You're right, wrong example.

Here's the proper example: it wasn't that person's picture. He had no rights to distribute it. Under the normal laws, only that person is at fault. Under this kind of law, all the people who downloaded it would be too. And that just ain't right. It leaves everybody open to entirely too many problems, it becomes impossible to do much on the web without constant fear.

I don't see the comparison with fragments of literary works as being valid. Coherent pieces from a text are usable on their own. But 2 random pieces from a movie file are useless. Can they really claim that the sharer harmed the rights holder by distributing pieces which are unusable? I just don't see it standing for one file-sharer alone, in the absence of all the others who together made available the whole file.

You don't even have to go that far. Criminalizing downloading is insane. It doesn't make sense, it cannot work. Example: someone posts a picture of their cat on any website, without mentioning distribution terms, anybody who downloads that picture is automatically at fault.

This is why I suspect this EU thing is not a blanket "let's get all downloaders" thing, but a rather more subtle approach.

You have to understand that in EU, not just in Netherlands but many countries, downloading is currently legal, period. What the law punishes is distribution ie. making available, uploading etc. But you can't go after uploaders who use protocols like BitTorrent, because any of them taken individually (usually) only upload pieces of files, not entire files. In order to be able to prosecute anybody for one download you'd have to keep track of all the IP's that provided all the file pieces, then identify the people behind them, then prove intent and knowledge of what they were doing, then prove collusion to break the law.

Given the privacy laws of most EU countries this is simply impossible. It won't even get past identifying people behind IP's, let alone seizing evidence to prove intent, knowledge and collusion. It's a chicken and egg problem: you need identities and evidence to prove they did something wrong, but you can't get identities and evidence until you prove it.

So I expect that this thing is about relaxing copyright and/or privacy laws so it allows media companies to get warrants for people that engage in certain "obvious" file sharing activities, on the downloading side, so they can identify them and get evidence. Even so, I'm not 100% sure how it would work. Simple participation in a BT swarm doesn't mean you get even a single file, and if you do you still have to prove intent and knowledge before you get your warrant. And if they hope to get warrants without proof... that opens a very big can of worms.

You know the US has had some countries it has had a beef with in the past. The UK, Germany, Japan, and so on. You might want to examine their reaction, their relations these days.

When's the last time US has been nasty to any of those countries? And when's the last time it did something that Iran resented? I think it was a bit more recent than 1945 or 1783.

Stuxnet was a cyber-attack on Iran and now they strike back. Whether Stuxnet was really deployed by the US is irrelevant at this point. Iran is lashing out at who's been doing the most threatening noises.

With any luck, this tangled web of patent wars will go on for so long, and reach such an intensity, that legislatures will finally recognize the problems with current patent laws.

The courts have already been swamped with stupid laws and rigid applications of stupid laws and all kinds of parties insisting to reach trial instead of settling things outside the court. It still hasn't made Americans review their approach and turn to mediation instead of litigation.

In other countries they do what they can to keep the courts for really important stuff. In Japan they teach street cops to mediate disputes between people so they don't end up in court -- stuff like "his dog pees on my lawn" gets solved right at the source this way. In the EU they have national organizations protecting consumer rights so people will call on them when they have a problem with a product or service they bought instead of, again, ending up in court. And so on.

I don't believe the US doesn't have any mediation options, so I suspect they're either not very well known, not effective, or there's some cultural bias preventing people from using them.

Whoa, there. Careful with this line of thought. I mean, what's next, arguing that if one who owns reading material about bombs is not necessarily a terrorist, then one who owns naked kiddy pics is not necessarily a pedophile? Or that the ownership of said material, in itself, without acting on it, is not enough for punishment? Come on, think of the children, please. It's obvious that people who read about terrorist topics intend to commit it, just like it's been proven without a doubt that the degenerates who own naked kiddy pics will invariably go out and molest little children. I don't have the exact figures or a study at hand right now, but come on, it makes perfect sense, it's like doubting the sky is blue.

Your basic idea is that "it's not needed but it helps". Guess what, WYSIWYG HTML editors don't help. They try to do both graphical editing (best relegated to an actual graphical editor) and know HTML+CSS (best relegated to a human) and make a mess of both. People who rely on them are trapped in a pathetic limbo halfway from getting either right.

It really is disappointing that no one has an answer to Dreamweaver though. I've been searching for an alternative for years.

Maybe you should have used those years to learn HTML and CSS. By which I mean learning things like the CSS box model and being able to implement designs using a simple text editor.

Once you do that you can implement any design starting from a mockup made in whatever graphical editor you want. AND you will understand what's going on there, and be able to make stuff that's simply impossible for any HTML WYSIWYG editor ever made.

The editors have their place for a competent web designer[...]

I've never met a competent web designer. Most of them come from printing backgrounds are are incapable of understanding the most basic issue: that webpages are not print, that they're supposed to reflow and change depending on browser and user preferences, they're not a poster or a leaflet. Most of them have only vague ideas about the box model and are groping in the dark for the most part, achieving the desired effects in roundabout, non-optimal ways. Most of them have no proper knowledge of CSS or HTML and rely on the editor close to 100% to supply what they don't know.

Programmers who learn HTML and CSS do a much, much better job of it, because they're used to understanding how stuff works. Unfortunately, most of programmers don't have a high artistic ability for the design part. Plus, good programmers are much more valuable writing code, not markup.

The best compromise I've seen is having designers do mockups and programmers implement them. I've never personally met the mythical beast that combines both perfectly. Stop searching for the software version of it, it's a waste of time.

Ditto. It's been... about 5 years I think since I've last used a Windows desktop. It's Linux at home and luckily work lets me use it as well (asked me to use a LTS and that's the last I heard from the sysadmin).

How do I manage that? I don't play much on the PC, the games I do play work on Linux too (emulated or whatever). I have no "special" software I "must" run and all the portable hardware I got so far seems to work with it (Kindle, iPod, Nokia phone, Canon camera etc.)

Why Linux? We just click together I guess. Lots of configurability and options. I've used various distros (mainly Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu), various desktop environments, there's "just works" software as well as getting your hands deep under the hood and rebuild the entire thing from scratch if you want to. Bonus: sharing stuff with others and FOSS.

Basically, I'm a geek and a hobbyist and on the computer Linux is the equivalent of my garage workshop. Windows and OS X don't feel like that. Sooner or later you run into walls and "you shouldn't do that" or "you can't do that".

so, if a non-tech person from idaho was recommended linux, and got ahold of a cd and attempted to install it ............ go figure.

If someone cannot figure out a BIOS switch then maybe they're not the type of person you want using Linux in the first place.

Why does the Linux community try to woo "lusers"? I've never quite understood this. It's quite a departure from traditional Linux geeks, who abhorred users in the good old fashion of the BOFH.

It's like watching Leonard try to attract Penny in "The Big Bang Theory" and fail over and over. Except here there's not even the prospect of getting some sweet booty out of it. What do these ordinary users bring to the community? Absolutely nothing. Linux and FOSS has always been about contributing and they don't.

Is it some kind of statement, a pride thing? Linux is already everywhere else, does it really grate so much that there's one niche left that a technological dinosaur won't give up?

Unless you're saying that Microsoft would modify Windows so that no unapproved software could run.

That's probably in the works. In the end it's all about DRM. They tried to drop it straight at the top of the software stack (media players) and it didn't work out so well, so now they're going from the bottom up.

Here's how it will work:

1) Control the boot-up procedure and make sure no other OS can run on the machine.
2) Tie-in with Windows Update and driver signatures, after all, nobody can argue that having hardware-authenticated updates and drivers is a good thing, right?
3) Next come the security apps -- 'cause nobody wants malware messing with or disabling their firewall and antivirus.
4) Then it's a very short step to application whitelists, which follows naturally from the security step before.
5) Finally, you can really control the app content, since the entire stack is locked tight.

[..]you could have at least shown some respect rather than making the GNU (And by association, Linux, even though we hate you) community look like tools, instead of just yourself as you usually do.

Mate, decades from now, maybe centuries, Stallman (and Jobs) will be in the history books and nobody will remember you. Think about it.

So how about you sit back and shut up and let one of them talk about the other? 'Cause Stallman earned his right to say what he's saying, and Jobs the right to his legacy, however controversial. Whereas, unless you're Linus, I don't see what right you have to talk for the Linux community.

Steve may not have liked your taste in ripped music, your torrented TV series, or your third party apps, but he would defend to the death your right to run them, as long as that means you will pay an Apple tax to do so.

I think you're missing the point. RMS is about free software and has defined the fundamental software liberties already. Software made by Apple and that kept in its walled garden does not match those liberties. The values pushed by Apple don't even come close.

Let's not delude ourselves. As far as software is concerned, with some notable exceptions, Apple always took the hard proprietary line in order to protect and add value to their hardware. It's natural for RMS to point it out. Especially at this moment in time, in a controversial manner, because well, that's what he does.

And hell, if anybody is to talk dirt about Jobs, let it be RMS, a man every bit as influential, who has fundamentally changed things and who has his place reserved in history books as well.

Surgeons and medical doctors in general do have their ethics. As should every professional. I know people are ready to believe that since "cutting into people" is what a surgeon does, he or she can't wait to do it at any opportunity. In fact it's usually quite the opposite. To put it simply, any part of the body you've cut into will never be quite the same as before, no matter how well it heals. So they try to avoid doing it unnecessarily.

Granted, not all surgeons respect this to the same degree, and then there's plastic surgery and so on, but generally speaking it's unfair to say all surgeons are knife-happy.

Lots of German providers do this too (making VoIP a ToS violation), especially on plans which are for smartphones only... the big 5 gigabyte plans which allow tethering usually don't have this restriction... maybe the same is true here.

It's being done all over Europe AFAIK. VoIP is both blocked and considered a ToS violation and forbidden on "regular" plans, as well as grounds for account suspension and damages if you're caught trying to circumvent the prevention measures. But they do allow it on their unlimited plans.

Not sure if it's about hindering a directly competing service, or about them not having enough bandwidth for every client to be using VoIP over regular mobile plans, or about trying to squeeze the extra euro out of the client. Probably all of them. But I don't see how this is news.