In the downloading sense, no one spent any (appreciable) time or money delivering the content, Further, by listening to it, you didn't deprive anyone else of that quantity of content. This, this is nothing like ordering food (or indeed anything else) and not paying for it.

The point here is to clearly understand the differences between digital content and physical property or goods. It's then to clearly understand the similarities between them and design new laws, or apply existing ones appropriately. At the moment, all we have is the media distribution companies (who have a dwindling business model) talking about how digital content is just like physical - but unfortunately for them, that's simply not true. It doesn't matter if you're a so-called "freetard", a hardened criminal, a law abiding citizen, a media exec, a politician or an alien from the planet Zod - digital content is never, ever going to be the same as physical property. Thus, laws surrounding it cannot be the same either.

I don't get it... what's the for? is it for the host running the containers, or for the containers themselves?

I set up a bit of Docker goodness at work because I needed to do some stuff in RHEL5, 6 and 7 sort of simultaneously. I found getting the base image of a RHEL system into a container to be annoyingly hard - first of all, you somehow have to know what all the bajillions of 'base' packages are that you're going to need. Then you make your container and spin it up to a bash prompt. Great - all looking good, right? Wrong. For any other packages you want to install you need an RPM repo, only Redhat give you a satellite - for which you need a client license. You'll need one of those for every container you ever create - that can't be right, can it?

Maybe I'm completely missing the Chosen Path here, but getting Dockers up and going in an enterprise setting seems remarkably fiddly. That said, being able to spin up a considerably smaller container would be very welcome. I'm not so sure having a stripped down host to run them on necessarily excites me all that much, but whatever it takes to get the bloat out of distributions is fine with me.

I had non-binocular vision when I was a kid. the guy in the white coat just took a length of cardboard, drew a line down the middle of it and drew some blobs on the line which he marked from 1..10. I got a bunch of other exercises too (I seem to remember two stick men, one with arms but no legs and one with legs but no arms and having to make them into one complete stick man). I can't remember those very well, but that bit of cardboard fixed it for me.

As an aside, if lazy eye affects such a small proportion of the population, how is that most of them seem to end up in engineering/technical jobs?

...and I'll bet pretty much any ranking politician does much the same, and thinks along the same lines - in any party, in any country, in any system of governance.

If I'm honest, I reckon to be a politician of any note, you pretty much have to be a bit under-handed from time to time, and you pretty much have to push the rules to their limits. If you just want to be a local politician, or even maybe a national politician that doesn't do much more than that (what we call 'back bench' here in the UK) then you can probably be fairly noble, if you really want to be. If you've got any sort of ambition though, then you've got to 'play the game' considerably harder than that, and so pushing boundaries of the rules/decency/morality start to become more of a requirement.

The National Crime Agency has been looking for crimes to work on since it started. I'm glad they've found something useful to do.

interesting... so if your genetic algorithm were written in some "simple" high level language, then the second level 'noodling' would be easier as it would have less potential options to choose from. Thus, it could arrive at the destination in fewer generations, and the destination would be (hopefully) easier for us puny humans to understand.

This approach means you need higher raw power to run the first and second level algorithms, and as such will need a higher minimum processing power to achieve it. However, I look forward to the day where you buy a "vanilla" computer, and just ask it "make me a word processor", whereupon it just goes ahead and 'evolves' one for you (admittedly, you might not need a word processor much by then, but you get the point). When you've written your book, you send it to your friend to read. She receives a bunch of bytes in an email attachment, and just says to her computer "find a way to read it", rather than having to know it was created in SomeonesProduct v2.3 - her computer just 'evolves' a reader for your particular file type - there's no need to make sure both of you have the same software at the same time.

Anyone know how the FBI/others know it was him? I mean, he's been charged, presumably whilst absent, so there must be some 'damning' evidence of some sort. It's easy to say "we traced some connections to his house in Meerkovo", but how on earth did they do such a thing, and how can they be sure that it was actually him? I mean, wouldn't he have covered his tracks pretty comprehensively? I presume they (also?) found him lurking on some IRC channels or some such, but again, how would they know it was really him?

I dare say a lot of the methods they use are secret (eg. the NSA methods), but surely the principles of them must be public record if they've been used on anyone else.

Just to add, that the event driven thing makes a difference where you're doing lots of small transactions - in that case, you can support thousands of incoming requests with just one process using a relatively small amount of RAM. You can really make it fly by locking it to a CPU core and giving it real-time priority. If you expand that out to all but one of your system's cores, then assuming you have the ram, one box can serve nearly everyone on the planet, just so long as no one asks for anything too complicated. That's a pretty specialised use-case, which very few of us really need to think about.

However, as you say, almost no one really needs to squeeze the last few percent of performance out of any web app they're running. Your boss might complain about the cost of another server, but it's easily manageable in the grand scheme of things. That being the case, having a slightly inefficient stack, and some occasional cross-core IPC, in exchange for keeping your systems pretty close to vanilla, and keeping your code, testing and deployments super-simple makes a lot of sense.

Absolutely.

Samsung just can't write software. Every piece of software they're responsible for has a problem one way or another (or at least all the ones I've ever seen - and I've got a Samsung phone or two, so I've seen a lot). Their hardware is generally good, so they should stick to doing that and let the rest of us take over their software. Hell, if they had the whole of their "smart" features in a sort of plug-in box, then they could invite other 'partners' to make entirely new TVs out of their base hardware - that would be awesome for us consumers and it would mitigate the utter shitness of their own software.

If in doubt, unplug the TV - all the smart bollocks you've paid for are now useless, but at least you're safe.

I know you're A/C and so have a lower bar of thinking to reach than the rest of us, but it amazes me that you can't see the problem here.

You live in a neighbourhood, that presumably you chose and like. You presumably know your neighbours, at least vaguely. This TV (with the feature enabled, and if it's buggy, without the feature enabled) means you're now living in some shithole backwater in Elbonia where some geeks are using what you say for nefarious purposes. You're also living next door to the NSA, GCHQ, whomever the KGB turned into, and countless others - in fact, you have no way of ever knowing who you "neighbours" are.

Not interstella, but the Voyagers were able to do what they did because "the planets aligned" to allow for lots of slingshots. You could argue mankind waited a few millennia for that specific situation before launching those probes...

Repeating the exercise either takes some supremely advanced technology, lots of additional effort, lots of time, or possibly waiting the however-many-years until it happens again.

This time around though, Microsoft has a warehouse or two full of Surface 1s to 'dump'. A quick firmware change, and poof! 'budget' Windows tablet for the masses.

I recently put my blog on the .onion. You can get to it via the "normal web" via it's .com address, via google searches and whatnot, or you can use a .onion address to get the same stuff. I have to say, it was pathetically simple to set up, and I encourage everyone with a server of their own to do the same. Feel free to upgrade to a Tor relay if you have bandwidth too.

You may well ask what's the point? Well, my motivation was to see how easy it was, and to increase the amount of content available on the .onion network. I'm pretty sure the only people who've ever visited it are me and one friend of mine, but the fact there's another IP on the internet talking to Tor nodes, and the fact that on very rare occasions those Tor nodes talk back to it makes me feel good.

If ever I have too much spare time, maybe I'll make a search engine for .onion addresses...? ;-)

Back on topic: the Silk Road had a restrictions policy (albeit an inconsistent one), but other people have no such qualms. The authorities have succeeded in one sense in that they've fragmented the market, they've also put some additional risk onto the purchaser because it's now less clear how legit the site or vendor are. However, they've enabled someone looking for something minor like a bit of weed to also find all manner of other things. I'm sure someone looking for an RPG would have found one with or without the SR, but someone looking for weed might start thinking "I could also buy an RPG", where they might not have done before. In that sense, shutting down SR was a failure.

Ultimately, if there's a demand, there'll be supply. Shutting down websites of any kind doesn't alter demand very much, and so there'll always be supply. If the authorities wanted to do anything about this, they'd spend more time working on the demand side of the problem. Sadly, that doesn't have instant results, doesn't get headlines and for every success it has there's a notable failure too.

Does that imply there's a problem with the image processing then? I mean, if a high res sensor gets 100% red on one pixel, and 50% red on the ones surrounding it, should the image processor actually puff up the surrounding pixels to (say) 75%? My thinking being that the blob of light that got to the central pixel was partly lost in the gaps between pixels, so the ones surrounding it don't fully represent what was actually hitting the sensor.

As much as I agree that this case seems to have lots of holes in it, running a marketplace is not 'common carrier'. The important distinction is that a common carrier is paid to provide a 'connection' service, after which you can do anything you like with it. A marketplace connects a buyer to a seller, handles the money, and takes a fee for that introduction. Thus, the marketplace has to know what is being sold and whom the buyer and seller are, and further more collects the money from the buyer and gives it to the seller.

Had the Silk Road been more like a chat room, then there'd be many more parallels with the 'common carrier'. If Silk Road had provided the place to advertise goods and to connect buyers to the sellers, but otherwise kept out of any transactions, it's possible the 'common carrier' thing might work. However, as soon as SR started handling the money, it became part of the transaction, and so became implicated. As I understand it, the goods and services didn't have 'code names', so there's no way DPR could claim he thought he'd just brokered a 'cleaning' service for someone's apartment - so no 'reasonable doubt' there either.