A man died as a direct result of this douche bag's actions.
There are a lot of things wrong with what he did, but calling it a "direct result" is misleading.
Misleading? - It's plain wrong!
There are countless suicides every year linking to direct bullying, and it's beyond rare that someone actually gets prosecuted for it. There was no bullying or blackmail involved here as far as I know. There was just a recording of a sexual act. There's no direct link to the suicide so I'd have acquitted the guy completely for the suicide but of course convicted for the invasion of privacy.
Not unlike Godwin's Law about discussions degenerating until someone pulls the nazi card, a similar law exists about privacy-eroding proposals: Argue that in order to protect us against something really bad (terrorists, drug trafficking etc.) we need X, which incidentally also can help protect us against some almost as bad (kidnappers, violent criminals etc.), thus offering us a multi-pronged tool that can do almost everything against the badness out there. Scared people loves stuff like this.
But they forget to mention that it will also be very effective in taking away more of our freedom by offering a tool that essentially can be used to both track our movements and serve as the core of a police state where the authorities in real time came can both identify, track and easily apprehend people for anything, like parking tickets, expired license plates and everything else you put your mind to. Flag someone and you can easily locate and thus apprehend this person.
1) Christian satanism. Uses upside down crosses and maybe a pentagram here and there, and is usually what "Satanic metal" circles about. Satan appears personified and demons are everywhere.
2) LaVey Satanism. Has "The Black Bible" and the upturned pentagram (two points up, one down) is central. Probably the most common version. An actual Devil or demons are rare.
3) Temple of Set'ers. Much older than Cristianity and appears similar to a death cult. Usually organized in small local groups with little or no global cooperation.
4) Left hand path'ers. Sort of the dark side of Wicca. Also uses the upturned pentagram (Wicca uses the the regular pentagram) and appears similar to Wicca in many ways. Has no central deity but is a natural druid-like religion where nature and the believers themselves are celebrated.
5) Atheists. According to (at least) the major religions, anyone not believing in God or religion is really a satanist serving his wicked ways...
I'm in Denmark and I've got both seasons of Dollhouse on Blu-ray. Don't know which reason they are as all my players are region free. Wouldn't buy one if it wasn't. No, it isn't common for players to be region free but everything can be modified and they will be. Nobody serious about movies or tv-shows would want it any other way as it takes forever for even a fraction to be released locally.
The region system is stupid and just another way of geo-discriminating people. So our money isn't as good as the money of people who happen to live in the US and Canada? No matter how hard we try we cannot get to pay for watching tv-shows in a timely fashion. We have no choice but to pirate them. I want to pay. I want to support the shows. But no, they don't want our money. Sure, we can buy the boxed releases but buying the locally released box-sets released years later would be supporting the delayed release and I don't want that. Basically I want everything to be available globally on all formats at the same time. I want the choice of going to a cinema or watching it at home. I want the choice of watching it once for less or to have to watch whenever I feel like it for more. I want this choice from day one.
Oh my goodness, because I live in Australia I have to wait a week before seeing a TV show? How do I manage?
Sometimes I can't quite believe the world we live in.
How can this be moderated "Insightful"?! - It's arrogant bullshit, that's what it is!
A week, a month, a year... Different countries, different delays... and that's the problem! - Not how much but that there is a delay at all.
I pirate (meaning: download each new episode a few hours after airing when they turn up online) a dozen shows, and these shows are by far not all available in my country (yet). some turn up a few months late on subscription channels, but most turn up about a year late on 'free' advertising-based channels. On average per season 2-3 shows never make it here. Some don't even get released on DVD.
It should at least be possible for everyone to watch the shows as they air online through subscription... but all offers on this seem to be limited to the US residents only. Why can't someone from Europe sign up and actually be allowed to pay for the pleasure? - I guess they don't want our money so we have to pirate the shows instead. How mind-boggling stupid. We want to pay and they won't sell.
The analogy is right on! - I've often used roads as an analogy for the network simply because they are the same thing - a means of transport that can be used for good or evil, and everything in between.
The roads were - as were bittorrent - created for purely legitimate purposes. Then someone found a way to use them for something else. It's not the fault of the road or the network (and all its protocols) what they end up being used for. To say that bittorrent equals piracy is as wrong as saying that fast cars equals armed robberies. Sure, a lot of piracy involves bittorrent just as a lot of robberies involves fast cars, but you can't reverse the equation.
Piracy has become a classic arms race. First someone ripped some music and movies and put the up on his website for others to download. That was easy to stop stop and prosecute, for sure the actual pirate but also often all the downloaders. Then came the Napster-like services and P2P, but again the central server made it easy to stop. The individual users were harder to track but cutting the central server made everything else useless. Then came the first version of bittorrent where the central server was replaced by a central tracker. Now there was nothing illegal to go after centrally, so laws had to be changed to allow for prosecution of people providing services that pointed to the actual illegal stuff. Then bittorrent were updated to allow for trackerless operation. The distributed hash tables made it much harder to go for the central core as the hashes does not point anywhere, but they still try, now by national blocks of access to the indexing sites. They don't care that The Pirate Bay and similar now has made it impossible to go after themselves, and instead just try to censor access to TPB and similar.
In the meantime Cloud hosting has appeared and people are sharing links to anonymously uploaded data. The rights holders have now tried going after the biggest player here - MegaUpload - but it seems the antics used to escalate a civil matter into a major international crime has backfired. After all, MegaUpload didn't make money selling pirated stuff - they sold bandwidth and indirectly storage. The business model of free basic hosting and downloading, and premium services that gives you faster download and longer lifespan of the things you upload, combined with the basic privacy principle of not wanted to know what was shared (could be anything, including confidential stuff), makes it extremely hard to link the business to piracy.
Sure, a simple search would reveal that pirates also used MegaUpload, but a similar search would equally reveal that robbers always used roads to get away from the scene of their crimes, and just as this knowledge doesn't stop people from building more roads, it shouldn't stop MegaUpload and similar from providing their service.
The way to combat piracy is again similar to robberies. People commit robbery for two reasons: Money or the stuff taken. How to prevent robbery? Well, provide social security so that people don't have to commit crimes like robbery to survive, and build stores and banks so that robbery is both hard and unlikely to be worth it. Limit the amount of cash, make exit hard, make identification easier (cameras) and so on. Same thing with piracy. Why do people download pirated stuff? Prices too high and lack of availability are the two major culprits, and both things are under direct control of the rights holders. They can themselves change this and massively cut down on piracy. This will of course mean a major change in business model, and they fear this like a vampire fears sunlight, so the opt for a bunch of draconian measures that will have no real effect except in creating headlines, and it will keep the obsolete business models alive a fraction longer - before everything crashes and burns anyway.
(Yeah, Kim Dotcom got money off of piracy, though I'm sure he was earning far less than market value, which makes sense since he didn't have the burden of any costs of production.)
That is so wrong. Kim Dotcom made his money selling bandwidth. Maybe you missed this but he ran a cloud hosting business where you upload smaller files and and download with limited bandwidth for free, but could subscribe to premium services which included more storage, longer lifespan for uploaded material and much greater bandwidth for downloads. He never sold the stuff people uploaded, nor was it his business to care what they uploaded. Stupid legislation forced him to implement DMCA tools that allowed copyright holders to delete stuff they claimed to own but that's about it. It should never be the service providers responsibility to police their users usage of the services but the greedy media industry is of another opinion.
It's kind of strange because all the DMCA tools I've heard about allows the copyright holders to delete anything they think they own. They don't need to verify or prove it, despite the DMCA says they have to. You can't just delete something because the filename might indicate a title that might be something you own the rights to. I mean, a file named "Home Improvement" might hold something related to the tv-show of the same name, but might just as well be a thousand other things.
It should be a requirement to actually prove for each and every file that the content indeed is something you own the rights to, and of course that you do own the rights, i.e. show the contracts that link the content to the rights holder and the contract that allows the person/company doing the complaints to do so on behalf of the rights holder. Yes, for each and every file. This will help prevent abuse which I'm sure occurs rampant these days.
The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing? - Ah, you mention batteries... You are away how many it makes to cover all the gaps where there's not enough sun or wind? - and that those batteries are lead based?
Oh, and windmills have suddenly stopped making noise and casting a shadow? - a lot of people has had the lives destroyed by the often powerful infra sound from a nearby windmill and their property values severely reduced by the constantly moving shadows from a nearby windmill...
a) Climate changes have begun b) They are man-made
This is what needs to be put on the table in a court in order for the claim to be even feasible.
Remember, you need to prove that what we're seeing in actual change and not some inherent dynamic in a static climate, and if you can do that, you also need to prove that any and all damage is caused by these changes, and that none of them are natural.
Good luck in proving that the relatively small variations we may be seeing now are entirely man-made and the natural variations over the millenia that gave us the ice ages and everything in between is not at play.
If an American company were to ship a sex toy to Saudi Arabia would it be okay for the Saudis to send an agent to chop off the hands of all of those responsible for shipping it? Or how about life in prison in a Saudi jail?
They could request extradition, assuming the two nations have good relations and working treaties with extradition agreements. This type of thing can and has happened before.
Actually... Until the post 9/11 era it was ab absolute requirement that the crime was indeed a crime in both countries. No problem when it comes to murder and similar, because that's illegal in most countries, but something like a sex toy might be extremely illegal in Saudi Arabia but it sure isn't in more other (civilized) countries. So the people shipping the sex toy would never be eligible to be extradited. Now, some countries have expanded extradition treaties where 'serious crimes' (terror in particular) are grounds for extradition from country A and prosecution in country B even for citizens of country A currently located in country A.
A recent example was a danish woman who was extradited from Denmark to the US (Florida) on drug charges - her former boyfriend was convicted of drug smuggling which happened while they were together, and as part of a plea-bargain he testified that she was in on it. Fortunately she was cleared (zero evidence) and is now safely back in Denmark. It was an obvious misuse of the expanded extradition treaty because even if she did it (knew about it), she obviously didn't have a connection to the smuggling itself, nor took part in the proceeds except third hand. She was nothing like a drug king pin or similar which would be a minimum for triggering the expanded treaty.
Was the crime committed on U.S. soil or within U.S. jurisdiction?
Yes. That's where they're selling the stuff.
Wrong. They're selling the stuff on the Internet. It has no nationality and thus no laws - and thus no crime can be committed.
Some or most of their customers are in the US but that doesn't matter. If they can't touch the manufacturers (that are committing the crimes here) which are physically located in China they can go after the stuff when it hits US soil. They don't need to mess with the Internet in order to stop people from buying this stuff.
Ads on the Internet were interesting 10-15 years ago... Small static banners advertising stuff that might even be relevant for a student/nerd like me at that time. Today they lie ("You have won!", "You may be at risk..." etc.), flash, jump, shake, slide over content etc. and that beyond obnoxious. I now block it all and it's their loss. If they behaved I probably wouldn't be so likely to do it. The so-called 'targeted advertising' simply doesn't work - for me at least. Whenever I happen to unblock ads or surf from other machines, the ads are all over the place, usually thinking I'm either a pregnant woman or a handyman, both of which are unbelievably off the mark.
I also block telemarketers and paper ads in my mailbox, using relevant signup services.
Ads on TV are even worse. Once in a full moon someone makes a good or funny television ad, but they rarely stand the test of being repeated 6-10 times each hour...
I think you're going to have some trouble getting Jews to stop their ritual circumcision. Hey, it's part of their culture, and if they believe their god demands that skin be cut from a boy's penis as part of a religious ceremony, I don't think they're going to give up just because you say so, Stormwatch.
Some cultures stretch necks, some scarify the skin, some pull the earlobes using bones and some cut skin off the penises of boys. Human beings are weird, what can you say? When your god tells you to do something, you don't ask questions, I guess.
Exactly the reason why all religion must be abolished.
I just have to quote Robert M. Pirsig here: "When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion."
Think, people... Think! - Don't do things just because someone else tells you, and especially not if some weird voice inside your tells you (even if it seems to be coming from the neighbors dog or similar).
Think! Question!
"One billion flies can't be wrong..." - well, that they all love a steaming pile of shit doesn't mean it's right for you - or even good for you.
Ban all religious and ritual mutilations of any kind. If people - when they're old enough to make a mature decision - then chose to have their penis mutilated, their skin discolored or burned, their neck streched or whatever - they're most welcome to do so. Adults must of course be allowed to do to themselves as they please.
But to allow children and infants to be mutilated - No. Not in a million years. It must stop and parents must be forced to pay restitution and damages to their children if the children decides they were violated and perhaps want the procedure reversed either completely or cosmetically.
The article is about people coming in UNDER weight, and I've never seen any false-positives on that end.
You're looking at the wrong end of the height scale. Someone who's 4'6" would be considered "underweight" at 76 pounds, which is actually a healthy weight for someone that short.
Correct. There's issues at the other end due to the lack of distinction between fat and muscle (taking the data of Arnold Schwarzenegger at his prime and calculating his BMI put him at the heavy end of overweight close to obese - which he clearly wasn't as he was Mr. Universe with zero body fat), but at the lower end the BMI works fine to determine underweight.
ObJoke: Garfield: "I'm not overweight! I'm underhigh!"
As with any fomula it can be inverted and thus I can see that I lack a bunch of inches in order to be healthy...;)
Saying that Palestinians should not be kept walled into ghettos is not antisemitic. Disagreeing with Israeli government policy is not antisemitic. Being in favor of a two-state solution is not antisemitic. Criticizing Israel is not antisemitic.
Depends very much on how you do it. For instance, saying "The jews are keeping the Palestinians walled into ghettos" is in fact antisemitic. Saying "Israel are keeping the Palestinians walled into ghettos" isn't.
It's all about the choice of words - often choosing the right synonym for (more or less) the same thing, which can be a problem when crossing language barriers.
Unfortunately a lot of the public rhetoric we hear from the Arab/Muslim world are heavily laden with strong antisemitic phrases and often it's obvious that they indeed were chosen to be antisemitic without being overtly antisemitic. Some of this might be excused by language barriers but some are obviously intentional.
Why did the TSA agent take the risk of *assuming* the scanner wouldn't hurt the insulin pump? - It is an obvious medical device that need special attention.
Why not just do the grope search and be on the safe side?
Apart from abolishing the TSA altogether the best solution would be to make the TSA agents legally responsible and liable for any and all damage resulting from their decisions, from medical damage (from the scanner), over psychic damage (from the grope search) to any and all complications following. So a bad search resulting in a successful terrorist attack or frying an expensive piece of medical technology in the scanner can make it a *very* expensive day at work. They way they will be forced to actually think and adjust their approach accordingly if they want to limit their liability. Oh, and as the scanners actually don't work very well, they can do little to actually prevent terror, which means that they *will* end up paying damages from a terrorist attack at some point, their only sensible course of action would be to quit their jobs or demand better procedures/solutions.
Pretty much every protester is considered a possible terrorist by the gov't today, and it's likely that most of the OWS protesters went in with the assumption that they were going to get a file opened on them.
And we are back to the 60s again when the FBI used to send people into churchs and other gatherings of non-violent organizations in order to spy on, and sometimes screw with, them.
Now, The Occupy protesters were not non-violent. In fact they some were very violent when they were removed from the places they 'occupied'. The peaceful ones are uninteresting, but the violent ones are a whole other ballgame. They have the potential to be both rioters and down the line armed revolutionaries, and any civilized society has to defend itself against those seeking to overthrow it as swift and fast as possible. Thus the interest from law enforcement.
Well, the Muslims are pretty bent on destroying themselves for at best symbolic reasons, at worst for absolutely nothing (the 9/11 attack for instance - killed thousands completely unrelated to both the attackers and their imagined enemies, and caused much more hostility than sympathy), so there's a good chance they'll destroy themselves in some way almost without outside help.
I have written about this before but it's still important...
No only can multiple persons in a household and/or devices share an IP in an authorized way (each family member may have one or more devices online and they all share the same IP)... and not only can a Wifi-connection be illegally accessed either because it's unsecured or because it was hacked... there are known actual cases where even more ways to illegally share someone elses IP can occur:
1) One of the known devices was compromised (like a computer with an active backdoor) - this is pretty common 2) A neighbor physically breaks in and connects himself to the household network in secret using a hidden network cable 3) A neighbor physically breaks in and installs his own wireless access point and hides it - no cables will lead to the thief if discovered 4) A neighbor physically breaks in and uses network-over-powerlines adapters to connect to the household network
I guess only the imagination limits the possibilities here. Only a thorough search would reveal some of these, so without such a search they cannot be ruled out, and most can be quickly removed without leaving a trace so unless the search is conducted right away, it's pretty useless.
I have had about the same tabs across several versions, and while initial use are lower (because tabs are not loaded until are accessed) leaving FF open results in FF used over 2GB of memory! - A few versions ago it was 'only' 1.2GB after a few days. I use NoScript and AdBlock so it's not ads reloading that eats the memory, and none of the pages auto-refresh, and still it eats more and more memory.
My solution has been to restart FF every day. Stupid but it keeps memory use down around 800MB.
BSE is poorly tested for in the USA (regulations not adhered to or relaxed) , this is why many US beef products are/were unwelcome in Japan. Human infection is understated, symptoms and diagnosis can take 10 years to manifest. There are postmortem studies performed in the 90's that indicate over 25% of diagnosed dementia and Alzheimer's victims were actually BSE infected individuals.
These studies were not widely distributed and testing has been allowed to become relaxed for purely economic reasons.... See the UK incidence.
Humans don't get BSE (Hint: The 'B' stands for 'Bovine') - they get Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD). They're both prion diseases but the actual prion involved differs. It is believed that BSE prions from food can trigger invalid folding of the CJD prion in humans and thus CJD but the details are not completely understood. Both BSE and CJD can also be triggered through genetic defects, either hereditary or through mutations.
Of course, the USDA has required insanely higher levels of testing for cows/beef from Canada.
Of coruse! - It's Canada! - We all know they're planning to invade the US and it would make their invasion much easier if everybody had CJD (the human variant of BSE, possibly caused by eating BSE-infected meat), right? - So remain vigilant when it comes to those pesky Canadians!:)
They are copyrighted. They just have to be publicized and it doesn't matter how limited this 'public' is...
So the next spies beware... Forget about treason... it can only land you in jail or in front of a firing squad... when you unauthorized copy those secret documents, you're committing COPYRIGHT VIOLATION and then you not only get the death penalty, your family will owe the state trillions for many generations to come because that's the reasonable market value of that material you're illegally copying!
The BREIN foundation is the joint anti-piracy program of authors, artists, publishers, producers and distributors of music, film, games, interactive software and books; A unique bundling of forces of the entire entertainment industry in the fight against Intellectual Property theft.
Again? - They STILL try to make filesharing into stealing and theft?
That unique 'bundling of forces' sure don't know much about the law it seems. Okay, once more for the daft and retarded: Stealing and theft refers to the illegal transfer of possession of an item or resource. It is characterized as as a transfer, i.e. someone (the victim) loses the item or resource as the thief gains it.
If you make a copy of the Mona Lisa, the Louvre doesn't end up with a empty space on its wall, and whatever you do with that copy can result in a number of possible criminal charges being brought against you, but stealing the painting is NOT one of them. After all, it's still there - in the Louvre.
Now some might argue that there's in indirect loss when you make a copy of a movie for instance. Because the legal way of getting a copy would be to pay for it, and since you don't pay, there's a loss. Now, there's two problems with that; first assuming that the recipient of the copy would have paid for it if the free copy wasn't available. That's not true at all, and it might be due to both unwillingness and inability to pay. Second, we quite often see filesharing of materials not available for purchase (as-yet unreleased), and it's absurd to claim a loss when no profit were possible.
Slashdot Mirror
A man died as a direct result of this douche bag's actions.
There are a lot of things wrong with what he did, but calling it a "direct result" is misleading.
Misleading? - It's plain wrong!
There are countless suicides every year linking to direct bullying, and it's beyond rare that someone actually gets prosecuted for it. There was no bullying or blackmail involved here as far as I know. There was just a recording of a sexual act. There's no direct link to the suicide so I'd have acquitted the guy completely for the suicide but of course convicted for the invasion of privacy.
Not unlike Godwin's Law about discussions degenerating until someone pulls the nazi card, a similar law exists about privacy-eroding proposals: Argue that in order to protect us against something really bad (terrorists, drug trafficking etc.) we need X, which incidentally also can help protect us against some almost as bad (kidnappers, violent criminals etc.), thus offering us a multi-pronged tool that can do almost everything against the badness out there. Scared people loves stuff like this.
But they forget to mention that it will also be very effective in taking away more of our freedom by offering a tool that essentially can be used to both track our movements and serve as the core of a police state where the authorities in real time came can both identify, track and easily apprehend people for anything, like parking tickets, expired license plates and everything else you put your mind to. Flag someone and you can easily locate and thus apprehend this person.
Demons... as in Satanism?
Satanism appears to be many things...
1) Christian satanism. Uses upside down crosses and maybe a pentagram here and there, and is usually what "Satanic metal" circles about. Satan appears personified and demons are everywhere.
2) LaVey Satanism. Has "The Black Bible" and the upturned pentagram (two points up, one down) is central. Probably the most common version. An actual Devil or demons are rare.
3) Temple of Set'ers. Much older than Cristianity and appears similar to a death cult. Usually organized in small local groups with little or no global cooperation.
4) Left hand path'ers. Sort of the dark side of Wicca. Also uses the upturned pentagram (Wicca uses the the regular pentagram) and appears similar to Wicca in many ways. Has no central deity but is a natural druid-like religion where nature and the believers themselves are celebrated.
5) Atheists. According to (at least) the major religions, anyone not believing in God or religion is really a satanist serving his wicked ways...
I'm in Denmark and I've got both seasons of Dollhouse on Blu-ray. Don't know which reason they are as all my players are region free. Wouldn't buy one if it wasn't. No, it isn't common for players to be region free but everything can be modified and they will be. Nobody serious about movies or tv-shows would want it any other way as it takes forever for even a fraction to be released locally.
The region system is stupid and just another way of geo-discriminating people. So our money isn't as good as the money of people who happen to live in the US and Canada? No matter how hard we try we cannot get to pay for watching tv-shows in a timely fashion. We have no choice but to pirate them. I want to pay. I want to support the shows. But no, they don't want our money. Sure, we can buy the boxed releases but buying the locally released box-sets released years later would be supporting the delayed release and I don't want that. Basically I want everything to be available globally on all formats at the same time. I want the choice of going to a cinema or watching it at home. I want the choice of watching it once for less or to have to watch whenever I feel like it for more. I want this choice from day one.
Why don't they offer this?
Oh my goodness, because I live in Australia I have to wait a week before seeing a TV show? How do I manage?
Sometimes I can't quite believe the world we live in.
How can this be moderated "Insightful"?! - It's arrogant bullshit, that's what it is!
A week, a month, a year... Different countries, different delays... and that's the problem! - Not how much but that there is a delay at all.
I pirate (meaning: download each new episode a few hours after airing when they turn up online) a dozen shows, and these shows are by far not all available in my country (yet). some turn up a few months late on subscription channels, but most turn up about a year late on 'free' advertising-based channels. On average per season 2-3 shows never make it here. Some don't even get released on DVD.
It should at least be possible for everyone to watch the shows as they air online through subscription... but all offers on this seem to be limited to the US residents only. Why can't someone from Europe sign up and actually be allowed to pay for the pleasure? - I guess they don't want our money so we have to pirate the shows instead. How mind-boggling stupid. We want to pay and they won't sell.
The analogy is right on! - I've often used roads as an analogy for the network simply because they are the same thing - a means of transport that can be used for good or evil, and everything in between.
The roads were - as were bittorrent - created for purely legitimate purposes. Then someone found a way to use them for something else. It's not the fault of the road or the network (and all its protocols) what they end up being used for. To say that bittorrent equals piracy is as wrong as saying that fast cars equals armed robberies. Sure, a lot of piracy involves bittorrent just as a lot of robberies involves fast cars, but you can't reverse the equation.
Piracy has become a classic arms race. First someone ripped some music and movies and put the up on his website for others to download. That was easy to stop stop and prosecute, for sure the actual pirate but also often all the downloaders. Then came the Napster-like services and P2P, but again the central server made it easy to stop. The individual users were harder to track but cutting the central server made everything else useless. Then came the first version of bittorrent where the central server was replaced by a central tracker. Now there was nothing illegal to go after centrally, so laws had to be changed to allow for prosecution of people providing services that pointed to the actual illegal stuff. Then bittorrent were updated to allow for trackerless operation. The distributed hash tables made it much harder to go for the central core as the hashes does not point anywhere, but they still try, now by national blocks of access to the indexing sites. They don't care that The Pirate Bay and similar now has made it impossible to go after themselves, and instead just try to censor access to TPB and similar.
In the meantime Cloud hosting has appeared and people are sharing links to anonymously uploaded data. The rights holders have now tried going after the biggest player here - MegaUpload - but it seems the antics used to escalate a civil matter into a major international crime has backfired. After all, MegaUpload didn't make money selling pirated stuff - they sold bandwidth and indirectly storage. The business model of free basic hosting and downloading, and premium services that gives you faster download and longer lifespan of the things you upload, combined with the basic privacy principle of not wanted to know what was shared (could be anything, including confidential stuff), makes it extremely hard to link the business to piracy.
Sure, a simple search would reveal that pirates also used MegaUpload, but a similar search would equally reveal that robbers always used roads to get away from the scene of their crimes, and just as this knowledge doesn't stop people from building more roads, it shouldn't stop MegaUpload and similar from providing their service.
The way to combat piracy is again similar to robberies. People commit robbery for two reasons: Money or the stuff taken. How to prevent robbery? Well, provide social security so that people don't have to commit crimes like robbery to survive, and build stores and banks so that robbery is both hard and unlikely to be worth it. Limit the amount of cash, make exit hard, make identification easier (cameras) and so on. Same thing with piracy. Why do people download pirated stuff? Prices too high and lack of availability are the two major culprits, and both things are under direct control of the rights holders. They can themselves change this and massively cut down on piracy. This will of course mean a major change in business model, and they fear this like a vampire fears sunlight, so the opt for a bunch of draconian measures that will have no real effect except in creating headlines, and it will keep the obsolete business models alive a fraction longer - before everything crashes and burns anyway.
(Yeah, Kim Dotcom got money off of piracy, though I'm sure he was earning far less than market value, which makes sense since he didn't have the burden of any costs of production.)
That is so wrong. Kim Dotcom made his money selling bandwidth. Maybe you missed this but he ran a cloud hosting business where you upload smaller files and and download with limited bandwidth for free, but could subscribe to premium services which included more storage, longer lifespan for uploaded material and much greater bandwidth for downloads. He never sold the stuff people uploaded, nor was it his business to care what they uploaded. Stupid legislation forced him to implement DMCA tools that allowed copyright holders to delete stuff they claimed to own but that's about it. It should never be the service providers responsibility to police their users usage of the services but the greedy media industry is of another opinion.
It's kind of strange because all the DMCA tools I've heard about allows the copyright holders to delete anything they think they own. They don't need to verify or prove it, despite the DMCA says they have to. You can't just delete something because the filename might indicate a title that might be something you own the rights to. I mean, a file named "Home Improvement" might hold something related to the tv-show of the same name, but might just as well be a thousand other things.
It should be a requirement to actually prove for each and every file that the content indeed is something you own the rights to, and of course that you do own the rights, i.e. show the contracts that link the content to the rights holder and the contract that allows the person/company doing the complaints to do so on behalf of the rights holder. Yes, for each and every file. This will help prevent abuse which I'm sure occurs rampant these days.
The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing? - Ah, you mention batteries... You are away how many it makes to cover all the gaps where there's not enough sun or wind? - and that those batteries are lead based?
Oh, and windmills have suddenly stopped making noise and casting a shadow? - a lot of people has had the lives destroyed by the often powerful infra sound from a nearby windmill and their property values severely reduced by the constantly moving shadows from a nearby windmill...
It's already begun, and ...
Really? - And you can PROVE that?
I mean prove beyond a reasonable doubt that
a) Climate changes have begun
b) They are man-made
This is what needs to be put on the table in a court in order for the claim to be even feasible.
Remember, you need to prove that what we're seeing in actual change and not some inherent dynamic in a static climate, and if you can do that, you also need to prove that any and all damage is caused by these changes, and that none of them are natural.
Good luck in proving that the relatively small variations we may be seeing now are entirely man-made and the natural variations over the millenia that gave us the ice ages and everything in between is not at play.
If an American company were to ship a sex toy to Saudi Arabia would it be okay for the Saudis to send an agent to chop off the hands of all of those responsible for shipping it? Or how about life in prison in a Saudi jail?
They could request extradition, assuming the two nations have good relations and working treaties with extradition agreements. This type of thing can and has happened before.
Actually... Until the post 9/11 era it was ab absolute requirement that the crime was indeed a crime in both countries. No problem when it comes to murder and similar, because that's illegal in most countries, but something like a sex toy might be extremely illegal in Saudi Arabia but it sure isn't in more other (civilized) countries. So the people shipping the sex toy would never be eligible to be extradited. Now, some countries have expanded extradition treaties where 'serious crimes' (terror in particular) are grounds for extradition from country A and prosecution in country B even for citizens of country A currently located in country A.
A recent example was a danish woman who was extradited from Denmark to the US (Florida) on drug charges - her former boyfriend was convicted of drug smuggling which happened while they were together, and as part of a plea-bargain he testified that she was in on it. Fortunately she was cleared (zero evidence) and is now safely back in Denmark. It was an obvious misuse of the expanded extradition treaty because even if she did it (knew about it), she obviously didn't have a connection to the smuggling itself, nor took part in the proceeds except third hand. She was nothing like a drug king pin or similar which would be a minimum for triggering the expanded treaty.
Was the crime committed on U.S. soil or within U.S. jurisdiction?
Yes. That's where they're selling the stuff.
Wrong. They're selling the stuff on the Internet. It has no nationality and thus no laws - and thus no crime can be committed.
Some or most of their customers are in the US but that doesn't matter. If they can't touch the manufacturers (that are committing the crimes here) which are physically located in China they can go after the stuff when it hits US soil. They don't need to mess with the Internet in order to stop people from buying this stuff.
Ads on the Internet were interesting 10-15 years ago... Small static banners advertising stuff that might even be relevant for a student/nerd like me at that time. Today they lie ("You have won!", "You may be at risk..." etc.), flash, jump, shake, slide over content etc. and that beyond obnoxious. I now block it all and it's their loss. If they behaved I probably wouldn't be so likely to do it. The so-called 'targeted advertising' simply doesn't work - for me at least. Whenever I happen to unblock ads or surf from other machines, the ads are all over the place, usually thinking I'm either a pregnant woman or a handyman, both of which are unbelievably off the mark.
I also block telemarketers and paper ads in my mailbox, using relevant signup services.
Ads on TV are even worse. Once in a full moon someone makes a good or funny television ad, but they rarely stand the test of being repeated 6-10 times each hour...
I think you're going to have some trouble getting Jews to stop their ritual circumcision. Hey, it's part of their culture, and if they believe their god demands that skin be cut from a boy's penis as part of a religious ceremony, I don't think they're going to give up just because you say so, Stormwatch.
Some cultures stretch necks, some scarify the skin, some pull the earlobes using bones and some cut skin off the penises of boys. Human beings are weird, what can you say? When your god tells you to do something, you don't ask questions, I guess.
Exactly the reason why all religion must be abolished.
I just have to quote Robert M. Pirsig here: "When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion."
Think, people... Think! - Don't do things just because someone else tells you, and especially not if some weird voice inside your tells you (even if it seems to be coming from the neighbors dog or similar).
Think! Question!
"One billion flies can't be wrong..." - well, that they all love a steaming pile of shit doesn't mean it's right for you - or even good for you.
Ban all religious and ritual mutilations of any kind. If people - when they're old enough to make a mature decision - then chose to have their penis mutilated, their skin discolored or burned, their neck streched or whatever - they're most welcome to do so. Adults must of course be allowed to do to themselves as they please.
But to allow children and infants to be mutilated - No. Not in a million years. It must stop and parents must be forced to pay restitution and damages to their children if the children decides they were violated and perhaps want the procedure reversed either completely or cosmetically.
You're looking at the wrong end of the height scale. Someone who's 4'6" would be considered "underweight" at 76 pounds, which is actually a healthy weight for someone that short.
Correct. There's issues at the other end due to the lack of distinction between fat and muscle (taking the data of Arnold Schwarzenegger at his prime and calculating his BMI put him at the heavy end of overweight close to obese - which he clearly wasn't as he was Mr. Universe with zero body fat), but at the lower end the BMI works fine to determine underweight.
ObJoke: Garfield: "I'm not overweight! I'm underhigh!"
As with any fomula it can be inverted and thus I can see that I lack a bunch of inches in order to be healthy... ;)
Saying that Palestinians should not be kept walled into ghettos is not antisemitic. Disagreeing with Israeli government policy is not antisemitic. Being in favor of a two-state solution is not antisemitic. Criticizing Israel is not antisemitic.
Depends very much on how you do it. For instance, saying "The jews are keeping the Palestinians walled into ghettos" is in fact antisemitic. Saying "Israel are keeping the Palestinians walled into ghettos" isn't.
It's all about the choice of words - often choosing the right synonym for (more or less) the same thing, which can be a problem when crossing language barriers.
Unfortunately a lot of the public rhetoric we hear from the Arab/Muslim world are heavily laden with strong antisemitic phrases and often it's obvious that they indeed were chosen to be antisemitic without being overtly antisemitic. Some of this might be excused by language barriers but some are obviously intentional.
Why did the TSA agent take the risk of *assuming* the scanner wouldn't hurt the insulin pump? - It is an obvious medical device that need special attention.
Why not just do the grope search and be on the safe side?
Apart from abolishing the TSA altogether the best solution would be to make the TSA agents legally responsible and liable for any and all damage resulting from their decisions, from medical damage (from the scanner), over psychic damage (from the grope search) to any and all complications following. So a bad search resulting in a successful terrorist attack or frying an expensive piece of medical technology in the scanner can make it a *very* expensive day at work. They way they will be forced to actually think and adjust their approach accordingly if they want to limit their liability. Oh, and as the scanners actually don't work very well, they can do little to actually prevent terror, which means that they *will* end up paying damages from a terrorist attack at some point, their only sensible course of action would be to quit their jobs or demand better procedures/solutions.
Pretty much every protester is considered a possible terrorist by the gov't today, and it's likely that most of the OWS protesters went in with the assumption that they were going to get a file opened on them.
And we are back to the 60s again when the FBI used to send people into churchs and other gatherings of non-violent organizations in order to spy on, and sometimes screw with, them.
Now, The Occupy protesters were not non-violent. In fact they some were very violent when they were removed from the places they 'occupied'. The peaceful ones are uninteresting, but the violent ones are a whole other ballgame. They have the potential to be both rioters and down the line armed revolutionaries, and any civilized society has to defend itself against those seeking to overthrow it as swift and fast as possible. Thus the interest from law enforcement.
Well, the Muslims are pretty bent on destroying themselves for at best symbolic reasons, at worst for absolutely nothing (the 9/11 attack for instance - killed thousands completely unrelated to both the attackers and their imagined enemies, and caused much more hostility than sympathy), so there's a good chance they'll destroy themselves in some way almost without outside help.
I have written about this before but it's still important...
No only can multiple persons in a household and/or devices share an IP in an authorized way (each family member may have one or more devices online and they all share the same IP)... and not only can a Wifi-connection be illegally accessed either because it's unsecured or because it was hacked... there are known actual cases where even more ways to illegally share someone elses IP can occur:
1) One of the known devices was compromised (like a computer with an active backdoor) - this is pretty common
2) A neighbor physically breaks in and connects himself to the household network in secret using a hidden network cable
3) A neighbor physically breaks in and installs his own wireless access point and hides it - no cables will lead to the thief if discovered
4) A neighbor physically breaks in and uses network-over-powerlines adapters to connect to the household network
I guess only the imagination limits the possibilities here. Only a thorough search would reveal some of these, so without such a search they cannot be ruled out, and most can be quickly removed without leaving a trace so unless the search is conducted right away, it's pretty useless.
Nah - Daleks can be stopped by installing a simple staircase.
That was the old Daleks... The new ones can fly! ;)
FF memory hogging has never been worse!
I have had about the same tabs across several versions, and while initial use are lower (because tabs are not loaded until are accessed) leaving FF open results in FF used over 2GB of memory! - A few versions ago it was 'only' 1.2GB after a few days. I use NoScript and AdBlock so it's not ads reloading that eats the memory, and none of the pages auto-refresh, and still it eats more and more memory.
My solution has been to restart FF every day. Stupid but it keeps memory use down around 800MB.
BSE is poorly tested for in the USA (regulations not adhered to or relaxed) , this is why many US beef products are/were unwelcome in Japan.
Human infection is understated, symptoms and diagnosis can take 10 years to manifest. There are postmortem studies performed in the 90's that indicate over 25% of diagnosed dementia and Alzheimer's victims were actually BSE infected individuals.
These studies were not widely distributed and testing has been allowed to become relaxed for purely economic reasons. ... See the UK incidence.
Humans don't get BSE (Hint: The 'B' stands for 'Bovine') - they get Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD). They're both prion diseases but the actual prion involved differs. It is believed that BSE prions from food can trigger invalid folding of the CJD prion in humans and thus CJD but the details are not completely understood. Both BSE and CJD can also be triggered through genetic defects, either hereditary or through mutations.
Of course, the USDA has required insanely higher levels of testing for cows/beef from Canada.
Of coruse! - It's Canada! - We all know they're planning to invade the US and it would make their invasion much easier if everybody had CJD (the human variant of BSE, possibly caused by eating BSE-infected meat), right? - So remain vigilant when it comes to those pesky Canadians! :)
They are copyrighted. They just have to be publicized and it doesn't matter how limited this 'public' is...
So the next spies beware... Forget about treason... it can only land you in jail or in front of a firing squad... when you unauthorized copy those secret documents, you're committing COPYRIGHT VIOLATION and then you not only get the death penalty, your family will owe the state trillions for many generations to come because that's the reasonable market value of that material you're illegally copying!
BREIN's stated mission:
Again? - They STILL try to make filesharing into stealing and theft?
That unique 'bundling of forces' sure don't know much about the law it seems. Okay, once more for the daft and retarded: Stealing and theft refers to the illegal transfer of possession of an item or resource. It is characterized as as a transfer, i.e. someone (the victim) loses the item or resource as the thief gains it.
If you make a copy of the Mona Lisa, the Louvre doesn't end up with a empty space on its wall, and whatever you do with that copy can result in a number of possible criminal charges being brought against you, but stealing the painting is NOT one of them. After all, it's still there - in the Louvre.
Now some might argue that there's in indirect loss when you make a copy of a movie for instance. Because the legal way of getting a copy would be to pay for it, and since you don't pay, there's a loss. Now, there's two problems with that; first assuming that the recipient of the copy would have paid for it if the free copy wasn't available. That's not true at all, and it might be due to both unwillingness and inability to pay. Second, we quite often see filesharing of materials not available for purchase (as-yet unreleased), and it's absurd to claim a loss when no profit were possible.