How do you confuse DDOS with violence? Attack is just a word I think you can attack in a debate as well.

I'd say that voluntary DDOS is more like a rally in front of a shop, for example animal right activists protesting in front of a fur-clothing store. It will turn down some customers but not in the way a DDOS does that. End result is mostly similar.

However I believe that Amazon might be the first one that might actually get some financial backslash over this compared to Mastercard and Visa which probably are not in the most visited websites, whereas S3 powers many and Amazon seems to have a lot of (American) customers.

You'd think INDIE film makers like the mastermind Uwe Boll would be delighted to have someone watching their shit, not suing for it — they sure as hell are not selling their products [to me] either nor can I rent them anywhere.

How good business model it is to produce something, only sell/make it available to very limited crowd and then start suing when someone is interested enough in your production to hunt it down online? I'd set up a "support us by buying a license for your downloaded film," for any sum. I'd at least would like to see a film maker do this once and publish the results.

I bet in EU you could even get some public funds for trial like the one described above. Or more specifically, even more public funding.

If this'll make Monty STFU and end his grief, then I'm all for it.

I just don't understand why not PostgreSQL, could someone explain why is mysql better when you provide simple hosting plans? PostgreSQL does seem to have an edge as a RDBMS, so are mysql databases more manageable per user or what's the reason?

I've bashed Vista and agree with almost everything I've read about it for the single reason; I've experienced all that myself.

I wasn't an early adopter -- my first experience was with my laptop, which I bought before SP1. Horrible startup times, and even though I've taken out all the desktop effects and updated everything it still simply sucks.

Kubuntu on the otherhand simply worked immediatedly after I installed it, much snappier and no IO problems (Vista SP2 still hangs when copying files). With the 9.04 I finally got very fast desktop effects that still enable the desktop to be faster than Vistas (without any effects).

Now days even ACPI sleep/hibernate work well in both operating systems.

I only keep Vista around to enable myself HP's bios/firmware upgrades; there's not even a remote possibility of being able to work with Eclipse in Vista -- not that it's fun in Kubuntu, but the times I need it, it'll do.

To get back to replying to you; Vista hasn't done any progress compared to Kubuntu. Perhaps Windows 7 finally fixes everything (copying files etc.) but I still think I should be getting it for free as an SP it really is; don't really care for the UI or DirectX side. I'm glad I only paid "the microsoft tax" with my laptop, imagine what the people who actually bought a license must feel..

Go and demand your gsm subscriptions and your mobiles separately.

Easy as that. Unless you are already past the point when there are only these mega corporations (Verizon + AT&T) selling you what ever bigger companies want.

Buy Nokia :) (The cheapest ones, you don't get angry when destroy the damn thing next friday when you're drunk! You don't really need all those fancy features, you just want to make a call, send an sms and every phone can run Opera Mini)

UAVs are to detect hostiles, observe movements (spying if you will) and perhaps engage them. You can't really use the UAV information to kill the ones benefiting from it -- unless someone is stupid enough to observe/admire their own camp from an UAV, which at wartime sounds pretty stupid. As an opposing force member you could see yourself in it's video feed, or gain information that you are not. That information can however be gained other ways too; for example:

• If the other side knows about you, and have assessed you as a significant threat, they will take action. Nevertheless, you must be prepared to be taken action upon; it's not like any trained militia is going to party high until they are certain they are going to get hit, they'll always keep high alertness. With the modern UAV's carrying air-to-ground missiles you really can't move your terrorist training camp out of the way before UAV operator gets permission to blow you up, even if you knew that they had just learned about you -- there just is not enough time.
• If the other side doesn't know about you, they can't take any straight action against you. Simple as that.

Information sent by this UAV becomes a problem if it's decode able by the opposing forces while it's landing to or taking off from the airforce base. Then again, there cannot be too much to learn from there. As an opposing force member you most likely already have information (googled up perhaps) about their airforce base, the kind of security they have behind their lines. If someone was decoding your UAV transmissions to learn about your airbase, you'll most likely been already compromised as they ought to be in the visual range as well.

Of course this is mostly from army point of view, intelligence gathering can't be stupid enough transmitting anything unencrypted/unobfuscated.

I do not think that the problem lies in use of C/C++, but in the horrible way of using it. From what I've gathered around the Internet "why win32 is great" is that they lacked any kind of stable way of creating their (old?) APIs; everyone just created a new standard for return values and parameter handling. And on top of that some crazy macros that make Symbian code look readable in comparison.

I mean, I've only learned how to program in C/C++ (at university) but been working as a Java dev for quite some time now. Still I can almost make sense of mplayer's or ffmpeg's source code but every time I see some "Windows" C++ it's just plain awful because of all the macros and #define constants. If you ever read KDE's or Qt's sources and compare those to something done with win32... There is a massive difference.

Every tool can be miserably misused.

With Eclipse having it's own update/upgrade functionality I really think that distros should drop eclipse packaging.

It's damn misguiding though that distros have some antique version.

I think a quote from my favourite mini-tv-series "Generation Kill" works well in almost any discussion about "why army X does thing Y like Z when it would be the best to do it like A":

Not retarded enough.

That'll sum it up.

IANAL but didn't every *AA just have a record year (again), despite of the general downturn? They can blame it on "movies inspiring people when they are poor" but I'm not buying that.

At least my consuming habits have gone up since P2P; I buy the tv-series I watch (if or when they ever are released where I live) and buy the movies I enjoyed watching. Actually I just bought a book too, on which a movie was based.

For every new PC (w/ Vista) we buy I instruct their new owners to start getting used to OpenOffice and if necessary, use the Office trial they bundle with it again, only if necessary.

So far I've had 100% (2/2 yei!) success with converting co-workers from Office to OpenOffice. Perhaps the transition from XP to Vista helps with Office to OpenOffice at the same time.. At least the new ribbon interface is so strange to some people that it seems to scare people off.

Small print: these guys were not programmers or writers and only do simple tasks; they most likely had never even (nor will learn in the future) learned how to use styles with word processor.

Two greatest ideas of the century.

I wonder why not instead blocking these sites officials would attempt to co-operate internationally to hunt down the child abusers?

Sounds like there could be higher chance of random "normal" (as in not-interested-in-children-in-that-way) person seeing some child porn while hunting for his/her kind of free porn from the Internet compared to the chance of someone "just happening to produce child porn and putting it up on the Internet."

In your model the "random normal person" would be thrown to the jail, child abusers getting thanked by the police for giving them yet another sick person stumbling on their site.

What all this boils down to is the politicians thinking that closing their eyes makes the problem go away. The Police officials must know that is not the right way; but they do not have a choice.