They just need to cast a more narrow net - Target those who, for whatever reason (old? stupid? Researchers studying the behavior of bottom-feeders in a shrinking ecosystem?) don't block ads - And leave the rest of us the hell alone.
Some of us don't worry about ad blocking because we don't use sites that have annoying amounts of adverts (I subscribe to slashdot so don't see any here). If I do browse to a site with an annoying amount of adverts I generally just avoid using it and try and go somewhere else. Sometimes they can't be avoided like on articles linked to on slashdot but to be honest I have started remembering sites I don't want to read content from due to ads and just skip the whole story.
I think I might use an ad-blocker if I still used torrent sites as they seemed to be the worst candidates for adverts from what I remember. (Ok, I am thinking of the pirate bay which is blocked in my part the world now anyway). I also used to use something to block flash on my old laptop as many websites would kill the CPU with a few flash files. That was because it had a crap CPU though.
Google, an advertising/marketing company, puts out an OS for phones and tablets and gives it away for free and then allows users access to a repository system where free apps and games are often supplied... for free.
I'd say it was implied.
That said? I do not feel obligated to donate my bandwidth for free. I run AdFree which is a hosts file modifier. It's fairly effective.
I'll just have to get updates from non-market sources.
I had assumed this was about ad-blockers that blocked in application adverts. In that case you HAVE agreed (at least in principle) to seeing adverts based on the fact that you chose to install a piece of advert supported software on your device.
Personally I see very few adverts on my phone, as I only use software that lets by chose between and advert supported "free" version and a paid for version. I use the ad-supported for a few minutes to see if it does what I want, if it does I purchase install the paid one. I do this because as a software developer I strongly believe in supporting other software developers for their efforts.
I actually think that if ad blockers are interfering with other installed software, depriving the user who created it of revenue, then that is wrong and should be stopped.Of course if that is not what these ad blockers were doing then maybe google has overstepped the mark, but it does seem obvious functionality to build in to an ad blocker for a phone, even if it is slightly immoral.
The damage being done by the Obama Administration (*accelerating* overspending, withdrawal from leading global alliances, and refusal to take a moral stance and promote Enlightenment Freedoms around the World [Obama's shameful actions in 2009 at the time of the Green Revolution and his ouster of Mubarak to promote the anti-liberty Muslim Brotherhood will mark him in history as an even worse president than Jimmy Carter - even if his supporters are so smitten they can't see it yet; you have to judge the action by the consequences, not by the ideals that made you do it]).
I have no idea what you are talking about here. Mubarak was ousted by the people of Egypt taking to the streets and protesting against him en-mass. He had precious little public support and was going to lose the next election anyway (actually, he said himself he was not even going to bother standing for election).
While it is inconvenient for the US to lose Egypt as a loyal ally there was precious little Obama could do about it without trying to subvert the will of the Egyptian people and install a dictatorship. If a country chooses leaders we in the west do not support, we have to respect that decision.
What the US needs is strong leadership.
Personally I do not think I need defending from China or anyone else by the US. I have never met anyone outside america who does. We in the rest of the world do not get any say in the US leadership, so they should stay the hell out of our business.
The world doesn't need weak "beta-male" Obama apologizing to tyrants for the liberties the US has (as he shamefully did in Cairo), it doesn't need a thoroughly incompetent Secretary of State (Hilliary, whose chief assistant is tied to the Muslim Brotherhood - the same organization whose ultimate goal is to overthrow the US and the West) followed by another weak beta-male one. It is clear the US doesn't believe in itself anymore, so why should anyone else? The US should be standing up in the World saying it believes in the liberties in its Constitution, and not apologizing for its citizens when they exercise those rights (the "Innocence of Muslims" was mostly factually correct, may have been offensive to Muslims, but the author should have been protected under the Constitution - instead he was hounded by his own Government for exercising his Constitutional right). Yes, this sounds like a rant. Actually it is not, it just happens to be the facts as seen from outside the Matrix. If one can disprove these apparent facts with counter-evidence then I'm all ears.
I don't really know very much about Hilary Clinton being tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, but it sounds like the ravings of a paranoid lunatic and you did not actually post anything backing this up. If you want counter-evidence then try posing some evidence of your own first.
As to the innocence of muslims guy, I think you may have a point. To be honest though I do not really care since I am not a US citizen and consider it an internal issue. I don't really have any great desire to watch it, any more than I want to learn to sing the Koran in Arabic. I was far more disturbed by the death threats against Salmon Rushdie many years ago since that obviously had artistic merit rather than just some crap film designed to promote hatred.
Please note I'm not from the US.
Are you Israeli? It's just a random guess but I notice from another post you made you are worried about Sharia Law in Europe. I always find the idea of that preposterous since we have far to long and established traditions of drinking alcohol as part of our culture. There is about a 0% chance of us all becoming teetotal, especially here in the UK where I come from.
The only people in Europe who carp on about things like Sharia Law are morons like Geert Wilders who are just making it all up in order to try and get elected.
Note that Obama's cuts are not really about saving money money. After all, he'd save vastly more by limiting entitlements and social programmes (the unfunded liabilities being promised completely dwarf even the current US deficit). The cuts also are not because the nukes aren't needed, they are needed for decades to come and for unseen threats in the next 50 years. The cuts are all purely ideologically based on Obama's (flawed) world view. Sadly, his supporters don't want to face the truth about his intentions to remake America by first breaking it by overspending and weakening its traditional strengths. Obama wants to unilaterally disarm and surrender the US to the world. He's already abandoned many allies. The world is about to get very chaotic as a result of a lack of strong leadership from secular democracies lead by the US.
Lol, you sir are clearly on crack. He is not actually that different to Bush was when you look at his actions.
In four years time he will be out of office and the US will be no different. You will still be spending more on your military than any other country in the world. You will still be allied with Europe. Israel will still be around, and the US will still be giving them just as much aid (http://journalistsresource.org/studies/international/conflicts/u-s-foreign-aid-to-israel-2012-congressional-report). The US will still have troops all over the world acting as policemen.
The only difference seems to be that he wants rich people to contribute slightly more in taxes to pay for this instead of taking the shortfall from schemes like Medicare designed to help poor people. As to whether this is a good idea or not is a different matter, but either way it will make precious little difference to anyone not in either extreme.
The biggest threat to the US is actually if the US economy tanks due to tax rises hitting the middle class and taking a huge dent out of consumer spending. The problem is that some people seem to think this would be a good idea to scare the country into voting republican. They think things like this as the very rich do not suffer as much in recessions as the middle class and the poor do.
China will take at least 10 years, maybe longer to build up a large enough military to be a serious challenge to the US. They are just too far behind at present with their one piddly aircraft carrier they bought from Russia anyway.
"In space" doesn't mean "hard vacuum." The low mass (so they can carry enough of them) combined with the large surface area (to mimic a large object) will make them decelerate rapidly enough that they won't confuse anyone for very long. Then remember that the real ICBM has been tracked from very close to the surface, so if one missile suddenly turns into 99 missiles slowing down very quickly and 1 that keeps the same trajectory, you can be pretty confident you know which one is real and which is chaff. Then you'll see one missile descending into the atmosphere and 99 that aren't, the jig will be up.
Sorry, but if you look at the numbers this simply is not right, even with mylar baloons. When missiles hit atmosphere on re-entry they decelerate so hard they regularly pull almost 50g (That is from a very old missile here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM-19_Jupiter). That means that while the balloons would definitely decelerate, they would not decelerate that quickly in comparison to a flight time that is only a few minutes after the missile separates.
Also, it is worth remembering that detecting the warhead itself is no peace of cake by that time it is descending under gravity, it used its propellant up long before it hit the apogee of its flight.
Also, the original poster had no real reason to make the decoys light since a half decent missile can launch far more weight than is taken up by a single warhead. You might want to read some of the following wikipedia pages on modern nuclear missiles to realise that most of them already have the features the poster suggests.
The simple reality is than any sort of nuclear missile defense against a country like the US, Russia or China is utterly non-existant. The only thing you can hope is to pick off the odd one if launched by terrorists capturing a silo. A hostile nuclear super power can just blanket you in so many missiles your only option is to annihilate them at the same time and hope the ability to do that is a deterrent.
>The one where the democratically elected Afghani government
Since when are coup d'etats "democratically-elected"? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saur_Revolution)
You are an idiot. The coup took place after the former prime minister of Afghanistan (Daoud Khan) moved to increase ties with the West, and to distance itself from the USSR. It was the commie stooges that overthrew the government that called for help from Moscow, not some democratically-elected nonsense. And did so after their disastrous policies alienated the entire country. The US poured aid money into the opponents after the communist coup.
>Yeah, US funding/training for those great up-and-coming Anti-Communist Freedom Fighters like Osama Bin Laden
Osama wasn't funded or trained by the US. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_%E2%80%93_al-Qaeda_controversy)
You, sir, are a dancing fucking moron.
Of course Daoud Khan was not actually a democratically elected president though was he? That was just the title he chose for himself after deposing his cousin in a bloodless coup. He was just as bad though it terms of promoting his friends and family into positions of power and he certainly did not want to share any power with the common people.
The communists who then shot and overthrew him were at least made up of commoners rather than royalty who felt they were entitled to rule from birth. If he was democratically elected maybe they would not have done this and would have taken power more peacefully instead.
Russia did not want another Muslim nut job country on its southern borders. When Russia was booted out of Afghanistan by the Taliban (with covert US assistance) the first thing Russia did was quietly try and ask NATO for help in preventing the Taliban from completely seizing power. The US refused since they thought they could control the people they had been arming for years, they failed and years later the US had to depose the very people it helped put in.
The problem with much of the US's foreign policy in the 60's and 70's was that it would support anyone fighting communism, even if they were a utter shitbag rulers with very little popular support or religious fundamentalists who wanted to see all non believers killed. Sometimes the doctrine that your enemies enemy is your friend does not apply.
That is not to say Russia is or was any better though, just look at Syria to see that. Let's not put anyone on pedestals here, none of them (or often us) stand up to any scrutiny.
I think we should send some of what we have now on a one-way trip to North Korea. That would make everyone happy. For the liberals we would have actually reduced the number left. For the conservatives we would have used them as intended and made the U.S. much safer by demonstrating that they can be used and are not just an empty threat.
The only slight problem with this is that China might get a little antsy about the US dropping nukes right next door to them being that some of the fallout would go their way. Also, our ally South Korea would probably be a little annoyed too for the same reason.
Is it proper actual threading support? the closest I've seen to date in PHP have been based on hacks using curls.
Probably not. It was just a plus point I remember from evaluating it was the ability to kick things off from the web application then let them continue in the background and track their progress somehow.
Whether it is true threading was not really that relevant to me, if it does something I don't really care how providing it just works.
As it was there were not enough plus points to justify the cost.
I think you seriously understate what's wrong with PHP. Beside all the things that is mentioned in that article, I love how you suggest several php frameworks that attempt to be like Rails but all built on such a flawed language.
And Rails is not hard to deploy any more... that argument is several years out of date.
Rails is great, providing you are willing to do everything exactly the way you are supposed to according to best practice. The problem is that some times in the real work you have to do things wrong (either to meet a deadline or just because you are stuck interfacing with a shit legacy system that nobody will pay to rewrite) and then Rails just refuses to play ball.
Short cuts are a part of commercial development unfortunately, that is why so much commercial stuff is written in PHP.
I always compare Rails to Pascal: A great language for learning best practice but lack the flexibilty that comes with languages like PHP or C in comparison to Pascal.
Because sometimes web sites are used to trigger some form of processing behind the scenes that you don't want the user to have to sit and wait for and that might otherwise result in a time out anyway?
You can do this if you cough up and buy Zend Server. Zend keep this as a paid for add on it seems
And last, but not least, the majority of the population does not support copyright law. That is clear when you see how many people think it is ok to share songs, for example. I don't know anyone that it shouldn't be allowed, for example, or who haven't done that since the time of K7 tapes.
Are you sure? Try asking your parents, or some of their friends.
I know plenty of people who believe in copyright law. As you get older you probably will too. The simple fact is that if you ask most people in the 30-80 age group then they come out much more conservative than people in the 18-30 age group and there are far more of them.
All your equivocated ideas stem for your belief that you live in a democracy, which is just an illusion.
I used to think like that when I was young and all the old people voting meant my beliefs were drowned out. Nowadays I think things are not so simple. We definitely have elections every once in a while, and we can all definitely vote in them. We might often have some shitty choices but it is still democracy of a kind.
Also, it is worth noting that even in countries where the have proportional representation (a much fairer system in my opinion as it allows votes for smaller parties to still carry some weight) the pirate party is still a tiny minority compared to the others.
The simple fact that young people have to deal with is that most old people are scared shitless about the change that getting rid of copyright law would ensue and whether it would damage our economy even if it would not affect them directly. Even if us oldies do not agree with every element of law we often do not want them changed as we have spent more time adjusting ourselves to the status quo.
But most of this you will probably only understand in 10 or 20 years. Until then, try and ask more old people (parents, lecturers, teachers, etc) about copyright law and see where they stand. You might be surprised.
"The things is though, we all know he intended to violate copyright by distributing what he had downloaded to other people who did not have access to it. that was the point of what he was doing."
So what? (1) Keep in mind that an intent is not a commission. Unless you want to get into the area of thought crime. And (2) copyright violation of the sort he may have intended is still not a felony.
As far as THIS prosecution was concerned, what he intended by violating the TOS still doesn't make it a crime.
Well there must have been some reason that there was a reasonably likelihood of conviction or Aaron's lawyer would have told him not to worry about it. I am certainly not a lawyer (or even US resident) so I have no idea, although here in the UK if the police stop you in the process of committing a crime but it is obvious you were going to commit it if not stopped (to the jury) then you can still be found guilty.
One example of this is shoplifting, you can be stopped by plain clothes store detectives as soon as you put something in your pocket if it would be obvious you were not going to pay. Usually they will actually let you walk out of the store first as that makes conviction easier but legally they do not have to.
On another note though if he was innocent, then maybe his committing suicide had nothing to do with his prosecution. I am assuming he had a lawyer of some kind who was able to tell him if what he did was illegal or not better than you or I in which case by your logic his lawyer would have told him this was a bullshit case and a jury would never convict and ultimately they would drop the charges or he would be found not guilty. If his lawyer was not telling him this then maybe his lawyer should be in the dock instead.
They could simply ignore your appeal, which you would then win by default.
They could simply make a new claim, costing you another $35 dollars, Rinse, wash, repeat until you no longer have money.
Anyone worth bothering with in society can pay $35 dollar fee's until the cows come home.
In the time it would take for your appeal to be processed you will have earned at least $35 unless you are borderline bankrupt anyway. You need to earn at least $35 per day in this society and it will take longer than that for them to process your email.
egalize (or at least make non-actionable) otherwise infringing activity by natural persons if noncommercial in nature. Then much of what they're upset about would not be illegal (at least not meaningfully so).
So you need to convince a majority of the US population that this is something that needs to be done. Unfortunately that is never going to happen because in my experience, most of the people who advocate the change you mention are kids, young teenagers or uni students. Eventually most of them grow up and change their minds deciding that copyright law is great once they actually have something to sell behind them and have enough of their own money to buy any media they want to consume.
I am a firm believer that if had a referendum on changing copyright law tomorrow most people would come out on the side of making it stronger, not weaker. This is despite my own feeling that many aspects of copyright law should be made weaker or abolished completely.
No, someone committed suicide because society had no place for them. What he was doing may have had value to him, but society as a whole has, through its legal system, has made it so even in cases where there is no financial or physical harm to others, said that what he was doing had no value. Since what he was doing was at the core of who he was (obviously, since it drove him to kill himself when he was deprived of it), it is more accurate to say society had no place for him. Whether that's moral, or ethical, right, or wrong, I leave to you. But that is why he died.
You make it sound as if the legal system represents society's will, which is obviously not the true (and never was). Society had a place for him, but those who rule did not, and despite any illusions you may have of living in a democracy, rest assured those who rule are not the people.
Are you sure about that?
I reckon there is a very good chance he good have opted for a jury trial and been found guilty. His lawyer will probably have warned him this was a distinct possibility too. That is not to say it was a certainty he would be found guilty, but there have been less likely things happen in courts of law with regard to juries.
The reality is that a majority of the population seem to support law of copyright and think that people like him who advocate breaking laws they do not agree with (read his manifesto to see that he does just this: http://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto) actually do deserve to be punished for it, especially if they are caught trying to break those laws themselves. He might have been caught very early in the process, but a prosecutor friendly jury may well have found him guilty anyway based on his stated intent.
The best place to start looking to change copyright law in the manner Aaron desired is by trying to convince the public that the law needs to change.
If his lawyer had advised him it was a joke prosecution and he was never going to be found guilty then he probably would still be alive (assuming his suicide was anything to do with his legal problems).
He had authorization to download files from the source in question, though the TOS said he was not authorized to do it automatically. He wasn't "stealing" anything, or even violating copyright.
The things is though, we all know he intended to violate copyright by distributing what he had downloaded to other people who did not have access to it. that was the point of what he was doing.
Now tell me you don't honestly believe that he had every intention of violating copyright law.
Whether you believe in what he was doing is one thing (I actually kind of do), but lets not bullshit about his intentions: He had no respect for a bullshit state of affairs that is enshrined in law and he had every intention of breaking the law to bypass it.
That's why IMHO industry trainings and certifications are bullshit. Industry courses usually cost a lot, deliver few information not published somewhere obvious and are so condensed that they allow not time for reflection.
Some times the condensed nature though is exactly what is needed.
A friend of mine worked for a company that adopted the Zend Framework for their core product. They needed an entire dev team of 10 or 20 people to be up to speed and writing solid code in a few weeks so they brought trainers in and brought the entire team up to speed and paid for them all to do certification. This let them advertise the fact that all their developers were Zend certified, but more importantly it meant that inside a month the company was back to extending their core product and hence back to earning revenue from selling the new features to clients.
I spent the best part of six months learning Zend on the job. In that time I made some mistakes which ultimately resulted in code I had to go back to and change. Also, the first project I did overran considerably. I was often unable to say how much longer the project would take because I was trying to learn something I previously knew very little about and did not know how much work remained.
Sometimes investing in certification and training pays off, especially when you want to leverage new technology to enhance the services your company provides quickly to keep ahead of your competitors.
The attitude is that if you complain about no training you're basically saying you don't know what you're doing.
Sounds like a shit place to work, maybe you should jump ship and find a better employer.
If you are a half decent techy of any kind and have a few years experience under your belt then your skills are in demand (certainly in the UK where I live) and you can probably earn the same salary or more else where and also get some form of training from a company that believes in investing in it's own staff.
The technology industry moves pretty quickly and if you do not have some form of budget for keeping your staff's skills up to date then the services you provide will ultimately fall behind your competitors.
Installing software using the GUI is still a little broken though as if you search for stuff it tries to reissue your search every time you type a character. That gets annoying if you type 3 or 4 chars, then change your mind and hit backspace 4 times, then type another 5 or so you have locked your machine up until it does 15 searches of the application repositories you have installed, some of which return a lot of results (ie, the ones where 0,1 or 2 chars were in the search box).
In an ideal world, we would be able to eliminate CO2 from our atmosphere completely. And ultimately, if we as a species are going to survive, we need to do that. But in the here and now, we have to do the best we can. And cars produce way more of that poison than anyone on a bicycle. The Congressman is just an ignorant jackass who has no understanding of how our biosphere works.
A good start to limiting CO2 production would be by killing off this particular congressman.
Most rational people rate things like CO2 based on the amount given off per mile travelled, I'd be willing to bet that cycling gives off far less CO2 per mile than driving a car with no other occupants apart from the driver.
Of course, there are plenty of ways to make car travel more efficient such as car sharing and tons of other things I can't be bothered to list but if you are only talking about 1 person getting themselves to work then bike is better than car in terms of CO2.
Also, the energy used in cycling is basically food, which grows quickly even if you consume it in cow or sheep form. Oil on the other hand takes slightly longer to "grow" so keeps carbon locked up under ground for longer during the process of it forming.
There are plenty of times you cannot cycle and car or van becomes the only option, such as when carrying lots of people or luggage so it not an option in many cases. When it is possible and practical though it is certainly more efficient.
If it's a rubble type, then a nuke would work to displace enough mass to move it. Seems like this is a one-size-fits-all solution. One solution for the iron-type and one for the rubble piles. The optimal solution for each may not match. Then the question becomes at what range we can distinguish. That, and the one I heard about casting a net over the whole thing and towing it with a long cable.
The problem is that your nuke would fire bits off in every direction and that would balance out.
What you really want is to only fire an exactly calculated mass of bits off the asteroid in one, very carefully chosen direction that perfectly puts your asteroid into a fairly harmless new orbit (ie, not likely to hit or pass close by anything in this solar system at least). Also, make each of the the bits you fire off small so that if they hit anything they just burn up.
Another option I just thought off is event better: Just steer the asteroid into Jupiter. Problem solved permanently, no more asteroid, and Jupiter absorbs one more chunk of crap that barely alters is size in relative terms so has no impact on its orbit.
It's a little more complicated than that in practice, but the general idea is sound.
If you a) don't download infringing content in the first place; and b) do not ever share your internet connectivity with anybody else who might, I might suggest that you'd be pretty safe from harassment.
Try not to feed anoymous trolls. This moron is posting about people being arrested for file sharing but this thread is about sites being blocked which has nothing to do with prosecution or being arrested.
Given the choice between:
1) A campaign of over the top prosecutions on parents just because their kids downloaded something illegally because the kids don't agree with the concept of copyright.
2) Trying to play whack-a-mole to block access to sites that specialise in distributing content they have no legal right to as they pick up market share from the last site that was shut down.
I would much rather they carried on with option 2. It is a mere annoyance letting people who want to break the law carry on doing so, it lets the government be seen to be doing something (even though it is ineffective) and far more importantly it does not involve the possibility of prosecuting people and fucking their life over with a fine and criminal record that is with them for the rest of their life.
All the hacktivism in the world won't change that.
And all the whining from the industry in the world won't make copyright enforceable. It's almost as if... they need to find a different business model, and as if... they're the ones responsible for doing so, just like any other business would be.
The problem is that our society is not ready to abandon the concept of copyright. If you asked a selection of people in the street I do not think the majority of the population support abolishing all copyright law.
This leaves us with the dilemma of trying to educate young people as to why to follow a law that to them, makes no sense what so ever without fucking their lives over too badly if they get caught braking it.
Copyright law though does make sense to some people who stand to gain from it and as young people get older and get full time jobs themselves some of them will decide they like copyright law too and change their viewpoint (disclaimer: I already have now I rely on producing copyrighted code to feed my family).
You may even change your own mind about copyright law once you start working 50+ hours every week (including travel time) and have no time to watch more than a movie or two a week anyway and cannot risk the idea that your wage would drop even slightly without the mortgage company foreclosing on the house your kids live in. Maybe you are different (maybe you are old with a family already) but in most cases people become more conservative in their political views as they get older.
FUCK you content producers, I'm going to lobby the government that we should be taxing copyrighted content to subsidise the delivery system that the people have paid for,
I'm a content producer and well... FUCK you, too! It's been shown via many studies that people that share music also buy much more than those that don't share it. Hollywood has made, hand-over-fist, more money each year, even when they have strings of crappy releases. This isn't a war of the content producers, insomuch, vs the public; it's the content copyright HOLDERS waging this war convincing ISPs to serve as the judge and jury to questionable connections between one computer and another. Really, I could be sharing a legal torrent from archive.org with a person that's also torrenting a newly-released Hollywood movie. Both of us are encrypting all inbound and outbound traffic. Guilt by association? I don't know, but I have a feeling that if the EFF was arguing on my behalf, I'd win.
You right about your criticism of the RIAA and the like, but lets remember that these banned sites were just free loading shit bags making money from advertising or donations in return for giving access to content that they have no right to distribute.
It is one thing to think RIAA and MPAA are crap but that doesn't mean that sites like these are any better. They are just freeloading off the original artists that produced the works we all enjoy as well. At least the record companies share 0.001% (a pathetically small amount anyway) or whatever of the revenue of a piece of music with the actual band who produced it, sites like these share sweet FA.
Slashdot Mirror
They just need to cast a more narrow net - Target those who, for whatever reason (old? stupid? Researchers studying the behavior of bottom-feeders in a shrinking ecosystem?) don't block ads - And leave the rest of us the hell alone.
Some of us don't worry about ad blocking because we don't use sites that have annoying amounts of adverts (I subscribe to slashdot so don't see any here). If I do browse to a site with an annoying amount of adverts I generally just avoid using it and try and go somewhere else. Sometimes they can't be avoided like on articles linked to on slashdot but to be honest I have started remembering sites I don't want to read content from due to ads and just skip the whole story.
I think I might use an ad-blocker if I still used torrent sites as they seemed to be the worst candidates for adverts from what I remember. (Ok, I am thinking of the pirate bay which is blocked in my part the world now anyway). I also used to use something to block flash on my old laptop as many websites would kill the CPU with a few flash files. That was because it had a crap CPU though.
Uh... let's just glance at the situation:
Google, an advertising/marketing company, puts out an OS for phones and tablets and gives it away for free and then allows users access to a repository system where free apps and games are often supplied... for free.
I'd say it was implied.
That said? I do not feel obligated to donate my bandwidth for free. I run AdFree which is a hosts file modifier. It's fairly effective.
I'll just have to get updates from non-market sources.
I had assumed this was about ad-blockers that blocked in application adverts. In that case you HAVE agreed (at least in principle) to seeing adverts based on the fact that you chose to install a piece of advert supported software on your device.
Personally I see very few adverts on my phone, as I only use software that lets by chose between and advert supported "free" version and a paid for version. I use the ad-supported for a few minutes to see if it does what I want, if it does I purchase install the paid one. I do this because as a software developer I strongly believe in supporting other software developers for their efforts.
I actually think that if ad blockers are interfering with other installed software, depriving the user who created it of revenue, then that is wrong and should be stopped.Of course if that is not what these ad blockers were doing then maybe google has overstepped the mark, but it does seem obvious functionality to build in to an ad blocker for a phone, even if it is slightly immoral.
The damage being done by the Obama Administration (*accelerating* overspending, withdrawal from leading global alliances, and refusal to take a moral stance and promote Enlightenment Freedoms around the World [Obama's shameful actions in 2009 at the time of the Green Revolution and his ouster of Mubarak to promote the anti-liberty Muslim Brotherhood will mark him in history as an even worse president than Jimmy Carter - even if his supporters are so smitten they can't see it yet; you have to judge the action by the consequences, not by the ideals that made you do it]).
I have no idea what you are talking about here. Mubarak was ousted by the people of Egypt taking to the streets and protesting against him en-mass. He had precious little public support and was going to lose the next election anyway (actually, he said himself he was not even going to bother standing for election).
While it is inconvenient for the US to lose Egypt as a loyal ally there was precious little Obama could do about it without trying to subvert the will of the Egyptian people and install a dictatorship. If a country chooses leaders we in the west do not support, we have to respect that decision.
What the US needs is strong leadership.
Personally I do not think I need defending from China or anyone else by the US. I have never met anyone outside america who does. We in the rest of the world do not get any say in the US leadership, so they should stay the hell out of our business.
The world doesn't need weak "beta-male" Obama apologizing to tyrants for the liberties the US has (as he shamefully did in Cairo), it doesn't need a thoroughly incompetent Secretary of State (Hilliary, whose chief assistant is tied to the Muslim Brotherhood - the same organization whose ultimate goal is to overthrow the US and the West) followed by another weak beta-male one. It is clear the US doesn't believe in itself anymore, so why should anyone else? The US should be standing up in the World saying it believes in the liberties in its Constitution, and not apologizing for its citizens when they exercise those rights (the "Innocence of Muslims" was mostly factually correct, may have been offensive to Muslims, but the author should have been protected under the Constitution - instead he was hounded by his own Government for exercising his Constitutional right). Yes, this sounds like a rant. Actually it is not, it just happens to be the facts as seen from outside the Matrix. If one can disprove these apparent facts with counter-evidence then I'm all ears.
I don't really know very much about Hilary Clinton being tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, but it sounds like the ravings of a paranoid lunatic and you did not actually post anything backing this up. If you want counter-evidence then try posing some evidence of your own first.
As to the innocence of muslims guy, I think you may have a point. To be honest though I do not really care since I am not a US citizen and consider it an internal issue. I don't really have any great desire to watch it, any more than I want to learn to sing the Koran in Arabic. I was far more disturbed by the death threats against Salmon Rushdie many years ago since that obviously had artistic merit rather than just some crap film designed to promote hatred.
Please note I'm not from the US.
Are you Israeli? It's just a random guess but I notice from another post you made you are worried about Sharia Law in Europe. I always find the idea of that preposterous since we have far to long and established traditions of drinking alcohol as part of our culture. There is about a 0% chance of us all becoming teetotal, especially here in the UK where I come from.
The only people in Europe who carp on about things like Sharia Law are morons like Geert Wilders who are just making it all up in order to try and get elected.
Note that Obama's cuts are not really about saving money money. After all, he'd save vastly more by limiting entitlements and social programmes (the unfunded liabilities being promised completely dwarf even the current US deficit). The cuts also are not because the nukes aren't needed, they are needed for decades to come and for unseen threats in the next 50 years. The cuts are all purely ideologically based on Obama's (flawed) world view. Sadly, his supporters don't want to face the truth about his intentions to remake America by first breaking it by overspending and weakening its traditional strengths. Obama wants to unilaterally disarm and surrender the US to the world. He's already abandoned many allies. The world is about to get very chaotic as a result of a lack of strong leadership from secular democracies lead by the US.
Lol, you sir are clearly on crack. He is not actually that different to Bush was when you look at his actions.
In four years time he will be out of office and the US will be no different. You will still be spending more on your military than any other country in the world. You will still be allied with Europe. Israel will still be around, and the US will still be giving them just as much aid (http://journalistsresource.org/studies/international/conflicts/u-s-foreign-aid-to-israel-2012-congressional-report). The US will still have troops all over the world acting as policemen.
The only difference seems to be that he wants rich people to contribute slightly more in taxes to pay for this instead of taking the shortfall from schemes like Medicare designed to help poor people. As to whether this is a good idea or not is a different matter, but either way it will make precious little difference to anyone not in either extreme.
The biggest threat to the US is actually if the US economy tanks due to tax rises hitting the middle class and taking a huge dent out of consumer spending. The problem is that some people seem to think this would be a good idea to scare the country into voting republican. They think things like this as the very rich do not suffer as much in recessions as the middle class and the poor do.
China will take at least 10 years, maybe longer to build up a large enough military to be a serious challenge to the US. They are just too far behind at present with their one piddly aircraft carrier they bought from Russia anyway.
"In space" doesn't mean "hard vacuum." The low mass (so they can carry enough of them) combined with the large surface area (to mimic a large object) will make them decelerate rapidly enough that they won't confuse anyone for very long. Then remember that the real ICBM has been tracked from very close to the surface, so if one missile suddenly turns into 99 missiles slowing down very quickly and 1 that keeps the same trajectory, you can be pretty confident you know which one is real and which is chaff. Then you'll see one missile descending into the atmosphere and 99 that aren't, the jig will be up.
Sorry, but if you look at the numbers this simply is not right, even with mylar baloons. When missiles hit atmosphere on re-entry they decelerate so hard they regularly pull almost 50g (That is from a very old missile here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM-19_Jupiter). That means that while the balloons would definitely decelerate, they would not decelerate that quickly in comparison to a flight time that is only a few minutes after the missile separates.
Also, it is worth remembering that detecting the warhead itself is no peace of cake by that time it is descending under gravity, it used its propellant up long before it hit the apogee of its flight.
Also, the original poster had no real reason to make the decoys light since a half decent missile can launch far more weight than is taken up by a single warhead. You might want to read some of the following wikipedia pages on modern nuclear missiles to realise that most of them already have the features the poster suggests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercontinental_ballistic_missile
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman (old, but still the main man)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-118_Peacekeeper (retired as it was too nasty)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targetable_reentry_vehicle
The simple reality is than any sort of nuclear missile defense against a country like the US, Russia or China is utterly non-existant. The only thing you can hope is to pick off the odd one if launched by terrorists capturing a silo. A hostile nuclear super power can just blanket you in so many missiles your only option is to annihilate them at the same time and hope the ability to do that is a deterrent.
>The one where the democratically elected Afghani government
Since when are coup d'etats "democratically-elected"? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saur_Revolution)
You are an idiot. The coup took place after the former prime minister of Afghanistan (Daoud Khan) moved to increase ties with the West, and to distance itself from the USSR. It was the commie stooges that overthrew the government that called for help from Moscow, not some democratically-elected nonsense. And did so after their disastrous policies alienated the entire country. The US poured aid money into the opponents after the communist coup.
>Yeah, US funding/training for those great up-and-coming Anti-Communist Freedom Fighters like Osama Bin Laden
Osama wasn't funded or trained by the US. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_%E2%80%93_al-Qaeda_controversy)
You, sir, are a dancing fucking moron.
Of course Daoud Khan was not actually a democratically elected president though was he? That was just the title he chose for himself after deposing his cousin in a bloodless coup. He was just as bad though it terms of promoting his friends and family into positions of power and he certainly did not want to share any power with the common people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Daoud_Khan
The communists who then shot and overthrew him were at least made up of commoners rather than royalty who felt they were entitled to rule from birth. If he was democratically elected maybe they would not have done this and would have taken power more peacefully instead.
Russia did not want another Muslim nut job country on its southern borders. When Russia was booted out of Afghanistan by the Taliban (with covert US assistance) the first thing Russia did was quietly try and ask NATO for help in preventing the Taliban from completely seizing power. The US refused since they thought they could control the people they had been arming for years, they failed and years later the US had to depose the very people it helped put in.
The problem with much of the US's foreign policy in the 60's and 70's was that it would support anyone fighting communism, even if they were a utter shitbag rulers with very little popular support or religious fundamentalists who wanted to see all non believers killed. Sometimes the doctrine that your enemies enemy is your friend does not apply.
That is not to say Russia is or was any better though, just look at Syria to see that. Let's not put anyone on pedestals here, none of them (or often us) stand up to any scrutiny.
I think we should send some of what we have now on a one-way trip to North Korea. That would make everyone happy. For the liberals we would have actually reduced the number left. For the conservatives we would have used them as intended and made the U.S. much safer by demonstrating that they can be used and are not just an empty threat.
The only slight problem with this is that China might get a little antsy about the US dropping nukes right next door to them being that some of the fallout would go their way. Also, our ally South Korea would probably be a little annoyed too for the same reason.
Is it proper actual threading support? the closest I've seen to date in PHP have been based on hacks using curls.
Probably not. It was just a plus point I remember from evaluating it was the ability to kick things off from the web application then let them continue in the background and track their progress somehow.
Whether it is true threading was not really that relevant to me, if it does something I don't really care how providing it just works.
As it was there were not enough plus points to justify the cost.
Sure, PHP has its fair share of design flaws,
I think you seriously understate what's wrong with PHP. Beside all the things that is mentioned in that article, I love how you suggest several php frameworks that attempt to be like Rails but all built on such a flawed language.
And Rails is not hard to deploy any more... that argument is several years out of date.
Rails is great, providing you are willing to do everything exactly the way you are supposed to according to best practice. The problem is that some times in the real work you have to do things wrong (either to meet a deadline or just because you are stuck interfacing with a shit legacy system that nobody will pay to rewrite) and then Rails just refuses to play ball.
Short cuts are a part of commercial development unfortunately, that is why so much commercial stuff is written in PHP.
I always compare Rails to Pascal: A great language for learning best practice but lack the flexibilty that comes with languages like PHP or C in comparison to Pascal.
Because sometimes web sites are used to trigger some form of processing behind the scenes that you don't want the user to have to sit and wait for and that might otherwise result in a time out anyway?
You can do this if you cough up and buy Zend Server. Zend keep this as a paid for add on it seems
And last, but not least, the majority of the population does not support copyright law. That is clear when you see how many people think it is ok to share songs, for example. I don't know anyone that it shouldn't be allowed, for example, or who haven't done that since the time of K7 tapes.
Are you sure? Try asking your parents, or some of their friends.
I know plenty of people who believe in copyright law. As you get older you probably will too. The simple fact is that if you ask most people in the 30-80 age group then they come out much more conservative than people in the 18-30 age group and there are far more of them.
All your equivocated ideas stem for your belief that you live in a democracy, which is just an illusion.
I used to think like that when I was young and all the old people voting meant my beliefs were drowned out. Nowadays I think things are not so simple. We definitely have elections every once in a while, and we can all definitely vote in them. We might often have some shitty choices but it is still democracy of a kind.
Also, it is worth noting that even in countries where the have proportional representation (a much fairer system in my opinion as it allows votes for smaller parties to still carry some weight) the pirate party is still a tiny minority compared to the others.
The simple fact that young people have to deal with is that most old people are scared shitless about the change that getting rid of copyright law would ensue and whether it would damage our economy even if it would not affect them directly. Even if us oldies do not agree with every element of law we often do not want them changed as we have spent more time adjusting ourselves to the status quo.
But most of this you will probably only understand in 10 or 20 years. Until then, try and ask more old people (parents, lecturers, teachers, etc) about copyright law and see where they stand. You might be surprised.
"The things is though, we all know he intended to violate copyright by distributing what he had downloaded to other people who did not have access to it. that was the point of what he was doing."
So what? (1) Keep in mind that an intent is not a commission. Unless you want to get into the area of thought crime. And (2) copyright violation of the sort he may have intended is still not a felony.
As far as THIS prosecution was concerned, what he intended by violating the TOS still doesn't make it a crime.
Well there must have been some reason that there was a reasonably likelihood of conviction or Aaron's lawyer would have told him not to worry about it. I am certainly not a lawyer (or even US resident) so I have no idea, although here in the UK if the police stop you in the process of committing a crime but it is obvious you were going to commit it if not stopped (to the jury) then you can still be found guilty.
One example of this is shoplifting, you can be stopped by plain clothes store detectives as soon as you put something in your pocket if it would be obvious you were not going to pay. Usually they will actually let you walk out of the store first as that makes conviction easier but legally they do not have to.
On another note though if he was innocent, then maybe his committing suicide had nothing to do with his prosecution. I am assuming he had a lawyer of some kind who was able to tell him if what he did was illegal or not better than you or I in which case by your logic his lawyer would have told him this was a bullshit case and a jury would never convict and ultimately they would drop the charges or he would be found not guilty. If his lawyer was not telling him this then maybe his lawyer should be in the dock instead.
They could simply ignore your appeal, which you would then win by default.
They could simply make a new claim, costing you another $35 dollars, Rinse, wash, repeat until you no longer have money.
Anyone worth bothering with in society can pay $35 dollar fee's until the cows come home.
In the time it would take for your appeal to be processed you will have earned at least $35 unless you are borderline bankrupt anyway. You need to earn at least $35 per day in this society and it will take longer than that for them to process your email.
egalize (or at least make non-actionable) otherwise infringing activity by natural persons if noncommercial in nature. Then much of what they're upset about would not be illegal (at least not meaningfully so).
So you need to convince a majority of the US population that this is something that needs to be done. Unfortunately that is never going to happen because in my experience, most of the people who advocate the change you mention are kids, young teenagers or uni students. Eventually most of them grow up and change their minds deciding that copyright law is great once they actually have something to sell behind them and have enough of their own money to buy any media they want to consume.
I am a firm believer that if had a referendum on changing copyright law tomorrow most people would come out on the side of making it stronger, not weaker. This is despite my own feeling that many aspects of copyright law should be made weaker or abolished completely.
No, someone committed suicide because society had no place for them. What he was doing may have had value to him, but society as a whole has, through its legal system, has made it so even in cases where there is no financial or physical harm to others, said that what he was doing had no value. Since what he was doing was at the core of who he was (obviously, since it drove him to kill himself when he was deprived of it), it is more accurate to say society had no place for him. Whether that's moral, or ethical, right, or wrong, I leave to you. But that is why he died.
You make it sound as if the legal system represents society's will, which is obviously not the true (and never was). Society had a place for him, but those who rule did not, and despite any illusions you may have of living in a democracy, rest assured those who rule are not the people.
Are you sure about that?
I reckon there is a very good chance he good have opted for a jury trial and been found guilty. His lawyer will probably have warned him this was a distinct possibility too. That is not to say it was a certainty he would be found guilty, but there have been less likely things happen in courts of law with regard to juries.
The reality is that a majority of the population seem to support law of copyright and think that people like him who advocate breaking laws they do not agree with (read his manifesto to see that he does just this: http://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto) actually do deserve to be punished for it, especially if they are caught trying to break those laws themselves. He might have been caught very early in the process, but a prosecutor friendly jury may well have found him guilty anyway based on his stated intent.
The best place to start looking to change copyright law in the manner Aaron desired is by trying to convince the public that the law needs to change.
If his lawyer had advised him it was a joke prosecution and he was never going to be found guilty then he probably would still be alive (assuming his suicide was anything to do with his legal problems).
"Uh. What he did was really illegal."
Uh. No, it wasn't.
He had authorization to download files from the source in question, though the TOS said he was not authorized to do it automatically. He wasn't "stealing" anything, or even violating copyright.
The things is though, we all know he intended to violate copyright by distributing what he had downloaded to other people who did not have access to it. that was the point of what he was doing.
Read the following: http://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto
Now tell me you don't honestly believe that he had every intention of violating copyright law.
Whether you believe in what he was doing is one thing (I actually kind of do), but lets not bullshit about his intentions: He had no respect for a bullshit state of affairs that is enshrined in law and he had every intention of breaking the law to bypass it.
That's why IMHO industry trainings and certifications are bullshit.
Industry courses usually cost a lot, deliver few information not published somewhere obvious and are so condensed that they allow not time for reflection.
Some times the condensed nature though is exactly what is needed.
A friend of mine worked for a company that adopted the Zend Framework for their core product. They needed an entire dev team of 10 or 20 people to be up to speed and writing solid code in a few weeks so they brought trainers in and brought the entire team up to speed and paid for them all to do certification. This let them advertise the fact that all their developers were Zend certified, but more importantly it meant that inside a month the company was back to extending their core product and hence back to earning revenue from selling the new features to clients.
I spent the best part of six months learning Zend on the job. In that time I made some mistakes which ultimately resulted in code I had to go back to and change. Also, the first project I did overran considerably. I was often unable to say how much longer the project would take because I was trying to learn something I previously knew very little about and did not know how much work remained.
Sometimes investing in certification and training pays off, especially when you want to leverage new technology to enhance the services your company provides quickly to keep ahead of your competitors.
You're told to read the fucking manual.
The attitude is that if you complain about no training you're basically saying you don't know what you're doing.
Sounds like a shit place to work, maybe you should jump ship and find a better employer.
If you are a half decent techy of any kind and have a few years experience under your belt then your skills are in demand (certainly in the UK where I live) and you can probably earn the same salary or more else where and also get some form of training from a company that believes in investing in it's own staff.
The technology industry moves pretty quickly and if you do not have some form of budget for keeping your staff's skills up to date then the services you provide will ultimately fall behind your competitors.
Mint is king.
Mostly.
Installing software using the GUI is still a little broken though as if you search for stuff it tries to reissue your search every time you type a character. That gets annoying if you type 3 or 4 chars, then change your mind and hit backspace 4 times, then type another 5 or so you have locked your machine up until it does 15 searches of the application repositories you have installed, some of which return a lot of results (ie, the ones where 0,1 or 2 chars were in the search box).
Speak the truth and the hate mongers want to have you killed off.
If you thought I was being serious you are pretty dumb
In an ideal world, we would be able to eliminate CO2 from our atmosphere completely. And ultimately, if we as a species are going to survive, we need to do that. But in the here and now, we have to do the best we can. And cars produce way more of that poison than anyone on a bicycle. The Congressman is just an ignorant jackass who has no understanding of how our biosphere works.
A good start to limiting CO2 production would be by killing off this particular congressman.
Most rational people rate things like CO2 based on the amount given off per mile travelled, I'd be willing to bet that cycling gives off far less CO2 per mile than driving a car with no other occupants apart from the driver.
Of course, there are plenty of ways to make car travel more efficient such as car sharing and tons of other things I can't be bothered to list but if you are only talking about 1 person getting themselves to work then bike is better than car in terms of CO2.
Also, the energy used in cycling is basically food, which grows quickly even if you consume it in cow or sheep form. Oil on the other hand takes slightly longer to "grow" so keeps carbon locked up under ground for longer during the process of it forming.
There are plenty of times you cannot cycle and car or van becomes the only option, such as when carrying lots of people or luggage so it not an option in many cases. When it is possible and practical though it is certainly more efficient.
If it's a rubble type, then a nuke would work to displace enough mass to move it. Seems like this is a one-size-fits-all solution. One solution for the iron-type and one for the rubble piles. The optimal solution for each may not match. Then the question becomes at what range we can distinguish. That, and the one I heard about casting a net over the whole thing and towing it with a long cable.
The problem is that your nuke would fire bits off in every direction and that would balance out.
What you really want is to only fire an exactly calculated mass of bits off the asteroid in one, very carefully chosen direction that perfectly puts your asteroid into a fairly harmless new orbit (ie, not likely to hit or pass close by anything in this solar system at least). Also, make each of the the bits you fire off small so that if they hit anything they just burn up.
Another option I just thought off is event better: Just steer the asteroid into Jupiter. Problem solved permanently, no more asteroid, and Jupiter absorbs one more chunk of crap that barely alters is size in relative terms so has no impact on its orbit.
It's a little more complicated than that in practice, but the general idea is sound.
If you a) don't download infringing content in the first place; and b) do not ever share your internet connectivity with anybody else who might, I might suggest that you'd be pretty safe from harassment.
Try not to feed anoymous trolls. This moron is posting about people being arrested for file sharing but this thread is about sites being blocked which has nothing to do with prosecution or being arrested.
Given the choice between:
1) A campaign of over the top prosecutions on parents just because their kids downloaded something illegally because the kids don't agree with the concept of copyright.
2) Trying to play whack-a-mole to block access to sites that specialise in distributing content they have no legal right to as they pick up market share from the last site that was shut down.
I would much rather they carried on with option 2. It is a mere annoyance letting people who want to break the law carry on doing so, it lets the government be seen to be doing something (even though it is ineffective) and far more importantly it does not involve the possibility of prosecuting people and fucking their life over with a fine and criminal record that is with them for the rest of their life.
All the hacktivism in the world won't change that.
And all the whining from the industry in the world won't make copyright enforceable. It's almost as if... they need to find a different business model, and as if... they're the ones responsible for doing so, just like any other business would be.
The problem is that our society is not ready to abandon the concept of copyright. If you asked a selection of people in the street I do not think the majority of the population support abolishing all copyright law.
This leaves us with the dilemma of trying to educate young people as to why to follow a law that to them, makes no sense what so ever without fucking their lives over too badly if they get caught braking it.
Copyright law though does make sense to some people who stand to gain from it and as young people get older and get full time jobs themselves some of them will decide they like copyright law too and change their viewpoint (disclaimer: I already have now I rely on producing copyrighted code to feed my family).
You may even change your own mind about copyright law once you start working 50+ hours every week (including travel time) and have no time to watch more than a movie or two a week anyway and cannot risk the idea that your wage would drop even slightly without the mortgage company foreclosing on the house your kids live in. Maybe you are different (maybe you are old with a family already) but in most cases people become more conservative in their political views as they get older.
FUCK you content producers, I'm going to lobby the government that we should be taxing copyrighted content to subsidise the delivery system that the people have paid for,
I'm a content producer and well... FUCK you, too! It's been shown via many studies that people that share music also buy much more than those that don't share it. Hollywood has made, hand-over-fist, more money each year, even when they have strings of crappy releases. This isn't a war of the content producers, insomuch, vs the public; it's the content copyright HOLDERS waging this war convincing ISPs to serve as the judge and jury to questionable connections between one computer and another. Really, I could be sharing a legal torrent from archive.org with a person that's also torrenting a newly-released Hollywood movie. Both of us are encrypting all inbound and outbound traffic. Guilt by association? I don't know, but I have a feeling that if the EFF was arguing on my behalf, I'd win.
You right about your criticism of the RIAA and the like, but lets remember that these banned sites were just free loading shit bags making money from advertising or donations in return for giving access to content that they have no right to distribute.
It is one thing to think RIAA and MPAA are crap but that doesn't mean that sites like these are any better. They are just freeloading off the original artists that produced the works we all enjoy as well. At least the record companies share 0.001% (a pathetically small amount anyway) or whatever of the revenue of a piece of music with the actual band who produced it, sites like these share sweet FA.