ack; in my hates, didn't notice the other author mentioned on wiki. That poem is atributed to Rudyard Kipling, not Shakespeare, though they both speak similarly on the subject.

I think you're probably strongly underestimating just how bad the *accusation* of such a charge can be,; especially with how easy it is to plant any sort of incrimnating file. Really, though, America's panic over that entire topic is a topic for another thread.

the story is now that you've payed someone to keep quiet

Of course, THAT obviously-wrong solution to being blackmailed has been know for a long time. As Shakespeare put it:

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: --

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!"

It may have bad consequences, and it may nto even work, but irunning fighting the blackmailer is still a much, much better option than giving in to what they want, which only invites more of the same.

Why are you all pre-supposing that the threat has to be about something you actually did? If $ENEMY calls you with threats to reveal that secret child-pornography studio you have hidden away in your house, it doesn't matter if it isn't actually true - they can still ruin your life with just the accusation. Really, blackmail doesn't rely on you on something you did that you try to hide, but instead preys upon people who have something to lose, such as your family or job.

A traditional way isn't even to go after *YOU*. They just see to it that your parents -or kids start losing their jobs or are subject toother threats. To quote from a particularly well-written reddit post (which everybody should read!)

With this tech in place, the government doesn't have to put you in jail. .... they can email you a note saying that they can prove your dad is cheating on his taxes. Or they can threaten to get your dad fired. All you have to do is... report back every week [and rat out your friends], or you dad might lose his job. So you do. You turn in your friends and even though they try to keep meetings off grid, you're reporting on them to protect your dad.

[...]

Everyone walking around is scared. They can't talk to anyone else because they don't know who is reporting for the government. Hell, at one time YOU were reporting for the government. Maybe they just want their kid to get through school. Maybe they want to keep their job. Maybe they're sick and want to be able to visit the doctor. It's always a simple reason. Good people always do bad things for simple reasons.

The copyright infringement problem you describe is only the beginning. The long-term flaw in this plan, I suspect, is that they are claiming to be able to detect a class of "illegal"/"bad" data.

In the early days of the net, this kind of detection was a major part of the pornography debate in addition to the usual copyright stuff. A major defense (one I suspect lead to the creation of the "safe harbor" provisions in the DMCA) was that it is patently unreasonable to force an ISP to decide the legality of each bit that moves across their network. Comparisons were made to the Common Carriers, etc. The consensus seems to be more or less that "safe harbor" idea - that it was only reasonable to request the ISP act after the fact, instead of trying to make them invent some sort of magic "evil bit" detector.

If an ISP wants to ignore all that, though, and volunteer that they have such detection capability... they might be asking for a long line of lawsuits for each item they *failed* to warn about. Even better: it's all the excuse the anti-porn (or anti-whatever) busybodies need to impose their ideas of a "child safe" internet. After all, if you can detect something complicated like copyright infringement, detecting pornography must be trivial.

TL;DR - their lawyer must be having a seizure over the potential liability exposure they seem to be asking for

"The Media" is overwhelmingly dominated by corporations, and it is not just Americas problem. Those corporations are overwhelmingly interconnected with the interests of a vast array of other unrelated businesses, be it just advertising revenue or outright arms of the same corporation. The mass corporate media is using FUD/muddying the waters/dumbing down just enough to make the majority of voters for political reasons, they are doing so because it is good business for other arms of their corporation and their partners.
[...snip...]

TL;DR version: "The Media is just a few more Lords. It's what we get for letting our government degrade back into feudalism."

Really? I guess my ISP doesn't count as "major"? They may not be the biggest player, but they've not exactly "small" either. Frankly I respect their business decision of going with the "slow and steady"growth rate instead of the "quickly oversubscribe as many people as possible" that most other ISPs seem to be going with. More importantly, they have a specific policy of treating all data equally:

At Sonic.net, we believe that customers buy our service with the understanding that we will simply deliver their traffic without inspection, modification or artificial limitations.

In summary: We don't touch yer bits! (We believe that would be inappropriate.)
Just because you have an anti-competitive and restricting contract with your ISP doesn't mean everybody does.

You should be careful not to project your own bad decisions onto others - some of us do research first, and choose the businesses we want associate with on more than just price.

"We paid for the internet one dialup account at a time."

Not really, though dialup paid for a bit of it. Much of the cash came from the federal government, in the form the grants that made ARPA/DARPA, and later the subsidies to AT&T/etc to build out fiber-optic to the entire country... which we're still waiting for... over a decade later.

Exactly!

Now, the big questions is: do you or anybody else truly believe that the NSA's (or anybody else's) search tools and data mining heuristics can magically avoid making that exact same mistake?

Too much data-capture just adds noise. Any database of sufficient size is going to be full of this kind of incorrect association. In the end, with the vast amounts of data available, you can probably find "data" that "supports" any conclusion you want.

This is the danger of sweeping data collection: not that they care about any traditional concern, but that decisions are being made because of sombody saw animals^Wterrorists in the clouds^Wemail and cell-phone metadata.

I normally don't resort to what is basically name-calling, but given how the 4th Amendment patently requires a number of criteria they are stating they will no longer bother with, that would normally make them criminals. However, with this statement, they've removed much of the ambiguity surrounding the searching issue, and added a significant amount of intent on their part. So instead of "merely" having criminals in high places at the DoJ, we have traitorous and un-American criminals instead.

This isn't, unfortunately, a conflict of law at the core, but instead a conflict of basic ideology and philosophy. If you believe in the constitution and the ideas about "freedom" and "equality" that it was built to maintain, you wouldn't try to argue your way around the spirit of the law. Everybody involve here knows damn well that the founders tried to stress the importance of limiting government's power and reach. So what do you call someone who willfully makes a point of acting against those very core ideas and protections? Someone who promises to continue violating the highest law of the land, in their own words?

  Simple: "un-American traitors".

*sigh*

I guess I will keep trying to teach people gpg/otr/etc. One positive thing to come of this is that there have been more people receptive to learning some basic crypto the last month or so, than in the last ~12 years. "Better late than never?"

http://www.hungry.com/~jamie/hacktest.text

0133 Ever fix a hardware problem in software?
0134 ... Vice versa?

...

0141 Ever physically destroy equipment from software?

WipeoutHD renders many frames at the full 1080p60, but uses a trick for "complex" areas with too much overdraw, that, at least in my opinion, is quite clever. They start rendering at full resolution, but time how long each row is taking, and if it looks like they won't reach the 1/60s deadline, they start rending the frame in half resolution in the horizontal direction only. This way, they always maintain a solid 60Hz which is important for such a dexterity-based game, and only degrade the image in the frames that need it.

Because it maintains the framerate and the full 1080 rows, any slight blur is totally hidden. Even better: because the blur only engages on the frames with *lots* of stuff happening on the screen, it's pretty much guaranteed you will always be distracted by the crazy stuff happening to even notice any quality change.

I really wish more games used this (or similar) tricks - just keeping the framerate consisten (at the expense of quality) really helps - you don't have those stutters that end up just drawing attention to the problem areas.

The kind of argument made by someone who understands the difference between criminal , reckless act likely to lead a nasty manslaughter, and an act that is simply a civil tort, likely to only incur statutory damages?

Of course, this "civil-vs-criminal law" being one of the most common distinctions made in all jurisprudence, I'm sure you already knew this... but i never like to accuse random people of willfully lying to blur a political issue, in the hopes of serving some hypothetical self-interest. So I'll assume this is a freak case of ignorance instead. Links to easily cure yourself of this unfortunate condition have been provided.

http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html

It's even worse than that: the horrible legacy of hacks that windows uses pretty much guarantees that apps will always render horribly in anything by the default PPI. Their rounding "tricks" cause the text to scale inconsistently, as it's snapping individual letters to horizontal pixel boundaries. (err, it's more complicated than that; see the above link for a very well written discussion of the problem, and a very nice discussion of font rendering issues in general)

As long as windows apps scale badly, there's a strong incentive to *not* produce a high-PPI display; customers would likely blame the monitor for "screwing up windows".