I was making a point to the poster I was replying to, and no, the connections shouldn't be shut down by the ISP for any reason other than nonpayment, customer request, or a court order; but I wasn't about to start two separate arguments with that poster.

Partly because the moment the endpoints begin using encryption, the ISP has no clue what the data is. Fix that without breaking peoples' privacy and you'll have an argument.

There is a huge difference between knowing that your product or service is being used or will be used, by someone at some point, to facilitate criminal activity, and knowing who is using it for criminal activity and how. If they know who and how, then yes, they should either shut it down or face liability; however, your implication that they should face liability just because they know it's probably happening, with no specifics, also implies that, maybe, they should just shut down altogether to avoid liability.

Think about the words you are about to say before you say them.

The post I was responding to claimed that this was easier to do in Windows than Linux, a claim which I countered. Are you, now, claiming that you don't need the same physical security on a Windows machine, or are you just being a pedantic dick?

Only allow root to mount disks. Your users shouldn't have access to sudo, su, or the root login, anyway. Pretty simple, really; locate the mount binary for your system (/bin/mount is a good bet; if your mount binary resides elsewhere, you'll have to modify the commands below to reflect that), then do the following:

chown root:root /bin/mount
chmod 0750 /bin/mount

Done. Now, only root can even execute the mount binary, so only root can mount disks, and that will include flash drives.

It does get a little more complicated if you need to be able to mount network shares, but you should be able to add those to /etc/fstab and auto-mount them on boot.

Considering that the negative response came mostly from the *user* community, I'd say it was appropriate. Users know what they want and "change for change's sake" is not on that list. There's nothing inherently better about Gnome 3 over Gnome 2, Unity is a piece of crap, the the most usable of the "user friendly" desktops, and systemd had the potential to be great, but rather than just try to replace sysvinit and maybe add additional functionality once that had been done properly, it came out of the gate with a load of half-baked functionality, including its core functionality as a sysvinit replacement. As a result, setting up LDAP on Debian or Ubuntu has become a pain in the ass, and setting it up *properly* has become impossible.

There was a time when there were KDE zealots who could still use Gnome when necessary, Gnome zealots who could still use KDE when necessary, and people like me who liked both. I know I left out a few dozen other WMs; if I left out your favorite, oh well, use what you like, I'm not judging; I'm only covering the big ones here, though. Honestly, I blame KDE for starting us down the road to our current desktop mess, they really fucked the market with KDE4. But I can't foist all the blame upon them; they didn't force Gnome to follow suit some years later, and Unity is Ubuntu's answer to the Gnome/KDE shitstorm, it just isn't the right answer. It's what I use because it's, sadly, the best of the lot, unless I want to put in the time to get everything working with KDE3, but honestly, I'd rather just use my damn desktop at this point.

New ideas are plenty welcomed. However, contrary to popular belief, the Open Source community isn't chock full of whores who love having things shoved down their throats. If your solution works better than what we currently have, we'll embrace it; if it's crap, don't expect us to respond positively when our working solution is ripped out to make way for the new shitpile. Like systemd.

Well, considering that I was amazed that my driving didn't appear to be affected in the video, when I felt, while I was actually driving, that it was... it's amazing how easy it is to twist someone's words by quoting a phrase out of the context of its sentence, though, isn't it? Asshole.

<sarc>Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know that applied to account credits awarded in a class action settlement or judgment, which is what we're talking about here. My bad.</sarc>

You're almost right. We're talking about the cost of a single transaction, here, not the cost of running the entire business. While it is true that transaction volume impacts staffing, server, and bandwidth requirements, a single transaction does not have a measurable impact on these; further, transaction volume has no meaningful impact on developer workload (and, therefore, no impact on developer staffing). When you divide the tens of thousands of dollars Apple spends on all of that, with regard to iTunes and iTunes only, each month (let's use a high number, hell let's call it $100k), it only takes 10 million individual transactions to drop the cost of a single transaction to a penny. In the US alone, the top 10 songs have resulted in over 200,000 sales in the past 24 hours, so I'd say it's a safe bet the entire iTunes catalog sees more than 1 million transactions per day, again, just in the US, putting the cost per transaction somewhere around 1/3 of a penny, averaged over a month, only taking the US into consideration. When you factor in the global market, the cost per transaction drops so low it's not even worth considering.

So, for the sake of not having to deal with rounding error while considering thousandths of cents, their cost is, for all intents and purposes, 70 cents per dollar.

They take 30%, actually, so if we're talking $1, their cost is 70 cents.

First of all, I think you meant prison. Second, you missed the point by such a margin I'm not even sure where to begin... hopefully, someone else will step in and clean this up.

Oh hellz naw, being stoned will make you a worse driver. There is question as to whether being high has said effect and, if so, at what point. I, personally, have dashcam evidence that the level of high I prefer does not affect my driving. A bit higher and I'd probably be a horrible driver; I don't drive in that state, so I wouldn't know (I only drive high for the first time out of necessity and was amazed when I reviewed the dashcam footage, as I thought I had driven quite poorly at the time). Any alcohol above and beyond a drink with dinner (or combined with any amount of active THC) and you won't see me behind the wheel.

But if I'm doing 40 in a 40, where I'd be doing 50 were I sober... I'll let you finish that thought.

And there's a huge difference between smoking a joint and "acute cannabis consumption". Also:

The "study" you're quoting is a meta-analysis of several other studies which, for all we know, were cherry-picked to ensure the desired result. In short, your source, while it is indeed more current, is not research, and its findings are as questionable as the aggregate methodologies of the 9 studies it analyzed.

This. I've driven high a few times, out of necessity (the driving, not the being high), and I've driven stoned once for similar reasons. That one experience driving stoned actually put me off of driving under the influence of *anything* and ensured that I only partook when someone else could drive. Then, one night, I was a bit high, but my wife was completely passed out, from just a generally long day... that was the first time I drove high (not stoned) and it was a completely different experience. I thought I was heavily impaired, but my dashcam did not agree.