"There was a lot more oxygen in the air back then. It wasn't just hotter. With the lower oxygen levels the huge dinos wouldn't do so well because they didn't have muscles for breathing like we do."

I think you are rather badly mistaken. There was actually much less oxygen in the atmosphere then.

Warning, link is not really a webpage, js required :( but you can search yourself for a better source.

"TSE costs $45. And if you are ok with that huge flaw, then by all means..."

Huh?

Being windows only (WINE works but I dont want to have to rely on it,) and closed source are drawbacks I care about, and why I am not using it. The $45 is nothing for a quality tool. I bet you've paid more than that for games that you did not even play through once.

This link puts a little meat on the bones, though the story is still sketchy. Seems the law was aimed at 5 or 6 specific bloggers, though probably upwards of 500 could wind up being covered. ISPs not happy with it. Law purports to regulate Russian-language blogging, not limited by geography or physical placement. So a foreigner could theoretically run afoul of it if they publish in Russian (and become popular doing so) while a Russian could write anything they want without worry as long as they do it in another language?

"Emacs is a great operating system, if only it had a decent text editor!"

Nice dig but quite out of date. Check out EVIL.

Absolutely. For simple text file editing, it really cant be beat. No wasted time, you type what you want and it does it, end of story. You can even use it in scripts! The ideal tool for many, many jobs.

Notepad++ is windows-only. And if you are ok with that huge flaw, you should really try TSE. By far the best windows editor.

"That's one of the reason I stopped using Google anything. Until they do the right thing and give us back our YouTube accounts, they can go fuck themselves."

Hear hear!

That was really an act of astonishing rudeness and arrogance. A formal apology and the firing of the person responsible would not be uncalled for.

So they did a text-editor roundup that excluded every serious contender in favor of 5 third-string also-rans.

I actually tried to read the text but it was too brain-numbingly stupid to get through. He's trumpeting all these wonderful features that... vi and emacs had in the 80s.

It's so true - 'those who do not remember Unix are condemned to re-invent it, poorly.'

Sounds like a good deal. I did opt for a lot more options, tv card, wireless, dual burners, fairly high end card in its day etc., which ate up part of the balance. I know I could have built for a little less, but sometimes it is a matter of putting the risk on someone else, and how much your time is worth at the time. But either way, it shows it pays to buy quality. I'm using that computer right now, on my TV in the bed room :)

Indeed, ages ago, I used to have so much fun with assembly.

High level languages sucked all the fun out of programming for me though.

I don't really understand what you're trying to say here. I don't know COBOL. Are you saying that if you gave me an assignment to parse a data stream in COBOL, and I couldn't do it in COBOL because I don't know COBOL, but I could both demonstrate a solution in another language and learn COBOL at a later date, I would still FAIL?

Not the same guy but I think we are on the right wavelength.

Here. Now go parse that stream using Cobol.

I dont care if you have ever heard of Cobol or not. I have never used it myself, and I havent been a working programmer in decades. But if I needed a parser written in Cobol I expect I could search for the docs first thing in the morning, find a syntax reference, and have a working if rough parser done before lunch. If this sort of work was needed by me on a regular basis I expect I would become very familiar with Cobol and a week later I would re-implement that parser in less than an hour and do a much better job.

All a computer can do is math, or if you prefer to think of it as symbolic logic, fine. But it's still all the same stuff. Any high level language you use, no matter how strange the syntax, no matter how unfamiliar the vocabulary, is still the exact same thing at core. Logic. Arithmetic. Algorithms.

A particular language may be a pleasure to work with, or it may be a pain but end of the day if you understand logic you should be able to translate your logic into any language for which you can find useful reference documentation.

I think the reasoning is fine, because of these words: "...if the behaviour which is currently criminal is to remain criminal..."

Your example is a simple crime, where the victim had an experience related to the crime (so there's a body to be found by the police, or a surviving victim who says "ouch, someone shot me"). They are talking about certain types of crimes where neither the victim nor anyone closely watching the victim would never have any idea that a crime happened. All the evidence is completely disconnected from the victim.

I publish a magnet link. You read it, and use it to acquire a file. Someone who isn't there and sees absolutely no effect on their life, is defined as a victim because the action is "currently criminal." Maybe it's because they hold a copyright on the contents of the file, or because the file contains a picture of them without clothes (taken by hidden camera when they were 17 years and 364 days old), or because the file contains some other information related to them.

You can't detect these kinds of things.

The House of Lords is saying that if these are going to remain crimes, then the laws should be enforced, and if we ass/u/me that getting laws enforced is far more valuable to our society than liberty, efficiency, etc then it's important that the watchers know about every transaction that is happening and who is involved. They need to know that I transmitted information to you (and who both of us are) and what that information was. Until they have all that information, they can't even begin to guess whether or not a crime occurred. Maybe the file contained a picture of my dog rather than a 17-year-old human, and they need to know who took the dog picture and that I sent it to you, so that they know it wasn't a copyright violation.

Of course it's absurd, but that's because the premise is absurd. Their reaction to it, is quite rational. But that's my point: it almost looks like (especially in the paragraph that I quoted) they might be calling the bluff, pointing out the inevitable consequences of having externally un-detectable things be crimes. If they weren't that clever and didn't mean to do that, too bad, but even if it's an accident, they did it.

It's not an accident, though. Look at it (emphasis mine): "if it's to remain criminal" (see the wiggle room there?) and "currently criminal" and "there is little point in [doing this] at the same time [as doing that]" and "difficult question."

I'm not saying this is ingenious, but it really is a fairly well-crafted.

The techdirt article quotes this delicious excerpt:

From our perspective in the United Kingdom, if the behaviour which is currently criminal is to remain criminal and also capable of prosecution, we consider that it would be proportionate to require the operators of websites first to establish the identity of people opening accounts but that it is also proportionate to allow people thereafter to use websites using pseudonyms or anonymously. There is little point in criminalising certain behaviour and at the same time legitimately making that same behaviour impossible to detect. We recognise that this is a difficult question, especially as it relates to jurisdiction and enforcement.

I can't even say I really disagree with that reasoning. Can't you see how there are two completely different ways to reach a conclusion from that paragraph?

Nice rant but missing a few facts.

These are not domains like ICE have seized (which are analogous to post office box #xxxx) but the ccTLDs (more analogous to the zip code at the end.) Which is really a good way to grok how absurd the request is - imagine the families of the Iranians who died when the USN shot down their passenger jet sue the USA in their court systems, get a civil judgement, and then attempt to 'confiscate' the international postal codes used to route mail to the USA.

"Offtopic i know, but another thing that strikes me as absurd is the lawsuit. "Plaintiffs who successfully sued Iran, Syria and North Korea as sponsors of terrorism" include who exactly? and of these plaintiffs how many are willing to admit they openly ignore their own governments sponsorship of terrorism? The suit seems rather silly."

Indeed. The article has no other information on the plaintiffs involved but it certainly sounds like lawfare. There are a few governments brazen enough to misuse their court systems like this... aside from the ones mentioned as targets.

I tend to buy boxes with fairly high end parts (not expensive, just high quality), and when I built them I did the same. High end enough that I really didn't have to upgrade until everything was no longer "state of the art", so no parts to recycle in.

My ooold computer has a Q9550 and 8 gigs of ram, just as I ordered it. It is still pretty usable as a daily backup video player, and not bad for midline gaming like Portal 2, Goat Simulator, etc. Upgraded the video 3 years ago, $150-175 for what was then a steal.

5 years old, and the CPU is still on the front page of Passmark, at >4000 pmarks. Not bad. Paid around 1800 without monitor. Upgraded to 7 Pro over Vista, but even the original install is intact. Hard to beat that kind of stability, and not convinced you can build it by hand anymore.