The key words here being "tax revenue". The governments do not give a flying fuck about "fairness" of gambling. Commercial gambling being "fair" is one of the most ridiculous concepts I ever heard of and its only useful fools like you who believe such nonsense. The government's only concerns are financial: that is to prevent any activity that does not feed their coffers.
Gambling is a particularly painful thorn because it involves a large number of very small cash transactions without receipts and thus it allows for casino operators to avoid onerous taxation. Governments also see gambling in general as a form of taxation on the arithmetically challenged and so see any private operators as direct competition for easy money.
Those are the true reason why governments of all stripe attack any gambling enterprises as viciously as major drug cartels.
Idiots like you are just useful tools in this campaign of ever expanding governmental reach and sating its ever growing hunger for money and resources.
And as to asking for "services" to regulate gambling, it is the same dynamics as "asking" for all these "think of the children" and "terrorists under every bed" gleefully psychotic campaigns of terror by the government: the only people who are really asking for such things are the members of government-centered elites, their sycophantic hanger-ons and their associated parasitic police-military-prison complex corporations who stand to profit from this.
But some people want to do that, and want to make sure the places they gamble have some impartial oversight.
Why? You still did not explain that part. If you regulate gambling, (not to be "fair" for it never is, the "house" always wins in all the "regulated" casinos - so you can quit that bullshit line) then you must regulate all games of skill or chance. After all one can bet on any event, and so, in your government-nanny-to-the-rescue (with bonus side revenue opportunities) model, we should have the somber FBI men check out playgrounds and inspect playing cards in every family dwelling for marks, lest evils of unfair gambling be the downfall of the civilization as we know it!
.... and they also have mean bet size of $.05 at their tables. The ones that actually use real money that is. Vast majority of players on sites like Poker Stars use fake, in-house, "play money". No real world value of any kind.
If people are to gamble with real money, it is their (not government's) responsibility to make sure the casino is not crooked. After all gambling is for fools who have money to burn in the first place and not some essential like food or shelter.
Your attitude is the classic example of extreme "government nannyism". If casinos are to be regulated by government, so should kindergarten soccer matches. After all mothers could gamble on their kid's performance and just think of all the deal making and cheating possible!
These government assholes can go fsck themselves. America is screwed. Free country my ass.
Particularly obnoxious here is the stench of utter corruption and duplicity when it comes to US government and gambling: you see gambling is eeeevil..... unless its the US or State governments who run the casinos, or their anointed cronies, in which case its just an innocent, family past-time...
4. Continue to build nuclear until there are better choices
This is another form of denial represented in force by the strangely nuclear-power-hypnotized Slashdot crowd. Nuclear power generation is universally the worst choice of all the energy sources commercially available.
This is so because nuclear power is such an exercise in "creative accounting" that would make Bernie Madoff blush. The costs are far, far under-represented due to "socialization of expenses" for the taxpayers and "privatization of profits" for the companies, by every nuclear power company in the world (something like 90% of costs are not on the "official" balance sheets). If all the actual R&D, operational and ancillary costs were included, nuclear power would be over twice as expensive per kWh as amateur-installed, dusty, crooked solar panels and wobbly wind turbines.
But that topic is apparently taboo, as everyone seems hell-bent on focusing on flame-wars about the safety concerns, which in themselves are meaningless until the economic costs of nuclear power are removed from the realm of financial charlatans and exposed to daylight.
Discussing safety of things that are simply not even remotely economically viable is like discussing trends in real-estate on the moon: first bring the cost of getting there within the realm of sanity.
There is a reason why coal and natural gas plants are everywhere: their cost per kWh is a tiny fraction of all the alternatives, with the exception of hydro which has huge up-front investments but nearly infinite steady returns.
The argument was actually not about that addiction is impossible to stamp out, but about the ridiculous strength of enforcement-based measures required to achieve even moderate "success" in stamping it out. And these measures, and their consequences, even at their smallest scale, are far more destructive to us and our societies than any practically possible levels of addiction.
Furthermore, addiction is clearly a medical problem, yet various power and greed crazed individuals insist that we use the police-military-prison-industrial complex to solve it. Even without overwhelming evidence overflowing from all directions demonstrating beyond any doubt the true aim of such measures, this very proposition on its own terrified anyone who knows anything about history and the mechanics of governmental power. Of course people like you never listened in your self-assured conviction that your "moral superiority" overrides any silly objections about forcing your view of the world down other people's throats at gun-point. It never apparently occurred to you that those who cheered and egged you on, and who volunteered to be the "protectors" and "enforcers" of your will had somewhat diverging agendas, a bit wider in scope. But then again, screeching about "alcoholism" then "reefer madness" then "child pornography" and finally "rag-head terrorists" is such a satisfying pursuit for the smug arm-chair "moralists". It gets them invited to pontificate on TV shows, shake hands with "important people" and politicians and be patted on the back by all these glorious "defender knights" in their smart uniforms and body armor. In light of that, who cares about all them hippie, malcontent, "personal freedoms"?! Only a child-molester-drug-dealing-terrorist sympathizer would have wanted them anyway! Defense of the "values" of "this greatest of nations" is what it is all about! Just don't ask exactly what these "values" are.
Also, murder is mostly deterred by societal conditioning, rather then draconian punishments. You can examine the dubious relationship between punishment and deterrence in either historical context or in places like modern-day Saudi Arabia or Indonesia. No penalty, no matter how harsh, will deter people who see the drug run as either their "last chance" to get ahead in the society in which they hit the bottom both financially and psychologically, not to mention the inexhaustible supply of people who are simply too dumb to realize what they are being manipulated into.
Also note that the mechanics of committing murder is nowhere near the same as "carrying some stuff for a friend of mine across the border". One requires overcoming genetically wired thresholds of tribal cohesion, the other actually feeds off the same genes by triggering the "fit into the group" circuitry.
I could go on enumerating reasons why your comparison of drug use and drug running to "murder" was so dishonest, but this should give you a general idea. That is if you actually had any interest in it to begin with, which I doubt.
In fact, if you work for any sort of business with more than 5 employees, you've been doing exactly that!
Except you apparently failed to note that the workers who call for "collaboration" have positions and titles like: managers, bosses, CEOs etc. It is exceptional indeed if any of them is capable of doing even a fraction of actual work his or her underlings do since they've, quite successfully may I add, invested all their time into skills to induce "collaboration" with others in which they reap nearly all the benefits.
And, surprisingly, a vast majority of those with "valuable skill sets" waste no time in their rush to "collaborate" with the said individuals, likely including you. It is only your fellow competitors for the favors of these masters of yours, or people whom you intend to "collaborate" into your own personal gain, that you reserve all your disdain for: those better know what they are all about, lest no profit!
As it is, in the "real world", "cheating" is one of the most valuable skills in our duplicity-based society: that is how the social elites are made. Those who learned early on to "play by the rules" are doomed to be forever serfs and to "collaborate" for those who did not.
If you wanted a direct analogy, you would have to be talking about suicide. That is because drug use, like suicide, is a self-inflicted malady.
Funny thing is, if you were to try to enforce a ban on suicides, you would also need a draconian police state complete with daily brain scans to detect suicidal moods!
That is of course due to the obvious relationship between attempting to enforce one's "morality" onto others and basis for totalitarian police states: i.e. they are one and the same.
Actually you are quite right. The true reason for all the "prohibitions" is pencil-necked control-freaks who positively cannot stand someone, somewhere doing something in private they do not approve of. All the whining about "addictions" (in case of drugs) or "innocent children" (in case of sexual material on the net) is just a smoke screen.
Sexual gratification they derive from enforcing their will on others is what it is all about.
So, in your view, you prefer to COMBINE the effects of the "highly addictive substances" which "entrap lives" with all the side-effects of prohibition, since the prohibition has no chance of actually working in practice because in order to be effective, the counter measures require essentially a totalitarian police state apparatus to be erected, which also presents additional power concentration and profit opportunities for the "authorities" - see also: private prisons etc, not to mention dispensing with all of these inconvenient civil liberties and personal freedoms, Habeas Corpus and the like hindrances for the Holy Crusaders of Anti-Addiction.
So if you are intellectually honest with us, you also advocate a complete Big Brother 24/7/365 all-encompassing surveillance totalitarianism, since it is the only possible scenario under which the supposed "benefits" (i.e. no addicts) of the prohibition could ever be realized. That is, of course, if you are a believer in totalitarian police states and think Orwell's 1984 was an instruction manual.
You forget that in addition to having a convenience of such a law, the thugs, otherwise euphemistically known as "the authorities", must also create a pretense of "working for the greater good", "justice", "defending against The Bogeyman" and similar notions, so that the sheeple feel that they are giving up all their rights for "protection" or some such nonsense. Otherwise there is a lot of pensive bleating in the shearing shack. Some even dig in their hooves, or fewer yet even try to bolt or bite, which disrupts the orderly shearing process.
that deals with the service providers responsibility to disclose to the copyright holder information that can be used to identify the infringer when subpoenaed . If you have a way to identify the infringer that does not involve keeping logs, good for you. However "must have been some unknown person using my open wifi" is not going to go very far in giving you safe harbor.
I actually I did not say there would be no logs, only that the law does not list them as a requirement by name. I would have to log logon/logoff times of ids/MAC addresses. When DMCA request arrives stating the 3 times the infringement occured (remember law talks about "multiple" offenders) I would simply look up and terminate all (going beyond the call of duty! eager to comply with the spirit of the law! the extra mile!) accounts that were active at those times and send the complainer a report of what user ids/MAC addresses were terminated. By doing so I complied with the law, terminated the offenders and disclosed, in good faith, all of the information on them available to me.
Lastly, yeah, moving to a new address is exactly the same as creating a new dummy user id.
I fail to see how specifics make any difference. All that counts is that an average ISP is as defenseless against fake driver licenses, phony resident's names and the like as I am against forged MAC addresses. They can be no more reasonably expected to do retina scans and keep global biometrics databases then I to run around with a radiation detector and pounce on people whom I suspect of changing WiFi MAC addresses on their laptops.
I see. So your bright idea to supporting this on an 'open wifi' is to make the wifi not open (if you require userids and passwords it isn't open, regardless of what the actual over-the-air protocol is doing).
It is open if the user ids and passwords are accepted from all comers as soon as you register them, very much the same way IRC is still open even though you need to register you nick/password on most channels.
Since there is nothing tying you personally (other then your MAC address) to the completely arbitrary nick/id and since there are no restrictions on how many nicks can you get and when, how is this affecting "openness"?!
Next, I assume this is present day we are talking about, so IPV4 is still what is being used. You do own the block of addresses you are handing out to your users, and you are logging who was using what address when, right? I mean, you're not so dumb as to be using NAT are you (because that makes all traffic look like it belongs to you, not your 'users')? If you are using NAT, you're logging who you gave an address to, and what activity they had on that address, right?
No. The law does not specify that you cannot use NAT nor that you have to keep records. Only that you, quote a): adopted and reasonably implemented, and informs subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network of, a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network who are repeat infringers; - which we have: user ids and MAC addresses. And, quote: accommodates and does not interfere with standard technical measures, which is the case as NAT is a "standard technical measure", deployed by the tens of millions of instances worldwide.
So someone sends you a DMCA notice and says at such-and-such a date on such-and-such a time copyright infringement was occurring on your addresses you own. You do have the proper procedures in place to identify who was generating the traffic they are complaining about, and you can properly notify that person, and after multiple occurrences you can cut them (and only them) off (and make sure they don't just 'make up' another id), right?
My measures are no different than those of an ISP. What stops a user from moving to another address and using 2nd removed cousin's name who happened to be at present in Bolivia? Most ISPs have no provisions whatsoever for verifying real-world IDs and are happy if you pay the bill, under whatever name.
Easily done. You flash a typical Hot Spot software into your cheap router with an initial intercept page and a huge EULA in it threatening dire consequences for "piracy" etc, then you allow free access after people register with some made up user ids and passwords.
You can also set up a web server facing the other way with a form for DMCA complaints so that the big media (in theory) can ask to cut of particular users.
Now this probably would fail, because as many pointed out, the law in North America is has no longer anything to do with justice and large conglomerates end up with verdicts that show that there is one law for the social elites and a completely different one for everybody else, but doing this would satisfy the legal requirements and make the utter hypocrisy of the whole "justice" system just a bit more visible.
While its most prominent in the US, it is now apparent that there is an emerging pattern as of late in all the traditional "industrialized" societies: lack of any sort of adequate planning and preparation for a major disaster. Everyone in a position of authority seems to be always "caught by surprise" and "improvising".
Contrast this with the Chinese response after their major earthquake where they essentially mobilized the entire country to provide relief with massive columns of supplies rolling within hours into the zone. Yet even this example was somewhat diminished by the prior decades of shoddy construction and corrupted officials helping greedy builders to skimp on building safety.....
If anything, the near-perfect organisation of Japan has saved countless lives.
You gotta be kidding. Or are you talking about some Anime Japan and not the real thing?
If anything, the authorities were caught completely flat-footed and are still scrambling. People in many areas were left for days to their own devices with no official response anywhere in sight.
Confusion, incompetence, constant cover-ups, unresponsiveness, nepotism... those are the defining characteristics of Japan's bureaucracy, be it governmental or corporate.
The trains running obsessively on time are the artifact of workers getting abused, sometimes physically, by their bosses when they are 1 minute late.
You can't do that. Only user installed certs can be deleted. You have to use "Get Info" on the Comodo cert, expand the "Trust" section and set the drop-down to "Do not trust". The icon for the cert will get a red "x" indicating its untrusted.
The "you right-wingers" bit is a particularly precious example of your broad-brush tarring everyone who dares to fail to be awed by your religious fervor of choice, me in particular who finds all "right-wing" one-size-fits-all ideologies no less laughable than their "left wing" equivalents, exceeded in their humorous irony only by their Fevered Converts and Unwavering In The Face Of Mere Mortal Facts True Believers, such as you.
And so as soon as some inconvenient thing is said of your "1.5 century", one-and-only, Straight From the Mount, the Anointed Guru's mouth to your ear, the Ultimate Truth (TM) and Unchallengeable By All You Little People, Grand And Final Definition, you lash out at all of them "right wingers!" crowding you, right next to the "Bad people Mom told me about!'.
I also found it very educational to learn from you how all of these Most Evilly Evil Foes of yours are on a "Crusade", apparently to lure the hapless, innocent flock from the Sweet Waterhole of The Everlasting Happiness and to challenge the Ultimate And Divine Truth That Will Save Us All As Sayeth Unity100.
But we should fear not! For if you could only round up enough followers to setup a "reeducation" camp or two, to detect and Righteously Smite the Evil Crusaders, things would be set back on the The One And Only, 1.5 Century, Verily True, Shining Path To Universal Happiness And Endless Glory! No?
Actually, most of the problem in such discussions are the labels.
Insisting on applying labels rather then describing ideas has a way of descending to inanity and name calling.
Some terms, like "Socialism" (or "Fascism"), are only very vague and their definitions change depending on who is talking. The Wikipedia definition you insist on is far from authoritative (in fact there is no authoritative definition of any kind amongst even the scholars). And to add to the squabbling over the definition, you get the historical record of multiple regimes calling themselves "socialist" (such as USSR - the official government stance was that they were a "socialist" state in their "transition" to "communism") etc. while engaging in pervasive activities in direct contravention of even their own definition of the term.
Then you have confusion about what "corporatist" means in the ideology of "Fascism" (Mussolini was talking about "corpora" as in "businessmen" or "workers" not "corporations" as in GE or Microsoft).
In the end, one can only talk comparatively about individual policies of various regimes who called themselves this or that, irrespective of what the actual theoretical definition was claimed to be. Some of these policies (or their combinations) are unique to a class of regimes and that is how the labeling goes: Mussolini's Italy and Hitlers Germany shared the extreme nationalism, militarism, merger of the state and the wealth elites, racism etc. Contrast with the Warsaw Pact states (all claiming to be "socialist") where the wealthy elites were essentially eradicated and the state itself took their place (which is why some label the USSR as a "state capitalist" entity)
That is why in political discussions, excepting a very common and well established basic terms, when I use a label as a short-cut (which is all that labels are) in a discussion, I am rather prepared to explain in full what I mean by it, rather than point to a (rather controversial) Wikipedia page. Because politics, unlike hard sciences, has this issue with subjective terminology.
So your insistence that your definition is the "right" one is only going to encourage people to show up and insult you because, don't you know, it is theirs, and only theirs that is the "right" one... and so the Holy Flame Wars commence.
This is sort of stupidity is why the "intellectual property" crowd is so morally bankrupt.
Let me spell out the difference for you:
1. you obtain information "illegally" - the original source data remains and its user can keep using it with no difficulties. Result: theoretical loss of theoretical income based on a make-believe concept of "artificial scarcity" of information, a concept introduced as an ill-planned and seriously back-firing method of promoting arts and sciences (many other methods can replace this scheme and remove the whole issue but would result in eradication of massive corporate profits based on scams rooted in the current system).
2. you disable a previously working (paid for) software feature remotely - the user can no longer use it. Result: actual monetary theft resulting from loss of access to paid-for functions.
I have the email notification for replies to my posts on and this is how I was able to keep replying in this thread.
That is also how I did not notice the comment tracking mess, yet another screwup in a very looong list.
The thing that really boggles my mind is that these idiots did not bother running any "beta" site, like any self-respecting high volume site does with any major redesign, but just went the whole hog, live on a production system and expected things to work!
And to take things completely into the realm of the bizarre is the fact that this is supposedly a premier IT/Tech site which should be a prime example of how to do things non-disruptively and with 100% backwards compatibility!
.... clear up bandwidth for users who still enjoy this excellent free website...
If you are to be the example of the "users who still enjoy Slashdot" then I will gladly "clear up the bandwidth" for you so that you can splash about in your cesspool all you want along with your fellow members of the species of a vomit-covered loudmouth moron.
Clearly, having a website that exhibits even a most basic modicum of usability or readability on various devices is not very high on an average troll's priority list. As long as you can get your drooling idiocy exhibited somewhere for "free", everything is "excellent" as far as you are concerned.
Its a high DPI monitor of course 3840x2400 / 22 inches = over 200 DPI.
You are of course right about the DPI, which makes this new layout even more retarded since there are phones and netbooks out there with 300 DPI displays...
Nothing is "wrong" with my system, it is simply the difference in font technologies and subsequently font scaling on different OSs. That is why it is such a no-no to create convoluted layouts that can break based on different font rendering strategies by different browsers on different platforms.
Poorly designed sites that depend on floating panels and similar crap encourage breakage when some parameters are not absolutely "perfect" and as the result "work" only on a few browsers on very few platforms under very specific conditions (and no, the fact that these combinations are the most "popular" is not an excuse)
Note that other properly formatted HTML contents (i.e. formatted for usability instead of "effect") has no such problems on my, or any other browser that even remotely follows basic markup language principles.
Have you tried a brain? Next time some moronic site decides to go with mega fonts that break layout when resized you will likely suggest that I go out and buy a higher resolution monitor yet. That way I could keep unplugging one monitor and plugging in another, from a selection of 10 or so, every time I switch sites...
You'd probably call it the "Web 10.0"!
More seriously, have you tried "Ctrl-+"? That will increase the displayed font size.
Do you read threads before replying? This is something like the 5th time I am mentioning that the floating side menu overlaps and obscures main text if you resize fonts, be it with Ctrl+/- or any other way.
Slashdot Mirror
The key words here being "tax revenue". The governments do not give a flying fuck about "fairness" of gambling. Commercial gambling being "fair" is one of the most ridiculous concepts I ever heard of and its only useful fools like you who believe such nonsense. The government's only concerns are financial: that is to prevent any activity that does not feed their coffers.
Gambling is a particularly painful thorn because it involves a large number of very small cash transactions without receipts and thus it allows for casino operators to avoid onerous taxation. Governments also see gambling in general as a form of taxation on the arithmetically challenged and so see any private operators as direct competition for easy money.
Those are the true reason why governments of all stripe attack any gambling enterprises as viciously as major drug cartels.
Idiots like you are just useful tools in this campaign of ever expanding governmental reach and sating its ever growing hunger for money and resources.
And as to asking for "services" to regulate gambling, it is the same dynamics as "asking" for all these "think of the children" and "terrorists under every bed" gleefully psychotic campaigns of terror by the government: the only people who are really asking for such things are the members of government-centered elites, their sycophantic hanger-ons and their associated parasitic police-military-prison complex corporations who stand to profit from this.
Why? You still did not explain that part. If you regulate gambling, (not to be "fair" for it never is, the "house" always wins in all the "regulated" casinos - so you can quit that bullshit line) then you must regulate all games of skill or chance. After all one can bet on any event, and so, in your government-nanny-to-the-rescue (with bonus side revenue opportunities) model, we should have the somber FBI men check out playgrounds and inspect playing cards in every family dwelling for marks, lest evils of unfair gambling be the downfall of the civilization as we know it!
.... and they also have mean bet size of $.05 at their tables. The ones that actually use real money that is. Vast majority of players on sites like Poker Stars use fake, in-house, "play money". No real world value of any kind.
If people are to gamble with real money, it is their (not government's) responsibility to make sure the casino is not crooked. After all gambling is for fools who have money to burn in the first place and not some essential like food or shelter.
Your attitude is the classic example of extreme "government nannyism". If casinos are to be regulated by government, so should kindergarten soccer matches. After all mothers could gamble on their kid's performance and just think of all the deal making and cheating possible!
Particularly obnoxious here is the stench of utter corruption and duplicity when it comes to US government and gambling: you see gambling is eeeevil ..... unless its the US or State governments who run the casinos, or their anointed cronies, in which case its just an innocent, family past-time ...
This is another form of denial represented in force by the strangely nuclear-power-hypnotized Slashdot crowd. Nuclear power generation is universally the worst choice of all the energy sources commercially available.
This is so because nuclear power is such an exercise in "creative accounting" that would make Bernie Madoff blush. The costs are far, far under-represented due to "socialization of expenses" for the taxpayers and "privatization of profits" for the companies, by every nuclear power company in the world (something like 90% of costs are not on the "official" balance sheets). If all the actual R&D, operational and ancillary costs were included, nuclear power would be over twice as expensive per kWh as amateur-installed, dusty, crooked solar panels and wobbly wind turbines.
But that topic is apparently taboo, as everyone seems hell-bent on focusing on flame-wars about the safety concerns, which in themselves are meaningless until the economic costs of nuclear power are removed from the realm of financial charlatans and exposed to daylight.
Discussing safety of things that are simply not even remotely economically viable is like discussing trends in real-estate on the moon: first bring the cost of getting there within the realm of sanity.
There is a reason why coal and natural gas plants are everywhere: their cost per kWh is a tiny fraction of all the alternatives, with the exception of hydro which has huge up-front investments but nearly infinite steady returns.
The argument was actually not about that addiction is impossible to stamp out, but about the ridiculous strength of enforcement-based measures required to achieve even moderate "success" in stamping it out. And these measures, and their consequences, even at their smallest scale, are far more destructive to us and our societies than any practically possible levels of addiction.
Furthermore, addiction is clearly a medical problem, yet various power and greed crazed individuals insist that we use the police-military-prison-industrial complex to solve it. Even without overwhelming evidence overflowing from all directions demonstrating beyond any doubt the true aim of such measures, this very proposition on its own terrified anyone who knows anything about history and the mechanics of governmental power. Of course people like you never listened in your self-assured conviction that your "moral superiority" overrides any silly objections about forcing your view of the world down other people's throats at gun-point. It never apparently occurred to you that those who cheered and egged you on, and who volunteered to be the "protectors" and "enforcers" of your will had somewhat diverging agendas, a bit wider in scope. But then again, screeching about "alcoholism" then "reefer madness" then "child pornography" and finally "rag-head terrorists" is such a satisfying pursuit for the smug arm-chair "moralists". It gets them invited to pontificate on TV shows, shake hands with "important people" and politicians and be patted on the back by all these glorious "defender knights" in their smart uniforms and body armor. In light of that, who cares about all them hippie, malcontent, "personal freedoms"?! Only a child-molester-drug-dealing-terrorist sympathizer would have wanted them anyway! Defense of the "values" of "this greatest of nations" is what it is all about! Just don't ask exactly what these "values" are.
Also, murder is mostly deterred by societal conditioning, rather then draconian punishments. You can examine the dubious relationship between punishment and deterrence in either historical context or in places like modern-day Saudi Arabia or Indonesia. No penalty, no matter how harsh, will deter people who see the drug run as either their "last chance" to get ahead in the society in which they hit the bottom both financially and psychologically, not to mention the inexhaustible supply of people who are simply too dumb to realize what they are being manipulated into.
Also note that the mechanics of committing murder is nowhere near the same as "carrying some stuff for a friend of mine across the border". One requires overcoming genetically wired thresholds of tribal cohesion, the other actually feeds off the same genes by triggering the "fit into the group" circuitry.
I could go on enumerating reasons why your comparison of drug use and drug running to "murder" was so dishonest, but this should give you a general idea. That is if you actually had any interest in it to begin with, which I doubt.
In fact, if you work for any sort of business with more than 5 employees, you've been doing exactly that!
Except you apparently failed to note that the workers who call for "collaboration" have positions and titles like: managers, bosses, CEOs etc. It is exceptional indeed if any of them is capable of doing even a fraction of actual work his or her underlings do since they've, quite successfully may I add, invested all their time into skills to induce "collaboration" with others in which they reap nearly all the benefits.
And, surprisingly, a vast majority of those with "valuable skill sets" waste no time in their rush to "collaborate" with the said individuals, likely including you. It is only your fellow competitors for the favors of these masters of yours, or people whom you intend to "collaborate" into your own personal gain, that you reserve all your disdain for: those better know what they are all about, lest no profit!
As it is, in the "real world", "cheating" is one of the most valuable skills in our duplicity-based society: that is how the social elites are made. Those who learned early on to "play by the rules" are doomed to be forever serfs and to "collaborate" for those who did not.
Murder? Talk about intellectual dishonesty!
If you wanted a direct analogy, you would have to be talking about suicide. That is because drug use, like suicide, is a self-inflicted malady.
Funny thing is, if you were to try to enforce a ban on suicides, you would also need a draconian police state complete with daily brain scans to detect suicidal moods!
That is of course due to the obvious relationship between attempting to enforce one's "morality" onto others and basis for totalitarian police states: i.e. they are one and the same.
Actually you are quite right. The true reason for all the "prohibitions" is pencil-necked control-freaks who positively cannot stand someone, somewhere doing something in private they do not approve of. All the whining about "addictions" (in case of drugs) or "innocent children" (in case of sexual material on the net) is just a smoke screen.
Sexual gratification they derive from enforcing their will on others is what it is all about.
So, in your view, you prefer to COMBINE the effects of the "highly addictive substances" which "entrap lives" with all the side-effects of prohibition, since the prohibition has no chance of actually working in practice because in order to be effective, the counter measures require essentially a totalitarian police state apparatus to be erected, which also presents additional power concentration and profit opportunities for the "authorities" - see also: private prisons etc, not to mention dispensing with all of these inconvenient civil liberties and personal freedoms, Habeas Corpus and the like hindrances for the Holy Crusaders of Anti-Addiction.
So if you are intellectually honest with us, you also advocate a complete Big Brother 24/7/365 all-encompassing surveillance totalitarianism, since it is the only possible scenario under which the supposed "benefits" (i.e. no addicts) of the prohibition could ever be realized. That is, of course, if you are a believer in totalitarian police states and think Orwell's 1984 was an instruction manual.
All to "save us" from ourselves.
No?
You forget that in addition to having a convenience of such a law, the thugs, otherwise euphemistically known as "the authorities", must also create a pretense of "working for the greater good", "justice", "defending against The Bogeyman" and similar notions, so that the sheeple feel that they are giving up all their rights for "protection" or some such nonsense. Otherwise there is a lot of pensive bleating in the shearing shack. Some even dig in their hooves, or fewer yet even try to bolt or bite, which disrupts the orderly shearing process.
I actually I did not say there would be no logs, only that the law does not list them as a requirement by name. I would have to log logon/logoff times of ids/MAC addresses. When DMCA request arrives stating the 3 times the infringement occured (remember law talks about "multiple" offenders) I would simply look up and terminate all (going beyond the call of duty! eager to comply with the spirit of the law! the extra mile!) accounts that were active at those times and send the complainer a report of what user ids/MAC addresses were terminated. By doing so I complied with the law, terminated the offenders and disclosed, in good faith, all of the information on them available to me.
I fail to see how specifics make any difference. All that counts is that an average ISP is as defenseless against fake driver licenses, phony resident's names and the like as I am against forged MAC addresses. They can be no more reasonably expected to do retina scans and keep global biometrics databases then I to run around with a radiation detector and pounce on people whom I suspect of changing WiFi MAC addresses on their laptops.
It is open if the user ids and passwords are accepted from all comers as soon as you register them, very much the same way IRC is still open even though you need to register you nick/password on most channels.
Since there is nothing tying you personally (other then your MAC address) to the completely arbitrary nick/id and since there are no restrictions on how many nicks can you get and when, how is this affecting "openness"?!
No. The law does not specify that you cannot use NAT nor that you have to keep records. Only that you, quote a): adopted and reasonably implemented, and informs subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network of, a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network who are repeat infringers; - which we have: user ids and MAC addresses. And, quote: accommodates and does not interfere with standard technical measures, which is the case as NAT is a "standard technical measure", deployed by the tens of millions of instances worldwide.
My measures are no different than those of an ISP. What stops a user from moving to another address and using 2nd removed cousin's name who happened to be at present in Bolivia? Most ISPs have no provisions whatsoever for verifying real-world IDs and are happy if you pay the bill, under whatever name.
Easily done. You flash a typical Hot Spot software into your cheap router with an initial intercept page and a huge EULA in it threatening dire consequences for "piracy" etc, then you allow free access after people register with some made up user ids and passwords.
You can also set up a web server facing the other way with a form for DMCA complaints so that the big media (in theory) can ask to cut of particular users.
Now this probably would fail, because as many pointed out, the law in North America is has no longer anything to do with justice and large conglomerates end up with verdicts that show that there is one law for the social elites and a completely different one for everybody else, but doing this would satisfy the legal requirements and make the utter hypocrisy of the whole "justice" system just a bit more visible.
While its most prominent in the US, it is now apparent that there is an emerging pattern as of late in all the traditional "industrialized" societies: lack of any sort of adequate planning and preparation for a major disaster. Everyone in a position of authority seems to be always "caught by surprise" and "improvising".
Contrast this with the Chinese response after their major earthquake where they essentially mobilized the entire country to provide relief with massive columns of supplies rolling within hours into the zone. Yet even this example was somewhat diminished by the prior decades of shoddy construction and corrupted officials helping greedy builders to skimp on building safety .....
You gotta be kidding. Or are you talking about some Anime Japan and not the real thing?
If anything, the authorities were caught completely flat-footed and are still scrambling. People in many areas were left for days to their own devices with no official response anywhere in sight.
Confusion, incompetence, constant cover-ups, unresponsiveness, nepotism ... those are the defining characteristics of Japan's bureaucracy, be it governmental or corporate.
The trains running obsessively on time are the artifact of workers getting abused, sometimes physically, by their bosses when they are 1 minute late.
Japan is not a healthy society.
You can't do that. Only user installed certs can be deleted. You have to use "Get Info" on the Comodo cert, expand the "Trust" section and set the drop-down to "Do not trust". The icon for the cert will get a red "x" indicating its untrusted.
That is why you make me laugh so much.
The "you right-wingers" bit is a particularly precious example of your broad-brush tarring everyone who dares to fail to be awed by your religious fervor of choice, me in particular who finds all "right-wing" one-size-fits-all ideologies no less laughable than their "left wing" equivalents, exceeded in their humorous irony only by their Fevered Converts and Unwavering In The Face Of Mere Mortal Facts True Believers, such as you.
And so as soon as some inconvenient thing is said of your "1.5 century", one-and-only, Straight From the Mount, the Anointed Guru's mouth to your ear, the Ultimate Truth (TM) and Unchallengeable By All You Little People, Grand And Final Definition, you lash out at all of them "right wingers!" crowding you, right next to the "Bad people Mom told me about!'.
I also found it very educational to learn from you how all of these Most Evilly Evil Foes of yours are on a "Crusade", apparently to lure the hapless, innocent flock from the Sweet Waterhole of The Everlasting Happiness and to challenge the Ultimate And Divine Truth That Will Save Us All As Sayeth Unity100.
But we should fear not! For if you could only round up enough followers to setup a "reeducation" camp or two, to detect and Righteously Smite the Evil Crusaders, things would be set back on the The One And Only, 1.5 Century, Verily True, Shining Path To Universal Happiness And Endless Glory! No?
Actually, most of the problem in such discussions are the labels.
Insisting on applying labels rather then describing ideas has a way of descending to inanity and name calling.
Some terms, like "Socialism" (or "Fascism"), are only very vague and their definitions change depending on who is talking. The Wikipedia definition you insist on is far from authoritative (in fact there is no authoritative definition of any kind amongst even the scholars). And to add to the squabbling over the definition, you get the historical record of multiple regimes calling themselves "socialist" (such as USSR - the official government stance was that they were a "socialist" state in their "transition" to "communism") etc. while engaging in pervasive activities in direct contravention of even their own definition of the term.
Then you have confusion about what "corporatist" means in the ideology of "Fascism" (Mussolini was talking about "corpora" as in "businessmen" or "workers" not "corporations" as in GE or Microsoft).
In the end, one can only talk comparatively about individual policies of various regimes who called themselves this or that, irrespective of what the actual theoretical definition was claimed to be. Some of these policies (or their combinations) are unique to a class of regimes and that is how the labeling goes: Mussolini's Italy and Hitlers Germany shared the extreme nationalism, militarism, merger of the state and the wealth elites, racism etc. Contrast with the Warsaw Pact states (all claiming to be "socialist") where the wealthy elites were essentially eradicated and the state itself took their place (which is why some label the USSR as a "state capitalist" entity)
That is why in political discussions, excepting a very common and well established basic terms, when I use a label as a short-cut (which is all that labels are) in a discussion, I am rather prepared to explain in full what I mean by it, rather than point to a (rather controversial) Wikipedia page. Because politics, unlike hard sciences, has this issue with subjective terminology.
So your insistence that your definition is the "right" one is only going to encourage people to show up and insult you because, don't you know, it is theirs, and only theirs that is the "right" one ... and so the Holy Flame Wars commence.
This is sort of stupidity is why the "intellectual property" crowd is so morally bankrupt.
Let me spell out the difference for you:
1. you obtain information "illegally" - the original source data remains and its user can keep using it with no difficulties. Result: theoretical loss of theoretical income based on a make-believe concept of "artificial scarcity" of information, a concept introduced as an ill-planned and seriously back-firing method of promoting arts and sciences (many other methods can replace this scheme and remove the whole issue but would result in eradication of massive corporate profits based on scams rooted in the current system).
2. you disable a previously working (paid for) software feature remotely - the user can no longer use it. Result: actual monetary theft resulting from loss of access to paid-for functions.
It is "both ways" only in your mind.
I have the email notification for replies to my posts on and this is how I was able to keep replying in this thread.
That is also how I did not notice the comment tracking mess, yet another screwup in a very looong list.
The thing that really boggles my mind is that these idiots did not bother running any "beta" site, like any self-respecting high volume site does with any major redesign, but just went the whole hog, live on a production system and expected things to work!
And to take things completely into the realm of the bizarre is the fact that this is supposedly a premier IT/Tech site which should be a prime example of how to do things non-disruptively and with 100% backwards compatibility!
The whole thing just reeks of insanity...
If you are to be the example of the "users who still enjoy Slashdot" then I will gladly "clear up the bandwidth" for you so that you can splash about in your cesspool all you want along with your fellow members of the species of a vomit-covered loudmouth moron.
Clearly, having a website that exhibits even a most basic modicum of usability or readability on various devices is not very high on an average troll's priority list. As long as you can get your drooling idiocy exhibited somewhere for "free", everything is "excellent" as far as you are concerned.
The rest of us set the bar somewhat higher.
Its a high DPI monitor of course 3840x2400 / 22 inches = over 200 DPI.
You are of course right about the DPI, which makes this new layout even more retarded since there are phones and netbooks out there with 300 DPI displays...
Nothing is "wrong" with my system, it is simply the difference in font technologies and subsequently font scaling on different OSs. That is why it is such a no-no to create convoluted layouts that can break based on different font rendering strategies by different browsers on different platforms.
Poorly designed sites that depend on floating panels and similar crap encourage breakage when some parameters are not absolutely "perfect" and as the result "work" only on a few browsers on very few platforms under very specific conditions (and no, the fact that these combinations are the most "popular" is not an excuse)
Note that other properly formatted HTML contents (i.e. formatted for usability instead of "effect") has no such problems on my, or any other browser that even remotely follows basic markup language principles.
Have you tried a brain? Next time some moronic site decides to go with mega fonts that break layout when resized you will likely suggest that I go out and buy a higher resolution monitor yet. That way I could keep unplugging one monitor and plugging in another, from a selection of 10 or so, every time I switch sites...
You'd probably call it the "Web 10.0"!
Do you read threads before replying? This is something like the 5th time I am mentioning that the floating side menu overlaps and obscures main text if you resize fonts, be it with Ctrl+/- or any other way.