Web browser making requests to web server is just the 1990s+ version of mainframe terminal making requests to a mainframe. The difference is a one-to-few relationship becomes a one-to-many relationship. IBM terminals (and some others) understand page layout, and things like form elements. What we really need to defeat is "...on the internet" patents, and that's essentially what this is given the similarity to mainframes.

It doesn't matter - all it takes is someone who is willing to say "hey, that code infringes our copyright". The "offending" code gets removed, and (after the third time) the person who posted it gets kicked off the net.

Good luck trying to clear your name when you don't get to use the internet, and you can't sue to get reconnected because the company that made the claim is in another country.

And if you *do* manage to get it cleared up, the company just says "whoops, I guess I was wrong", and it starts all over again.

I believe you are being mislead by the word 'friend'.
It is supposed to be a person whose company one enjoys and who is there in good times and bad to give advice and encouragement as a confidant(e) and a sounding board. Not the 400-odd people who you may have met once in a long-forgotten party and have collected like baseball cards.

But what better cover for a spy than a profession that cannot be used as cover for spies?

I was with 3 other people for dinner the other night, none of them geeks in ANY way... When ebooks came up, 2 of them had heard the Kindle 1984 story and it gave them the willies. "They can just delete my stuff?"

Based on this massive sample I will say that Joe Public may be more aware of the problem than we give him credit for.

Foxit is terrible. Scratching marks on the ground with a stick beats Foxit.

(It has all the bloat of Adobe without any of the compatibility)

I like pizza, therefore we should impose a new tax and use it to give everyone FREE PIZZA! It doesn't matter if they like it or not. It also doesn't matter whether each one costs $100, or that you have to stand in line for six hours to get one.

Government has no business giving out bread and circuses. That is one of the things that destroyed Rome (the welfare state helped, as did the model of continuous exponential growth and to bring plunder so others would work for them), and it will eventually destroy any other nation that relies on it for too long. Welfare states inevitably collapse. Sweden has a noble history of free markets and trade, and the last few decades of socialism have been living off of that legacy. Look at your country's books, and you'll find that your outlays are well in excess of your revenues. Norway can get away with it due to their wealth of oil, but even that is limited.

"It seems that the general population here at slashdot are assuming that these oil-tankers are full of trained marines that are not allowed to carry guns. It's really not that way. These sailors are just trained seaman that know how to operate a modern ship. They might not even be trained in the use of guns. Pitting them against people with AK-47s is really asking for them to die."

And the "pirates" are fishermen. Do you know what the "training" to operate an AK-47 is? "Move this big lever first. Point. Pull trigger". Aim? no need - the guns are there for intimidation, not effectiveness.

Let me turn your question around: why is it that the population on Slashdot assumes that the pirates are poor, starving fishermen driven to this life, and then they become highly equipped, ruthlessly trained, steely eyed commandos?

You haven't been to china have you

This question seems to be a FAQ and SlashDot. Here is an approximation of what I posted last time. It is/was the actual policy at a Fortune 500 technology company during a time when I was the PHB that had to pay for the 24x7 coverage on a particular server.

For your 40 hrs/week, you get your regular pay. For your time "on the pager", you get 25% of your regular hourly, until such time as it goes off. From the time the pager goes off, until you clear the trouble ticket, you get 100% plus any applicable shift/holiday/overtime premium.

If you can dial in remotely and fix the problem, great for everyone. If not, you must be able to get from wherever you are to the server room in 30 minutes. 100% of the time you are on the pager, you must be in condition to work, ie: sober.

So... does that sound like getting paid 25% for doing nothing? Not to me. You can't get more than a 30 minute drive from the plant -- so no ski trips for you that weekend. Going to a party? Better have cranberry juice. You are getting paid for making yourself available.

My company had a policy that the cost of 24x7 coverage came out of the budget of the PHB demanding it. A very good policy, IMHO. Its too easy to ask for it otherwise, without considering the consequences, both in terms of dollar cost, and in terms of quality of life for the employees that provide the coverage.

I'm prepared to lose my excellent Karma on this issue. To be honest I'm not prepared to lose it over whether Microsoft is better than Linux, or Linux is better than Microsoft:

Research has shown Mount Kilimanjaro has been losing glaciers/snow cap over the last 150 years or so. The reasons for this are micro-climate issues, particularly deforestation around the base on the mountain. Now, will you just shut-up about Mount Kilimanjaro being somehow proof of CO2 based warming hypothesis. It isn't, it never was and it never will be.

Secondly, this whole topic is posted by a Real Climate shill and is nothing more than a propaganda piece to try to limit the damage from the unfolding scandal. The datasets aren't entirely independent as they both take data from the same poorly sited, poor maintained and poorly analysed surface station networks. Moreover, there are big data quality problems with NASA's GISS data. If CRU data agrees with GISS and CRU data has been fixed, I conclude that either GISS data has been fixed too, or that they're both crap.

Here's a brief analysis of data quality issues with GIStemp. Here's information about the poor quality of the surface station network.

They were not maintained because the local government refused to allow the maintenance and construction to take place.

Excellent, I'm glad you voluntered for phase 1 of the population thinning program. Feel free to remove your burden from the earth in any quiet environmentally-concious way you see fit.

Nothing personal, I just think that "great, lets start with you" is an good reply to anyone discussing population thinning :)

Two comments:

1. Comments are there to tell WHY the code is doing what it is doing, not necessarily what the code is doing. I deal with code all the time that has comments that tell me what I can easily learn by reading the code, but they don't tell me why so when it is broken I don't know if it is because there is a subtle problem with the code or that the developer didn't know what they were doing.

2. After literally getting headaches from reading code written by other people I came up with a simple metric: The complexity of the coding solution to a problem is inversely proportional to how well the developer understood the problem they were trying to solve. In other words, someone who understands the problem will have a simpler solution than someone who doesn't understand the problem as well. You can apply this metric to things other than code, too, but it is usually very apparent with software.

Why do you keep copy and pasting stuff you have already said?

My point here was not whether or not you write spyware, it was simply me taking issue with the *way* you go about things. You don't seem to have any respect for people.

I have said a couple of times that my comments to you have not been jokes. I have been quite serious the whole time. The joke was my original post about Windows vulnerabilities, which you then just pasted some offtopic spam in reply. Again, no respect. You could have at least wrote a relevant introduction.