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Comment Re:The actual damages... (Score 2) 647

Here's the issue... shoddy morality grounds or not, people en mass (all around the world too, not just the US) are not respecting copyright law.

Alcohol was illegal in the 20s... Did that stop everyone? It's legal now, isn't it? Legal issue became a moral issue.

Like it or not, as time goes on I think file sharing is going to follow the same path as prohibition. More and more kids are being brought up with getting payware for free. This is especially happening because many of the napster generation now have their own kids who think downloading music/movies/games/etc is perfectly okay (or they "know it's wrong", but do it anyway because morally they are okay with it, like say.... jaywalking).

In general, when millions upon millions of people are breaking the law every day, it seems to me that there's something wrong with the law.

Here's the crazy thing... I run a software company which survives by customers paying for the software of course. Would I be pissed if someone was running a copy they got for free? Yeah... I would be if it was a company using it for-profit. If it was some kid in a basement... eh, that's okay with me.

For me, morally it's a really tricky issue. Reading about grandmas, teenagers, and college students getting sued for hundreds of thousands over downloading an album or two makes me cringe. Reading about companies getting shut down for selling knockoff software or hardware makes me happy. There's a line somewhere where it all makes sense but it's not well defined.

Comment Re:this is complete BS (Score 1) 938

My point was....

You wrote "Drivers exhibiting signs of impaired driving... excessively long cushions to the next car"

You mean cushion as in the gap between vehicles... correct?

If so, I disagree entirely that long gaps between vehicles are a sign of impaired driving, or are a problem at all.

Comment Re:this is complete BS (Score 1) 938

"narrowing the air gap " when did I say that? I am all for classic 3 sec rule

When you wrote "excessively long cusions"

I don't see a problem with 100 yard cusions or 1000 yard cusions. When driving out in utah and the limit is 75 but everyone is doing 80 or 85 there's routinely huge distances between cars because it's ludicrous to be close together.

Comment Re:this is complete BS (Score 1) 938

Drivers should be only punished if there driving is dangerous. Drivers exhibiting signs of impaired driving (like slow reaction), excessively long cushions to the next car, speed lower than traffic.

...

I don't know about you, but I prefer to keep as much distance as possible between my vehicle and the one in front of it. It's the idiots on cell phones who are *also* riding your bumper that cause nasty accidents.

Tailgating should be heavily enforced.

Comment Re:Gibber (Score 1) 249

Google has a crappy dysfunctional checkout system and make no attempts to collect your payment details until you decide to bite the bullet and buy an app. At that point, they make the process painful and unsatisfying so that you are put off from ever trying again.

Huh? Are you referring to the app market or something else? The google mobile market is painless and easy to buy apps. You hit buy and it charges your card on file. You get the app. Done and done. What could be easier?

Comment Re:Hypothetical (Score 1) 228

It's not what he said.. It's what he didn't say

I check my new iPhone app and lo and behold, there's a checkpoint on the only highway between the bar and my house. I don't want to spend the night in jail, so I take a cab instead.

1) Check iphone app
2) Checkpoints noted
3) Decide not to drive

What if there were no checkpoints? Would he drive?

Comment Re:Lawlessness (Score 1) 983

Since I was born in this country I have never seen so much lawlessness by financial institutions, politicians and law enforcement.

If this continues the USA will break up. If the USA becomes politically unstable we could see civil war.

There are already indications of this as state legislatures ignore their constituents and yield to the criminals in Washington.

We have states desperate to save the currency Washington is destroying, by declaring new issues of monetary and economic rules in their own states.

Meanwhile you have Federal powers trying to make it illegal to put anything other than Federal Reserve notes and arresting anyone who dares try.

A confrontation is coming between those who have looted and stole everything in this country and those who have been stolen from.

Be sure you pick the correct side when the crap hits the fan, because it is going to get very very ugly.

-Hack

I believe some citations are in order.

Comment Re:Open standards? (Score 3, Informative) 271

End to end communication when both endpoints are behind NAT is a tricky problem. I don't know the skype protocol, did skype actually solve the problem, are the sessions truly end to end, NAT to NAT without the central server doing any proxying?

SIP by itself cannot solve the problem when both endpoints are behind a NAT without specifically forwarded ports, but it does work well when properly configured and only one side is NAT'd, which is classically the case with any protocol.

Halfway decent is hard to define. If it works, it's halfway decent at the minimum, heh. Most of your off the shelf consumer linksys, netgear, etc routers will handle passing sip just fine. Every so often you may run into a box that just fails miserably.

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