Fortunately it's probably just academic either way.
The ruling doesn't enable any old person in Antigua to ignore copyright as they wish, only the government to give permission.
It's unlikely the government will say "Right, go fuck up the GPL", more likely they're sell "Right, setup an online movie streaming business full of the latest Hollywood Blockbusters."
There's really no gain for Antigua in fucking the GPL, there's no real money in it for them compared to fucking over the MPAA/RIAA.
I looked at the video and to be quite fucking honest I think there's a more innocent excuse.
This to me, the police involvement and so forth, looked like the culmination of too many years of Hollywoodisation of American society. Let's be honest, some people wish they could do a Rambo irl.
This is a bunch of military/police officials who have far too big a budget fulfilling their life long fantasies on the tax payers dime.
I really don't think there's any dark desensitisation plan, I don't think there's any malice here. I think this is genuine military masturbation. The pinnacle of the all American tough guy fantasy being played out at your expense.
If you want to see where your country's debt is, it's not the fault of just the Republicans, or just the Democrats or some other partisan ideology. It's people like this, military and law enforcement with budgets so big they've really run out of ideas as to what the fuck else to do other than dick around in the middle of a city pretending they're part of some Hollywood thriller. Rather than do the right thing and admit they have more money than they need this year and hand some back to the tax payer, they splash it on life long macho fantasies.
You seem to think that performance improvements can be made linearly but that's faults, you start to get diminishing returns on the time spent relative to performance gains realised. That's why IIS has been able to catch up with Apache, and why Apache hasn't been able to maintain it's lead over IIS over the last decade - because it got to a point where Apache needed to start pouring exponentially more resources in, and hence increase exponentially the cost of development to maintain that lead. Even in open source that's not sustainable, especially not across 10 years.
The same is even true of Windows Server, 15 years ago it was a joke compared to Linux, but from Windows Server 2003 things started to improve, and as of Windows Server 2008 it's pretty trivial to secure a Windows server as well as a Linux server, and it performs comparatively well as well despite 10 - 15 years before hand it being the butt of all security jokes. Things change. Times change.
"Werecently (~a year ago) switched from IIS to Apache where, and got a better performance (still on Windows). With the hardware upgrades we did end up moving to Linux."
You simply can't make this comparison in a valid way though, Apache out the box with no modules enabled will always perform better than a default IIS setup, but that's not a like for like comparison, because there are even lighter weight servers again available if all you want to do is serve static HTML with no security - IIS doesn't even try and pretend to compete in that arena. If however you make Apache as useful as IIS, so set up say Apache with Tomcat so that you can serve a Spring MVC application which is a fair comparison against IIS serving an ASP.NET MVC application then in practice you realise absolutely no worthwhile difference to matter, and that remains true whether Windows or Linux.
This is what the story is supposed to be about - real world use cases, not theoretical massively cut down FOSS options vs. default IIS with hefty frameworks on top (which is what the author compared) and which is what you seem to be alluding to given that what you say isn't true of a comparable set of setups and when frankly, many of the statements in your previous post allude to a past, which simply just is not true anymore.
For what it's worth my current project is an Apache Tomcat targetted Java + Spring project, so it's not as if I have a particular interest in the Microsoft stack, however I do have a lot of experience with it to know that what you say does not ring true and that the way you say it makes it sound like it's something you knew/heard 10 years ago, but haven't bothered to properly check back on in recent years to find is simply not true anymore.
I really like Tomcat and Java, which is hence, why, now, as a technical architect, I chose it as the platform for our current project, but I chose it for portability to make it easier for our clients with varying platforms to deal with, not because of any inherent performance benefit- and this system really does have to be performant given the high volumes it will handle and perhaps somewhat ironically, it will be interfacing with IIS hosted.NET services with those same volumes of data that are already out there doing that work.
For what it's worth I worked on a.NET + MySQL project only about 2 years ago, and there are many good reasons not to use MySQL - the MySQL.NET connector was always shit and massively incomplete compared to Oracle and MSSQL connectors meaning you had to skip many of the features of the.NET framework - the entity framework was pretty much unusable because of it for example.
Also, we had a number of occasions where the MySQL data files just literally corrupted themselves, and needed to be repaired. This defies one of the key objectives of having a database system in the first place - reliability.
I struggle to believe in the last 2 years MySQL has magically fixed all it's ills. The reason people go for Oracle or MS SQL is not because it's part of the default stack, but because it's a known quantity and because for all their faults - they at least get the fundamentals right and don't suffer issues like the whole database completely falling over once in a while requiring a repair to the database files themselves with the response from the team behind the software being "Well you should just restore from your backups if the repair doesn't work" - a database shouldn't spontaneously just corrupt itself like that in the first place. Postgres is much better, but MySQL is not fit for purpose in real business applications, it's best left to pet projects and projects where it doesn't matter if it goes down now and again and causes a bit of data loss.
Using MS SQL with.NET buys you a massive amount in terms of productivity gains and assurance that you're getting a solid product. MySQL may be cheap, but you'll waste many hundreds of man hours from slower development due to poor integration, database corruption, bugs, and data loss on even a moderate project at which point the initial cost saving starts looking a lot less worthwhile or justifiable. Over the life of the product if it's going to be around say 3 years or more, then it'll end up resulting in a net loss.
If you want free go Postgres but absolutely not MySQL - it's best left as a beginners tool for learning a bit about SQL because it's easy to use and play with and nothing more.
"Now, if we compare the raw tests (C# vs Java) C# is faster, but when we move to the web servers, suddenly Java is better. That tells me... IIS is significantly (orders of magnitude) worse than Tomcat/Apache."
It tells you that, because you, like him, didn't understand the fundamental issue with his tests.
The issue at hand being that he used ASP.NET MVC (a full web application framework) for the C# tests which involves many extra steps behind the scenes, but a simple servlet for the Java tests which is about as barebones a method of returning web data as you can get on the Java platform.
In reality, eliminating the ASP.NET MVC framework overhead would tell us there's really fuck all difference between them and that IIS isn't actually any worse than Tomcat for this sort of simple task.
You harp on about "everyone knows IIS is slow", "it was a decade ago" or whatever. What, you think software never ever improves?
It sounds like you heard IIS was bad a decade ago, and assume nothing whatsoever has changed and have an attitude that if something was bad a decade ago it's never ever worth reevaluating it. That's just stupid.
Things change, stuff you knew to be true a decade ago, doesn't necessarily remain true now, especially in the fast moving IT world. Just like Windows Server, IIS has come a massively long way since then.
"The reason this is interesting, is it's a very simple test, and hows the maximum performance. Requests can never be faster than returning a simple string."
That'd be great, if it were true.
But there's still so so many variables involved here, what headers was each configured to return? is the CLR's initial response slower than Java's but subsequent responses faster? If you do multiple tests how is caching configured, how does it play into it? He chose ASP.NET MVC4 on the.NET side but a simple servlet on the Java side, despite what he says these things aren't equal. More equal would be to use say, a Spring MVC controller or similar as ASP.NET MVC has to do far more in terms of being passed through the router. Further, I notice he's using dynamic content in his view, what view engine? that matters - Razor is faster than the old view engine.
This is precisely why this test isn't interesting, because of what has been said above - in the "real world" there are just far too many variables to do a realistic comparison between the two technology stacks. Even returning a simple string isn't simple and so many layers of framework and platform technology are involved.
I was doing some performance tests the other day, in C#, specifically testing the impact of various configurations of encryption and compression algorithms on data being sent across a network. You could get some statistically meaningful results for larger data transfers of a few megabytes, but when you got down to data of only a few bytes it became hard to get any meaningful results, the garbage collector kicking in inconveniently could throw out the total processing times involved by a literal couple of orders of magnitude such that you'd get an average of maybe only 0.0052 on one set of 1,000 runs, then 0.73 on another set.
I don't think in the real world it really matters. Both platforms run high performance sites, Java due to it's longer history probably has more at a guess, but as someone else said above it's all meaningless at the high end and again as someone else pointed out that yeah, sure, Facebook runs on PHP, but Facebook PHP was first off just PHP translated into C++ so it was really actually just running on C++ with PHP used to generate the C++, and now they've written or are writing a VM for it so it looks just like Java/C# anyway. The same is true with Java and C# though, at the high end, on real high performance websites, they look so different from your run of the mill simple single server IIS/Tomcat deployment in terms of the amount of detailed configuration changes that have been made, and extra tools used, that you really can't determine anything about high performance worth of these platforms where all tweaks and changes necessary to make them perform to the best extent possible for the particular use case at hand from a simple low performance default configuration test using arbitrary frameworks with clear differences in best case use cases.
America has a base in Cuba, but I don't see Cuba exactly being a US lapdog.
If the only tenuous link that can be provided is that America has a base in Qatar and America/Qatar have military cooperation then I think that's a pretty weak link in suggesting Al Jazeera is somehow beholden to the US.
Especially as the GGP's post about Al Jazeera's stories all having to be approved by the Qatari government is an out and out light.
All sounds more like a bunch of typical "OMG FOREIGN SOUNDING NAME!" xenophobia than any actual solid valid criticism with some actual evidence behind it.
Out of interest, what's not economically feasible about it?
Please don't simply parrot the lie that those folks are magical job creators and will leave the country - they wont, they're not special, if they leave, someone just as competent will gladly come and replace them for even the increased tax rates placed upon them.
It's interesting that you cite Greece as an example though, you are aware that the biggest problem in Greece was the fact that paying income tax was largely optional due to poor enforcement of tax payment and that the wealthy there as a result would nearly always not pay even a penny of tax? If reduced tax on the wealthy improved national wealth then Greece would be a shining example of a productive and succesful economy.
Yeah except both have shit operating systems for doing real actual stuff.
But you're right, they do make this sort of thing now. Most PC manufacturers (Dell, HP, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, Lenovo, etc.) all make small form factor laptops.
NetBooks haven't died, they've just stopped being called NetBooks and become a standard part of most manufacturer's laptop range and come with a range of spec options from low end to high end.
There's no point going for a crippled tablet OS based device and trying to turn it into a laptop so it's useful for doing actual stuff other than browsing the web and playing shitty little games when you can just outright buy a laptop with a proper full functioning OS on instead. Tablets are okay for some simple on the move tasks, and they're okay as toys/entertainment devices in the home, but from the GPs post it sounds like he wants something he can actually do something more useful with than tablets allow.
Even an 11 inch MacBook Air is a better option if you prefer to go down the Apple route.
I'm not convinced tablets are NetBook replacements for a lot of use cases. For people who just wanted something small and light with long battery life for say, web browsing from the sofa in the living room the market intersects, but if you want to do anything much more than that they serve different markets and that's precisely why the NetBook hasn't gone anywhere and has instead just become a standard offering from just about every manufacturer out there, be it Apple, Samsung, Lenovo, Acer, or anyone else.
NetBook was always a buzzword anyway, and it's a buzzword that's stopped being of any value given the ambiguity as to when something stopped being a NetBook and started being a tablet. The only thing that's died is hence the buzzword itself. Thank fuck for that.
I bought a 360 all the way back in 2006, so have had one for quite some time, but a few months ago I finally bought a PS3 to act as a Bluray player in the living room partially, but because I finally felt like playing some of the PS3 exclusives that looked quite nice.
I made my own share of posts 5 years ago in the "console wars" against the PS3, but really if I'm honest, much of it then was just to wind the fanboys up because it was tiresome seeing the kind of drivel you're suffering in response to your post and people like that deserve a good trolling. But 5 years on and I'm a little more apathetic to it all, I couldn't care who wins, I can afford any of the consoles and any of the games nowadays and as such I don't feel any reason to feel brand loyalty - I can afford to go with whoever, I give money, I get entertainment, it's as simple as that.
So when I got my PS3 I was expecting a system that was perfectly on par with the 360, that the pros and cons of each console back then were mostly just fanboy FUD and that in reality there's not much in. But there is, and here's the thing, the areas where the 360 outplays the PS3 are the areas that matter - the graphical difference between the two at 1080p, and with or without 3D are not noticable, for every great looking 360 game I can find a PS3 counter example, and vice versa. Those games I got that are available on both look pretty much the same on both (AC3 for example - I bought it for the 360, but it then came free with my PS3), it's not that sort of thing that's a problem with the PS3. The areas where the PS3 falls flat are areas that really annoy users - the controllers are so much less comfortable to hold (the 360s left thumbstick is far more naturally placed for example), the updates/installs on the PS3 are frankly fucking brutal - I though the odd 30 second update on sticking a 360 game in the console was a bit of a pain, but it's nothing compared to the 2hr+ update/installation of games like LBP2. Even signing up for the Playstation Network was so much more painful - I got 404 error pages on the console when doing so at one point, but annoyingly it gave different errors when trying to come up with a nickname- for some names it'd say it was taken, for others it would say not available without explaining why. I figured maybe it's because that name was taken by an old Planetside account I had many years ago, so I found I could login to my old SOE account, but the SOE account where Planetside etc. resides wasn't the same as the SOE account for PSN, so despite an hour of Google, scouring their help etc. it seemed I just needed to make a new account for PSN and couldn't just use my existing SOE account.
Really, there's no differences between the two when it comes to graphics, framerates, audio and so forth, but where there is a difference is where it really pisses people off - general system usability. The 360, is, simply put, just far more painless to use, the whole Live setup is just so much better thought out, the interfaces so much better designed, the controls much nicer to hold - it's just a better experience.
To give an analogy, using a 360, vs. using a PS3 feels like the difference between using a modern Android/iPhone vs. using a Blackberry/N900 - the latter are not inherently bad devices, but they just feel so much more clunky to use and so much more in need of polish.
This isn't to say I regret buying my PS3, me and my girlfriend have had a hell of a lot of fun on LBP/LBP2 etc. and I've been enjoying uncharted, killzone etc. I'm glad I got them, and of course, it has a Bluray player and things like ITV Player which isn't on the 360 yet. But for the simple improvements in ease of use with the 360 and the fact there's no other real noticable differences, all cross platform games I buy, I will buy the 360 version of. It's just simply a more polished device with a better user experience.
Yes, and to put those ranks into context, our old local council leader got a CBE (the next rank up AFAIK) for "Services to local government" when those services involved getting it £27million into debt during the boom and times of highest funding, before he left to get paid even more to fuck up another council elsewhere.
So in other words, getting an MBE is a bit like being told you're just beneath someone who is highly incompetent and arguably even extremely corrupt.
I was watching a show on TV here in the UK last night, which was going on about some guy who invented kites with two strings so you could better control them in about 1979 and was being hailed for his excellent work in coming up with this simple but magnificent idea that gave greater control over them.
Only the problem is in parts of Asia like Afghanistan, and China they've been doing this at least 100 years prior, but likely much more than that.
I guess the "inventor" of a product in this day and age is who is best able to rewrite history, rather than who actually originally came up with the idea.
As another poster pointed out, the temperature must be in the shade, and that matters.
To demonstrate just how much a little environmental change can adjust heat though, and hence why the standard must be that the temperature is taken in shade, even here in the UK, in my greenhouse with no fans running for better airflow, my thermometer has recorded 56.5C (133F) even with the vents open. A simple glass structure with windows open can trap drastically more heat relative to the outside temperature in the shade which was only around 26C that day when the sun is hitting it directly. I'd be intrigued to know what a greenhouse in death valley on that day may have recorded, I suspect you'd be a fair way towards being able to boil water in it by just putting it there in a bucket.
Yeah, except there's not actually a problem with the government position in this case, it's actually a marked improvement from the current status quo, so yes, I'll label him a victim of sensationalism, because he's seeing a problem where there simply isn't one.
It's chilling in the way that The Register is a sensationalist trash-publication along the lines of Fox News and The Daily Mail and that it's readers have thus been brainwashed into thinking that everything ever is bad and out to get them, hence why they get confused between what is bad, and what is, in fact, actually good.
Seriously, this is what happens if you routinely read The Register, your brain turns to mush and you just start spouting complete and utter bollocks. You only have to read an Andrew Orlowski or Lewis Page article to see it already had this effect on the staff there years ago.
I don't think there's any suggestion it can't be appealed is there? simply that a retrial wont be ordered.
I'm not surprised though, from what I was reading from other sources about this outside the tech community this wouldn't be unusual, apparently retrials based on jury misconduct are extremely rare in the US and the jury is allowed to get away with the sort of thing the guy in this case did. It's only if there was say evidence of outright corruption such as a bribed jury that a retrial would come into play in the US.
An appeal is still Samsung's best bet as that would eliminate both Koh, and the bent jury from the equation altogether.
"This class of people tend not to break doors in, or have the physical capacity to do so."
I agree, but as I say, not everyone routinely locks, or remembers to lock their door.
"In the event of a drunk, someone who is high on drugs, or mental weirdo, if they cannot or will not respond correctly to "Stop. I have a gun and I will shoot you if you come closer!", and they've broken your door in, they are unquestionably a danger to your life, and the lives of your family members."
Sure, but I see little reason for a gun. I'm unaware of a single case here in the UK where this sort of thing has been a problem, and that removing such a person shouldn't need a gun. The only case that comes close is a recent case where a drunk man did exactly this and the house owner simply stabbed him, he was found guilty of murder because he used execessive force, sure there was a drunk guy on his property, but the fact is he may have been drunk but was still harmless, he could've been removed without killing him. You'd have every right though to say, knock him unconcious.
"However, chances are if there are law enforcement in your house uninvited, they're of the no-knock warrant ninja-commando type who have their address wrong. It's happened before, and sure enough, police are far and away more dangerous to your family than any other class of invader. God forbid you have a gun in your hand, as they like to shoot anything that moves first and ask questions later. You'd better hope your dog is asleep and deaf, because they're liable to shoot it as well. It's only a matter of time until these types of raids happen upon a PTSD riddled vet with a hair trigger, leaving a bunch of cops and one vet dead."
I sympathise with this and agree this isn't so much an American gun problem as much as it is an American cultural problem. In the UK our police work under a different principle to that of many other police forces around the world, we have a system known as "Policing by consent" and what this means is that the police should not normally be particularly more well armed than the general public, are allowed to be (other than specialised units). This is why our police do not routinely carry guns because we try to avoid this ideology of the police being a controlling force over the population, hence why the only time police with guns turn up, is if someone themselves has a gun. Since 9/11 we have now got a number of exceptions - armed police routinely patrol airports, but on the streets this is not the case. After a couple of police officers were killed recently there was talking of arming our police again by some people but interestingly it was the police themselves who said they do not wish to be armed - they made it clear that when you start arming police you create an "us vs. them" divide, whereas our police prefer to try and be part of the community, rather than something that's there to oversee and control the community.
I suspect drastic changes to police training in the US probably are needed to ensure cops understand that they're not there as people who exist above ordinary citizens which is the mindset of those particular cops you describe, but who exist alongside ordinary citizens.
For what it's worth the history of the term "policing by consent" stems from the idea that when our first police forces came about, the only way the peasant classes wouldn't simply rebel against them and make them meaningless by overwhelming them in riots was if the police worked with them rather than tried to act as an occupying force in their towns etc. There's somewhat of a bitter irony here - effectively the police forces in the UK were built up under the rules they work under to prevent what trigged America's battle for independence- the idea that it was the crown imposing their will on the people, rather than trying to provide a useful service to the people (prevention of crime). The idea stems from around the 1820s so it's likely that the whole mindset governing British policing does actually stem from the lessons lea
Someone whose mental capability is diminished would provide a number of reasons - too drunk, has alzheimers, mentally ill and hence walk into the wrong home.
Police/fire services being given the wrong house in an emergency call as a result of accident or a prank.
People being given the wrong address or similar for a party accidently or not.
Overly informal neighbour believing you would be okay with them just popping in.
Landlord if you have one entering the house to check/confirm something.
Gardener/Cleaner if you have one either because they're meant to be there or they came on the wrong day accidently or intentionally or you forgot what day they were supposed to be there.
Someone entering to warn you about an imminent danger, such as a neighbourhood fire, a bomb in the neighbourhood, a gas leak, a massive tidal surge or whatever.
There really are a lot of reasons, if your assertion is that it's unlikely these things would ever happen to you then you'd certainly be right about that, but that wasn't the GPs point. The GPs point is that there might be any number of innocent reasons why someone may intentionally or unintentionally enter your house and sure it even sometimes depends on if you always lock your door, never lock your door, sometimes forget to lock your door and so forth but that doesn't detract from the GP's point that sometimes, it can happen, and you shouldn't just instantly have the right to kill them.
"What do you propose? that I lie on the floor like a coward and hope he doesn't shoot me in the back out of contempt after he's done robbing me?"
You're assuming he'd have a gun, if the gun ban in the UK has taught us anything it's that the "If you ban guns, only bad guys have guns" mantra is grossly overplayed. In the UK guns are just about never ever used for breakins, whilst bad guys have them, they're so hard to get hold of and so expensive as a result that they only ever get used against other gang members and so forth in gang on gang violence. Innocent law abiding citizens are so very very rarely shot here, which is why it makes headline news on the rare occasions it does happen. Somewhat interestingly, the majority of guns that do make it across to the UK are actually legally bought guns from the US smuggled over, so a limitation on US firearms purchases would actually help us. It's not uncommon that the same gun in the UK is passed around for multiple murders, so of the 39 or so gun murders last year or whatever it was for example, 10 of them may have been with a single weapon which highlights the limited amount of firearms on the streets, which highlights the minimised impact they now have on our society.
"Who are you to state the value of my 'stuff'? My family? my rights? my dignity? Look at it another way, don't invade peoples' homes if you value your life. That makes a lot more pragmatic sense than some kind of neo-hippie stockholm syndrome attitude towards violence."
But that's what we do in the UK too, we make criminals scared to break in by telling them don't do if if they value their lives. We reinforce this principle by broadly publicising cases like this:
America seems obsessed with the need for guns to defend themselves, what happened to the good old fashioned cricket bat if you're paranoid? If you're really, really desperate for a gun then manual load shotguns and hunting rifles at least are still perfectly legal. You just can't have a concealable firearm or a semi or fully automatic one. Here we have a concept of reasonable force, if someone's in your home with a knife it's reasonable to grab a big fat kitchen knife and attack them with it before they attack you. But as this article points out there are limits:
"There was a case when a man in a warehouse captured an intruder who'd come onto his premises. He tied him up, threw him in a pit and set fire to him."
Obviously that was taking things a little too far.
It's about getting the balance right between deterring intruders and preventing excuse for murder. I think we have that balance about right in our country now and certainly guns aren't part of it. Of course Americans make the argument that we've no way to defend ourselves against our government, but I think this is a silly argument, is there really any evidence we're less free to influence political discourse in nations like ours where guns are banned than in the US? What if a theoretical dictator comes along, sure we wont be armed to remove him but do we need to be? If the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya showed us anything it's that gun ownership needn't be a barrier to revolution - the army either sides with the population because it's their friends and family being oppressed to, or if they don't, then the populace just storms the army bases and then gets their guns - this is precisely what happened in Libya, an otherwise peaceful protest passing an army check point turned on it and stormed it before they even knew what had happened. I don't buy the guns are essential to protect liberty argument, as there's absolutely zero evidence to date for that being the case whilst there is evidence that nations with strict gun
Afraid I can't find a source now, so it may simply have been bollocks (though I'm certain it was from a reputable source), but I recall reading that there's a period for about 2 weeks every year where pretty much the whole of Europe simply receives very little wind, which means that Europe at least couldn't rely too heavily on wind as that period would create too much of a low in Europe wide wind output to be able to spread the load across even the continent, let alone our own country. Effectively that would mean we'd need two weeks every year where some other power source would drastically pick up the slack.
That makes wind okay as a suplement, but not as a more widely used power source.
Personally I don't like wind because I think it's fucking ugly. Honestly, I can see three coal power plants from my bedroom winning over a distance of about 30 or so miles on a day with good visibility, but the plumes coming from them are nothing compared to the ugly sight of hundreds of turbines wrecking a landscape. I'd rather we stuck solar panels on everyone's roofs instead, at least that's simply smart utilisation of existing space, rather than creating massive no go areas on otherwise pleasant landscape. As someone else said up above, exclusion zones from nuclear accidents compare not even a fragment to the amount of landscape now inaccesible due to wind turbines and certainly the aesthetic damage is far greater. I wouldn't care about them so much if I live in a country like the US where there are still vast swathes of uninhabited and land for turbines and still plenty more for people to enjoy without them, but here in the UK? It seems we've lost the last few fragments of natural landscape to them now. Still, I'm sure utilitarians will no doubt tell me that aesthetics of landscapes and so much don't matter.
Your last paragraph sounds great, I agree it's a nice thing to aim for in theory, but have you actually worked on any serious cross-platform HTML5 projects in practice? It's a fucking nightmare.
I actually really, really hate Flash such that I've always refused to learn it and still refuse to, but we've actually had to resort to Flash on some projects because it's still the easiest way to implement cross-browser unified web experiences. HTML5 projects work poorly across different browsers and platforms.
HTML5s only real strength seems to be for building mobile web pages, on the desktop HTML5 still works and looks completely different between Chrome, IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, but even on mobile it's hardly the unified development dream we were sold it to be by WHATWG - far from it. Web development now, with HTML5 is more awkward than I remember it being for many many years because of the countless inconsistencies.
The fundamental issue is that like you say, "they might be wonky sometimes" but how is that different to older versions of (X)HTML? HTML5 is just more of the same - more features that don't work right/consistently between platforms, but because there's so much of it, if you try to use any sizeable number of new HTML5 features then you'll end up with more of an inconsistent clusterfuck than ever before. Or in other words, nothings changed, you could always use a minimal set of HTML/CSS features and get a page to work on all devices, and as you added more the inconsistencies grew, that's still the case, HTML5 doesn't change that, it just adds more inconsistencies to fuck things up with.
Honestly, your last paragraph is noble sounding but you're ultimately just parroting WHATWG's marketing blurb, and they simply didn't manage to live up to the hype they sold in practice with the production of HTML5. The end product is really quite a train wreck, partly because the spec was badly produced, partly because no matter how good the spec, browser vendors are still utterly shit at their job, and shit at achieving a decent degree of interop between each other's offerings.
I do agree with the GP, between current browsers being such a quagmire of shite as the codebases have become ever more screwed up with the addition of new features over the years, and the fact that HTML and related technologies were never really designed with the complexity of webapps people ask for in mind today, we'd be far better off if we just kept HTML as a web document format, and created a new set of technologies for web applications. I've mentioned it before, it could still interop with HTML, using say, app:// as a new protocol running alongside HTTP allowing linking and so forth between HTML pages and apps to work seamlessly, but ultimately the web isn't going to move in the direction people want it to move in unless some ground up technology like this is built.
Some employers will ask you to go through a CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) check. This is common in the world of finance, or if working with kids. Basically it is you that receives a copy of the check which will list any convictions - there are different levels of check - some may miss off minor things, like say, police cautions for being drunk and disorderly, but effectively the copy you receive lists the criminal records stored on you.
It is then upto you to show it to your employer, if you refuse to disclose it because you don't like what's on there then they can either refuse you the job, or take the risk. If you show it to them it's upto them how they wish to proceed.
But yes, there have been any number of cases where people convicted of being gay all those years ago have been turned down for jobs because of this and didn't realise they could get it struck from their record.
"As the government always had the option not to prosecute under the law, the least they can do is to explicitly declare the law an error and apologize to and pardon *all* who were prosecuted under it."
For what it's worth they do this for people who were convicted under those laws and are still alive. They can request that their record be whiped clean etc.
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Fortunately it's probably just academic either way.
The ruling doesn't enable any old person in Antigua to ignore copyright as they wish, only the government to give permission.
It's unlikely the government will say "Right, go fuck up the GPL", more likely they're sell "Right, setup an online movie streaming business full of the latest Hollywood Blockbusters."
There's really no gain for Antigua in fucking the GPL, there's no real money in it for them compared to fucking over the MPAA/RIAA.
I looked at the video and to be quite fucking honest I think there's a more innocent excuse.
This to me, the police involvement and so forth, looked like the culmination of too many years of Hollywoodisation of American society. Let's be honest, some people wish they could do a Rambo irl.
This is a bunch of military/police officials who have far too big a budget fulfilling their life long fantasies on the tax payers dime.
I really don't think there's any dark desensitisation plan, I don't think there's any malice here. I think this is genuine military masturbation. The pinnacle of the all American tough guy fantasy being played out at your expense.
If you want to see where your country's debt is, it's not the fault of just the Republicans, or just the Democrats or some other partisan ideology. It's people like this, military and law enforcement with budgets so big they've really run out of ideas as to what the fuck else to do other than dick around in the middle of a city pretending they're part of some Hollywood thriller. Rather than do the right thing and admit they have more money than they need this year and hand some back to the tax payer, they splash it on life long macho fantasies.
Agreed, this says more about the people making that interpretation, than it does the film itself.
It's simply not possibly to make the associations claimed unless you inherently have those beliefs about certain groups in the first place.
You seem to think that performance improvements can be made linearly but that's faults, you start to get diminishing returns on the time spent relative to performance gains realised. That's why IIS has been able to catch up with Apache, and why Apache hasn't been able to maintain it's lead over IIS over the last decade - because it got to a point where Apache needed to start pouring exponentially more resources in, and hence increase exponentially the cost of development to maintain that lead. Even in open source that's not sustainable, especially not across 10 years.
The same is even true of Windows Server, 15 years ago it was a joke compared to Linux, but from Windows Server 2003 things started to improve, and as of Windows Server 2008 it's pretty trivial to secure a Windows server as well as a Linux server, and it performs comparatively well as well despite 10 - 15 years before hand it being the butt of all security jokes. Things change. Times change.
"Werecently (~a year ago) switched from IIS to Apache where, and got a better performance (still on Windows). With the hardware upgrades we did end up moving to Linux."
You simply can't make this comparison in a valid way though, Apache out the box with no modules enabled will always perform better than a default IIS setup, but that's not a like for like comparison, because there are even lighter weight servers again available if all you want to do is serve static HTML with no security - IIS doesn't even try and pretend to compete in that arena. If however you make Apache as useful as IIS, so set up say Apache with Tomcat so that you can serve a Spring MVC application which is a fair comparison against IIS serving an ASP.NET MVC application then in practice you realise absolutely no worthwhile difference to matter, and that remains true whether Windows or Linux.
This is what the story is supposed to be about - real world use cases, not theoretical massively cut down FOSS options vs. default IIS with hefty frameworks on top (which is what the author compared) and which is what you seem to be alluding to given that what you say isn't true of a comparable set of setups and when frankly, many of the statements in your previous post allude to a past, which simply just is not true anymore.
For what it's worth my current project is an Apache Tomcat targetted Java + Spring project, so it's not as if I have a particular interest in the Microsoft stack, however I do have a lot of experience with it to know that what you say does not ring true and that the way you say it makes it sound like it's something you knew/heard 10 years ago, but haven't bothered to properly check back on in recent years to find is simply not true anymore.
I really like Tomcat and Java, which is hence, why, now, as a technical architect, I chose it as the platform for our current project, but I chose it for portability to make it easier for our clients with varying platforms to deal with, not because of any inherent performance benefit- and this system really does have to be performant given the high volumes it will handle and perhaps somewhat ironically, it will be interfacing with IIS hosted .NET services with those same volumes of data that are already out there doing that work.
For what it's worth I worked on a .NET + MySQL project only about 2 years ago, and there are many good reasons not to use MySQL - the MySQL .NET connector was always shit and massively incomplete compared to Oracle and MSSQL connectors meaning you had to skip many of the features of the .NET framework - the entity framework was pretty much unusable because of it for example.
Also, we had a number of occasions where the MySQL data files just literally corrupted themselves, and needed to be repaired. This defies one of the key objectives of having a database system in the first place - reliability.
I struggle to believe in the last 2 years MySQL has magically fixed all it's ills. The reason people go for Oracle or MS SQL is not because it's part of the default stack, but because it's a known quantity and because for all their faults - they at least get the fundamentals right and don't suffer issues like the whole database completely falling over once in a while requiring a repair to the database files themselves with the response from the team behind the software being "Well you should just restore from your backups if the repair doesn't work" - a database shouldn't spontaneously just corrupt itself like that in the first place. Postgres is much better, but MySQL is not fit for purpose in real business applications, it's best left to pet projects and projects where it doesn't matter if it goes down now and again and causes a bit of data loss.
Using MS SQL with .NET buys you a massive amount in terms of productivity gains and assurance that you're getting a solid product. MySQL may be cheap, but you'll waste many hundreds of man hours from slower development due to poor integration, database corruption, bugs, and data loss on even a moderate project at which point the initial cost saving starts looking a lot less worthwhile or justifiable. Over the life of the product if it's going to be around say 3 years or more, then it'll end up resulting in a net loss.
If you want free go Postgres but absolutely not MySQL - it's best left as a beginners tool for learning a bit about SQL because it's easy to use and play with and nothing more.
"Now, if we compare the raw tests (C# vs Java) C# is faster, but when we move to the web servers, suddenly Java is better. That tells me... IIS is significantly (orders of magnitude) worse than Tomcat/Apache."
It tells you that, because you, like him, didn't understand the fundamental issue with his tests.
The issue at hand being that he used ASP.NET MVC (a full web application framework) for the C# tests which involves many extra steps behind the scenes, but a simple servlet for the Java tests which is about as barebones a method of returning web data as you can get on the Java platform.
In reality, eliminating the ASP.NET MVC framework overhead would tell us there's really fuck all difference between them and that IIS isn't actually any worse than Tomcat for this sort of simple task.
You harp on about "everyone knows IIS is slow", "it was a decade ago" or whatever. What, you think software never ever improves?
It sounds like you heard IIS was bad a decade ago, and assume nothing whatsoever has changed and have an attitude that if something was bad a decade ago it's never ever worth reevaluating it. That's just stupid.
Things change, stuff you knew to be true a decade ago, doesn't necessarily remain true now, especially in the fast moving IT world. Just like Windows Server, IIS has come a massively long way since then.
"The reason this is interesting, is it's a very simple test, and hows the maximum performance. Requests can never be faster than returning a simple string."
That'd be great, if it were true.
But there's still so so many variables involved here, what headers was each configured to return? is the CLR's initial response slower than Java's but subsequent responses faster? If you do multiple tests how is caching configured, how does it play into it? He chose ASP.NET MVC4 on the .NET side but a simple servlet on the Java side, despite what he says these things aren't equal. More equal would be to use say, a Spring MVC controller or similar as ASP.NET MVC has to do far more in terms of being passed through the router. Further, I notice he's using dynamic content in his view, what view engine? that matters - Razor is faster than the old view engine.
This is precisely why this test isn't interesting, because of what has been said above - in the "real world" there are just far too many variables to do a realistic comparison between the two technology stacks. Even returning a simple string isn't simple and so many layers of framework and platform technology are involved.
I was doing some performance tests the other day, in C#, specifically testing the impact of various configurations of encryption and compression algorithms on data being sent across a network. You could get some statistically meaningful results for larger data transfers of a few megabytes, but when you got down to data of only a few bytes it became hard to get any meaningful results, the garbage collector kicking in inconveniently could throw out the total processing times involved by a literal couple of orders of magnitude such that you'd get an average of maybe only 0.0052 on one set of 1,000 runs, then 0.73 on another set.
I don't think in the real world it really matters. Both platforms run high performance sites, Java due to it's longer history probably has more at a guess, but as someone else said above it's all meaningless at the high end and again as someone else pointed out that yeah, sure, Facebook runs on PHP, but Facebook PHP was first off just PHP translated into C++ so it was really actually just running on C++ with PHP used to generate the C++, and now they've written or are writing a VM for it so it looks just like Java/C# anyway. The same is true with Java and C# though, at the high end, on real high performance websites, they look so different from your run of the mill simple single server IIS/Tomcat deployment in terms of the amount of detailed configuration changes that have been made, and extra tools used, that you really can't determine anything about high performance worth of these platforms where all tweaks and changes necessary to make them perform to the best extent possible for the particular use case at hand from a simple low performance default configuration test using arbitrary frameworks with clear differences in best case use cases.
America has a base in Cuba, but I don't see Cuba exactly being a US lapdog.
If the only tenuous link that can be provided is that America has a base in Qatar and America/Qatar have military cooperation then I think that's a pretty weak link in suggesting Al Jazeera is somehow beholden to the US.
Especially as the GGP's post about Al Jazeera's stories all having to be approved by the Qatari government is an out and out light.
All sounds more like a bunch of typical "OMG FOREIGN SOUNDING NAME!" xenophobia than any actual solid valid criticism with some actual evidence behind it.
Out of interest, what's not economically feasible about it?
Please don't simply parrot the lie that those folks are magical job creators and will leave the country - they wont, they're not special, if they leave, someone just as competent will gladly come and replace them for even the increased tax rates placed upon them.
It's interesting that you cite Greece as an example though, you are aware that the biggest problem in Greece was the fact that paying income tax was largely optional due to poor enforcement of tax payment and that the wealthy there as a result would nearly always not pay even a penny of tax? If reduced tax on the wealthy improved national wealth then Greece would be a shining example of a productive and succesful economy.
Yeah except both have shit operating systems for doing real actual stuff.
But you're right, they do make this sort of thing now. Most PC manufacturers (Dell, HP, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, Lenovo, etc.) all make small form factor laptops.
NetBooks haven't died, they've just stopped being called NetBooks and become a standard part of most manufacturer's laptop range and come with a range of spec options from low end to high end.
There's no point going for a crippled tablet OS based device and trying to turn it into a laptop so it's useful for doing actual stuff other than browsing the web and playing shitty little games when you can just outright buy a laptop with a proper full functioning OS on instead. Tablets are okay for some simple on the move tasks, and they're okay as toys/entertainment devices in the home, but from the GPs post it sounds like he wants something he can actually do something more useful with than tablets allow.
Even an 11 inch MacBook Air is a better option if you prefer to go down the Apple route.
I'm not convinced tablets are NetBook replacements for a lot of use cases. For people who just wanted something small and light with long battery life for say, web browsing from the sofa in the living room the market intersects, but if you want to do anything much more than that they serve different markets and that's precisely why the NetBook hasn't gone anywhere and has instead just become a standard offering from just about every manufacturer out there, be it Apple, Samsung, Lenovo, Acer, or anyone else.
NetBook was always a buzzword anyway, and it's a buzzword that's stopped being of any value given the ambiguity as to when something stopped being a NetBook and started being a tablet. The only thing that's died is hence the buzzword itself. Thank fuck for that.
You're absolutely right.
I bought a 360 all the way back in 2006, so have had one for quite some time, but a few months ago I finally bought a PS3 to act as a Bluray player in the living room partially, but because I finally felt like playing some of the PS3 exclusives that looked quite nice.
I made my own share of posts 5 years ago in the "console wars" against the PS3, but really if I'm honest, much of it then was just to wind the fanboys up because it was tiresome seeing the kind of drivel you're suffering in response to your post and people like that deserve a good trolling. But 5 years on and I'm a little more apathetic to it all, I couldn't care who wins, I can afford any of the consoles and any of the games nowadays and as such I don't feel any reason to feel brand loyalty - I can afford to go with whoever, I give money, I get entertainment, it's as simple as that.
So when I got my PS3 I was expecting a system that was perfectly on par with the 360, that the pros and cons of each console back then were mostly just fanboy FUD and that in reality there's not much in. But there is, and here's the thing, the areas where the 360 outplays the PS3 are the areas that matter - the graphical difference between the two at 1080p, and with or without 3D are not noticable, for every great looking 360 game I can find a PS3 counter example, and vice versa. Those games I got that are available on both look pretty much the same on both (AC3 for example - I bought it for the 360, but it then came free with my PS3), it's not that sort of thing that's a problem with the PS3. The areas where the PS3 falls flat are areas that really annoy users - the controllers are so much less comfortable to hold (the 360s left thumbstick is far more naturally placed for example), the updates/installs on the PS3 are frankly fucking brutal - I though the odd 30 second update on sticking a 360 game in the console was a bit of a pain, but it's nothing compared to the 2hr+ update/installation of games like LBP2. Even signing up for the Playstation Network was so much more painful - I got 404 error pages on the console when doing so at one point, but annoyingly it gave different errors when trying to come up with a nickname- for some names it'd say it was taken, for others it would say not available without explaining why. I figured maybe it's because that name was taken by an old Planetside account I had many years ago, so I found I could login to my old SOE account, but the SOE account where Planetside etc. resides wasn't the same as the SOE account for PSN, so despite an hour of Google, scouring their help etc. it seemed I just needed to make a new account for PSN and couldn't just use my existing SOE account.
Really, there's no differences between the two when it comes to graphics, framerates, audio and so forth, but where there is a difference is where it really pisses people off - general system usability. The 360, is, simply put, just far more painless to use, the whole Live setup is just so much better thought out, the interfaces so much better designed, the controls much nicer to hold - it's just a better experience.
To give an analogy, using a 360, vs. using a PS3 feels like the difference between using a modern Android/iPhone vs. using a Blackberry/N900 - the latter are not inherently bad devices, but they just feel so much more clunky to use and so much more in need of polish.
This isn't to say I regret buying my PS3, me and my girlfriend have had a hell of a lot of fun on LBP/LBP2 etc. and I've been enjoying uncharted, killzone etc. I'm glad I got them, and of course, it has a Bluray player and things like ITV Player which isn't on the 360 yet. But for the simple improvements in ease of use with the 360 and the fact there's no other real noticable differences, all cross platform games I buy, I will buy the 360 version of. It's just simply a more polished device with a better user experience.
Yes, and to put those ranks into context, our old local council leader got a CBE (the next rank up AFAIK) for "Services to local government" when those services involved getting it £27million into debt during the boom and times of highest funding, before he left to get paid even more to fuck up another council elsewhere.
So in other words, getting an MBE is a bit like being told you're just beneath someone who is highly incompetent and arguably even extremely corrupt.
I was watching a show on TV here in the UK last night, which was going on about some guy who invented kites with two strings so you could better control them in about 1979 and was being hailed for his excellent work in coming up with this simple but magnificent idea that gave greater control over them.
Only the problem is in parts of Asia like Afghanistan, and China they've been doing this at least 100 years prior, but likely much more than that.
I guess the "inventor" of a product in this day and age is who is best able to rewrite history, rather than who actually originally came up with the idea.
As another poster pointed out, the temperature must be in the shade, and that matters.
To demonstrate just how much a little environmental change can adjust heat though, and hence why the standard must be that the temperature is taken in shade, even here in the UK, in my greenhouse with no fans running for better airflow, my thermometer has recorded 56.5C (133F) even with the vents open. A simple glass structure with windows open can trap drastically more heat relative to the outside temperature in the shade which was only around 26C that day when the sun is hitting it directly. I'd be intrigued to know what a greenhouse in death valley on that day may have recorded, I suspect you'd be a fair way towards being able to boil water in it by just putting it there in a bucket.
Yeah, except there's not actually a problem with the government position in this case, it's actually a marked improvement from the current status quo, so yes, I'll label him a victim of sensationalism, because he's seeing a problem where there simply isn't one.
It's chilling in the way that The Register is a sensationalist trash-publication along the lines of Fox News and The Daily Mail and that it's readers have thus been brainwashed into thinking that everything ever is bad and out to get them, hence why they get confused between what is bad, and what is, in fact, actually good.
Seriously, this is what happens if you routinely read The Register, your brain turns to mush and you just start spouting complete and utter bollocks. You only have to read an Andrew Orlowski or Lewis Page article to see it already had this effect on the staff there years ago.
I don't think there's any suggestion it can't be appealed is there? simply that a retrial wont be ordered.
I'm not surprised though, from what I was reading from other sources about this outside the tech community this wouldn't be unusual, apparently retrials based on jury misconduct are extremely rare in the US and the jury is allowed to get away with the sort of thing the guy in this case did. It's only if there was say evidence of outright corruption such as a bribed jury that a retrial would come into play in the US.
An appeal is still Samsung's best bet as that would eliminate both Koh, and the bent jury from the equation altogether.
But is that mindset still even relevant now?
The days of monitors/TVs having refresh rates that were multiples of 15, or 30 or whatever seem to have gone out the door with CRT technology.
"This class of people tend not to break doors in, or have the physical capacity to do so."
I agree, but as I say, not everyone routinely locks, or remembers to lock their door.
"In the event of a drunk, someone who is high on drugs, or mental weirdo, if they cannot or will not respond correctly to "Stop. I have a gun and I will shoot you if you come closer!", and they've broken your door in, they are unquestionably a danger to your life, and the lives of your family members."
Sure, but I see little reason for a gun. I'm unaware of a single case here in the UK where this sort of thing has been a problem, and that removing such a person shouldn't need a gun. The only case that comes close is a recent case where a drunk man did exactly this and the house owner simply stabbed him, he was found guilty of murder because he used execessive force, sure there was a drunk guy on his property, but the fact is he may have been drunk but was still harmless, he could've been removed without killing him. You'd have every right though to say, knock him unconcious.
"However, chances are if there are law enforcement in your house uninvited, they're of the no-knock warrant ninja-commando type who have their address wrong. It's happened before, and sure enough, police are far and away more dangerous to your family than any other class of invader. God forbid you have a gun in your hand, as they like to shoot anything that moves first and ask questions later. You'd better hope your dog is asleep and deaf, because they're liable to shoot it as well. It's only a matter of time until these types of raids happen upon a PTSD riddled vet with a hair trigger, leaving a bunch of cops and one vet dead."
I sympathise with this and agree this isn't so much an American gun problem as much as it is an American cultural problem. In the UK our police work under a different principle to that of many other police forces around the world, we have a system known as "Policing by consent" and what this means is that the police should not normally be particularly more well armed than the general public, are allowed to be (other than specialised units). This is why our police do not routinely carry guns because we try to avoid this ideology of the police being a controlling force over the population, hence why the only time police with guns turn up, is if someone themselves has a gun. Since 9/11 we have now got a number of exceptions - armed police routinely patrol airports, but on the streets this is not the case. After a couple of police officers were killed recently there was talking of arming our police again by some people but interestingly it was the police themselves who said they do not wish to be armed - they made it clear that when you start arming police you create an "us vs. them" divide, whereas our police prefer to try and be part of the community, rather than something that's there to oversee and control the community.
I suspect drastic changes to police training in the US probably are needed to ensure cops understand that they're not there as people who exist above ordinary citizens which is the mindset of those particular cops you describe, but who exist alongside ordinary citizens.
For what it's worth the history of the term "policing by consent" stems from the idea that when our first police forces came about, the only way the peasant classes wouldn't simply rebel against them and make them meaningless by overwhelming them in riots was if the police worked with them rather than tried to act as an occupying force in their towns etc. There's somewhat of a bitter irony here - effectively the police forces in the UK were built up under the rules they work under to prevent what trigged America's battle for independence- the idea that it was the crown imposing their will on the people, rather than trying to provide a useful service to the people (prevention of crime). The idea stems from around the 1820s so it's likely that the whole mindset governing British policing does actually stem from the lessons lea
Someone whose mental capability is diminished would provide a number of reasons - too drunk, has alzheimers, mentally ill and hence walk into the wrong home.
Police/fire services being given the wrong house in an emergency call as a result of accident or a prank.
People being given the wrong address or similar for a party accidently or not.
Overly informal neighbour believing you would be okay with them just popping in.
Landlord if you have one entering the house to check/confirm something.
Gardener/Cleaner if you have one either because they're meant to be there or they came on the wrong day accidently or intentionally or you forgot what day they were supposed to be there.
Someone entering to warn you about an imminent danger, such as a neighbourhood fire, a bomb in the neighbourhood, a gas leak, a massive tidal surge or whatever.
There really are a lot of reasons, if your assertion is that it's unlikely these things would ever happen to you then you'd certainly be right about that, but that wasn't the GPs point. The GPs point is that there might be any number of innocent reasons why someone may intentionally or unintentionally enter your house and sure it even sometimes depends on if you always lock your door, never lock your door, sometimes forget to lock your door and so forth but that doesn't detract from the GP's point that sometimes, it can happen, and you shouldn't just instantly have the right to kill them.
"What do you propose? that I lie on the floor like a coward and hope he doesn't shoot me in the back out of contempt after he's done robbing me?"
You're assuming he'd have a gun, if the gun ban in the UK has taught us anything it's that the "If you ban guns, only bad guys have guns" mantra is grossly overplayed. In the UK guns are just about never ever used for breakins, whilst bad guys have them, they're so hard to get hold of and so expensive as a result that they only ever get used against other gang members and so forth in gang on gang violence. Innocent law abiding citizens are so very very rarely shot here, which is why it makes headline news on the rare occasions it does happen. Somewhat interestingly, the majority of guns that do make it across to the UK are actually legally bought guns from the US smuggled over, so a limitation on US firearms purchases would actually help us. It's not uncommon that the same gun in the UK is passed around for multiple murders, so of the 39 or so gun murders last year or whatever it was for example, 10 of them may have been with a single weapon which highlights the limited amount of firearms on the streets, which highlights the minimised impact they now have on our society.
"Who are you to state the value of my 'stuff'? My family? my rights? my dignity? Look at it another way, don't invade peoples' homes if you value your life. That makes a lot more pragmatic sense than some kind of neo-hippie stockholm syndrome attitude towards violence."
But that's what we do in the UK too, we make criminals scared to break in by telling them don't do if if they value their lives. We reinforce this principle by broadly publicising cases like this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8812716/Homeowner-cleared-after-burglar-stabbed-to-death.html
America seems obsessed with the need for guns to defend themselves, what happened to the good old fashioned cricket bat if you're paranoid? If you're really, really desperate for a gun then manual load shotguns and hunting rifles at least are still perfectly legal. You just can't have a concealable firearm or a semi or fully automatic one. Here we have a concept of reasonable force, if someone's in your home with a knife it's reasonable to grab a big fat kitchen knife and attack them with it before they attack you. But as this article points out there are limits:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20398432
"There was a case when a man in a warehouse captured an intruder who'd come onto his premises. He tied him up, threw him in a pit and set fire to him."
Obviously that was taking things a little too far.
It's about getting the balance right between deterring intruders and preventing excuse for murder. I think we have that balance about right in our country now and certainly guns aren't part of it. Of course Americans make the argument that we've no way to defend ourselves against our government, but I think this is a silly argument, is there really any evidence we're less free to influence political discourse in nations like ours where guns are banned than in the US? What if a theoretical dictator comes along, sure we wont be armed to remove him but do we need to be? If the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya showed us anything it's that gun ownership needn't be a barrier to revolution - the army either sides with the population because it's their friends and family being oppressed to, or if they don't, then the populace just storms the army bases and then gets their guns - this is precisely what happened in Libya, an otherwise peaceful protest passing an army check point turned on it and stormed it before they even knew what had happened. I don't buy the guns are essential to protect liberty argument, as there's absolutely zero evidence to date for that being the case whilst there is evidence that nations with strict gun
Afraid I can't find a source now, so it may simply have been bollocks (though I'm certain it was from a reputable source), but I recall reading that there's a period for about 2 weeks every year where pretty much the whole of Europe simply receives very little wind, which means that Europe at least couldn't rely too heavily on wind as that period would create too much of a low in Europe wide wind output to be able to spread the load across even the continent, let alone our own country. Effectively that would mean we'd need two weeks every year where some other power source would drastically pick up the slack.
That makes wind okay as a suplement, but not as a more widely used power source.
Personally I don't like wind because I think it's fucking ugly. Honestly, I can see three coal power plants from my bedroom winning over a distance of about 30 or so miles on a day with good visibility, but the plumes coming from them are nothing compared to the ugly sight of hundreds of turbines wrecking a landscape. I'd rather we stuck solar panels on everyone's roofs instead, at least that's simply smart utilisation of existing space, rather than creating massive no go areas on otherwise pleasant landscape. As someone else said up above, exclusion zones from nuclear accidents compare not even a fragment to the amount of landscape now inaccesible due to wind turbines and certainly the aesthetic damage is far greater. I wouldn't care about them so much if I live in a country like the US where there are still vast swathes of uninhabited and land for turbines and still plenty more for people to enjoy without them, but here in the UK? It seems we've lost the last few fragments of natural landscape to them now. Still, I'm sure utilitarians will no doubt tell me that aesthetics of landscapes and so much don't matter.
Your last paragraph sounds great, I agree it's a nice thing to aim for in theory, but have you actually worked on any serious cross-platform HTML5 projects in practice? It's a fucking nightmare.
I actually really, really hate Flash such that I've always refused to learn it and still refuse to, but we've actually had to resort to Flash on some projects because it's still the easiest way to implement cross-browser unified web experiences. HTML5 projects work poorly across different browsers and platforms.
HTML5s only real strength seems to be for building mobile web pages, on the desktop HTML5 still works and looks completely different between Chrome, IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, but even on mobile it's hardly the unified development dream we were sold it to be by WHATWG - far from it. Web development now, with HTML5 is more awkward than I remember it being for many many years because of the countless inconsistencies.
The fundamental issue is that like you say, "they might be wonky sometimes" but how is that different to older versions of (X)HTML? HTML5 is just more of the same - more features that don't work right/consistently between platforms, but because there's so much of it, if you try to use any sizeable number of new HTML5 features then you'll end up with more of an inconsistent clusterfuck than ever before. Or in other words, nothings changed, you could always use a minimal set of HTML/CSS features and get a page to work on all devices, and as you added more the inconsistencies grew, that's still the case, HTML5 doesn't change that, it just adds more inconsistencies to fuck things up with.
Honestly, your last paragraph is noble sounding but you're ultimately just parroting WHATWG's marketing blurb, and they simply didn't manage to live up to the hype they sold in practice with the production of HTML5. The end product is really quite a train wreck, partly because the spec was badly produced, partly because no matter how good the spec, browser vendors are still utterly shit at their job, and shit at achieving a decent degree of interop between each other's offerings.
I do agree with the GP, between current browsers being such a quagmire of shite as the codebases have become ever more screwed up with the addition of new features over the years, and the fact that HTML and related technologies were never really designed with the complexity of webapps people ask for in mind today, we'd be far better off if we just kept HTML as a web document format, and created a new set of technologies for web applications. I've mentioned it before, it could still interop with HTML, using say, app:// as a new protocol running alongside HTTP allowing linking and so forth between HTML pages and apps to work seamlessly, but ultimately the web isn't going to move in the direction people want it to move in unless some ground up technology like this is built.
Some employers will ask you to go through a CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) check. This is common in the world of finance, or if working with kids. Basically it is you that receives a copy of the check which will list any convictions - there are different levels of check - some may miss off minor things, like say, police cautions for being drunk and disorderly, but effectively the copy you receive lists the criminal records stored on you.
It is then upto you to show it to your employer, if you refuse to disclose it because you don't like what's on there then they can either refuse you the job, or take the risk. If you show it to them it's upto them how they wish to proceed.
But yes, there have been any number of cases where people convicted of being gay all those years ago have been turned down for jobs because of this and didn't realise they could get it struck from their record.
"As the government always had the option not to prosecute under the law, the least they can do is to explicitly declare the law an error and apologize to and pardon *all* who were prosecuted under it."
For what it's worth they do this for people who were convicted under those laws and are still alive. They can request that their record be whiped clean etc.