And as evidence of this, they presented e-mails in which Kim Dotcom and the other staff refused to pay rewards to uploaders on the basis that it looked like they "earned" them through pirated content. In fact, there was even evidence in the e-mails that they did this as much as possible as a cost-saving measure. I think Megaupload had a reputation for doing that at the time of the e-mails in question as well.
The Megaupload indictment is a really slippery, dishonest piece of work.
Not only that, but the company that complained about Google offering this additional information in search results was Microsoft, who do exactly the same thing in their own search engine Bing. They're fully aware that Google search will be less usable if the EU gets its way, and are effectively using the EU to try and force Google to cripple their search in order to drive users to Bing.
(Well, technically I think it was the Microsoft subsidiary which provides shopping results for Bing which submitted the EU complaint, but it's effectively the same thing.)
Now have fun finding a state that's willing to give copyright protection to US government works when the US isn't willing to permit copyright on them within the country.
it's not even necessarily businesses that benefit. For instance, a while ago the government - and the Guardian - were pushing for new laws on prostitution in the UK that were aimed at stopping sex trafficking. All the available scientific evidence suggested that they were trying to solve a problem that didn't exist rather than deal with reality and the actual workers who the law was meant to protect actually considered it to be dangerous. Despite this, said law very nearly passed in its original form just because our feminist lobbying groups demanded it, and in their world ideology outweighs actual facts.
When they start arresting people for choosing to drink natural milk, then they've gone too far and need to be downsized.
A few years ago I'd have agreed with you on that - raw milk's perfectly legal in the UK, you can even get cheese made with unpasteurised milk in the supermarkets, and it doesn't seem to do us any harm. Then I got some idea of the kinds of people who were deliberately flouting the law in the US, realised that they were marketing it as some kind of healthy natural option that was actually safer than pasteurised milk, and decided that you know what? Maybe banning it's not such a bad idea after all.
People did read the Wikipedia articles, though - they were there as part of a broader campaign by the students to create a viral hoax about the past that would spread.
I hadn't heard of Projektor before and had trouble finding it on the Kickstarter website. Here's their project page - turns out that Kickstarter noindexes projects that have failed to meet their funding goal in order to make it harder to find them.
They don't need to. Kickstarter takes an entirely risk-free 5% cut of the proceeds of any successful funding campaign, and it's not like they have to pay credit card fees and chargeback fees out of that - those are entirely taken out of the project creator's share of the proceeds - nor do they have to worry about liability for the inevitable Kickstarter-based scams and failures to deliver thanks to some careful disclaimers in their TOS. If you take a look at the amount of money some projects have raised through Kickstarter, that means they have an awful lot of income.
In theory it should be quite easy to poison the DHT used to find other members of the swarm so that genuine nodes can't actually find each other though. That wasn't practical back in the days when everyone used centralized trackers, but now that TPB has switched over to magnet: links that don't AFAIK even support them...
Not just financial service providers either. Apparently the #1 seller on Silk Road, the anonymous drugs marketplace, recently did a runner with the Bitcoins he was paid over the 4/20 rush and didn't actually fulfill any of his orders. Turns out that anonymous reputation systems aren't sufficient to protect against scammers. Whoever would have guessed?
Actually there's good reason to suspect that the big daddy of all Bitcoin organisations - MtGox - has been less than honest about its own losses to fraud and theft. Their main payment provider suffered massive fraud targetted at Bitcoin exchanges and clawed back all the fraudulent deposits, and Mt Gox's claim not to have been hit by this seemed really unlikely. As you pointed out when talking about bank theft, we only know about the ones we actually get to hear about and not the thefts that are hushed up sucessfully.
In theory, the poor may collectively be more powerful than the rich, but because there's more of them the costs associated with actually organising and exercising that power are higher. For instance, suppose a handful of wealthy billionaires think that they want the law changed in a particular way that benefits them. Because their individual benefits from the change are high and they each have lots of resources, they can rationally afford to carry out their own in-depth analysis of what the law change does and whether it will benefit them and to follow it as it passes through Congress to make sure that it doesn't get amended in detrimental ways. It'd be irrational for poor individuals to each carry out this kind of in-depth analysis of whether laws benefit them because their individual expected gain from expending the time and resources required to do so is so much smaller than the cost, leaving them reliant on third-party sources of information like Fox News which have their own - often conflicting - interests.
Nope, lithium primary cells are quite capable of failing explosively. In fact, I think in some ways they're more dangerous than lithium ion batteries because they contain elemental lithium in normal operation. Button cells are probably small enough and rigid enough to be reasonably safe, other lithium cells not so much.
From an economic perspective, money saved is money available for investment.
Yet it seems that the only person who does actually save money over the long term in order to make it available for investment when he needs it, the way that libertarian economic theory suggests people should do, is Warren Buffet - and libertarians seem to absolutely hate him for it! I've seen some really interesting conspiracy theories about how he's plotting to drive hard-working entreprenurial business owners out of business because, thanks to saving up money and shrewd investments, he could afford to buy up the businesses they'd mismangaged into the ground and operate them as going concerns rather than making all the staff suffer for the previous management's failings.
Except it doesn't mean that at all, because all those technologies are backwards-compatible. So any client that doesn't know about.secure should quite happily resolve.secure domains without using DNSSEC and connect to them over plain, unencrypted HTTP. In fact, I expect that in practice most clients won't validate DNSSEC because otherwise it'll break access to.secure sites on networks which don't support DNSSEC and their users will complain.
Look at the release date of Adobe CS6. It was released on the 7th of May, basically just a few days ago. Now look at when the bug apparently reported to them - back in September of last year! It looks very much like Adobe have delayed fixing a serious security vulnerability until they could get away with charging users for the fix.
There'd probably be more government-funded loans, but apparently banks realised they could pay high schools to give pupils who'd be likely to go to university mandatory hard-sell sessions for the commercial student loans disguised as financial education and leave the government option totally unmentioned.
That's not even the biggest KickStarter failure. Eyez by ZionEyez took in a cool $340,000, promised actual physical hardware in return, and hasn't delivered anything except broken promises and pictures of the development team's expensive holidays to exotic foreign paradises. There have been other less high-profile failures to deliver - Hanfree, some pen, various other things I'm forgetting...
Even putting aside the ones that didn't deliver at all, there's delayed delivery Vere Sandals claimed one date and then not only didn't deliver its backers' pledged rewards promptly, but actually started selling the same sandals that their backers were still waiting for, at retail, for less than the backers had paid for them!
Then there's the projects that seem to be stuck in hardware development hell, such as HexBright and OpenViszla.
I'm pretty sure that DDR2, DDR3 and DDR4 still only transfer data two times per clock cycle, because it really doesn't make sense to increase the ratio beyond that. Aha - according to Wikipedia, DDR2 transfers data twice every bus clock cycle, but because the RAM chips divide the bus clock by 2 to get their internal clock they transfer data 4 times per internal clock cycle. It appears that DDR3 divides the bus clock by 4, giving 8 transfers per internal clock cycle, but it's still only double data rate with respect to the external clock. I'm guessing DDR4 is similarly-designed.
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And as evidence of this, they presented e-mails in which Kim Dotcom and the other staff refused to pay rewards to uploaders on the basis that it looked like they "earned" them through pirated content. In fact, there was even evidence in the e-mails that they did this as much as possible as a cost-saving measure. I think Megaupload had a reputation for doing that at the time of the e-mails in question as well.
The Megaupload indictment is a really slippery, dishonest piece of work.
Not only that, but the company that complained about Google offering this additional information in search results was Microsoft, who do exactly the same thing in their own search engine Bing. They're fully aware that Google search will be less usable if the EU gets its way, and are effectively using the EU to try and force Google to cripple their search in order to drive users to Bing.
(Well, technically I think it was the Microsoft subsidiary which provides shopping results for Bing which submitted the EU complaint, but it's effectively the same thing.)
Now have fun finding a state that's willing to give copyright protection to US government works when the US isn't willing to permit copyright on them within the country.
it's not even necessarily businesses that benefit. For instance, a while ago the government - and the Guardian - were pushing for new laws on prostitution in the UK that were aimed at stopping sex trafficking. All the available scientific evidence suggested that they were trying to solve a problem that didn't exist rather than deal with reality and the actual workers who the law was meant to protect actually considered it to be dangerous. Despite this, said law very nearly passed in its original form just because our feminist lobbying groups demanded it, and in their world ideology outweighs actual facts.
When they start arresting people for choosing to drink natural milk, then they've gone too far and need to be downsized.
A few years ago I'd have agreed with you on that - raw milk's perfectly legal in the UK, you can even get cheese made with unpasteurised milk in the supermarkets, and it doesn't seem to do us any harm. Then I got some idea of the kinds of people who were deliberately flouting the law in the US, realised that they were marketing it as some kind of healthy natural option that was actually safer than pasteurised milk, and decided that you know what? Maybe banning it's not such a bad idea after all.
I'm kinda conflicted - is this off-topic or on-topic?
People did read the Wikipedia articles, though - they were there as part of a broader campaign by the students to create a viral hoax about the past that would spread.
On the other hand, if you search "what is the best web browser" (without the quotes!) like the person you're replying to did, you get slightly different results. I see, in order a comparison from some site I've never heard of with Google Chrome as #1, a LifeHacker page (Chrome again), a random Yahoo! Answers link ("Google Chrome is, for Windows users, the fastest web browser."), a review with 4 equal "best browsers" including Chrome, a PC Mag review (spoiler: Chrome wins!), a really annoying YouTube video where Firefox comes first, "Review: Best Web browser? Google's Chrome outshines pack", a review where Firefox wins, and finally one that doesn't answer the question at all.
Google also markets Chrome quite heavily at Linux users, unlike Mozilla...
I have an odd feeling that I've seen a genuine Kickstarter campaign that's eerily similar to this joke. Can't quite place it though.
I hadn't heard of Projektor before and had trouble finding it on the Kickstarter website. Here's their project page - turns out that Kickstarter noindexes projects that have failed to meet their funding goal in order to make it harder to find them.
They don't need to. Kickstarter takes an entirely risk-free 5% cut of the proceeds of any successful funding campaign, and it's not like they have to pay credit card fees and chargeback fees out of that - those are entirely taken out of the project creator's share of the proceeds - nor do they have to worry about liability for the inevitable Kickstarter-based scams and failures to deliver thanks to some careful disclaimers in their TOS. If you take a look at the amount of money some projects have raised through Kickstarter, that means they have an awful lot of income.
I just looked, and as far as I can tell Peerblock's block lists are dead and the third-party ones all seem to require subscription payments.
In theory it should be quite easy to poison the DHT used to find other members of the swarm so that genuine nodes can't actually find each other though. That wasn't practical back in the days when everyone used centralized trackers, but now that TPB has switched over to magnet: links that don't AFAIK even support them...
Not just financial service providers either. Apparently the #1 seller on Silk Road, the anonymous drugs marketplace, recently did a runner with the Bitcoins he was paid over the 4/20 rush and didn't actually fulfill any of his orders. Turns out that anonymous reputation systems aren't sufficient to protect against scammers. Whoever would have guessed?
Actually there's good reason to suspect that the big daddy of all Bitcoin organisations - MtGox - has been less than honest about its own losses to fraud and theft. Their main payment provider suffered massive fraud targetted at Bitcoin exchanges and clawed back all the fraudulent deposits, and Mt Gox's claim not to have been hit by this seemed really unlikely. As you pointed out when talking about bank theft, we only know about the ones we actually get to hear about and not the thefts that are hushed up sucessfully.
In theory, the poor may collectively be more powerful than the rich, but because there's more of them the costs associated with actually organising and exercising that power are higher. For instance, suppose a handful of wealthy billionaires think that they want the law changed in a particular way that benefits them. Because their individual benefits from the change are high and they each have lots of resources, they can rationally afford to carry out their own in-depth analysis of what the law change does and whether it will benefit them and to follow it as it passes through Congress to make sure that it doesn't get amended in detrimental ways. It'd be irrational for poor individuals to each carry out this kind of in-depth analysis of whether laws benefit them because their individual expected gain from expending the time and resources required to do so is so much smaller than the cost, leaving them reliant on third-party sources of information like Fox News which have their own - often conflicting - interests.
Nope, lithium primary cells are quite capable of failing explosively. In fact, I think in some ways they're more dangerous than lithium ion batteries because they contain elemental lithium in normal operation. Button cells are probably small enough and rigid enough to be reasonably safe, other lithium cells not so much.
From an economic perspective, money saved is money available for investment.
Yet it seems that the only person who does actually save money over the long term in order to make it available for investment when he needs it, the way that libertarian economic theory suggests people should do, is Warren Buffet - and libertarians seem to absolutely hate him for it! I've seen some really interesting conspiracy theories about how he's plotting to drive hard-working entreprenurial business owners out of business because, thanks to saving up money and shrewd investments, he could afford to buy up the businesses they'd mismangaged into the ground and operate them as going concerns rather than making all the staff suffer for the previous management's failings.
All the TLDs that are over three characters long have gone almost totally unused for their intended purposes.
Except it doesn't mean that at all, because all those technologies are backwards-compatible. So any client that doesn't know about .secure should quite happily resolve .secure domains without using DNSSEC and connect to them over plain, unencrypted HTTP. In fact, I expect that in practice most clients won't validate DNSSEC because otherwise it'll break access to .secure sites on networks which don't support DNSSEC and their users will complain.
Look at the release date of Adobe CS6. It was released on the 7th of May, basically just a few days ago. Now look at when the bug apparently reported to them - back in September of last year! It looks very much like Adobe have delayed fixing a serious security vulnerability until they could get away with charging users for the fix.
There'd probably be more government-funded loans, but apparently banks realised they could pay high schools to give pupils who'd be likely to go to university mandatory hard-sell sessions for the commercial student loans disguised as financial education and leave the government option totally unmentioned.
That's not even the biggest KickStarter failure. Eyez by ZionEyez took in a cool $340,000, promised actual physical hardware in return, and hasn't delivered anything except broken promises and pictures of the development team's expensive holidays to exotic foreign paradises. There have been other less high-profile failures to deliver - Hanfree, some pen, various other things I'm forgetting...
Even putting aside the ones that didn't deliver at all, there's delayed delivery Vere Sandals claimed one date and then not only didn't deliver its backers' pledged rewards promptly, but actually started selling the same sandals that their backers were still waiting for, at retail, for less than the backers had paid for them!
Then there's the projects that seem to be stuck in hardware development hell, such as HexBright and OpenViszla.
I'm pretty sure that DDR2, DDR3 and DDR4 still only transfer data two times per clock cycle, because it really doesn't make sense to increase the ratio beyond that. Aha - according to Wikipedia, DDR2 transfers data twice every bus clock cycle, but because the RAM chips divide the bus clock by 2 to get their internal clock they transfer data 4 times per internal clock cycle. It appears that DDR3 divides the bus clock by 4, giving 8 transfers per internal clock cycle, but it's still only double data rate with respect to the external clock. I'm guessing DDR4 is similarly-designed.