some other email addresses belonging to other corporations. I would suspect that those are the people who are most at risk of blackmail

Why even bother with blackmail, which could land you in your own legal hell?

Instead of racistsgettingfired.tumblr.com, somebody could try setting up cheatersgettingfired.tumblr.com and get people fired for their infidelity (plans).

While I agree with what you're trying to say here, I think GP actually meant that they could confirm that the IP address belongs to a range assigned to government institutions - i.e. it's not just people using their .gov e-mail address from home, but they're using it from what should be their public servant workplace - and not so much tying it to a specific individual.

Why stop there? Why not say they should only be entitled to recover the fair market price?

Is it in theatres now? Good, the price of one admission, then.
Wait, it's in theatres in Bangladesh? The price of one admisssion there, then.

Is it on sale in iTunes? Whatever that is, then.

Is it on Netflix? Subscription cost / subscription duration * movie duration ~= $8.99 / 2,635,200 * 7200 ~= $0.03 (rounded up, being generous)

Or, given that the market in question - that is to say, 'pirates' - decide that the fair price is $0, they should be able to recover exactly that.

Insert further arguments to make the case that they should actually be paying the 'pirates' ;)

My ancient Windows Mobile one had IR - could receive/send, control TVs (learn remotes via some software aka 'app'), IR lighting, and even print to a printer with an IR port without any in-between server or AirPrint silliness.

In some ways, smart phones have really gone technologically backwards for the sake of user experience claims. On the other hand.. accurate capacitive displays, accelerometers, built-in GPS.. I wouldn't go back, exactly :)

I figured i'd keep the subject in tone with TFS's 'upworthiness'.

But unlike TFS and Upworthy et al, I'll spoil it for you:

Their servers used the originating IP address to identify a connecting client as being a subscriber. They also followed "X-Forwarded-For" - a header normally used to indicate that the connecting client is effectively just being a proxy. Thus by manually setting this header to a valid subscriber's IP address, the attacker can trick the server into thinking that their client is that of the subscriber.

I think the word 'invented' gives too much credit as is.

They merely released an app that does what others have done before;
http://rnd.azoft.com/mobile-ap...
http://petapixel.com/2013/09/1...
http://dspace.ucalgary.ca/bits...
http://circlewithme.tumblr.com...

But it's Google, so it gets eyeballs anew.

Ahhh you're Greek - Greece has been dealt an extremely raw deal and the EU knows they have Greece over a barrel. They can claim they didn't know that the Greek government wasn't being forthright with numbers - but they knew. Oh how they knew; I empathize with your situation.

As for waking up to European directives - that's already the reality that we live in. The UK had to change warranty laws around (the consumers did not necessarily win there), The Netherlands suddenly had to declare downloading (of infringing content etc.) as illegal after a ruling on interpretation of the laws (whereas before that was legal), and is having to lubricate matters in order to charge foreign drivers a sort of tax for driving on German motorways; their original plan was already shot down as it singled out foreign drivers: now they actually plan on taxing everybody, but Germans can get the money back via a sneaky construction.

It's mostly the bad effects that we notice, however - many cases of collusion have also been addressed by the European Union, not going bankrupt just for placing a 10 minute call or 1MB data download when across the border is something that has been addressed by the EU, etc. Some of these may have also naturally evolved, but the EU nudging doesn't hurt.

I'm on the fence on whether on the whole the EU has been a net positive or negative, but from your perspective I can well imagine that there's very, very little to be positive about.

Extremely off-topic, but just to touch on the 'who decides' - those with deep pockets, of course. That's not me - it might be you, but I suspect not :)

Let's face it, we can ask the same thing about our national governments, regional governments, municipal governments and local pseudogovernments.

That's something that always strikes me as hilarious about U.S. politics. Case in point: same sex marriage. Several state legislators are arguing the case that the Federal Government should have no say in this and that it should be up to the people whether or not same sex marriage should be allowed. But when they say "the people",they really mean that it should be up to the states. Imagine if Travis County, TX (home to Austin, TX) made much the same argument that the state shouldn't have a say in this, that it should be up to the people voting in county level politics. The state would smack that down in a heartbeat - while letting counties having free reign on various other matters.

So, really, which government decides anything in Austin, TX? Travis County? Texas State? The U.S.?

It's not much different in the EU - the EU just has the additional hassle of the law of the handicap of a head start; cultures progressed quickly but individually here, so now a bunch of legislation that really should apply to all European countries instead has to trickle down through each nation's own legislation, bubble back up to the EU when they hit a snag, come back down, etc.

We are indeed very good with bad ideas - but we do have a few good ones once in a while as well; executing on them remains a problem :)

Ah, yeah, got mangled in some editing around of my comment - that was supposed to come after the replacing of ads with other content :) Good catch, and good point as well :)

Seems tempting, but then you realize that they actually plan on taking money from the advertising companies to start allowing ads again:

The idea is to specifically target Google, blocking advertising on its websites in an attempt to force the company into giving up a cut of its revenues.

Also keep in mind that this almost requires them to play MITM with certs, inspect your traffic, etc. which can then further be monetized, and new content injected. Phorm comes to mind.

Add to that the slippery slope, and it should be evident to anybody that this is a bad idea - and one that has been struck down in the EU in the past already.

As much as people may dislike ads, having them blocked at the ISP level is a patently terrible idea. I, for one, am hoping the legal weasels haven't found loopholes that would make legislators nod in agreement that this would be a-ok.

Yeah, which is a good chunk more than $9 - showing that a lot of cost in a device is not really in the innards; and it still doesn't certify it for use on tests and all that jazz, where the true cost of graphing calculators normally referred to lies.
( There's certainly cheap graphing calculators as well - just can't use those in those situations. )

In defense of the calculator - it has an included screen, dedicated custom keyboard, custom slim case, battery life measured in months if not years, etc.

In non-defense of the calculator - most of its cost is not in the above, but in its certification for use in [school / university / industry] - even if not for itself, then its sibling product which is.. and when that product costs $NN, you can't very well start selling this one for $N without people cluing in.

Tuning is indeed important - as is balancing wheels; two fairly inexpensive steps you can take to get better efficiency out of your car.

But when I tried to look in the first-linked article for tuning.. I couldn't. It was stuck. I tried to click on the link for the study - I couldn't. It was stuck. I figured I'd wait it out.. that was a long wait.
By the time I could finally click the link for 'the study' (which is the 3rd link in TFS, for what it's worth, so just skip to that one), this is what the console showed:
http://i.imgur.com/n3wHVSC.png
That's 1,114 requests, 10.4MB transferred, taking 1.2 minutes. That's with ad blocking, without script blocking.

'ecosalon' should look in the mirror and consider how much energy is being wasted just by people loading that page - the useful content of which ultimately comes down to 10 small paragraphs of text.

I'm confused what dressing up cell towers as X has to do with the subject at hand.

Unless you want to make either A. the argument that if only cell towers looked like cell towers, you'd know when to turn your cell phone 's radio off (completely) so as to avoid being tracked; because you definitely leave your cell phone on if you can't see a cell tower, or B. the argument that people think their cell phones work via the power of magic if they can't see anything that looks like a cell tower; if they even know what those actually look like.

I don't disagree that this was provocative on purpose - the merits thereof I'll leave for some other day - but the situations presented aren't comparable.

This was a meeting held in some random location (a community center, with permission) - not inside a mosque.

Your freedom of speech expression apparently explicitly puts the BBQ in a synagogue. Unless you somehow got permission to do so, it's likely that you would be trespassing and - with the smoke from the BBQ - damaging property.

You could certainly hold your BBQ outside the synagogue, but then it would probably be just a BBQ. I'd imagine there's hot dog carts nearby synagogues in NYC, for example, without any particular issue.