People are willing to pay money to get rid of ads. That should tell the spammers / marketing people something, shouldn't it? (and no "great, make more ads, then charge people for not showing them is not the right answer)
This is the 2nd time I'm saying it, for the 2nd reason: Ever since MS acquired Skype, it's been going downhill. MS has always been a marketing-driven organisation, this just goes to show that the takeover is now complete.
It does give us a glimpse into the mind of the spammer, though. Doesn't "they are conversation starters" sound a lot like the "people are waiting for our newsletter" rationalisation that the other spammers use?
I don't think a formal "code" exists, but obviously, groups of humans tend towards defending their members against outside attacks - that is a vital survival trait so we should not be surprised in the least to find it.
While police brutality is regularily reported, brutality against the police is usually a sideline ("ten police officers were wounded").
The point is that yes, police brutality exists. And also, brutality against police exists. And people with an agenda wrongly reporting or suppressing information on either also exist. Everyone presenting their point of view, with evidence, is the best thing that could happen.
Aside from the funny, the reason they do (according to japanese friends of mine) is that they don't get many holiday days and almost never at the same time, so the often have to travel without their families and the photos are so that they can share their experience with the loved ones at home.
Yes, but until today I thought that it would follow a bell curve, at least roughly.
Given these numbers, though, 46% of Americans have an IQ of at most 50, which leaves only 4% for the range between 50 and 100, and that gives quite a strange distribution.
The number just feels wrong, therefore it must be a lie. My gut tells me there aren't nearly that many creationists around here, because neither I nor the people I know, are anything like that!
That's called selection bias. A good study considers it, which is why it's done on a representative sample.
If I had kids, there would be a lot of stuff I'd be more worried about than porn. There is violence and other graphic images on the Internet that I find a lot more disgusting than all but the most extreme porn. And that will almost certainly have a much worse effect on children than watching someone naked doing strange stuff they don't understand.
But then again, that's America for you, a culture where half the population believes in creationism and shooting someone's brains out on afternoon TV is fine while a quarter-second glance at half of a breast nipple is a national scandal.
There's worse than porn on the Internet, and if you want to play the "for the chiiiiildren" card, then I'd like to see some evidence that porn actual does any damage to children first. You assumptions and gut feelings, see creationism, are not reliable and not evidence.
I'd be surprised, especially given the historically abysmal adoption rates of new IE versions. If you're serious, you still have to support IE 7 - no other browser has any market share worth mentioning going back even nearly as far.
Hmm -- you must not be billing by the hour. It isn't your fault that you are transferring more of the wealth of your clients into your own pockets...
I was talking about the macro-economy. Your billing argument is a micro-economy view and totally besides the point. It's not wrong, it's worse than wrong.
Unfortunately, everyone doesn't have the ability to make a choice as to their browsers -- corporate policies are fairly pedantic (and idiotic - in all senses of the word)
Agreed. I maintain my point: Fuck them, let them feel the full impact of their stupid decision, it'll cause them to make better decisions next time.
It goes to their mail, but with tons of G+ crap wrapped around it.
Has anyone created a gateway for FB, G+, etc.? I can tell FB to send me an e-mail whenever I get a FB message, I can probably write some curl script to fetch the actual message and post an answer - but maybe someone has already done it? Integrate FB messaging into your e-mail program?
Mostly because people are printing out e-mails to take them to meetings.
The iPad does more for the paperless office vision than all other inventions of the past 10 years combined. The one thing it doesn't allow for is spreading out all your stuff in front of you to look important (managers) or get an overview (non-managers).
Besides, modern IE isn't exactly that difficult to support. Most browsers are much more forgiving and less picky than they were just a couple of years ago so if it displays right in Chrome/Firefox, chances are it does actually work just as well in say, IE7+ anyway.
No, it doesn't. There are tons of examples out there, and I've got some first hand experience. Stuff that works just fine in every other browser will break on IE in random versions because IE requires some totally different way of doing it than everyone else. That goes up to at least including IE8, I'm not entirely certain about IE9 as at least everything I use seems to finally work there.
IE still sucks and I will applaud anyone who writes a fast-spreading virus to irrestorable removes it from every machine, world-wide. And fuck those who don't have any other browser installed and are now stuck without the Web, we're all better off without them idiots anyways.
I may seem extreme, but just try to make a rough estimate of the total damage that IE has done to the world economy in requiring all the wasted time and effort for having its quirks supported.
I agree that pixel-perfect is crazy, but most of us geeks do ourselves a disservice by not taking the importance of design as seriously as we should.
I definitely want my web stuff to look as similar as possible on all kinds of devices. I hate it when some browser doesn't support some feature I need and displays totally different. Because there's actual thought going into my designs, it's not just eye-candy. Losing parts of the design is pretty much the same as using parts of the functionality.
Granted, every release of IE seems to finally bring it in line and make it play nicer with the other children, but IE is still the odd one out in many, many more cases than everyone else and probably more than everyone else combined. MS just has this "not invented here" fixation and insists on doing a ton of things differently than everyone else.
I've spent many, many hours working around IE quirks, and that was after declaring that IE6 will be completely unsupported and I don't really care all that much about IE7 as long as most of it barely works.
For something reasonably complex in both logic and presentation, I can easily imagine a cost of several ten-thousand bucks, if you count in overhead and all other expenses. 100k seems high, but not totally off.
I'm developing a web app so there's some personal frontline experience here. Supporting IE is still a bitch, it sucks badly and it's a punishment. If my target audience were private individuals, I'd say "fuck IE", plug a big "IE not supported" button on the homepage and be done with it. Unfortunately, my target audience is in the corporate environment.
The main problem is that IE does everything differently from everyone else and from version to version. In CSS, for example, sure, other vendors have their prefixes, but writing out half a dozen essentially identical statements for advanced CSS stuff is tedious, but not troublesome. Finding the five different ways the IE wants it done, that are totally incompatible with anything else is just horrible. Google up how IE does CSS gradients vs. how everyone else does it for an example.
For JS, fortunately we have stuff like jQuery or Prototype, and yet plugins to these still list compatability with various browser - and large everyone else is either supported or unsupported and then there's IE. It is very, very, very rare to find a plugin that works on Firefox, but not Chrome, or on Safari, but not Opera. It's a lot more common to find something that works everywhere except IE.
Basically, you can write a web app that runs fine and looks nearly the same on all recent versions of all major browsers, and breaks completely on IE. You would have to consciously try to do the same with any other major browser.
They should've been less greedy and put a strict (and much lower) limit on how much advertisement they show. They would've found that people are quite willing to put up with a bit of advertisement, but not with tons of it. Whenever I turn off AdBlock, I ask myself why people without AdBlock even use the Internet anymore.
So far, all I've read on/. is from people who know very little about the law whining about how evil everything the government does is by default.
He has more than enough resources to retain a bunch of really good lawyers. Don't you think that they will be happy to bring up absolutely everything that's not kosher?
This will be sorted out in court, don't you worry about it. Read up my other responses here for more details.
So what if the judge decides that he knew nothing of illegality (or that the US had no jurisdiction to charge him)?
Like the fence who turned out to not be a fence, he'd get compensation and his shop back.
How can they be sure it's an illegal business _before_ a judge rules on that? I agree that illegal business should not be free to operate while the court case proceeds.
That's the dilemma the cops and courts find themselves in all the time. The solution is that if they are reasonably certain, they shut you down, put you in jail, and take the risk of having to pay compensation. If they aren't so sure, they don't and only try you in the court.
I think it also depends on the case. The fence would have his inventory seized because it also serves as evidence. The guy jailed for shooting someone would also have to close his shop since he's now in jail, but his inventory has no bearing on the case and thus would remain.
Of course, in the US, if it's a drug case, then all bets are off due to the crazy laws specifically written for the "war on drugs", i.e. your car gets seized if you're jailed for drug dealing, even if nobody even alleges that you ever used your car in relation to that.
But do you really consider seizing his assets and shutting down his service well before court rules on anything to be "due process"?
The closest physical-world equivalent to Megaupload is a fence - not doing any stealing himself, but a knowing part of the process.
Would the police seize the goods of the fence and close his shop? Yes, they would. Would they close it even if he runs a newspaper shop as a front? Yes, they would. Would it suck for the honest and probably unknowning customers of his legal shop? Yepp.
And still, that's how the system works. It's not perfect, I have plenty of stories to tell myself where it fails or falls short. But frankly, I'll take this one over any out of Africa or most of the rest of the world.
So what about due process? Why does it work like this?
Because there are the rights of the accused on the one hand, and then there are the rights of the victims on the other. "Innocent until proven guilty" does not mean what you think it does. Otherwise he wouldn't be in jail, for example. The fence isn't exactly free to continue fencing until the court case has run its course. If the government busts an illegal business, it gets shut down. Because the accused isn't the only person in the world having rights. The rest of society has rights, too. Not having to put up with criminal activities is one of them.
I am all for prosecuting him, but not without following due process.
Which is being followed, otherwise his lawyer wouldn't be able to ask the court for anything, he'd be in a small box somewhere with no lawyer and no court.
Have you considered that everyone who is reporting things is biased?
Innocent until proven guilty and all that (not sure if this doctrine applies in German(
Something tells me that his choice of country of residence does not depend on the opinions of local "tech scene".
When you're a con-man, your image determines how many fresh marks you can find. Once your image is ruined, it's time to move. Tech scene or not doesn't matter, any scene will do.
And yes, it makes me angry when I see people get behind sleazebags while they could be rooting for someone who's worth it, and there are more than enough of those people in jail.
If the guy is a crook, book him for being a crook!
They didn't jail Al Capone for running the Mafia. Sometimes, you simply can't prove what everyone knows, so you get the guy on what you can prove.
We are doing things fair. He will be convicted for something he's actually done, I'm pretty sure of that. But the reason they went after him full force for a comparatively minor crime is that they know he has a dozen other skeletons in the closet.
He won't be jailed for them, because there's too little evidence. But it's the reason they didn't just say "oh, fuck it, too much trouble".
What he deserves is not at issue. What is legal and correct procedure is;
I'm sorry, but I have an understanding of justice that goes beyond the letter of the law. If my country were to legalize, say, rape tomorrow, I would nevertheless physically assault any attempted rape I come across, even if it means that I am the criminal in the eye of the law.
I do agree with your stance on copyright enforcement, with some reservations for large-scale infringement - just like a shop owner not sending me the right item is a civil matter, but if he makes a business out of it then he's into the area of fraud and that's a criminal matter. Same for copyright infringement, all those filesharing cases belong into civil courts, not criminal courts. But someone running a factory producing counterfeit DVDs is a criminal, period. And the scale on which Megaupload operated certainly falls into that category.
The rule of law is supposed to be one the things that make our nation unique, special, and great.
Yours? Have they really put LSD into the tap water? Every western country today and a lot of countries back to ancient Rome were built on that principle.
Slashdot Mirror
People are willing to pay money to get rid of ads. That should tell the spammers / marketing people something, shouldn't it? (and no "great, make more ads, then charge people for not showing them is not the right answer)
The right answer is: Go get a useful job.
This is the 2nd time I'm saying it, for the 2nd reason: Ever since MS acquired Skype, it's been going downhill. MS has always been a marketing-driven organisation, this just goes to show that the takeover is now complete.
It does give us a glimpse into the mind of the spammer, though. Doesn't "they are conversation starters" sound a lot like the "people are waiting for our newsletter" rationalisation that the other spammers use?
I don't think a formal "code" exists, but obviously, groups of humans tend towards defending their members against outside attacks - that is a vital survival trait so we should not be surprised in the least to find it.
While police brutality is regularily reported, brutality against the police is usually a sideline ("ten police officers were wounded").
The point is that yes, police brutality exists. And also, brutality against police exists. And people with an agenda wrongly reporting or suppressing information on either also exist. Everyone presenting their point of view, with evidence, is the best thing that could happen.
Aside from the funny, the reason they do (according to japanese friends of mine) is that they don't get many holiday days and almost never at the same time, so the often have to travel without their families and the photos are so that they can share their experience with the loved ones at home.
Yes, but until today I thought that it would follow a bell curve, at least roughly.
Given these numbers, though, 46% of Americans have an IQ of at most 50, which leaves only 4% for the range between 50 and 100, and that gives quite a strange distribution.
The number just feels wrong, therefore it must be a lie. My gut tells me there aren't nearly that many creationists around here, because neither I nor the people I know, are anything like that!
That's called selection bias. A good study considers it, which is why it's done on a representative sample.
If I had kids, there would be a lot of stuff I'd be more worried about than porn. There is violence and other graphic images on the Internet that I find a lot more disgusting than all but the most extreme porn. And that will almost certainly have a much worse effect on children than watching someone naked doing strange stuff they don't understand.
But then again, that's America for you, a culture where half the population believes in creationism and shooting someone's brains out on afternoon TV is fine while a quarter-second glance at half of a breast nipple is a national scandal.
There's worse than porn on the Internet, and if you want to play the "for the chiiiiildren" card, then I'd like to see some evidence that porn actual does any damage to children first. You assumptions and gut feelings, see creationism, are not reliable and not evidence.
I'd be surprised, especially given the historically abysmal adoption rates of new IE versions. If you're serious, you still have to support IE 7 - no other browser has any market share worth mentioning going back even nearly as far.
Hmm -- you must not be billing by the hour. It isn't your fault that you are transferring more of the wealth of your clients into your own pockets...
I was talking about the macro-economy. Your billing argument is a micro-economy view and totally besides the point. It's not wrong, it's worse than wrong.
Unfortunately, everyone doesn't have the ability to make a choice as to their browsers -- corporate policies are fairly pedantic (and idiotic - in all senses of the word)
Agreed. I maintain my point: Fuck them, let them feel the full impact of their stupid decision, it'll cause them to make better decisions next time.
It goes to their mail, but with tons of G+ crap wrapped around it.
Has anyone created a gateway for FB, G+, etc.? I can tell FB to send me an e-mail whenever I get a FB message, I can probably write some curl script to fetch the actual message and post an answer - but maybe someone has already done it? Integrate FB messaging into your e-mail program?
Mostly because people are printing out e-mails to take them to meetings.
The iPad does more for the paperless office vision than all other inventions of the past 10 years combined. The one thing it doesn't allow for is spreading out all your stuff in front of you to look important (managers) or get an overview (non-managers).
But in these cases, they don't really use the messaging functionality of e-mail addresses. They use the unique identifier functionality.
Besides, modern IE isn't exactly that difficult to support. Most browsers are much more forgiving and less picky than they were just a couple of years ago so if it displays right in Chrome/Firefox, chances are it does actually work just as well in say, IE7+ anyway.
No, it doesn't. There are tons of examples out there, and I've got some first hand experience. Stuff that works just fine in every other browser will break on IE in random versions because IE requires some totally different way of doing it than everyone else. That goes up to at least including IE8, I'm not entirely certain about IE9 as at least everything I use seems to finally work there.
IE still sucks and I will applaud anyone who writes a fast-spreading virus to irrestorable removes it from every machine, world-wide. And fuck those who don't have any other browser installed and are now stuck without the Web, we're all better off without them idiots anyways.
I may seem extreme, but just try to make a rough estimate of the total damage that IE has done to the world economy in requiring all the wasted time and effort for having its quirks supported.
I agree that pixel-perfect is crazy, but most of us geeks do ourselves a disservice by not taking the importance of design as seriously as we should.
I definitely want my web stuff to look as similar as possible on all kinds of devices. I hate it when some browser doesn't support some feature I need and displays totally different. Because there's actual thought going into my designs, it's not just eye-candy. Losing parts of the design is pretty much the same as using parts of the functionality.
No, it doesn't.
Granted, every release of IE seems to finally bring it in line and make it play nicer with the other children, but IE is still the odd one out in many, many more cases than everyone else and probably more than everyone else combined. MS just has this "not invented here" fixation and insists on doing a ton of things differently than everyone else.
I've spent many, many hours working around IE quirks, and that was after declaring that IE6 will be completely unsupported and I don't really care all that much about IE7 as long as most of it barely works.
For something reasonably complex in both logic and presentation, I can easily imagine a cost of several ten-thousand bucks, if you count in overhead and all other expenses. 100k seems high, but not totally off.
I'm developing a web app so there's some personal frontline experience here. Supporting IE is still a bitch, it sucks badly and it's a punishment. If my target audience were private individuals, I'd say "fuck IE", plug a big "IE not supported" button on the homepage and be done with it. Unfortunately, my target audience is in the corporate environment.
The main problem is that IE does everything differently from everyone else and from version to version. In CSS, for example, sure, other vendors have their prefixes, but writing out half a dozen essentially identical statements for advanced CSS stuff is tedious, but not troublesome. Finding the five different ways the IE wants it done, that are totally incompatible with anything else is just horrible. Google up how IE does CSS gradients vs. how everyone else does it for an example.
For JS, fortunately we have stuff like jQuery or Prototype, and yet plugins to these still list compatability with various browser - and large everyone else is either supported or unsupported and then there's IE. It is very, very, very rare to find a plugin that works on Firefox, but not Chrome, or on Safari, but not Opera. It's a lot more common to find something that works everywhere except IE.
Basically, you can write a web app that runs fine and looks nearly the same on all recent versions of all major browsers, and breaks completely on IE. You would have to consciously try to do the same with any other major browser.
To re-phrase another recent comment of mine:
There's content on TV?
They should've been less greedy and put a strict (and much lower) limit on how much advertisement they show. They would've found that people are quite willing to put up with a bit of advertisement, but not with tons of it.
Whenever I turn off AdBlock, I ask myself why people without AdBlock even use the Internet anymore.
So far, all I've read on /. is from people who know very little about the law whining about how evil everything the government does is by default.
He has more than enough resources to retain a bunch of really good lawyers. Don't you think that they will be happy to bring up absolutely everything that's not kosher?
This will be sorted out in court, don't you worry about it. Read up my other responses here for more details.
So what if the judge decides that he knew nothing of illegality (or that the US had no jurisdiction to charge him)?
Like the fence who turned out to not be a fence, he'd get compensation and his shop back.
How can they be sure it's an illegal business _before_ a judge rules on that? I agree that illegal business should not be free to operate while the court case proceeds.
That's the dilemma the cops and courts find themselves in all the time. The solution is that if they are reasonably certain, they shut you down, put you in jail, and take the risk of having to pay compensation. If they aren't so sure, they don't and only try you in the court.
I think it also depends on the case. The fence would have his inventory seized because it also serves as evidence. The guy jailed for shooting someone would also have to close his shop since he's now in jail, but his inventory has no bearing on the case and thus would remain.
Of course, in the US, if it's a drug case, then all bets are off due to the crazy laws specifically written for the "war on drugs", i.e. your car gets seized if you're jailed for drug dealing, even if nobody even alleges that you ever used your car in relation to that.
But do you really consider seizing his assets and shutting down his service well before court rules on anything to be "due process"?
The closest physical-world equivalent to Megaupload is a fence - not doing any stealing himself, but a knowing part of the process.
Would the police seize the goods of the fence and close his shop? Yes, they would.
Would they close it even if he runs a newspaper shop as a front? Yes, they would.
Would it suck for the honest and probably unknowning customers of his legal shop? Yepp.
And still, that's how the system works. It's not perfect, I have plenty of stories to tell myself where it fails or falls short. But frankly, I'll take this one over any out of Africa or most of the rest of the world.
So what about due process? Why does it work like this?
Because there are the rights of the accused on the one hand, and then there are the rights of the victims on the other. "Innocent until proven guilty" does not mean what you think it does. Otherwise he wouldn't be in jail, for example. The fence isn't exactly free to continue fencing until the court case has run its course. If the government busts an illegal business, it gets shut down. Because the accused isn't the only person in the world having rights. The rest of society has rights, too. Not having to put up with criminal activities is one of them.
What is being done to DotCom is ILLEGAL.
The courts will decide that, not /.
I am all for prosecuting him, but not without following due process.
Which is being followed, otherwise his lawyer wouldn't be able to ask the court for anything, he'd be in a small box somewhere with no lawyer and no court.
Have you considered that everyone who is reporting things is biased?
Innocent until proven guilty and all that (not sure if this doctrine applies in German(
You're either ignorant, or an asshole.
Something tells me that his choice of country of residence does not depend on the opinions of local "tech scene".
When you're a con-man, your image determines how many fresh marks you can find. Once your image is ruined, it's time to move. Tech scene or not doesn't matter, any scene will do.
And yes, it makes me angry when I see people get behind sleazebags while they could be rooting for someone who's worth it, and there are more than enough of those people in jail.
If the guy is a crook, book him for being a crook!
They didn't jail Al Capone for running the Mafia. Sometimes, you simply can't prove what everyone knows, so you get the guy on what you can prove.
We are doing things fair. He will be convicted for something he's actually done, I'm pretty sure of that. But the reason they went after him full force for a comparatively minor crime is that they know he has a dozen other skeletons in the closet.
He won't be jailed for them, because there's too little evidence. But it's the reason they didn't just say "oh, fuck it, too much trouble".
What he deserves is not at issue. What is legal and correct procedure is;
I'm sorry, but I have an understanding of justice that goes beyond the letter of the law. If my country were to legalize, say, rape tomorrow, I would nevertheless physically assault any attempted rape I come across, even if it means that I am the criminal in the eye of the law.
I do agree with your stance on copyright enforcement, with some reservations for large-scale infringement - just like a shop owner not sending me the right item is a civil matter, but if he makes a business out of it then he's into the area of fraud and that's a criminal matter. Same for copyright infringement, all those filesharing cases belong into civil courts, not criminal courts. But someone running a factory producing counterfeit DVDs is a criminal, period. And the scale on which Megaupload operated certainly falls into that category.
The rule of law is supposed to be one the things that make our nation unique, special, and great.
Yours? Have they really put LSD into the tap water? Every western country today and a lot of countries back to ancient Rome were built on that principle.
well, there's one thing: yahoo mail has stupid and obnoxious graphical ads,
There are ads on the Internet?
i didn't had time to install AdBlock Plus.
Oh, I see.