Those "pre-approved offer" are just a marketing scheme. They don't do any credit checks before sending them out.

The credit check occurs when you reply to the offer. Then, they may refuse you or say; "After review, we can provide you with a limit of $5,000 or $10,000.

Just to clarify, the crime Vickerman was prosecuted for is Conspiracy to Defraud, purely for running SurfTheChannel, a streaming links site. This is quite a different law from Fraud, it's vaguer and much more prone to abuse - it seems to be FACT's go-to law whenever they realise a suspect they've spent time and money investigating isn't breaking any actual laws. Without it, Vickerman would probably never have been prosecuted for anything, although civil action would have been likely, IMO. If some defendant somewhere ever gets an appeal up to the ECJ, I think it quite possible they'll shoot the law down in flames, just for being so badly written. More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_to_defraud http://torrentfreak.com/surfthechannel-owner-sentenced-to-four-years-in-jail-120814/

No, the crime is copyright infringement. THAT is what infringement is, not someone downloading an episode of Downton Abbey because they missed it the other day.

Changes in the business models made every one of their excuses invalid and as much as companies bent over backwards to get these people to be honest customers the trend just continued.

He's my MP, but I'm afraid I can't report on his file-sharing habits.

And to lend some context to his words, from TFA:

“The discrepancy I mentioned is a source of great frustration. For example, the private prosecution by the Federation Against Copyright Theft of Anton Vickerman, who was making £50,000 a month from running a website [SurfTheChannel] that facilitated mass-scale copyright infringement, saw him convicted of conspiracy to defraud and sentenced to four years in prison,” Leech explained.

“This level of sentence would not have been possible if he had been prosecuted under copyright law, but FACT was able to prove conspiracy in his actions. Without proof of conspiracy, a serious criminal could have been left subject to a disproportionately low maximum penalty.”

In a way, I do agree with his point; those making that sort of money from infringement do need to be punished properly. However, it'll be all too easy to abuse this sort of measure, and end up with the disproportion going the other way.

jumping from POSIX shell to bash, i.e. implicitly assuming i was a linux zealot, gibbering about how much easier language A is than language B, arguing with portability where POSIX is all about portability, and portable scripts run on any POSIX compliant system, further demonstrates how little you know. Perhaps take a bit of your own advice and learn the shell command language, the quality of your straw-men would probably double. Also, your assumptions are plain wrong. Yes, i'm a coder, but yes, then again, i'm a sys- and network admin of a mid-sized network (~200 hosts, not counting the VLANs for guest, wifi, isolation, etc) We do nearly everything in posix shell, even the damn server configuration automation. - the prime reason being that the scripts will not bother whether they run on our BSD servers or the linux boxen. But why don't you tell me some more about how vastly superior some-language-you-know-better-than-sh-is

Clearly you have no clue about the fundamentals of computing. Let's break it into small pieces: Perl: turing-complete. Python: turing-complete. Ruby: turing-complete POSIX shell: turing complete. So how exactly are they ``many times more powerful''? All you're doing is demonstrating how little you actually know, so will happily skip the second half of your gibberish and repeat: Brain. Do you use it?

Oh, right, because python, perl or ruby scripts totally don't need a python, perl or ruby interpreter/runtime to run. There is no difference between that, and, say, posix shell. Brain. Do you use it?

Apparently, I have to. But it's a quick one: A CLI typically is a 'scripting environment', especially the unix CLI which is what TFA is about. So your statement really says that using the CLI is superior to using the CLI, or the GUI.

What we're both really saying is, use the right tool for the right job.

Wow...just..wow. This is probably the dumbest comment I have ever read. Need I explain why?

Its almost sad to me that so many techies are falling back into the "I dont understand it so I hate it" mentality.

StackExchange has a pretty good explanation of the whole Powershell vs Bash thing, with the takeaway being, they have different designs and are good at different things. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/573623/is-powershell-ready-to-replace-my-cygwin-shell-on-windows

There are a lot of reasons to criticize powershell (startup time for one, memory usage for another), but sadly the ones here basically amount to "I hate closed source" or "I gave it 5 minutes and I didnt like it" or "im a unix guy and see no need for it". Those may be true, but theyre not faults with powershell

I dont disagree, but one of the reasons I love powershell is because there is so much vendor support for it. Rather than having to use crappily written vendor provided scripts, or learn a new set of syntax and instructions for everything, you can just use one set of cmdlets to manage everything. For example, managing storage units, virtual infrastructure, and networking (if you were using Cisco UCS for example) would involve a unified set of syntax and command structure (verb-noun-- GET-nacifsshare; REMOVE-cluster), with output that can easily be manipulated and passed around. Everything is an object; everything can be piped into get-member to discover its methods, properties, and data types.

Obviously it will depend on what platform youre on; if your work involves primarily *nix boxes I imagine you would want to stick with bash. But Ive found that it is incredibly rewarding to work with powershell in a windows environment just because of how easy it is to take knowledge from one task and apply it to many others, and how easy it is to get your bearings in an unfamiliar task.

Your finger needs to slip quite a few times to add the --no-preserve-root to that command (it might be GNU coreutils exclusive though). :)

I've clicked the wrong button on a GUI several times, just as I've made typos on the command line. Both have the potential to screw things up unless I'm being careful.