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Comment Re:the problem is elsewhere (Score 1) 389

Is it really true that there are no penalties and liabilities of any kind for the person that filed the fraudulent DMCA notice?

If that's the case, is there anything stopping us from creating and deploying tools that submit [fraudulent] DMCA notices for every single piece of content hosted on Youtube and similar sites, effectively crippling every part of the web hosts user-submitted content and provides an interface to submit DMCA claims? Wouldn't such blatant [legal] abuse of the DMCA be enough to attract attention to the calls for reform?

I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me like it could meet the requirements for defamation. From wikipedia:

Defamation is the communication of a false statement that harms the reputation of an individual person, business, product, group, government, religion, or nation. ...
[In the US] the four (4) categories of slander that are actionable per se are (i) accusing someone of a crime; (ii) alleging that someone has a foul or loathsome disease; (iii) adversely reflecting on a person's fitness to conduct their business or trade; and (iv) imputing serious sexual misconduct. Here again, the plaintiff need only prove that someone had published the statement to any third party. No proof of special damages is required.

(iii) could be argued, if the uploader was monetizing their videos, though I suspect negligence might be more appropriate.

The underlying issue is that the internet is international in nature, so you can easily have the complainant, accused and service provider in three different countries, and it's prohibitively expensive to sue anyone not in the same country as you. The DMCA was put in place to streamline complainant-ISP interactions, but didn't consider the rights of the accused (despite them being the weakest party in most cases). This was exacerbated by placing the burden of proof on the accused, since the ISP just forwards the complaint to them.

Comment Re:When you encrypt everything... (Score 1) 200

Thats why most services are marketed as up to the given speed. It actually is cheaper to offer a mostly full speed connection than a full speed connection. As long as they provide a defined minimum connection speed and don't default to that speed most of the time, then there really is no reason for complaint.

And there's nothing wrong with that, provided the consumer is fully informed.
If they were required to publish data on the distribution of speeds achieved by customers, broken down by suburb/exchange, I'd have a lot less problems with their marketing.

Comment Re:College is a scam (Score 1) 331

I'm an Australian university student in one of our top 10 universities, so I thought it would be interesting to compare your experiences to mine, especially since the cost of a 4 year degree (~$32k) is similar to the average cost in the US (according to wikipedia, anyway).

Yes, there are those that just drink themselves out. But the colleges offer absolutely no help with anything at all.

All our lecturers have consultation hours, which is basically a block of time they schedule each week for anyone who wants one-on-one help, and they start each unit by telling us when they are and to make use of them if we need it.
While I haven't used them myself, whenever I have emailed a lecturer or posted a query on the discussion forums, I've usually gotten a reply in a few days.

So I'd say we do get help, but only if we ask for it.

You're paying a fortune for classes, and the schedules make little to no sense at all. I'd go to a 30min English class, then have to wait an hour and half to take a 4 or philosophy class, then wait 2hrs for my 1 hour programming class. There were thousands of students studying for the same degree I was! What's the point of having these nonsense schedules?? Can't I just get into the 8am-5pm compsci course and be done with it?

Timetabling is a fairly hard problem, computationally speaking. The more students who take a unit, the more slots there will be for its classes, but that's still subject to the availability of its lecturers. On top of that, you can't assume that everyone will take the same units at the same time - lots of courses require the same units, or require you to take them in a certain (distinct) order in order to take certain electives, and some people will need to alter their course structure if they fail a few. Having some dead time is unavoidable as a result of this.

A 30 minute class is pretty stupid though - the longer the class, the less dead time you'll have between classes. 60-90 min lectures work well in my experience.

On top of that, what's with the books scams? I'm required to buy a book my professor wrote but we never open it in class? Really? I was so broke I'd literally go without eating some days, but my professors ripping me off for $89.95?

How were you required to buy it? I'm genuinely curious, because I often hear this as a criticism (of US universities).
How it works here is the unit guide sets out a proscribed textbook, or recommended resources. Whether we buy them or not is entirely up to us, though some coursework may say "refer to ch X for background", and the library usually has copies that they don't allow to be loaned (so that they're always available).

Then the campus police... Constant unending harassment. Granted, I was a long hair... but, for example, they decided to raid the door rooms over xmas break and leave me a ticket for underage drinking for having an empty wine bottle in my room. It took me 2 months and 2 visits to court to get it cleared up that I was 23 I had enough going on, I didn't need to be dealing with them.

I don't live on campus, but I haven't heard of any problems with the campus security.

Comment Re:Hope! (Score 1) 522

I know you've probably written off gentoo at this point, here's a completely random bit of usage advice:

- Set use flags as you need them, even if this means re-installing the same thing multiple times. This avoids big important packages being pulled in as mere dependencies (though you can add them to the world list afterwards) and more importantly lets you set up and configure everything one at a time and makes it more likely that you'll notice error messages.
- Don't be afraid of package.keywords, especially for very specific use flags.
- Avoid gnome if possible. I don't know wtf it is with gnome, but it seems to be the poster child for weird and hard to diagnose issues as well as crazy dependency trees.
- Pay attention to what virtual packages are doing. Usually they are in your best interest, but not always.
- Don't bother using ebuilds for web apps

I started using a Gentoo derivative (Sabayon*) about a year ago, and it's an absolute pleasure to work with. (Particularly how colourful the package manager is compared to Debian.) In addition to the above, I suggest the following:
-Keep package.use, etc. and make.conf under version control. (This is really helpful in case you accidentally break something.)
-Use git instead of rsync for the portage tree - it's much faster, especially when the total no. of changes is small. (This is doubly true if you have multiple Gentoo installs.)

* Sabayon has systemd as the default, but it's easy enough to change back to OpenRC and being able to use binary packages saves a lot of time.

Comment Re:I hate to say it... (Score 1) 366

The problem is that these decisions are going to be made long before we have anything resembling a complete understanding of what these genes do. The classic example is sickle cell anemia: given the choice it would be selected again, even though it results in resistance to malaria. This kind of control over genetics can only lead to a reduction in biodiversity (since the majority of people will make decisions using similar values), and then we're just one pandemic away from near-extinction.

Comment Re:Backwards Compatibility - Backward Languages (Score 1) 240

Yeah. Functional languages are so much better.. like the elegance of breaking out of a for loop... (oops... not possible... resort to clumsy workarounds). Or handling exceptions....

For loops are an imperative construct - you wouldn't find one in a functional language. Depending on what you were trying to achieve, you might express a similar concept using a fold and an algebraic type (Either or Maybe) to indicate when to ignore the rest of the elements.
I do agree that error handling is more inconvenient than in languages with exceptions though - wrapping the result in a type that can contain the result or an error is only a minor improvement on C-style return codes.

Personally, I've settled for a compromise between the two - Rust and D are both imperative languages with excellent functional programming support.

Comment Re:Scripting language du jour (Score 1) 547

There are two big problems with Python (and no, the whitespace thing is not either of them).

The first is that the Python community has effectively been fragment by Python2 vs Python3. Many libraries support one but not the other, which can lead to dependency hell.

The other big problem is duck typing. No language which uses duck typing by default (with no way to strongly type variables) should be used for programs more than a few hundred lines long. Strongly typed variables significantly improve the static verification of programs, and throwing something like that away just seems foolish. The most common justification I've seen for it is that it's more concise and saves time, but there are plenty languages which are strongly typed and use type inference instead of requiring explicit declarations (e.g. Haskell).

Comment Re:Same as it's been forever. (Score 1) 303

If you're completely insane and are sexually aroused by compiler flags, you want Gentoo.

Gentoo really doesn't enough love - it wasn't even mentioned in the article, despite being on par with Arch.
If anyone is interested in Gentoo but put off by the prospect of having to compile all your packages, I suggest they try Sabayon - it's a Gentoo derivative that uses a binary package manager in addition to portage, so you can install packages as easily as with apt-get/yum while still being able to use portage if you really want to mess around with USE flags.

Comment Re: The cure for obesity! (Score 1) 126

Aspartame is one of the few substances that has been analysed to death, and we know it is quickly metabolised into 3 parts that are also found in many other sources of food that we wouldn't think twice of consuming. We don't know nearly as much about herbal teas, for instance.

It also results in glucose intolerance.
Regardless of how we think the body processes it, it's pretty hard to argue with the evidence on what effects it actually has.

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