Pretty much the same feeling, and from most people I know in tech circles. Though I'm in Canada, and my view is Canada-centric. But the vast majority of people here don't trust the UN at all.

Hey if I signed over any comment so it becomes their property, then I can't wait to see and what happens when someone posts something that falls under libel laws.

First, due process already interferes wit a person's life. Having to go to court to defend yourself is not something you do lightly - but if you're innocent, you should be ready to make the sacrifice in time and resources to prevent future abuse - to "pay it forward". As Thomas Paine said "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”

All the alternatives are there - but not for something that's illegal, or, in your own words, "illegal downloading." The lesson is simple - don't do the crime unless you're ready to do the time. Someone who has been wrongfully blocked can use those alternatives legitimately and without fear while the fight for what's right.

The only "inaccuracies" in the past several years have been from BlackBerry. They've been trying - and failing - to push their phone platform. The first indication that they were making the shift was when they started offering BBM for non-BlackBerry phones. Now, focusing on their Intellectual Property - we all still remember when SCO started making the same noises.

After decimating their workforce, they're now hiring - but for non-hardware related services. For a company that renamed itself from RIM (Research In Motion) to BlackBerry in a failed effort to show "commitment" to their new line of cell phones, and a record loss of $6 billion, of which $934 million was for unsold Z10 phones, and their inability to sell themselves to a private investor when that investor couldn't get equity partners to pony up cash ... there's simply no way that they can continue to devote more than "maintenance mode" funding to the cell phone business - and if they try to do both, not only will the markets hammer them, but they'll just burn through their remaining cash reserves that much faster, AND scare off any potential investors/partners.

Blackberry's phone div is now a distraction as they try to reinvent themselves. They don't dare say it publicly, but there are no reasons to believe they're stupid enough to continue when their smartphone market share is a rounding error. They'll sell the bones to a 3rd-party manufacturer, now that they've shielded the core IP in another division.

Sure you can. I was once falsely (and maliciously) accused of something, and was able to prove that I was 100 km away in a different city for the extended weekend, with hundreds of witnesses. 7 witnesses was more than sufficient.

What's this - BadAnalogyGuy posting anon, or what? Seriously ... if someone gets hit with a redirect, it's not like they still don't have other avenues to pursue. For one, they can fight the ban legally with their ISP (unless, of course, they're guilty and their ISP has the records to prove it). Then there's free wifi networks. Going to a friends. The library. Buying a data plan for your smartphone. Switching ISP.

What it boils down to is simple. If you're not guilty, you have both the right and the duty to fight. If you are, then maybe it's time to grow up and face the music, because these programs only exist because people ARE breaking the rules in the first place. And if you don't think a particular program/show/song is worth the asking price ("how much? What a ripoff"), that's not an excuse for downloading (ripping it off).

If you download stuff that the rights-holders don't want to sell you, and you end up paying $20, of which $10 goes to the copyright holder, that's pretty damn decent.

Without radiation, our planet wouldn't have a molten core, plate tectonics, or LIFE - at least not "life as we know it." And that's not counting solar radiation (infra-red through ultraviolet) that makes our orbit the "Goldilocks zone for life."

>> In particular, the algorithm points out that Norman Rockwell's Shuffleton's Barber Shop painted in 1950 is remarkably similar to Frederic Bazille's Studio 9 Rue de la Condamine painted 80 years before.

Not at all. Apart from both being of (different sized) rooms painted from an approximately similar angle, there really is nothing else that is the same about the two paintings. It would appear that the computer is keying only off of very large features such as a general observation that a large lightsource of a simliar size and location is in both (but in one painting its half a window which is really a secondary subject, and in the other, a doorway to a room with a light in that is the primary subject). If the computer can only make decisions based on such broad generalisations, it really is pretty much useless.

That idea won't be effective at all. All that this will do is become another forum for sanitized mediocre groupthink.

The problem is that on most public websites, someone genuinely posting a polite, well-reasoned yet strongly contrary viewpoint will often still get marked as flamebait or trolling just because there are apparently a surprisingly high percentage of closed-minded people that just can't abide even the existence of any viewpoint that is much different from theirs, or the social norm.

You don't even need to leave this site to find plenty of great examples of that effect in action.

If you give those people even more power, they would just delete everything that doesn't fit their wold view, so the only thing left on the website would quickly become just all the uncontroversial politically correct unintelligent mush.

Salt in the air sure, but we drive through the stuff roughly 9 months out of the year adding water to the mix. Corrosion against metal in "salt in the air" areas is magnitudes less than direct. Oh and we've got corrosion warranties in Canada, you *might* be lucky if the coverage is longer than 5 years.

I've never denied I enjoy trolling the trolls, Fat Boy. And why should I bother with your "challenge" when the whole issue has been rendered moot by hardware advances?

As for my running for Parliament in the next federal election, there are plenty of people who are depending on me to continue to fight for their rights and against projects that are a waste of money and have results contrary to their stated goals. There IS life after programming, and the same problem-solving skills apply to "debugging" political problems.

But you can continue to "solve" a problem that nobody cares about any more. And now that I'm back you can continue to try to bug me. After all, like I said before I started going blind, someone has to keep you busy so you don't get distracted and start chewing more paint chips.

Before jumping on the previous poster for mentioning Windows 7, you might have wanted to read the linked article, or better yet Microsoft's own description of one of the updates that states it affects a LOT more than just Win8x, and it has nothing to do with drivers

Buffer overflow in a character set table?

If this story had provided a link to any source, it would be worth reading. But at this point, all I can say is [citation needed].