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That's why the publishing companies invented Copyright -- to stop other publishers!

The first copyright privilege in England bears date 1518 and was issued to Richard Pynson, King's Printer, the successor to William Caxton. The privilege gives a monopoly for the term of two years. The date is 15 years later than that of the first privilege issued in France. Early copyright privileges were called "monopolies," particularly during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who frequently gave grants of monopolies in articles of common use, such as salt, leather, coal, soap, cards, beer, and wine. The practice was continued until the Statute of Monopolies was enacted in 1623, ending most monopolies, with certain exceptions, such as patents; after 1623, grants of Letters patent to publishers became common.

As the "menace" of printing spread, governments established centralized control mechanisms, and in 1557 the English Crown thought to stem the flow of seditious and heretical books by chartering the Stationers' Company. The right to print was limited to the members of that guild, and thirty years later the Star Chamber was chartered to curtail the "greate enormities and abuses" of "dyvers contentyous and disorderlye persons professinge the arte or mystere of pryntinge or selling of books." The right to print was restricted to two universities and to the 21 existing printers in the city of London, which had 53 printing presses. The French crown also repressed printing, and printer Etienne Dolet was burned at the stake in 1546. As the English took control of type founding in 1637, printers fled to the Netherlands. Confrontation with authority made printers radical and rebellious, and 800 authors, printers and book dealers were incarcerated in the Bastille before it was stormed in 1789. The notion that the expression of dissent or subversive views should be tolerated, not censured or punished by law, developed alongside the rise of printing and the press. The Areopagitica, published in 1644 under the full title Areopagitica: A speech of Mr. John Milton for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the Parliament of England, was John Milton's response to the English parliament re-introducing government licensing of printers, hence publishers. In doing so Milton articulated the main strands of future discussions about freedom of expression. By defining the scope of freedom of expression and of "harmful" speech Milton argued against the principle of pre-censorship and in favour of tolerance for a wide range of views.

GPS would be completely unaffected. GPS relies on timed radio signals from various satellites in orbit and determines the location of the GPS unit based on the time differences.

Yes, GPS will still work, but it will be slightly affected. That could be an issue depending on what type of GPS system you are using. The speed of GPS signals through the ionosphere vary and result in about 5 meters of error. The magnetic field has a huge affect on the ionosphere and during the transition the field will be very odd (extra poles), so it will also affect GPS. Luckily, they are already launch satellites that allow civilians to receive more frequencies and to do automatic ionospheric corrections. Also, anyone doing differential GPS wouldn't notice.

my prius goes into electric silent mode every time I go downhill no matter how fast I'm going.

And most diesel trucks activate their Jake Brake, which makes them extremely loud but they're not burning fuel.

hybrid diesel-electric locomotives

Diesel-electric locomotives are not hybrids. They are electric locomotives with on-board diesel generators. The diesel engines never drive the wheels.

And only recently have some railroads started experimenting with adding battery packs to recover energy while braking.

It is not the job of western corporations to "fix" China. That is up to the Chinese.

The last time they tried; the Chinese government killed them.

it is OK to publish classified information as long as it "landed in your lap"?

Yep. At least if you define "OK" as "Legal". Your personal morality may disagree, but your personal morality is also not the law.

As long as you're a civilian who never had a security clearance, and you did not assist the leaker, you can publish away.

Heck, if you're a civilian with a clearance and don't receive anything of value for the leak, and you leak it "to the public" instead of handing it over to a foreign country, you also haven't broken the law. See: Ellsberg.

...that Alexa actually has no AI at all. It just records audio commands, sends them to a central server, where human monkeys listen to conversations, and make Alexa act accordingly. It is just like the Truman show, only bigger. Probably the same happens for Siri.

But not Google Home / Google Assistant?

"Magnetic Field Reversals Unlikely To Be a Problem For Life ..."

Key word there is "life", other than messing with any species that uses the magnetic field to guild its migration path for the most part a collapse and flip of the Earth's magnetic field will have little or no long term impact on "life"

But Technology on the other hand is going to be mostly screwed over by a flip. Something most people don't get is a pole flip won't be a clean instant flip where suddenly your compass is 180 degrees off from where it pointed to before lunch. The poles will move around, the "North" pole could end up on the Equator while the "South" pole has become multiple "poles" scattered around the other side of the planet for awhile. This unstable period could last for years if not decades. But that won't be what fucks over technology..

When the Earths magnetic field starts going wonky the Van Allen Belts, the shield that protects the Earth and, most important to Humans, all the communication/GPS/monitoring satellites in orbit will mostly cease to exist. Many of those satellites are not made to withstand direct exposure to the Sun's radiation for very long. So most of the electronics in orbit will be fried. Also affected will be the Earth's Ionosphere, when it gets hit by strong solar radiation, like during a solar flare or direct exposure to the solar wind the layer becomes opaque to radio, no more GPS or reliable communications via satellite will be able to reach the ground, which will mess with shipping, aircraft, commerce (lots of systems use GPS for their time reference) and even local cell phone connections. And all the copper wire strung all over the planet we rely on for power distribution and communications will be similarly hosed. Read up on the Carrington Event" of 1859 to learn what happens when the Earth gets hit by a LOT of solar wind.

All that said I'm not going to lose sleep over the possibility of a flip in my lifetime. Like the Astronomer said, it won't be a problem for Life because it will adapt to the changes and continue on. And as much as I would dislike it not being able to get GPS driving directions to my hotel or surf the Internet won't kill me.

[Trump] aligns himself with Nazis and the Alt-right

Some stuff that aligns one with the Nazis/Hitler:
* Animal welfare
* Environmentalism
* Vegetarianism
* Hatred of Christian religions

source

John Kanzius already found the cure for cancer. There is no need to waste time with this stuff. All efforts should go into his method of destroying cancer with radio waves and making it available to the public.

Just like the Northrop Grumman/EADS KC-30 contract.

The Swedish government (i.e. the executive branch) cannot make promises about extradition, as that is a matter for the judicial system. But the judicial system cannot rule on whether to grant an extradition request until one is received. If a minister tried to force their will through anyway, then that would be ministerial rule, which violates the constitution.

If an extradition request was made once Assange was in Sweden, it would have to be approved by both Swedish and UK courts due to them both following the European Arrest Warrant Act.

So I disagree with your premise that it is easy for Sweden to make such promises, when it seems to involve breaking both their constitution and EU law. It would be easier to just extradite Assange from UK directly.

Gmail Becomes First Major Email Provider To Support MTA-STS and TLS Reporting

My servers have been negotiating TLS connections for years.

Are you a "Major Email Provider"?

What's all this about?

Google feeling the heat of protonmail.

I'm hearing that people in Norway are apparently already feeling sorry for their biggest mass murderer in history who might, maybe, have to stay locked up for 25 years.

"People," as in one blog article, or a verifiable chunk of the population?

Norway is not Sweden but it's probably not all that different either, so I wouldn't be surprised if the Swedes granted bail and Assange found a way to sneak into Russia.

There's no bail in the Swedish judicial system. They instead detain suspects if certain criteria are met, which this investigation seems to do on several points.

To me the question isn't why they they are underestimating the problem, but instead why are they concentrating on self driving cars?

Obviously the first applications should be self driving Buses, Long Haul 18 wheelers, Garbage Trucks, etc. etc.

Things where slower speed is acceptable whose route is mostly pre-planned, where companies are paying a man to drive rather than someone is driving themselves.

But people are working on autonomous trucks and also trying other things such as platoon driving. Also check out Self-Driving Trucks: Are Truck Drivers Out Of A Job?. However I think that these are being underreported because self driving cars are seen as "sexy" but a truck isn't.

To me the question isn't why they they are underestimating the problem, but instead why are they concentrating on self driving cars?

Obviously the first applications should be self driving Buses, Long Haul 18 wheelers, Garbage Trucks, etc. etc.

Things where slower speed is acceptable whose route is mostly pre-planned, where companies are paying a man to drive rather than someone is driving themselves.

But people are working on autonomous trucks and also trying other things such as platoon driving. Also check out Self-Driving Trucks: Are Truck Drivers Out Of A Job?. However I think that these are being underreported because self driving cars are seen as "sexy" but a truck isn't.

Are you sure about that? It sounds like you're saying: If a person from a foreign nation tries to rob a store in a US city, the local police would forego arresting and charging that person?

Should have been picked up as sarcasm. Yes, breaking US law can be prosecuted in the US, even if the person is not a US citizen.

Pretty much the same as any country. That's one of the reasons there are extradition treaties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Now, they are not always honored, but in a case where Assange is located in Great Britain, it is very likely to be honored. There are some cases where a country might refuse extradition if the country demanding extradition intends to seek the death penalty, and in any event, refusal to extradite rests as a soverign right.

But Assange isn't likely to be charged with anything calling for a death penalty. And while within their rights to refuse Extradition, GB would be playing a game with a future extradition request to the US.

Where the Slashdot Lawyers have got off thinking that there is no recourse, that Assange is unindictable because he isn't a US citizen, is pretty obviously based on their hatred of the US and support of Assange and the people he works for than actual law. Read the replies to my posts. It's more 'Murrica is evil, dammit!" than actual knowledge.

> LOL. What makes you think you aren't being trolled by somebody posing as an ultraconservative?

Poe's Law

he'd get sentenced under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Unless there's more information that has not been released, this is very unlikely. So far, he's being charged with helping Manning to hack a password.

but if the US is out of power for 14 months because no one can get the transformers rebuilt

Not so much a transformer damage problem. We know how to protect transmission systems and related equipment. Breakers will trip open* to prevent geomagnetically induced currents (GIS) from causing damage. The big problem is that this won't be one single solar flare event type incident. I'm not sure anyone knows how long geomagnetic fields take to reverse and rebuild. It could be years. And during this time, we will experience repeated blackouts. Or perhaps one big one.

*This is predicated upon implementation of NERC recommendations for improved system protection against GIS. Currently (no pun intended) NERC has limited authority to enforce compliance. And utilities tend to fall largely into the anti regulation political camp.

but if the US is out of power for 14 months because no one can get the transformers rebuilt

Not so much a transformer damage problem. We know how to protect transmission systems and related equipment. Breakers will trip open* to prevent geomagnetically induced currents (GIS) from causing damage. The big problem is that this won't be one single solar flare event type incident. I'm not sure anyone knows how long geomagnetic fields take to reverse and rebuild. It could be years. And during this time, we will experience repeated blackouts. Or perhaps one big one.

*This is predicated upon implementation of NERC recommendations for improved system protection against GIS. Currently (no pun intended) NERC has limited authority to enforce compliance. And utilities tend to fall largely into the anti regulation political camp.

Of course, geologists point out that it has literally all happened before, that there is no significant association of extinction with reversals, and that what evidence there is points to a reversal taking a number of centuries to millennia to achieve.

There also was no significant damage from the solar storm of 1859, but I thought it was well accepted that if such an event were to happen today, it would be disastrous.

I'm not saying we should fear a magnetic field reversal, only that "it happened before and nothing bad happened" is not an argument that we shouldn't fear it.

Yes, craniometry.

Here is a book on that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Is it the solid core that spins differently to the earth, or is it the liquid layer only sloshing around?

A 20 second search on Wikipedia would answer your question...

Kids, passengers, radio, etc....

Here around (Switzerland), the FM-RDS's "RT" and "RT+" (Radio Text and Plus) functionality was only implemented by the national radios much later than the rest of Europe, because they were literary afraid that the text would provide too much extra distraction to the driver and take their attention away from driving.

Seriously.

(Or at least that's what they were telling us).

You know, what you write makes perfect sense and is perfectly aligned with what one would expect. Unfortunately, it would be a whole heck of a lot easier to believe that it has any relation to what's going to happen, or were what was originally going to happen, if the rendition of Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed Alzery hadn't happened.

He's a real dick...

There is no "moral" choice, because Apple's actions are not going to change anything either way.

These are the choices Apple faces:

1. Stay in China, and do nothing to fix China's problems. 2. Leave China, and do nothing to fix China's problems.

This is the famous Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.

The problem is not that Apple lacks courage, but that you lack wisdom.

There's also a difference between seeing a pool of shit and diving on in anyway because that's where the gold is and saying, I don't want to swim in this, I have enough gold.

...that Alexa actually has no AI at all. It just records audio commands, sends them to a central server, where human monkeys listen to conversations, and make Alexa act accordingly. It is just like the Truman show, only bigger. Probably the same happens for Siri.

Why call upon black holes, then?

A black hole with a mass 30x that of the sun is about 200 kilometres across. Two such black holes in a decaying orbit around one another, coming closer and faster, would touch and merge when their orbital period was about 10 milliseconds ... which is why the LIGO signals show a chirping signal with a sine wave shrinking down to a period of milliseconds.

A star with a mass 30x that of the sun will be at least as big as the sun (1.4 million km). If two such stars are the size of the sun, and in a decaying orbit, they will touch and merge when their orbital period is about 1.4 hours. If they are larger than the sun, their orbital period when they merge will be longer than this. This is much longer and slower than the chirped signal seen by LIGO.

Merging stars would produce gravitational waves that are too long and slow to explain the signal seen by LIGO.

(I used Kepler's third law in working out these periods. It's probably not quite right when dealing with two equally-sized orbiting bodies, and there will be some relativistic correction for the black-hole case, but the numbers should be close enough that the conclusion above is valid.)

can cause constipation, diarrhea, liver and kidney problems, can cause other cancers. ...
Price? $10000 a month, ...

You jest, but... my wife died of a brain tumor (GBM) in 2006, just seven weeks after diagnosis. Her chemotherapy medicine was Temodar and the list price was $11,000 for a one-month supply of pills (several months would normally be needed). She had both my BC/BS and her Optima insurance -- on BC/BS the co-pay was 10% ($1,100) on her Optima it was $40 (yes, forty).

The instructions cautioned against prolonged handling of the pills and breathing dust from them as that could cause -- wait for it -- cancer.

can cause constipation, diarrhea, liver and kidney problems, can cause other cancers. ...
Price? $10000 a month, ...

You jest, but... my wife died of a brain tumor (GBM) in 2006, just seven weeks after diagnosis. Her chemotherapy medicine was Temodar and the list price was $11,000 for a one-month supply of pills (several months would normally be needed). She had both my BC/BS and her Optima insurance -- on BC/BS the co-pay was 10% ($1,100) on her Optima it was $40 (yes, forty).

The instructions cautioned against prolonged handling of the pills and breathing dust from them as that could cause -- wait for it -- cancer.

How do they know what os you run? I want to see proof of this.

The most common phrasing of this is "How do cellular carriers detect tethering?" Methods include IP TTL/hop count values, MAC numbers, TCP implementation fingerprinting, User-agent of cleartext HTTP requests, and sniffing DNS/SNI for requests to OS update servers. A Cisco manual explains what Cisco ECS does.

> I don't think that's a good comparison.

Comparing very-long-baseline interferometry to "panorama stitching" is even worse.

It was reinstated withMaiLai.
    The current legal status is: "Following Orders is not a valid defence if you lose the war. So fight harder for your freedom"

There is no "moral" choice, because Apple's actions are not going to change anything either way.

These are the choices Apple faces:

1. Stay in China, and do nothing to fix China's problems.
2. Leave China, and do nothing to fix China's problems.

This is the famous Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

The problem is not that Apple lacks courage, but that you lack wisdom.

These companies just don't get it, do they?

Oh, they get it, they just don't care enough to do anything about it.

Give me an option where I can choose exactly what channels I want, and exclude the channels I don't want..

Start with an example: I like Science channel, as it is one of the few "science-y" channels left that actually shows "scienc-y stuff". Unlike The Learning Channel that is hasn't had anything of any value on it in a decade, and I wouldn't pay a dime for. The problem? They are both owned by Discovery, Inc, who owns among others, The Food Network, HGTV, Cooking Channel, DIY Network, Great American Country. You'll quickly find that almost every one of your favorite channels is owned by a conglomerate. And while that large "network" may have one or two channels you like, they likely have a dozen that you couldn't care less about. And from what I've seen, all of the "Entertainment Providers" are only willing to sell them by the bundle. Oh, you only want to buy Science Channel? That'll be $50/month please, but the good news is that it includes all this other useless shit we have that you have no interest in.

No serious* person in the Progressive movement

You invalidate your entire post by opening with the No True Scotsman fallacy. You use it more than once.

And I don't think you speak for the whole "Progressive movement". Did they elect you Queen of the Progressives?

We'll just leave identifying all the other logical fallacies your post is overflowing with as exercise for other readers.

Physicist here. Try this:

Lighter-than-air vehicle. Favorable wind.

Much more efficient than spherical cows.

There is a 10 meter telescope at the South Pole that has been in operation since 2007.

See the glazier's fallacy.

Yeah, the amount the moon affects the dirt under our feet is really weird. My kid was very surprised when it was brought up in his grade school science class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Apple has a history of censoring content in its platforms. In this it seems that they're no different from many other major players. That's probably not surprising, given the symbiotic relationship between big corporations and governments. But there's an inconsistency here. On the one hand, Apple actively opposes US law enforcement's efforts to compromise users' private data. On the other hand, they seem to get behind censorship in a big way, sometimes even in support of totalitarianism.

People behave inconsistently - I guess entities that enjoy 'corporate personhood' exhibit similar behaviour.

According to Wikipedia an eagle can spot a rabbit up to 3.2 km away !!

Just wow.

>> Our eyes and brains do an exceptional job of integrating information across different visual glances to give us a deep, persistent illusion of uniformly high-resolution vision.

YES ! The brain is a remarkable computer.

Of course, there many situations in which the brain makes patently wrong conclusions
But on the whole, I think the human brain is one of the most remarkable things in the universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

As a matter of fact, the very same LIGO let us see two neutron stars doing that exactly back in 2017.

On the other hand, as far as I'm aware, there are no conclusive observation of black holes, which makes for a much more spectacular headline.

You might want to read up on autorotation

Engine failure is a known issue in non-electric vehicles.

Those of Caucasian decent have been told for years that they are racists simply because of their skin color.

No one (serious*) is saying that. There is a strong believe for progressives that the mainstream American society goes out of its way to avoid recognizing or admitting that the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation in this country has done serious damage to the social mobility and opportunity available to people of color. As shorthand, progressives will often say something along the lines of "the system is racist" and make the assertion that people who don't see or aren't willing to acknowledge this are practicing racism themselves.

They can't be discriminated against because they aren't the right color.

See above. Progressives are pretty clear that the issue is systemic racism, not individual racism. In the vast majority of places in society where race might be a factor, the systemic racism is biased against people of color. This is supported by statistics across the board. I hope you can understand that because of the huge disparity that exists today, progressives don't generally feel like there's much room to discuss racism against white people. We're generally in agreement that we should focus our energy on fixing the racism against people of color first, since the scale of problem and resulting social harm is so much worse.

They have something called " White Privilege " that, apparently, is some sort of " I win " button available on tap.

No one talk about an "I win" button. "White Privilege" is again a shorthand to refer to the natural outcome of so many functions in society being inherently biased against people of color. The simplest example is the outcome of the policy of redlining. The direct result of redlining was that even those people of color that were financially sound and otherwise prosperous effectively couldn't purchase real estate. This insulated the black community from potential gains in the housing market as real estate has exploded in value over the years. The trickle-down result which is often referred to as white privilege is that further generations of people of color are born into circumstances where their family wasn't able to build generational wealth to pass on and give their kids a boost. I don't know anything about you or your family, but I don't think it's far-fetched to assume that your parents eventually owned their own house. Maybe they willed it to you, or maybe they were able to retire comfortably after paying it off. That's a source of financial stability and opportunity that much much fewer black families have been allowed to have.

They get turned down for jobs and education slots because the Company or University has to have enough minorities lest they be called racists too.

People get turned down for jobs and education for all sorts of reasons. It's never really been about how hard you work, that's a piece of American mythology with little basis in reality. If your interviewer had a bad day, you might not be getting that job. If you happened to apply to a school that had a huge bump in applications that year, you might not be getting that acceptance letter. It's illegal to discriminate against an individual in an application process specifically on their race. It's not illegal, however, to discriminate based on some other innocuous qualities such as their name. Unfortunately, studies have shown that having a name associated with being of color will negatively affect your job acceptance, even when you have an identical resume to someone with a more white-sounding name. There's a

If that worked prisons could not have any surveillance either.

I would presume that by default some small private part in a normal prison (e.g.: toilet booth) aren't on continuously cam (and an escort would be required if strong suspiction requires to monitor those moments).
From what I've heard, here around in Europe, when inmates are having conjugal visits their activities aren't on cam either for the same obvious reasons.

(Where's BankRoberMBA when you need him to share his experience as an inmate ?)

I would strongly presume that nothing forbids the teenage person to engage in sex.
And given they WTF-ness levels of laws on your side of the Antlantic Pond, where even teens consensually sexting each other could be charged for child pornography, I would suspect that suing for child pornography isn't as far fetched as it sounds.

A suspect for armed robbery disabled his monitor and is on the run?

First, as I've mentionned, if the guy is stupid enough to *actually* get into something like armed robbery, he's probably not smart enough to successfully mess with the monitor.

Second, someone smarter would probably not try to disable it (that would immediately attract attention), but instead try to artificially report the noises they want to the monitor (random background noises) to mask their activity to get some privacy.

Mitch McConnell could be fired.

But that would require the Republican base to vote for a *gasp* Democrat!
That won't happen.

Another alternative to voting Democrat would be to vote for a third party.

They could also just decide to not vote at all and let a handful of Democrats vote for the Democrat. (Unless Kentucky have the same problem as NC and just makes sure that McConnell wins regardless of what people vote.)

In that case the last resort is to do an Eriksgata veto of the McConnell vote the way it was done with Ragnvald Knaphövde, although the constitution doesn't specifically support it. (Many of the founders hinted that such an approach might be necessary from time to time but it was never codified.)