OMG, someone mentioned the iPhone, quick fanboys, jump into knee jerk defensive reaction mode!
No one's bitching about the iPhone, he's just pointing out it's a lot of power, for not very much money. If you read more into it than that it says more about what kind of rabid irrational volatile fanboy you are than anything he said.
But that doesn't change the fact literally thousands of people keep encountering problems of high memory usage in the real world with Firefox that goes way above and beyond that of other browsers.
Across many operating systems, on much different hardware, and with many configurations I've time and time again seen Firefox chewing silly amounts of RAM and grinding to a halt.
You can say it's fine in benchmarks, or you can say it's just me all you want - these are the usual responses from people on this sort of thing, but the fact is Firefox has lost a lot of users to Chrome etc. and the biggest complaint about Firefox is always it's high memory usage and the sluggishness this seems to introduce.
Denial of the problem isn't going to stop Firefox hemorrhaging users to the competition where users don't complain of these problems. Writing off anyone complaining as a troll is the surest way to condemn Firefox to history as an "also ran". I don't really see fanboyism when it comes to browser complaints, when people complain about a browser the complaint seems to just about always be genuine, so to give a fanboyist defensive reaction over it is just childish and silly.
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It's stupid, I suppose these people think that Gaddaffi was in on it too and sent his forces to destory Benghazi provoking the initial French strikes to tip the scales in favour of military action too only to be backstabbed later on? Presumably after the initial strikes the reason Qatar, Britain, and France spent most money and took most risk over the conflict was because Cameron and Sarkozy were caught up in a love triangle with Obama and hoped to whisk him away to Canada where gay marriage is legal too?
A bank is a pretty important symbol of a functioning state, and a rebel cause like this needs an incredible amount of funding to stand up to the amount of reserves of gold and cash Gaddaffi had lying around to fund mercenairies and so forth.
As with all wars, those that helped the winning side will likely hope for some kind of repayment - favour for their companies when it comes to oil contracts and such, but to suggest this was some kind of planned US coup is fucking laughable. America was pretty reluctant over Libya and didn't even really want much to do with it, and after softening Gaddaffi's stationary implacements and facilities with initial cruise missile strikes, didn't in fact have much to do with it providing little more than intel from drones and satellites.
If there were any countries for whom this would be a conspiracy it would be Britain, France, or Qatar, as they were the primary instigators of it throughout, but then you'd have to find a reason other than the US dollar conspiracy theory.
It's also highly unlikely Russia and China wouldn't have an idea of what the Americans were upto, and they'd have outright vetoed the UN resolution knowing this is what it was about.
Really, it was what it was, some may disagree whether it was right and that's a fair point, some may point to greed when countries who supported the uprising get handed favourable contracts, but this wasn't some grand US conspiracy - as with most conspiracy theories, the theory only tentatively pieces together a handful of disparate points, whilst failing to string together a cohesive explanation for all the parts of the story that don't fit, no, they just get conveniently ignored by the nutjobs.
I think the fine is indeed a deterrent for large companies, not because of the monetary value because of the knock on effect on their corporate image. The big guys tend to be fairly responsible anyway, because they know they have a reputation to protect.
My concern is the small companies, and these have been the companies which the ICO in the UK has been most powerless to stop because a small percentage fine isn't enough for them - the guys running these type of companies are making £200k and that's more than they've ever had, they don't care if they lose even £50k, £150k is still more than they're ever going to make elsewhere because they're unemployable jackasses, making money through illegal use of personal data.
Unless there's some sanction for repeat offenders, they can just feign incompetence, so unless the authorities can find a whistleblower willing to act as a witness proving malice, there's little they can do to demonstrate it wasn't incompetence.
No it wont, complying with this legislation isn't exactly hard and frankly a lot of responsible companies of all sizes do this sort of thing already.
I dealt with a number of recruitment agencies earlier this year, some very small, some larger, but none of them went bust when they complied with my request to remove my personal details from their systems after I'd finished looking for a new role.
My only dissapoint is the constant bandying about of the fines thing. They point out that 2% is massive in monetary value, well yes, it can be, but it's not enough of a deterrent.
In the UK, for companies like Phorm, and ACS:Law, this would be zero deterrent to what they did, the fines shouldn't be capped percentage wise, as only a fine of perhaps 80% of annual revenue would've been enough to make Phorm and ACS:Law start behaving. The $1.2bn figure for MS sounds a lot less scary when you consider for someone like Andrew Crossley at ACS:Law who really has been in gross breach of the UK's data protection act, were he bringing in £250,000 a year with his personal one man business, would only see a fine of £5000, still leaving him £245,000 to take home. Where the fuck is the deterrent in that? You could write it off as the cost of doing business and just carry on doing it.
Jail terms for owners/execs, or completely uncapped fines left to the decision of the judge as to what size fine to levy would be the only real deterrents. That's the biggest problem I see with this proposed law - there's no worthwhile deterrent for companies with no positive image to protect (e.g. Phorm) in the fines, they're toothless as proposed right now.
Well the obvious answer is that they can't if it really has no EU ties, just like they can't do anything about sites outside the EU hosting child porn currently.
But that's just the way the world works, it's designed with that knowledge, but it wont protect companies like Facebook, Google, Apple etc. as they do have a prescence, and even if they withdrew that prescence they could potentially still harm those companies by preventing EU firms advertising with them for example.
I'm sure firms will argue it'll cause some competitive disadvantage, but I'm not convinced that's true- I'd argue the opposite if anything, users across the globe should feel far more comfortable using companies that adhere to these rules, than those that don't.
So I don't really see how it'll be a failure, it'll force all major online firms to adhere to it because they do have an EU prescence, and from there anyone else that doesn't comply will have the disadvantage of being much less attractive to customers. Who wants their data held by some fly by night company that has no restrictions on what it can do with that data when they can instead use a company with more ethical rules surrounding what it can and will do with your data?
"The government says "Hey, we really didn't consult the public before we agreed to this""
I don't know why this is being billed as the government admitting any kind of fault, I thought the whole point in ACTA was to get it produced and signed off without the public even finding out, hence the secrecy of negotiations in the first place?
I think when they say they admit they didn't consult the public they're not saying "Yeah, we kind of should have consulted the public", they're saying, "We didn't consult the public, because that was the whole fucking point of ACTA".
Under our FPTP system parties are often elected to be given effective 100% of power in parliament with sometimes as little as 30% of the public vote. Then, when parties are in power, they form a cabinet, which is basically 10 - 20 or so people with the PM at the top, the PM heavily influences the cabinet, but then what the rest of the part things is irrelevant as if they want to push something through they can use the whip, which largely forces MPs to vote along the lines the cabinet wants.
So basically, in the UK, 30% of the public vote is enough to give a small clique - the cabinet - effective 100% of control over how the country should go.
It's obviously not healthy, and is precisely why corruption is such a big problem (i.e. see the recent phone hacking stuff, the expenses scandal, and so on) - when you give a handful of people so much power, based on so little support, and leave no real counter to that power, then of course they'll get drunk on it and take bribes, because they know there's no one with the power to stand up to them. On some issues the Lords may intervene, but now that government has succeded in replacing the hereditary Lords with Lords chosen by MPs to a great extent then they've actually removed the semi-independance that hereditary peers even if not democratic, brought to the Lords. This is not to say I think hereditary peers are ideal of course, but simply that by allowing governments to install their own puppets in there instead, you remove the whole point of the Lords - a check and balance against bad government.
The US didn't seem to find cost prohibitive in buying the original pirate bay raid, the pirate bay show trial, the prosecutor in the Assange case, or even the Swedish PM judging by his public prejudgemental comments about the guilt of Assange. Perhaps Sweden is an anomally though and Norway, Iceland, and Finland just keep the average up?
"The problem is that it's like selling knives to people and the most common thing people do is stab each other with them."
I don't know what neighbourhood you live in, but in our neighbourhood the most common thing people do with knives is cut inanimate objects up, like food for example.
I can't take credit for any such thing but on a similar note I've made the point before that in the UK and US, despite the billions that have been spent on airport security, the only terrorists that have actually tried to sneak a bomb on the plane since 9/11 have actually succeded at that, and only failed overall because their explosives were shit - the shoe bomber, and the underpants bomber.
To date I do not believe we have one single case of all this expensive enhanced airport security catching a single terrorist red handed trying to smuggle explosives on the plane, the success rate of these technologies and techniques going by the attempts that have got through is currently 0%. We're spending a hell of a lot of money achieving nothing, and eroding civil liberties.
We have had people stopped en-route to the airport, after being discovered, followed, and arrested by the security services, but by airport security itself? Nope.
There's an argument it's helped with other crimes, like drug smuggling and so forth, but that's not what we were sold these security features on, and frankly I'm not convinced drug smuggling is worth giving up so much money and so many civil liberties to prevent.
So not just free blood pressure screening, in general, if the money spent on security was spent on absolutely anything even semi-related to health care or well being, it'd undoubtedly be more effective at saving lives.
Well of course, if you want to be that pedantic you could just nuke every human off the planet, then there'd be no piracy, but let's be honest, there reaches a point where the cost of solving a problem outweighs the benefits, and that's the problem with fighting piracy - it's too large scale a problem for any solution that involves aggression against pirates to be cost effective.
For digital piracy you can increase internet monitoring which ups the cost for ISPs and consumers, and makes internet connections more shit, but then your internet economy weakens and any tax increase that would be gained from a stronger music/movie industry would be far outweighed by the corporate tax lost from failure to create a culture where a digital economy can thrive.
So when I say solving such a problem is impossible, what I actually mean is that yes, with most things it's theoretically possible, but it's not possible in a practical sense. You can take Iraq as an example, America's "surge" could be said to be a new tactic with greater resources, and it kind of worked, but one can hardly say it completely solved the problem - Iraq still has a massive insurgency issue and since the surge in Iraq, things have become a hundred times worse in Afghanistan such that there's a fair argument it simply moved the problem.
Ah yes, [Citation needed], AKA, "I'm far too lazy to check the facts, but I'm going to disagree with you regardless, because I prefer to wallow in my own ignorance."
What are you disputing exactly? Here, have a bunch of links, not that I expect you to read them if you can't even be arsed to use Google to confirm a point:
There's plenty more sources out there, it's a pretty well researched area. I'm not sure what exactly you're disputing, because you just posted a meaningless one liner, but terrorist groups of all shapes and sizes have long used counterfeit goods as a source of funding, as has organised crime. If you're not disputing that I can only assume you're disputing that these groups act in the UK, and if it's that you're disputing I can only ask, where have you been for the last few decades? There's been many cases of individuals linked to terrorism being guilty of financing terrorism in the UK- and they're only the ones the police have detected and been able to build enough evidence for a criminal case against. You only have to look at my 3rd link to see the scale of the Tamil operations in the UK to see that they absolutely are operating here.
Honestly, I'm all for defending digital piracy, but let's please not try and blur it all in together and hide the ugly facts of physical piracy. Read my other post in response to the AC that replied to me - I made it quite clear that I actually see digital piracy as the cure to physical piracy which genuinely does fund terrorism and organised crime.
If people are going to start lumping physical piracy in with digital piracy and argue that piracy is fine, then the battle is already lost, because those defending piracy really are genuinely being irrational at that point, and the MPAA really can bill them as terrorist sympathisers. That's not right, because digital piracy is a separate issue, with separate knock on effects - the effects of digital diracy are IMO harmless, and potentially even beneficial (increased access to knowledge, no evidence of decreased profits as a result), whilst the effects of physical piracy are quite problematic (funding of organised crime etc.). As I say, the former can actually act as a market that counters the latter, which means digital piracy likely actually decreases funding for terrorism and organised crime because people are no longer buying counterfeit content when they can download it at home. They will though, if that option is taken away.
It's slightly more complex in the case of computer access - i.e. we've still got to consider how we deal with for example, a criminal hacker in France stealing money from a bank in the US - do they face US, or French justice? but certainly for simple legality of hosting issues there's no real argument for extradition.
I think even in that example though the person in question should be tried in France regardless, we've just got to have faith that friendly countries have reached their own acceptable views on how best to deal with offenders. Unfriendly countries wont extradite regardless, so there's little discussion to be had there I guess. Effectively a request for extradition from a country tells that country "Look, we think your criminal justice system is shit, so we want to use ours" - that strikes me as pretty fucking insulting and I think that's why there is such a backlash in the UK over the UK-US extradition treaty for example. People are offended that America thinks we're not capable of dealing with criminals as well as they are, despite their much worse crime stats.
Well it's not entirely altruistic, but it's still beneficial.
The problem is sites like Expert Exchange, any IT person will have searched for an IT problem and got an Experts Exchange link only to click it and find nothing but ads - so many professional IT workers don't realise that the content is actually hidden away at the bottom, after pages of fake blocking content trying to convince you to subscribe such that many go to the page, scroll down a bit, see nothing but ads, then leave the page and try a different link.
If this happens too often people wont get fed up with those sites, they'll get fed up of Google not returning nice results and Google risks losing them to the likes of Bing and Yahoo.
So sure it's not altruistic, it's about keeping users on board by providing the most pleasing results to users as it can, but it's still a good thing IMO.
Many people today probably don't even remember the pre-Google search engines, where you'd far more frequently have to click well past the 1st page of results to find what you want, and had to click into and exit out of far more results because they weren't what you wanted.
The fact is, if Google first searches based on relevance of content, and then given roughly equally content relevance to the search query then starts ranking those pages based on how pleasant they are to use then that makes searching a much less stressful endeavour. As a search engine, the user experience of a search engine is somewhat linked to the user experience of the results it returns - if two search engines return the same results equally ordered by relevance, but then one of them ranks the most pleasant to use sites first where relevance is pretty much identical, which are you going to use? The one where you have to deal with annoying sites to find your answer, or the one where you don't?
"So what you're saying is, piracy funds terrorism."
Physical piracy yes.
"That sounds like a great reason to stop piracy don't you think?"
It's a great reason to stop physical piracy yes, but as you can't beat it with law enforcement and legislation as decades of failed attempt to do so have shown, then the only solution to date that's decreased physical piracy of content is digital piracy, then legislating against digital piracy actually works counter to stopping funding for terrorism from physical piracy.
Yes, I know you're too caught up in your own simplistic world view to get this, because you demonstrated in your post that you completely and utterly missed the point, which is also why you posted AC because you didn't want people linking your lack of ability to talk rationally about such a topic with your comments elsewhere where you may or may not have a clue what you're on about, but I figured it's worth clarifying anyway in case anyone else needed it explaining.
Still, have fun calling pirates stupid whilst simultaneously demonstrating a complete inability to follow what is frankly a quite simple argument to understand- any pirates reading this will at least be quite amused by the irony of that I imagine, so no doubt they'll thank you for that at least.
"If this type of service was only meant for personal backups and not illegal file sharing, this would have been the standard in the first place."
Well, how about legal file sharing for one?
There are still many companies around the globe who have strict limits on e-mail sizes even to this day, and as such there are many millions of people every day looking for ways to send large files back and forth between clients, and other companies they simply do business with.
MegaUpload was just one site that offered a solution for those millions of people.
Make no mistake, the MegaUpload closure, and to a lesser degree, this Filesonic change has caused millions in damage through lost files, lost time, and damage to client relationships.
I hope it was all worth it, when the MPAA and RIAA see a massive increase in revenue as people start flocking back to legitimate methods to get their content.
It's worse than that, attacks on file sharing actually outright aid criminals in other ways too.
If people can't download films and music on the internet anymore, they aren't going to go to their local HMV or whatever and pay £14 for a CD, then some will just get copies from their friends, but others will just go down the local market and pay £3 to a dodgy dealer like people used to before the internet. This genuinely, directly puts money into the hands of organised crime- some of which is tied back to terrorism (both Taliban/al Qaeda sympathisers, and the Tamil Tigers got a lot of funding doing this sort of thing in the UK and other Western countries), rather than the bunk claims that file sharing somehow profits organised crime.
"Considering that nobody forced them to locate a server in the US, I'm not sure whom they can reasonably blame other than themselves. It remains to be seen whether the allegations lead to any convictions, but the US certainly does have the right to try them for those felonies."
What a load of bollocks. Most people have no idea where their hosts server's are located, it's been pointed out many a time, that if you had broken Iranian law would you thus be happy to be extradited to Iran? If you signed up for a web hosting package because it was cheap, hosting something about gay rights, only to find the servers were in Iran you'd be happy to be sent over there to face the death penalty would you?
Sorry, but it doesn't matter if the servers were hosted in the US, all this means the US should be able to do is seize the servers, and any financial assets related to them passing through US financial institutions, it doesn't mean they should be able to extradite foreign citizens over it.
I know America thinks differently, seeing as it's abducted many hundreds of people over the last decade for things not illegal in their country like funding political viewpoints the US just happens to dislike, but that doesn't make it right, or acceptable, nor does it mean the people involved in any way deserve or should have to blame themselves for being extradited - it's a massively unfair, and disproportional step, and the only time extradition is acceptable is if the crime is both serious (i.e. rape, murder), and actually committed whilst the person is physically on US soil, and has escaped the country, or if the person in question is a US citizen living overseas - and even then it's questionable, but any dispute should fall into the category of an effective asylum request.
Yep, this is exactly the way petitions in the UK worked when they were interested years ago, and still largely work today.
They were sold as a way of using the internet to help get people involved in democracy.
But what they really were was a way of using the internet to allow politicians to pretend they give a fuck about democracy.
Things like the Digital Economy Act were some of the most voted against, but just got pretty much entirely ignored, now the new government has revamped the petitions barely a couple of thousand people have voted, despite I think hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions having voted on a petition about that the first time around.
The petitions are just another way of pretending politicians care about the general populace, whilst doing quite the fucking opposite. The Whitehouse has obviously learnt from our successive governments what a useful tool they are for distracting people from the real situation.
"Who is being protected by allowing two people to get a better tax return for being married?"
Okay, I know it was mainly a rhetorical question, but I had to answer - the religious institutions who use marriage as a major income source.
Marriage tax benefits are merely a way to try and push people down the path of religious ceremony with the hope it will give the church greater opportunity to pull people in, and yes, I think it stinks. If religion declines without state support then so be it, but the problem is in many countries, including where I live - the UK - the leaders are often irrational enough to believe in the magical fairy man in the sky.
This is also why many countries are against gay marriage too - because that's also against religion.
Really, legislation in many countries or states surrounding marriage comes back to using it as a tool to push religious beliefs and has absolutely fuck all to do with "ensuring stable families".
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OMG, someone mentioned the iPhone, quick fanboys, jump into knee jerk defensive reaction mode!
No one's bitching about the iPhone, he's just pointing out it's a lot of power, for not very much money. If you read more into it than that it says more about what kind of rabid irrational volatile fanboy you are than anything he said.
That's great, it performs well in benchmarks.
But that doesn't change the fact literally thousands of people keep encountering problems of high memory usage in the real world with Firefox that goes way above and beyond that of other browsers.
Across many operating systems, on much different hardware, and with many configurations I've time and time again seen Firefox chewing silly amounts of RAM and grinding to a halt.
You can say it's fine in benchmarks, or you can say it's just me all you want - these are the usual responses from people on this sort of thing, but the fact is Firefox has lost a lot of users to Chrome etc. and the biggest complaint about Firefox is always it's high memory usage and the sluggishness this seems to introduce.
Denial of the problem isn't going to stop Firefox hemorrhaging users to the competition where users don't complain of these problems. Writing off anyone complaining as a troll is the surest way to condemn Firefox to history as an "also ran". I don't really see fanboyism when it comes to browser complaints, when people complain about a browser the complaint seems to just about always be genuine, so to give a fanboyist defensive reaction over it is just childish and silly.
"Libya - The US Currency Protection War"
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It's stupid, I suppose these people think that Gaddaffi was in on it too and sent his forces to destory Benghazi provoking the initial French strikes to tip the scales in favour of military action too only to be backstabbed later on? Presumably after the initial strikes the reason Qatar, Britain, and France spent most money and took most risk over the conflict was because Cameron and Sarkozy were caught up in a love triangle with Obama and hoped to whisk him away to Canada where gay marriage is legal too?
A bank is a pretty important symbol of a functioning state, and a rebel cause like this needs an incredible amount of funding to stand up to the amount of reserves of gold and cash Gaddaffi had lying around to fund mercenairies and so forth.
As with all wars, those that helped the winning side will likely hope for some kind of repayment - favour for their companies when it comes to oil contracts and such, but to suggest this was some kind of planned US coup is fucking laughable. America was pretty reluctant over Libya and didn't even really want much to do with it, and after softening Gaddaffi's stationary implacements and facilities with initial cruise missile strikes, didn't in fact have much to do with it providing little more than intel from drones and satellites.
If there were any countries for whom this would be a conspiracy it would be Britain, France, or Qatar, as they were the primary instigators of it throughout, but then you'd have to find a reason other than the US dollar conspiracy theory.
It's also highly unlikely Russia and China wouldn't have an idea of what the Americans were upto, and they'd have outright vetoed the UN resolution knowing this is what it was about.
Really, it was what it was, some may disagree whether it was right and that's a fair point, some may point to greed when countries who supported the uprising get handed favourable contracts, but this wasn't some grand US conspiracy - as with most conspiracy theories, the theory only tentatively pieces together a handful of disparate points, whilst failing to string together a cohesive explanation for all the parts of the story that don't fit, no, they just get conveniently ignored by the nutjobs.
I think the fine is indeed a deterrent for large companies, not because of the monetary value because of the knock on effect on their corporate image. The big guys tend to be fairly responsible anyway, because they know they have a reputation to protect.
My concern is the small companies, and these have been the companies which the ICO in the UK has been most powerless to stop because a small percentage fine isn't enough for them - the guys running these type of companies are making £200k and that's more than they've ever had, they don't care if they lose even £50k, £150k is still more than they're ever going to make elsewhere because they're unemployable jackasses, making money through illegal use of personal data.
Unless there's some sanction for repeat offenders, they can just feign incompetence, so unless the authorities can find a whistleblower willing to act as a witness proving malice, there's little they can do to demonstrate it wasn't incompetence.
No it wont, complying with this legislation isn't exactly hard and frankly a lot of responsible companies of all sizes do this sort of thing already.
I dealt with a number of recruitment agencies earlier this year, some very small, some larger, but none of them went bust when they complied with my request to remove my personal details from their systems after I'd finished looking for a new role.
My only dissapoint is the constant bandying about of the fines thing. They point out that 2% is massive in monetary value, well yes, it can be, but it's not enough of a deterrent.
In the UK, for companies like Phorm, and ACS:Law, this would be zero deterrent to what they did, the fines shouldn't be capped percentage wise, as only a fine of perhaps 80% of annual revenue would've been enough to make Phorm and ACS:Law start behaving. The $1.2bn figure for MS sounds a lot less scary when you consider for someone like Andrew Crossley at ACS:Law who really has been in gross breach of the UK's data protection act, were he bringing in £250,000 a year with his personal one man business, would only see a fine of £5000, still leaving him £245,000 to take home. Where the fuck is the deterrent in that? You could write it off as the cost of doing business and just carry on doing it.
Jail terms for owners/execs, or completely uncapped fines left to the decision of the judge as to what size fine to levy would be the only real deterrents. That's the biggest problem I see with this proposed law - there's no worthwhile deterrent for companies with no positive image to protect (e.g. Phorm) in the fines, they're toothless as proposed right now.
Well the obvious answer is that they can't if it really has no EU ties, just like they can't do anything about sites outside the EU hosting child porn currently.
But that's just the way the world works, it's designed with that knowledge, but it wont protect companies like Facebook, Google, Apple etc. as they do have a prescence, and even if they withdrew that prescence they could potentially still harm those companies by preventing EU firms advertising with them for example.
I'm sure firms will argue it'll cause some competitive disadvantage, but I'm not convinced that's true- I'd argue the opposite if anything, users across the globe should feel far more comfortable using companies that adhere to these rules, than those that don't.
So I don't really see how it'll be a failure, it'll force all major online firms to adhere to it because they do have an EU prescence, and from there anyone else that doesn't comply will have the disadvantage of being much less attractive to customers. Who wants their data held by some fly by night company that has no restrictions on what it can do with that data when they can instead use a company with more ethical rules surrounding what it can and will do with your data?
"The government says "Hey, we really didn't consult the public before we agreed to this""
I don't know why this is being billed as the government admitting any kind of fault, I thought the whole point in ACTA was to get it produced and signed off without the public even finding out, hence the secrecy of negotiations in the first place?
I think when they say they admit they didn't consult the public they're not saying "Yeah, we kind of should have consulted the public", they're saying, "We didn't consult the public, because that was the whole fucking point of ACTA".
I refuse to believe this about the country that bought us Neighbours, Home and Away, and that childhood gem they called Pugwall!
This is the way "democracy" works in the UK too.
Under our FPTP system parties are often elected to be given effective 100% of power in parliament with sometimes as little as 30% of the public vote. Then, when parties are in power, they form a cabinet, which is basically 10 - 20 or so people with the PM at the top, the PM heavily influences the cabinet, but then what the rest of the part things is irrelevant as if they want to push something through they can use the whip, which largely forces MPs to vote along the lines the cabinet wants.
So basically, in the UK, 30% of the public vote is enough to give a small clique - the cabinet - effective 100% of control over how the country should go.
It's obviously not healthy, and is precisely why corruption is such a big problem (i.e. see the recent phone hacking stuff, the expenses scandal, and so on) - when you give a handful of people so much power, based on so little support, and leave no real counter to that power, then of course they'll get drunk on it and take bribes, because they know there's no one with the power to stand up to them. On some issues the Lords may intervene, but now that government has succeded in replacing the hereditary Lords with Lords chosen by MPs to a great extent then they've actually removed the semi-independance that hereditary peers even if not democratic, brought to the Lords. This is not to say I think hereditary peers are ideal of course, but simply that by allowing governments to install their own puppets in there instead, you remove the whole point of the Lords - a check and balance against bad government.
"Those Scandinavians will cost you a bundle . . ."
That or they're just better at hiding it.
The US didn't seem to find cost prohibitive in buying the original pirate bay raid, the pirate bay show trial, the prosecutor in the Assange case, or even the Swedish PM judging by his public prejudgemental comments about the guilt of Assange. Perhaps Sweden is an anomally though and Norway, Iceland, and Finland just keep the average up?
"The problem is that it's like selling knives to people and the most common thing people do is stab each other with them."
I don't know what neighbourhood you live in, but in our neighbourhood the most common thing people do with knives is cut inanimate objects up, like food for example.
I can't take credit for any such thing but on a similar note I've made the point before that in the UK and US, despite the billions that have been spent on airport security, the only terrorists that have actually tried to sneak a bomb on the plane since 9/11 have actually succeded at that, and only failed overall because their explosives were shit - the shoe bomber, and the underpants bomber.
To date I do not believe we have one single case of all this expensive enhanced airport security catching a single terrorist red handed trying to smuggle explosives on the plane, the success rate of these technologies and techniques going by the attempts that have got through is currently 0%. We're spending a hell of a lot of money achieving nothing, and eroding civil liberties.
We have had people stopped en-route to the airport, after being discovered, followed, and arrested by the security services, but by airport security itself? Nope.
There's an argument it's helped with other crimes, like drug smuggling and so forth, but that's not what we were sold these security features on, and frankly I'm not convinced drug smuggling is worth giving up so much money and so many civil liberties to prevent.
So not just free blood pressure screening, in general, if the money spent on security was spent on absolutely anything even semi-related to health care or well being, it'd undoubtedly be more effective at saving lives.
*facepalm*
I guess the whole point about usability went right over your head?
Well of course, if you want to be that pedantic you could just nuke every human off the planet, then there'd be no piracy, but let's be honest, there reaches a point where the cost of solving a problem outweighs the benefits, and that's the problem with fighting piracy - it's too large scale a problem for any solution that involves aggression against pirates to be cost effective.
For digital piracy you can increase internet monitoring which ups the cost for ISPs and consumers, and makes internet connections more shit, but then your internet economy weakens and any tax increase that would be gained from a stronger music/movie industry would be far outweighed by the corporate tax lost from failure to create a culture where a digital economy can thrive.
So when I say solving such a problem is impossible, what I actually mean is that yes, with most things it's theoretically possible, but it's not possible in a practical sense. You can take Iraq as an example, America's "surge" could be said to be a new tactic with greater resources, and it kind of worked, but one can hardly say it completely solved the problem - Iraq still has a massive insurgency issue and since the surge in Iraq, things have become a hundred times worse in Afghanistan such that there's a fair argument it simply moved the problem.
Ah yes, [Citation needed], AKA, "I'm far too lazy to check the facts, but I'm going to disagree with you regardless, because I prefer to wallow in my own ignorance."
What are you disputing exactly? Here, have a bunch of links, not that I expect you to read them if you can't even be arsed to use Google to confirm a point:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3074669.stm
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NsJGLW_hX3IC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Film+piracy,+organized+crime,+and+terrorism&hl=en&sa=X&ei=P3QdT6CWNsvOsgbIm9xI&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Film%20piracy%2C%20organized%20crime%2C%20and%20terrorism&f=false
http://cryptome.org/ltte-vigil.htm
There's plenty more sources out there, it's a pretty well researched area. I'm not sure what exactly you're disputing, because you just posted a meaningless one liner, but terrorist groups of all shapes and sizes have long used counterfeit goods as a source of funding, as has organised crime. If you're not disputing that I can only assume you're disputing that these groups act in the UK, and if it's that you're disputing I can only ask, where have you been for the last few decades? There's been many cases of individuals linked to terrorism being guilty of financing terrorism in the UK- and they're only the ones the police have detected and been able to build enough evidence for a criminal case against. You only have to look at my 3rd link to see the scale of the Tamil operations in the UK to see that they absolutely are operating here.
Honestly, I'm all for defending digital piracy, but let's please not try and blur it all in together and hide the ugly facts of physical piracy. Read my other post in response to the AC that replied to me - I made it quite clear that I actually see digital piracy as the cure to physical piracy which genuinely does fund terrorism and organised crime.
If people are going to start lumping physical piracy in with digital piracy and argue that piracy is fine, then the battle is already lost, because those defending piracy really are genuinely being irrational at that point, and the MPAA really can bill them as terrorist sympathisers. That's not right, because digital piracy is a separate issue, with separate knock on effects - the effects of digital diracy are IMO harmless, and potentially even beneficial (increased access to knowledge, no evidence of decreased profits as a result), whilst the effects of physical piracy are quite problematic (funding of organised crime etc.). As I say, the former can actually act as a market that counters the latter, which means digital piracy likely actually decreases funding for terrorism and organised crime because people are no longer buying counterfeit content when they can download it at home. They will though, if that option is taken away.
Yep, I agree completely.
It's slightly more complex in the case of computer access - i.e. we've still got to consider how we deal with for example, a criminal hacker in France stealing money from a bank in the US - do they face US, or French justice? but certainly for simple legality of hosting issues there's no real argument for extradition.
I think even in that example though the person in question should be tried in France regardless, we've just got to have faith that friendly countries have reached their own acceptable views on how best to deal with offenders. Unfriendly countries wont extradite regardless, so there's little discussion to be had there I guess. Effectively a request for extradition from a country tells that country "Look, we think your criminal justice system is shit, so we want to use ours" - that strikes me as pretty fucking insulting and I think that's why there is such a backlash in the UK over the UK-US extradition treaty for example. People are offended that America thinks we're not capable of dealing with criminals as well as they are, despite their much worse crime stats.
Well it's not entirely altruistic, but it's still beneficial.
The problem is sites like Expert Exchange, any IT person will have searched for an IT problem and got an Experts Exchange link only to click it and find nothing but ads - so many professional IT workers don't realise that the content is actually hidden away at the bottom, after pages of fake blocking content trying to convince you to subscribe such that many go to the page, scroll down a bit, see nothing but ads, then leave the page and try a different link.
If this happens too often people wont get fed up with those sites, they'll get fed up of Google not returning nice results and Google risks losing them to the likes of Bing and Yahoo.
So sure it's not altruistic, it's about keeping users on board by providing the most pleasing results to users as it can, but it's still a good thing IMO.
Many people today probably don't even remember the pre-Google search engines, where you'd far more frequently have to click well past the 1st page of results to find what you want, and had to click into and exit out of far more results because they weren't what you wanted.
The fact is, if Google first searches based on relevance of content, and then given roughly equally content relevance to the search query then starts ranking those pages based on how pleasant they are to use then that makes searching a much less stressful endeavour. As a search engine, the user experience of a search engine is somewhat linked to the user experience of the results it returns - if two search engines return the same results equally ordered by relevance, but then one of them ranks the most pleasant to use sites first where relevance is pretty much identical, which are you going to use? The one where you have to deal with annoying sites to find your answer, or the one where you don't?
"So what you're saying is, piracy funds terrorism."
Physical piracy yes.
"That sounds like a great reason to stop piracy don't you think?"
It's a great reason to stop physical piracy yes, but as you can't beat it with law enforcement and legislation as decades of failed attempt to do so have shown, then the only solution to date that's decreased physical piracy of content is digital piracy, then legislating against digital piracy actually works counter to stopping funding for terrorism from physical piracy.
Yes, I know you're too caught up in your own simplistic world view to get this, because you demonstrated in your post that you completely and utterly missed the point, which is also why you posted AC because you didn't want people linking your lack of ability to talk rationally about such a topic with your comments elsewhere where you may or may not have a clue what you're on about, but I figured it's worth clarifying anyway in case anyone else needed it explaining.
Still, have fun calling pirates stupid whilst simultaneously demonstrating a complete inability to follow what is frankly a quite simple argument to understand- any pirates reading this will at least be quite amused by the irony of that I imagine, so no doubt they'll thank you for that at least.
"If this type of service was only meant for personal backups and not illegal file sharing, this would have been the standard in the first place."
Well, how about legal file sharing for one?
There are still many companies around the globe who have strict limits on e-mail sizes even to this day, and as such there are many millions of people every day looking for ways to send large files back and forth between clients, and other companies they simply do business with.
MegaUpload was just one site that offered a solution for those millions of people.
Make no mistake, the MegaUpload closure, and to a lesser degree, this Filesonic change has caused millions in damage through lost files, lost time, and damage to client relationships.
I hope it was all worth it, when the MPAA and RIAA see a massive increase in revenue as people start flocking back to legitimate methods to get their content.
Yes, that last paragraph was sarcasm.
It's worse than that, attacks on file sharing actually outright aid criminals in other ways too.
If people can't download films and music on the internet anymore, they aren't going to go to their local HMV or whatever and pay £14 for a CD, then some will just get copies from their friends, but others will just go down the local market and pay £3 to a dodgy dealer like people used to before the internet. This genuinely, directly puts money into the hands of organised crime- some of which is tied back to terrorism (both Taliban/al Qaeda sympathisers, and the Tamil Tigers got a lot of funding doing this sort of thing in the UK and other Western countries), rather than the bunk claims that file sharing somehow profits organised crime.
"Considering that nobody forced them to locate a server in the US, I'm not sure whom they can reasonably blame other than themselves. It remains to be seen whether the allegations lead to any convictions, but the US certainly does have the right to try them for those felonies."
What a load of bollocks. Most people have no idea where their hosts server's are located, it's been pointed out many a time, that if you had broken Iranian law would you thus be happy to be extradited to Iran? If you signed up for a web hosting package because it was cheap, hosting something about gay rights, only to find the servers were in Iran you'd be happy to be sent over there to face the death penalty would you?
Sorry, but it doesn't matter if the servers were hosted in the US, all this means the US should be able to do is seize the servers, and any financial assets related to them passing through US financial institutions, it doesn't mean they should be able to extradite foreign citizens over it.
I know America thinks differently, seeing as it's abducted many hundreds of people over the last decade for things not illegal in their country like funding political viewpoints the US just happens to dislike, but that doesn't make it right, or acceptable, nor does it mean the people involved in any way deserve or should have to blame themselves for being extradited - it's a massively unfair, and disproportional step, and the only time extradition is acceptable is if the crime is both serious (i.e. rape, murder), and actually committed whilst the person is physically on US soil, and has escaped the country, or if the person in question is a US citizen living overseas - and even then it's questionable, but any dispute should fall into the category of an effective asylum request.
Yep, this is exactly the way petitions in the UK worked when they were interested years ago, and still largely work today.
They were sold as a way of using the internet to help get people involved in democracy.
But what they really were was a way of using the internet to allow politicians to pretend they give a fuck about democracy.
Things like the Digital Economy Act were some of the most voted against, but just got pretty much entirely ignored, now the new government has revamped the petitions barely a couple of thousand people have voted, despite I think hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions having voted on a petition about that the first time around.
The petitions are just another way of pretending politicians care about the general populace, whilst doing quite the fucking opposite. The Whitehouse has obviously learnt from our successive governments what a useful tool they are for distracting people from the real situation.
"Who is being protected by allowing two people to get a better tax return for being married?"
Okay, I know it was mainly a rhetorical question, but I had to answer - the religious institutions who use marriage as a major income source.
Marriage tax benefits are merely a way to try and push people down the path of religious ceremony with the hope it will give the church greater opportunity to pull people in, and yes, I think it stinks. If religion declines without state support then so be it, but the problem is in many countries, including where I live - the UK - the leaders are often irrational enough to believe in the magical fairy man in the sky.
This is also why many countries are against gay marriage too - because that's also against religion.
Really, legislation in many countries or states surrounding marriage comes back to using it as a tool to push religious beliefs and has absolutely fuck all to do with "ensuring stable families".