Stuffed with turkey and burned out on holiday shopping, Geeks everywhere will be watching the skies
Either your definition of "everywhere" stops at the US border or you really believe Thanksgiving and Black Friday are global phenomena.
unless the arrestee gives up his password, which he doesn't have to do
Coercive detention, anyone? Maybe not an option in the US, fifth amendment and all, although -- because of the very nature of common law -- that's a matter of interpretation, but certainly in most civil law systems (e.g. continental Europe).
I agree with most of what you two said, albeit solely on a theoretical basis. The EU (or rather its member states) could freeze assets, issue warrants or hold fiduciaries responsible -- but let's keep it real here:
a) The 'international community' never ostracises even the maddest of tyrants until their time in power is clearly running out, only then enacting said measures for fear of losing business; even if e.g. Facebook's importance on the EU's economy is obviously nowhere near e.g. Gaddafi's, most European companies still consider social networks to be a valuable communication tool nowadays, be it through astroturfing or genuine customer care. Being unable, as in forbidden by law, to do business on the already established and popular ones, which in effect are all US-based right now, could quickly become a competitive disadvantage compared to their non-European competition who'd face no such restriction.
b) Sure, a pan-European substitute for Facebook might be created, possibly even with the help of billions of EU money in subsidies, just to prove a point, but would it - realistically - be accepted on a pan-European level as well? There are currently 23 official working languages recognised by the EU, but no real lingua franca, if you don't count broken English. In most European countries or language areas there already are local/national social networks that challenge Facebook on per-capita numbers, but what they are largely missing is the broader scope of, for instance, being able to discuss world events, your favourite sports league's result or even your kittens with someone you couldn't meet in your corner cafe anyway, a restraint sailing around which Facebook seems to manage better in comparison, despite (or because of?) the language barrier.
c) Even if the issued legislation was meant to protect EU citizens from abuse, the public opinion about it could nevertheless turn against the parties/politicians propagating measures to enforce it, be it the banning of entire sites (which, as
The voting masses are not that stupid anymore, I hope, that at least some of them won't notice the hypocrisy of politicians who not only postulate that almost infinite retention of internet, telephony, flight, account,
Seems more like an egomaniacal turf war to me.
Say Facebook et al. won't surrender to these new regulations, for whatever reasons. So according to the proposal, these social networks would no longer be allowed to do business on the EU's internal market â" which would be enforced exactly how? By blocking their DNS entries on a pan-European level, pissing of dozens of millions of users (i.e. voters); or at least those who aren't tech-savy enough to circumvent such futile attempts in the first place?
Bring it on, I'd say! Let's see who holds the whip hand.
That's the first thing I thought when reading the story â" to track unlicensed copies they would have to be able to communicate with V.i. Labs' servers. Surely even in China most enterprise networks are behind firewalls (the voluntary ones), so only the most careless companies would be caught.
If you thought Portal's fake ending in the incinerator was cool, wait till you escape the Aperture complex in Portal 2, only to find yourself right at the start of HL2:EP3
Loading a page like this - http://slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=YYYYMMDD - used to retrieve all of that day's (in your timezone) stories at once.
Now the best you can do is call up http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?index=1&view=stories&startdate=YYYYMMDD to get about a fifth of the stories and then browse through up to four more pages for the rest of the day's news.
I can imagine you're desperate for clicks like any other commercial web site but surely you can't be serious with suddenly making yours *that* user-unfriendly?
Also, about half of the stories seem to be headline-only instead of Headline, Author/Date, from the x-y-z dept. & Summary. Both 'Options' and 'Account' seem to offer a chance to change that behaviour but I can't seem to get all the stories to display fully.
this would [..] force the CIA to [..] break the law in their use of the pirated software
So they're free to execute suspected potential terrorists in ambush without proper trial or sentencing, but are expected to follow the letter of the law when it comes to "intellectual property"? Is the irony of it all completely lost on the submitter? Kinda reminds me of that quote from Apocalypse Now: 'We teach young men to drop fire on people but won't allow them to write FUCK on their airplanes - because THAT would be obscene.'
what's unique, however, is that it's the first branded Linux-based OS to be widely marketed to consumers
Yeah, and Android is so unique that Motorola doesn't even need to mention Linux once on the page the summary links to...
So the Taliban have been hiding in Iraq after all, not just in Afghanistan? Don't think so. That soldier's mother should rather channel her understandable anger and grief by denouncing the politicians responsible for needlessly invading Iraq and sending her son there to his pointless death than to take exception to a game that let's people unbeknownst to her play as members of a party that in her case isn't even to blame for her son's death.
"I prefer the blunted cudgels of the followers of the Serpent God." -- Sean Doran the Younger
