It would be interesting to see how much IRS 'investigators' received as bonus payments for 'retrieving proceeds of illegal activities'. I suspect that they target people who are least able to fight back and take amounts (by & large) that many people will just write off since employing a lawyer to get it back will just cost more.

It looks as if they have been reading the Mafia extortion handbook.

Since legalized theft through Civil Forfeiture pumps billions of dollars every year into the coffers of police departments throughout the country, the IRS simply wants their piece of the pie as well.

Two years ago in Strasbourg France, I ordered McDonalds breakfast for me and my kids on a computer.

Burger King has had iPhone ordering for ages in many European countries.

I think it has taken this long in the U.S. Because it would be too hard to find competent people to deal with computer problems.

That's "Free thinking". Critical thinking requires actual thought. Free thinking let's you spout the crap other people say as scripture

How difficult would it be for a firefox plugin to alter HTML headers like HTTP_USER_AGENT & HTTP_REFERER to convince the sales site that you are a poor student ? The on-line sites will howl - but if it is OK for them to profile to charge me more, then I believe that it is OK for me to game them.

The article is as bad as the summary :/

I read the whole thing and can safely say I gained absolutely nothing by reading it.

The law they had their cronies enact is still on the books. It's only Google that no longer has to give a shit about it, but it's still there to threaten innovation.

Did you seriously just use TCP as an example of what will limit downloads? Honesty... I though we were done with this silliness.

TCP is for little thingies. UDP based file transfer protocols with more intelligent mechanisms are the solution as always.

To be fair, I'm entirely in favor of men and women being equal in all ways which are logical. This means that I think it's nice to be able to pee standing up but I don't see the point in purchasing devices for my daughter to do the same. I also don't have any person urges to experience menstruation or pregnancy. I do think however that for air conditioning purposes, wearing a kilt might not be too bad.

I remember a friend of mine in the early 90s being fired and sued by his company for the fact that he was legitimately researching in a newspaper and the back page of the section he was reading had a full page J.C. Penny lingerie advertisement. A complaint was filed against him for sexual harassment and intentional objectification of women in the work place. Nothing came of it, but he had trouble getting a new job after this.

I know of many teenagers who play video games on the Internet who would likely fall victim to the fact that they lack the elocution when expressing themselves which these measures would enforce.

Also, as an example of an extremely narrow mind, she is thinking in terms of a single government and single country. There are at least 100 countries where measures would have to be implemented to enforce the same standards the U.S. introduced to manage harassment in the workplace. Let's not forget that anonymity is much easier to achieve online.

I think it's best to consider that it should be more easily possible for people to block and report each other on online services.

Isn't Orion a space craft being made by the crooks at Boeing, Lockheed and the other losers who rape the shit out of tax payers, intentionally underbid projects and run decades and billions over budget and laugh at us?

NASA should not be allowed to commission their own spacecraft since the laws currently in place force them to choose contractors like those crooks to build their space craft and when was the last time any of them actually built anything that wasn't a royal heap of shit?

:) i'd love to but sadly it's one of the [few] contracts where i was in a proprietary environment. if i meet a software libre project some time in the future that needs that kind of stuff i'll certainly attempt to recreate it but it would need to be at least a year before i consider that.

oo, thank you very much for that tip, i'll try to pass it on and will definitely remember it for the next projects i work on. thank you.

the mistake you've made has been raised a number of times in the slashdot comments (3 so far). the wikipedia page that was deleted was about LMDB, not python-lmdb. python-lmdb is just bindings to LMDB and that is not notable in any significant way.

it's an interpreter which was [originally] based on a FORTH engine.

there is a compiler which does that, yes.

it interprets it.

*sigh* it does. the effect that this has on threading is to reduce threads to the role of a mutually-exclusive task-switching mechanism.

yes. you are one of the people who will appreciate, given that the codebase could not be written in (or converted to) any other language, due to time-constraints, that using processes and custom-written IPC because threads (which you'd think would be perfect to get high-performance on event processing because there would be no overhead on passing data between threads) couldn't be used, means that the end-result is going to be... complicated.

not a snowball in hell's chance of that happening :) not in a milllion years. not on this project, and not on any project i will actively and happily be involved in. and *especially* i cannot ever endorse the use of java for high performance reliable applications. i'm familiar with python's advantages and disadvantages, the way that the garbage collector works, and am familiar with the size of the actual python interpreter and am happy that it is implemented in c.

java on the other hand i just... i don't even want to begin describing why i don't want to be involved in its deployment - i'm sure there are many here on slashdot happy to explain why java is unsuitable.

there are many other ways in which the limitation of threads in python imposed by the GIL may be avoided. i chose to work around the problem by using processes and custom-writing an IPC infrastructure using edge-triggered epoll. it was... hard. others may choose to use stackless python. others may agree with the idea to use jython, but honestly if the application was required to be reasonably reliable as well as high-performance there would be absolutely no way that i could ever endorse such an idea. sorry :)

don't jest... please :) jokes about "you should just have a big LED on the box with a switch and a battery" _not_ appreciated :)

but, seriously: the complete lack of need in this application for joins (as well as any other features of SQL or NOSQL databases) was what led me to research key-value stores in the first place.