All movies need an inciting incident, an escalation, then a crisis and resolution.

Boyhood doesn't. And the Before trilogy pretty much doesn't have it either, except at the very end.

IBM sold them computers, so a fair bit.

Next time don't trade oil for land to Nazis.

Unlike the US, who didn't trade with them at all, right?

Fuck the Soviets. It's their own fault.

Fuck the US. It's their own fault 9/11 happened. Next time don't fund terrorists.

Because everything you need to know when coding is the library of a language, right?

Should the cook be held to "physical standards" which aren't relevant to the actual job either? Outside movies like Under Siege, shooting at people really isn't part of the chef's job either. (As an Air Force cadet, I was pretty good at Escape & Evasion - and if I'd gone on to be an actual fighter pilot, that could well have been a vital skill if shot down over enemy territory. As a drone pilot, eight time zones from the action where the biggest threat is road rage on the daily commute? Not a chance.)

Supposing Stephen Hawking were a computing genius, rather than a physicist. Does it really make sense to anyone to reject his brilliant contribution, just because he can't do pushups? Isn't it a better army if it includes that talent?

In fact, the same court had already ruled in a earlier case (Svensson) that linking to a file does not constitute copyright infringement either.

The court doesn't seem - at least from this report - to have taken into account that the uploader on YouTube has the ability to permit or deny this embedding, which would have strengthened the argument that it is that uploader who was to blame, not others linking to the video there. I wonder if the copyright owner went after them as well - considering a copyright takedown against the video on YouTube would have disabled the embedded view anyway?

What could be interesting here is how this relates to recent UK court orders forcing the largest UK ISPs to censor access to "pirate" websites like TPB, some of which also merely link to files which may be online in breach of copyright?

I actually like the idea - having been on an overnight flight landing on 9/11, I remember quite a few online contacts wanting to check I was OK. Of course, with Facebook a simple status update would have done the trick, no need for any special tool - and if I'd been offline, a friend could probably have posted that on my page on my behalf. (The gap between "can phone a friend" and "can get online" is pretty slim these days, too: much more so now than it was then.)

Aircraft do look nice and airy on the inside - right up until you cram in extra rows of seats to make more money, then fill them up with people and luggage. Even in coach, I had some very comfortable long-haul flights in the months after 9/11 with an entire row of seats on a 777 to myself - of course, the airlines weren't quite as comfortable with the plane being that empty. (I'm told this is how Sean Connery flies: rather than pay for first class, just book a whole row in coach. Presumably the airline's perfectly happy with an empty seat, as long as it's being paid for.)

Actually this is complete bullshit. Torrent'ing in no way "help ISPs".
The shear number of connections a single person generates by downloading using torrents is ridiculous. It is basically a legal DDoS (well depending on what your downloading). The problems from bittorrent isn't because of the bandwidth used, it is from the number of connections.

The number of connections is completely irrelevant to any proper ISP (i.e. one which isn't NATting or snooping on your traffic): 100 packets per second on a single TCP connection is precisely the same traffic as 1 packet per second on each of 100 connections, except that it may spread out across more peering/transit links. My ISP literally does not know, let alone care, how many TCP connections I have open right now - only how many packets and how many bytes I'm transferring each way. It does indeed benefit my ISP if more of my traffic is local, since that means it can go via cheaper peering links at LoNAP or LINX rather than the expensive Level3 global transit they use for routing to/from more remote networks.

Where it does matter, though, is your home router/firewall/NAT device, which does need to keep track of each and every connection while it's active: a hundred or so connections might well overwhelm the available state storage long before you run out of bandwidth. On that level, downloading a single file is the same whether it comes from the ISP itself or another continent.

Of course, some ISPs are more clueful than others; mine is not only entirely happy for us to run torrent, servers (official policy: do whatever you like except spam; copyright and other issues are up to the police/courts not your ISP) but are even considering hosting their own Tor exit node. No shaping or filtering except the overall bandwidth limit - which caused packet loss for 0.83% of the last week. If only all ISPs could run like that!

I was wondering when any former nukes would respond. I was a submarine nuke electrician. In the nuke world they can drop a dump truck full of knowledge on you quickly and most nukes can retain and use it. Also, the troubleshooting that I learned and used has really helped me. I use a loose version of the six step troubleshooting procedure I learned in "A" school when I approach a broken system.

The first time you get a name collision and the spy gets his/her real name assigned randomly, expect sparks to fly

I'm going to try using "007" or, in case they insist on words, "Bond, James Bond" next time I'm in that silly place :p

In the US, this would be "Google Maps Reveals Widespread Tax Evasion"

In the UK, even before Google got in there, the government was using spy satellites to check on things like farm subsidies: when a farm submits a claim saying there's a 100 acre patch empty (to claim "setaside" payments) or has a highly subsidised crop growing, it's quick and easy to check a satellite photo and know if it's really only 90 acres - or if only the strip nearest the road is as claimed, with a big patch of some more profitable crop hidden inside. Compared to the cost of sending someone there by car to inspect the whole field on foot, using satellites (which of course they had in orbit anyway, for more predictable purposes) apparently it saved a fortune.

My /. account still works. Havent' used it in ...err... a few years.

Just here to bump this article for my friend Mike and his fantastic work on RC.