Almost never happen? That might have been true before Bush got in but as soon as he did and September 11th happened the CIA felt it had free reign to do whatever they liked, under the guise of protecting america from another attack. After that, they did not care about PR nightmares abroad as a bigger worry would be some fucker flying another plane into a US building.

This lists some of the cases where the subject survived and we know about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Even the cases we now know about make it fairly clear this was happening quite often.

One of the most important things to consider is that historically very few violent or armed revolutions and coup d'etat have resulted in a better government than the one they were overthrowing. Things that have generally brought improvement are slow drifts in line with public mood over time.

The problem with violent change, especially when instigated by people who have history of serving in a professional army is that they often have huge difficulties when it comes to coping with disagreement. People not doing what they are told in a military context often has huge repercussions (and so it often needs to) but the general public not doing what they are told is often their democratic right in a free society.

People with an army background seem to be very good at becoming dictators. The sort of flexible, politician types that have no backbone are exactly the sort of people you need when it comes to dealing with a free populace. Part of being free, is being able to believe things like "socialism is better than capitalism" even though the vast majority of the population and the government strongly disagrees.

The best sort of change the US could undergo would be driven by a mass movement of a highly educated, non-violent population who realised they were being oppressed and refused to stand for it simply by not playing along with a bullshit system designed to keep them down. Of course, that is not likely to happen any time soon.

Maybe you missed that my central point was that as a Linux user myself I can attest that actually only Safari is not available. For IE I can use a free VM provided by MS specifically for testing browser compatibility.

Using Safari as a shining example here is utterly bogus. I have had to jump though so many hoops to get a decent copy of Safari running without buying an whole computer just to test and debug web pages on a recent version of Safari or and iPad.

In the end I eventually managed to get a OSX VM running on my Linux box under VirtualBox. That finally enables me to test stuff under the virtual ipad thingy under OSX and also on the current version of Safari under OSX, this is essential for testing any HTML5 stuff. This is legally dodgy however, the only legal approach is have separate chunk of hardware made by Apple to test this stuff under. Apple are great providing you sell them your soul and move to using their hardware as your primary developer box, but then you are paying far more for the hardware then you need to.

As many other people have noted, MS are actually better than Apple in this regard in that they let you download VM's for testing browser compatibility with your site even if you choose to run Linux as your primary OS.

Anyone running Vista has bigger problems than not getting IE 10 :)

Sorry, I thought maybe you were as you seemed to have an idea of how our political system worked in a way that most Americans do not.

The proposed replacement was some shitty, over complicated, Alternative Vote ( http://www.electoral-reform.or... ) approach unfortunately, not Proportional Representation like the rest of Europe uses. It would not really have been much better as it still would have resulted in a single party ending up with all the power, unlike PR which forces the ruling party to work with losing parties if they got a sizeable share of the vote.

I was not talking about polling, I was talking about how if there was ever any sort of referendum on copyright law that most of the British public could be pushed into supporting the current status quo by our media running lots of stories about how "copyright law is needed for our digital economy" in the run up to it. This would also apply if one of the parties likely to win any votes in our electoral system changed it's stance to support copyright reform.

I was half joking.

The fact is that many techies are arrogant, selfish and exceedingly immature. These are all traits you have to rid yourself of pretty quickly once you become a parent though. It is very difficult to find out if people are like this at interview though so asking if they have kids often gives you a way of identifying those who are less likely to have these sort of unresolved personality issues.

I doubt anyone would purely use whether someone had kids as the deciding factor if you gave them a job, but if you had already come across as possibly having any of the aforementioned problems then being asked if you had kids and saying yes might be a way you could dig yourself out of a hole by showing you had a certain degree of maturity.

Also, having kids forces you to value also having stable income in a way that nothing else does, especially if you are the sole breadwinner for your family. That makes you a much more flexible employee.

I have been doing this web development thing long enough now that I feel I can untangle just about anything given enough time, I have had to work on some serious drivel created by other people over the years. That does not make writing awful code a good idea though.

I generally work on the the principle of making sure that any code I write could be understood by anyone as easily as possible, even if they are not a super duper code ninja like yourself. The only exception would be if the more readable approach caused serious efficiency issues, but in those situations I try to over do the comments.

I generally consider the ternary operator to be useful shorthand but if I had to do lots of nested stuff like that I would write it as if-then-elseif-then-else which I find much clearer. It might involve more typing initially, but if it saves someone else time later then it's worth it in my opinion.

I am not sure what that second bit of PHP sadness it really moaning about to be honest.

Ok, I understand the difference, but I also think that anyone who wrote code where the stacked ternary operators like that should be sacked. There are times when the ternary operator is useful, but it has to be used carefully if you want to keep your code easily readable by other people, stacking them like that is a quick recipe for unmaintainable junk useful for nothing else than building your own empire.

Also, wouldn't a few well placed brackets both solve the problem and make the code more readable?

Do you really choose to be childless or can you just not find anyone who will put up with you long enough to have a child together?

They could remove the links to it just like Google does.

We have very little say over how any of the police work democratically. Even if PIPCU was part of the Met it would be no different.

I know this, but the british public also voted to retain that system recently if you remember.

I would also point out that if enough of the british public actually felt strongly in favour of copyright reform then one of the major parties would look at adopting it and working it into their manifesto to try and win votes. The problem however is that if any party did this they would be savaged by the Murdoch press as he stands to lose out by copyright reform.

I also think that most of the voting public actually support the idea of copyright and are far more against reform than some of us on the other side of the spectrum like to acknowledge. Once you put it to the british public as "Ensuring our digital economy is not undermined by copyright infringement" they soon think things like relaxing copyright law are a bad idea. You can be damn sure that is how the media would put it to the public when they have so much to lose by copyright reform.

Yes you were, just like I was. We both got the opportunity to vote in the last general election where we got to pick which bunch of toerags we wanted to rule us. The fact that not one single party that had loosening copyright law in its manifesto stood any chance of being elected simply means that most of the UK population do not give a toss about this either way unfortunately.

Exactly!!

I this case the police actually try and engage with the site owners first and help them become legal. That means honouring take down requests from rights holders and such. Google quite happily do that, so they are fine even if in some cases they do enable people to find pirated work. Torrentz.eu on the other hand probably do not honour take down requests :)

It is not about whether your site enables copyright infringement, it is about whether you make even the slightest attempt to take stuff down when legally compelled to. Believe it or not some torrent sites exist legally by letting people upload copyright infringing content but then taking it down when the copyright owner asks them to, even though this is clearly ridiculous it is also legal.

Copyright infringement is a criminal matter, not a civil one. Our duly elected governments have passed various (albeit baddly concieved) laws making this the responsibility of the police to enforce as a criminal matter. Therefore the police are kind of forced into doing this sort of stuff. I agree with some of your sentiment, but factually you are utterly incorrect.

If you are going to post about what a stupid move this sort of thing is, and how ineffective it will turn out to be then fine, that is correct. It is however worth remembering that UK law has made dealing in illegal copies of copyright works a criminal offence since the copyright, designs and patents act of 1988 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright,_Designs_and_Patents_Act_1988).

There was some debate as to whether linking to something that was on a different server and therefore held by someone else was covered by this, but I believe most of that debate was held in the US as here in the UK it was covered by the same act that codified this as "secondary infringement" and also made it a criminal offence.

The net result of this is in this case, the police were just doing there job by enforcing criminal law. The fact that you think that the law is unjust and should be changed does not stop the plod from having to enforce it.