True though at the end of the day it's also a good thing to realize that science is about evidence, and if a bunch of scientists believe a theory to be true I think that's pretty damn good evidence that it is true.
No, if a bunch of scientists believe that something is true, that's an indicator that the thing is probably considered by consensus to be a more efficient or more useful proposition than the well-explored alternatives currently available.
Just because a theory is very successful it doesn't mean that it's necessarily true. Many theories in the past have been very successful and then have been overturned by even better theories that have wider ranges of applicability.
"Scientists believe..." is a problematic phrase. Of course scientists, as human beings, tend to believe certain things. But the perfect scientist would have no beliefs at all, only working hypotheses.
Re:More than scientific learning
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
Black holes aren't considered to bethe main potential problem.
Teeny black hole are expected to go "Pfft" almost immediately after they're created (rather like Higgs bosons). Black hole stability is a function of radius... the smaller the hole, the stronger the gravitational tidal forces around the hole, and the stronger the hole's "Hawking radiation" effect. Black holes of stellar mass are "pretty cold", and we'd normally expect them to have a Hawking radiation temperature colder than the background CMBR. But tiny black holes should be pretty hot, and really tiny black holes are expected to spout out all their massenergy almost immediately.
So under current theory, black holes aren't the nightmare. The nightmare would be some sort of new physics that we've never seen before, that only kicks in when there's a freak convergence of high-energy events within a small region of spacetime.
It's hoped that LHC will reveal new physics, things that we didn't realise happened. If it's successful, and it shows us that some of our ideas are wrong... well, how do we calculate safety-statistics for the operation of a machine that we hope will show current theories to be wrong, in ways that we can't currently even imagine? Sure, we can use current theory to fudge some impressively-high numbers for the odds of something going wrong, but part of the justification for our spending a few billion dollars of taxpayers' money on the LHC was the hope that the machine would show us that the theory that we're using to make these calculations isn't actually correct under LHC's extreme operating conditions.
To make a "car" analogy, they're turned the ignition key and listened to the engine start up and turn over, and are congratulating themselves that the thing that they've just finished building seems to be working.
They've revved the engine with the gears in neutral. They haven't actually driven anywhere yet. That comes later.
I felt sorry for the professionals who used their Compuserve accounts and got a certain amount of kudos from having a CIS email addy (lots of professional groups had active online CIS communities: programmers with MSDN accounts, doctors, police... and then AOL bought the company and switched them to AOL email addresses -- which didn't exactly present the same message. Ouch.
"Congratulations, your CIS contract is now with AOL. Don't worry, nothing will change. Have you considered switching to AOL? AOL is Grrrrrreat for kids! Why haven't you switched yet? Are you having technical problems switching? Don't worry, in order to improve your online experience, we'll do it for you... Wow, thank you for choosing AOL!"
Corporate buyouts can be bad news. You sign with Company B because you don't want to have anything to to with Company A, and then the company that you were trying to avoid buys the one you signed with, and you find yourself with a contract with them anyway. Grrr.
... on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content,..."
gives FaceBook the right to generate abstracts, snapshots, thumbnail previews etc for the purposes of running and promoting the site.
The earlier part of the terms of service says that you give
... to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise...
In other words, is seems that they can probably do anything with the material on the site that they like, including selling it as stock photography (and keeping the proceeds), or subcontracting another company to sell the content as stock photography on their behalf (and keeping the proceeds). You can't object that they haven't paid you for the right to use the material, because you've granted them those rights with "fully paid" status.
The agreement also seems to try to legally protect them from liability in the eventuality that they sell on material uploaded by a user that has other rights rights attached. If you upload a good holiday photo of the Eiffel Tower, and Facebook sells the image to postcard and teeshirt manufacturers, and a French company complains that they own all rights to merchandising that displays images of the Tower and that FaceBook are therefore breaking the law by printing or licensing those products, then Facebook can say that they aren't liable - you are. Facebook can pass your details to the lawyers suing them and say, "It's not our fault, it's the nasty user who uploaded the photo and clicked a box assuring us that they were legally in a position to grant us full and unrestricted rights to use it however we saw fit."
... you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company...
So their lawyers can say that Facebook isn't liable for misuse of the image of the Eiffel Tower (or your fan photo of you posing with Britney Spears, or your nice photo of that "Coca Cola" billboard), and that the person who needs to be sued by the third-party company over the offending postcards and teeshirts is the person who uploaded their holiday pics to Facebook. And here's their ID, their email address, their date of birth and their home address.
One final warning: if you're with one of these companies and you decide that this state of affairs is unacceptable and try to quit, then don't just delete your account and assume that your page and its content will be deleted. It doesn't necessarily follow. The company will want as many personal pages as possible, and you're still liable for the content, so why should they take your page down once you've gone? Once you've quit, you've removed the ability to go back in and change your page settings. So if you're going to quit, first edit your page to be an innocuous placeholder that doesn't give the game away ("under construction"?), then quietly delete the rest of your content, wait a few days, and only then consider starting the account deletion process. Better yet, get advice from someone who's already been through the process.
Remember under the terms of the agreement, your page is not your page. It's their page. It just happens to be about you and written by you. They may be under no obligation to remove it once you've ceased to be a customer.
I guess the potential weak point of "click through agreements" is the absence of full advance disclosure. The customer often can't take a copy of the agreement away and peruse it (or show it to a lawyer) before deciding whether or not to sign. If they spend too long on a page, the signup process may time-out. They often won't be shown some parts of the agreement until they're already signed up to other parts, and they may need to disclose personal information up-front (such as their ID, address and credit card details) as a precondition for being allowed to see the EULA.
So a lawyer could argue that this isn't fair and equitable dealing. However, their counterpart could argue that it's still the customer's fault, because they could see during the signup process that they were being treated like dirt, so why the hell did they go all the way through the process instead of baling out and having nothing further to do with such a company?:)
There are cases where I've personally decided not to sign up for a service after reading the EULA. For instance, a newspaper published FaceBooks's terms and conditions, and after reading them I thought, well, I'd been considering signing up for one of these networkign sites, but I'm as sure as hell not going to be signing up with THEM.
I also think that perhaps we need some legislation that says that a company has to make its terms and conditions freely readable by anyone casually visiting the site, BEFORE they start applying for membership. The idea that you have to be part-way through the application process before being allowed to see what the terms and conditions are is wrong. "Terms and Conditions" should be a publicly-available document. But I think that some companies know that their T&C are so bad that they can't publicly defend them.
Granted, most people ignore the EULAs. But, what happens if the EULAs can actually be enforced?
Online service providers can usually enforce an EULA "penalty" without comebacks, by choosing to delete your account and refusing to grant you another one.
Which can become a problem if the service provider has been bought out by a large corporation that's also bought up a load other of online companies in order to merge the user-bases, and you also use those other services.
If you criticise Microsoft's Vista or a Warner Bros movie on a long-standing proprietary discussion group that's been [i]taken over[/i] by MS or AOLTW, then your action might be classed as a violation of the EULA that you signed up for to join the discussion group, where you agreed not to use the service as a platform to to criticise the company that owns it, or its affiliates, or any future owner or affiliates.
If your account gets deleted for EULA violation, and the parent company has also taken over a range of other small companies whose services you use and rely on, then if the parent company has linked and merged your different accounts, then losing access to a fairly trivial service (such as access to a computing or film review forum) might also mean losing access to more critical services such as ecommerce, email, or professional networking (or online banking) that are run by those affilate companies.
As corporate takeovers "pool" disparate customer-bases, we're ending up with increasingly "pooled" EULAs (with Yahoo and Google being the most obvious examples). So although some of the more draconian EULAs may not be legally enforcable (and in some cases may even be outright illegal), its a good idea to make sure that the site where you hang out and discuss politics or movies doesn't have the same parent company as your e-commerce website or your internet banking service (or your professional networking page, or your business email account).
Yeah, wasn't there something in the Microsoft development tools EULA saying that you weren't allowed to use them to create any product that might compete with any existing or future Microsoft product?
I think the main idea was that you weren't allowed to leverage MSVC to write your own languages that might compete with MSVC, or to write "MSOffice"-type products. Mostly, I think they were keen that you didn't use the Access db engine as the basis of your own generic database program, or the old (very powerful, now withdrawn) version of the VB "grid" control as the basis of your own spreadsheet program.
But the prohibition was open-ended. So there was a risk that if you developed some new sort of productivity tool or ecommerce or banking application using MS tools, and it was a soaring success, and MS decided that they wanted a slice of the action, their lawyers could insist that your old product was now breaking the conditions of the EULA by competing with the newer MS "clone" product, and your "competing" product had to be withdrawn from the market.
Back when there were lots of little companies producing spreadsheets and office apps that competed with MSOffice, developers had to be very careful about their choice of tools.
Yeah, just because people who are well-educated realise that a contract is "bad" and legally unenforceable, it doesn't mean that the issuing of the contract to the general public is okay.
Contractual clauses like this are harmful to the internet business environment. They set precedents and help to define the perception of common (bad) industry practice.
If you're working at some little software company, and you want to add an outrageous statement to your user-licence, and you see that Google are already doing stuff like this, you're liable to think, well, Google are one of the largest corporations in the world, with access to as many lawyers as they like, and if they reckon that companies can get away with stuff like this, than my company is going to do the same.
There are plenty of legal "terms and conditions" out there that aren't (or shouldn't be) legally enforceable... but that doesn't mean that bad companies aren't still sheltering behind them, and that their customers aren't still being intimidated by what they've unwittingly agreed to.
The argument that it doesn't matter because people don't read the legal stuff anyway also doesn't wash, because by including sloppy psuedo-legal "junk" clauses that obviously shouldn't be there, the company is encouraging end-users to think that
(a) online legal contracts are worthless junk that're not worth reading, and
(b) that if a contract appears to say something daft that potentially screws the customer over in an outrageous way, that they, the customer, don't need to worry because the company lawyers will obviously never attempt to use that clause in their favour.
There are "bad" companies out there whose whole business model depends on exploiting contractual clauses that the customer either doesn't read, or thinks that the company won't try to enforce on the grounds of unreasonableness, so these contracts encourage a dangerous sense of complacency in end-users over what they sign up to online.
On the plus side, Google did the right thing by acting immediately and emphatically to fix the problem once it had been brought to their attention.
Good for them for doing that.
But really, there was no excuse for a company as much in the spotlight as Google, whose business depends so much on public goodwill, releasing a contract in that state in the first place. People in large corporations get paid an awful lot of money to make sure that things like this don't happen.
New Orleans residents have been crapped on ever since the city was originally founded as a giant "real estate" con. French investors were persuaded that it was a paradise, only to find that when they turned up it was actually a stinking, fetid, disease-ridden alligator-infested swampland.
And this info is from the New Orleans tourist information plaques - seriously!
Well, at least they've rebuilt the levies properly this time...
(watches some news)
Oh. Crap. Never mind, forget that I said that.
(watches more news)
Well, at least the bits of levies that they HAVE rebuilt look better, it's just there that haven't quite finished joining them up yet. Well, I guess it's just as well that water can't go round corners.
Or, Bush was quite insistent that New Orleans WAS going to be rebuilt, and that the people of New Orleans WERE going to go back to New Orleans - because he sure as hell didn't want them relocating permanently to neighboring Texas.
If the environment really is warming, then some of the old statistics become invalid.
The problem happens when you start losing inland ice. Water (and ice) are heavy... not quite as heavy as rock, but heavy nonetheless. If you lose a few hundred metres of ice off the top of a landmass, it's almost like shaving off a similar amount of rock. Once the big icy paperweight is taken off the top, the ground beneath rises to restore the balance of forces, and if you have corners and edges of tectonic plates trying to rise against their neighbours, quickly, it sets up geological forces in non-geological time that require resolution. There have already been a few earthquakes blamed on dam construction, where the additional weight of the water has depressed a whole region.
So if we start losing significant amounts of landlocked ice, we might have to be prepared for some of these old hotspots to start kicking off as the new plate stresses try to sort themselves out.
Also consider this: Of 183000 or so cases of BSE in the UK, "only" 129 cases of vCJD were the result. Less than one in thousand. The odds of a single vCJD case arising in the human population unless there's a large BSE epidemic that goes unnoticed is extremely small.
Yeah, but you also have to bear in mind that initially, the threat posed by BSE was never expected to be nvCJD. We were expecting a human version of the disease to be something much more like standard CJD, with a timelag of decades between exposure to the agent and the development of the full-blown disease. People were talking about the possibility of a statistical swell only starting to appear in the CJD stats (due to BSE) after maybe forty years. We still don't know how big this future body of more "conventional"-looking cases might be. It might only be hundreds, in which case it'll probably be lost in the existing CJD statistics, or it might be in the tens of thousands. We don't yet have a statistical baseline to work from.
What we did start doing in the UK a few years ago was thinking about emergency plans for the mass hospitalisation of large numbers of CJD-type cases, and discussing possible changes in the law to make medical euthanasia easier should society be faced with an overwhelming number of untreatable "terminal" patients with a very low quality of life and low life expectancy.
If we're lucky, then everyone with a susceptibility to the BSE agent will have already "shown" with nvCJD.
If we're not so lucky, the nvCJD cases are simply an anomalous spike preceding the main event.
If we're ==very== unlucky, the worst-case scenario would be that the ratio of BSE-related cases in the two categories ends up reflecting the ratio between the numbers of standard CJD and nvCJD-style cases before all this happened. Hopefully it won't play out like that, but it's still too early to be sure exactly what's going to happen.
If the test really isn't effective, then why is it considered "good enough" to test 1% of the cows? I mean if it's not effective at a sample rate that low, it's not going to be any less effective when the testing is bumped substantially.
It's not always snake-oil. There are companies out there who genuinely try to make living conditions better for their animals, and try to apply ethical and veterinary standards that are above the prevailing norm. Trouble is, if they tell anyone what they are doing, their competition complains to the regulatory authorities, and they get told that they aren't legally allowed to tell customers what they're doing, because it might imply that there was something bad about their competitors products.
There was a case a few years ago where a dairy farm decided that injecting cows udders with hormones to boost milk production wasn't very nice for the cows, it created cysts and pus at the injection sites that got into the milk, and caused the cows long-term discomfort. So they took the decision not to do it, and labelled their milk accordingly as coming from non-hormone-treated cows. They then got told that it was against US laws to label their product like that. Saying that your animals are reared and maintained more humanely suggests that your competitors animals are reared and maintained less humanely, and although this may well be factually correct, if consumers start exercising choice to buy the more expensively reared product, then the rest of the industry might start feeling pressure to follow suit. That'd put up costs in the industry, higher industry costs are considered a Bad Thing, and therefore government regulators decided that the customer didn't have a right to make those informed decisions.
Now, regarding this case, the idea that this ruling is designed to protect the foreign consumer is bullshit. The ruling isn't about protecting poor foreign industries from being mislead about the efficacy of US BSE testing. It's about avoiding the economic turmoil that might happen in US agriculture if a company tests all their animals and starts finding a few positive results. What the ruling says is that a company supplying food isn't legally allowed to use commercially available testing kits to check their meat products without central authorisation, no matter what version of the test they want to use, and no matter whether the animal they want to test is old or young. It's not a ban on advertising, it's a ban on doing the tests in the first place. They now aren't even allowed to do it for their own peace of mind.
This is part of a pattern. A little while back, SlashDot carried a story about an NY official trying to ban the use of air quality testing devices by unauthorised personnel, which meant that if you were an environmental activist, and you lived next door to a polluting company that was breaking the law, if you used your hand-held tester to document the law-breaking, then =you= were the criminal, and your evidence couldn't be submitted to a court because you'd obtained it illegally (even if all you'd done was test the air in your own living room or back yard, or out in the public street). It was about avoiding the risk of public scares by making it illegal for people to carry out their own independent tests.
Same thing here. Chances are, there'll be some farmers feeding lousy feedstock to their animals, creating feed cycles that allow BSE to exist and persist at a low levels in the food chain. Since we know that BSE has already appeared in the US, we kinda expect that there probably ==are== a few animals out there with it. The regulatory authorities do spot tests that might hopefully give them the heads-up if there is a BSE epidemic looming, but they actively don't want to know about little one-off cases, because then they get put on the spot, and expected to take action. If they disclose the result, they come under pressure to investigate and establish how many cases there are, and to take steps to make sure that no other contaminated meat reaches the market. Which is expensive. If they choose not to tell anyone about a positive result, then they get accused of being responsible for a coverup about the true state of the US food industry, and dishonestly endangering US consumers lives to protect US business.
So,
Actually I think that there have been regulations in place saying that you aren't supposed to carry spare lithium batteries in "stowed" airliner luggage for some years now:
Security people also tend to be generally suspicious of batteries, because they're essentially sealed packs of combinations of chemicals, with internal wiring and convenient external electrical contacts.
Slashdot Mirror
No, if a bunch of scientists believe that something is true, that's an indicator that the thing is probably considered by consensus to be a more efficient or more useful proposition than the well-explored alternatives currently available.
Just because a theory is very successful it doesn't mean that it's necessarily true. Many theories in the past have been very successful and then have been overturned by even better theories that have wider ranges of applicability.
"Scientists believe ..." is a problematic phrase. Of course scientists, as human beings, tend to believe certain things. But the perfect scientist would have no beliefs at all, only working hypotheses.
The phrase "charging elephant" springs to mind.
Teeny black hole are expected to go "Pfft" almost immediately after they're created (rather like Higgs bosons). Black hole stability is a function of radius ... the smaller the hole, the stronger the gravitational tidal forces around the hole, and the stronger the hole's "Hawking radiation" effect. Black holes of stellar mass are "pretty cold", and we'd normally expect them to have a Hawking radiation temperature colder than the background CMBR. But tiny black holes should be pretty hot, and really tiny black holes are expected to spout out all their massenergy almost immediately.
So under current theory, black holes aren't the nightmare. The nightmare would be some sort of new physics that we've never seen before, that only kicks in when there's a freak convergence of high-energy events within a small region of spacetime.
It's hoped that LHC will reveal new physics, things that we didn't realise happened. If it's successful, and it shows us that some of our ideas are wrong ... well, how do we calculate safety-statistics for the operation of a machine that we hope will show current theories to be wrong, in ways that we can't currently even imagine? Sure, we can use current theory to fudge some impressively-high numbers for the odds of something going wrong, but part of the justification for our spending a few billion dollars of taxpayers' money on the LHC was the hope that the machine would show us that the theory that we're using to make these calculations isn't actually correct under LHC's extreme operating conditions.
To make a "car" analogy, they're turned the ignition key and listened to the engine start up and turn over, and are congratulating themselves that the thing that they've just finished building seems to be working.
They've revved the engine with the gears in neutral. They haven't actually driven anywhere yet. That comes later.
"Congratulations, your CIS contract is now with AOL. Don't worry, nothing will change. Have you considered switching to AOL? AOL is Grrrrrreat for kids! Why haven't you switched yet? Are you having technical problems switching? Don't worry, in order to improve your online experience, we'll do it for you ... Wow, thank you for choosing AOL!"
Corporate buyouts can be bad news. You sign with Company B because you don't want to have anything to to with Company A, and then the company that you were trying to avoid buys the one you signed with, and you find yourself with a contract with them anyway. Grrr.
gives FaceBook the right to generate abstracts, snapshots, thumbnail previews etc for the purposes of running and promoting the site.
The earlier part of the terms of service says that you give
In other words, is seems that they can probably do anything with the material on the site that they like, including selling it as stock photography (and keeping the proceeds), or subcontracting another company to sell the content as stock photography on their behalf (and keeping the proceeds). You can't object that they haven't paid you for the right to use the material, because you've granted them those rights with "fully paid" status.
The agreement also seems to try to legally protect them from liability in the eventuality that they sell on material uploaded by a user that has other rights rights attached. If you upload a good holiday photo of the Eiffel Tower, and Facebook sells the image to postcard and teeshirt manufacturers, and a French company complains that they own all rights to merchandising that displays images of the Tower and that FaceBook are therefore breaking the law by printing or licensing those products, then Facebook can say that they aren't liable - you are. Facebook can pass your details to the lawyers suing them and say, "It's not our fault, it's the nasty user who uploaded the photo and clicked a box assuring us that they were legally in a position to grant us full and unrestricted rights to use it however we saw fit."
So their lawyers can say that Facebook isn't liable for misuse of the image of the Eiffel Tower (or your fan photo of you posing with Britney Spears, or your nice photo of that "Coca Cola" billboard), and that the person who needs to be sued by the third-party company over the offending postcards and teeshirts is the person who uploaded their holiday pics to Facebook. And here's their ID, their email address, their date of birth and their home address.
One final warning: if you're with one of these companies and you decide that this state of affairs is unacceptable and try to quit, then don't just delete your account and assume that your page and its content will be deleted. It doesn't necessarily follow. The company will want as many personal pages as possible, and you're still liable for the content, so why should they take your page down once you've gone? Once you've quit, you've removed the ability to go back in and change your page settings. So if you're going to quit, first edit your page to be an innocuous placeholder that doesn't give the game away ("under construction"?), then quietly delete the rest of your content, wait a few days, and only then consider starting the account deletion process. Better yet, get advice from someone who's already been through the process. Remember under the terms of the agreement, your page is not your page. It's their page. It just happens to be about you and written by you. They may be under no obligation to remove it once you've ceased to be a customer.
PS: IANAL
I guess the potential weak point of "click through agreements" is the absence of full advance disclosure. The customer often can't take a copy of the agreement away and peruse it (or show it to a lawyer) before deciding whether or not to sign. If they spend too long on a page, the signup process may time-out. They often won't be shown some parts of the agreement until they're already signed up to other parts, and they may need to disclose personal information up-front (such as their ID, address and credit card details) as a precondition for being allowed to see the EULA. So a lawyer could argue that this isn't fair and equitable dealing. However, their counterpart could argue that it's still the customer's fault, because they could see during the signup process that they were being treated like dirt, so why the hell did they go all the way through the process instead of baling out and having nothing further to do with such a company? :)
Yeah, the YouTube one seemed fairly reasonable to me, last time I read it.
I also think that perhaps we need some legislation that says that a company has to make its terms and conditions freely readable by anyone casually visiting the site, BEFORE they start applying for membership. The idea that you have to be part-way through the application process before being allowed to see what the terms and conditions are is wrong. "Terms and Conditions" should be a publicly-available document. But I think that some companies know that their T&C are so bad that they can't publicly defend them.
Online service providers can usually enforce an EULA "penalty" without comebacks, by choosing to delete your account and refusing to grant you another one.
Which can become a problem if the service provider has been bought out by a large corporation that's also bought up a load other of online companies in order to merge the user-bases, and you also use those other services.
If you criticise Microsoft's Vista or a Warner Bros movie on a long-standing proprietary discussion group that's been [i]taken over[/i] by MS or AOLTW, then your action might be classed as a violation of the EULA that you signed up for to join the discussion group, where you agreed not to use the service as a platform to to criticise the company that owns it, or its affiliates, or any future owner or affiliates.
If your account gets deleted for EULA violation, and the parent company has also taken over a range of other small companies whose services you use and rely on, then if the parent company has linked and merged your different accounts, then losing access to a fairly trivial service (such as access to a computing or film review forum) might also mean losing access to more critical services such as ecommerce, email, or professional networking (or online banking) that are run by those affilate companies.
As corporate takeovers "pool" disparate customer-bases, we're ending up with increasingly "pooled" EULAs (with Yahoo and Google being the most obvious examples). So although some of the more draconian EULAs may not be legally enforcable (and in some cases may even be outright illegal), its a good idea to make sure that the site where you hang out and discuss politics or movies doesn't have the same parent company as your e-commerce website or your internet banking service (or your professional networking page, or your business email account).
Do Yahoo still have that clause saying that the service mustn't be used to make comments critical of Yahoo or their owners or affiliates?
I think the main idea was that you weren't allowed to leverage MSVC to write your own languages that might compete with MSVC, or to write "MSOffice"-type products. Mostly, I think they were keen that you didn't use the Access db engine as the basis of your own generic database program, or the old (very powerful, now withdrawn) version of the VB "grid" control as the basis of your own spreadsheet program.
But the prohibition was open-ended. So there was a risk that if you developed some new sort of productivity tool or ecommerce or banking application using MS tools, and it was a soaring success, and MS decided that they wanted a slice of the action, their lawyers could insist that your old product was now breaking the conditions of the EULA by competing with the newer MS "clone" product, and your "competing" product had to be withdrawn from the market.
Back when there were lots of little companies producing spreadsheets and office apps that competed with MSOffice, developers had to be very careful about their choice of tools.
Contractual clauses like this are harmful to the internet business environment. They set precedents and help to define the perception of common (bad) industry practice.
If you're working at some little software company, and you want to add an outrageous statement to your user-licence, and you see that Google are already doing stuff like this, you're liable to think, well, Google are one of the largest corporations in the world, with access to as many lawyers as they like, and if they reckon that companies can get away with stuff like this, than my company is going to do the same.
There are plenty of legal "terms and conditions" out there that aren't (or shouldn't be) legally enforceable ... but that doesn't mean that bad companies aren't still sheltering behind them, and that their customers aren't still being intimidated by what they've unwittingly agreed to.
The argument that it doesn't matter because people don't read the legal stuff anyway also doesn't wash, because by including sloppy psuedo-legal "junk" clauses that obviously shouldn't be there, the company is encouraging end-users to think that
(a) online legal contracts are worthless junk that're not worth reading, and
(b) that if a contract appears to say something daft that potentially screws the customer over in an outrageous way, that they, the customer, don't need to worry because the company lawyers will obviously never attempt to use that clause in their favour.
There are "bad" companies out there whose whole business model depends on exploiting contractual clauses that the customer either doesn't read, or thinks that the company won't try to enforce on the grounds of unreasonableness, so these contracts encourage a dangerous sense of complacency in end-users over what they sign up to online.
On the plus side, Google did the right thing by acting immediately and emphatically to fix the problem once it had been brought to their attention.
Good for them for doing that.
But really, there was no excuse for a company as much in the spotlight as Google, whose business depends so much on public goodwill, releasing a contract in that state in the first place. People in large corporations get paid an awful lot of money to make sure that things like this don't happen.
"Honesshtly Offisher, Itsh there!"
(waves arm expansively)
"Itsh all awou ... awou ... Itsh EVEWWywhere!
And do you know why you can't see it?"
(shakily puts finger to lips to signify a deep secret)
"cos itsh vewwwy ... VERwwy ... dark"
(hic)
(turns and staggers off towards the light)
"Hewwo Mishter Lamppost, do you want to be my fwend?"
And this info is from the New Orleans tourist information plaques - seriously!
(watches some news)
Oh. Crap. Never mind, forget that I said that.
(watches more news)
Well, at least the bits of levies that they HAVE rebuilt look better, it's just there that haven't quite finished joining them up yet. Well, I guess it's just as well that water can't go round corners.
Oh. Crap.
Or, Bush was quite insistent that New Orleans WAS going to be rebuilt, and that the people of New Orleans WERE going to go back to New Orleans - because he sure as hell didn't want them relocating permanently to neighboring Texas.
The problem happens when you start losing inland ice. Water (and ice) are heavy ... not quite as heavy as rock, but heavy nonetheless. If you lose a few hundred metres of ice off the top of a landmass, it's almost like shaving off a similar amount of rock. Once the big icy paperweight is taken off the top, the ground beneath rises to restore the balance of forces, and if you have corners and edges of tectonic plates trying to rise against their neighbours, quickly, it sets up geological forces in non-geological time that require resolution. There have already been a few earthquakes blamed on dam construction, where the additional weight of the water has depressed a whole region.
So if we start losing significant amounts of landlocked ice, we might have to be prepared for some of these old hotspots to start kicking off as the new plate stresses try to sort themselves out.
No, I think that Microsoft should stay exactly where they are. Heh.
Yeah, but you also have to bear in mind that initially, the threat posed by BSE was never expected to be nvCJD. We were expecting a human version of the disease to be something much more like standard CJD, with a timelag of decades between exposure to the agent and the development of the full-blown disease. People were talking about the possibility of a statistical swell only starting to appear in the CJD stats (due to BSE) after maybe forty years. We still don't know how big this future body of more "conventional"-looking cases might be. It might only be hundreds, in which case it'll probably be lost in the existing CJD statistics, or it might be in the tens of thousands. We don't yet have a statistical baseline to work from.
What we did start doing in the UK a few years ago was thinking about emergency plans for the mass hospitalisation of large numbers of CJD-type cases, and discussing possible changes in the law to make medical euthanasia easier should society be faced with an overwhelming number of untreatable "terminal" patients with a very low quality of life and low life expectancy.
If we're lucky, then everyone with a susceptibility to the BSE agent will have already "shown" with nvCJD.
If we're not so lucky, the nvCJD cases are simply an anomalous spike preceding the main event.
If we're ==very== unlucky, the worst-case scenario would be that the ratio of BSE-related cases in the two categories ends up reflecting the ratio between the numbers of standard CJD and nvCJD-style cases before all this happened. Hopefully it won't play out like that, but it's still too early to be sure exactly what's going to happen.
You're not supposed to ask that! :)
Ug. Didn't preview. Posted version all ended up as one ugly paragraph. Sorry 'bout that. :(
It's not always snake-oil. There are companies out there who genuinely try to make living conditions better for their animals, and try to apply ethical and veterinary standards that are above the prevailing norm. Trouble is, if they tell anyone what they are doing, their competition complains to the regulatory authorities, and they get told that they aren't legally allowed to tell customers what they're doing, because it might imply that there was something bad about their competitors products. There was a case a few years ago where a dairy farm decided that injecting cows udders with hormones to boost milk production wasn't very nice for the cows, it created cysts and pus at the injection sites that got into the milk, and caused the cows long-term discomfort. So they took the decision not to do it, and labelled their milk accordingly as coming from non-hormone-treated cows. They then got told that it was against US laws to label their product like that. Saying that your animals are reared and maintained more humanely suggests that your competitors animals are reared and maintained less humanely, and although this may well be factually correct, if consumers start exercising choice to buy the more expensively reared product, then the rest of the industry might start feeling pressure to follow suit. That'd put up costs in the industry, higher industry costs are considered a Bad Thing, and therefore government regulators decided that the customer didn't have a right to make those informed decisions. Now, regarding this case, the idea that this ruling is designed to protect the foreign consumer is bullshit. The ruling isn't about protecting poor foreign industries from being mislead about the efficacy of US BSE testing. It's about avoiding the economic turmoil that might happen in US agriculture if a company tests all their animals and starts finding a few positive results. What the ruling says is that a company supplying food isn't legally allowed to use commercially available testing kits to check their meat products without central authorisation, no matter what version of the test they want to use, and no matter whether the animal they want to test is old or young. It's not a ban on advertising, it's a ban on doing the tests in the first place. They now aren't even allowed to do it for their own peace of mind. This is part of a pattern. A little while back, SlashDot carried a story about an NY official trying to ban the use of air quality testing devices by unauthorised personnel, which meant that if you were an environmental activist, and you lived next door to a polluting company that was breaking the law, if you used your hand-held tester to document the law-breaking, then =you= were the criminal, and your evidence couldn't be submitted to a court because you'd obtained it illegally (even if all you'd done was test the air in your own living room or back yard, or out in the public street). It was about avoiding the risk of public scares by making it illegal for people to carry out their own independent tests. Same thing here. Chances are, there'll be some farmers feeding lousy feedstock to their animals, creating feed cycles that allow BSE to exist and persist at a low levels in the food chain. Since we know that BSE has already appeared in the US, we kinda expect that there probably ==are== a few animals out there with it. The regulatory authorities do spot tests that might hopefully give them the heads-up if there is a BSE epidemic looming, but they actively don't want to know about little one-off cases, because then they get put on the spot, and expected to take action. If they disclose the result, they come under pressure to investigate and establish how many cases there are, and to take steps to make sure that no other contaminated meat reaches the market. Which is expensive. If they choose not to tell anyone about a positive result, then they get accused of being responsible for a coverup about the true state of the US food industry, and dishonestly endangering US consumers lives to protect US business. So,
Onwards and Downwards!
http://www.qantas.com.au/info/flying/beforeYouTravel/dangerousGoods
Here's why: http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2006/07/18/laptop-batteries-suspect-in-plane-crash
Security people also tend to be generally suspicious of batteries, because they're essentially sealed packs of combinations of chemicals, with internal wiring and convenient external electrical contacts.