In my not so humble opinion, PHP does not deserve the reputation of being a toy language- I've found it stable and functional enough for very serious stuff (here in Holland, the eBay company "Marktplaats.nl" runs on PHP).
Yes, it has backwards compatibility issues. Most any upgrade path does. I personally deal with this by wrapping core functionality into a library. I've written sites that are insensitive to PHP versioning- they work equally well on PHP 3, 4 and 5. Programmers that require a specific PHP version 4.4.something should be ashamed of themselves.
There are a lot of good reasons to use PHP: - PHP is very accessible, it is very easy to start working with - Very stable - it offers a ton of functionality right out of the box - No need to buy extra components for trivial functionality such as reading binary files - It's free (as in beer/speech), just like perl -...but it doesn't "feel" quite as complex as perl, partially because of - the excellent documentation- which blows the competition out of the water.
Most likely, being this accessible causes it to attract quite a lot of not-so-experienced programmers. Which is probably the *real* problem. The main complaint I hear people make about PHP is that invariably, the sites built with it are a huge mess. Don't blame the language for that- blame its users.
Assuming you're talking about an auction type site, make sure they're adults - they should take responsibility for their own actions. Set rules. In Real Life, people use contracts. Users of your site can agree to the rules you set- no more access to the site to whomever violates the rules you set. But by all means, keep any financial responsibility of the users at those users. Ebay uses a rating/feedback system - this is a social control system that works pretty well to keep people in line.
While reading the "every story..." chapters I found I needed to move the mouse cursor out of the way- so that it wouldn't be over the presented text. Which closed the text or navigated me to the next chapter. The irritation factor of having to click is considerably lower than that of the alternatives (timed buttons, gestures), in my opinion.
I consider 'idly' moving the mouse cursor around the equivalent to 'making up my mind about what I want to do' whereas clicking is saying 'do it'.
A clickless interface makes me have to mind my own thoughts as I idly move around the cursor- so the requirement to click also acts as a safety mechanism.
This part aside, from a developer point of view it sure looks like a simple point and click interface costs a lot less effort to put together than the alternative- EXCEPT when the click is replaced by a less-productive alternative (circle the mouse cursor around a button, sweeping over the button, having a button with timeout). Also, these alternatives do not map well to other types of input devices (touch screen, stylus).
That said, I come to the conclusion that point-and-click is actually quite brilliant. It's simple, fast, maps well to other input methods and a has virtually zero 'false positive' and 'false negative' rates (that is, it's not irritating). From a developer point of view, point and click interfaces give less room for error than command line processing, and are generally more intuitive than command line (unlike CLI, visual interfaces give visual clues. Which doesn't mean I prefer an explorer-style interface over the command line). Kudos for the designer of the flash site for considering alternatives- but I'll stick with what works best for me.
You don't need to be ashamed of your code not to want other people to read it. It just might be that you don't feel like giving away your life's work. Or that keeping the source closed is the only way not to be sued for patent infringement.
"The internet was paid for by my tax dollars"? Tune down the bloodshot eyes and get a clue. The majority of the infrastructure out there (you know, in 'the rest of the world') is paid for by ISP subscribers and businesses. Oh you're talking about the *design*, in the early days of the net? If you are a typical slashdotter, most likely you weren't even paying tax yet when that happened. If you're worried about your tax dollars, maybe you should act *now* against your own government - a great deal more of your tax dollars is being wasted on things far less useful than the Internet.
"If France wants to run the internet then they can build their own." Get another clue. At this moment, the Internet is large enough that any individual effort of 'rolling their own' will naturally end up integrated with the Main Internet. This doesn't diminish the value of the Internet; it is in fact what gives the net its tremendous value. One giant worldwide network for all to use. As you seem to be against this degree of freedom, are you sure you are living in the right country?
I would make some statement about karma here but (A) I don't know the Indian-equivalent term
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the term Karma originated in India. So I'd say the Indian term for Karma is Karma.
I relate to your financial trouble. Sorry to burst your bubble but one of the reasons that he can afford the 20 million, is that he *doesn't* help random geeks out of debt. If he would, that would quickly drown his reserves now wouldn't it?
You'd have a better chance of getting out of debt by asking for a raise or increasing your pay by changing jobs. If you're any good, a 500 raise should be doable. If you have a partner (of course, this is slashdot), a 250 raise for each of you should be even easier to arrange for. This should allow you to get out of debt in a few years, without need to reduce your standard of living in the meantime. I'll assume that you're already saving as much as you can. If this assumption is false, shame on you for begging- you don't need to yet.
No realtime 2.6.18 kernel yet
on
Ubuntu 6.10 is Out
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It runs kernel 2.6.17, which means it does not yet include the realtime patches by Gleixner and Molnar which find their way into the Linux kernel from kernel 2.6.18 on. To me, this would still mean manually recompiling the kernel, but not for long anymore!
Aside from the fact that I get a bit tired of the internet being blamed for social problems, whereas in reality it only makes them more visible.
I basically see two options:
- Censorship. Take offline the racist hate speech, forcing said racists to continue their business underground. However it continues to exist.
OR
- Let the racists (and everyone else) ventilate their hate speech. It only makes them more visible. Which makes the problem so much simpler to solve than if they remain underground. At some point they will say something punishable by law, at which point they can be arrested.
Google obviously once again faces a situation where it has to choose between the lesser of two evils.
I feel racism is also largely solved by educating and creating understanding between groups. I propose a third option, the opposite of censorship - Adding a warning to certain pages rather than taking them offline:
"Warning- Racist content. This page contains racist statements. Before accepting these statements, consider the primitive state that your country would be in without worldwide cooperation between countries and cultures."
- So far, every time I have changed jobs, I've had to work hard to adapt to the new environment. New environments will keep you on your toes on different technologies, introducing you to new concepts which probably apply to various platforms. Once you've seen Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLServer, you'll likely know how to handle databases. Once you've seen PHP, JSP, ASP and CGI Perl scripts, you'll probably be familiar with the underlying concepts of server-side web programming. See a few flavors of everything and you'll readily adapt to new environments.
- It's not just about learning new programming languages and platforms. Perhaps to you "The next level" means fewer bugs. Do you already consistently write unit tests? Document requirements? Perform regression testing? Have your code tested by collegue programmers? What about code reviews/code reading? Is your code maintainable? Readable? User-friendly? Well-documented? Bug free? How can you (automatically) prevent these bugs next time? How familiar are you with the infrastructure of your programming environment (version control, build servers, network, etc?)
- Get familiar with 'new stuff'. I first heard about "Correctness by construction" here on Slashdot. Follow the white rabbit and find out what Spark Ada has to do with this.
- Learn to do things by yourself, even just as hobby project. Although nowadays it is relatively useless to write your own file compressor/database engine/scripting language/GUI framework/chat program/network protocol/file system/operating system, doing so will give you massive insight in how these work in general.
- Find someone with whom you can discuss better ways to do things. You will pull each other up. Show your code to each other and discuss improvements. Keep in mind that other programmers sometimes have an opposing view from yours. This doesn't mean that one is right and the other is wrong. (Example: What is better, a micro-kernel or a monolithic kernel? Answer: The truth is probably somewhere between those extremes.) The importance is in understanding the shades of gray between the black and white.
- If you want to learn, first you must get rid of the strong ego that most programmers build up over the years. Most programmers with a strong ego don't deserve their arrogance anyway.
its text rendering performance is noticably slower than Opera and IE, especially on Linux.
Okay, I'll feed the troll and call BS.
There is no way you can reliably compare Firefox to Opera and IE on Linux (no, Wine doesn't count). I do believe that you may be experiencing a performance lag on Linux compared to Windows if you're running an ATI Radeon in non-accelerated mode, but this is by no means to blame on Firefox.
That said, here at work I often witness the opposite: I type a link in IE, find out it's slow, fire up firefox, and find the same page rendered on FF before it renders on IE.
In the Netherlands...the government doesn't kill journalists, people do. Thanks for the generalization. That would of course be, people that were raised with the belief that if you don't agree with what someone's saying, you should kill those people. In general, in our country, people are not raised with such beliefs.
In this particular case, mr. van Gogh was killed by a Muslim that didn't like that mr. van Gogh called the Muslims 'goat fuckers'. And in fact it's not a pretty thing to say. Freedom of speech and expression is fine; it guarantees us that we can critisize other people. But we can try to critisize without deliberately insulting people. I don't think that mr. van Gogh deserved to be killed for his words, but I do understand that his words raised the anger of the people he called names.
...is of course, still, that there simply is no life on Mars (except for the micro-organisms we brought there from Earth). Just because the equipment failed to detect it, doesn't mean it has to exist. That's like saying "I've never seen a yellow-dotted purple kangaroo, but I may have been looking in the wrong direction so they probably exist."
The official webpage of north korea is: www.voiceofkorea.org Is it? I thought it was http://www.korea-dpr.com. Word has it that their own top-level domain should be available any moment now.
"... People without hands can visit any pub they like!..." Not a problem: They can't pick up a glass, so they can't get drunk.
ARRR!!! I'll hold me bottle o'rum with me hook matey!
In Indonesia, computing culture has been shaped pretty much by software piracy. It's fairly hard to make a living on writing commercial (read: mass-produced) software as you will find your work copied and spread around from the moment you sell your first copy. Protecting your software other than by law is vital, as the copyright law isn't properly enforced.
Also, with the average salaries there, some people might even be able to afford a computer (which will cost several months of salary), but no longer will have the means to pay for software. Back then, I even found myself using pirated software, not because I didn't *want* to use legal software but simply because legal software or even proper books weren't available. Mind you, this was before Linus wrote his famous Usenet post. As a result, it was terribly hard to find decent programmers in that area. Limitations in budget made it necessary to come up with creative, effective solutions. Only large companies and multinationals can afford custom-made software, as it is perceived as very expensive (even though programming services are hard to come by). Overall the culture doesn't support traditional software development, although the GNU movement has a good chance to work in such a setting.
In Portugal, things are different. Frankly I think they are a bit behind in their computer science education. Universities there still teach COBOL, the horror. Corporate culture values hierarchy quite a bit- Things are sometimes done in a certain way 'because I say so' even if a better solution exists. Programmers are treated as 'resources' or 'factory workers'- if you want more productivity, push them harder (instead of finding a way to work more efficiently). If things don't work out as planned, it is always the programmer who is to blame, because upper management never makes mistakes. Needless to say, this goes against modern insights. Possibly this still has its roots in the dictatorship that used to reign the country.
In Holland, up-to-date, proper education is no issue. The attitude is one of professionalism and open discussion. The upside of this is that if there is a problem, it will be clear where the source of the problem lies. The downside is that time may be wasted in meetings. Overall the culture helps support software development.
In most countries I've seen, most of the people that call themselves 'programmer' have never received any formal education. Then again, this also goes for management. Depending on the country, there may be a smaller or bigger notion of what is 'the right way' to do things, but in many cases this is disregarded anyway.
So, I would say culture definitely has a large impact on computing.
Is uranium naturally radioactive or is this human produced nuclear waste? For now, I'll assume the former.
In case it is about 'normal' uranium, would it be viable to use its radioactvity as a power source without the creepy fission reactions? Would it then also be possible to turn human nuclear waste into a useful energy source? Or is the amount of energy released by radioactivity too small to turn into useful work?
Re:Voyager worked (still works?) like that
on
A Single Pixel Camera
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Early fax machines worked the same way, but spun the paper around while the single photocell moved linearly left to right.
Well that's just extremely cool! This allows for peer-to-peer without service provider. Now if every phone gets anonimized routing built-in, we no longer need any providers for longer-range calls anymore either. Great for connectivity in time of disaster.
So, no more RIAA/MPAA Big Brothering invading your privacy to check with whom you trade your (home-made, of course) MP3's or movies. Will this finally pop the bubble of bubble-gum "artists"?
If a law allows the government to lock up people that "behave immorally", soon the government will stretch the meaning of the word 'immoral' from 'having sex on the streets' to 'showing a patch of skin'.
The real problem in fining people who make "defamatory comments or remarks, launch personal attacks or seek to damage reputations online" is that this is obviously also open to such a flexible interpretation (albeit a bit more subtle than the above example).
Subjective law allows for abuse and therefore always *will* cause abuse.
Instead of making America take more drugs and waste more money, how about they just ban high fructose corn syrup?
Wikipedia says "A more recent study found a link exists between obesity and high HFCS consumption, especially from soft drinks.".
So instead of banning HFCS, how about cutting down on the fizzy drinks, for example by reducing the serving size at your local golden arcs? The bucketloads of soda-pop served as a single serving in the States are beyond ridiculous. An average restaurant in Europe will sell servings of 200 ml as 'small', 330 ml as 'normal' and 400 cc as 'large'. I commonly see liter-buckets (1000cc or about 1/4 gallon) being served in the States. Here in Europe we don't even *have* that type of serving size for fizzy drinks.
When I was a kid, my mother always taught us that fizzy drinks were 'party drinks', unsuitable for quenching thirst. Instead we'd have (pure, unsweetened) fruit juices/milk/tea/water. Not a drop of HFCS in there... My point is, instead of telling the government to 'ban HFCS instead of making the people spend more money', what about educating the people and letting them take some responsibility for their actions?
If people can not be held responsible for watching their own HFCS consumption, why trust them to walk around with guns?
Slashdot Mirror
In my not so humble opinion, PHP does not deserve the reputation of being a toy language- I've found it stable and functional enough for very serious stuff (here in Holland, the eBay company "Marktplaats.nl" runs on PHP).
...but it doesn't "feel" quite as complex as perl, partially because of
Yes, it has backwards compatibility issues. Most any upgrade path does. I personally deal with this by wrapping core functionality into a library. I've written sites that are insensitive to PHP versioning- they work equally well on PHP 3, 4 and 5. Programmers that require a specific PHP version 4.4.something should be ashamed of themselves.
There are a lot of good reasons to use PHP:
- PHP is very accessible, it is very easy to start working with
- Very stable
- it offers a ton of functionality right out of the box
- No need to buy extra components for trivial functionality such as reading binary files
- It's free (as in beer/speech), just like perl
-
- the excellent documentation- which blows the competition out of the water.
Most likely, being this accessible causes it to attract quite a lot of not-so-experienced programmers. Which is probably the *real* problem. The main complaint I hear people make about PHP is that invariably, the sites built with it are a huge mess. Don't blame the language for that- blame its users.
Bring on the evil euro trading blocks >:)
Assuming you're talking about an auction type site, make sure they're adults - they should take responsibility for their own actions. Set rules. In Real Life, people use contracts. Users of your site can agree to the rules you set- no more access to the site to whomever violates the rules you set. But by all means, keep any financial responsibility of the users at those users. Ebay uses a rating/feedback system - this is a social control system that works pretty well to keep people in line.
While reading the "every story..." chapters I found I needed to move the mouse cursor out of the way- so that it wouldn't be over the presented text. Which closed the text or navigated me to the next chapter. The irritation factor of having to click is considerably lower than that of the alternatives (timed buttons, gestures), in my opinion.
I consider 'idly' moving the mouse cursor around the equivalent to 'making up my mind about what I want to do' whereas clicking is saying 'do it'.
A clickless interface makes me have to mind my own thoughts as I idly move around the cursor- so the requirement to click also acts as a safety mechanism.
This part aside, from a developer point of view it sure looks like a simple point and click interface costs a lot less effort to put together than the alternative- EXCEPT when the click is replaced by a less-productive alternative (circle the mouse cursor around a button, sweeping over the button, having a button with timeout). Also, these alternatives do not map well to other types of input devices (touch screen, stylus).
That said, I come to the conclusion that point-and-click is actually quite brilliant. It's simple, fast, maps well to other input methods and a has virtually zero 'false positive' and 'false negative' rates (that is, it's not irritating). From a developer point of view, point and click interfaces give less room for error than command line processing, and are generally more intuitive than command line (unlike CLI, visual interfaces give visual clues. Which doesn't mean I prefer an explorer-style interface over the command line). Kudos for the designer of the flash site for considering alternatives- but I'll stick with what works best for me.
You don't need to be ashamed of your code not to want other people to read it. It just might be that you don't feel like giving away your life's work. Or that keeping the source closed is the only way not to be sued for patent infringement.
Will your box be at stake then?
"The internet was paid for by my tax dollars"? Tune down the bloodshot eyes and get a clue. The majority of the infrastructure out there (you know, in 'the rest of the world') is paid for by ISP subscribers and businesses. Oh you're talking about the *design*, in the early days of the net? If you are a typical slashdotter, most likely you weren't even paying tax yet when that happened. If you're worried about your tax dollars, maybe you should act *now* against your own government - a great deal more of your tax dollars is being wasted on things far less useful than the Internet.
"If France wants to run the internet then they can build their own." Get another clue. At this moment, the Internet is large enough that any individual effort of 'rolling their own' will naturally end up integrated with the Main Internet. This doesn't diminish the value of the Internet; it is in fact what gives the net its tremendous value. One giant worldwide network for all to use. As you seem to be against this degree of freedom, are you sure you are living in the right country?
I would make some statement about karma here but (A) I don't know the Indian-equivalent term
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the term Karma originated in India. So I'd say the Indian term for Karma is Karma.
Yeah, that's a very convenient way to cheat. After all 'Colour' is worth more points than 'Color'.
I relate to your financial trouble. Sorry to burst your bubble but one of the reasons that he can afford the 20 million, is that he *doesn't* help random geeks out of debt. If he would, that would quickly drown his reserves now wouldn't it?
You'd have a better chance of getting out of debt by asking for a raise or increasing your pay by changing jobs. If you're any good, a 500 raise should be doable. If you have a partner (of course, this is slashdot), a 250 raise for each of you should be even easier to arrange for. This should allow you to get out of debt in a few years, without need to reduce your standard of living in the meantime. I'll assume that you're already saving as much as you can. If this assumption is false, shame on you for begging- you don't need to yet.
It runs kernel 2.6.17, which means it does not yet include the realtime patches by Gleixner and Molnar which find their way into the Linux kernel from kernel 2.6.18 on. To me, this would still mean manually recompiling the kernel, but not for long anymore!
Aside from the fact that I get a bit tired of the internet being blamed for social problems, whereas in reality it only makes them more visible.
I basically see two options:
- Censorship. Take offline the racist hate speech, forcing said racists to continue their business underground. However it continues to exist.
OR
- Let the racists (and everyone else) ventilate their hate speech. It only makes them more visible. Which makes the problem so much simpler to solve than if they remain underground. At some point they will say something punishable by law, at which point they can be arrested.
Google obviously once again faces a situation where it has to choose between the lesser of two evils.
I feel racism is also largely solved by educating and creating understanding between groups. I propose a third option, the opposite of censorship - Adding a warning to certain pages rather than taking them offline:
"Warning- Racist content. This page contains racist statements. Before accepting these statements, consider the primitive state that your country would be in without worldwide cooperation between countries and cultures."
- So far, every time I have changed jobs, I've had to work hard to adapt to the new environment. New environments will keep you on your toes on different technologies, introducing you to new concepts which probably apply to various platforms. Once you've seen Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLServer, you'll likely know how to handle databases. Once you've seen PHP, JSP, ASP and CGI Perl scripts, you'll probably be familiar with the underlying concepts of server-side web programming. See a few flavors of everything and you'll readily adapt to new environments.
- It's not just about learning new programming languages and platforms. Perhaps to you "The next level" means fewer bugs. Do you already consistently write unit tests? Document requirements? Perform regression testing? Have your code tested by collegue programmers? What about code reviews/code reading? Is your code maintainable? Readable? User-friendly? Well-documented? Bug free? How can you (automatically) prevent these bugs next time? How familiar are you with the infrastructure of your programming environment (version control, build servers, network, etc?)
- Get familiar with 'new stuff'. I first heard about "Correctness by construction" here on Slashdot. Follow the white rabbit and find out what Spark Ada has to do with this.
- Learn to do things by yourself, even just as hobby project. Although nowadays it is relatively useless to write your own file compressor/database engine/scripting language/GUI framework/chat program/network protocol/file system/operating system, doing so will give you massive insight in how these work in general.
- Find someone with whom you can discuss better ways to do things. You will pull each other up. Show your code to each other and discuss improvements. Keep in mind that other programmers sometimes have an opposing view from yours. This doesn't mean that one is right and the other is wrong. (Example: What is better, a micro-kernel or a monolithic kernel? Answer: The truth is probably somewhere between those extremes.) The importance is in understanding the shades of gray between the black and white.
- If you want to learn, first you must get rid of the strong ego that most programmers build up over the years. Most programmers with a strong ego don't deserve their arrogance anyway.
its text rendering performance is noticably slower than Opera and IE, especially on Linux.
Okay, I'll feed the troll and call BS.
There is no way you can reliably compare Firefox to Opera and IE on Linux (no, Wine doesn't count). I do believe that you may be experiencing a performance lag on Linux compared to Windows if you're running an ATI Radeon in non-accelerated mode, but this is by no means to blame on Firefox.
That said, here at work I often witness the opposite: I type a link in IE, find out it's slow, fire up firefox, and find the same page rendered on FF before it renders on IE.
In the Netherlands...the government doesn't kill journalists, people do. Thanks for the generalization. That would of course be, people that were raised with the belief that if you don't agree with what someone's saying, you should kill those people. In general, in our country, people are not raised with such beliefs.
In this particular case, mr. van Gogh was killed by a Muslim that didn't like that mr. van Gogh called the Muslims 'goat fuckers'. And in fact it's not a pretty thing to say. Freedom of speech and expression is fine; it guarantees us that we can critisize other people. But we can try to critisize without deliberately insulting people. I don't think that mr. van Gogh deserved to be killed for his words, but I do understand that his words raised the anger of the people he called names.
...is of course, still, that there simply is no life on Mars (except for the micro-organisms we brought there from Earth). Just because the equipment failed to detect it, doesn't mean it has to exist. That's like saying "I've never seen a yellow-dotted purple kangaroo, but I may have been looking in the wrong direction so they probably exist."
The official webpage of north korea is: www.voiceofkorea.org
Is it? I thought it was http://www.korea-dpr.com. Word has it that their own top-level domain should be available any moment now.
"... People without hands can visit any pub they like!..."
Not a problem: They can't pick up a glass, so they can't get drunk.
ARRR!!! I'll hold me bottle o'rum with me hook matey!
Disclaimer: These are wildly subjective.
In Indonesia, computing culture has been shaped pretty much by software piracy. It's fairly hard to make a living on writing commercial (read: mass-produced) software as you will find your work copied and spread around from the moment you sell your first copy. Protecting your software other than by law is vital, as the copyright law isn't properly enforced.
Also, with the average salaries there, some people might even be able to afford a computer (which will cost several months of salary), but no longer will have the means to pay for software. Back then, I even found myself using pirated software, not because I didn't *want* to use legal software but simply because legal software or even proper books weren't available. Mind you, this was before Linus wrote his famous Usenet post. As a result, it was terribly hard to find decent programmers in that area. Limitations in budget made it necessary to come up with creative, effective solutions. Only large companies and multinationals can afford custom-made software, as it is perceived as very expensive (even though programming services are hard to come by). Overall the culture doesn't support traditional software development, although the GNU movement has a good chance to work in such a setting.
In Portugal, things are different. Frankly I think they are a bit behind in their computer science education. Universities there still teach COBOL, the horror. Corporate culture values hierarchy quite a bit- Things are sometimes done in a certain way 'because I say so' even if a better solution exists. Programmers are treated as 'resources' or 'factory workers'- if you want more productivity, push them harder (instead of finding a way to work more efficiently). If things don't work out as planned, it is always the programmer who is to blame, because upper management never makes mistakes. Needless to say, this goes against modern insights. Possibly this still has its roots in the dictatorship that used to reign the country.
In Holland, up-to-date, proper education is no issue. The attitude is one of professionalism and open discussion. The upside of this is that if there is a problem, it will be clear where the source of the problem lies. The downside is that time may be wasted in meetings. Overall the culture helps support software development.
In most countries I've seen, most of the people that call themselves 'programmer' have never received any formal education. Then again, this also goes for management. Depending on the country, there may be a smaller or bigger notion of what is 'the right way' to do things, but in many cases this is disregarded anyway.
So, I would say culture definitely has a large impact on computing.
Is uranium naturally radioactive or is this human produced nuclear waste? For now, I'll assume the former.
In case it is about 'normal' uranium, would it be viable to use its radioactvity as a power source without the creepy fission reactions? Would it then also be possible to turn human nuclear waste into a useful energy source? Or is the amount of energy released by radioactivity too small to turn into useful work?
Early fax machines worked the same way, but spun the paper around while the single photocell moved linearly left to right.
Hmmfff - Guess I'm giving my age away...
You should, in fact, call the Guinness Book of Records, as you must be the oldest person in the world. Fax machines of some sort or another have existed since the mid-late 19th century.
Well that's just extremely cool! This allows for peer-to-peer without service provider. Now if every phone gets anonimized routing built-in, we no longer need any providers for longer-range calls anymore either. Great for connectivity in time of disaster.
So, no more RIAA/MPAA Big Brothering invading your privacy to check with whom you trade your (home-made, of course) MP3's or movies. Will this finally pop the bubble of bubble-gum "artists"?
If a law allows the government to lock up people that "behave immorally", soon the government will stretch the meaning of the word 'immoral' from 'having sex on the streets' to 'showing a patch of skin'.
The real problem in fining people who make "defamatory comments or remarks, launch personal attacks or seek to damage reputations online" is that this is obviously also open to such a flexible interpretation (albeit a bit more subtle than the above example).
Subjective law allows for abuse and therefore always *will* cause abuse.
Instead of making America take more drugs and waste more money, how about they just ban high fructose corn syrup?
Wikipedia says "A more recent study found a link exists between obesity and high HFCS consumption, especially from soft drinks.".
So instead of banning HFCS, how about cutting down on the fizzy drinks, for example by reducing the serving size at your local golden arcs? The bucketloads of soda-pop served as a single serving in the States are beyond ridiculous. An average restaurant in Europe will sell servings of 200 ml as 'small', 330 ml as 'normal' and 400 cc as 'large'. I commonly see liter-buckets (1000cc or about 1/4 gallon) being served in the States. Here in Europe we don't even *have* that type of serving size for fizzy drinks.
When I was a kid, my mother always taught us that fizzy drinks were 'party drinks', unsuitable for quenching thirst. Instead we'd have (pure, unsweetened) fruit juices/milk/tea/water. Not a drop of HFCS in there... My point is, instead of telling the government to 'ban HFCS instead of making the people spend more money', what about educating the people and letting them take some responsibility for their actions?
If people can not be held responsible for watching their own HFCS consumption, why trust them to walk around with guns?
Salami/GOX? Do you mean you launched a sausage?