Well, those few needed tweaks never stop piling up. On top of that, UX research and (more importantly) user expectations continue to evolve.

To keep up with that, websites either need to constantly change in small increments, or to do it in big chunks. We'd been doing the former for a while, but the decision was made to start fresh. I totally understand how jarring it is to see such a huge amount of change all at once, but we also have to look at what the website will look like a few years down the road.

The classic design in 2014? Not too bad. The classic design in 2018? Probably not going to cut it.

Don Pardo is in Jeopardy !!

I guess a lot of Americans hate smart people, don't they? I'd have thought it would have been far more entertaining to watch someone do something different, interesting and successful, but what do I know. I'm sure the Idiocracy version will be along any time now.

What Mr. Chu did did not take the fun out of the viewers who can keep up. On the contrary, those who could keep up with Mr. Chu's strategic moves find the whole thing very stimulating and refreshing.

It is those Joe Sixpacks who are so perplexed by the unconventional moves deployed by Mr. Chu who are doing all the booing.

Those "pre-approved offer" are just a marketing scheme. They don't do any credit checks before sending them out.

The credit check occurs when you reply to the offer. Then, they may refuse you or say; "After review, we can provide you with a limit of $5,000 or $10,000.

Just to clarify, the crime Vickerman was prosecuted for is Conspiracy to Defraud, purely for running SurfTheChannel, a streaming links site. This is quite a different law from Fraud, it's vaguer and much more prone to abuse - it seems to be FACT's go-to law whenever they realise a suspect they've spent time and money investigating isn't breaking any actual laws. Without it, Vickerman would probably never have been prosecuted for anything, although civil action would have been likely, IMO. If some defendant somewhere ever gets an appeal up to the ECJ, I think it quite possible they'll shoot the law down in flames, just for being so badly written. More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_to_defraud http://torrentfreak.com/surfthechannel-owner-sentenced-to-four-years-in-jail-120814/

No, the crime is copyright infringement. THAT is what infringement is, not someone downloading an episode of Downton Abbey because they missed it the other day.

Changes in the business models made every one of their excuses invalid and as much as companies bent over backwards to get these people to be honest customers the trend just continued.

He's my MP, but I'm afraid I can't report on his file-sharing habits.

And to lend some context to his words, from TFA:

“The discrepancy I mentioned is a source of great frustration. For example, the private prosecution by the Federation Against Copyright Theft of Anton Vickerman, who was making £50,000 a month from running a website [SurfTheChannel] that facilitated mass-scale copyright infringement, saw him convicted of conspiracy to defraud and sentenced to four years in prison,” Leech explained.

“This level of sentence would not have been possible if he had been prosecuted under copyright law, but FACT was able to prove conspiracy in his actions. Without proof of conspiracy, a serious criminal could have been left subject to a disproportionately low maximum penalty.”

In a way, I do agree with his point; those making that sort of money from infringement do need to be punished properly. However, it'll be all too easy to abuse this sort of measure, and end up with the disproportion going the other way.

jumping from POSIX shell to bash, i.e. implicitly assuming i was a linux zealot, gibbering about how much easier language A is than language B, arguing with portability where POSIX is all about portability, and portable scripts run on any POSIX compliant system, further demonstrates how little you know. Perhaps take a bit of your own advice and learn the shell command language, the quality of your straw-men would probably double. Also, your assumptions are plain wrong. Yes, i'm a coder, but yes, then again, i'm a sys- and network admin of a mid-sized network (~200 hosts, not counting the VLANs for guest, wifi, isolation, etc) We do nearly everything in posix shell, even the damn server configuration automation. - the prime reason being that the scripts will not bother whether they run on our BSD servers or the linux boxen. But why don't you tell me some more about how vastly superior some-language-you-know-better-than-sh-is

Clearly you have no clue about the fundamentals of computing. Let's break it into small pieces: Perl: turing-complete. Python: turing-complete. Ruby: turing-complete POSIX shell: turing complete. So how exactly are they ``many times more powerful''? All you're doing is demonstrating how little you actually know, so will happily skip the second half of your gibberish and repeat: Brain. Do you use it?