Don't make scrolling text and a talking guy compete for attention - I couldn't pay attention to either of them. Play again, and again? You wish.

I was about to suggest you do what "Hide/Show Transcript" does, but I noticed it before I submitted this, so I deleted 2/3 of what I wrote. :)

All that money spent in the courts to get ISPs to block the Pirate Bay from direct access, and by the ISPs to implement the ruling, and for what? It appears only the lawyers won. The artists aren't any better off as a result, the "industry" isn't getting any fatter, and the pirates were only slightly inconvenienced for the five minutes it took to find a way around the blockade. You know, given this perspective, I'd suggest that the "industry" spends that money helping people in Africa or poor regions of the US (yeah, I crack myself up sometimes).

Thanks man. I haven't laughed so hard in a long while. My normal mood is grumpy, but in the last 5 minutes I've been full with laughter. Cheers.

Actually, that "pull" operation exists in other distributed versioning systems as well (Mercurial, Bazaar, Monotone). They also have a "push", for when you want to give your patches to others. Pulling and pushing are common operations in these systems. Also, your sense of "pulled" would be presented as "reverted" (as in "undone").

And you need a kernel in C++ why? Because you can't get your head around objects that aren't enforced by the language? Or you can't get your head around doing error cleanup without exceptions enforced by the language? The Linux kernel even does reference counting without explicit support from the language.

Just to get a complete picture, I looked at some competing kernels (I skimmed over the source really quickly):

FreeBSD kernel - C, with objects and refcounts, similar to Linux
OpenBSD kernel - C, but I have a hard time finding their equivalent to objects and refcounts, and I gave up looking
GNU Hurd - C, and I'm not even going to bother looking around too much
XNU - C, but with I/O Kit in C++ - works only with Apple software?
Haiku kernel - C++, which is interesting in itself - but supports only IA-32?
Plan9 kernel - C
OpenSolaris kernel - C

I think it's pointless to look at the rest. All the others listed by Wikipedia are even more obscure than some of the above.

C seems to dominate the kernel arena, so Next time you post, I'd like to know what you think C++ would bring to the party. No, really. I've seen many dismiss that Linux isn't written in C++, but haven't seen a single one of these trolls (yes, I'm feeding you) say what that would accomplish, and I'm really really really curious. I'll throw a bone from the XNU Wikipedia article: "helping device drivers be written more quickly and using less code", and that seems to be the only bit written in C++, yet Linux does pretty well without, and apparently so do the majority (see above).

At that point you don't need the reliabilitiy and retransmission features of TCP. Once you stack the layers up, TCP will take care of that anyway, without running it over TCP again. Think IP: unreliable datagrams; you put TCP on it and presto: reliable, ordered, everything. Run a VPN, and you do it over UDP, and end up with something like IP -> UDP -> TCP, and then TCP again does its thing, without a care in the world about the layers below. Same principles apply with this new things too. If your underlying layers are flaky, you can't make them less flaky by adding more TCP to your cake. In effect, you make them even more flaky as each TCP layer tries to do its own retransmission and floods your line.

Replying to myself because I just got the brilliant idea to see if BT aren't actually hijacking DNS itself, making me look like an idiot. Well... they succeeded:

Promobay.org works once I add its IP to /etc/hosts.

Why are BT hijacking the DNS for promobay.org? I have no idea, but a judge might be interested.

I can't believe I haven't read this one yet:

BT gives me "Error - site blocked" for both TPB and PromoBay.org which means they've hijacked the IP address itself. What I will have to see next is if anyone goes and tell the court that BT is doing more blocking than they've been ordered. They've been ordered to block TBP, but not anything else that may be hosted at the same IP address.

My conclusion: TPB is playing one of their games. Popcorn may be recommended for this one if the ball gets rolling.

I created a new profile in the profile manager of Firefox and wrote a tiny script that I called '~/bin/privatefox' with this command in it:

Bug fixed :)

I've switched away from Chrome since Chrome started adding my incognito cookie and javascript exceptions to the persistent list. Everything else Chrome did to tick me off was tolerable, but the leaking of incognito exceptions... GTFO

I imagine the OCR is overkill, but this invention could really make printed braille useful, and turn the fail I just linked to into a win (if you ignore the braille typo). I imagine the recognition would be a lot easier to do (to the likes of QR codes), and it would be really easy to retrofit to existing signs.

I was about to uphold my point by pasting this from the GPL:

emphasys mine,

but then I scrolled down:

emphasis mine here as well.

So I guess you're right. Thanks for making me look it up and update my knowledge.

This bit just isn't true. You get a full rainbow of licences to abide by: GPL, MIT, BSD, Apache, Creative Commons, just to name a few. Just no EULA, and no "fear the BSA" religious indoctrination, which is probably what you mean by the excerpt.

My guess is that she picked up an iPad, she liked it, but thought it was a Surface (a staffer is laughing on the floor in a closet right now), and tweeted that crap (directly, or via intern/secretary), and she'll go like "WTF is this shit?" when she receives her real Surface order later on. Don't attribute to malice (or shilling) what can be explained by stupidity or somesuch, right? It could have been more than speculation if she specified that she tweeted from her Surface, so I wouldn't have to write this at all.

So wait... let me get this straight... broken MD5 is not acceptable because it's... well... broken, but clear text is OK? I guess no one cracked clear text yet...

And lest I say something stupid, I went to Wikipedia to figure out who uses MD5 as a block cipher and came up empty. MD5 doesn't appear to be a block cipher in any usage, but something that you attach to data (either plain or encrypted) to verify integrity/identity. NIST seems to still like 3DES for block encryption just fine. NIST also like SHA and things. If DHS says NIST is pants, well... Are you sure those limitations aren't just for the purposes of your teaching, lest students leave with state secrets on their mobile phones?

There are so many ways I can't wrap my head around your post, it makes my head spin, so I'll stop. All I can safely do is ask: did I pass your class? :)

A while back, LoveFilm UK moved away from Flash to Silverlight citing DRM reasons. Apparently Flash DRM isn't good enough, while Silverlight DRM is. They also claimed that it was the studios that required the Silverlight DRM, so blame Hollywood.