Yes, you missed the whole post. You seem to be claiming that the massive advantage I was referring to was simply the fact you got less abuse, when in reality it was the fact that you got given more free shit, got invited to groups more often, and got better spots in raiding parties more frequently. The game was much easier when teenage boys made the incorrect assumption that female character = female player.

Again, try reading the whole post next time rather than cherry picking the bits you feel like arguing over despite the fact said argument then makes absolutely no sense because it's based on half a point and not the whole point.

Agreed but as I understand it it's possible that the agreement stands regardless of the validity of the patents, so if their agreement with Microsoft is such that they're paying for these patents regardless of validity then there's no point them focussing on invalidating the patents, hence why I suspect they've instead decided to try and invalidate their agreement by arguing that Microsoft is now a smartphone manufacturer where it wasn't before- just as Microsoft managed to argue that payments should be made regardless of patent validity, Samsung probably managed to argue the agreement was only valid whilst Microsoft is not acting as a smartphone vendor itself.

Have Google ever sued anyone that hasn't sued them first on patent issues? I don't think Google has, which would still make it purely defensive and not an aggressive patent troll like MS is.

Samsung isn't being told by the EU it faces a fine for using patents offensively and not defensively, it's being fined because it's being told it can't use those specific patents at all in court action because they're too fundamental to be allowed to do anything with them as compared to say, swipe to unlock. As such Samsung's potential fine still says nothing whatsoever about the defensiveness or lack of of their patent litigation.

I don't think the GP was saying Google/Samsung haven't sued, I think he was just saying that they've only ever counter-sued in response to being sued on these particular issues, which may still be wrong, but I can't think off the top of my head of any examples of Google/Samsung suing first in the smartphone race rather than simply as a response to being sued by someone else - i.e. neither of them sued Microsoft/Apple or whoever until Microsoft/Apple had already sued them.

Problem is, look what happened to Estonia, they were victims of a Russian state sponsored cyber attack which was quite problematic because they had built their state around heavy internet focus for provision of services and so forth.

It's a good idea, if you're a nation that has enough control of it's borders to prevent physical access to important internet infrastructure from Russian agents, and if you can withstand Russian cyber attack both focussed hacks and dumb DDOS attacks, but I don't think Ukraine is there right now, and it would probably just result in a quick and easy way for Putin to dig his claws back into the country.

I like their idea, most definitely, but I don't think the Ukraine is ready for it just yet, it doesn't have the independent strength of security to protect itself from Russian cyber-attack and meddling - they're having a hard enough time protecting themselves physically from Russian soldiers invading their territory, let alone protecting their digital infrastructure which will likely require decent physical security in the first place.

Um, try reading the rest of the post and you might make a bit more sense.

"This is more true than it should be. There's a whole generation of people using the Internet who literally don't know how to browse to a website directly. They don't know how an address bar works, and go to google to look up whatever they want."

To be fair, that's actually in part Google's fault. On my Android phone now Chrome has completely merged the Google search box with the URL bar, they are now one and the same, there is no longer an explicit distinction there between entering a URL and searching on Google.

The problem Google has it's that it's not just acting as someone's bank, it's profiting from the content via ads, and that opens up a fair argument of complicity.

I'm not about to judge as to whether that means it deserves to bear all responsibility for content- certainly I think it's unrealistic that it should have to scour all it's servers and make a judgement on whether every bit of content is or isn't there legally, but I don't think it's unreasonable that if someone points it to a specific bit of infringing content, that given that it both hosts the content, and profits from the content, that it should have to take it down, else I don't really see how Google can argue against the suggestion that it's knowingly profiting from illegal content at that point - if it's hosting the content, providing access to the content, and the content is known to be illegal, and it continues to host and provide access to it, then surely it's pretty clear cut that it's intentionally profiting from illegally provided content?

But I think that's the key thing here, it has to be knowingly doing so. That puts the onus on the alleged victim to put the effort it and make it clear to Google that the content is not being legally distributed - and even there Google should have recourse to get the courts to rule if it's not certain and should be protected until the courts have decided, but it most definitely should not put the onus on Google to try and figure out what content is illegal.

Your analogy would be better phrased as someone having stolen money from you, stored it in a bank and the bank is profiting off that cash by investing it, and continues to do so and refuses to hand it over even when it's been made clear to the bank that that money has been obtained illegally. In that case yes, I think the bank absolutely can no longer pay the innocent party - once it's been informed of alleged or proven illegality then it has a responsibility to investigate and act.

As for the demands of $100m? well, that's a different issue - that's just the US' stupid sue everyone for everything culture.

So as for this particular case, if they've given Google specific URLs and Google hasn't acted then apart from their stupid financial demands then I don't think they're really much in the wrong. If they've just blanket told Google to scour every inch of their server and make arbitrary judgements on legality then these folks should be told to go screw themselves or to come back when they have something more concrete.

So all in all, I think this sounds like it's probably a stupid case, but that doesn't mean Google should necessarily be given a get out of jail free card from knowingly profiting from illegally hosted content- there has to be at least some degree of responsibility held by them to act if genuinely and reasonably informed.

But what exactly is the point?

No one was prosecuted for doing this even when it was completely illegal, now it's legal if you're not circumventing DRM, but still no one is going to be prosecuted are they? The police have better things to do and it's too cost prohibitive and largely impossible for the industry to do it themselves.

So whatever the change it's completely meaningless all the same.

What I'm intrigued about though is the talk of not being able to share with your family, how does this apply within a household if family or friends live together? I can buy a music CD and can't lend it to my partner to play elsewhere in the same house?

What if we go to the shop and put a fiver each towards a £10 CD, who owns it? If the shop has allowed us to make a joint transaction then how is the owner defined - statutory consumer rights on what the shop sold us would normally overrule civil issues of non-commercial copyright infringement? Presumably if it was jointly owned however what's to stop someone putting up a website that allows 1000 people to contribute 1p to the price of a CD? is it jointly owned by all 1000? I'm intrigued to know how this works legally.

As I say it all seems academic regardless and no one's getting prosecuted over this stuff anyway, but I'm intrigued to know what the limits are.

"I'd say that you'd find an amazing amount of hatred for each of those categories."

On the contrary, when I played Dark Age of Camelot playing a female char was a massive advantage as all the desperate teenage boys assumed you were actually female, sucked up to you, gave you a load of free gear, and regularly invited you into groups. On large raids they were always given the best spots, and allowed first dibs on good items.

Females were always at a massive advantage in that game at least and any abuse they took wasn't even close to the amount that males took from other males.

It's just an anecdote of course, but it's certainly not universally the case that minority groups (minority in game that is) always inherently get treated worse than others in games, not at all.

We keep both cars in the garage though, so corrosion isn't really much of an issue. I can see that if we have a bad winter with lots of salt being spread corrosion certainly becomes more of a problem, but on a 7 year old car, doing 3000 miles a year, being kept in a garage, there's not really much that can go wrong.

I don't mind green taxes either as long as they're used to fund green things, but they never are. All money from supposed green taxes should go straight into funding installation of solar panels, and provision of electric car charging points and such.

The issue I have with mileage based taxation is that you have to figure out what problem you're trying to solve, I think you have to ask the question, who should be penalised more heavily, the 100 school mums who drive a gas inefficient 4x4 a mile to a single school and a mile back each resulting in 200 miles of utter laziness emission production and creates massive congestion, or the country vet or doctor that has to travel 50 miles a day for his job otherwise we wouldn't get our meat and dairy produce that we depend on?

Mileage based taxation, especially in rural areas, hits those areas hard, when the majority of pollution is actually being produced by inner city areas by people that could easily walk, cycle, or catch a train but are too lazy to do so. If you look at the places the government is failing to hit it's emission targets in it's entirely inside the cities, so emissions in the countryside where mileage is necessarily higher isn't really a problem, yet that's what mileage based taxation harms - of course, it also harms the necessary haulage industry too, and whilst I agree that in some ways that's not a bad thing if it means more stuff gets shifted overnight by rail for example, there's still a risk of damaging the lifeblood of the economy.

And I suspect that's exactly why successive governments have stuck with VED- they don't want to harm essential drivers when it's really lazy school mums and so forth that are the bulk of the problem. In an ideal world you'd really want to tax based on the level of necessity of a journey so that necessary journeys (say, ambulances for example) aren't taxed at all, whilst people doing short journeys where they have no time constraints because they're too lazy to walk should be hit the hardest. This would have the dual benefit of also increasing exercise and hence reduce the NHS bill too, but how you'd ever determine it I don't know, and I think that's why we're stuck with VED- the Chelsea tractor mothers continue to pay it to drive their 4x4s around, but necessary drivers just buy more fuel efficient vehicles - it's far from perfect, but I can see why they've stuck with it.

I've still had tax disc reminders this year, and my partner only just got hers even though she's in this first October tranche of no paper disc folks so even with the change to paperless taxation they're still sending out the reminders thankfully.

I agree about the MOT btw, I find it a royal pain in the arse because it's not like the tax disc where you get a reminder and do it online, as you say you get no reminder and then you're at the whims of the fucking garages as they determine when you must give up your car to them. It's so stupidly inconvenient, especially as we only do about 3000 miles a year on one of our cars- the fact it has to be MOT'd as much as the car we do about 25,000 miles a year on is just plain fucking stupid as it's the mileage wear and tear that makes a difference - the 25,000 mile a year car frankly never passes it's MOT so probably isn't really technically roadworthy for a short while before it's MOT given that it's being driven around with those failures prior to the test, whilst the 3,000 mile a year one hasn't failed an MOT for about 5 years now and never needs anything doing to it so it shows what a farce the MOT system really is - it's highly inconvenient and doesn't solve the problem it's meant to solve, low mileage cars are getting penalised for the sake of it, and high mileage cars are driving around unsafe regardless.

The authorities are actually pretty good on this, a friend completely forgot to renew his altogether and drove around for 6 months before realising, he phoned the DVLA to admit his mistake and they just told him not to worry, that people forget and as long as he's happy to pay it there and then that they wouldn't see any reason to pursue it as the fact he'd called them to explain was evidence enough in their eyes that it was nothing more than an honest mistake and I know my father forgot to display his new disc once, got pulled, but they took no action after checking he had renewed online (and this was back in 2004, so the ability to check online by the police has been in place at least a decade).

But most people don't know that, and even those that do generally want to avoid the hassle of being pulled over even if it would've meant no action would be taken against you so make the effort to avoid driving around without a valid tax disc anyway.

FWIW you most certainly can renew earlier than 2 weeks from expiration, that used to be the case when you could only renew from the 15th of the month, but you've been able to renew from the 5th for quite a while now just fine (at least 5 years), so you get the best part of a month to renew.

I suspect that normally people renew a week or two or three in advance because they need the paper disc to come through in time so they can display it before expiration at the end of the month and hence the load is spread across a few weeks.

Now however, people probably just figured "Hey, I don't need the disc anymore, I'll do it last minute", hence why it was the last day of the month that it fell over- because everyone now figures they can wait until last minute to do it.

I suspect even that would be better served by simply factoring in locale/language settings though rather than say something that can be used a bit more nefariously though like IP and/or some IP geolocation result, as you get different cultures within individual geolocation areas quite frequently.

Again, this isn't to say I necessarily trust Microsoft in this respect of course regardless, I'm just saying it's possible to gather this data in a fairly mundane manner with no ill effects if your intentions are genuinely innocent. The problem is that Microsoft's rarely are, so I'd still personally avoid this service by not installing the OS or turning it off if that was an option. It's not something I'd trust to have running on my system from Microsoft, or even any of the large tech vendors in all honesty.

I'm not naive, I thought I was pretty blunt in stating that I'm not convinced that Microsoft can stick to simply collecting only purely anonymous data, my post was made merely to point out that it's most definitely not impossible to collect anonymous usage data that is useful which is what you originally implied (but now seem to agree is incorrect).