Really, the way to do a feast is with a bunch of friends and/or family, not by yourself. So get together with some people, do something potluck-like (if you're doing turkey, that's obviously one person's job, but the rest of you can still make stuff, or help the person who's doing the main course.) Bring different things, have fun together.
Yes, it's geeky - it's an artificial imitation vaguely-turkey-like product that can only exist because of a combination of complex technologies (including the transportation networks that get the things to the store, and the marketing processes that make it possible to make enough Tofurkey to be profitable.)
And ok, it doesn't taste quite like the real thing, and I'm not actually going to bother. Traditional American Thanksgiving feasts have enough non-meat dishes that you can really just skip the actual turkey.
A few years ago I was driving back from the dentist after getting a root canal, and realized it was good that I was unlikely to get hit with a drug test. Novocaine's close enough to cocaine that it would trigger that one, codeine's an opiate, the Sudafed I'd taken as a decongestant is a mild amphetamine, ibuprofen causes false positives for marijuana tests (maybe not for this saliva test, but it does for the standard urine test.) The drug that would have actually affected my driving (nitrous oxide) doesn't get tested for, and it'd had plenty of time to wear off before I left.
I did find the "Percent Reporting" numbers to be frustratingly misleading, though, and that's not just the fault of Google; the California Secretary of State website had similar issues. The problem is that, while they can say "X% of Precincts Reporting", that doesn't actually tell you vote counts in jurisdictions that allow absentee ballots, voting by mail, or other slow-to-count voting methods. So for instance, some of the California races for US Congress took a week to finish counting, even though they had 100% of the precincts reporting by Wednesday noon or so. (And they were close enough races that the counts mattered, and the absentee ballots could hypothetically change the winner.)
Google's Election Results map would show you either two-candidate or multi-candidate results. Sometimes you had to click to get the multi-candidate results, but it was all there, so you could see the percentages that went to Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, other third-party and independent candidates. Getting the details for Congress was a bit tougher, because they did a better job of visuals for the President, Senate, and Governor than for the 438 district races, but the results were there.
A while back I filled out one of those surveys about "where do you get your news?" I checked "Conservative Talk Radio", and gave my local NPR station as the station.
They're not "Crazy Right-Wing Talk Radio", they're Establishment Radio, which is conservative in the more traditional sense. If there's a government position on something, they may examine it from multiple sides, but it'll be based on the government's framing of the questions, with the presumption that that's an appropriate framing to use. "Where will we find Iraq's WMDs?" "Which countries really belong in the Axis of Evil?"
A year or so ago I heard an NPR news station use the word "torture" - and except for Terry Gross's interviews with people, I hadn't heard them use that word since we learned about Gitmo. They'd say "harsh interrogation" or "enhanced interrogation" because those were the Administration's politically correct terms, but they didn't have the guts to say "torture" when everybody knew what it was.
In fact the standard commercial power in much of the area didn't go out. There were presumably the usual power lines hit by trees or other local outages, but the power grid stayed up. It's too far from the ocean for tide and storm surge flooding, and much of the storm energy either didn't head their direction or got expended on New Jersey.
As other comments point out, the story really comes from the Daily Mail, a right-wing total rag of a tabloid. It's typically more accurate than the Weekly World News, but it's not the Times or The Register.
So yes, if they were to literally implement the Daily Fail's description of how service will work, that means that any computer system, operating system or browser you get in the UK would have to have modifications to ask The Kids Question when you install it, and every Internet provider would have to redirect connections for Port 80 to the filter sign-up sheet (because Teh Internet is the same thing as Teh Webz, innit?) Wot's that about links in some arch?
Assuming David Cameron isn't quite is ignorant as the Daily Fail wants him to be, that's probably not something he'll actually propose. (If this were Australia, the answer would be different, because the pro-censorship politicians there really do appear to be that dumb.) Much more likely, if they do anything like it at all, they'll make ISPs offer censorware and/or have filtering set on by default, but filtering at the ISP level is really expensive and the ISPs will push back.
Even with Safesearch turned on, they could just turn to page 3 on their own site. Sure, it's just topless women, bu they're there for men to ogle, so that makes it porn, so they're being hypocrites about the whole thing.
Assuming they use the same overkill rules that most online censors do, the Page 3 Girls will get the Daily Mail blocked for anyone who has children. And won't that be a good thing! You'll still be able to get the actual paper copies if you need to wrap fish in it, of course.
I forget by now whether they stopped working for me when we got XP, or whether it was some generation of MS Outlook mail that didn't support the old connector software, but the real killer was when laptops stopped having RS232 ports on them:-) Yeah, I know it's possible to get a USB-to-serial adapter, and maybe it would even work with the Palm VII, but since the Outlook connector also didn't work, it wasn't worth restarting.
And when I recently upgraded to WIn7, HTC Sync stopped working, so I can no longer sync my Android phone to it, so it doesn't get calendar updates any more. Snarl. (Potentially I could fix this by dragging out an XP machine, installing the newest HTC sync, upgrading the phone to a slightly newer version of Android? What a Depressingly Stupid Machine.)
There are lots of ways to break stuff or write applications that will be useful 5-10 years later but won't run on the hardware or OS's people are using then. And while there are lots of way to fix them, they usually weren't *your* applications, so either you don't have the stuff you need to fix them, or you'd need to buy an updated version, if one exists, or it's just not time-effective to do it when you could just run an older operating system to keep them alive.
My problem's simpler - the corporate desktop IT department won't support 64-bit Win7 yet because they haven't want to / finished testing everything, so I've got 32-bit Win7 on my work laptop, so I'm limited to 4GB of RAM and Firefox crashes a lot. At least we're using IE8 now and not just IE6! One of my coworkers gave up, converted his corporate desktop to a VMware image, and installed 64-bit Linux with a VMware player, so he now has something like 8 or 16GB of RAM and a nice friendly window to run the work desktop in.
1) The orginal poster had said "except for GPGPU etc."; there's lots of obviously cool computational application for these things, if you need to do heavy calculation.
2) Thanks, I hadn't known about that! (I haven't really looked at Xen since Citrix bought it, though I'm starting to see people using it instead of VMware because of the Free Beer prices.)
3) This thing seems to be about 5-10 times the price of a typical medium-high-end video card, so you need a reasonably large group of users to make it pay off, but especially for scientific users who also want it for calculation it could be a good deal.
My standard desktop environment at work uses RDP on a 10 Mbps LAN through an old slow firewall to connect to a jump server in my lab; when I'm at home I use SSL VPN over 3 Mbps DSL to get to the company network gateway location, and then run RDP over that through the firewall in my lab. (We do computer security development in our underground laboratory, so we can't simply connect it to the office LAN because it has a direct internet connection with various mean nasty ugly stuff on it.) The jump server used to be an actual machine; now it's a VM image of Win2008 or something similar.
So a standard office desktop kind of environment works ok there - I can surf the web on the jump server, run lightweight Flash or Java animation, drag windows around, etc. I can even use VMware tools to access the consoles of other VMs. Theoretically I can run video on it, but at least YouTube in a browser is badly jumpy, and audio is actively painful, even if I'm at the office. I haven't bothered to track down the bottlenecks, because there are too many of them in between me and the application; if I really need to watch animation on one of the lab boxes, I can connect my laptop directly to the lab-net cable instead of using RDP.
I'd expect that PCoIP on an adequately tuned network would work better, because some of the people they sell it to need to do need to watch video or listen to audio at work (and because we haven't bothered tuning ours.) And the BYOD market has become seriously important to business - too many people want to use their iPads or shiny Mac laptops to access their work environments, and Virtual Desktop provides a way to do that without the IT department having to make all the corporate applications work on all the target platforms.
I didn't say I'm convinced that Desktop Virtualization is a good thing, as opposed to a scam for selling hardware to IT departments. But this chip could very well make it better. It seems to be especially popular in environments where everybody has an actual desk they sit in front of, but it's also starting to address the BYOD market.
Server virtualization doesn't really need this - running web servers or databases or name servers, which are all essentially fancy timesharing.
But "Desktop Virtualization" emulates your entire desktop as a virtual machine on a shared server, graphics and all, and just ships the rendered screens back to your desktop, accessible from anywhere, with RDP or VNC or whatever, kind of like a clumsy version of X Windows except you get to do full-scale graphics acceleration at the server farm instead of at your desktop. The mainframe IT crowd like it, because the PC on your desk can be dumb and low-powered, and the server back in the server farm they get to maintain can be big and fancy, and they can have better control over it than over your desktop, don't need to keep every bit of software up to date on everybody's remote PC, and it's generally easier to manage. And if you're logging into your work desktop from Starbucks, they don't have to protect it as thoroughly from everybody else there, and you can access your work Windows desktop from your personal iPad or your kid's gaming machine or whatever, and the company data's not very vulnerable because there's really nothing running on the remote machine.
And using this chip, they've got a lot more graphics horsepower available for rendering desktops, so for instance they can provide you with adequate performance for video editing, not just for email and word processing .
There are some really nice applications out there for runners to track their regular runs and display them on Google Maps, and while I can see the appeal of having all that information sometimes, I'm not really thrilled with making it available to Google or whoever else has access to it. It sounds like a really good job for a PC-based mapping program.
I would assume that by now these things are implemented as iPhone/Android apps that use the GPS locations (or maybe less-granular cellular locations) so your phone will track you in real time while you're running, as well as showing your heartbeat and playing your music. And we'll start seeing lots more user interface and user experience, and the apps may track you more intensively than Angry Birds if you don't watch carefully.
Several of my friends use Fitbits, and one of them has it set to upload to Twitter with her daily distance count. (Wow, she puts on a lot of miles!) I don't know if it's providing more detail at her fitbit website, or if all the detail stays on her home computer (I'm guessing the latter.)
Is this question really about whether Darwin in his prime would have been a good Congresscritter, or whether Darwin TODAY would be better than his opponent?
I think that today, what with being dead, he'd probably do less damage than the guy he ran against, so on balance he'd be better, but back when he was alive he'd really rather have spent his time away from Washington, sailing around looking for interesting flora and fauna. Still better than leaving That Idiot in charge.
The only ways to get off this rock are to understand ecologies well enough to be able to build a sustainable large-scale ecology with enough complexity to maintain human life, or to understand human minds well enough to upload ourselves into robots. To do the former, humans need to be Not Dead Yet, which means we have to be able to understand ecologies well enough not to poison ourselves before we've got a bunch of starships. So far, we haven't been able to build little model terrariums like Biosphere 2 without cheating, and we won't be able to build a colony on Mars (where you've got some resources to cheat with), much less outer space, until we can do one on Earth.
So if you want to get off the planet, you've got to fix the planet first. Or, like, do the robot upload dance, and you're not getting me inside one of those things any time soon.
Look, if you want to pretend that there are Dead People voting in Chicago, and that we therefore have to disenfranchise the 5-10% of (mostly poor, elderly, and/or dead) Americans who don't have photo ID because there's a risk that ringers will show up at the polls instead of them, that's one thing.
But this is just trolling - corrupt voting machines were a Republican scam that you guys pushed on the rest of us after the 2000 Florida vote count debacle, because you didn't want any chance that the next time you stuff the ballot boxes some judge might insist on an actual complete recount. (In particular, that's why the original ones didn't have paper records of any kind.)
And there's probably no truth to the rumor that the reason Ireland rejected the American proposal to sell them voting machines was because the "Change The Vote To Republican"/i> feature does something entirely different over there. (And really, as long as those Chicago voters were properly registered, there's no reason to disenfranchise them just because they're metabolically challenged and looking for brainnzzzz.)
Oh, no, if you want to get that $600 into the country, you're going to have to register your bank account with the Ministry of Finance, and here's the phone number for the minister, Jonathan Goodluck!
Yeah, because a US judge is going to believe a "Lebanese hacker" who won't even come out from behind his seven proxies, much less show up in person, who's admitting that you bribed him to testify against your competitor instead of attacking you, because the fact that you had to bribe him to rat out the person who allegedly paid him indicates that he's entirely trustworthy. Even if it's entirely true and the judge believes it, it's not up to the standards of proof it would take to find for you and against your competitor or do any more than give them a restraining order against doing it again.
About the only way you're going to accomplish anything is to pay him with some traceable payment system and follow the money. If he takes credit cards, you can maybe trace it to some hawalladar that's handling them for him, but it's unlikely that you'll get more than a burner bank account or a corner store, and get Visa to cancel the store's merchant account, which might annoy the attacker the next time some sucker tries to pay him.
The best extra-legal counter-attack I've seen was the one in Cheswick and Bellovin's original firewall book. They'd tracked down the attacker, who was a teenage kid in the Netherlands, where there wasn't any computer-hacking law yet, so "we did the next best thing - we called his mom."
Definitely, somebody had to say it first, glad it was you and not me. But yes, you'll start seeing Rule 34 sites for IP addresses with webcams and mobile phones that can have the cameras turned on, based on Section 34 data collection.
How many times do police or copyright enforcers quit the first time they get thrown out by a court or spanked by public opinion? At most they shut up till the noise quiets down and then come back with a renamed bill a bit later... That's extra-true for you in Canada, because the US police and copyright mafias want laws like that pushed in the US, and it's easier to do that if they get Canada to do it first so they can point to what a fine example our neighbors to the north are providing, so they're always nagging your bureaucrats and politicians to do things their US counterparts can't quite get away with yet.
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Really, the way to do a feast is with a bunch of friends and/or family, not by yourself. So get together with some people, do something potluck-like (if you're doing turkey, that's obviously one person's job, but the rest of you can still make stuff, or help the person who's doing the main course.) Bring different things, have fun together.
Yes, it's geeky - it's an artificial imitation vaguely-turkey-like product that can only exist because of a combination of complex technologies (including the transportation networks that get the things to the store, and the marketing processes that make it possible to make enough Tofurkey to be profitable.)
And ok, it doesn't taste quite like the real thing, and I'm not actually going to bother. Traditional American Thanksgiving feasts have enough non-meat dishes that you can really just skip the actual turkey.
A few years ago I was driving back from the dentist after getting a root canal, and realized it was good that I was unlikely to get hit with a drug test. Novocaine's close enough to cocaine that it would trigger that one, codeine's an opiate, the Sudafed I'd taken as a decongestant is a mild amphetamine, ibuprofen causes false positives for marijuana tests (maybe not for this saliva test, but it does for the standard urine test.) The drug that would have actually affected my driving (nitrous oxide) doesn't get tested for, and it'd had plenty of time to wear off before I left.
I did find the "Percent Reporting" numbers to be frustratingly misleading, though, and that's not just the fault of Google; the California Secretary of State website had similar issues. The problem is that, while they can say "X% of Precincts Reporting", that doesn't actually tell you vote counts in jurisdictions that allow absentee ballots, voting by mail, or other slow-to-count voting methods. So for instance, some of the California races for US Congress took a week to finish counting, even though they had 100% of the precincts reporting by Wednesday noon or so. (And they were close enough races that the counts mattered, and the absentee ballots could hypothetically change the winner.)
Google's Election Results map would show you either two-candidate or multi-candidate results. Sometimes you had to click to get the multi-candidate results, but it was all there, so you could see the percentages that went to Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, other third-party and independent candidates. Getting the details for Congress was a bit tougher, because they did a better job of visuals for the President, Senate, and Governor than for the 438 district races, but the results were there.
A while back I filled out one of those surveys about "where do you get your news?" I checked "Conservative Talk Radio", and gave my local NPR station as the station.
They're not "Crazy Right-Wing Talk Radio", they're Establishment Radio, which is conservative in the more traditional sense. If there's a government position on something, they may examine it from multiple sides, but it'll be based on the government's framing of the questions, with the presumption that that's an appropriate framing to use. "Where will we find Iraq's WMDs?" "Which countries really belong in the Axis of Evil?"
A year or so ago I heard an NPR news station use the word "torture" - and except for Terry Gross's interviews with people, I hadn't heard them use that word since we learned about Gitmo. They'd say "harsh interrogation" or "enhanced interrogation" because those were the Administration's politically correct terms, but they didn't have the guts to say "torture" when everybody knew what it was.
In fact the standard commercial power in much of the area didn't go out. There were presumably the usual power lines hit by trees or other local outages, but the power grid stayed up. It's too far from the ocean for tide and storm surge flooding, and much of the storm energy either didn't head their direction or got expended on New Jersey.
As other comments point out, the story really comes from the Daily Mail, a right-wing total rag of a tabloid. It's typically more accurate than the Weekly World News, but it's not the Times or The Register.
So yes, if they were to literally implement the Daily Fail's description of how service will work, that means that any computer system, operating system or browser you get in the UK would have to have modifications to ask The Kids Question when you install it, and every Internet provider would have to redirect connections for Port 80 to the filter sign-up sheet (because Teh Internet is the same thing as Teh Webz, innit?) Wot's that about links in some arch?
Assuming David Cameron isn't quite is ignorant as the Daily Fail wants him to be, that's probably not something he'll actually propose. (If this were Australia, the answer would be different, because the pro-censorship politicians there really do appear to be that dumb.) Much more likely, if they do anything like it at all, they'll make ISPs offer censorware and/or have filtering set on by default, but filtering at the ISP level is really expensive and the ISPs will push back.
Even with Safesearch turned on, they could just turn to page 3 on their own site. Sure, it's just topless women, bu they're there for men to ogle, so that makes it porn, so they're being hypocrites about the whole thing.
Assuming they use the same overkill rules that most online censors do, the Page 3 Girls will get the Daily Mail blocked for anyone who has children. And won't that be a good thing! You'll still be able to get the actual paper copies if you need to wrap fish in it, of course.
I forget by now whether they stopped working for me when we got XP, or whether it was some generation of MS Outlook mail that didn't support the old connector software, but the real killer was when laptops stopped having RS232 ports on them :-) Yeah, I know it's possible to get a USB-to-serial adapter, and maybe it would even work with the Palm VII, but since the Outlook connector also didn't work, it wasn't worth restarting.
And when I recently upgraded to WIn7, HTC Sync stopped working, so I can no longer sync my Android phone to it, so it doesn't get calendar updates any more. Snarl. (Potentially I could fix this by dragging out an XP machine, installing the newest HTC sync, upgrading the phone to a slightly newer version of Android? What a Depressingly Stupid Machine.)
There are lots of ways to break stuff or write applications that will be useful 5-10 years later but won't run on the hardware or OS's people are using then. And while there are lots of way to fix them, they usually weren't *your* applications, so either you don't have the stuff you need to fix them, or you'd need to buy an updated version, if one exists, or it's just not time-effective to do it when you could just run an older operating system to keep them alive.
My problem's simpler - the corporate desktop IT department won't support 64-bit Win7 yet because they haven't want to / finished testing everything, so I've got 32-bit Win7 on my work laptop, so I'm limited to 4GB of RAM and Firefox crashes a lot. At least we're using IE8 now and not just IE6! One of my coworkers gave up, converted his corporate desktop to a VMware image, and installed 64-bit Linux with a VMware player, so he now has something like 8 or 16GB of RAM and a nice friendly window to run the work desktop in.
1) The orginal poster had said "except for GPGPU etc."; there's lots of obviously cool computational application for these things, if you need to do heavy calculation.
2) Thanks, I hadn't known about that! (I haven't really looked at Xen since Citrix bought it, though I'm starting to see people using it instead of VMware because of the Free Beer prices.)
3) This thing seems to be about 5-10 times the price of a typical medium-high-end video card, so you need a reasonably large group of users to make it pay off, but especially for scientific users who also want it for calculation it could be a good deal.
My standard desktop environment at work uses RDP on a 10 Mbps LAN through an old slow firewall to connect to a jump server in my lab; when I'm at home I use SSL VPN over 3 Mbps DSL to get to the company network gateway location, and then run RDP over that through the firewall in my lab. (We do computer security development in our underground laboratory, so we can't simply connect it to the office LAN because it has a direct internet connection with various mean nasty ugly stuff on it.) The jump server used to be an actual machine; now it's a VM image of Win2008 or something similar.
So a standard office desktop kind of environment works ok there - I can surf the web on the jump server, run lightweight Flash or Java animation, drag windows around, etc. I can even use VMware tools to access the consoles of other VMs. Theoretically I can run video on it, but at least YouTube in a browser is badly jumpy, and audio is actively painful, even if I'm at the office. I haven't bothered to track down the bottlenecks, because there are too many of them in between me and the application; if I really need to watch animation on one of the lab boxes, I can connect my laptop directly to the lab-net cable instead of using RDP.
I'd expect that PCoIP on an adequately tuned network would work better, because some of the people they sell it to need to do need to watch video or listen to audio at work (and because we haven't bothered tuning ours.) And the BYOD market has become seriously important to business - too many people want to use their iPads or shiny Mac laptops to access their work environments, and Virtual Desktop provides a way to do that without the IT department having to make all the corporate applications work on all the target platforms.
I didn't say I'm convinced that Desktop Virtualization is a good thing, as opposed to a scam for selling hardware to IT departments. But this chip could very well make it better. It seems to be especially popular in environments where everybody has an actual desk they sit in front of, but it's also starting to address the BYOD market.
Server virtualization doesn't really need this - running web servers or databases or name servers, which are all essentially fancy timesharing.
But "Desktop Virtualization" emulates your entire desktop as a virtual machine on a shared server, graphics and all, and just ships the rendered screens back to your desktop, accessible from anywhere, with RDP or VNC or whatever, kind of like a clumsy version of X Windows except you get to do full-scale graphics acceleration at the server farm instead of at your desktop. The mainframe IT crowd like it, because the PC on your desk can be dumb and low-powered, and the server back in the server farm they get to maintain can be big and fancy, and they can have better control over it than over your desktop, don't need to keep every bit of software up to date on everybody's remote PC, and it's generally easier to manage. And if you're logging into your work desktop from Starbucks, they don't have to protect it as thoroughly from everybody else there, and you can access your work Windows desktop from your personal iPad or your kid's gaming machine or whatever, and the company data's not very vulnerable because there's really nothing running on the remote machine.
And using this chip, they've got a lot more graphics horsepower available for rendering desktops, so for instance they can provide you with adequate performance for video editing, not just for email and word processing .
There are some really nice applications out there for runners to track their regular runs and display them on Google Maps, and while I can see the appeal of having all that information sometimes, I'm not really thrilled with making it available to Google or whoever else has access to it. It sounds like a really good job for a PC-based mapping program.
I would assume that by now these things are implemented as iPhone/Android apps that use the GPS locations (or maybe less-granular cellular locations) so your phone will track you in real time while you're running, as well as showing your heartbeat and playing your music. And we'll start seeing lots more user interface and user experience, and the apps may track you more intensively than Angry Birds if you don't watch carefully.
Several of my friends use Fitbits, and one of them has it set to upload to Twitter with her daily distance count. (Wow, she puts on a lot of miles!) I don't know if it's providing more detail at her fitbit website, or if all the detail stays on her home computer (I'm guessing the latter.)
Is this question really about whether Darwin in his prime would have been a good Congresscritter, or whether Darwin TODAY would be better than his opponent?
I think that today, what with being dead, he'd probably do less damage than the guy he ran against, so on balance he'd be better, but back when he was alive he'd really rather have spent his time away from Washington, sailing around looking for interesting flora and fauna. Still better than leaving That Idiot in charge.
The only ways to get off this rock are to understand ecologies well enough to be able to build a sustainable large-scale ecology with enough complexity to maintain human life, or to understand human minds well enough to upload ourselves into robots. To do the former, humans need to be Not Dead Yet, which means we have to be able to understand ecologies well enough not to poison ourselves before we've got a bunch of starships. So far, we haven't been able to build little model terrariums like Biosphere 2 without cheating, and we won't be able to build a colony on Mars (where you've got some resources to cheat with), much less outer space, until we can do one on Earth.
So if you want to get off the planet, you've got to fix the planet first. Or, like, do the robot upload dance, and you're not getting me inside one of those things any time soon.
Look, if you want to pretend that there are Dead People voting in Chicago, and that we therefore have to disenfranchise the 5-10% of (mostly poor, elderly, and/or dead) Americans who don't have photo ID because there's a risk that ringers will show up at the polls instead of them, that's one thing.
But this is just trolling - corrupt voting machines were a Republican scam that you guys pushed on the rest of us after the 2000 Florida vote count debacle, because you didn't want any chance that the next time you stuff the ballot boxes some judge might insist on an actual complete recount. (In particular, that's why the original ones didn't have paper records of any kind.)
And there's probably no truth to the rumor that the reason Ireland rejected the American proposal to sell them voting machines was because the "Change The Vote To Republican"/i> feature does something entirely different over there. (And really, as long as those Chicago voters were properly registered, there's no reason to disenfranchise them just because they're metabolically challenged and looking for brainnzzzz.)
Oh, no, if you want to get that $600 into the country, you're going to have to register your bank account with the Ministry of Finance, and here's the phone number for the minister, Jonathan Goodluck!
Yeah, because a US judge is going to believe a "Lebanese hacker" who won't even come out from behind his seven proxies, much less show up in person, who's admitting that you bribed him to testify against your competitor instead of attacking you, because the fact that you had to bribe him to rat out the person who allegedly paid him indicates that he's entirely trustworthy. Even if it's entirely true and the judge believes it, it's not up to the standards of proof it would take to find for you and against your competitor or do any more than give them a restraining order against doing it again.
About the only way you're going to accomplish anything is to pay him with some traceable payment system and follow the money. If he takes credit cards, you can maybe trace it to some hawalladar that's handling them for him, but it's unlikely that you'll get more than a burner bank account or a corner store, and get Visa to cancel the store's merchant account, which might annoy the attacker the next time some sucker tries to pay him.
The best extra-legal counter-attack I've seen was the one in Cheswick and Bellovin's original firewall book. They'd tracked down the attacker, who was a teenage kid in the Netherlands, where there wasn't any computer-hacking law yet, so "we did the next best thing - we called his mom."
Definitely, somebody had to say it first, glad it was you and not me. But yes, you'll start seeing Rule 34 sites for IP addresses with webcams and mobile phones that can have the cameras turned on, based on Section 34 data collection.
How many times do police or copyright enforcers quit the first time they get thrown out by a court or spanked by public opinion? At most they shut up till the noise quiets down and then come back with a renamed bill a bit later... That's extra-true for you in Canada, because the US police and copyright mafias want laws like that pushed in the US, and it's easier to do that if they get Canada to do it first so they can point to what a fine example our neighbors to the north are providing, so they're always nagging your bureaucrats and politicians to do things their US counterparts can't quite get away with yet.