And probably all rendered inadmissible in court because they were obtained illegally. Way to immunise a guy against an awful lot of evidence.
I know someone who was threatened by ACS:Law. As with all things serious, we researched it and discovered it was likely a scam, and this was WAY before they were news-worthy. The threat was ignored, except for a polite response, and nothing else happened. If you pay up, you're a moron. If you think this will stop such companies, there are no shortage of other morons willing to pick up such easy work, and they don't even need to be anywhere near a lawyer themselves.
DDOS, hacking, etc. isn't doing anything but legitimising their actions should they go to the mainstream media. Just ignoring their threats and/or inviting them to court, as any sensible person would do (and have done - ACS:Law are under investigation by various high-level UK legal authorities for legal irregularities) does infinitely more.
The guys an scamming idiot, but it's like a playground fight here - I can guess how much a moron he is without having to break into his personal emails and just because they might reveal he is an asshole doesn't mean that you've "won" anything against anti-piracy lawsuits or even against legal threats with zero evidence. All you've done is become nothing more than a publicity generator. How long before I see on the news: "Pirates hack into law-firm's servers, distribute private emails, law-firm says it's represents the mindset of the people they are chasing".
And just about every court in the world recognises that it's extremely hard to prove a negative. That's what I'm waiting for - the court's interpretation of the first few real life cases where a denial is officially lodged. The problem is that EU law trumps French law (absolutely, completely, 100%) and EU legislation is pretty hot on things like not requiring people to prove they *DIDN'T* do things.
Fining someone in such an environment is really tricky, because you're basically putting undue burden on them to prove their innocence (which is a much simpler set of laws to interpret and can still basically trump shit like this). Every law that passes is not valid in all its points until it's been tested multiple times in multiple courts.
It could easily be equated, in a court, to someone being fined for not locking their house, which allowed other people to walk in and use their house as a brothel / drug factory / playing loud music etc... Yes, they should protect their property, but can't be held liable for a third-party's actions unless you can prove that they were aware of what was going on, or involved in it. EU law, especially some quite basic human rights legislation, trumps this "law" into the ground and France can be forced to rescind it. The UK has been forced to rescind and modify laws that did similar things because they clashed with EU interpretations of similar laws.
And are the *copyright holders* tasked with identifying the same amount of copyright material, verifying it (which would presumably involve downloading a substantial proportion of it themselves, otherwise it's just hearsay - "Yes, your honour, I saw this IP address connect to this tracker asking for this file. Even though it's called "Aliens" I can't tell you the content because it *obvious* that it must be the Hollywood film of the same name"), its original IP address, the copyright holder (i.e. if they find infringing material that isn't under *their* copyright, are they obliged to notify the authorities and/or the person whose copyright it is? Surely otherwise they are deliberately ignoring a crime? That could get interesting).
It's one of those laws that'll be in fashion and then in a year's time the copyright holders will all be complaining that it's insufficient and not effective and too much work for them and they'll give up on it. Hopefully they *have* bitten off more than they could chew and ISP's therefore have to employ dozens of staff, double their broadband prices etc. to keep up and that'll provide a pretty clear economic oversight to those implementing that law and, most importantly, putting some of that burden on the ISP's.
And all for a letter dropping through the door where people reply saying "It wasn't me, my son visited/dog did it/wireless was hacked/computer caught a virus/etc." and you have to go to court to try to prove it eventually anyway (cutting off your broadband for alleged but unproven infringements sounds a pretty good way to waste the courts time too, and they take much less kindly to that).
It takes precisely the time for a file copy of a single index.html / index.php file to complete to upgrade a website. You MUST have your new website running, probably on the same server, probably in a protected subdirectory (by.htaccess or similar), so that you can see the performance / compatibility side of things are working okay. Then the "upgrade" is nothing more than moving those files into place, unprotecting the directories (all invisible to users so far) and then moving the new index file over the old (which you hopefully kept a backup of).
Don't tell a site full of website hosts, managers, designers etc. how to upgrade a website. We know exactly how. That's why we say it's stupid and unreasonable and only a publicity stunt to do a "new website launch". Hell, Google, Slashdot and a million other websites do it in different sections of their users while in Beta and then just move across - zero uptime. My brother's website has gone from Geocities to its own dediserver with an complete 100% upgrade with every new HTML revision, basically, including forums and CGI/PHP upgrades and not once would a user have spotted more than a second of downtime and that's just a home-spun website run on a shoestring.
It's a publicity stunt, NOT a technically-enforced hiatus.
It gives me no authority at all. My point, if any, was that to demonstrate a) I'm not American and b) my country has done some shit in its time but, apart from us blindly following the US into something incredibly stupid and dangerous, on the whole behaves pretty reasonably and still treats its prisoners with a bit more humanity.
The Brits, at some point or another, have invaded 1/3rd of the world, displaced or murdered entire civilisations, stripped places of every natural resource and then moved on, and much, much worse stuff. In our *history*. Talking like that, pretty much the Romans are the worst people ever and we should all hate them. What's happened is only important as a reference. What's *happening* is infinitely more important. I am actually quite ashamed that we're even *involved* in any way with the "war on terror" because it seeks to legitimise it. In actual fact, we should have been condemning it from the get-go.
I don't even claim we're perfect today, but our biggest recent failing is following the US into their own stupidity. Did you know that we abandoned the entire country of Singapore during WW2 when it would have taken a tiny military presence to keep it? We knew this and, as a result of us pulling out, the populace was invaded by the Japanese and lots of people died for the sake of, say, a few hundred stationed men or a ship or two. Churchill called it one of our greatest mistakes of the war, and the Singaporeans still had the humility to thank us for our efforts. No? I'm happy to volunteer this information - my country is not and will never be perfect. But on a sliding scale, it's a couple of notches up from the US at the moment.
I *did* deliberately omit any suggestion of Nazism, but the damn thing is a concentration camp, and there are still nearly 200 "prisoners" there over 8 years later and the most that *ANY* of them has been charged with are retroactive terrorism laws that didn't exist at the time, one was a chauffeur for someone considered militarily important, and one made a video celebrating an attack. Considering they get zero legal protection, representation, etc. for the most part, that's truly disgusting. This is not a "prison", this is not a detention camp for "PoW's" (even they should have been allowed release when the "war" ended), it's not a housing for militarily important people (because not one has been charged with actual serious war crimes yet, or brought before a military tribunal etc.). And if it WAS a war and these ARE PoW's then the US is required to abide by the Geneva convention and/or treat them humanely (which SHOULD go without saying, ffs), and can't exactly charge them with "murder" because it was a war and thus they were required to shoot by their country.
To address your points:
1) What intelligence can you NOT obtain within 8 years that will serve any good at all in a "war" which is over? What intelligence has come out of those camps? How was it used? Although it would be simpler to "shoot" them, it would also cause EVEN more uproar because then it would PERFECTLY fit the description of a Nazi concentration camp, as I carefully avoided in my original post. Tried, sentence and shot for something that probably isn't a crime at all by all written laws? That's called execution. These people have ZERO intelligence usefulness now - they have been out of touch with the regime that you want intelligence about for many, many years and their capture is absolutely public, so anything they know is useless already. And no other country in the world that's "helping" the US in this war has the same situation, and hasn't for decades, if not centuries.
2) The "war on terror" is complete bollocks, always was. How many terrorists were caught, stopped, detained, shot or otherwise, compared to innocent civilians. In a time when we have precision killing instruments and are horrified by a single news story about "Five military personnel killed in Afghanistan" (have you ANY idea how many innocent civilians have died over there, who did NOT sign up to be shot at? Or how many died during WW1 or WW2?) the effectiveness and accuracy of this "war" was zero.
I lost interest in replying to this point when I actually read your line : "So your "not military" argument doesn't really hold, particularly in light of the preferred mechanisms of combat of the Muslims." The Muslims didn't knock down your tower of bricks, some extremists did. It's shit like that that makes (some, unstable) people hate your country and want to remove it from the planet.
3) "If it were not a war, their leaders and organizers would not be phrasing it as such, would they?" It's a war because someone says so? Er. No. Because in that case, according to the current US president, it's actually an "Overseas Contingency Operation" and never been referred to as a real war by that president. It's not a war because there is no mutual agreement to attack each other. Otherwise it's just government-funded invasion (which is a different thing entirely) assassination, execution, persecution, torture, etc. And do you really think that if it *wasn't* called a war at the time that anyone would support it at all? "Oh, we're just going to shoot up Afghanistan with some of the largest military mobilisations in the world in order to kill some people who we don't even know where they are." It's not a "war" because that requires the *countries* to be at war. Don't confuse the "Overseas Contingency Operation" of the "War on Terror" with an actual war on Iraq, which didn't happen until a year after the "OCO" started and was to eliminate the threat of WMD's. That was an astounding success, given that they conclusively proved that Iraq did
Whichever way you look at it (input or output) no damn javascript should EVER make it into a tweet. Nobody but Twitter knows if that's because the tweet-input routines didn't filter it effectively, or because the tweet display routines allow you to see the javascript as actual markup instead of sanitised plain-text.
Either way, allowing JS scripts, HTML tags or anything NOT TEXT into a tweet means you didn't attend your first grade computer security courses. This isn't some massively complex hack - somehow javascript was not stripped or escaped adequately, allowing a single piece of it on the site to constantly be executed automatically by all users, and whose input was then accepted time and time again as a valid tweet without escaping it properly.
Someone should REALLY be fired. In fact, several people, because on a site that size there should damn-well be several programmers and several people running tests and checking for such things.
The day you have to shoot at your own government, it's all over anyway. Speaking as a Brit, the US is far closer to that sort of problem than most other countries - gimme a country in anarchy where the populace don't have easy access to guns than the most politically stable country in the world (which the US is *not*) where they do. The US are not as superior as they wish to pretend and actually your problem is a *weak* government that doesn't want to recognise the true cost of oil, the results of war and political destabilisation in other countries at its own behest, did not want to largely recognise terrorism existed before 9/11 (and now won't shut up about it and uses it as an excuse to kill 10 times the number in other countries - we'd been telling you for YEARS that you were breeding trouble because of the things you were funding, and because of our experience with IRA terrorism and similar and you didn't want to know), or ask its citizens to put their guns to one side.
No country's perfect but the US is getting further and further down the list as the years tick by. Hell, Guantanamo Bay is/was nothing but a concentration camp - government sanctioned, isolation/imprisonment of particular sections of society, movement of those elements outside of any country they've ever lived in, par-for-the-course torture and humiliation, denial of a fair trial, many people there totally innocent and STILL you won't recognise their basic rights. Up until a few years before 9/11 you could have lectured the rest of the world on how to run a country. Now you're far more the problem than the solution.
That's always been true, anyway. If I commit a crime against Outer Mongolia, you can be fairly sure that I will never be able to safely set foot in Outer Mongolia or (sometimes) any country even associated with it. The US is no special exception here.
The more important questions are: Would this actually stop anybody? (No, most such electronics make huge profits throughout the world whether they are excluded from certain countries or not - and you'll *STILL* get US customers and, to be honest, not setting foot in the US is hardly a chore for most citizens of the world) Would you WANT to enter a country that could potentially arrest you for wanting to watch your movies? (My answer: Not a chance in hell, thus the US has been on my own personal "no fly" list for several years now for various reasons, not just that one).
If the crime is not committed on US soil, or directly against the US itself, it's also extremely difficult to convict under any modern first-world legal system (and the US's). The UK has had trouble convicting people who went on holidays to countries that allowed them to visit children prostitutes, because it's such a legal minefield.
If you arrest me in the US for a minor crime committed at a particular time, entirely within another country, then it's a real stretch to prosecute me for it. You can bar entry for me, you can send me back, chances are the worst that would happen (unless the crime was somehow militarily involved) is extradition back to my country. And if the US are too heavy-handed with such prosecutions, chances are that most imports will dry up. Why would I ever want to sell any product to the US *AT ALL* if it could be deemed potentially illegal and thus I have to be careful where I travel? Much easier to a) not sell to the US and/or b) not travel to the US.
I don't think that not being able to travel to the US is a huge hindrance to the majority of people who work in the grey market of HDCP strippers, modchips, bootleg arcade games etc. around the world. Hell - if you're into that sort of thing, would you rather live in a country that lets you make and sell those sorts of devices, or the one who invented most of those barriers in the first place?
What about those people in countries that don't have a DMCA, don't have software patents and have "interoperability" clauses in most things?
Can't I just buy my HDCP stripper from them, instead? Fortunately, that tends to be the same countries that make lots of cheap electronics. Surprising, that, isn't it?
(Not that I care - I don't own a single piece of HD equipment, and don't feel like I'm missing out either)
I subscribed years ago and hence have the ads disabled button. I did not join to disable the ads, I disabled the ads because I saw the box and it makes the page load quicker (every now and again, the code changes and my pretty-minimal layout goes wrong again and I have to fiddle with the options, but at the moment it loads pretty smoothly).
However, I have actually stopped clicking on a lot of stories (and even filtering authors) which I've never done before because, well, slashvertisements, old news, dupes and absolute bollocks keep showing up on my front page. The old news? Fair enough, but sometimes it's by YEARS. Dupes? If *I* know it's a dupe from memory and only check the frontpage a couple of times a day, how do the posters manage to miss that? Slashvertisement, however, are really starting to annoy me. Various indie games (MULTIPLE times), various software, etc. all the time posting to get a frontpage link for their product. I'm really not interested any more and I come to sites like this in order to have some moderation and filtering applied to the stuff I see. But lately, if it's not on The Register first, it's a slashvertisement, or a kernel release or something equally as dull.
I tell you, Slashdot is slowly weaning me off itself.
What's written on paper, and what a court judges to be fair, differ in many ways. Consumer protection is high on the list for most judiciary - just don't expect some small claims court to accept that argument if you try to represent yourself (and do it badly). Just because something is written down, does NOT make it a fair and binding part of a contract. Otherwise, a company could easily write that every agreement it signs is covered by the laws of Sealand which is happens to own. If you're trading in a country, that country's consumer protection, court interpretation and idea of contract law applies. They can wipe out any clause they want, if they think it's unfair, and still make the company enforce the rest of the contract.
The fact that in law there exist such things as "implied contracts" where NO paper or any record at all exists, no words have ever been spoken, but the court feels that such things would be implied by any reasonable consumer means that the judiciary know that, let loose, companies would do whatever they felt like. That's what consumer protection laws are for.
It's the same the world over - I can name ten large store chains that INSIST they have to have a receipt to refund or exchange a faulty item. It's bollocks, under UK law, but a "store policy". They try to make it as difficult as possible but you do NOT have to have a receipt - that just happens to be the most convenient proof of purchase, however a credit card bill showing the stores name for a roughly correct amount will happily suffice and stores have to keep credit card records. Try explaining that to even the managers of some stores and they will not give in. Write a letter to their head office or take them to court and they cave within the first minute - because they KNOW it's bollocks, whether they have it written into every contract with their customers or not.
I have to agree - don't "be angry" as a customer, phone them up and complain. If they won't do anything for you, cut the service there and then and tell them why. If they bother to argue about things, dig out your contracts, file official complaints, etc. But, ffs, don't just "get angry" on a forum they probably never read and don't care about while you're still paying your monthly fee. Damn well complain, move companies, terminate contracts, etc.
This is the sort of thing you should realise while the contract is still fresh if it's important to you, so use the early get-out clause and introductory periods and get the hell off it. If you keep paying, it's really NOT that important to you. And if you entered into a cast-iron contract that you can't get out of (HIGHLY unlikely) for a service that you didn't bother to read up on, check terms, insist on minimum speeds, etc. then that's your own tough luck.
I still can't figure out why people pay for shit that they don't want, and then complain about it.
"Were you really ripping your VHS tapes to watch on your, I don't know, NeoGeo?"
No, but nobody prescribed what video player I had to buy, nobody said I couldn't use a video recorder from another country (assuming they used the same display technology, etc), nobody told me what TV I had to have to play my video, nobody told me that the video would only work over SCART / composite / RF-out. It just worked, that's what I mean by "on whatever hardware I want".
About the only exception to that was Macrovision but I can't say that I've ever owned a video player that took any notice of it, even when recording from a Macrovision source (not that I did it very often but sometimes it was handy to give "us kids" a destroyable videotape, or to tape a brief snippet of something for a school presentation.
"so I "must be blind""
Unfortunately, it's *really* hard to form a true double-blind (pun intended) scientific trial for this because along with HDTV came a lot of advances in display technology that have NOTHING to do with resolution or refresh rate. However, I challenge anyone to tell the difference between otherwise identical displays, one of which is standard-def, one of which is HD (by any definition) from across a room. Your visual acuity just cannot see that much fine detail at that distance.
Using two HD TV's, one showing SD content, is extremely unfair because there are an awful lot of HDTV's on the market that deliberately do a quite atrocious job at scaling up the image to make SD look "bad" and HD look "good". But my old 4:3 CRT is still just as fine display as I ever want it to be from where I sit in my sofa. Closer up, yeah, but otherwise no. This comes from a person who spends all day less than 18 inches from computer screens and can spot a single bad pixel from two-three times that distance. It might be bullshit to you, but to me HD res provides absolutely no advantage whatsoever.
200Mb/s or not, you're assuming that you have to do it all in real-time, and that you have to store 200Mb/s. You only need the slightest possible chance to pause the video via an automated system (it's digital, so pause can be perfect if the hardware is right) even if that means clocking a BluRay player's main processor down so it's showing 1fps, or a large enough buffer, or (SHOCK, HORROR) throw the raw data through, say, a MPEG/H264 encoding chip which is a bog-standard component in every HDMI recording device and can turn that 200Mb/s raw stream into, say, a manageable Blu-ray-rate encoded file. That's the whole POINT of encoder chips, after all.
I agree that it's not exactly common hardware but it's a damn sight easier than your assumption that you need a 200MB/s write array (which isn't outside of the realms of possibility, either, by the way). It is now well within the reach of your average electrical engineering student to record a HD stream into whatever format they want (even some raw format if they are feeling sadistic, but almost every HD source I know uses compression of some kind - cameras, Blu-ray, HDTV etc.)) using a £5 off-the-shelf encoder chip of their choice, and a small processor that can handle the HDCP negotiation process (I don't know what speed this is done at but you could possibly do it with something fast and very cheap).
It doesn't allow anyone to back up their Blu-ray cheaper than running one of the many software decoders, but it does let people with only a smidge of electronics knowledge to record HD streams from the raw data without having to worry about having a "compliant" device, or registering their home-brew HDCP device.
"It's ironic that the same government that can be so forward thinking with things like the NBN (regardless of how wasteful you think it is) can be so incompetently backward with it's filtering plan."
Question: What do you think the introduction of the NBN is *really* for, then?
Right, now all I need is for someone to build a complete HDCP stripper, emulate/strip BD+ completely, supply cheap BD-R/RW drives and media, give me a few cheap HDMI cables, a new "HD-ready" TV, and a free voucher for the BluRay version of every movie that I already "own" on DVD and I'm ready to join the HD era.
Hell, I still can't see the extra pixels at my comfortable viewing distance (so I "must be blind"), but I have to get with technology apparently. Apparently my 1440x900x32-bit display, fed via a VGA cable, or SCART, or composite, is "obsolete" and not as good quality as me having a digital cable, despite decades of viewing to the contrary. Apparently being able to watch *anything*, not having to worry about where I bought the disk, not having to fight with new cabling that does a lesser job of simply putting some images on my screen, and being able to backup all my movies is "old-hat". Oh, and I have to pay an extra X amount per month, plus new decoder hardware, in order for them to send me a slightly higher quality signal down my aerial/satellite dish/cable. In the case of FreeView, that means second-generation hardware too. Not wanting that apparently makes me "cheap".
I don't own Blu-ray hardware, don't own "HD ready" kit, and I don't miss it. My normal computer monitors have been "HD" for decades, you just want to add fancy definitions and restrictions so that it's "Movie Industry HD" instead of "HD". When you solve these problems, you'll see the boom in HD adoption that you are desperately hoping for.
Movie companies: The deal in the past was always "I give you about £20, you let me watch that movie wherever I take the disc/tape, on whatever hardware I want, and I promise not to copy it". That sufficed for about 40 years. If you're not willing to keep up your end of the bargain any more, then I won't keep up mine. My morals and job require me not to break the last promise, so I just won't give you the £20 (which is creeping closer to £40 now) OR watch your movie. Deal? Last time I went to the cinema was over a year ago, and that was because I was passing, was bored, was with someone and we needed to fill a few hours until the restaurant opened. The movie we saw was a heap of crap but wasted a few hours. I can't even *name* any movies that come out in 2010. I don't feel I've missed out, though.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon zooming down the highway with a trunk full of backup tapes".
Same principle. You could probably attach nearly a Terabyte to a pigeon if you tried, if you had the money, etc. and pretty much wherever you sent it in Britain it would have better "bandwidth", that wouldn't prove the point at all. (However, the bandwidth might be fabulous but its latency would be atrocious).
200Mb is a not-unreasonable example - that's a single old Zip disk, and people easily have more data than that on every PC they use (as pointed out, your average camera uses 2Gb cards almost as a minimum now). By demonstrating on such a pitiful amount of data, they are providing a more far comparison. Otherwise I could easily claim that my cat has a better bandwidth than just about any Internet link in the world.
Yeah, because GPU's under Windows XP don't exist. And certainly NO-ONE is using GPU accelerated games under Windows XP. And hell, it isn't true that a huge proportion of serious gamers (say, those with Steam installed) use GPU acceleration with just about every chipset under Windows XP.
Nope. Totally impossible. No way they can use that general-purpose, platform-independent chip designed to accelerate graphics and other parallel tasks under an operating system that allows complete control of it, which has drivers for every major card from every serious graphics manufacturer, that's already used in acceleration of browser-based things across all platforms by their major competitor. Out of the question. Of course.
Stop believing their bullshit. IE9 doesn't use GPU acceleration not because it can't, not because it absolutely MUST have DirectX insert-stupid-number-here-that-was-artificially-bumped-when-we-dropped-XP-support-for-no-technical-reason, but because Microsoft just don't want it to. They want you to upgrade not only to their shiny new browser, but to their shiny new OS to use a browser. And MS are still selling HUGE numbers of XP licenses - just about every netbook that doesn't come with 7 comes with XP instead.
Back in my youth, an operating system didn't get in the way, was never seen and just did it's job. It genuinely didn't matter to the programs you ran whether you had DR DOS 1 or MS DOS 6.22 or 4DOS so long as the required libraries were around. MS were the ones who started the "Windows only works with OUR version of the OS" crap and have propogated that through to today. To me, an OS is, was, and always will be something that abstracts all the fancy hardware of a computer to a standardised interface that gets out of my program's way as much as possible.
Please stop confusing "If OS == XP and date > 2009 then print 'Upgrade' else run_program" hard-coded, bullshit checks with actually platform differences. It's the same way that Windows 3.1 wouldn't work on DR DOS, that ME could not run.NET properly (hardcoded check, where all OS before and after it worked fine), that XP can't run DirectX 10/11, or they can't put IE 9 onto XP. It's a hard-coded, conscious choice to obsolete their previous OS and it's starting to hit the wall for them because people are starting to realise that, actually, XP was probably the pinnacle of MS operating systems.
It's a good way to shift more customers to alternatives. I know that all the schools I've worked in, Firefox is compulsory because even the *thought* of updating IE or trying to move to 7 just to gain some small advantages and lose quite a lot of existing functionality / ease of use puts fears into the bursars.
Support XP and you could EASILY double the userbase of IE9. It shows what Microsoft is really after - not customers, but lock-in to ever-decreasing upgrades. My bursar promised to kill me if I end up needing something that HAS to have Windows 7 installed in the school to run. At least for the next few years. I similarly have a promise to hunt down any of my users who tries to fiddle with their desktop icons in order to restore IE access instead of Firefox.
In the UK, the sale is already "prevented" in that's it's illegal to sell games to consumers outside of their rated ages. Done. That's as much as you could ever actually do. That's been in places for years, like video ratings were in places for decades before that. That piece of legislation is fine but if it's never enforced (like in the UK) or doesn't exist (presumably how the US is at the moment), then it's worthless.
And even with the law? Still you don't *stop* anything. Nothing. Kids of parents that don't keep an eye, don't run a household with consequences, etc. still smoke, drink, have sex, play violent videogames, bully, steal, watch porn and whatever else. That's not to say the kids WILL be ruined because of that, but you can't go complaining that the govenrment didn't do enough. It's already illegal for children to do ALL those things. It's up to the parents to make sure they don't because, ultimately, the parent is at least partly legally responsible for any and all crimes committed by their children.
Almost by the definition of a crime, allowing a crime to take place hinders the freedoms of OTHERS in society instead of the person committing the crime.
Teach a parent that they can say no, confiscate items, withdraw pocket money and other privileges to anyone under the age of 18 and living in their house and you instantly solve this and millions of other problems. Introducing any more complex laws than "don't sell this stuff to kids" panders to the "I can't control my kid, he just says no to me" parents.
Personally, I was brought up in a household where my parents said no, refused to allow me to buy that stuff, would have *killed* me if I'd broken the law and actually bought me things that I thought I was mature enough to handle themselves (violent videos, games, alcohol etc.). I turned out pretty well, got all my qualifications, got a decent job that requires me to have never committed a crime, and I don't screw people over. Same for my brother. It's not even very hard. My dad was 17 when he had my brother, yet we were both "brought up properly" and never got into trouble.
My brother and I both work in schools, both taught lots of different youth clubs, both never had a problem handling dozens or hundreds of kids simultaneously sometimes for weeks away from their parents at a time. Kids doing things they shouldn't is the most pathetic, pandering excuse for someone who has no idea how to say No and be a parent.
There's a big difference between using people's weight to make electricity (whether by piezoelectrics, or simpler physics of gravity and moving parts) and doing so by the force of exhaled breath touching an area some distance away.
And what you miss is that these people are *also*, somehow, using their own energy to power the lights. It's no different to having a pedal-powered bike to power the lights - the effort is just spread across a lot of people. Those people still needed to use the energy, so it wasn't "free" or "profit" unless you're taxing the people who have to buy more food to cope with their ever-so-slightly more strenuous walk home.
Rule #1: If you can't power an old-fashioned walkman using a device smaller than said walkman to power it, it's a waste of money, materials, design, consultancy, engineering and effort to produce that electricity.
Yeah, how hard is it? If you child has a game you don't want them to have, take it away from them or stop them buying it in the first place. If your child's friends have those games - that's up to *their* parents, or up to you to enforce your rules even when your child is staying over at a friends house.
Even with ratings, fining retailers, etc. you will still get kids who get their hands on these things (in my country, some kids are smoking at 12 despite it being 100% illegal, but it still happens). No amount of government intervention will stop your child doing something that YOU let slip past you.
Grow a pair and learn to say no to your children. They'll thank you for it in 20 years time.
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And probably all rendered inadmissible in court because they were obtained illegally. Way to immunise a guy against an awful lot of evidence.
I know someone who was threatened by ACS:Law. As with all things serious, we researched it and discovered it was likely a scam, and this was WAY before they were news-worthy. The threat was ignored, except for a polite response, and nothing else happened. If you pay up, you're a moron. If you think this will stop such companies, there are no shortage of other morons willing to pick up such easy work, and they don't even need to be anywhere near a lawyer themselves.
DDOS, hacking, etc. isn't doing anything but legitimising their actions should they go to the mainstream media. Just ignoring their threats and/or inviting them to court, as any sensible person would do (and have done - ACS:Law are under investigation by various high-level UK legal authorities for legal irregularities) does infinitely more.
The guys an scamming idiot, but it's like a playground fight here - I can guess how much a moron he is without having to break into his personal emails and just because they might reveal he is an asshole doesn't mean that you've "won" anything against anti-piracy lawsuits or even against legal threats with zero evidence. All you've done is become nothing more than a publicity generator. How long before I see on the news: "Pirates hack into law-firm's servers, distribute private emails, law-firm says it's represents the mindset of the people they are chasing".
And just about every court in the world recognises that it's extremely hard to prove a negative. That's what I'm waiting for - the court's interpretation of the first few real life cases where a denial is officially lodged. The problem is that EU law trumps French law (absolutely, completely, 100%) and EU legislation is pretty hot on things like not requiring people to prove they *DIDN'T* do things.
Fining someone in such an environment is really tricky, because you're basically putting undue burden on them to prove their innocence (which is a much simpler set of laws to interpret and can still basically trump shit like this). Every law that passes is not valid in all its points until it's been tested multiple times in multiple courts.
It could easily be equated, in a court, to someone being fined for not locking their house, which allowed other people to walk in and use their house as a brothel / drug factory / playing loud music etc... Yes, they should protect their property, but can't be held liable for a third-party's actions unless you can prove that they were aware of what was going on, or involved in it. EU law, especially some quite basic human rights legislation, trumps this "law" into the ground and France can be forced to rescind it. The UK has been forced to rescind and modify laws that did similar things because they clashed with EU interpretations of similar laws.
And are the *copyright holders* tasked with identifying the same amount of copyright material, verifying it (which would presumably involve downloading a substantial proportion of it themselves, otherwise it's just hearsay - "Yes, your honour, I saw this IP address connect to this tracker asking for this file. Even though it's called "Aliens" I can't tell you the content because it *obvious* that it must be the Hollywood film of the same name"), its original IP address, the copyright holder (i.e. if they find infringing material that isn't under *their* copyright, are they obliged to notify the authorities and/or the person whose copyright it is? Surely otherwise they are deliberately ignoring a crime? That could get interesting).
It's one of those laws that'll be in fashion and then in a year's time the copyright holders will all be complaining that it's insufficient and not effective and too much work for them and they'll give up on it. Hopefully they *have* bitten off more than they could chew and ISP's therefore have to employ dozens of staff, double their broadband prices etc. to keep up and that'll provide a pretty clear economic oversight to those implementing that law and, most importantly, putting some of that burden on the ISP's.
And all for a letter dropping through the door where people reply saying "It wasn't me, my son visited/dog did it/wireless was hacked/computer caught a virus/etc." and you have to go to court to try to prove it eventually anyway (cutting off your broadband for alleged but unproven infringements sounds a pretty good way to waste the courts time too, and they take much less kindly to that).
It takes precisely the time for a file copy of a single index.html / index.php file to complete to upgrade a website. You MUST have your new website running, probably on the same server, probably in a protected subdirectory (by .htaccess or similar), so that you can see the performance / compatibility side of things are working okay. Then the "upgrade" is nothing more than moving those files into place, unprotecting the directories (all invisible to users so far) and then moving the new index file over the old (which you hopefully kept a backup of).
Don't tell a site full of website hosts, managers, designers etc. how to upgrade a website. We know exactly how. That's why we say it's stupid and unreasonable and only a publicity stunt to do a "new website launch". Hell, Google, Slashdot and a million other websites do it in different sections of their users while in Beta and then just move across - zero uptime. My brother's website has gone from Geocities to its own dediserver with an complete 100% upgrade with every new HTML revision, basically, including forums and CGI/PHP upgrades and not once would a user have spotted more than a second of downtime and that's just a home-spun website run on a shoestring.
It's a publicity stunt, NOT a technically-enforced hiatus.
It gives me no authority at all. My point, if any, was that to demonstrate a) I'm not American and b) my country has done some shit in its time but, apart from us blindly following the US into something incredibly stupid and dangerous, on the whole behaves pretty reasonably and still treats its prisoners with a bit more humanity.
The Brits, at some point or another, have invaded 1/3rd of the world, displaced or murdered entire civilisations, stripped places of every natural resource and then moved on, and much, much worse stuff. In our *history*. Talking like that, pretty much the Romans are the worst people ever and we should all hate them. What's happened is only important as a reference. What's *happening* is infinitely more important. I am actually quite ashamed that we're even *involved* in any way with the "war on terror" because it seeks to legitimise it. In actual fact, we should have been condemning it from the get-go.
I don't even claim we're perfect today, but our biggest recent failing is following the US into their own stupidity. Did you know that we abandoned the entire country of Singapore during WW2 when it would have taken a tiny military presence to keep it? We knew this and, as a result of us pulling out, the populace was invaded by the Japanese and lots of people died for the sake of, say, a few hundred stationed men or a ship or two. Churchill called it one of our greatest mistakes of the war, and the Singaporeans still had the humility to thank us for our efforts. No? I'm happy to volunteer this information - my country is not and will never be perfect. But on a sliding scale, it's a couple of notches up from the US at the moment.
I *did* deliberately omit any suggestion of Nazism, but the damn thing is a concentration camp, and there are still nearly 200 "prisoners" there over 8 years later and the most that *ANY* of them has been charged with are retroactive terrorism laws that didn't exist at the time, one was a chauffeur for someone considered militarily important, and one made a video celebrating an attack. Considering they get zero legal protection, representation, etc. for the most part, that's truly disgusting. This is not a "prison", this is not a detention camp for "PoW's" (even they should have been allowed release when the "war" ended), it's not a housing for militarily important people (because not one has been charged with actual serious war crimes yet, or brought before a military tribunal etc.). And if it WAS a war and these ARE PoW's then the US is required to abide by the Geneva convention and/or treat them humanely (which SHOULD go without saying, ffs), and can't exactly charge them with "murder" because it was a war and thus they were required to shoot by their country.
To address your points:
1) What intelligence can you NOT obtain within 8 years that will serve any good at all in a "war" which is over? What intelligence has come out of those camps? How was it used? Although it would be simpler to "shoot" them, it would also cause EVEN more uproar because then it would PERFECTLY fit the description of a Nazi concentration camp, as I carefully avoided in my original post. Tried, sentence and shot for something that probably isn't a crime at all by all written laws? That's called execution. These people have ZERO intelligence usefulness now - they have been out of touch with the regime that you want intelligence about for many, many years and their capture is absolutely public, so anything they know is useless already. And no other country in the world that's "helping" the US in this war has the same situation, and hasn't for decades, if not centuries.
2) The "war on terror" is complete bollocks, always was. How many terrorists were caught, stopped, detained, shot or otherwise, compared to innocent civilians. In a time when we have precision killing instruments and are horrified by a single news story about "Five military personnel killed in Afghanistan" (have you ANY idea how many innocent civilians have died over there, who did NOT sign up to be shot at? Or how many died during WW1 or WW2?) the effectiveness and accuracy of this "war" was zero.
I lost interest in replying to this point when I actually read your line : "So your "not military" argument doesn't really hold, particularly in light of the preferred mechanisms of combat of the Muslims." The Muslims didn't knock down your tower of bricks, some extremists did. It's shit like that that makes (some, unstable) people hate your country and want to remove it from the planet.
3) "If it were not a war, their leaders and organizers would not be phrasing it as such, would they?" It's a war because someone says so? Er. No. Because in that case, according to the current US president, it's actually an "Overseas Contingency Operation" and never been referred to as a real war by that president. It's not a war because there is no mutual agreement to attack each other. Otherwise it's just government-funded invasion (which is a different thing entirely) assassination, execution, persecution, torture, etc. And do you really think that if it *wasn't* called a war at the time that anyone would support it at all? "Oh, we're just going to shoot up Afghanistan with some of the largest military mobilisations in the world in order to kill some people who we don't even know where they are." It's not a "war" because that requires the *countries* to be at war. Don't confuse the "Overseas Contingency Operation" of the "War on Terror" with an actual war on Iraq, which didn't happen until a year after the "OCO" started and was to eliminate the threat of WMD's. That was an astounding success, given that they conclusively proved that Iraq did
Whichever way you look at it (input or output) no damn javascript should EVER make it into a tweet. Nobody but Twitter knows if that's because the tweet-input routines didn't filter it effectively, or because the tweet display routines allow you to see the javascript as actual markup instead of sanitised plain-text.
Either way, allowing JS scripts, HTML tags or anything NOT TEXT into a tweet means you didn't attend your first grade computer security courses. This isn't some massively complex hack - somehow javascript was not stripped or escaped adequately, allowing a single piece of it on the site to constantly be executed automatically by all users, and whose input was then accepted time and time again as a valid tweet without escaping it properly.
Someone should REALLY be fired. In fact, several people, because on a site that size there should damn-well be several programmers and several people running tests and checking for such things.
The day you have to shoot at your own government, it's all over anyway. Speaking as a Brit, the US is far closer to that sort of problem than most other countries - gimme a country in anarchy where the populace don't have easy access to guns than the most politically stable country in the world (which the US is *not*) where they do. The US are not as superior as they wish to pretend and actually your problem is a *weak* government that doesn't want to recognise the true cost of oil, the results of war and political destabilisation in other countries at its own behest, did not want to largely recognise terrorism existed before 9/11 (and now won't shut up about it and uses it as an excuse to kill 10 times the number in other countries - we'd been telling you for YEARS that you were breeding trouble because of the things you were funding, and because of our experience with IRA terrorism and similar and you didn't want to know), or ask its citizens to put their guns to one side.
No country's perfect but the US is getting further and further down the list as the years tick by. Hell, Guantanamo Bay is/was nothing but a concentration camp - government sanctioned, isolation/imprisonment of particular sections of society, movement of those elements outside of any country they've ever lived in, par-for-the-course torture and humiliation, denial of a fair trial, many people there totally innocent and STILL you won't recognise their basic rights. Up until a few years before 9/11 you could have lectured the rest of the world on how to run a country. Now you're far more the problem than the solution.
So the data update to change a few dozen names justifies a whole new game purchase?
That's always been true, anyway. If I commit a crime against Outer Mongolia, you can be fairly sure that I will never be able to safely set foot in Outer Mongolia or (sometimes) any country even associated with it. The US is no special exception here.
The more important questions are: Would this actually stop anybody? (No, most such electronics make huge profits throughout the world whether they are excluded from certain countries or not - and you'll *STILL* get US customers and, to be honest, not setting foot in the US is hardly a chore for most citizens of the world) Would you WANT to enter a country that could potentially arrest you for wanting to watch your movies? (My answer: Not a chance in hell, thus the US has been on my own personal "no fly" list for several years now for various reasons, not just that one).
If the crime is not committed on US soil, or directly against the US itself, it's also extremely difficult to convict under any modern first-world legal system (and the US's). The UK has had trouble convicting people who went on holidays to countries that allowed them to visit children prostitutes, because it's such a legal minefield.
If you arrest me in the US for a minor crime committed at a particular time, entirely within another country, then it's a real stretch to prosecute me for it. You can bar entry for me, you can send me back, chances are the worst that would happen (unless the crime was somehow militarily involved) is extradition back to my country. And if the US are too heavy-handed with such prosecutions, chances are that most imports will dry up. Why would I ever want to sell any product to the US *AT ALL* if it could be deemed potentially illegal and thus I have to be careful where I travel? Much easier to a) not sell to the US and/or b) not travel to the US.
I don't think that not being able to travel to the US is a huge hindrance to the majority of people who work in the grey market of HDCP strippers, modchips, bootleg arcade games etc. around the world. Hell - if you're into that sort of thing, would you rather live in a country that lets you make and sell those sorts of devices, or the one who invented most of those barriers in the first place?
What about those people in countries that don't have a DMCA, don't have software patents and have "interoperability" clauses in most things?
Can't I just buy my HDCP stripper from them, instead? Fortunately, that tends to be the same countries that make lots of cheap electronics. Surprising, that, isn't it?
(Not that I care - I don't own a single piece of HD equipment, and don't feel like I'm missing out either)
I subscribed years ago and hence have the ads disabled button. I did not join to disable the ads, I disabled the ads because I saw the box and it makes the page load quicker (every now and again, the code changes and my pretty-minimal layout goes wrong again and I have to fiddle with the options, but at the moment it loads pretty smoothly).
However, I have actually stopped clicking on a lot of stories (and even filtering authors) which I've never done before because, well, slashvertisements, old news, dupes and absolute bollocks keep showing up on my front page. The old news? Fair enough, but sometimes it's by YEARS. Dupes? If *I* know it's a dupe from memory and only check the frontpage a couple of times a day, how do the posters manage to miss that? Slashvertisement, however, are really starting to annoy me. Various indie games (MULTIPLE times), various software, etc. all the time posting to get a frontpage link for their product. I'm really not interested any more and I come to sites like this in order to have some moderation and filtering applied to the stuff I see. But lately, if it's not on The Register first, it's a slashvertisement, or a kernel release or something equally as dull.
I tell you, Slashdot is slowly weaning me off itself.
What's written on paper, and what a court judges to be fair, differ in many ways. Consumer protection is high on the list for most judiciary - just don't expect some small claims court to accept that argument if you try to represent yourself (and do it badly). Just because something is written down, does NOT make it a fair and binding part of a contract. Otherwise, a company could easily write that every agreement it signs is covered by the laws of Sealand which is happens to own. If you're trading in a country, that country's consumer protection, court interpretation and idea of contract law applies. They can wipe out any clause they want, if they think it's unfair, and still make the company enforce the rest of the contract.
The fact that in law there exist such things as "implied contracts" where NO paper or any record at all exists, no words have ever been spoken, but the court feels that such things would be implied by any reasonable consumer means that the judiciary know that, let loose, companies would do whatever they felt like. That's what consumer protection laws are for.
It's the same the world over - I can name ten large store chains that INSIST they have to have a receipt to refund or exchange a faulty item. It's bollocks, under UK law, but a "store policy". They try to make it as difficult as possible but you do NOT have to have a receipt - that just happens to be the most convenient proof of purchase, however a credit card bill showing the stores name for a roughly correct amount will happily suffice and stores have to keep credit card records. Try explaining that to even the managers of some stores and they will not give in. Write a letter to their head office or take them to court and they cave within the first minute - because they KNOW it's bollocks, whether they have it written into every contract with their customers or not.
I have to agree - don't "be angry" as a customer, phone them up and complain. If they won't do anything for you, cut the service there and then and tell them why. If they bother to argue about things, dig out your contracts, file official complaints, etc. But, ffs, don't just "get angry" on a forum they probably never read and don't care about while you're still paying your monthly fee. Damn well complain, move companies, terminate contracts, etc.
This is the sort of thing you should realise while the contract is still fresh if it's important to you, so use the early get-out clause and introductory periods and get the hell off it. If you keep paying, it's really NOT that important to you. And if you entered into a cast-iron contract that you can't get out of (HIGHLY unlikely) for a service that you didn't bother to read up on, check terms, insist on minimum speeds, etc. then that's your own tough luck.
I still can't figure out why people pay for shit that they don't want, and then complain about it.
"Were you really ripping your VHS tapes to watch on your, I don't know, NeoGeo?"
No, but nobody prescribed what video player I had to buy, nobody said I couldn't use a video recorder from another country (assuming they used the same display technology, etc), nobody told me what TV I had to have to play my video, nobody told me that the video would only work over SCART / composite / RF-out. It just worked, that's what I mean by "on whatever hardware I want".
About the only exception to that was Macrovision but I can't say that I've ever owned a video player that took any notice of it, even when recording from a Macrovision source (not that I did it very often but sometimes it was handy to give "us kids" a destroyable videotape, or to tape a brief snippet of something for a school presentation.
"so I "must be blind""
Unfortunately, it's *really* hard to form a true double-blind (pun intended) scientific trial for this because along with HDTV came a lot of advances in display technology that have NOTHING to do with resolution or refresh rate. However, I challenge anyone to tell the difference between otherwise identical displays, one of which is standard-def, one of which is HD (by any definition) from across a room. Your visual acuity just cannot see that much fine detail at that distance.
Using two HD TV's, one showing SD content, is extremely unfair because there are an awful lot of HDTV's on the market that deliberately do a quite atrocious job at scaling up the image to make SD look "bad" and HD look "good". But my old 4:3 CRT is still just as fine display as I ever want it to be from where I sit in my sofa. Closer up, yeah, but otherwise no. This comes from a person who spends all day less than 18 inches from computer screens and can spot a single bad pixel from two-three times that distance. It might be bullshit to you, but to me HD res provides absolutely no advantage whatsoever.
200Mb/s or not, you're assuming that you have to do it all in real-time, and that you have to store 200Mb/s. You only need the slightest possible chance to pause the video via an automated system (it's digital, so pause can be perfect if the hardware is right) even if that means clocking a BluRay player's main processor down so it's showing 1fps, or a large enough buffer, or (SHOCK, HORROR) throw the raw data through, say, a MPEG/H264 encoding chip which is a bog-standard component in every HDMI recording device and can turn that 200Mb/s raw stream into, say, a manageable Blu-ray-rate encoded file. That's the whole POINT of encoder chips, after all.
I agree that it's not exactly common hardware but it's a damn sight easier than your assumption that you need a 200MB/s write array (which isn't outside of the realms of possibility, either, by the way). It is now well within the reach of your average electrical engineering student to record a HD stream into whatever format they want (even some raw format if they are feeling sadistic, but almost every HD source I know uses compression of some kind - cameras, Blu-ray, HDTV etc.)) using a £5 off-the-shelf encoder chip of their choice, and a small processor that can handle the HDCP negotiation process (I don't know what speed this is done at but you could possibly do it with something fast and very cheap).
It doesn't allow anyone to back up their Blu-ray cheaper than running one of the many software decoders, but it does let people with only a smidge of electronics knowledge to record HD streams from the raw data without having to worry about having a "compliant" device, or registering their home-brew HDCP device.
"It's ironic that the same government that can be so forward thinking with things like the NBN (regardless of how wasteful you think it is) can be so incompetently backward with it's filtering plan."
Question: What do you think the introduction of the NBN is *really* for, then?
Right, now all I need is for someone to build a complete HDCP stripper, emulate/strip BD+ completely, supply cheap BD-R/RW drives and media, give me a few cheap HDMI cables, a new "HD-ready" TV, and a free voucher for the BluRay version of every movie that I already "own" on DVD and I'm ready to join the HD era.
Hell, I still can't see the extra pixels at my comfortable viewing distance (so I "must be blind"), but I have to get with technology apparently. Apparently my 1440x900x32-bit display, fed via a VGA cable, or SCART, or composite, is "obsolete" and not as good quality as me having a digital cable, despite decades of viewing to the contrary. Apparently being able to watch *anything*, not having to worry about where I bought the disk, not having to fight with new cabling that does a lesser job of simply putting some images on my screen, and being able to backup all my movies is "old-hat". Oh, and I have to pay an extra X amount per month, plus new decoder hardware, in order for them to send me a slightly higher quality signal down my aerial/satellite dish/cable. In the case of FreeView, that means second-generation hardware too. Not wanting that apparently makes me "cheap".
I don't own Blu-ray hardware, don't own "HD ready" kit, and I don't miss it. My normal computer monitors have been "HD" for decades, you just want to add fancy definitions and restrictions so that it's "Movie Industry HD" instead of "HD". When you solve these problems, you'll see the boom in HD adoption that you are desperately hoping for.
Movie companies: The deal in the past was always "I give you about £20, you let me watch that movie wherever I take the disc/tape, on whatever hardware I want, and I promise not to copy it". That sufficed for about 40 years. If you're not willing to keep up your end of the bargain any more, then I won't keep up mine. My morals and job require me not to break the last promise, so I just won't give you the £20 (which is creeping closer to £40 now) OR watch your movie. Deal? Last time I went to the cinema was over a year ago, and that was because I was passing, was bored, was with someone and we needed to fill a few hours until the restaurant opened. The movie we saw was a heap of crap but wasted a few hours. I can't even *name* any movies that come out in 2010. I don't feel I've missed out, though.
The Flander's Pigeon Murderer!!!
Because then the carrier pigeon would always win.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon zooming down the highway with a trunk full of backup tapes".
Same principle. You could probably attach nearly a Terabyte to a pigeon if you tried, if you had the money, etc. and pretty much wherever you sent it in Britain it would have better "bandwidth", that wouldn't prove the point at all. (However, the bandwidth might be fabulous but its latency would be atrocious).
200Mb is a not-unreasonable example - that's a single old Zip disk, and people easily have more data than that on every PC they use (as pointed out, your average camera uses 2Gb cards almost as a minimum now). By demonstrating on such a pitiful amount of data, they are providing a more far comparison. Otherwise I could easily claim that my cat has a better bandwidth than just about any Internet link in the world.
Yeah, because GPU's under Windows XP don't exist. And certainly NO-ONE is using GPU accelerated games under Windows XP. And hell, it isn't true that a huge proportion of serious gamers (say, those with Steam installed) use GPU acceleration with just about every chipset under Windows XP.
Nope. Totally impossible. No way they can use that general-purpose, platform-independent chip designed to accelerate graphics and other parallel tasks under an operating system that allows complete control of it, which has drivers for every major card from every serious graphics manufacturer, that's already used in acceleration of browser-based things across all platforms by their major competitor. Out of the question. Of course.
Stop believing their bullshit. IE9 doesn't use GPU acceleration not because it can't, not because it absolutely MUST have DirectX insert-stupid-number-here-that-was-artificially-bumped-when-we-dropped-XP-support-for-no-technical-reason, but because Microsoft just don't want it to. They want you to upgrade not only to their shiny new browser, but to their shiny new OS to use a browser. And MS are still selling HUGE numbers of XP licenses - just about every netbook that doesn't come with 7 comes with XP instead.
Back in my youth, an operating system didn't get in the way, was never seen and just did it's job. It genuinely didn't matter to the programs you ran whether you had DR DOS 1 or MS DOS 6.22 or 4DOS so long as the required libraries were around. MS were the ones who started the "Windows only works with OUR version of the OS" crap and have propogated that through to today. To me, an OS is, was, and always will be something that abstracts all the fancy hardware of a computer to a standardised interface that gets out of my program's way as much as possible.
Please stop confusing "If OS == XP and date > 2009 then print 'Upgrade' else run_program" hard-coded, bullshit checks with actually platform differences. It's the same way that Windows 3.1 wouldn't work on DR DOS, that ME could not run .NET properly (hardcoded check, where all OS before and after it worked fine), that XP can't run DirectX 10/11, or they can't put IE 9 onto XP. It's a hard-coded, conscious choice to obsolete their previous OS and it's starting to hit the wall for them because people are starting to realise that, actually, XP was probably the pinnacle of MS operating systems.
It's a good way to shift more customers to alternatives. I know that all the schools I've worked in, Firefox is compulsory because even the *thought* of updating IE or trying to move to 7 just to gain some small advantages and lose quite a lot of existing functionality / ease of use puts fears into the bursars.
Support XP and you could EASILY double the userbase of IE9. It shows what Microsoft is really after - not customers, but lock-in to ever-decreasing upgrades. My bursar promised to kill me if I end up needing something that HAS to have Windows 7 installed in the school to run. At least for the next few years. I similarly have a promise to hunt down any of my users who tries to fiddle with their desktop icons in order to restore IE access instead of Firefox.
In the UK, the sale is already "prevented" in that's it's illegal to sell games to consumers outside of their rated ages. Done. That's as much as you could ever actually do. That's been in places for years, like video ratings were in places for decades before that. That piece of legislation is fine but if it's never enforced (like in the UK) or doesn't exist (presumably how the US is at the moment), then it's worthless.
And even with the law? Still you don't *stop* anything. Nothing. Kids of parents that don't keep an eye, don't run a household with consequences, etc. still smoke, drink, have sex, play violent videogames, bully, steal, watch porn and whatever else. That's not to say the kids WILL be ruined because of that, but you can't go complaining that the govenrment didn't do enough. It's already illegal for children to do ALL those things. It's up to the parents to make sure they don't because, ultimately, the parent is at least partly legally responsible for any and all crimes committed by their children.
Almost by the definition of a crime, allowing a crime to take place hinders the freedoms of OTHERS in society instead of the person committing the crime.
Teach a parent that they can say no, confiscate items, withdraw pocket money and other privileges to anyone under the age of 18 and living in their house and you instantly solve this and millions of other problems. Introducing any more complex laws than "don't sell this stuff to kids" panders to the "I can't control my kid, he just says no to me" parents.
Personally, I was brought up in a household where my parents said no, refused to allow me to buy that stuff, would have *killed* me if I'd broken the law and actually bought me things that I thought I was mature enough to handle themselves (violent videos, games, alcohol etc.). I turned out pretty well, got all my qualifications, got a decent job that requires me to have never committed a crime, and I don't screw people over. Same for my brother. It's not even very hard. My dad was 17 when he had my brother, yet we were both "brought up properly" and never got into trouble.
My brother and I both work in schools, both taught lots of different youth clubs, both never had a problem handling dozens or hundreds of kids simultaneously sometimes for weeks away from their parents at a time. Kids doing things they shouldn't is the most pathetic, pandering excuse for someone who has no idea how to say No and be a parent.
There's a big difference between using people's weight to make electricity (whether by piezoelectrics, or simpler physics of gravity and moving parts) and doing so by the force of exhaled breath touching an area some distance away.
And what you miss is that these people are *also*, somehow, using their own energy to power the lights. It's no different to having a pedal-powered bike to power the lights - the effort is just spread across a lot of people. Those people still needed to use the energy, so it wasn't "free" or "profit" unless you're taxing the people who have to buy more food to cope with their ever-so-slightly more strenuous walk home.
Rule #1: If you can't power an old-fashioned walkman using a device smaller than said walkman to power it, it's a waste of money, materials, design, consultancy, engineering and effort to produce that electricity.
Yeah, how hard is it? If you child has a game you don't want them to have, take it away from them or stop them buying it in the first place. If your child's friends have those games - that's up to *their* parents, or up to you to enforce your rules even when your child is staying over at a friends house.
Even with ratings, fining retailers, etc. you will still get kids who get their hands on these things (in my country, some kids are smoking at 12 despite it being 100% illegal, but it still happens). No amount of government intervention will stop your child doing something that YOU let slip past you.
Grow a pair and learn to say no to your children. They'll thank you for it in 20 years time.