...if you have the evidence and the law on your side it's an extremely small chance.
Yes, an extremely small 50% chance of losing.
I'm sorry, but I'll need to see something to back that figure up. If you're honestly saying that when someone has the evidence and the law on their side, when they get their case to court, they still have a 50% chance of losing, you have a seriously fucked up view of our system of justice, or perhaps you just live somewhere where the court system is based on something other than evidence and law?
I suspect the price of gallium will be a concern more for the manufacturers than the consumers. LCD technology will adapt to the available materials and you probably won't even see a blip in the price or availability of TVs using LCD or similar technologies. I'm not sure why people seem to be of the belief that gallium is the center of the LCD universe, and that the LCD market will collapse as its price goes up. You don't exactly need a lot of it.
Or how about 4. Companies realize a shortage of gallium is imminent, and that they could make a buttload of cash by being the first to come up with a new way of making LCDs that doesn't use gallium. Plus, you're assuming that gallium-less LCDs don't already exist. Maybe #1 is really the best match with reality, and a shortage will provide exactly the momentum needed to switch. I rather suspect that all of this will occur as a real shortage manifests (assuming one does), without the consumer ever noticing a blip in the price of their TVs. You don't need a lot of gallium to make an LCD.
The problem is another one. The amount of LCD panels sold is increasing, and we have a natural limit on the amount of LCD panels than can be in use at a given time: This limit is set by the amount of gallium available.
So as the supply "dries up" (which I don't think will happen in a sense that agrees with this article), the price should start to skyrocket. The production of LCDs with gallium will cost more, creating an incentive to find a way to produce LCDs without it. If not, people will simply buy fewer LCDs and switch to other display technologies.
If the price of gallium becomes absurdly high, it might even be cost-effective to sell your (obsolete or even in-use) LCD panel back to a gallium reclamation business.
The difference between your examples and gallium is that gallium isn't a core, critical component of these technologies. If you run out of gallium, it's unlikely that this will mean the end of computer and TV displays. In a situation like this, the market will function as it should: the price will rise, and people will be encouraged to find a way to deal with the scarcity (use something else) and produce more gallium (recycle perhaps).
What I think you fail to realize is that some applications will try to utilize as much network bandwidth as they can. Bittorrent is a good example, as is HTTP or FTP downloads. With these application types, the speed of the network is always the limiting factor, and they will invariably saturate the slowest link along the path. Usually this is your Internet connection, and traffic shaping can help keep things flowing properly on the outgoing side, but it does nothing on the incoming side (because the packets have already been dropped by the time they reach your router).
The only way to solve this problem exclusively through increasing bandwidth is to provide an infinite amount of bandwidth, or at least so much that storage devices now become the limiting factor in data transfers. This is unlikely to occur. Any time you try to place a VoIP call on a network that is shared with bandwidth-greedy applications, regardless of whatever traffic shaping you want to unilaterally do on one end of that link, your calls will cut out. Applying rules on both ends of the connection are necessary to keep that from happening, and QoS is the logical framework within which to do that.
If user A is sending 400kb/sec of [whatever] and user B is sending 64kb/sec of [whatever] and you need to cut 50kb/sec, you cut it out of user A's bandwidth until he's down to user B's level and then you cut both. It doesn't matter what application which user is using at all -- but if user B is using VOIP then he's fine, and if user A is using VOIP then he's clearly also using something else and he can get his own traffic shaper to make sure his important packets get priority over his own unimportant packets based on the priorities he assigns himself.
But how do you intend on communicating that user's priorities to the ISP (which is cutting 50kb/sec)? Rate limiting works by dropping packets. With your example and a "neutral" ISP, packets would get dropped without regard to service, so user A's VoIP calls would be dropped either way. The only chance this would work is if user A anticipated the throttling and cut back non-VoIP traffic voluntarily.
I'm not sure what you mean. The studies showed congestion occurring sometimes. Do you want your VoIP call being dropped 2-5% of the time because someone fired up Bittorrent? Prioritization is not about throttling Bittorrent. It's about choosing what gets dropped when congestion occurs. Something has to get degraded.
When you choose to prioritize things on your own local network, that doesn't extend to the public Internet. If I want VoIP calls to have precedence over bulk bittorrent downloads, I can tell my router to do that. But when the upstream link gets congested, it's going to drop packets equally regardless of service. So when my neighbors start up bittorrent, and briefly saturate that upstream link, my VoIP call gets dropped. I curse and blame my ISP.
The most reasonable thing to do here is to come up with a common set of traffic classifications. VoIP calls are latency-sensitive, Bittorrent transfers are not. Come up with a list, vet it with the public, and implement QoS using that list. This isn't about "throttling" the Internet, it's about applying common sense when congestion occurs.
My suggestion: two channels, one for QoS-respected traffic, the other free-for-all. The QoS channel costs you, per period time. The free-for-all is all you can eat. Vary the mix you want to purchase, or offer at your free hotspot or WebbieTubeBar. You get what you pay for, no more, and less if you don't use it.
So the problem with this approach is one of cost/administration. The QoS-enabled path must be a QoS-trusted path. That is, you have to ensure that everyone in that path is going to be honest and respectful with their QoS flags, and honor them appropriately. Otherwise, everyone is going to start prioritizing their random BitTorrent downloads so they'll go faster, and we'll be stuck right where we are today with everything prioritized equally (high).
The second problem is political. What you're proposing is the exact definition of a "non-neutral" Internet.
And how can you tell the difference between someone downloading the latest torrent of a Linus or BSD distro for their company server for his work and say someone downloading movies?
Why does it matter? The intent (ostensibly) is to ensure latency-sensitive applications (e.g. VoIP) are still usable when links become congested. Random Bittorrent transfers can easily accommodate a few extra seconds of delay. Your VoIP phone call cannot. Bear in mind that QoS only matters when links become congested. When a link is congested, *something* (everything, currently) has to be degraded. QoS simply allows the network operator to specify what gets degraded less. IMO, sacrificing bulk data transfers in favor of interactive traffic is generally in everyone's best interests, but I can understand how people would get squeamish if there is the possibility that this could eliminate P2P at all. If I had an easy way at home to ensure that my web browsing, SSH, etc., were all responsive even though I had a bunch of bittorrents going, I'd love that.
If the USPS become deluged with junk mail, to the point that the average piece of mail was "degraded" by 2-3 weeks, wouldn't you want the USPS to offer a way to prioritize your rent check to arrive in a more reasonable time? Some applications are flat out *unusable* when the link is congested, because everything has equal priority today. Other applications can tolerate this congestion more easily, so why not exploit this fact and make everything work as well as it can when things are congested?
TLS doesn't have to use only X.509 with trusted roots. Get browsers and servers to implement RFC5081 and you can use OpenPGP keys instead. Take advantage of that web of trust.
In any case there's no point in being so accusatory about it. Either it works or it doesn't.
People are accusatory because these scams surface every year, and every time, it's obviously a scam, and every time, it turns out to be. At some point it's safe to be preemptively accusatory.
So you're implying that huge technological leaps are not possible?
No. That does not logically follow from my statements.
we've found all sorts of ways to use the Earth's raw materials to do work for us, from the stone age up until today.
But nothing in our history has ever approached the magnitude of discovering a way to extract energy from water for free. Once you have an effectively free source of energy, you can do nearly anything.
Oxygen and hydrogen can combust. It's just not efficient to do so with current technology. I'm not holding my breath for someone to figure it out, but I'm not going to dismiss the concept until someone proves it's impossible.
This doesn't make any sense. We burn hydrogen all the time. This is usually the second part of the scams involving fueling cars from water: First, separate the hydrogen from the water. Then, burn the resulting hydrogen. Profit! Any high school student should be able to see the real problem here: the "burning" of hydrogen is nothing more than converting it back to water. It releases energy because energy was required to split them apart in the first place. Nobody wants to explain where that energy came from.
And they're marketing it to power a car?
Sure: isn't that what a ton of research is being poured into now? This part doesn't surprise me at all, actually.
I don't know, but if I were the inventor of this, I'd aim a little higher, like replacing every single power plant in the world with my new patented technology. It would be kind of stupid to limit one's invention to such a small portion of the energy market, don't you think? Perhaps you don't realize just how big a deal free energy from water really is, and how insanely profitable and humanity-altering this invention would be. The only reason cars are chosen for scams like this is because lots of idiots drive cars, and lots of those idiots are desperate to find ways to cut their fuel costs.
Right, but my point is that there is a device which does mechanical work by "just adding water".
But the water provides no power! No energy whatsoever is "extracted" from the water. Water isn't even necessary for the drinking bird. You just need some way to provide a temperature differential. You could just as easily apply heat to the other side. To say that this thing is "powered by water" is absolutely factually incorrect.
but what research proves that there is no possible way to, for example, beat the efficiency of electrolysis?
The only way you are going to require less energy to split hydrogen out of water than you'd receive by recombining (burning) them later is if you violate the law of conversation of energy. You can't prove that something violating the law of conversation of energy doesn't exist, but you'd be an utter idiot to invest in something claiming to do so.
As long as replacing the aluminum substrate is cost competitive compared to maintenance of other vehicles (nothing runs forever), it's still a win.
Absolutely. But the energy here is provided by the aluminum, not the water. The aluminum is the fuel.
I don't think you are using the word "impossible" correctly. Improbable, sure. If we want to go after people about precision, we should probably be precise ourselves.
There is no use of impossible that is ever (precisely) correct, since it can never be proven. The word is merely an assertion. Don't be so pedantic.
I don't believe it likely this car works as advertised
So you agree that they're lying, or that this is a scam?
I also don't see how in theory water can't provide power.
Think about this for a moment, though. If someone discovered a way to extract energy from water "for free" (i.e. no "hidden fuels" like aluminum), this would completely revolutionize energy production in the world. This would be the most significant invention in human history. And they're marketing it to power a car? And lying about how it works?
the drinking bird is a real machine powered only by water (and the environment, if you want to get technical).
Ahh, but it's only when you "get technical" do you actually get at the truth. The water powers nothing. No energy is "extracted" from the water. The evaporation of the water cools the beak, but it's really the temperature differential that produces the energy. There are plenty of types of heat engines that exploit temperature differences to generate power.
We don't know of a means to extract energy efficiently from water yet, but I don't see any reason we might not be able to in theory.
There's one way of extracting energy from water: fusion. I would hope that the person inventing fusion in a package suitable to power a car would do more with this humanity-altering invention than that. You could also mix the hydrogen with anti-hydrogen, but you'd have to produce anti-hydrogen somehow, which would require energy.
What these guys are claiming is impossible. Other ways of extracting energy from water are completely impractical, and, if they ever become practical, are unlikely to be announced to the world in a press release suggesting a new way to power your car.
If the victim/falsely accused later is released, and obtains cash compensation from the kidnapper/state that includes a line item for "lost wages", I don't think it unreasonable at all for that amount to be reduced by the expenses actually incurred supporting the individual while he or she was in "custody". He did eat the food, right? If you're going to itemize your compensation package, it needs to be complete. If your reaction to this is that since he was screwed by the state, he deserves "more" money, then you should re-examine the portion of the compensation package that is actually compensatory (and not the line items) and increase it if necessary.
I said "normally", as in "generally". Criminal convictions for copyright infringement are exceptionally rare, while civil suits are common. In fact, if you believe the RIAA, there has been only a single criminal conviction for online copyright infringement of music. Your assertion that "Most copyright infringement on the Internet is falls under Criminal Infringement" needs a citation.
1. Copyright infringement isn't normally a crime. You're using the word "illegal" and "guilty" carelessly here. 2. Committing a crime to retaliate in response to another crime is still wrong, and committing a crime in retaliation for a mere civil infraction doubly so.
Toon child porn is a very real problem that affects residents of Toontown every day. Local ordinances only go so far. So long as there are no laws against toon child porn outside of Toontown, the demand exists and toon children continue to be exploited. Toon children are regularly taken across municipal lines and blatantly exploited in dark basements to produce these images. It's about time we did something about this and I applaud this ban.
Techniques for "converting" a photograph or a video into a form that mimics drawings or cartoons have been around for years. Pick up any graphics program and check out some of the filters that are bundled with it.
It is possible for genetics to heavily influence behavior, which should be obvious when you consider that humans behave differently from other species. Rarely do behavioral traits come exclusively from genetics or exclusively from the environment. Usually it's a combination of the two (with the genetic component considered a predisposition).
The vast majority of what? Pedophiles? Or those convicted of child rape? How can you possibly draw any conclusions about those that are sexually attracted to children but have never been convicted of a related crime? How do you even know who they are? I might buy your unsourced assertion that the vast majority of convicted child rapists were abused themselves as a child, because at least there, some meaningful data can be collected, but not all pedophiles have ever acted on their attraction. It seems premature to dismiss the parent poster's claim as "not true" when you have no facts to back that up.
You seem to be confusing pedophilia with rape. A person can be a pedophile without ever touching a child/minor. This distinction is important to understanding the problem with laws like this.
The article and video show individual HIV particles emerging from a cell. There isn't any imaging of "hundreds of thousands of molecules coming together" to form the particles. Or am I missing something?
Nope, not at all. If I try to interpret your comment as making a joke, I haven't the foggiest idea where it's coming from or why it's amusing, except in the sense that it's absurd, which is why I originally responded. If it was intended to be a joke, then I apologize for not getting it.
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I'm sorry, but I'll need to see something to back that figure up. If you're honestly saying that when someone has the evidence and the law on their side, when they get their case to court, they still have a 50% chance of losing, you have a seriously fucked up view of our system of justice, or perhaps you just live somewhere where the court system is based on something other than evidence and law?
I suspect the price of gallium will be a concern more for the manufacturers than the consumers. LCD technology will adapt to the available materials and you probably won't even see a blip in the price or availability of TVs using LCD or similar technologies. I'm not sure why people seem to be of the belief that gallium is the center of the LCD universe, and that the LCD market will collapse as its price goes up. You don't exactly need a lot of it.
Or how about 4. Companies realize a shortage of gallium is imminent, and that they could make a buttload of cash by being the first to come up with a new way of making LCDs that doesn't use gallium. Plus, you're assuming that gallium-less LCDs don't already exist. Maybe #1 is really the best match with reality, and a shortage will provide exactly the momentum needed to switch. I rather suspect that all of this will occur as a real shortage manifests (assuming one does), without the consumer ever noticing a blip in the price of their TVs. You don't need a lot of gallium to make an LCD.
So as the supply "dries up" (which I don't think will happen in a sense that agrees with this article), the price should start to skyrocket. The production of LCDs with gallium will cost more, creating an incentive to find a way to produce LCDs without it. If not, people will simply buy fewer LCDs and switch to other display technologies.
If the price of gallium becomes absurdly high, it might even be cost-effective to sell your (obsolete or even in-use) LCD panel back to a gallium reclamation business.
The difference between your examples and gallium is that gallium isn't a core, critical component of these technologies. If you run out of gallium, it's unlikely that this will mean the end of computer and TV displays. In a situation like this, the market will function as it should: the price will rise, and people will be encouraged to find a way to deal with the scarcity (use something else) and produce more gallium (recycle perhaps).
What I think you fail to realize is that some applications will try to utilize as much network bandwidth as they can. Bittorrent is a good example, as is HTTP or FTP downloads. With these application types, the speed of the network is always the limiting factor, and they will invariably saturate the slowest link along the path. Usually this is your Internet connection, and traffic shaping can help keep things flowing properly on the outgoing side, but it does nothing on the incoming side (because the packets have already been dropped by the time they reach your router).
The only way to solve this problem exclusively through increasing bandwidth is to provide an infinite amount of bandwidth, or at least so much that storage devices now become the limiting factor in data transfers. This is unlikely to occur. Any time you try to place a VoIP call on a network that is shared with bandwidth-greedy applications, regardless of whatever traffic shaping you want to unilaterally do on one end of that link, your calls will cut out. Applying rules on both ends of the connection are necessary to keep that from happening, and QoS is the logical framework within which to do that.
But how do you intend on communicating that user's priorities to the ISP (which is cutting 50kb/sec)? Rate limiting works by dropping packets. With your example and a "neutral" ISP, packets would get dropped without regard to service, so user A's VoIP calls would be dropped either way. The only chance this would work is if user A anticipated the throttling and cut back non-VoIP traffic voluntarily.
I'm not sure what you mean. The studies showed congestion occurring sometimes. Do you want your VoIP call being dropped 2-5% of the time because someone fired up Bittorrent? Prioritization is not about throttling Bittorrent. It's about choosing what gets dropped when congestion occurs. Something has to get degraded.
When you choose to prioritize things on your own local network, that doesn't extend to the public Internet. If I want VoIP calls to have precedence over bulk bittorrent downloads, I can tell my router to do that. But when the upstream link gets congested, it's going to drop packets equally regardless of service. So when my neighbors start up bittorrent, and briefly saturate that upstream link, my VoIP call gets dropped. I curse and blame my ISP.
The most reasonable thing to do here is to come up with a common set of traffic classifications. VoIP calls are latency-sensitive, Bittorrent transfers are not. Come up with a list, vet it with the public, and implement QoS using that list. This isn't about "throttling" the Internet, it's about applying common sense when congestion occurs.
So the problem with this approach is one of cost/administration. The QoS-enabled path must be a QoS-trusted path. That is, you have to ensure that everyone in that path is going to be honest and respectful with their QoS flags, and honor them appropriately. Otherwise, everyone is going to start prioritizing their random BitTorrent downloads so they'll go faster, and we'll be stuck right where we are today with everything prioritized equally (high).
The second problem is political. What you're proposing is the exact definition of a "non-neutral" Internet.
Why does it matter? The intent (ostensibly) is to ensure latency-sensitive applications (e.g. VoIP) are still usable when links become congested. Random Bittorrent transfers can easily accommodate a few extra seconds of delay. Your VoIP phone call cannot. Bear in mind that QoS only matters when links become congested. When a link is congested, *something* (everything, currently) has to be degraded. QoS simply allows the network operator to specify what gets degraded less. IMO, sacrificing bulk data transfers in favor of interactive traffic is generally in everyone's best interests, but I can understand how people would get squeamish if there is the possibility that this could eliminate P2P at all. If I had an easy way at home to ensure that my web browsing, SSH, etc., were all responsive even though I had a bunch of bittorrents going, I'd love that.
If the USPS become deluged with junk mail, to the point that the average piece of mail was "degraded" by 2-3 weeks, wouldn't you want the USPS to offer a way to prioritize your rent check to arrive in a more reasonable time? Some applications are flat out *unusable* when the link is congested, because everything has equal priority today. Other applications can tolerate this congestion more easily, so why not exploit this fact and make everything work as well as it can when things are congested?
TLS doesn't have to use only X.509 with trusted roots. Get browsers and servers to implement RFC5081 and you can use OpenPGP keys instead. Take advantage of that web of trust.
People are accusatory because these scams surface every year, and every time, it's obviously a scam, and every time, it turns out to be. At some point it's safe to be preemptively accusatory.
No. That does not logically follow from my statements.
But nothing in our history has ever approached the magnitude of discovering a way to extract energy from water for free. Once you have an effectively free source of energy, you can do nearly anything.
This doesn't make any sense. We burn hydrogen all the time. This is usually the second part of the scams involving fueling cars from water: First, separate the hydrogen from the water. Then, burn the resulting hydrogen. Profit! Any high school student should be able to see the real problem here: the "burning" of hydrogen is nothing more than converting it back to water. It releases energy because energy was required to split them apart in the first place. Nobody wants to explain where that energy came from.
I don't know, but if I were the inventor of this, I'd aim a little higher, like replacing every single power plant in the world with my new patented technology. It would be kind of stupid to limit one's invention to such a small portion of the energy market, don't you think? Perhaps you don't realize just how big a deal free energy from water really is, and how insanely profitable and humanity-altering this invention would be. The only reason cars are chosen for scams like this is because lots of idiots drive cars, and lots of those idiots are desperate to find ways to cut their fuel costs.
But the water provides no power! No energy whatsoever is "extracted" from the water. Water isn't even necessary for the drinking bird. You just need some way to provide a temperature differential. You could just as easily apply heat to the other side. To say that this thing is "powered by water" is absolutely factually incorrect.
The only way you are going to require less energy to split hydrogen out of water than you'd receive by recombining (burning) them later is if you violate the law of conversation of energy. You can't prove that something violating the law of conversation of energy doesn't exist, but you'd be an utter idiot to invest in something claiming to do so.
Absolutely. But the energy here is provided by the aluminum, not the water. The aluminum is the fuel.
There is no use of impossible that is ever (precisely) correct, since it can never be proven. The word is merely an assertion. Don't be so pedantic.
So you agree that they're lying, or that this is a scam?
Think about this for a moment, though. If someone discovered a way to extract energy from water "for free" (i.e. no "hidden fuels" like aluminum), this would completely revolutionize energy production in the world. This would be the most significant invention in human history. And they're marketing it to power a car? And lying about how it works?
Ahh, but it's only when you "get technical" do you actually get at the truth. The water powers nothing. No energy is "extracted" from the water. The evaporation of the water cools the beak, but it's really the temperature differential that produces the energy. There are plenty of types of heat engines that exploit temperature differences to generate power.
There's one way of extracting energy from water: fusion. I would hope that the person inventing fusion in a package suitable to power a car would do more with this humanity-altering invention than that. You could also mix the hydrogen with anti-hydrogen, but you'd have to produce anti-hydrogen somehow, which would require energy.
What these guys are claiming is impossible. Other ways of extracting energy from water are completely impractical, and, if they ever become practical, are unlikely to be announced to the world in a press release suggesting a new way to power your car.
If the victim/falsely accused later is released, and obtains cash compensation from the kidnapper/state that includes a line item for "lost wages", I don't think it unreasonable at all for that amount to be reduced by the expenses actually incurred supporting the individual while he or she was in "custody". He did eat the food, right? If you're going to itemize your compensation package, it needs to be complete. If your reaction to this is that since he was screwed by the state, he deserves "more" money, then you should re-examine the portion of the compensation package that is actually compensatory (and not the line items) and increase it if necessary.
Also from "TFA":
I read this as saying Google provided the "anonymized" PDF, and the ACCC said, "OK," and posted it. This would make it Google's error.
I said "normally", as in "generally". Criminal convictions for copyright infringement are exceptionally rare, while civil suits are common. In fact, if you believe the RIAA, there has been only a single criminal conviction for online copyright infringement of music. Your assertion that "Most copyright infringement on the Internet is falls under Criminal Infringement" needs a citation.
1. Copyright infringement isn't normally a crime. You're using the word "illegal" and "guilty" carelessly here.
2. Committing a crime to retaliate in response to another crime is still wrong, and committing a crime in retaliation for a mere civil infraction doubly so.
Toon child porn is a very real problem that affects residents of Toontown every day. Local ordinances only go so far. So long as there are no laws against toon child porn outside of Toontown, the demand exists and toon children continue to be exploited. Toon children are regularly taken across municipal lines and blatantly exploited in dark basements to produce these images. It's about time we did something about this and I applaud this ban.
Techniques for "converting" a photograph or a video into a form that mimics drawings or cartoons have been around for years. Pick up any graphics program and check out some of the filters that are bundled with it.
It is possible for genetics to heavily influence behavior, which should be obvious when you consider that humans behave differently from other species. Rarely do behavioral traits come exclusively from genetics or exclusively from the environment. Usually it's a combination of the two (with the genetic component considered a predisposition).
The vast majority of what? Pedophiles? Or those convicted of child rape? How can you possibly draw any conclusions about those that are sexually attracted to children but have never been convicted of a related crime? How do you even know who they are? I might buy your unsourced assertion that the vast majority of convicted child rapists were abused themselves as a child, because at least there, some meaningful data can be collected, but not all pedophiles have ever acted on their attraction. It seems premature to dismiss the parent poster's claim as "not true" when you have no facts to back that up.
You seem to be confusing pedophilia with rape. A person can be a pedophile without ever touching a child/minor. This distinction is important to understanding the problem with laws like this.
The article and video show individual HIV particles emerging from a cell. There isn't any imaging of "hundreds of thousands of molecules coming together" to form the particles. Or am I missing something?
Nope, not at all. If I try to interpret your comment as making a joke, I haven't the foggiest idea where it's coming from or why it's amusing, except in the sense that it's absurd, which is why I originally responded. If it was intended to be a joke, then I apologize for not getting it.