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.

I am not so sure about that. Here in the UK we used to have tremendous problems with cars being nicked, mainly because mechanical keys were so straight forward to bypass. The motor industry here was encouraged to invest heavily in this though so now we have some of the most secure keys in the world protecting our cars. We have things like immobilisers as standard, so the actual mechanical key is not really any good unless the electronics in the fob is also working and present.

Car keys used to be pretty basic, and maybe they still are in the US (although I doubt it), but in most of the europe they are complex little remote controls such that manufacturers are now starting to do away with they actual key bit and just leave a fob. That way the car does things like auto unlock when you move within a few feet of it and just have a start button for the engine.

You might say that this is not actually a feature you want, and I might even agree. The fact is though that most car keys are very far from basic compared to the rest the car. The truth is that the security on modern cars is often the most advanced part to keep one step ahead of the criminals.

What utter crap. So any debate about gun safety or firearms law is off limits because some people on both sides of the coin have strong opinions and cannot believe how anyone in their right mind would be on the other side of the argument?

You only need to look at some of the moderation in this thread to see examples where people have been moderated as troll despite it being obvious they are actually posting pretty honestly held beliefs. Dismissing other points of view as a troll is just an easy way out so you do not have to listen to their point of view and recognise it as being valid, even if you personally do not agree.

Personally, I think anyone who would want to live in a society with so many guns is completely bonkers since they certainly do not make them any safer from crime, and judging by the shit successive governments have got away with they aren't doing much to protect from tyranny. I have no idea how the US could remove all the guns from circulation though so can entirely understand most people who have to live in that society wanting a gun for their own protection even though that act was exacerbating the problem for society as a whole.

The reality is that some people disagree with you, deal with it. that is what makes people so amazing is that we can have amazingly diverse beliefs in some areas but be in complete agreement in others.

Nah, I reckon they could be made to work perfectly reliably based on the other things we can do and enough time and investment. If you look at the amazing things with have accomplished technologically, even in cases where absolute reliability or as near to it as damn is needed we have done pretty well given enough investment.

The real reason the NRA says things like "let the market decide" is that they know full well that very few people will pay extra for these sort of firearms, especially the amount extra that a working technology would cost. Most people will just go for the cheaper option then keep the gun hidden in the bedroom where only they can get to it, but in a locked box away from their kids. A gunsafe with a combination lock is always going to be cheaper than a fingerprint reader, even if there is the chance someone you do not want to know the combination like your kids (or wife after she found out you were screwing the neighbour :-) ) might discover it.

I actually very much doubt there are too many cases where you pull a gun on someone defensively and end up not using it in the US. The problem is that in the US too many criminals have guns too, you are not going to pull a gun on someone and tell them to "freeze" unless you are a cop, if you are a civilian in your own home and surprise an intruder you are going to confirm them as an intruder, then fire as soon as possible to ensure they do not have a chance to do the same to you.

Anything else is just a recipe for being shot as the criminal pulls his gun and fires. He knows that anyone he comes across is trouble, since he has already broken in, and is looking at prison time plus the possibility of being lawfully shot. He has so much to lose, he might as well just fire at everything he sees then sort it out later. If you shout anything chances are he will just turn and fire in the direction of the noise on instinct, especially since he may very well have been in that situation before and done the same.

The only advantage you have is that you know your home, you know which floorboards creak and such like and can use that to surprise him. If you do it successfully, you have one, very slim opportunity to get a stopping shot in before he does exactly that to you. Only he will most likely follow up his stopping shot with an execution, followed by the same to anyone else in the residence to make sure no witnesses remain.

The truth is that I am extremely glad I live in a country which has never really let the firearms genie out of the bottle and where there are very few guns in circulation compared to the US. Just being caught with an illegal firearm in this country gets you 5 years in prison, even if it was just a fake and you were pretending it was real. This is a very heavy sentence compared to what you would get for other offences where you could earn a similar financial reward, you could beat someone half to death in their own home and get less time believe it or not.

We have very few cases of the sort of home invasion robbery where a gun would help defend yourself, I guess because most criminals will try and make sure they brake into houses where people are out, or will just run off if they hear people wake up. The only exception to this would be targeting old people since they put up less resistance, and once again, this would get you far less time inside than if you brandished a gun (providing they survived, murder is the exception).

DRM being crackable is not actually that important, what matters is how difficult it is for the average user. You only have to make it slightly tricky or add some slight perceived risk to downloading pirated stuff and they will choose to pay for it instead. For most people with a bit of cash the hassle factor of DRM is what keeps them on the straight and narrow, for the people without cash who cares, they probably would not have paid for it anyway.

Some people who pirate lots of stuff eventually grow into big paid consumers of stuff when they get a bit money, but when they do they often end up forgetting about their strict stance on DRM and just sign up with Netflix or Lovefilm or whatever based on how convenient it is for them. Who cares about keeping a copy of the latest crap to come out of content permanently, just give us lots of stuff to watch on demand and most of the time as consumers those of us with money are happy.

It's not really the job of browser vendors to make sure you can be a freeloading shithead is it? Their job is to make a product that as many people find useful as possible and that means a certain amount of mass appeal. Refusing to support this part of the standard would have robbed Firefox of more users than they will lose by supporting it.

The reality is that people who view piracy as some sort of moral duty and right like you do are in the minority, that is why most of the public quite happily go along with more stringent copyright laws being drafted by the politicians they elect. That means that creating a browser that will be unusable for certain sites that want to protect their content will just drive users away.

BTW, I actually also think DRM is a joke and a complete waste of space and that more companies should trust us to buy their content if we like it. I spend a fortune on services like netflix and cable TV. I also think though that people who refuse to pay should do without, pure and simple. Anything other than that is freeloading off those of us who pay.

This is a nice idea, but what happens to that lone officer checking up if this is a real hostage situation with well armed felons? He is put in a life or death situation where he may end up as another hostage.

It's all very well to say that he should investigate subtly, but how can he? He can't enter without permission or warrant to he has to knock on the door and see who answers. If the person who answers is crook and it is hostage situation he is not going to confirm very much after they invite him in to reassure him and he suddenly finds himself looking at 3 felons, some with hostages (in a shield type configuration) and all armed.

Even if you have a couple of cops, it is pretty easy to see a way of getting the better of them if you are actually the sort of felons these calls purport to be from or reporting. The reality is that one of the reasons for the SWAT response is that this is safest for the police.

Nice idea, but fails in practice if used in a commercial setting where each rejected email may be a lost sale.

The number of our clients or commercial partners who have mail servers that do things like spoof from addresses is quite alot. If they use things like online hosted accounting software, hosted CRM systems and other similar stuff it often spoofs the person who is sending you the messages from address even though the mail server sending it is actually running on the web server that provided the software. Unfortunately this is pretty common place so most small business have to be a little more flexible in their anti spam solution.

Whitelisting is a useful tool to cope with some of this, but the problem is that new leads who you have not spoken to yet will not be in the list and those are the emails you really need to get through.

Maybe things are different if you work for MS, IBM or someone but after almost a decade working in various small businesses as a system admin who had to deal with spam I can say that in that world flexibility is key.

It is a stretch to call creating single person websites "Web Developers". I know there is probably no better name, but it is setting your sights pretty low if you aim to do that as a career. It also doesn't always provide the job security of many technical jobs.

The really hard bits of web development are about working as part of a team, working on other peoples code just as quickly as if it was your own, learning to adapt to other peoples way of coding and design principles without it affecting your productivity. Also, learning to write technical documents is a huge part of being a web developer. This is not just about the comments, this is about preparing yourself for when you are a technical architect who provides guidance to web developers on large projects or being able to document that API you created so someone else can use it.

Then there is the learning about how development teams are organised, how software is tested and deployed, how you debug complicated systems, how you track changes and change requests. You might use some of this in small projects, but until you really get stuck in to working on a bigger project you never realise how essential some of this stuff is to them but how useful it can be in the small stuff too.

Robbing yourself of working on large projects means you will probably never be as good a web developer as you could be.

I agree with your learning list, but there is one huge bit missing: API's. So many areas of software development now require you know how to integrate with someone else's API and also how to create one yourself.

You obviously did not read my post. No computer or device can match a human being when the you ask complicated questions like "the pub with the yellow sign off chancery lane", Google Maps or Siri or whatever are just not good enough yet.

Try asking Google maps to directions to "Nazi Dog" from any place in london, it is useless and shows you nothing. Here is a link to what a cabbie would be able to tell you: http://golondon.about.com/od/l...

Weird yes, but this is the sort of stuff you have to learn to be a cabbie.

Its not about knowing more, its about how you retrieve the information. A human being is always better at understanding what you are asking for than a computer when asking complicated questions.

Some people choose to use that minute more constructively while their minions make them coffee :)

I thought it didn't support loading things concurrently and instead forced this slow, one after the other approach that meant Linux generally took about 10 seconds longer to boot than any other modern OS?

You might not consider a slow boot time broken, but some people do.

The problem with the uber drivers though is that they may have no clue where they are going. These cabbies doing the protesting are Londons black cab drivers, that means they have passed "The Knowledge" know london pretty intimately:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
http://www.theknowledgetaxi.co...

This does mean I entirely agree with their protest, but comparing them to any other taxi drivers elsewhere is not a great comparison because no other Taxis in the world are expected to pass such a ridiculously difficult exam first.

You might say this is pointless now that Sat-Navs are so ubiquitous, but I would still say it is useful to be able to ask for a destination by something like "that pub off chancery lane with the yellow sign" and he instantly names it and drives you there. It is also useful if you get the road name you are going to slightly wrong and can't find it with Google maps, just jump in cab. I have actually done this one night when I had been drinking and the cabbie had a right laugh about taking me somewhere that was only two minutes away, but I had already spent 20 minutes cluelessly walking around so was more than happy to pay him the minimum fare.

Most of the time London Black Cabs are pretty awesome, if a little expensive.