have no control over development of (e.g. business apps) requires an x86 binary at some point, or isn't supported on ARM. So even your programs that are written in NET need to be ported (which usually means it'll never happen).
Telling people that Windows now runs on ARM is misleading - they will think that everything from Half-Life 2 to Sage should work on it without touching anything. What you mean is that there is now an official OS for ARM that looks and works a bit like Windows. Like Windows CE was. But then, what ARM? There are hundreds of ARM variations and not all of them can be catered to, so you're back to it only working on select platforms that have been especially designed for it - like, erm, Windows CE was. Can I join a domain and run my existing business apps? No? Then it's actually just the Windows *GUI* that's consistent across platforms, not the OS.
Even if the next-gen of Windows 8 can be almost identical on PC or other devices, you're then into the problem that it's not the OS that matters (and that pretty much *does* have to be changed for every hardware variation) but the applications. And "Windows on ARM" will make people think they can install Steam on it and just run everything. That's not the case and never will be.
Windows on ARM is a response to Android, to try to pretend to be as cross-platform. Same as OpenXML was a response to ODF, to try to pretend to be platform-independent. In reality, the headline will grab eyes and then the reality will disappoint. But in the meantime, you've sold a "portable Windows" license to some mobile-carrier who has to repeatedly explain that "desktop Windows" isn't the same as "mobile Windows".
It's just Windows CE. Remember trying to explain to people that Pocket Word wasn't the same as desktop Word? Same thing over again.
Nobody forces you to play a game. Zynga have made a lot of money by giving people games that they voluntarily want to play and, in some cases, buy. Just because it's not *your* (or my) type of game, doesn't mean they are somehow inherently the antithesis of gaming. I don't understand people that pay monthly subscriptions to play crappy click-fest MMORPG's just to get to the next "virtual" level but it's hard to say that they are the "bane" of gaming.
I spent a small fortune on Steam over Christmas, on an already bursting-at-the-seams account. I got 75 new games for less than the price of a Wii. Do you know what I ended up playing the most (without intending to) and what I ended up gifting to friends who also wouldn't get off it? Flight Control HD. It's a flash-like game where you draw flight-paths for cartoon planes to have them land at their relevant airport runway without hitting each other. I could write it in a few hours in any programming language that lets you manipulate pixels or draw bitmaps. Thing is, I have extracted more gaming value from that than expensive, new, 3D, top-range FPS with advanced physics, realistic graphics and online gaming. If you go by hours-of-entertainment-per-price, it rates extremely highly. My previous big-value-purchase? Altitude. Fly a little 2D plane around while shooting other people doing the same. (And no, I'm not plane-obsessed in any way - they just happen to both be fun games). It cost me £3 and I've played 200+ hours and even set up my own server for it. Grand Theft Auto IV? I got it on the Steam Christmas sales because it worked out to be about 3 pounds, but even GTA 3 was only 10-15 hours of play for me and cost about £30 at the time (I didn't even buy GTA 3, someone else gifted it to me). I haven't even bothered to download it yet - I'll leave it until I'm bored of the other 74 games I bought this Christmas and have nothing else to play. There are *very* few big name, "complex" games that can give me value anywhere near a little mess-around game. And if that value is present, even when I *can* see it (e.g. Half-Life 2 when it first came out) it has to work REALLY hard to get me to part with my money.
I don't think I played any Zygna titles except for Farmville and that was mostly to see what the fuss was about (I was late to Facebook but eventually succumbed to using it as an online photo gallery, and - mainly to prove a point - in a week of playing Farmville for free for 10 minutes a day I had something valued about 10 times what my closest "obsessive" friends had managed in years with their DLC purchases... it was just a matter of seeing what provided the greatest return on investment without actually spending *real* money to buy things). I don't play their games, I find them a bit too simplistic and boring and aimed towards making profit. But hell, I've played many more worse games that cost lots of *real* money.
Zygna are making money from people who are willingly parting with cash and giving it to them rather than to companies like Valve - there's a reason for that. Without Zygna, they *wouldn't* be giving their money to Valve or other high-end-gaming producers anyway. They haven't *ruined* gaming, they've just found a niche that most people who consider themselves serious gamers (if ever there was a contradiction in terms, that's it) don't like. Good luck to them - they aren't hurting anyone. But if they could stop everyone else from spamming my Facebook page with crap by default, that would be nice too.
It could certainly go against them to choose not to initiate lawsuits on similar violations that they were (or reasonably should have been) aware of. It's not as cast-iron as trademark law (where not defending your mark means you can lose your rights to it) but it's certainly something that would need explanation if there was a hint of deliberate action in that respect.
That said, it will still cost thousands to even get to that point and the worst that would happen is probably the case would just get thrown out, they'd go bankrupt and you'd never recoup your legal costs from the administrators.
And this is the problem with even doing business in a country that allows such abstract "patents", especially software patents. You don't need to be in the patent business, or invention, or even be in an area where you expect to have to research patents for running a business, and you don't even need to actually violate any valid patent - you can still sued out of existence if you're not big enough to fend such things off.
It's not the "yet-another-big-company-sued-for-obviousness" stories that are the problem - how many tiny little outfits just settled out of court instead of fight something they *know* they should win? You don't point at Google first, you take lots of small companies and get their settlements in order to provide you with some authenticity and then go for the big boys, and you'll never hear about those small-fry that feel they have to pay up because it's too costly for them to annoy the patent-holders or defend against them in court.
Seriously - stop doing business in places that have software patents. It's a gamble that is going to cost you big if you are unlucky enough to step on a patent-troll's foot. I hereby patent "method to determine if a user of a game is in a country subject to software patent laws for the purpose of denial of access to such users", by the way.
And you've made the classic mistake - "want most" does not equal "good idea". That's the part that's *really* hard to understand until you actually are on the other end of it. Most of those suggestions would end up completing unbalancing games and basically turning things into click-fests or making them too complicated.
Listen to the users. But filter appropriately.
You're only thinking ADSL - and, yes, 90% of the ADSL out there is over BT-owned copper. There are some phone companies that do LLU so although it uses original BT copper, it's literally only using the *copper* and actually connected to non-BT equipment in the exchange, hence BT has no say over it. Bulldog used to do this but they are only available in limited areas, for obvious reasons (where they can make money by pulling enough people off BT equipment and taking the "risk" themselves).
However, over other methods BT aren't involved at all - Virgin Media fibre is totally independent of BT, for instance, and they offer just as good a business deal (even pay-TV, telephone and Internet over the same fibre cable). But again, only where they (or their predecessor cable companies) bothered to cable. In London you can get a non-BT line very easily, and most of the time it's just a matter of switching on the fibre that already runs to the end of your garden. Outside that, I don't know but while it's true that MOST places are BT, it's certainly not true that you can't reasonably get anything else, and I'm not entirely sure that rival ISP's, even if they use BT as backhaul, will be at all happy to be associated with this - Phorm was a PR disaster, this could easily turn out the same.
The laws against driving while completely legally blind are also predicated upon probability. What's to say he *won't* make it home even though he can't see anything and his buddy is giving him audible directions (an ACTUAL case, repeated in several countries)? Don't be an idiot. Driving while drunk is *INCREDIBLY* dangerous. If you drive drunk and I know about it, I *WILL* report you to the police even if that means tailing you for 30 minutes before they can get to us. I will remove a friends car keys if I think he's planning to drive home drunk. Barmen across the country do the same and call police pre-emptively if they think you're going to do the same.
Second, drunk driving has *catastrophic* consequences on a (admittedly) chance event. The risk is still there though, and you can *easily* take out an entire family in less than a second just by being a macho dick. It doesn't matter if it's one family or one hundred, that's not something to be proud of risking. Walk home drunk and the only person you'll hurt is yourself.
On the use of police time? I think 10 officers is an exaggeration (in the UK it's rarely more than three or four at the side of the road even on organised "we'll have anything that look dodgy" pull-overs). And that's the point - if they stop two cars it can take that many officers to organise that many drunks without them being a hazard to themselves, the police or other road users, and to cart the cars off (over here cars are often seized on DUI offences) and to keep traffic moving and keep eyes out for other suspicious drivers. Even before being pulled over, they're not JUST looking for DUI - they're probably looking for *anything* suspicious (people who get nervous at traffic stops often have something to be nervous about, even if it's just a bald tyre) and (mostly I imagine) making people aware on their way TO an event that they police will be around AFTER the event too, acting as an immediate deterrent even to idiots that think they can drive home because they "only had a couple".
I don't see the problem. If an officer stops me, even just to ask me the time, he can pick me up on any *CRIME* that I've committed even if he doesn't notice it until my car has stopped (e.g. faulty rear light). It's a crime. That's his job. If he pulls me over because my car is a type often used by boy racers, so what? It won't always pay off but he's putting knowledge of the area, local criminals and likely activity to work in order to cut crime. That's his *job*. I happen to own such a car - the cheapest, shittest wreck money can buy but it goes fast and can be made to look quite sleek - I get pulled over on random stops and customs inspections all the time. I don't care because they never inconvenience me once they have (quickly) checked that I'm not doing anything illegal. I even thank them when I leave, because I wouldn't want their thankless job.
And pulling over even random people to check road tax, insurance, MOT, licence, roadworthiness, speed, sobriety, etc. is perfectly acceptable in a modern society - you don't need "probable cause" in my country and that's only ever mentioned because people moan if you pull over, say, 90% black people in a 90% black area of the country (they say it's unfairly picking on the minorities, thus showing their lack of a grasp of simple statistics). And without such checks nobody would bother with ANY of those things (look at speeds on an unmonitored road, look at speeds on a monitored road - people only obey the law when there's a chance they will get caught if they don't). It's not some conspiracy to enslave the masses, it's stopping people who don't see the problem with driving drunk from being on the roads.
Conspiracies to enslave the masses would have to be a LOT better than that to have any effect whatsoever. Either that or you have an INCREDIBLY dumb populace that can't tell the difference between 1984 and a traffic stop.