For no reason I can fathom Apple's iOS UI designers had the idea that it would be cool to just blindly replace words with it's very first guess.

This has the effect of rendering entire paragraphs into complete gibberish. I can fix that by backspacing and retyping but it is a huge PITA.

I did try disabling autocorrect completely but that was actually worse.

but then I actually read your post.

The modern concept of Civil Disobedience originated with Mohandas K. Gandhi's work to free India from British Colonial Rule. As part of his protest he violated British Law by making salt from seawater. The franchise for the production of India's salt had been granted to a British company by the king of England.

Did Gandhi break the law by going to the sea to make salt? the British Crown claimed he did but the Indian people hastened to disagree.

Reverend King personally spent a lot of time in the slammer during the Civil Rights movement for doing all kinds of things that would be rightly regarded as hooliganism were he and his people not working for peaceful political change.

in the country from just one room in Stasi headquarters in East Berlin.

Digital telephony - not VoIP but digital POTS - was making phones hard to tap so the apparently reasonable law was passedbto require that phone switching equipment be equipped with automated wiretap interfaces, that would of course require a signed warrant from a judge to activate.

But now the PATRIOT Act authorizes warrantless wiretaps, with it having made headlines a few years ago that Oacific Bell provided the NSA with abwiretap facility in downtown San Francisco.

Sure if I were to ride in your own personal car then I would be obligated to follow your rules. But if I wanted to ride in your bus, despite your bus company being privately owned, your bus is a "public accommodation". That's a legal Term of Art that enables the government to require that YOU follow certain rulers and that I have certain rights.

Some Americans are heavily into the ideavthat property rights are absolute and inalienable, but that is not and has never been the case.

I have quite a serious mental illness. I have spent quite a lot of time being one of those bums in the street that you claim has no right to elected representation. the very fact that the stigma against mental illness led someone to direct three security guards to beat the living crap out of me for no other crime than that I was photographing my own hallucinations is the reason I devote psych tireless effort to pointing out the error of your ways to gentlemen such as yourself.

Consider the End User License Agreements that disclaims liability for causing real damage, as when a completely reproducible bug in Excel led my boss to overdraw the company checking account by four grand.

I recently turned down a lucrative remote consulting gig because the client was in Arizona, which recently passed an appallingly racist law that is clearly intended to keep Hispanic people down. I didn't just decline the gig, my email about it went on at some length about how wrong I feel that law is.

Human Machine Interface / Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition is some of the most human life critical software there is. I resigned from that job not because their code isn't exception safe but because the company president specifically forbid me from teaching my colleagues how to do exception safe resource management. I am completely convinced that that company's industrial control system code will someday make Stuxnet look like a walk in the park.

I resigned in protest from the highest paying job I ever had because I was convinced their failure to adequately test our hardware RAID put end user data and possibly even human lives at risk.

the first time I resigned in protest it was over the CEOs decision to move our office out of scenic Scotts Valley California so she personally would have a shorter commute. While she was hired to take Live Picture public, instead she drove the company into bankruptcy.

I regard my real life's work not any kind of software I overwrite, but the essays and articles I write. I have always been clear about that. but even so, my colleagues at Kuro5hin give me no end of crap for not having gotten my first iOS App intonthebapp Store yet.

They wrent just violating segregation laws by refusing to sit in the back of the bus. They violated all manner of laws by braising all kinds if Hell. The "Civil" in Civil Disobedience doesn't mean one is polite, just that one is nonviolent.

An example of the way the Civil Rights Movement would violate the law, which those white ministers I mentioned claimed was wrong, was that the protestors would shut down entire cities by blocking the streets.

That negatively impacted corporate profits, pretty much what Anonymous has been doing.

In principle I agree with younthat one should commit such crimes under ones own real name. That lends legitimacy to ones argument. but consider the good sense that the French Underground and Eastern European Partisans had in hiding their identities from the Nazis. By not getting shot - or prosecuted in the case of Anonymous - they can survive to fight another day.

-h.

Someone was charged with distributing political pamphlets without complying bwith campaign finance laws by declaring who paid for it. The court found that they had the right to anonymity. Sooty I don't have the citation.

Anonymous pamphleteering has a long tradition. nowadays we have Anonymous and LulzSec, but the USSR had typewritten Samizdat, and the British faced hand-operated printing presses operated in thevdark of the night.

The FBI isn't all bad. they really do investigate corrupt politicians, such as the Portland, Oregon city official who now stands accused ofvtaking bribes from a parking meter company.

The problem we have is that it is not illegal to change your vote in response to a campaign "donation". I would like to see a Constitutional amendment that forbid any but individual live humans from contributing nonpolitical campaigns.

My personal objective is in part to do away with the greed, corruption and incompetence that permeates the software industry. I have never made a secret of that fact, because the software industry sickens me so.

Yet the not men but mice who inhabit Kuro5hin fault me for not devoting more of my time to shipping software products. I really don't see how that would be a productive use of my limited time on The Mortal Plane. We have lots of software products, but few who are willing to take a stand against corruption.

Some German friends asked me what Americans celebrated on The Fourthnof July. "Thats when we started shooting at the British," I replied. I was joking - we started shooting a couple years earlier - but that is what I said.

All of Our Founding Fathers who signed The Declaration of Independence had sufficiently many testicles to do so with their real names. They all knew that if they were caught by the British, they would not just be spending some time in the slammer, theybwould be swinging from a noose for treason.

That Shawn guy is all huffy because Anonymous and LulzSec break the law, as if legitimate political protest is on the same level as robbery or mindless vandalism.

During the Civil Rights Movement some white clergymen published an open letter thatvwhile ostensibly supporting equal rights for blacks, urged them to comply with The Whie Mans law during their protests, for example by not shutting down entire cities for days on end.

While spending some time in the slammer, The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior wrote "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" on a few scraps of paper that he begged from the jailer, in which he said "One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

I regard that letter as King's most important written work.

My colleagues at Kuro5hin fault me for not being a Team Player because I regard raising Hell as the greatest contribution I can make to society. We would all be better off if there were fewer Team Players not more of them. Consider what happened when the "Guter Deutschers" - that was the German word for Team Player back in the day - failed to heed the dictates of their consciences and so encouraged Hitler's rise to power.

If you are not up to Hacktivism, don't just politely hand out some leaflets when you protest in meatspace. No, get yourself hauled off to jail by shutting down the entire business district of a city.

Introduce your friends and family to The Onion Router.

Set up a Tor node yourself. Amazon will provide an entry level EC3 host to anyone free of charge for a year.

Register a domain that is not under US control and so cannot be taken from you by the Feds. .is looks good - Iceland.

Mirror some Samizdat at PRQ AB of Sweden. They have a full time legal staff to defend their customers against takedown orders. you can host anonymously and pay them with anonymous money orders.

I would hardly say that turning phone numbers into hyperlinks qualifies as novel and unobvoius.

A real problem is that fiendishly expensive lawsuits are required to overturn patents. we would be much better off if just anyone could point out prior art that would get the patent office to overturn patents that aren't really novelmor unobvious.

the patent examiner who decides the unobvious part really should be an expert in the given technology. had some examiner ever studied the most elementary graphics, they never would have granted a patent for the XOR cursor.

MP3?

I agree that the patent system is broken because patents are granted for frivolous claims such as XOR cursors.

But to the extent that inventions really are novel and unobvious, and the claims non frivolous, continuously reinventing the wheel is really what we want. if we never reinvented wheels, we would still be rolling things around on the trunks of fallen trees.

Further I do not agree that software should be exempt from patents for the reason that the patent office gave, that software is an inherently mathematical concept. Anyone who does not agree that software is just as mechanical as an automobile engine has never written any code.

WGet is chugging away even when I speak. I'm gonna have to cough up for more storage.

Here is an SEO tips for y'all. I didn't discover it, but I stumbled across it just now:

placing the terms "index of", "parent directory", "name", "last modified", "size" and "description" on your web pages is a real good way to attract visitors.

I wasn't able to turn up any actual Apache directory listings for Penthouse Pet of the Year Corinne Alphen. They were all your typical pr0n site that not only weren't presenting directory listings, but none of the sites I looked at had any photos of her, scantily clad or otherwise.

Directory listings for well-known models though, turned right up.