The summary, as well as the article, contains the sentence "Israel is to attempt, again, to pass a bill ...".
Another way to phrase it is: "The bill did *not* pass last time, and may end up not passing again.".
Sounds less sinister, doesn't it? And non-news....

In other words., unlike some other countries (most notably the U.S.) where laws for taking down Websites have passed and have been used, laws outlawing various behaviors that have nothing to do with copying as "copyright circumvention", laws allowing people to be banished from the Internet have passed etc., - none of this crap exists in Israel. So if anything, the Internet freedom situation is *better* in Israel than in most countries.

While he makes some interesting points, I think he misunderstands the spam issue, and why his users, especially free users, rightly marked his mail as "spam":

If I look at spam I get, some of it is "random" spam. E.g., someone I never heard of trying to sell me viagra, or asking me to help smuggle $10,000,000 he stole while being the president of his country. But a growing percentage of the spam are people who confused a one-time business relationship with my desire to read all about them and their products for the next 20 years. E.g., I'm constantly getting mails from a particular hotel I once stayed at, mails from some company I once bought from, etc. People *hate* that, and it doesn't really help that they once used your services - they still hate the spam.

But why did free users complain more? That's easy: Every paying user remembered you and your service, and most of them "forgave" the one time "thank you mail" (but be warned, they won't so easily forgive repeated annoyances). From the free users, a lot of them probably don't even remember what service you provided them. Heck, it is possible that half of them never even fully used (e.g., didn't even complete a card) or didn't enjoy your service, and you don't know that. These people have no recollection who you are, and thought that even a "thank you" letter was an outright spam.

What should you do about the spam thing next time? Don't make the "I want to get mails" checkbox hidden in some long form and default to on. You have two options - either make it default to "off" (so only people who REALLY want to get your mails will get them, but be warned that few people will actually want that), or, if you want it to default to "on" make a very very clear screen which basically says "I'm giving you this service for free, in exchange for the right to mail you in the future. If you do not agree, or would consider such mails to be spam, please do not use this service.".

"vi" is short of "visual".
First there was "ed", the, you guessed it, "editor". But "ed" was a real pain to use, because you wouldn't see what you were actually editing (if you ever used ed, you'd know what I mean). So the "visual" editor "vi" was invented.

No, the GP was actually right - in this kind of competition, prices go *up*, not down.
Why?
Because the situation today is that the law requires companies like Netflix to beg and bargain for content from the different movie studios and distribution companies. As Netflix and DirecTV and others compete, each will try to get "better" movies, "exclusive" movies, and so on, allowing the movie producers to *increase* the prices they charge these companies. Consumer will get higher prices and fewer choices - because some of the content you wish to see was made "exclusive" to the streaming company you don't use...

The only solution I see is to make laws or regulations allowing any company to broadcast *any* movie or show, for a predetermined (by the rights holder) price. Even better (but perhaps this is too idealistic) would be that the price for any movie will be the same. A similar situation exists in the radio business - radio stations can play any piece of music they want providing they pay royalties - and individual radio stations do not have to deal and bargain with rights holders to play each different song.

The second question in the same article was more interesting, or rather, the "UPDATE" to it.
A doctor asks whether it is ethical to sign on a convict mom's petition to delay her jail sentence for a couple of weeks while her child undergoes from surgery.
Then, the UPDATE says, that the dad lost his medical insurance, so the surgery was cancelled.
God, am I the only one seeing the irony in this?
A doctor is worried whether or not it is ethical to send mail to a judge on his patient's behalf (hmm, why wouldn't it?) and at the same time isn't at all worried about the ethical consequences of not treating his child patient who needs surgery (according to his decision), just because her dad lost his job while waiting for the surgery.
Disgusting.

In other news from 1980, programming toolkits are dominating the programming landscape.

Programmers have discovered that they can amass great profits by using easily accessible "programming toolkits", which are now used in the majority of the software in the wild. These toolkits include compilers (no longer does the programmer need to remember all these geeky hex codes!), libraries (and idiot can now use the quicksort algorithm without reading Knuth!), and kernels (you don't need to know anything about IO or virtual memory to program!).

All these freightening developments are opening the doors to more programmers who would likely otherwise lack the required technical expertise to succeed in the programming underground.

The Talmud (basically, the Jewish law codex) contains an interesting discussion about this. Consider one man dropping a pot from the top floor of a building, and before the pot hits the ground, a man walking in the street hit it with a stick and breaks it. Now, who is responsible for the vase breaking? The man on the ground actually broke it, but even if he didn't, it would have broken a second later when it hit the ground.
Similarly, when somebody fills a house with so many explosives they can no longer be gently disarmed, he already caused it to be destroyed. The fact it has not yet been destroyed, and the actual destruction will be caused a bit later (perhaps by a policeman lighting a match) doesn't change the fact that it was the tenant who started the inevitable destruction, not the police.

Most commenters in this discussion badmouth the traffic cops, and speeding laws, because they assume that these laws suck in South Africa, just like they suck in their own country like the USA or the UK and so on.

But in fact, when I visited South Africa, I was suprised to see that the situation is actually different - and better - in South Africa; In much of the rest of the world, speed limits are relatively arbitrary. E.g., the speed limit used to be 50 miles per hour throughout the US (although this changed somewhat in recent years), and is 90 km per hour in highways throughout Israel. Since modern cars can easily go much more than that, drivers have gotten used to break the speed laws all the time, and (rightly) feel the cops are pigs (to use the original poster's terms) and are out to get them - not to catch criminals.

But in South Africa, my experience (from driving along and around the N2 for about a week) is that the speed limit on the highway is *not* arbitrary. Every few miles, the speed limit changes depending on actual road conditions - sometimes when the road is bad, it is just 90 km/h, but in good stretches, it becomes 120km/h. My feeling in South Africa was that indeed, someone who goes over the posted speed limit is really doing something wrong. It is really dangerous to go over 120, and when the speed limit says 90, you would really be stupid to do over 90 because there is a real reason why this limit, and not 120, was posted.

When the speed limits make sense, and only criminals and crazy drivers break them, why would you want to fight a system to catch those criminals and crazy drivers?

So all the people badmouthing South Africa on this thread - better learn from South Africa (at least on this issue...) instead of just assuming that everything is wrong in that country.

This is actually not true. I've often been downloading TV series and movies from the 60's, 70's and 80's, things I would never see on today's Television channels but bittorrent allows me to watch. Think of any tv show you liked as a child (or your father liked as a child), be it Star Trek (the original series), Little House on the Prairie or whatever - and you can watch it on bittorrent.

This is ridiculous. Why say that the Ipad will kill the $2000 DVD player when.... The $100 DVD player has already killed it????

After all, for $100-$200 you can get a fine portable player which can: 1. Connect to car or home electricity (with Ipad you need to buy more power supplies). 2. Play physical dvd's and/or movies on flash disk or memory cards (Ipad only has internal memory), 3. hang on the front sit's head rest (the ipad doesn't come with any solution for that), 4. Sit comfortably on your horizontal lap while the display is tilted (you can't do this on the flat ipad).

So what is so new with the ipad in this sense?

The parent is described as "computer-handicapped", so let's put it in terms he or she will understand: Consider, instead those old-fashed toys of yesteryear. Or consider the TV which many kids of my generation had in their rooms.

Could you imagine a parent asking that his children's toys will automatically stop working on 10pm? Or that his TV cannot be turned on when the child is grounded, or perhaps show only certain channels at certain times? Or the toys checking themselves and letting the parent know when one of them gets broken?

This is all ridiculous, of course. With toys and TV you simply couldn't even imagine doing this. With a computer you can *imagine* doing it, but it doesn't mean it makes sense to do it. A child will always find ways to break such technological rules, especially if the parent is so-called "computer-handicapped".

I don't know about you, but the cocaine isn't the thing that worries me - I'm more worried about the fact that 90% of the bills I use have been up someone's nose!

I've been using Zsh (the Z shell) for years, because it had better completion, and a richer bourne-shell and ksh-based programming language including also associative arrays and the co-process.
So it would appear that bash finally caught up. But zsh has continued to improve. I'll be sticking with zsh for now, until I see that bash really caught up.