The problem is that an idiot with a camera can manipulate the footage for their own gains. This happened in Australia just recently where a fairly violent arrest was made at the Mardi Gras after a guy 'groped' a stranger (whether it was sexual assault or not is for the courts to decide). The video released initially showed the cops in a very bad light - seeming unprovoked brutality, throwing him to the ground etc. Video and feedback that came out later showed that the cops started by trying to talk to the guy, who then realised he could actually be in a bit of trouble and became very violent, and while it may be that the police used 'excessive force' during the arrest, measuring the exact amount of force required is a very difficult thing to do so I don't really see that there is much of a problem. So go ahead and film whatever you want, but if you release the video you should be held to the same level of accountability as journalists (which unfortunately these days isn't very high...)
Forget the journalist standards. Just hold people to the same standard for libel/defamation, whether it be written or deceptively presented video recordings. Video recordings made out of context are similar to quote mining. Presenting a video where it can reasonably be determined that the intention is to deceive should be no different to taking the quote "I love seeing child porn users being prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law" being presented without the emboldened text with a reasonably understood attempt to defame the originator of the quote.
Make personal phone calls with the phone on *speaker*. And then they would get PO'd at *me* for objecting.
I bloody hate that, along with it's cousin, the practice of using speakerphone to dial and only pick-up the handset once the call has been answered. beep boop beep hoop beep boop beepy boop. ring ring, ring ring, ring ring, ring ring "Hello" *picks up phone*
A cube-neighbour used to do the speakerphone call thing. He stopped doing it after I began joining in with his conversations.
The purpose of patents is to encourage and enable inventors to invent. If they have to spend all of their time and money dealing with lawyers and accountants and marketeers, then the system is broken.
Agreed, and do inventors typically spend all of their time and money dealing with lawyers, accountants, and marketeers? Probably not or we wouldn't be seeing any inventions.
- no/dev (bye-bye Unix philosophy cornerstone "everything is a file"); - unusable "locate" that doesn't find all the stuff it should (because Apple wants you to use Spotlight, the command line is bad, you silly!); - much of the userland isn't aware of the HFS+ filesystem extensions (have fun cp'ing files, discovering months later that - oops! - the stuff had a resource fork and is now unusable -- verrry dependable!); - case insensitive filesystem by default, you could switch to case sensitive for compatibility with any other Unix in the universe (have fun reformatting and reinstalling) but - alas! - important application software won't support it (photoshop & others); - no cron! If you want to get it to do things periodically, you either gotta write freaking XML for launchd, or run Vixie Cron in addition to launchd. No thanks!
If OSX is Unix, it's the worst Unix I've ever seen. No serious command line nerd could ever like it (OTOH, it's perfect for know-nothings who like to click on pretty pictures). Using it is a totally different (as in "worse") experience than using any BSD (or Linux!), so spare me the old "OSX is BSD" hearsay!
So you noticed that/dev/ still exists. Well done. Although mounting is automatic (which I hardly see as being a bad feature and something unique to Mac OS X) there's no reason why you can't manually mount stuff as you wish. man mount.
On locate, log a bug if it's not working as intended. This is what techie people do. I'd opt for mdfind unless I have a script that *absolutely must* use locate. mdfind is fast and isn't reliant upon having an up-to-date locate database.
cp by default preserves resource forks. It's been that way for over six years! You're right that prior to that it was a mess during the period when resource forks were still very much used in Classic applications, and CpMac was kind of hidden away in the developer tools. Anyway resource forks were problematic for a long time. Saw plenty of issues where people would email files or copy them to alien filesystems, ending up with broken applications. man CpMac and man cp.
Agreed on the case insensitive default of HFS+. That I find a bit odd.
On cron - it was at first odd to see it go but I'm now happy working with launchd. XML isn't a pain if you have templates ready, or use something to generate the XML for you. Granted it's not as straightforward as popping a line in to a crontab. Personal preference and use cases really. I like launchd because a task can be triggered by a fairly broad range of events. I too miss the simplicity of cron.
Incidentally, I've had similar issues switching between BSD and Linux. Shit's not necessarily where I expect it to be. I'd say your gripes are more to do with outdated information and personal preference. I stick with BSDs, not because I think they're inherently a better Unix than Linux - more because BSD feels like coming home. Linux feels like a parallel universe where things are sufficiently different to be noticeable, yet overall pretty familiar.
Ello sir. Yeah, it can definitely work that way. Being first to market isn't everything though. I'd imagine that cancer cure cost a fair bit of money to develop. Even if you're first to market, I can sweep in after you and sell far more cheaply (assuming the actual manufacturing costs to be way lower than the development process). My main point is that it is stealing, and that the term is imprecise.
Wow... AC is such a BAMF that they can't even take responsibility for their own post.
He can't. The AC is clearly some kind of genius, and he's saving himself for when humanity's need is greatest. Until that time comes he must remain in the shadows, in his secret lair. It's a bit like the bat cave, equipped with fleshlights and a bath robe that's a complex ecosystem of melted cheese and bacteria. Where Batman had Alfred, he has mum. AC ponders his own excellence and forgives those who pass him over for jobs, he contents himself with the knowledge that he's way better than any of those college sheeple (probably 133% better).
Don't believe me? *chuckles* I used to be like you, and I don't blame you for doubting his excellence in whatever it is he imagines himself doing. The truth will one day hit you, and it'll be as hard as the sock AC keeps hidden behind his bed.
I can't figure out what the difference open of closed source would make here. You already have the application (maybe also the source), litigation against the developer doesn't make that go away. And support for a closed source product also disapears if they can't legally call it their application.
Although it might not make it go away, legal action could kill hopes of future releases and support. The same thing applies to all software vendors, obviously with the smaller operations being more vulnerable. I believe as well that users could be sued for patent infringement.
For enterprises with thousands of users it's not a minor thing to have to transition users to new software, and understandable that they prefer software where the vendor indemnifies them against patent suits. There's a market though for companies who can package and support FOSS software, and perhaps provide indemnification.
You're still stuck on a singular definition of stealing that quite obviously isn't exclusive. Consider your examples:
When you steal a kiss, you deny someone else that kiss
Stealing a kiss is about surprising someone with a kiss. Your definition is a bit odd, and more than a little creepy. It creates an odd situation where usage of anything that can only be used by a single person at any given time would be redefined as stealing. I'm stealing a chair at the bar because no-one else can use it while I'm seated there?
When you steal a look, you're looking at something before others do.
Again you have an oddly specific understanding of this expression that seems contingent on denying something to others, or at least beating them to it. What if I'm the last man on Earth - is it possible to steal a look at something when there's no-one else around? If someone else has already stolen a look, can I no-longer steal a look?
When you steal an idea, you gain its advantages before the original creator
So an idea can't be stolen if the creator has already enjoyed its advantages? That's patently nonsensical. While it's true that stealing the idea could devalue the idea, stealing the idea requires neither timing (slipping in before the creator can enjoy the idea) nor advantage over the creator.
A woman has stolen my heart. Now my heart is not mine to command any more
More awkwardly for Fox, the Glee version uses Jonathan Coulton's revised lyrics. Listen at 2:16 (of the Glee version) to hear the line "Johnny C's in trouble". I don't know if they owe him money, but certainly a nod in his direction wouldn't have been a bad thing. I don't watch this High School Glee Factor Musical shite, so maybe someone with impaired tastes could tell us whether or not there's any kind of credit to him?
That anime soundtrack stuff is pretty obscure, yet my ears require a higher standard of obscurity. With Haitian techno becoming a bit passe*, my ears cry out for a Lebanese barber playing an oud.
Although d33tah may be correct (dependant on the licence behind the code being "stolen"), your reply is exactly why I don't describe copyright/licence infringement as "stealing". Quite a few people seem to forget that the word has for a very long time had multiple meanings. Would you steal yourself away to steal a kiss? Ever stolen a look at something in the hope of stealing an idea?
TV modulators came as standard with the Amiga, at least in '87 when I got my first one... Shame it stuck out the back!
Yeah, that modulator was a pain. It was about as long as half of the Amiga itself, so I ended up having to cut a hole in the back of my computer desk so I didn't have the Amiga hanging over the front. At the time the Commodore supplied monitors were way to expensive to consider on top of a computer that way more expensive than anything else my parents had ever bought me. Best bloody thing they ever bought me though. I contribute a lot of what my current career to nights spent hacking around on that thing. Hooray for AmigaDOS, AMOS and DICE C.
The CEO's name is James Sinegal, and he's decided to earn less than $500k. Wall Street hates the dude because they're afraid he's going to start some kind of trend where bonuses go down and then they won't be able to afford that new infinity pool in their houses in St Lucia.)
Well, 2 million dollars in 2011 and 3.5 million in 2010 (if you include stock and other perks). Still that shouldn't detract from a company that seems to be doing better by its workers than similar large chains, both in terms of pay and health coverage.
While what you're saying is mostly true, I'd hope there would be room for decency and having things in moderation. For instance, thinking of an extreme situation, if a person had been kidnapped and stripped of their clothes but managed to escape, I'd hope that there would be some protections in place to prevent the inevitable videos of their naked run for help down the street from getting out of control. Obviously, we can't mandate common decency, nor should we do so, but there should be some way to protect people who have no meaningful control over the fact that they're in public.
I consider such a video being hawked around for cheap laughs to be disgusting, but still I wouldn't hope for protections on this. There's no good way to protect such fringe cases without creating legal nightmares for a much larger group of people. Extreme situations aren't typically a good basis for general decision making or argumentation.
And, what if I did not want the tape to be posted? Maybe I did something shameful and don’t want it to be public? Maybe something that is implied to be shameful – like a false arrest. Let’s say you were pulled over for a moving violation in a red light district? A little careful editing and it could look very bad.
Malicious editing would be best handled through libel. It'd be the same if someone posted an article stating only that "MysteriousPreacher was stopped by police in an area frequented by prostitutes and drug dealers". Technically that could be accurate, yet it's horribly misleading if this area is a common route from x to y, and I was pulled over for a broken light while heading to the soup kitchen to do some volunteer work. Even with this difficulty in mind, it's better than making it illegal to record and publish such incidents.
There should be some restrictions, such as when a court has ordered that the name of a person cannot be disclosed. In general though, it's far better than the slippery slope of sparing the blushes of people.
This is why I tend to go ballistic when someone argues that we should stick with the larger vendor because they provide product stability. I've been told we can't count on the smaller guys to stay in the market and be able to provide support over the long term.
Folding the functionality of a product in to another (after 13 years of service) is hardly short-term or being done on a whim. That's pretty good stability by just about any standard.
I can imagine a pretty big difference between informal communication (Internet fun) and the formal language required of a thesis. I'd be surprised to see big differences among the Internet activities, assuming that what you post on these forums is pretty much of equal value. A disposable Slashdot post is different to a Wikipedia edit that must be bound by the very specific requirements of Wikipedia (or a similar site where rules would affect your usual style of communication).
In terms of online communication, leaving aside sites where I'm writing something productive and intended to be less ephemeral than a forum post, the big difference is down to time pressures. When in WoW, the quality of my English drops a fair bit because I have less time to consider my writing, and I can't edit something once it's been sent.
Styles could vary a great deal if the author is affecting a style. For example, the well educated guy who slips in to a mockney speech pattern when he's down the King's Head or at Uni, while at home he'll have the well spoken accent his mum knows him for. I'm not deriding this practice. I worked to lose some of my "Saaf London" accent, because I didn't like it. Unfortunately I doubt I'll ever pronounce the "th" sound as I'd like, but at least I don't sound like an extra out of The Bill. It helped me a great deal as a trainer to make myself more clearly understandable to non-native English speakers.
Poverty and drugs have a complex relationship. If you're in a depressed area, where there's not much work and even less to do, I'd suspect you're more likely to be slipping in to alcohol and drugs to medicate yourself and kill time. Doesn't have to be expensive. The local homeless alcoholics manage to find pretty cheap hard booze. In a previous apartment I had the joy of a bunch of them sitting nearby for their daily drinking sessions, and from the bottles and cans left behind got a pretty good insight in to which drinks were on special at the time. It's not as if a poor guy is going out every day to buy himself a bottle of Laphroaig Single Malt. Crack and meth can vary pretty drastically in pricing, and with meth a dedicated meth head can cook it up fairly cheaply. And yes, in such situations they're putting drugs/booze before food. It's why I don't normally give money to beggars. These local unfortunates beg when they're not drinking, and then go to the local shelter for a meal and a bed.
Drug abuse can cause poverty, that's true. It's also true that poverty can lead to drug abuse, and certainly can sustain poverty. Even when the substances they abuse are cheap, it makes them incapable of functioning in a regular job, pretty much trapping them in a downwards spiral.
A western-owned account suddenly being accessed from a Chinese IP smells like a compromised account. In the past seen a pretty big chunk of account hacking and credit card fraud coming from China. I'm guessing that Steam has some kind of fraud detection that tracks suspicious behaviours, and suspends accounts (or at least blocks possible damaging actions) when there's a reasonable chance of it being a compromised account.
Realistically, it's about as normal as going from not traveling at all, and never spending more than a few hundred dollars on a card, to hitting 5 countries in 5 days, making large purchases in each one. No wonder the credit card company would suspend the card or at least attempt to contact you.
Main problem I see here is that it presumably took a month to fix after you had first contacted support.
am not an epidemiologist; but it is worth noting that the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is sort of a John Birch version of the American Medical Association, with some... intriguingly contrarian... theories on a variety of matters.
I'd forgotten about those nutjobs. Not sure if he's still on payroll, but at one point Andrew Schlafly, of Conservapedia fame, enjoyed wingnut welfare in the form of an appointment as the AAPS general counsel. Oh the fun when Andy goes to court. Pro-tip, Andy: When the judge laughs, he's not laughing with you.
The AAPS claims to be non-partisan, and technically that's an accurate claim. In reality though, any endorsement they've given (of which there have been quite a few for candidates) will go to Republicans. They have in the past criticised Republicans. This is understandable. In terms of political alignment, the AAPS is pretty far right of Santorum.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that an idiot with a camera can manipulate the footage for their own gains. This happened in Australia just recently where a fairly violent arrest was made at the Mardi Gras after a guy 'groped' a stranger (whether it was sexual assault or not is for the courts to decide). The video released initially showed the cops in a very bad light - seeming unprovoked brutality, throwing him to the ground etc. Video and feedback that came out later showed that the cops started by trying to talk to the guy, who then realised he could actually be in a bit of trouble and became very violent, and while it may be that the police used 'excessive force' during the arrest, measuring the exact amount of force required is a very difficult thing to do so I don't really see that there is much of a problem. So go ahead and film whatever you want, but if you release the video you should be held to the same level of accountability as journalists (which unfortunately these days isn't very high...)
Forget the journalist standards. Just hold people to the same standard for libel/defamation, whether it be written or deceptively presented video recordings. Video recordings made out of context are similar to quote mining. Presenting a video where it can reasonably be determined that the intention is to deceive should be no different to taking the quote "I love seeing child porn users being prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law" being presented without the emboldened text with a reasonably understood attempt to defame the originator of the quote.
Make personal phone calls with the phone on *speaker*. And then they would get PO'd at *me* for objecting.
I bloody hate that, along with it's cousin, the practice of using speakerphone to dial and only pick-up the handset once the call has been answered. beep boop beep hoop beep boop beepy boop. ring ring, ring ring, ring ring, ring ring "Hello" *picks up phone*
A cube-neighbour used to do the speakerphone call thing. He stopped doing it after I began joining in with his conversations.
The purpose of patents is to encourage and enable inventors to invent. If they have to spend all of their time and money dealing with lawyers and accountants and marketeers, then the system is broken.
Agreed, and do inventors typically spend all of their time and money dealing with lawyers, accountants, and marketeers? Probably not or we wouldn't be seeing any inventions.
- no /dev (bye-bye Unix philosophy cornerstone "everything is a file");
- unusable "locate" that doesn't find all the stuff it should (because Apple wants you to use Spotlight, the command line is bad, you silly!);
- much of the userland isn't aware of the HFS+ filesystem extensions (have fun cp'ing files, discovering months later that - oops! - the stuff had a resource fork and is now unusable -- verrry dependable!);
- case insensitive filesystem by default, you could switch to case sensitive for compatibility with any other Unix in the universe (have fun reformatting and reinstalling) but - alas! - important application software won't support it (photoshop & others);
- no cron! If you want to get it to do things periodically, you either gotta write freaking XML for launchd, or run Vixie Cron in addition to launchd. No thanks!
If OSX is Unix, it's the worst Unix I've ever seen. No serious command line nerd could ever like it (OTOH, it's perfect for know-nothings who like to click on pretty pictures). Using it is a totally different (as in "worse") experience than using any BSD (or Linux!), so spare me the old "OSX is BSD" hearsay!
So you noticed that /dev/ still exists. Well done. Although mounting is automatic (which I hardly see as being a bad feature and something unique to Mac OS X) there's no reason why you can't manually mount stuff as you wish. man mount.
On locate, log a bug if it's not working as intended. This is what techie people do. I'd opt for mdfind unless I have a script that *absolutely must* use locate. mdfind is fast and isn't reliant upon having an up-to-date locate database.
cp by default preserves resource forks. It's been that way for over six years! You're right that prior to that it was a mess during the period when resource forks were still very much used in Classic applications, and CpMac was kind of hidden away in the developer tools. Anyway resource forks were problematic for a long time. Saw plenty of issues where people would email files or copy them to alien filesystems, ending up with broken applications. man CpMac and man cp.
Agreed on the case insensitive default of HFS+. That I find a bit odd.
On cron - it was at first odd to see it go but I'm now happy working with launchd. XML isn't a pain if you have templates ready, or use something to generate the XML for you. Granted it's not as straightforward as popping a line in to a crontab. Personal preference and use cases really. I like launchd because a task can be triggered by a fairly broad range of events. I too miss the simplicity of cron.
Incidentally, I've had similar issues switching between BSD and Linux. Shit's not necessarily where I expect it to be. I'd say your gripes are more to do with outdated information and personal preference. I stick with BSDs, not because I think they're inherently a better Unix than Linux - more because BSD feels like coming home. Linux feels like a parallel universe where things are sufficiently different to be noticeable, yet overall pretty familiar.
Ello sir. Yeah, it can definitely work that way. Being first to market isn't everything though. I'd imagine that cancer cure cost a fair bit of money to develop. Even if you're first to market, I can sweep in after you and sell far more cheaply (assuming the actual manufacturing costs to be way lower than the development process). My main point is that it is stealing, and that the term is imprecise.
Wow... AC is such a BAMF that they can't even take responsibility for their own post.
He can't. The AC is clearly some kind of genius, and he's saving himself for when humanity's need is greatest. Until that time comes he must remain in the shadows, in his secret lair. It's a bit like the bat cave, equipped with fleshlights and a bath robe that's a complex ecosystem of melted cheese and bacteria. Where Batman had Alfred, he has mum. AC ponders his own excellence and forgives those who pass him over for jobs, he contents himself with the knowledge that he's way better than any of those college sheeple (probably 133% better).
Don't believe me? *chuckles* I used to be like you, and I don't blame you for doubting his excellence in whatever it is he imagines himself doing. The truth will one day hit you, and it'll be as hard as the sock AC keeps hidden behind his bed.
I can't figure out what the difference open of closed source would make here. You already have the application (maybe also the source), litigation against the developer doesn't make that go away. And support for a closed source product also disapears if they can't legally call it their application.
Although it might not make it go away, legal action could kill hopes of future releases and support. The same thing applies to all software vendors, obviously with the smaller operations being more vulnerable. I believe as well that users could be sued for patent infringement.
For enterprises with thousands of users it's not a minor thing to have to transition users to new software, and understandable that they prefer software where the vendor indemnifies them against patent suits. There's a market though for companies who can package and support FOSS software, and perhaps provide indemnification.
You're still stuck on a singular definition of stealing that quite obviously isn't exclusive. Consider your examples:
When you steal a kiss, you deny someone else that kiss
Stealing a kiss is about surprising someone with a kiss. Your definition is a bit odd, and more than a little creepy. It creates an odd situation where usage of anything that can only be used by a single person at any given time would be redefined as stealing. I'm stealing a chair at the bar because no-one else can use it while I'm seated there?
When you steal a look, you're looking at something before others do.
Again you have an oddly specific understanding of this expression that seems contingent on denying something to others, or at least beating them to it. What if I'm the last man on Earth - is it possible to steal a look at something when there's no-one else around? If someone else has already stolen a look, can I no-longer steal a look?
When you steal an idea, you gain its advantages before the original creator
So an idea can't be stolen if the creator has already enjoyed its advantages? That's patently nonsensical. While it's true that stealing the idea could devalue the idea, stealing the idea requires neither timing (slipping in before the creator can enjoy the idea) nor advantage over the creator.
A woman has stolen my heart. Now my heart is not mine to command any more
Agreed.
More awkwardly for Fox, the Glee version uses Jonathan Coulton's revised lyrics. Listen at 2:16 (of the Glee version) to hear the line "Johnny C's in trouble". I don't know if they owe him money, but certainly a nod in his direction wouldn't have been a bad thing. I don't watch this High School Glee Factor Musical shite, so maybe someone with impaired tastes could tell us whether or not there's any kind of credit to him?
That anime soundtrack stuff is pretty obscure, yet my ears require a higher standard of obscurity. With Haitian techno becoming a bit passe*, my ears cry out for a Lebanese barber playing an oud.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy6zRQsmeb0
He's actually pretty decent.
* Will Slashdot beat the Amish in the race to build a discussion site that supports UTF-8 encoded comments?
Jo Co's "Baby Got Back (In the style of Glee) Single"
https://itunes.apple.com/ie/album/baby-got-back-in-style-glee/id596893770
It's shitty to do this without so much as a tip of the hat to the guy whose arrangement they clearly lifted almost wholesale.
Although d33tah may be correct (dependant on the licence behind the code being "stolen"), your reply is exactly why I don't describe copyright/licence infringement as "stealing". Quite a few people seem to forget that the word has for a very long time had multiple meanings. Would you steal yourself away to steal a kiss? Ever stolen a look at something in the hope of stealing an idea?
TV modulators came as standard with the Amiga, at least in '87 when I got my first one... Shame it stuck out the back!
Yeah, that modulator was a pain. It was about as long as half of the Amiga itself, so I ended up having to cut a hole in the back of my computer desk so I didn't have the Amiga hanging over the front. At the time the Commodore supplied monitors were way to expensive to consider on top of a computer that way more expensive than anything else my parents had ever bought me. Best bloody thing they ever bought me though. I contribute a lot of what my current career to nights spent hacking around on that thing. Hooray for AmigaDOS, AMOS and DICE C.
Offtopic, but damned good posts. Quite enjoyed reading your stuff - even the less kosher suggestion in this thread.
The CEO's name is James Sinegal, and he's decided to earn less than $500k. Wall Street hates the dude because they're afraid he's going to start some kind of trend where bonuses go down and then they won't be able to afford that new infinity pool in their houses in St Lucia.)
Well, 2 million dollars in 2011 and 3.5 million in 2010 (if you include stock and other perks). Still that shouldn't detract from a company that seems to be doing better by its workers than similar large chains, both in terms of pay and health coverage.
While what you're saying is mostly true, I'd hope there would be room for decency and having things in moderation. For instance, thinking of an extreme situation, if a person had been kidnapped and stripped of their clothes but managed to escape, I'd hope that there would be some protections in place to prevent the inevitable videos of their naked run for help down the street from getting out of control. Obviously, we can't mandate common decency, nor should we do so, but there should be some way to protect people who have no meaningful control over the fact that they're in public.
I consider such a video being hawked around for cheap laughs to be disgusting, but still I wouldn't hope for protections on this. There's no good way to protect such fringe cases without creating legal nightmares for a much larger group of people. Extreme situations aren't typically a good basis for general decision making or argumentation.
So we can say it's a good thing that people can video tape you in public, keeps the riff-Raff in line and pants on.
Or gives them an audience to play to. Some people seem to revel in making arses of themselves to as big an audience as is possible.
I think the editing could constitute libel. Good luck though establishing that if the content shown is technically factual.
And, what if I did not want the tape to be posted? Maybe I did something shameful and don’t want it to be public? Maybe something that is implied to be shameful – like a false arrest. Let’s say you were pulled over for a moving violation in a red light district? A little careful editing and it could look very bad.
Malicious editing would be best handled through libel. It'd be the same if someone posted an article stating only that "MysteriousPreacher was stopped by police in an area frequented by prostitutes and drug dealers". Technically that could be accurate, yet it's horribly misleading if this area is a common route from x to y, and I was pulled over for a broken light while heading to the soup kitchen to do some volunteer work. Even with this difficulty in mind, it's better than making it illegal to record and publish such incidents.
There should be some restrictions, such as when a court has ordered that the name of a person cannot be disclosed. In general though, it's far better than the slippery slope of sparing the blushes of people.
This is why I tend to go ballistic when someone argues that we should stick with the larger vendor because they provide product stability. I've been told we can't count on the smaller guys to stay in the market and be able to provide support over the long term.
Folding the functionality of a product in to another (after 13 years of service) is hardly short-term or being done on a whim. That's pretty good stability by just about any standard.
I can imagine a pretty big difference between informal communication (Internet fun) and the formal language required of a thesis. I'd be surprised to see big differences among the Internet activities, assuming that what you post on these forums is pretty much of equal value. A disposable Slashdot post is different to a Wikipedia edit that must be bound by the very specific requirements of Wikipedia (or a similar site where rules would affect your usual style of communication).
In terms of online communication, leaving aside sites where I'm writing something productive and intended to be less ephemeral than a forum post, the big difference is down to time pressures. When in WoW, the quality of my English drops a fair bit because I have less time to consider my writing, and I can't edit something once it's been sent.
Styles could vary a great deal if the author is affecting a style. For example, the well educated guy who slips in to a mockney speech pattern when he's down the King's Head or at Uni, while at home he'll have the well spoken accent his mum knows him for. I'm not deriding this practice. I worked to lose some of my "Saaf London" accent, because I didn't like it. Unfortunately I doubt I'll ever pronounce the "th" sound as I'd like, but at least I don't sound like an extra out of The Bill. It helped me a great deal as a trainer to make myself more clearly understandable to non-native English speakers.
Please to make explaining in swiftness.
Poverty and drugs have a complex relationship. If you're in a depressed area, where there's not much work and even less to do, I'd suspect you're more likely to be slipping in to alcohol and drugs to medicate yourself and kill time. Doesn't have to be expensive. The local homeless alcoholics manage to find pretty cheap hard booze. In a previous apartment I had the joy of a bunch of them sitting nearby for their daily drinking sessions, and from the bottles and cans left behind got a pretty good insight in to which drinks were on special at the time. It's not as if a poor guy is going out every day to buy himself a bottle of Laphroaig Single Malt. Crack and meth can vary pretty drastically in pricing, and with meth a dedicated meth head can cook it up fairly cheaply. And yes, in such situations they're putting drugs/booze before food. It's why I don't normally give money to beggars. These local unfortunates beg when they're not drinking, and then go to the local shelter for a meal and a bed.
Drug abuse can cause poverty, that's true. It's also true that poverty can lead to drug abuse, and certainly can sustain poverty. Even when the substances they abuse are cheap, it makes them incapable of functioning in a regular job, pretty much trapping them in a downwards spiral.
A western-owned account suddenly being accessed from a Chinese IP smells like a compromised account. In the past seen a pretty big chunk of account hacking and credit card fraud coming from China. I'm guessing that Steam has some kind of fraud detection that tracks suspicious behaviours, and suspends accounts (or at least blocks possible damaging actions) when there's a reasonable chance of it being a compromised account.
Realistically, it's about as normal as going from not traveling at all, and never spending more than a few hundred dollars on a card, to hitting 5 countries in 5 days, making large purchases in each one. No wonder the credit card company would suspend the card or at least attempt to contact you.
Main problem I see here is that it presumably took a month to fix after you had first contacted support.
The preferred moniker is GNU/Torvalds.
am not an epidemiologist; but it is worth noting that the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is sort of a John Birch version of the American Medical Association, with some... intriguingly contrarian... theories on a variety of matters.
I'd forgotten about those nutjobs. Not sure if he's still on payroll, but at one point Andrew Schlafly, of Conservapedia fame, enjoyed wingnut welfare in the form of an appointment as the AAPS general counsel. Oh the fun when Andy goes to court. Pro-tip, Andy: When the judge laughs, he's not laughing with you.
The AAPS claims to be non-partisan, and technically that's an accurate claim. In reality though, any endorsement they've given (of which there have been quite a few for candidates) will go to Republicans. They have in the past criticised Republicans. This is understandable. In terms of political alignment, the AAPS is pretty far right of Santorum.