This link puts a little meat on the bones, though the story is still sketchy. Seems the law was aimed at 5 or 6 specific bloggers, though probably upwards of 500 could wind up being covered. ISPs not happy with it. Law purports to regulate Russian-language blogging, not limited by geography or physical placement. So a foreigner could theoretically run afoul of it if they publish in Russian (and become popular doing so) while a Russian could write anything they want without worry as long as they do it in another language?

"Emacs is a great operating system, if only it had a decent text editor!"

Nice dig but quite out of date. Check out EVIL.

Absolutely. For simple text file editing, it really cant be beat. No wasted time, you type what you want and it does it, end of story. You can even use it in scripts! The ideal tool for many, many jobs.

Notepad++ is windows-only. And if you are ok with that huge flaw, you should really try TSE. By far the best windows editor.

"That's one of the reason I stopped using Google anything. Until they do the right thing and give us back our YouTube accounts, they can go fuck themselves."

Hear hear!

That was really an act of astonishing rudeness and arrogance. A formal apology and the firing of the person responsible would not be uncalled for.

So they did a text-editor roundup that excluded every serious contender in favor of 5 third-string also-rans.

I actually tried to read the text but it was too brain-numbingly stupid to get through. He's trumpeting all these wonderful features that... vi and emacs had in the 80s.

It's so true - 'those who do not remember Unix are condemned to re-invent it, poorly.'

Indeed, ages ago, I used to have so much fun with assembly.

High level languages sucked all the fun out of programming for me though.

I don't really understand what you're trying to say here. I don't know COBOL. Are you saying that if you gave me an assignment to parse a data stream in COBOL, and I couldn't do it in COBOL because I don't know COBOL, but I could both demonstrate a solution in another language and learn COBOL at a later date, I would still FAIL?

Not the same guy but I think we are on the right wavelength.

Here. Now go parse that stream using Cobol.

I dont care if you have ever heard of Cobol or not. I have never used it myself, and I havent been a working programmer in decades. But if I needed a parser written in Cobol I expect I could search for the docs first thing in the morning, find a syntax reference, and have a working if rough parser done before lunch. If this sort of work was needed by me on a regular basis I expect I would become very familiar with Cobol and a week later I would re-implement that parser in less than an hour and do a much better job.

All a computer can do is math, or if you prefer to think of it as symbolic logic, fine. But it's still all the same stuff. Any high level language you use, no matter how strange the syntax, no matter how unfamiliar the vocabulary, is still the exact same thing at core. Logic. Arithmetic. Algorithms.

A particular language may be a pleasure to work with, or it may be a pain but end of the day if you understand logic you should be able to translate your logic into any language for which you can find useful reference documentation.

Nice rant but missing a few facts.

These are not domains like ICE have seized (which are analogous to post office box #xxxx) but the ccTLDs (more analogous to the zip code at the end.) Which is really a good way to grok how absurd the request is - imagine the families of the Iranians who died when the USN shot down their passenger jet sue the USA in their court systems, get a civil judgement, and then attempt to 'confiscate' the international postal codes used to route mail to the USA.

"Offtopic i know, but another thing that strikes me as absurd is the lawsuit. "Plaintiffs who successfully sued Iran, Syria and North Korea as sponsors of terrorism" include who exactly? and of these plaintiffs how many are willing to admit they openly ignore their own governments sponsorship of terrorism? The suit seems rather silly."

Indeed. The article has no other information on the plaintiffs involved but it certainly sounds like lawfare. There are a few governments brazen enough to misuse their court systems like this... aside from the ones mentioned as targets.

"I can understand wanting to save money by putting tech script as the first line of tech support, but it gets a little tiring when want to skip to the advanced folks and still they want to stick to their script and ask me to reboot the modem as if I hadn't done that 3 times already. If it isn't low hanging fruit for the script readers it's not going to be a very successful or efficient support call."

The sad thing is that the volume of calls is so heavily weighted towards people that refuse to do anything whatsoever on their own before calling and demanding someone else fix it that clued-in customers with real problems are just lost in the noise from their perspective.

"The pdf javascript reader wastes kilobytes on your / or C:\ partition, that's all."

It also adds more lines of code that need to be carefully analyzed, audited, and constantly re-audited for exploitable bugs to the codebase.

Web browsers are the main point of vulnerability, they have an absolutely horrible track record for anything related to security. There are several relatively good .pdf programs that are actively maintained and whose security track records are not nearly so tarnished as Mozilla's. Some are Free Software as well. So I am seriously having a very hard time imagining a scenario where this has any reason to exist. And I am usually the one that's all in favor of having 15 slightly different choices for every role.

"Screw your acceptable ads, there's no such thing as an acceptable ad."

You are entitled to your point of view. I personally do not agree.

I like to expose myself to advertising. By seeing what is currently being pushed I know which products to avoid, which is a big time-saver. And the notion that some small payment comes to a website as a result of giving me this information is 100% ok with me.

Yet I almost never see ads. Why? Because I refuse to allow random servers all over the net a free hand to run programs on my computer. And ad companies apparently have some sort of problem with using the web, the only thing they know how to do is javascript, java, and flash.

"So what do you think should be Israel's response to the constant bombing of their country?"

What constant bombing? Hamas has honored truces and cease-fires in the past, it's the IDF that keeps breaking them. How do you think the Palestinians should respond to Israel periodically 'mowing' their families down 'like grass?'

Ultimately you simply cannot keep a nation captive forever, nor can you exterminate them, and Israelis of all people should realize that.

NT

Which makes it sound like some sort of attack on the ad network.

Without more details it's hard to say, but it sounds like the ad network should file a complaint with the UK and get these overenthusiastic corporate cops charged.

There's a battle to love - ad networks versus the 'city of london.' May they fight forever and leave the rest of us in peace.