The point is that threatening legal action costs the person you're threatening. Not everyone even has a few hundred dollars to retain a lawyer no matter how briefly. Yes, you might "get it all back" but at great risk even if you are completely innocent and the charges are groundless.

A threatening letter from a lawyer doesn't have to go through another expensive lawyer. Sure, if you try to get clever, you can dig yourself in deeper, but the fact is that if you can't afford to fight the case, then you sure as hell can't afford to do anything at all - even the simplest of letters from your lawyer will not make the case go away every time, but will cause huge bills unless you find a no-win, no-fee lawyer.

Courts are quite reasonable in this regard. You just write back a letter that says "I have received your letter dated XX/XX/XXXX. I believe it to be without merit." (or similar). That's it. Just send it back. Let *them* take *you* to court if you're sure you're innocent. There, THEY have to prove YOU did it. With expensive lawyers and to a legal standard. And once you get there, junior lawyers will often jump for the chance to advise on a case for free. Once it's in court, your legal fees will be paid if you're victorious and it will be stupidly expensive if not so you have nothing to lose. Hell, if you are forced to take out a loan to hire a lawyer, it can often happen that the other side has to pay the loan too. And you will KNOW that it's time to hire a lawyer or face worse problems.

However, before it gets to court, there's no point settling unless you are guilty (and sometimes not even then) as it will only be to your detriment. Settlement paperwork often has clauses that say you were guilty and accept that you did it. It's then an irrevocable fact of law that you can't ever contest. This is also why "no comment" exists, and why you have the right to say nothing when arrested, and why you SHOULD say nothing until a lawyer arrives. However, if you are innocent, there's no harm in saying "No, I didn't do that, etc." By letter, being silent is easily confused with ignorance, disregard, attempts to evade justice, etc. so you just write back and say, in effect, "Nope".

Even if settle only to get away from the case, you are forever taking responsibility for that event. If it later comes up in another case that "if you did X, then you must have done Y" (i.e. if you downloaded that tune at that time on that day, then that MUST have been you driving your car past your house a minute earlier, etc.) then you are stuffed.

Until something lands in court, you don't need a lawyer. It may be prudent if you can afford it, but lots of people can't. And in the same way you don't need a lawyer to go over your terms and conditions of every service you use, or approve everything you say to a sales person, you don't need a lawyer in the early stages of response to threats like that.

I have been threatened with court several times. Funnily, it's never actually happened.

First, over a mobile phone contract (with phone) that never arrived at my door, was never signed by me, and I phoned up to REPORT IT MISSING / STOLEN. They wanted to force me to pay for the contract (for the whole year!), pay for the missing phone, pay for any replacement, etc. They threatened all sorts, in writing and on the phone. I wrote back, stated my side, and let them get on with it.

I can see it from their point of view - I ordered a phone, it might have arrived and I've done a runner with it. Sure. I get that. It's a valid case that there might be a simple answer to or that might need taking to court to get to the facts of the matter.

They harassed me for a month with letters and phone calls and after a while, I just stopped answering or answered only with "Sorry, your company has threatened me with legal action. Therefore, I will not discuss the issue."

In the end, I had the bank force a refund of my money that they'd taken (with zero problems, actually, it took only ten minutes and no paperwork - good old Direct Debit scheme!). Which made them even angrier, and they threatened even more, including recouping their bank default charges etc. And, after a month I received a letter. "We're sorry... " blah, blah, blah. And they "generously" decided not to charge me for the chargeback.

Because, I assume, by that point a lawyer had actually looked at the case and decided that they had no proof of postage, let alone proof of receipt, no received contract, no authorisation from myself for the funds given (they are supposed to be taken only on verification of the contract, and the contract was presumably in the box that never arrived!), no way to prove any sort of malice on my behalf, and I had phoned THEM up to report the phone missing and DEMANDED they place it on the IMEI blacklist that my country uses (so even if I had "stolen" the phone, it would have been useless from that point onwards).

You can threaten all you like. Until it's in court, it doesn't matter and actually until then, the less you say, the better. But silence isn't the best option either. It's only if you're playing dodgy legal games that saying things will hurt your case, though. And even when you get a letter from a lawyer who may have a case, until it gets to a court it still doesn't matter.

Case in point: I collided with a car, in my car. It was a little knock, but my fault. It went through the insurance, all legal. A year later, I get a snotty letter from the other driver's insurance company's lawyer (on letter-headed paper, and with any amount of legal threats) demanding I pay £9000 because my insurers hadn't paid out despite agreeing to do so. It threatened court action and taking my money and all sorts. It looked very scary, I give them that, and cited lots of technical legal mumbo-jumbo.

I sent a letter back. It said that they had no recourse through myself, that my insurer was the only entity they had any business talking to, that there were compensation schemes and regulators whom they need to take their complaint to for it to have any merit (and still wouldn't involve me, even in my insurers had gone bankrupt), and that - even if I was wrong - what my insurer agreed as reasonable costs isn't in any way binding on myself.

Additionally, they are lawyers, and they know this - they knew this before they started writing the letter - and they shouldn't be sending me such letters at all. I threatened to report them to their bar. I got a letter back that was equally snotty, but didn't address any of my points. I ignored it. Haven't heard back from them in 4 years. But the guy I hit? He didn't even know anything about it and has had all his work paid for a long time ago, and my insurer's happily reinsured me for years, are still in business etc.

I can only assume there was some dispute over the £9000 charge (which seems very excessive for what damage was caused) and the lawyers were hoping to scare me into either paying or pressuring my insurer's to pay it.

I did a little basic research, told them where to go, and at all times made my view clear. It cost me nothing. I imagine it cost them a lot more then it needed to (probably why they charge £9000 for a dent). I imagine they couldn't possibly have made me pay that in a court and it would have been laughed out, but they could have made an awful mess of my life in the meantime if they'd tried to. But I also imagine that some people just pay up because it's a scary letter from a lawyer.

I was renting a house once with someone. The plumbing blocked meaning we had no toilet. In law, the landlord (or their agent) is responsible for fixing that, and it's a public-health sort of law, not just "Well, we'll get round to it in 30 days or so". Phoned up the landlord's agent, they refused to send someone out to fix it, or give the landlords details. Not just "that day", but ever. So just kept phoning and phoning and phoning.

They threatened me with ALL sorts. I told them they can do what they like, because when the policeman knocks on my door asking why I'm "harassing" them with phonecalls in their little office, I'll be quite happy to explain the situation. Strangely it didn't happen. Nor their threats to sue me. Strangely, I had a plumber on my doorstep at 9am the next day. Strangely, I also had the landlord come around because he'd heard that I'd "been harassing the agent" and it was then that he discovered that I had proof of paying the rent that the agent said they'd never received from me and never passed onto the landlord (I didn't know anything about that, but it was certainly entertaining when the landlord found out, and he was very nice about it, very reasonable and dealt with me direct from them on, and sued the agency, I believe. But if the situation had continued you could quite easily see the agency throwing me out and not telling me why because they'd told the landlord I'd not paid the rent!).

They threatened me with police, with lawyers, with everything you can imagine. But, in the end, it never materialised. And, in fact, my threat to report them to Companies House wasn't as empty as their threats. And - purely because I wanted to dig down into the agency and find out who was in charge - their absence of prominent display of company registration details on their website, their paperwork, and their place of business (which *almost* stopped me finding out who was actually director of the company) just meant that they had to have a word with a government agency and pay THOUSANDS to replace all their stationery and change their website to include said details. And pay for the emergency plumber. And the follow-up work he recommended. And compensate the landlord. And lose all his future custom on several properties.

Funnily, at no point did they mention the "harassment" after that, or try to sue me for destroying their reputation, etc.

I had a friend get one of the infamous letters from ACS:Law. Told them to ignore it, write back a simple letter saying "No" in posh words. All the people who fought it - even the genuine innocents - lost out when ACS:Law was declared bankrupt by its owner. Sometimes thousands of pounds more than it would have cost to settle. But the ones who wrote back "No"? Never even got to court. They were just ignored by ACS:Law and their cases forgotten about. They knew they were meritless, they were just trying to cash in quickly. The people who took them to court caused the company's bankruptcy because they never expected anyone to actually bother to fight it.

Don't get clever. If it gets complex, call in a lawyer. But 99.9% of these things can be handled by denial or coming to the settlement yourself (a settlement is a two-way agreement, not just what they put on paper, so even if you were guilty of pirating, say, $10 of music, you could offer to pay $10 or even $20 first and see how that goes).

Cooperate, even in the face of ridiculous accusations or outright lies, but that doesn't mean capitulate. And then if it ever does goes before a court, you're extremely unlikely to have done anything to make the situation worse for yourself and quite likely to have made it MUCH worse for the other side. What do you think a judge would make of a case involving the "unauthorised copying" of $10 of music which a lawyer then tries to turn into a $5000 settlement / fight, plus legal expenses, and waste the court's time - when the accused is perfectly happy to pay reasonable recompense from the start?

Don't be an idiot, and you'll be fine. Once it gets to court, bring in backup - at that point it's win or lose so you need to make damn sure you win. Before that? Nothing much matters so long as you don't write "I did it, but ha ha, fuck you".

And 99.9% of everyone who threatens you with court action - even lawyers - know that it would never stand or would cost so much it wouldn't be worth it. And when it would stand up, they'll issue you a court order or similar legal notice first.

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html

It's actually an Americanism and not "wrong", so much as "superfluous" (i.e. unnecessary, not incorrect).

I'm not sure it does.

"there are infinitely many pairs of primes that are less than 70 million units apart"

It just means that the individual primes in the pairs must be 70 million units apart (from each other) or less. (and where the hell did "unit" come from? Do they mean integer?)

Not that single primes must be. Not that one pair from the next must be. You could have twin prime pairs at any interval so long as the other half of the pair is within 70 million integers.

Unless I'm reading it wrong. The thing about maths is, you have to be VERY precise and not leap into assumptions without testing them very, very, very thoroughly first. 99.99999% certain isn't good enough for a mathematician.

How long before we can extend this Aliens-wise and get a working motion tracker?

I could rant too, but I just need to pick up on something.

Current estimates of WHAT WE KNOW NOW, just for Uranium, with current technology and current prices? Gives us about 700 years of nuclear power. If we haven't found something else by then, we're in trouble. And that's JUST Uranium.

Oil? In terms of usefulness for energy production, we'll be lucky to get 100. Damn lucky.

Flying is pretty safe when done right. We got there in the end. Space travel is pretty safe when done right. We got there too. And we got there by government intervention. It's not good enough to write off a technology because people mishandle it - we have to find ways to make mishandling impossible and/or impose extremely severe penalties for mishandling, with billions of guidelines for what to do and what not to do. Fact is, 50 years ago we were still putting asbestos in buildings materials. It took a LONG time to learn that it was stupid and even longer for government to stop it happening. But abandoning all housebuilding until we sort the problem wasn't really an option.

Some countries don't need nuclear power. Granted. Some do. Exports from the US can't covert the world. And there's a question of efficiency. Although the US *might* be able to produce all its own energy - at what cost? Not just environmental (apparently, that's our grandchildren's problem, as always), but sheer financial. Not much scales as nicely as nuclear, or we wouldn't still be using it. When you "need" Gigawatts, you have two choices - fossil or nuclear. The renewables are an interesting distraction at the moment, but we could really argue that until Uranium runs out.

And, to be honest, nobody cares about yours or my opinions. They mean nothing. What matters is that it's possible to make an AWFUL lot of money out of nuclear by providing a product that people are willing to pay through the nose for (electricity) DESPITE the huge amount of infrastructure, planning, waste disposal, and safety concerns. No nuclear power station has ever not been profitable for the people running it.

The trick is not to argue over how to supply people with megawatt-hours of electricity to their house. We have any number of ways to do it, and they all cost about the same in the long run. The trick is to work out how to stop people requiring megawatt-hours of electricity each in the first place. Because that's madly-unsustainable in the long-term until we have some other technological breakthrough.

Fact is, until then, we're like someone in the 1920's arguing over what blend of petrol is more efficient in our non-catalytic-convertor cars, while still making a big mess for others to clear up through what is basically laziness and greed.

Never really "got" MMORPG's. My brother was mad on MUD's back in his university days and I kind of got that. You would literally stumble into the person who was building all the rooms, quests, objects, etc. and it was usually a small team who created things INSIDE the game, so they were having fun as well (I don't doubt there was a lot of coding involved, but a lot of actions performed actually worked in-game as some in-game "magic" or similar). They were playing Minecraft, basically, and everyone else was inside their dungeons. And they were free, and run by people who lovingly created them.

The next fad was the Diablo's etc. Basically an MMORPG set in a formulaic plot. Nothing bad about that the first few times through, and they are still quite fun to play even with the poor-equivalents today(e.g. Torchlight etc.). But no real huge amounts of replayability without someone else there to play with. And they were pay-for, but professional and well-polished, but limited and repeating.

But MMORPG's, they kind of take the worst of everything. Let's have lots of random idiots. Let's have restrictions on what you can do. Let's have a financial incentive to make you spend as long as possible getting to the things you want to do. Let's have no "creators", no change to the set-down mechanics of the world, except in some far-off office where they come up with insane ideas without much player feedback.

Let's instead have the story evolve very, very slowly and in huge pay-for leaps and people get little choice about whether it was good or not, or whether they pay or not. There's no feedback. No people with interest in the state of the world, only the economy (which, as we all know, can be a disaster even in real-life). You're paying to play a Diablo with a bunch of random people whose co-operation you require, who are all also paying. And every time there's a significant change in the world, you have to pay again or be stuck in the timewarp of "old".

I couldn't really see the attraction, and the people I know who do spend a fortune on WoW tend not to have been exposed to the games of old (like MUDs etc.), hell some of them I'd barely class as gamers - they are mainly just socialising while button-bashing and the gaming is second. Nothing wrong with that, but Facebook-in-Second-Life is not what I want.

The "serious" gamers I know are infinitely more likely to spend their money on non-subscription games and equipment. They might well buy a pack of games for their LAN party, and upgrade to the next version as a one-off payment if it's good enough (or even just to play it together as friends), but an ongoing subscription model just isn't their thing.

And the people I do know who did play WoW etc. have all given it up, and their only real "catch" to doing so is losing their accounts/characters/whatever. Without exception, though, they do give it up and just abandon what they had in there after a while, whether through financial problems, or time problems, or the breakup of their favourite group, or just sheer exhaustion at the virtual world (especially prevalent at "pay-for-the-next-expansion" time).

The free-to-play ones aren't really popular with the gamers I know either. I think the whole free-to-play concept is great - as a teenager, I would have been hooked and no doubt WOULD have ended up spending money (hell, even as it is, I've made money just playing free-to-play games to play the game and then selling the random junk I was awarded). But it attracts even more idiots, and profiteering. And with free-to-play, you are willing to suffer slight bugginess or changes or restrictions that you wouldn't accept elsewhere.

Like anything else, I don't get "subscription" payments. Of course I don't mind paying but an automatic payment on a schedule? I don't see the incentive for the creators to keep creating after a while. They earn just as much between updates as they do immediately after them.

The same reason people keep gym memberships going and why most gyms prefer the membership model. You'll start off keen, get into it, get your money's worth, then you'll have a long hiatus where you'll be paying for it but hardly using it (or costing them anything), and then you'll pay for several months after you've completely finished going anyway. And THEN you'll cancel it.

In the same way that gyms don't have to put in lots of new equipment to entice you back every week, they can just stick with what they already had ready, and subscription-based games can coast for a LONG time. Hell, Blizzard probably have made enough money from WoW to coast for a decade or more now. And even with an exodus, it'll take years before it's making them less than it costs to run. And that seems like the perfect time to release some other expansion / sequel / other MMORPG.

I don't understand drip-fed, pay-for, entertainment. I don't really get why others do. And the rumours of WoW contained in the summary aren't really anything shocking or new. They'll still be making profits for years on the back of the content they have now, let alone whatever else they pump out. And even in the case of a mass exodus where everyone leaves? They'll still be rolling in the profits for years. 8 million users is a damn lot when they are paying monthly (over $800 million a quarter judging by the link in the summary).

The question really is, would I be still reaping the benefits as a player in any case? What, exactly, is shoring up the things that I enjoy about the game? Is it the players (not really, except from a strictly financial point of view)? Is it their ideas and the way they play the game? Or is it just the underlying pay-for-content that has a finite amount of entertainment in it? How much does a mistake cost in terms of my entertainment? How easy is it to ruin the entire game for me by a slight oversight or a silly concept?

At least with "ordinary" games, I expect to only get X hours of entertainment out of something. And I can just keep buying them and getting more and more hours of new things as I go. With MMORPG's, there's too much taken out of my hands and left to other people.

And, hell, my total gaming budget for the month is probably less than the cost of the subscription and a portion of the necessary purchase prices, but I have 500 games on Steam instead of... well... one big one that changes on me.

Any idiot typing in their credit card number on an unencrypted connection? Well, they deserve what they get, basically. Even my dad is paranoid about the little yellow padlock and he's only just graduated to two-finger typing (two index fingers, mind you, but it's an improvement!). Hell, he phoned me up one day because he was buying something and the site had a GREEN padlock icon. Gosh. But he had the brains to stop, think, and check in before he typed ANYTHING in.

Pre-HTTPS, which is a long while ago, yes you could grab a lot over the network. Email is probably your biggest target - still a lot of unencrypted email sent around, people obviously haven't heard of SSL/TLS when it comes to SMTP. But anyone sending their credit card number by email - again, they deserve what they get, because at any stage it could end up transmitted or stored unencrypted.

Nowadays, if you can sniff anything, there should be alarm bells ringing. Hell, even the good guys who want to sniff SSL have to basically make all clients trust their fake-root certificate in order to do so. There's no way to sniff SSL/TLS traffic on clean device without being in possession of the target website's private keys, or getting HUGE warnings about how your connection might be unencrypted, basically.

That said, there's a lot worse you can do, for instance intercepting DNS via ARP spoofing and then redirecting to your own "google.com" with a self-signed certificate that you've got from somewhere trusted by the client, or similar. But it's a lot less of a viable real-world attack.

And most people who work from home or hotels have now been forced onto VPN's by their local data protection laws. Good luck sniffing anything on those, even what DNS server they are using.

But, sure, if you gave me a capable connection that sniffed the open Internet, you'd find some fool - and you'd maybe get some details out of an email or two, or passwords to websites, that you can then use for further attacks.

Fact is, though - pretty much you're safe as a casual browser, so long as you keep an eye out for proper security whenever something sensitive is requested. And the people with something worth losing are using VPN's. I know all my "hotel"/"pub"/"airport" access goes through my personal VPN, or not at all.

That's like saying that the OpenGL group is heavily supported by ATI and nVidia, and the suggestion to remove GPU's from computers in favour of a little man who draws the screen for you breaks their business model.

It doesn't mean that having the little man ISN'T a stupid idea, or that ATI/nVidia should be ignored for their opinion.

Assume for a second that Google *are* anti-DRM. Assume it has nothing to do with their business or (equally) is SOLELY because it affects their way to make money. Who are they going to support? Probably groups that are anti-DRM. Who listens to the EFF? People who want the opinion of an anti-DRM organisation.

Thus is Google support for EFF something that should be expected anyway, or is the EFF some huge front to push on Google's behalf? You can't really draw any conclusion from the facts given.

If two linked items seem unfairly biased or somehow malicious, try to reverse the positions and see what happens.

Define "virtual world".

If we could replicate all the elements necessary to provide a convincing analog of reality (like in The Matrix, hinted at in the article), then surely there is nothing different for the brain to process.

I hereby posit a theory that asnosmic animals also don't activate the parts of their brain related to smell, nor those in a smell-free environment.

However, if we could create a virtual analog of smell that stimulated the smell's senses, chances are the brain patterns would be strikingly similar to "real" smell.

Like "virtual" servers - we don't have a 100% perfect analog, but we get closer all the time. However, the article summary appears to draw the conclusion that this means we'll never have The Matrix (or similar) because we'd always be able to tell we were in a virtual environment because there's no smell (for instance).

What we're basically saying is "a rat in a box but with fake images whizzing past it's eyes can smell that it's not in the 'real' world". Which is a bit obvious, and quite misleading to then extrapolate to large things. I imagine any amount of other senses will also give it away too (not least proprioception, temperature sensing, air pressure sensing, etc.).

What are we supposed to draw from the article? That virtual worlds won't be perfect until we do that? Or that we can't ever have a virtual world that's perfect (which seems nonsense even if it's not possible yet)? Or that scientists conduct experiments where the conclusion is a sure-gone conclusion before you even start and don't bother to compensate (e.g. introducing smells in synchronicity with the virtual world)?

Hang up the phone. Drive. 20 years ago you DID NOT HAVE THAT PHONE. What would you have done then? You'd have driven, and then called from your destination.

There is NOTHING that urgent that you have to do it in the car and can't pull over. Especially not a phone call. CERTAINLY not a text.

Drive the damn car, and enjoy the peace and quiet or some gentle music as you travel. Stop for people on crossings. Give that bike a bit of extra room to make his life easier. ANY and ALL "slowdowns" on your travel will have such a tiny, insignificant effect on your actual arrival time that it's just not worth worrying about. And any savings can be wiped out by the tiniest bit of roadworks or bad timing on the traffic light or whatever else.

Enjoy driving again. And throw away the god-damn phone.

Please also apply this if you are in the following categories:

- Waiting to pull out on a busy road and so distracted on your phone that other drivers DELIBERATELY do not let you out (or you don't even see the gap because you're too busy talking).
- Have your sat-nav front-and-center of your driving position, splat-bang in the way of actually seeing real objects (they talk for a reason, and can be put on your dash for absolutely no cost whatsoever).
- Eating at the wheel. If you're that hungry, you can't concentrate properly. If you're in a rush, you're going to kill someone and then you'll be later than ANYTHING else. If you're doing it because you need something for your hands to do: DRIVE.
- Smoking at the wheel. I don't care about your personal habits, I'm not even advocating a rigid "two hands on wheel at all times", necessarily (hell, that even makes putting your indicators on or changing gear almost impossible). I just care about you not having a burning object in your hand that is dripping ash into your lap that you'll try to blow out of the window or throw the cigarette out, and you have to keep puffing on while trying to drive. STOP IT.

Great suggestion for a localised programming language there, then.

It's not hard. Barely takes ten minutes. We use one in work, tied to our domain.

Install Openfire on your servers (Windows/Linux). Set it up. Install Pidgin on your clients (or whatever you want to use). Set them up.
Stick a SRV record in your DNS (optional, the above is fine for an internal system).
Done.

Are you a Christian, or an Athiest, or what?

Because I'd like to know what random group I should completely alienate on the basis of a single lifestyle choice they happen to share with a terrorist.

Up next: All brown-eyed people are murderers.

Idiot.

Dogs and chocolate, for example.

And, yes, I'm amazed that people are surprised that a "toxic to humans" substance is actually beneficial to plants. When was the last time you ate fertilizer / bug-spray / weedkiller straight out of the bottle and lived to tell the tale?

Nice. Because that's the worst thing to do to a Lithium-ion, for example.