Republicans: I say your Affordable Healthcare policy goes too far! Democrats: And I say your Affordable Healthcare policy doesn't go too far enough!
There's be an Oblig. link to youtube if I could find one. And, not being a USian, I'm not sure if I've got the parties the right way around in my paraphrasing.
u38cg already mentioned that prostitution is legal in the UK (although many ancillary activities commonly related to prostitution are not), but for the most part you can just go to the wiki page for Prostitution_in_$country:
If it's anything like the articulated bogies they're introducing on the tube/London Underground, there'll be even less seats. The Metropolitan line - one of the lines that extends out the furthest into the commuter belt - used to run the venerable A Stock which had 448 seats per train, but they've been replaced with the S8 stock which have only 306 seats.
I believe the proper conduct in British journalism is to refer the aggressor to Arkell v. Pressdram;
"We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off"
Similar experience here; I've always previously been at MS/outlook/exchange shops, so it was a shock to arrive at a new job (at a ye olde established firm) and seeing everyone use Notes. Email, depending on the business unit, was either long since migrated to exchange, or in the process of migrating to exchange (so I've never had to deal with it for it's much-derided mail functionality, although I think outlook is a bag of crap in this regard as well), yet there are still a shitload of bespoke applications we still use in Notes and precious little in the way of a migration path precisely because Notes was the only game in town to begin with.
And to be honest, as clunky as it can be at times, the groupware stuff in Notes works pretty flawlessly for me and my colleagues. Reasonably good version control, snappy performance (don't think we're using any of that java gunk), lots of cool functionality in the native widgets (far ahead of anything you could achieve in every wiki I've used) and - most importantly for the firefighting part of my job - the ability for everyone in my team to easily keep a searchable, offline copy of the documentation database.
Like I said, there seems to be little in the way of groupware clients/servers that can do this nowadays, and there's a depressing amount of project managers who seem to think it's a piece of piss to replicate the same behaviour in despairpoint or mediawiki... and our backups and source repos are filled with the carcasses of those projects that tried and failed.
You've been modded funny, but it's more +1 Insightful, -2 Depressing.
I've had several calls from my bank that basically go like this: GB: "Hello, I'm calling from Generic Bank regarding your account, in order to verify your identity as the account holder can I ask you to confirm your name, date of birth and account number please?" MN: "Sure" GB: "..." MN: "Well are you going to tell me?" GB: "Sorry sir, you need to tell me that information" MN: "And how do I know you're not a scammer?" GB: "Because I'm calling from Generic Bank" MN: "I'm not going to give any information to an unsolicited caller asking me for my bank details. Are you going to tell me what this call is about?" GB: "I'm afraid I can only do that with the verified account holder" MN: "And who is that?" GB: "I'm afraid I can't tell you until you tell me, but I can assure you I am calling from Generic Bank" MN: "And I can assure you I didn't take a shit in your cornflakes but that doesn't necessarily make it true, does it?" *click*
Yes, these calls really were from the bank because every time this happens I walk into a branch and ask a) why I was called and b) why they still haven't fixed this utterly moronic behaviour. Don't even get me started on the almost complete and utter lack of two-factor auth for online banking as well as the utterly ridiculous password requirements. About 5 years back my bank said I could have a current account with an RSA key... the catch was it had to have at least £50,000 in it. I think it's only within the last year or so they've brought in two-factor auth for us mere peons, and yet you're apparently still able to reset your account with "security questions". When I tried to set answers that were purposefully incorrect (e.g. for "memorable place" you might choose to give "Marvin's turgid bowling average") I was told I wasn't allowed to do that so I cancelled the whole process. Asinine.
I haven't given the name of my bank, because they all seem equally shitty in this regard.
Are you kidding?! Natural disasters and (inter)national tragedies are the PERFECT time for adverts - think of all the people who'll be frantically searching for relatives, or will be crippled and needing a new medical plan, or need temporary accommodation, or need to find a pharmacy and a gun shop in close proximity in a hurry... it's our duty, nay, our DESTINY to ensure our consumers are made aware of all the fine products our sponsors can provide for them for a very reasonable fee in times of crisis. If anything, we'll need to dedicate more page real estate to adverts during crises so that we can ensure the citizenry can demonetise effectively and thus not risk further damage to the economy. Our case studies show that during events like 9/11, click-through rates increased from 0.2% to 0.93%, indicating that people want more adverts during times of trial by a factor of at least 800 millicapitalisations.
This turning off adverts (a concept that in itself any right-minded consumer would consider a ludicrous proposition) during a time of chaos would not only be fiscally irresponsible, but also allows people to have a shared experience in consuming the grieving process.
I don't really see what the problem with that is - all it'll mean is that everything you learn from copying something will mean we need a system in place to automatically make royalty payments to the people you copied it from. All you need do is when you create a New Work, Learning Concept (TM) or Factoid Slam (TM) is register it with the Education Attribution Corporation and we'll leverage our multi-source bottom-line scoping architect to provide our top-down talent-nurturing stakeholders with enough pre-prepared interdependencies to fully institutionalise and monetise high-quality, consumer-empowering selective knowledge transfers, entailing growing a streamlined, leading and financially re-aligned investor confidence paradigm.
Of course, since nothing is created in a vacuum, as prime stakeholder of over 83% of all Amelioration Reimbursement Diversification Cogitators, the Education Attribution Corporation will take a 60% cut of all provided input. Those found to be illegally harbouring unlicensed intellectual property of Education Attribution Corporation will be temporarily granted access to neurosurgical frontal cortex reassignment therapy so as to ensure no unjust exploitation of unfettered unrecompensed proficiency.
Just to chime in with a "me, too!" but The Day After is very much a Hollywood version of nuclear war. Threads (and to a lesser extent 1965's The War Game which inspired the structure of the film but was banned from being broadcast) is essentially some of the most harrowing TV you can put yourself through. If you like your post-apocalyptic stuff then despite its pitifully small budget Threads is hard to beat; just don't expect to feel too chipper afterwards.
It's might not be well known outside of the UK, but part of what made Threads so chilling was the fact that the documentary-style delivery was done partly with excerpts from Protect and Survive, a real PI film, just to show how ineffective and futile the advice being given out by the government would really be. I think the nearest US equivalent is Duck and Cover.
These days, almost every time a story is posted along the lines of "Linux says X" it's frequently framed in such a way as to paint Linus as a frothing madman hurling not just insults but entire furniture factories at his cringing subordinates. It's become such a regular occurence that I half expect them to be followed up with a story on how Steve Ballmer has converted to buddhism and will be using the armpit sweat from his meditations to irrigate the sahara.
Reading the article, of course, usually reveals a different picture, but that gets in the way of attention-grabbing headlines. I'm not really sure how the following post can be construed as "fury"; irritation, indignation, perhaps, but not fury.
Where do I start a petition to raise the IQ and kernel knowledge of people? Guys, go read drivers/char/random.c. Then, learn about cryptography. Finally, come back here and admit to the world that you were wrong. Short answer: we actually know what we are doing. You don't. Long answer: we use rdrand as _one_ of many inputs into the random pool, and we use it as a way to _improve_ that random pool. So even if rdrand were to be back-doored by the NSA, our use of rdrand actually improves the quality of the random numbers you get from/dev/random. Really short answer: you're ignorant.
As far as I can tell, no-one's found any evidence for rdrand being backdoored, and even if it were, there's bigger issues at foot with things like microcode. Linus explains how the kernel implementation uses random data from several different sources to guard against this kind of stuff. Plus, as other people have pointed out, you can disable rdrand with a kernel parameter. Linus is primarily a pragmatist, so it doesn't really make much sense to excise the code from the kernel - throwing out the baby with the bathwater if you will. Surely if there were any hardware to worry about, it'd be the hardware providing AES-NI? Why isn't there a petition to have that removed...?
Daily Mail Island, a reality TV show where several normal people are deposited on an island and not allowed access to any media other than the strongly right-wing and conservative Daily Mail newspaper, leading to them becoming progressively more irrational and brutal as the series progresses - for example, tying teenage lovers together with sacks on their heads and beating them, or sealing a teenager caught masturbating into a coffin filled with broken glass and dog faeces and throwing it over a cliff and their language devolving into rhetorical questions and sarcastic snorts.
As with all the best satire, it's hilariously difficult to distinguish it from reality. Sadly (and I say this as a resident), Daily Mail Island feels like it's becoming synonymous with the United Kingdom.
What I can take away from this statement by PJ is that the powers that be already have their hands on the servers either by hook or by crook and although groklaw may be able to set up tor or any number of any other number of secure workarounds, the entire site is compromised at source, therefore making any further measures moot.
If I were PJ and the feds or whomever came down on me with a gagging order, a reaction and a message like this would be the only possibly-legal way of informing the users, although I wouldn't be surprised if repercussions weren't coming. Shifting the site outside of US jurisdiction, warning members or modifying access protocols to get around wiretapping would be directly against the terms of the gag order.
Now I'll go swap my tinfoil hat for a lead one.
Related aside: back when speed limits were introduced in the UK, the AA (Automobile Association) got in trouble for obstructing the police by using their scouts to warn drivers of speed checks in the area. So they introduced the slogan "If an AA patrol fails to salute you, please stop and ask why".
I'm at work so I can't see the video yet, but it sounds like it bears a resemblance to Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares which posits the idea that a great deal of the western world, without any Big Bad to fight against, has increasingly overblown things like terrorists in order to facilitate the transition to a more repressive society, a process which merely accelerated after the attacks on the world trade centre. That is to say, it's not just America that's potentially in decline. Recommended viewing.
It's occasionally visible on YouTube but can be downloaded in its entirety from archive.org (uploaded by Curtis himself I believe). Sadly you can't buy it because the way Curtis makes his documentaries out of lots of scraps of archive footage basically makes licensing impossible.
Those of you who find these interesting might also want to see his other works in the same vein, most notably: The Trap centring on the modern idea (and subsequent manipulation) of the concept of freedom All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace basically about the 2008 financial meltdown but approached from the angle of people putting too much confidence in artificial models of organic systems.
I'm beginning to wonder if GoDaddy's web server policy follows the solar cycle...:)
From the look of Netcraft's graph, prior to the GoDaddy move it looked like most of the marketshare lost from apache went straight into nginx (itself also frequently used as a caching proxy/frontend to another web server on the backend) so I'm not quite sure what the summary/TFA are trying to imply.
I was about to reply with a post about "...but here in the EU (unlike the US IIRC), PayPal *is* classified as a bank and therefore has to comply with much stricter legistlation than they appear to have to do in the US".
Not sure where the derogatory tone is coming from, but this isn't a patent troll - they do actually have a patent on something that's useful and ubiquitous.
As someone said in the last slashdot thread, all patent trolls may ask for money for patents they hold, but not all patent holders are patent trolls. As with many,many previous articles on this, it somehow seems to be framed in a "US versus them" argument to help fan the flames of jingoistic controversy.
Given the headlines and summaries this morning I think samzenpus is coming down off a three-day bender.
Can't comment on the rest of the commonwealth, but aside from ER here in the UK we had Florence Nightingale on a tenner throughout my childhood.
Fun geeky factoid: the lady with the lamp was so successful with her hospital reform because she was immensely good at presenting statistics visually and was able to demonstrate how a little extra spent on better preventative medicine and sanitation would save much more money in the long term, both in terms of military hospitals and sanitation in general.
Completely agree, korea's been consistently turning out brilliant films for about ten years now (probably longer, but Oldboy was when I started paying attention). All of Chan Wook Park's "vengeance" films are fantastic. Japanese horror's always been on my radar ever since the Ring films, as you state they're some of the masters at making a lot with very little. John Woo returned to china and made the incredible Red Cliff, Takashi Miike's been making some great samurai movies. Don't know if you've watched anything by the late, great Satoshi Kon but he made some truly mind-bending anime; Aaronofsky borrowed heavily from Perfect Blue for Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan and I can only describe Paprika as what an evil version of Inception might look like. Yup. Lots of brilliant stuff coming out of the orient.
Never saw any of "The Girl With..." films because I found the books (well, the first hundred or so pages of the first one anyway) so execrable.
Of course there's an export filter in place, typically we'll only hear about the good foreign cinema in english speaking countries (and by the same token get flooded with all manner of dross in english), but it still means there's a glut of film out there to be discovered. Great cinema all over the place, just precious little coming from Hollywood at the moment.
Sad to hear that the fear of subs is still apparently prevalent, although continental europe (well, germany, italy and france at any rate) still seem to like to dub things at the drop of a hat.
P.S. an american who uses the handle "gobshite" and the term "yank"? Are you sure you're not secretly british/irish?:)
Sadly I'll have to agree with jebediah, I had Iron Sky on pre-order, it was a one-night-only at the flicks and I missed it, it started brilliantly but I felt it faltered halfway through and collapsed by about two-thirds of the way through. In my opinion, Galaxy Quest is still the pinnacle of silly sci-fi; it's a deconstruction/parody, but never insults its viewers and skilfully reconstructs its own concept to remind us why it's fun in the first place.
Reciprocating, if you fancy trying out the very antithesis of silly sci-fi movies you could do a lot worse than tracking down the famous-but-still-under-appreciated Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, another movie to appear from one of Hollywood's golden eras. A tragicomedy, nothing but adults talking, but one of the most heartbreaking stories delivered by some of the finest acting I've ever seen. Radically different (then and now) from anything Hollywood's done for decades, but still shows how great (and socially challenging) Hollywood can be when they choose to.
I think one of the key differentiators here is the amount of starting capital. Movies outside of the Hollywood machine might have the budgets for at least a certain level of special effects but because they don't have the marketing budget to ever think about attaining blockbuster status, there's no incentive to have to rake back in hojillions of profits because that money was never spent in the first place. As such, there's no desire to pander to every single market and thus less of a chance that your movies comes out as blandly homogenised-by-committee crap. Take Looper, or Prometheus for example. Set themselves up to say something brilliant and profoud about their retrospective environments, and then didn't.
Honestly, I don't really care that much about the plot re-use; there are only so many plots and so many ways you can fit them into 2hrs, but so many big-budget movies recently seem to have actually forgotten how to deliver them with style (or indeed at all in many cases). The effects all look the same, the characters are all the same.
Eurotrash pontificating here, but this is why I've ended up like euro-centric cinema the most these days. There's a fair few attempts at effects-laden hokum but most of the stuff tends to revolve around some sort of a character study in $period_setting. Cheap to film but requires good acting/directing and a solid script. My favourite example of these came as a recommendation from a friend to see Il Divo, examining Giulio Andreotti, an Italian politician with incredible staying power. I know, I'd never heard of him either, but he's painted like a real-life version of Francis Urquhart. It's an immensely stylish swoop through Italian politics and corruption and general hideousness with fantastically opulent trappings and a convoluted plot. It got next to no publicity here in the UK but all the Italians I knew were raving about it (and thankfully we have enough indie cinemas here that you can guarantee that most of these films will receive some sort of showing, at least in London). The same director has done at least two other films with the same lead actor, Tony Servillo, all character studies and, by and large, examining completely different themes and all, IMHO, enthralling viewing.
Also IHMO (and yes, I'm trying to be objective about the rose-tinted specs effect), Hollywood's last "golden period" was something like 1998 to 2005 where a lot of movies with interesting ideas or themes, or even just old ones but with a radical new style, came out and a large chunk of it's output since then has been distinctly boring. Thankfully, as Hollywood history has shown, this is usually a cyclical thing and after the current swathe of identikit superheroes and invading CGI monsters collapse under their own weight we'll hopefully see interesting ideas brought to the fore again.
Slashdot Mirror
Republicans: I say your Affordable Healthcare policy goes too far!
Democrats: And I say your Affordable Healthcare policy doesn't go too far enough!
There's be an Oblig. link to youtube if I could find one. And, not being a USian, I'm not sure if I've got the parties the right way around in my paraphrasing.
u38cg already mentioned that prostitution is legal in the UK (although many ancillary activities commonly related to prostitution are not), but for the most part you can just go to the wiki page for Prostitution_in_$country:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Canada - legal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_United_Kingdom - legal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Ireland - legal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Australia - varies by state but legal in the most populous (NSW and Victoria)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_New_Zealand - legal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_South_Africa - illegal
If it's anything like the articulated bogies they're introducing on the tube/London Underground, there'll be even less seats. The Metropolitan line - one of the lines that extends out the furthest into the commuter belt - used to run the venerable A Stock which had 448 seats per train, but they've been replaced with the S8 stock which have only 306 seats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_S7_and_S8_Stock
But great news for people who like to stand for an hour on their morning commute into the City.
Obligatory Penny Arcade.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/28
I believe the proper conduct in British journalism is to refer the aggressor to Arkell v. Pressdram;
"We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off"
Similar experience here; I've always previously been at MS/outlook/exchange shops, so it was a shock to arrive at a new job (at a ye olde established firm) and seeing everyone use Notes. Email, depending on the business unit, was either long since migrated to exchange, or in the process of migrating to exchange (so I've never had to deal with it for it's much-derided mail functionality, although I think outlook is a bag of crap in this regard as well), yet there are still a shitload of bespoke applications we still use in Notes and precious little in the way of a migration path precisely because Notes was the only game in town to begin with.
And to be honest, as clunky as it can be at times, the groupware stuff in Notes works pretty flawlessly for me and my colleagues. Reasonably good version control, snappy performance (don't think we're using any of that java gunk), lots of cool functionality in the native widgets (far ahead of anything you could achieve in every wiki I've used) and - most importantly for the firefighting part of my job - the ability for everyone in my team to easily keep a searchable, offline copy of the documentation database.
Like I said, there seems to be little in the way of groupware clients/servers that can do this nowadays, and there's a depressing amount of project managers who seem to think it's a piece of piss to replicate the same behaviour in despairpoint or mediawiki... and our backups and source repos are filled with the carcasses of those projects that tried and failed.
You've been modded funny, but it's more +1 Insightful, -2 Depressing.
I've had several calls from my bank that basically go like this:
GB: "Hello, I'm calling from Generic Bank regarding your account, in order to verify your identity as the account holder can I ask you to confirm your name, date of birth and account number please?"
MN: "Sure"
GB: "..."
MN: "Well are you going to tell me?"
GB: "Sorry sir, you need to tell me that information"
MN: "And how do I know you're not a scammer?"
GB: "Because I'm calling from Generic Bank"
MN: "I'm not going to give any information to an unsolicited caller asking me for my bank details. Are you going to tell me what this call is about?"
GB: "I'm afraid I can only do that with the verified account holder"
MN: "And who is that?"
GB: "I'm afraid I can't tell you until you tell me, but I can assure you I am calling from Generic Bank"
MN: "And I can assure you I didn't take a shit in your cornflakes but that doesn't necessarily make it true, does it?"
*click*
Yes, these calls really were from the bank because every time this happens I walk into a branch and ask a) why I was called and b) why they still haven't fixed this utterly moronic behaviour. Don't even get me started on the almost complete and utter lack of two-factor auth for online banking as well as the utterly ridiculous password requirements. About 5 years back my bank said I could have a current account with an RSA key... the catch was it had to have at least £50,000 in it. I think it's only within the last year or so they've brought in two-factor auth for us mere peons, and yet you're apparently still able to reset your account with "security questions". When I tried to set answers that were purposefully incorrect (e.g. for "memorable place" you might choose to give "Marvin's turgid bowling average") I was told I wasn't allowed to do that so I cancelled the whole process. Asinine.
I haven't given the name of my bank, because they all seem equally shitty in this regard.
They're the Muslims that British people cultivate for food so as not to get scurvy.
Are you kidding?! Natural disasters and (inter)national tragedies are the PERFECT time for adverts - think of all the people who'll be frantically searching for relatives, or will be crippled and needing a new medical plan, or need temporary accommodation, or need to find a pharmacy and a gun shop in close proximity in a hurry... it's our duty, nay, our DESTINY to ensure our consumers are made aware of all the fine products our sponsors can provide for them for a very reasonable fee in times of crisis. If anything, we'll need to dedicate more page real estate to adverts during crises so that we can ensure the citizenry can demonetise effectively and thus not risk further damage to the economy. Our case studies show that during events like 9/11, click-through rates increased from 0.2% to 0.93%, indicating that people want more adverts during times of trial by a factor of at least 800 millicapitalisations.
This turning off adverts (a concept that in itself any right-minded consumer would consider a ludicrous proposition) during a time of chaos would not only be fiscally irresponsible, but also allows people to have a shared experience in consuming the grieving process.
I don't really see what the problem with that is - all it'll mean is that everything you learn from copying something will mean we need a system in place to automatically make royalty payments to the people you copied it from. All you need do is when you create a New Work, Learning Concept (TM) or Factoid Slam (TM) is register it with the Education Attribution Corporation and we'll leverage our multi-source bottom-line scoping architect to provide our top-down talent-nurturing stakeholders with enough pre-prepared interdependencies to fully institutionalise and monetise high-quality, consumer-empowering selective knowledge transfers, entailing growing a streamlined, leading and financially re-aligned investor confidence paradigm.
Of course, since nothing is created in a vacuum, as prime stakeholder of over 83% of all Amelioration Reimbursement Diversification Cogitators, the Education Attribution Corporation will take a 60% cut of all provided input. Those found to be illegally harbouring unlicensed intellectual property of Education Attribution Corporation will be temporarily granted access to neurosurgical frontal cortex reassignment therapy so as to ensure no unjust exploitation of unfettered unrecompensed proficiency.
This post brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Just to chime in with a "me, too!" but The Day After is very much a Hollywood version of nuclear war. Threads (and to a lesser extent 1965's The War Game which inspired the structure of the film but was banned from being broadcast) is essentially some of the most harrowing TV you can put yourself through. If you like your post-apocalyptic stuff then despite its pitifully small budget Threads is hard to beat; just don't expect to feel too chipper afterwards.
It's might not be well known outside of the UK, but part of what made Threads so chilling was the fact that the documentary-style delivery was done partly with excerpts from Protect and Survive, a real PI film, just to show how ineffective and futile the advice being given out by the government would really be. I think the nearest US equivalent is Duck and Cover.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/Threads
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_and_survive
These days, almost every time a story is posted along the lines of "Linux says X" it's frequently framed in such a way as to paint Linus as a frothing madman hurling not just insults but entire furniture factories at his cringing subordinates. It's become such a regular occurence that I half expect them to be followed up with a story on how Steve Ballmer has converted to buddhism and will be using the armpit sweat from his meditations to irrigate the sahara.
Reading the article, of course, usually reveals a different picture, but that gets in the way of attention-grabbing headlines. I'm not really sure how the following post can be construed as "fury"; irritation, indignation, perhaps, but not fury.
Where do I start a petition to raise the IQ and kernel knowledge of people? Guys, go read drivers/char/random.c. Then, learn about cryptography. Finally, come back here and admit to the world that you were wrong. Short answer: we actually know what we are doing. You don't. Long answer: we use rdrand as _one_ of many inputs into the random pool, and we use it as a way to _improve_ that random pool. So even if rdrand were to be back-doored by the NSA, our use of rdrand actually improves the quality of the random numbers you get from /dev/random. Really short answer: you're ignorant.
As far as I can tell, no-one's found any evidence for rdrand being backdoored, and even if it were, there's bigger issues at foot with things like microcode. Linus explains how the kernel implementation uses random data from several different sources to guard against this kind of stuff. Plus, as other people have pointed out, you can disable rdrand with a kernel parameter. Linus is primarily a pragmatist, so it doesn't really make much sense to excise the code from the kernel - throwing out the baby with the bathwater if you will. Surely if there were any hardware to worry about, it'd be the hardware providing AES-NI? Why isn't there a petition to have that removed...?
From wikipedia:
Daily Mail Island, a reality TV show where several normal people are deposited on an island and not allowed access to any media other than the strongly right-wing and conservative Daily Mail newspaper, leading to them becoming progressively more irrational and brutal as the series progresses - for example, tying teenage lovers together with sacks on their heads and beating them, or sealing a teenager caught masturbating into a coffin filled with broken glass and dog faeces and throwing it over a cliff and their language devolving into rhetorical questions and sarcastic snorts.
As with all the best satire, it's hilariously difficult to distinguish it from reality. Sadly (and I say this as a resident), Daily Mail Island feels like it's becoming synonymous with the United Kingdom.
Suborbital Spaceflight Picks Up Speed
...then it'd be orbital spaceflight.
suborbital spaceflight is heating up
...and now it's crashing back down through the atmosphere.
Sheesh, this is elementary physics, make your mind up editors!
What I can take away from this statement by PJ is that the powers that be already have their hands on the servers either by hook or by crook and although groklaw may be able to set up tor or any number of any other number of secure workarounds, the entire site is compromised at source, therefore making any further measures moot.
If I were PJ and the feds or whomever came down on me with a gagging order, a reaction and a message like this would be the only possibly-legal way of informing the users, although I wouldn't be surprised if repercussions weren't coming. Shifting the site outside of US jurisdiction, warning members or modifying access protocols to get around wiretapping would be directly against the terms of the gag order.
Now I'll go swap my tinfoil hat for a lead one.
Related aside: back when speed limits were introduced in the UK, the AA (Automobile Association) got in trouble for obstructing the police by using their scouts to warn drivers of speed checks in the area. So they introduced the slogan "If an AA patrol fails to salute you, please stop and ask why".
I'm at work so I can't see the video yet, but it sounds like it bears a resemblance to Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares which posits the idea that a great deal of the western world, without any Big Bad to fight against, has increasingly overblown things like terrorists in order to facilitate the transition to a more repressive society, a process which merely accelerated after the attacks on the world trade centre. That is to say, it's not just America that's potentially in decline. Recommended viewing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares
It's occasionally visible on YouTube but can be downloaded in its entirety from archive.org (uploaded by Curtis himself I believe). Sadly you can't buy it because the way Curtis makes his documentaries out of lots of scraps of archive footage basically makes licensing impossible.
http://archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares-Episode1BabyItsColdOutside
Those of you who find these interesting might also want to see his other works in the same vein, most notably:
The Trap centring on the modern idea (and subsequent manipulation) of the concept of freedom
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace basically about the 2008 financial meltdown but approached from the angle of people putting too much confidence in artificial models of organic systems.
Dupe! ...and the knock-on.
I'm beginning to wonder if GoDaddy's web server policy follows the solar cycle... :)
From the look of Netcraft's graph, prior to the GoDaddy move it looked like most of the marketshare lost from apache went straight into nginx (itself also frequently used as a caching proxy/frontend to another web server on the backend) so I'm not quite sure what the summary/TFA are trying to imply.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/04/02/april-2013-web-server-survey.html
Normally when I'm in Richmond, I'm off my face and can't find my wallet
Richmond Upon Thames is where Paypal and eBay's UK head office are.
Mod AC redundant, I think they're confused. Dupple is clearly the UK president of PayPal and eBay :)
I was about to reply with a post about "...but here in the EU (unlike the US IIRC), PayPal *is* classified as a bank and therefore has to comply with much stricter legistlation than they appear to have to do in the US".
But in looking for a citation I found these:
http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?391236-Paypal-freezing-closing-accounts
http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?235225-Paypal-claim-and-the-small-claims-court...
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=2198081&page=1
Glad to see my initial "PayPal are an utter shower of bastards" estimation all those years ago still seems to be true.
Not sure where the derogatory tone is coming from, but this isn't a patent troll - they do actually have a patent on something that's useful and ubiquitous.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/06/01/2258221/csiro-sues-us-carriers-over-wi-fi-patent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO#802.11_patent
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/10/csiro_patent_trolls_wifi/
As someone said in the last slashdot thread, all patent trolls may ask for money for patents they hold, but not all patent holders are patent trolls. As with many,many previous articles on this, it somehow seems to be framed in a "US versus them" argument to help fan the flames of jingoistic controversy.
Given the headlines and summaries this morning I think samzenpus is coming down off a three-day bender.
Can't comment on the rest of the commonwealth, but aside from ER here in the UK we had Florence Nightingale on a tenner throughout my childhood.
Fun geeky factoid: the lady with the lamp was so successful with her hospital reform because she was immensely good at presenting statistics visually and was able to demonstrate how a little extra spent on better preventative medicine and sanitation would save much more money in the long term, both in terms of military hospitals and sanitation in general.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_nightingale
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/people-without-tattoos-labelled-freaks-and-attention-seekers-2013060771240
Completely agree, korea's been consistently turning out brilliant films for about ten years now (probably longer, but Oldboy was when I started paying attention). All of Chan Wook Park's "vengeance" films are fantastic. Japanese horror's always been on my radar ever since the Ring films, as you state they're some of the masters at making a lot with very little. John Woo returned to china and made the incredible Red Cliff, Takashi Miike's been making some great samurai movies. Don't know if you've watched anything by the late, great Satoshi Kon but he made some truly mind-bending anime; Aaronofsky borrowed heavily from Perfect Blue for Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan and I can only describe Paprika as what an evil version of Inception might look like. Yup. Lots of brilliant stuff coming out of the orient.
Never saw any of "The Girl With..." films because I found the books (well, the first hundred or so pages of the first one anyway) so execrable.
Of course there's an export filter in place, typically we'll only hear about the good foreign cinema in english speaking countries (and by the same token get flooded with all manner of dross in english), but it still means there's a glut of film out there to be discovered. Great cinema all over the place, just precious little coming from Hollywood at the moment.
Sad to hear that the fear of subs is still apparently prevalent, although continental europe (well, germany, italy and france at any rate) still seem to like to dub things at the drop of a hat.
P.S. an american who uses the handle "gobshite" and the term "yank"? Are you sure you're not secretly british/irish? :)
Sadly I'll have to agree with jebediah, I had Iron Sky on pre-order, it was a one-night-only at the flicks and I missed it, it started brilliantly but I felt it faltered halfway through and collapsed by about two-thirds of the way through. In my opinion, Galaxy Quest is still the pinnacle of silly sci-fi; it's a deconstruction/parody, but never insults its viewers and skilfully reconstructs its own concept to remind us why it's fun in the first place.
Reciprocating, if you fancy trying out the very antithesis of silly sci-fi movies you could do a lot worse than tracking down the famous-but-still-under-appreciated Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, another movie to appear from one of Hollywood's golden eras. A tragicomedy, nothing but adults talking, but one of the most heartbreaking stories delivered by some of the finest acting I've ever seen. Radically different (then and now) from anything Hollywood's done for decades, but still shows how great (and socially challenging) Hollywood can be when they choose to.
It's a big part of the problem.
I think one of the key differentiators here is the amount of starting capital. Movies outside of the Hollywood machine might have the budgets for at least a certain level of special effects but because they don't have the marketing budget to ever think about attaining blockbuster status, there's no incentive to have to rake back in hojillions of profits because that money was never spent in the first place. As such, there's no desire to pander to every single market and thus less of a chance that your movies comes out as blandly homogenised-by-committee crap. Take Looper, or Prometheus for example. Set themselves up to say something brilliant and profoud about their retrospective environments, and then didn't.
Honestly, I don't really care that much about the plot re-use; there are only so many plots and so many ways you can fit them into 2hrs, but so many big-budget movies recently seem to have actually forgotten how to deliver them with style (or indeed at all in many cases). The effects all look the same, the characters are all the same.
Eurotrash pontificating here, but this is why I've ended up like euro-centric cinema the most these days. There's a fair few attempts at effects-laden hokum but most of the stuff tends to revolve around some sort of a character study in $period_setting. Cheap to film but requires good acting/directing and a solid script. My favourite example of these came as a recommendation from a friend to see Il Divo, examining Giulio Andreotti, an Italian politician with incredible staying power. I know, I'd never heard of him either, but he's painted like a real-life version of Francis Urquhart. It's an immensely stylish swoop through Italian politics and corruption and general hideousness with fantastically opulent trappings and a convoluted plot. It got next to no publicity here in the UK but all the Italians I knew were raving about it (and thankfully we have enough indie cinemas here that you can guarantee that most of these films will receive some sort of showing, at least in London). The same director has done at least two other films with the same lead actor, Tony Servillo, all character studies and, by and large, examining completely different themes and all, IMHO, enthralling viewing.
Also IHMO (and yes, I'm trying to be objective about the rose-tinted specs effect), Hollywood's last "golden period" was something like 1998 to 2005 where a lot of movies with interesting ideas or themes, or even just old ones but with a radical new style, came out and a large chunk of it's output since then has been distinctly boring. Thankfully, as Hollywood history has shown, this is usually a cyclical thing and after the current swathe of identikit superheroes and invading CGI monsters collapse under their own weight we'll hopefully see interesting ideas brought to the fore again.
£0.02