I'm not at all sure the greens won't sell us out for environmental causes - but given both major parties want this "so stupid it's indistinguishable from evil" filter, and labour is already selling us out to the fundies while the liberals seem to be running around with their heads alternately chopped off or buried in the sand... I'm thinking it's one of those situations where we're better off with the devil we don't know.
Check Peter's history. He has a previous conviction for being belligerent to a cop.
From Peter's blog: I do not have a criminal record in Canada. I have never been convicted of anything in Canada; those of you who want to find evidence to the contrary, knock yourselves out and good luck.
Sorry, my point was more that I don't like anyone who abuses the privileges of their station, such as policies and procedures that allow them to be safe, to inflict cruelties on others.
Perspective anecdote: one of my personal "unknown heroes" is a highway cop who stood there calmly listening to this frustrated motorist he pulled over deliver this obscene tirade of vitriol. He just asked questions, wrote the ticket, and let the guy vent. No shouting, no arrest for disorderly conduct, no mace, no "he tripped in the car and hit his face on the steering wheel", nothing. Totally kept his cool. You could have balanced tigers on his cool. So when I read of situations like this, where a guard flies off the handle and beats the crap out of a tourist for daring to ask what the problem is, I know one bad cop doesn't mean all bad cops - I've seen the proof otherwise.
When an officer of the law resorts to the use of violence (and I mean bloody violence, not some wrestling lock or whatever) on a non-violent "offender" (regardless of any verbal aggressiveness), I consider that officer has failed in his duty. But what truly disturbs me is not that it inevitably happens - we're all human - but that it can be excused and abetted when it happens so blatantly. When the testimonies of those guards present not only don't match but contradict, when the guy laying on the ground covered in mace and his own blood gets dragged through the courts and convicted of a felony, when the officer who put him there does not even get an official reprimand let alone arrested himself... it has gone way past one officer losing his temper and making a mistake.
American society is not armed. That a minority own guns and a smaller minority take them out to go shooting on weekends, does not Heinlein's armed society make. Not even close.
Au contraire, his defense lawyer should be congratulated for keeping Peter's head above the muck and mire that are the US border and legal systems. And if you read Peter's blog, he speaks incredibly highly of Doug.
So you don't like police officers because their policies and procedures allow them to be safe.
To quote Peter himself, "... taxicab drivers suffer three times the homicide rate of any law enforcement category, that being a cabbie is the fifth-most-dangerous job in the US while Law Enforcement doesn’t even make the Top 10. If the risks associated with border patrol can be invoked to excuse the kind of violence I experienced, should we not extend the same immunity to cabbies?"
Perhaps if they looked and avoided them they wouldn't have anything to worry about?
As noted in the summary, the patent holders seem keen to insinuate that you simply can't do video codecs without infringing on their patents, without actually saying so plainly.
As noted in the summary, Jobs says 'a patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other "open source" codecs now' - and I read "go after" as "attack", because that's what it is.
Perhaps if we didn't allow asshats to decide they can control the use of mathematics, to decide they can use patents as weapons, we wouldn't have this sort of crap to worry about.
As we're working with squares, ~11,538 km^2 is roughly a little over 107x107 km. And that's to provide 15 TW of power for the entire planet.
10% efficiency? Build ten 107x107 km plants. 5%? Build fifty. That's still a dot on the surface area of the planet.
PV panels exorbitant? Use mirrors and steam, no fancy photovoltaics required.
Big cost to replace all our existing coal plants? We're going to have do that anyway, power stations require maintenance and eventually need replacing/rebuilding.
Big cost to build a new distribution grid? Same thing, our current grid requires constant maintenance, one way or another we're spending the money...
What I would like to see done is a formal, independent study of the _total logistics_ for fossil (coal, gas, etc), nuclear (slow, fast, etc) and solar (PV, ST, etc). Not just how much it costs a business to build and run a power station, but the total cost to our civilisation as a whole of everything involved in putting those power stations there, maintaining and supplying them, and cleaning up the mess they make both during and after their existence.
This is an ISP. If they don't have gear that can make 8.8.8.8 at your end go to a different IP address at their end, they aren't worthy of their acronym.
15,000,000,000,000 W / ~1,300 W/m^2 = ~11,538,461,538 m^2 or ~11,538,461 km^2
Um... without looking at the rest, do note that 1 km^2 = 1,000,000 m^2. (consider: how many 1x1 metre squares can fit in a 1x1 km square). Your result should thus be ~11,538 km^2.
Also interesting is that the two cases took six and five years respectively to resolve. Despite the "not guilty" at the end, each still had the government's sword hanging over their head for that length of time....
"I'm not giving you anything. Give me the passwords. If you don't, I'll fire you and then pursue criminal charges against you for withholding them. And now that there is precedent, you'll likely get 5 years in prison.
Now give me the passwords."
"Certainly. The passwords are sixty-four character randomised strings stored in a locked box in the company safe and at the bank, both under constant video surveillance, and each box can only be opened with the physical keys of at least two of the company's six executive directors. I certainly don't remember them. Oh, and if you forgot the memo and were wondering what this little thing hanging around my neck is, due to that very same precedent all conversations with IT department administrators are now recorded - live - by Legal... uh, sir... please put that down... sir, it's not that bad... *loud bang*... oh, yuck...."
Now that may be a "nuke it from orbit" BOFH example, but the lesson to take away from this mess is to choose passwords you can't remember and store them such that idiot PHBs need a third party's authorisation ("gosh, I'd love to help, but my hands are tied, sorry boss"). If you're in a job where this is not company policy and you suspect your PHB is the type, then apply social engineering to make it become policy (or find a new job). The smart execs won't have a problem, the idiots are kept away from the nukes, and nobody spends years in jail for the crime of having stronger ethics than their boss.
So a member of the jury admits that the defendant was wrongly put in a position by the government, that the government "did everything they possibly could wrong", and then when the government arrests the defendant, the jury - despite having "a lot of sympathy for him" - still convicts him?!
One could argue that, but doing so doesn't make it a good idea. Do you really want a law that says your memories can be owned (and thus subject to taxation, forfeiture, etcetera) by a government (or anyone else)? Don't go there.
The law says "All production system-level passwords must be part of the security administered global password management database." He should not be the only person with access to the network. That is why he was asked for the password and should have handed it over.
If that's what the law says, they should have asked him to follow it and he should have then complied (and if he refused then sure call the cops), but saying "you're not following policy so we're going to order you to break another policy as well" is not right.
Question is, did the mail office (Google) actually do that? Orkut requires you to sign in. I can't find any "Anonymous Coward" option. Should the mail office be fined if someone posts a letter with a false sender name?
True. On the other hand, if you run a public bulletin board (post office) where a computer (sorting machine) puts up (delivers) whatever people tell it to post (write), should you be held accountable for someone who fakes their id (puts a false return address)?
The poster is the one who placed the message. The poster decided to type it, the poster decided to submit it, the poster decided to do so anonymously. Google no more "placed it" than the post office "places" letters, and to shoot the bearer of bad tidings just because you can't catch the author is a petty and vindictive act, especially by a court of a country that claims to enshrine personal honour in its constitution.
And if I anonymously graffiti someone's wall in Brazil, does the Federal Constitution of Brazil hold the wall's owner accountable for my action if I can't be identified?
Yes, one of the posters here has pointed out that Brazil forbids anonymous speech, which I was not aware of when I made the submission*. However, Orkut requires you to sign in - unless there's some "anonymous coward" option I missed - so the poster must have supplied an email address that the Brazilian authorities could not or did not trace. How is that Google's fault? There are no magic wands, and this is still a blatant case of "shoot the messenger".
And regarding the Italian case, they didn't just fine Google, they convicted four Google employees - the second article I linked to goes into some detail, includes personal statements from two of those convicted, and also has this comment from a Google VP: "To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video's existence until after it was removed." That's not just shooting the messenger, that's shooting the messenger's family and neighbours.
*(how does that even work?! do they fine the telephone company whenever somebody makes an anonymous call? do they arrest the owners of walls whenever somebody paints graffiti? it is like forbidding the tide from coming in or the sun from rising in the morning)
One viable set of economic models is to have no copyrights, no patents, and limited trademarks. A smooth transition to a model fitting that set requires far more political will than currently exists, however market forces (i.e., seven billion people who don't like being told what they can and can't know) will continue to generate motivating feedback. No guarantees that entrenched interests won't push us into some intellectual hellhole first, though.
Update to my above post - apparently the government's security is covered by different-but-similar pieces of legislation, and not being a US resident I'm not about to go wading through it to find out where they've hidden the inevitable loopholes.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not at all sure the greens won't sell us out for environmental causes - but given both major parties want this "so stupid it's indistinguishable from evil" filter, and labour is already selling us out to the fundies while the liberals seem to be running around with their heads alternately chopped off or buried in the sand... I'm thinking it's one of those situations where we're better off with the devil we don't know.
FWIW, Heinlein's idea of an armed society was that the majority of citizens went armed in public. Keeping arsenals in our basements isn't the same.
From Peter's blog: I do not have a criminal record in Canada. I have never been convicted of anything in Canada; those of you who want to find evidence to the contrary, knock yourselves out and good luck.
So cite proof or retract.
Sorry, my point was more that I don't like anyone who abuses the privileges of their station, such as policies and procedures that allow them to be safe, to inflict cruelties on others.
Perspective anecdote: one of my personal "unknown heroes" is a highway cop who stood there calmly listening to this frustrated motorist he pulled over deliver this obscene tirade of vitriol. He just asked questions, wrote the ticket, and let the guy vent. No shouting, no arrest for disorderly conduct, no mace, no "he tripped in the car and hit his face on the steering wheel", nothing. Totally kept his cool. You could have balanced tigers on his cool. So when I read of situations like this, where a guard flies off the handle and beats the crap out of a tourist for daring to ask what the problem is, I know one bad cop doesn't mean all bad cops - I've seen the proof otherwise.
When an officer of the law resorts to the use of violence (and I mean bloody violence, not some wrestling lock or whatever) on a non-violent "offender" (regardless of any verbal aggressiveness), I consider that officer has failed in his duty. But what truly disturbs me is not that it inevitably happens - we're all human - but that it can be excused and abetted when it happens so blatantly. When the testimonies of those guards present not only don't match but contradict, when the guy laying on the ground covered in mace and his own blood gets dragged through the courts and convicted of a felony, when the officer who put him there does not even get an official reprimand let alone arrested himself... it has gone way past one officer losing his temper and making a mistake.
American society is not armed. That a minority own guns and a smaller minority take them out to go shooting on weekends, does not Heinlein's armed society make. Not even close.
Au contraire, his defense lawyer should be congratulated for keeping Peter's head above the muck and mire that are the US border and legal systems. And if you read Peter's blog, he speaks incredibly highly of Doug.
To quote Peter himself, "... taxicab drivers suffer three times the homicide rate of any law enforcement category, that being a cabbie is the fifth-most-dangerous job in the US while Law Enforcement doesn’t even make the Top 10. If the risks associated with border patrol can be invoked to excuse the kind of violence I experienced, should we not extend the same immunity to cabbies?"
As noted in the summary, the patent holders seem keen to insinuate that you simply can't do video codecs without infringing on their patents, without actually saying so plainly.
As noted in the summary, Jobs says 'a patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other "open source" codecs now' - and I read "go after" as "attack", because that's what it is.
Perhaps if we didn't allow asshats to decide they can control the use of mathematics, to decide they can use patents as weapons, we wouldn't have this sort of crap to worry about.
As we're working with squares, ~11,538 km^2 is roughly a little over 107x107 km. And that's to provide 15 TW of power for the entire planet.
10% efficiency? Build ten 107x107 km plants. 5%? Build fifty. That's still a dot on the surface area of the planet.
PV panels exorbitant? Use mirrors and steam, no fancy photovoltaics required.
Big cost to replace all our existing coal plants? We're going to have do that anyway, power stations require maintenance and eventually need replacing/rebuilding.
Big cost to build a new distribution grid? Same thing, our current grid requires constant maintenance, one way or another we're spending the money...
What I would like to see done is a formal, independent study of the _total logistics_ for fossil (coal, gas, etc), nuclear (slow, fast, etc) and solar (PV, ST, etc). Not just how much it costs a business to build and run a power station, but the total cost to our civilisation as a whole of everything involved in putting those power stations there, maintaining and supplying them, and cleaning up the mess they make both during and after their existence.
This is an ISP. If they don't have gear that can make 8.8.8.8 at your end go to a different IP address at their end, they aren't worthy of their acronym.
Um, this could be a silly question, but: why?
Um... without looking at the rest, do note that 1 km^2 = 1,000,000 m^2. (consider: how many 1x1 metre squares can fit in a 1x1 km square). Your result should thus be ~11,538 km^2.
Also interesting is that the two cases took six and five years respectively to resolve. Despite the "not guilty" at the end, each still had the government's sword hanging over their head for that length of time....
"Certainly. The passwords are sixty-four character randomised strings stored in a locked box in the company safe and at the bank, both under constant video surveillance, and each box can only be opened with the physical keys of at least two of the company's six executive directors. I certainly don't remember them. Oh, and if you forgot the memo and were wondering what this little thing hanging around my neck is, due to that very same precedent all conversations with IT department administrators are now recorded - live - by Legal... uh, sir... please put that down... sir, it's not that bad... *loud bang*... oh, yuck...."
Now that may be a "nuke it from orbit" BOFH example, but the lesson to take away from this mess is to choose passwords you can't remember and store them such that idiot PHBs need a third party's authorisation ("gosh, I'd love to help, but my hands are tied, sorry boss"). If you're in a job where this is not company policy and you suspect your PHB is the type, then apply social engineering to make it become policy (or find a new job). The smart execs won't have a problem, the idiots are kept away from the nukes, and nobody spends years in jail for the crime of having stronger ethics than their boss.
So a member of the jury admits that the defendant was wrongly put in a position by the government, that the government "did everything they possibly could wrong", and then when the government arrests the defendant, the jury - despite having "a lot of sympathy for him" - still convicts him?!
Milgram experiment, anyone?
One could argue that, but doing so doesn't make it a good idea. Do you really want a law that says your memories can be owned (and thus subject to taxation, forfeiture, etcetera) by a government (or anyone else)? Don't go there.
If that's what the law says, they should have asked him to follow it and he should have then complied (and if he refused then sure call the cops), but saying "you're not following policy so we're going to order you to break another policy as well" is not right.
Question is, did the mail office (Google) actually do that? Orkut requires you to sign in. I can't find any "Anonymous Coward" option. Should the mail office be fined if someone posts a letter with a false sender name?
True. On the other hand, if you run a public bulletin board (post office) where a computer (sorting machine) puts up (delivers) whatever people tell it to post (write), should you be held accountable for someone who fakes their id (puts a false return address)?
And messages posted in the mail have to go through the Post Office to get to a place where people can see them... seriously, how is this different?
The poster is the one who placed the message. The poster decided to type it, the poster decided to submit it, the poster decided to do so anonymously. Google no more "placed it" than the post office "places" letters, and to shoot the bearer of bad tidings just because you can't catch the author is a petty and vindictive act, especially by a court of a country that claims to enshrine personal honour in its constitution.
And if I anonymously graffiti someone's wall in Brazil, does the Federal Constitution of Brazil hold the wall's owner accountable for my action if I can't be identified?
Yes, one of the posters here has pointed out that Brazil forbids anonymous speech, which I was not aware of when I made the submission*. However, Orkut requires you to sign in - unless there's some "anonymous coward" option I missed - so the poster must have supplied an email address that the Brazilian authorities could not or did not trace. How is that Google's fault? There are no magic wands, and this is still a blatant case of "shoot the messenger".
And regarding the Italian case, they didn't just fine Google, they convicted four Google employees - the second article I linked to goes into some detail, includes personal statements from two of those convicted, and also has this comment from a Google VP: "To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video's existence until after it was removed." That's not just shooting the messenger, that's shooting the messenger's family and neighbours.
*(how does that even work?! do they fine the telephone company whenever somebody makes an anonymous call? do they arrest the owners of walls whenever somebody paints graffiti? it is like forbidding the tide from coming in or the sun from rising in the morning)
One viable set of economic models is to have no copyrights, no patents, and limited trademarks. A smooth transition to a model fitting that set requires far more political will than currently exists, however market forces (i.e., seven billion people who don't like being told what they can and can't know) will continue to generate motivating feedback. No guarantees that entrenched interests won't push us into some intellectual hellhole first, though.
Update to my above post - apparently the government's security is covered by different-but-similar pieces of legislation, and not being a US resident I'm not about to go wading through it to find out where they've hidden the inevitable loopholes.