Another interesting tidbit which has been true of the many states I've lived in. Responding to a verbal threat with force but less than deadly force almost universally has the result of you being considered the guilty party.
As Mr. Bumble opined in Dickens's novel Oliver Twist, "... the law is an ass."
"You're a great man," the scammer cajoled. "You was a judge, you was an attorney, you was a basketball player, you were in the U.S. Navy, homeland security. I know everything about you. I even seen your photograph, and I seen your precious wife.
I would have taken that to be complimentary designed to lower the defences of the potential victim. He's just saying he's looked into they guy obviously that would include photos and from the context he is saying the guys wife is pretty, thats it. Sure it sounds vaguely threatening out of context and written down but that doesn't make it a threat. And seeing as the guy was apparently in Jamaica where is the threat?
To me, it sounds a lot like an obsessed stalker, rather than a fan. Also, Webster is in his 90's, so I doubt the wannabe scammer was saying his wife was pretty. "Precious," again, comes across as vaguely threatening in the context of his call, to me. Tone of voice would make the difference as to which interpretation the judge felt was correct, of course - and it seems clear that the FBI recorded the second call, so the judge would have actually heard it, as we have not.
Your comment that "the guy was apparently in Jamaica" leads me to suspect you're not American. If you were, you would be as familiar with - and as frustrated by - the ever-increasing barrage of scam calls from phone numbers spoofed to appear as though they originate from local exchanges that we who live here have to endure, as the FCC sits with folded hands, doing absolutely nothing to stem the deluge.
On SS7, nobody can tell you're a Jamaican scammer...
I'm pretty sure the judge viewed, "I know everything about you. I even seen your photograph, and I seen your precious wife," as an implied threat, à la, "Nice wife you have there. Pity if anything happened to her."
But concluded:
"I agree that he was never in any personal danger..."
Prompting Shaitan to point out:
Sure but if you threaten to kill someone who turns out to be Navy seal it is still the same crime as threatening to kill the sweet old lady from 2B. Now if said seal or old lady kills you alleging they feared for their life considerations like that matter.
You're correct on both points. A threat is a threat, no matter who it's directed at. Responding to a threat with deadly force may or may not be treated as justifiable homicide, depending not only on the self-defense capabilities of the person being threatened, but on other circumstances, such as the credibility of the threat, the other options (short of deadly force) that were available to the target of the threat at the moment he/she acted, and - very importantly - the state of his or her mind at the time.
But issuing a threat constitutes simple assault under American jurisprudence, regardless. And doing so while in the process of committing a felony crime against the target of that threat is an act that the presiding judge may consider deserving of an "enhancement" to the sentence for the original felony - as clearly happened in this case.
Full disclosure: IANAL. I don't even watch any of the 57 flavors of Lawn Order. So there... !
The director never really had potential to be a victim. However this guy won't be targeting other potential victims, it will make make some people think twice before becoming a criminal as well which has positive benefit on society for us all.
I'm pretty sure the judge viewed, "I know everything about you. I even seen your photograph, and I seen your precious wife," as an implied threat, à la, "Nice wife you have there. Pity if anything happened to her."
However, given Webster's career - and his reaction to this idiot's attempt to scam him - I agree that he was never in any personal danger...
This is a good thing. We need to stop obsessing about Mars. Once humanity moves off-earth, the dumbest thing we could do is settle onto another planetary surface. We would just be moving from one gravity well to another. The asteroids should be our colonial target.
I could not more heartily agree.
Mars gravity is less than 40% of Earth's - but that's still a pretty major barrier to launching anything (people, for instance) from its surface into orbit, where an actual spaceship (i.e. - one that was built in zero g, and designed to shuttle stuff from orbit around one gravity well to orbit around another, without itself ever actually landing on a planetary surface) can transport it across interplanetary space. By contrast, even Ceres (the largest object in the asteroid belt) has only a sixth the gravity of Luna - not weak enough for a human to be able to achieve orbit by jumping off its surface, but also not strong enough to require enormous amounts of reaction mass for such a spacecraft to reach escape velocity.
C-type asteroids (aka "carbonaceous chondrites") should be excellent sources of organic raw materials for manufacturing plastics, etc. M-types are likely to be rich sources of highly-corrosion-resistant nickel-iron (aka "meteoric iron"), easily transformed into structural material (easy, because it doesn't need to be smelted). And 16 Psyche - to which NASA will be launching a probe in 2022 - may well be lousy with radionuclides and other heavy metals (think "rare earth elements") for reactor fuel and high-tech, microgravity manufacturing.
Yes, there will be plenty of challenges involved in establishing a permanent human presence in the asteroid belt - but the same is absolutely true of Mars, which offers all the disadvantages of colonizing a planet, and (ubiquitously-available sub-surface water aside) very few of the pluses.
As I see it, the major attraction of colonizing Mars is the "romance" (which is to say, "the public's awareness of and interest in") of the destination. Even people who have zero interest in space know it's the prime candidate for an eventually-self-sustaining human colony. By contrast, mention colonizing the asteroid belt, and most people will respond, "Why would you want to do that?" closely followed by "Is that even possible?"
Way back in the 1960's, I read Raymond Z. Gallun's book The Planet Strappers, a young adult novel about a group of teenagers who share the goal of becoming asteroid pioneers. It presupposes relatively-inexpensive launch-to-orbit technology, a permanent, multi-facility human presence on the Moon that provides fuel and resources for the kind of spaceships I mentioned earlier, and a network of orbital facilities, including shipyards and drydocks for them. The protagonist and his friends are able to earn enough money on the Moon to purchase low-cost, personal spacecraft called "bubbs" to then pilot to the asteroid belt (which already has a substantial, permanent human presence) to attempt to make their fortunes and achieve their shared dream. It's a vastly-underappreciated gem of 60's-era "hard" science fiction (which is now in the public domain!) and I heartily recommend it to everyone who isn't an aspiring anti-space-colonization troll.
Full disclosure: in light of the knowledge we now have about conditions in space, Gallun's "bubbs" wouldn't work, of course (not just because each is powered by a pocket nuclear reactor, but because the cosmic ray flux in interplanetary space, outside the protection of Earth's magnetosphere, is too high for humans to survive the long periods of exposure required to reach the asteroid belt in what, essentially, is a plastic bubble), but his book opened my eyes to the advantages in easy access to essential resources that colonizing asteroids, rather than planetary surfaces could provide.
And I still think that's where we ought to be focusing our efforts...
We (and they, too) have known this for years, if not for decades.
What "we" have known for years is anecdotal and inferential in nature. This, by contrast, is a formal study. As in "science?"
Okay, "statistics."
Either way, it's a non-anecdotal, evidence-based study. And, yes, there are other such studies, including one from 2014 that concluded, depending on when unauthorized copies appear on torrent sites, piracy can actually help box office revenues. Others - primarily ones sponsored by and paid for by the MPAA - have concluded that piracy mostly hurts international (i.e. - non-USA) box office tallies. However, that damage disappears if the film's international release coincides with its U.S. rollout, so its negative effect is likely due to impatience on the part of foreign audiences.
The point is that independent researchers who are not beholden to the industry for their financing have concluded that (again, depending on when in a film's release cycle pirate copies begin to appear) piracy's effects on box office receipts can be negligible to mildly positive. That, in turn, should be taken as evidence that delaying a movie's release in international markets is a losing strategy for movie production companies seeking to maximize their theatrical revenue - but it probably won't be, because the study's conclusion is not a straighforward "piracy==bad"...
The deathless prose quoted in TFS was burped up by one Erin Winick, who, believe it or not, bills herself as an Associate Editor for MIT's Technology Review newsletter. This despite her seeming inability to comprehend basic English grammar or unwillingness to proofread the writing that appears over her byline. Or both.
We truly live in an age of wonder - as in "I wonder who hired this illiterate dimwit... ?
Way back when I was a boy and the fear was a new ice age and not hothouse earth, I used to make simple radios. I lived in north London about 5 miles from the BBC Brookmans Park transmitters. With a 25m long wire aerial, a simple tuner and no battery or other power, it was possible to get enough volume on a earphone for two or three people to gather round and listen to it to the main BBC channels, i.e. without putting it into your ear. Couldn't do the same with any of my small speakers though.
When my family moved to the Dayton, Ohio area in 1971, our first residence was a single-family rental the back yard of which ended at the fence around WHIO-FM's transmitter tower. My brother mounted bookshelf-style speakers (which I believe had 6-inch woofers) for his 8-track player (!) on the wall of his bedroom, at the back of the house. With his sound system powered down, you could clearly hear WHIO's broadcast over those speakers.
When I hear people (who inevitably also falsely claim to be gluten-intolerant) insist that EMF from cell towers a half-mile or more from them somehow makes them sick, I just laugh and point...
Preoccupation with The Face: what if these apps were called something different, like Brainbook and Heart-time? What if they were designed to explore what is deeper than appearance, mere image? Would they have a different ethos, a different cultural focus, a different user base and therefore a more sensitive development model? But okay, words mean little anymore, I suppose it's a silly question in this culture.
First of all, words do have meaning - in fact, many of them have multiple meanings. (When there's more than one definition for a term, in the sense which it is used is typically obvious from the context in which it appears - but I digress.)
Apple appropriated the compound term "face time," eliminated the space between the two words, and used it as the name of its video calling app. The original term, however, significantly predates social media. Dictionary.com gives three, somewhat related definitions of "face time." Other online dictionaries list the same three definitions/senses, although some of them order those definitions differently, which is important only because the convention is that definitions are listed in order of the frequency with which they occur in everyday use. (The Urban Dictionary lists several additional slang definitions, most of which are variations on the use of "face time" as a euphemism for oral sex.)
Before Apple turned it into an app name, "face time" was most often used to mean face-to-face contact, as opposed to voice calls, emails, or other means of communication, and, used in that sense, it traces back to 1990 or thereabouts. (Merriam-Webster traces "face time" used in the sense of celebrities "appearing in front of the media or on television" to 1978, but that usage was basically confined to the entertainment industry and its associated publications.) Apple's useage is an attempt to equate video calling with face-to-face conversation for millenials and grandparents.
Facebook derived its name from the "facebooks" of campus fraternities and sororities, which are a kind of cross between a yearbook and a membership roster for participants in fratority life. (It's kind of ironic that the social media company is so aggressive about throwing cease-and-desist orders at commercial uses of the words "face" or "book" by other online sites, when the fact is that Zuckerberg appropriated a widely-used campus slang term for his own company's name - but I don't think that guy is capable of appreciating, or even understanding irony.)
What you're bemoaning is the narcissism and self-involvement of smartphone-and-social-media users (the ranks of which are not exclusively confined to milennials, although they do make up its largest sub-demographic). I think it's a legitimate concern, but what I take issue with is your assumption that these face-plus-whatever compound terms derive from a focus on the individual self that is somehow reflective of a cultural sea change.
I don't think it is. I think people have always been self-absorbed, going all the way back to Lucy. Every creative person I've ever met certainly is (to be an artist, you pretty much have to be a narcissist, because your choice of profession is predicated on the bedrock assumption that the works you produce are compelling enough to persuade people to pay you for them). Social media and smartphones have simply enabled and legitimized that fundamental human predisposition - and, unfortunately, helicopter parenting has validated it for the millennial generation.
We're human. The tendency towards excessive self-involvement is baked into our genes. Learning to resist it isn't easy for any of us - and it's especially hard for kids whose parents insisted on bubble-wrapping them, while assuring them all the while that the smell of their feces is as fresh as a summer ham...
The newest diet fad is "intermittent fasting". 20 years ago it was "skipping breakfast" and was bad for you.
This is purely anecdotal evidence, of course, but I'm an insuliin-dependent, Type II diabeitc. I've been "daytime fasting" (fasting a minimum of 16 hours each day) for about 8 months now.
My weight is down about 40 lbs since I began this regimen. Just as importantly, I now need only half as much insulin per day as I did before I began fasting during the day. In fact, I have to be especially careful with my Lantus intake, because hypoglycemia is a fucking drag.
Oh, and I "cheat" on weekends by eating sparingly during the day, to reward myself for exercising the required self-discipline during the week.
YMMV - but it probably won't, as long as you stick to the schedule...
but Steve Jobs isn't to blame for the walled garden concept
Which prompted thegarbz to respond:
He certainly is to blame. The examples you cite are from an archaic time and were limited to specific contracts between specific people. These situtations existed as corporate contracts and affected few people outside of large corporations.
Computing evolved into a more general case and the world ended up with devices at the fingertips of every normal person. Steve Jobs is to blame from introducing the walled garden concept at this general level which is orders of magnitude worse than a few ultra rich companies trying to screw each other out of service contracts.
As far as I'm concerned, you're drawing a distinction without a meaningful difference.
Granted that, in the 1970's and early 80's the computing world and the business world were, from a commercial perspective, practically identical, my point is that the walled garden as a business plan was utterly ubiquitoius. It wasn't the dominant paradigm - it was the only paradigm. All Jobs did was to appropriate that business model and apply it to the consumer market. Others (including what was left of Wang, interestingly enough) attempted it, but their products tended to be aimed at niche markets, rather than at affluent consumers, and they weren't lucrative enough to let those players get very fat, or grow very large.
Jobs simply realized that certain types of users would see his walled garden as a positive thing - and that those very users were the ones who were most willing to pay a premium price for computer devices whose interfaces were designed to be as simple and non-threatening as possible. So he built a prison for them that's so plush they never see the bars - and they paid him handsomely for that favor.
It wasn't built for you. It sure as Hell wasn't built for me. But the people for whom it was built love it, and would fight you, if you tried to take it away from them...
Well said -- Apple practically invented the walled garden and computing as a prison.
Not even. Not at all, in fact.
Once upon a time, there was a company called Wang that owned the word processing market. If you wanted to use computers to process words, there really wasn't any choice, at least in a corporate environment at the departmental level or above. And, much like Oracle's sales model, buying into Wang meant hiring ridiculously-overpriced consultants to create document templates and teach your staff how to use their proprietary, terminal-based network and software. You even had to buy printers from them, because there were no third-party products that worked with Wang's hardware ecosystem.
Oh, and you didn't actually get to buy Wang systems - you could only lease them. And, boy, were they expensive to lease, even discounting things like support contracts and having to pay Wang technicians to install upgrades and patches.
Before that, there was IBM and its competitors in the mainframe market, with their proprietary hardware and software systems and their own legions of consultants and product support engineers.
Steve Jobs learned about closed computer ecosystems from the real pioneers in the field. In fact, it's only because in 1981, or thereabouts, the same IBM that kept such an iron grip on its mainframe environment inexplicably decided to open its PC architecture to third-party vendors that we've gotten used to open standards for personal computing hardware and the OSes that control it. Otherwise, closed gardens would be the rule, rather than the exception for the consumer and small-business computing markets.
I don't have a lot of good things to say about the current version of Apple, but Steve Jobs isn't to blame for the walled garden concept - it existed long before he was even conceived...
It looks like the world's largest democracy is coming into some bumpy times. Clearly, the UK does want to control its people just as Orwell predicted, but until now the Indian government has not been visibly interested in this sort of control. It's ver sad, and very bad news for the people of India.
Modi's government has displayed repressive and authoritarian tendencies from day one. Luckily, as Al Jazeera reports, his Bharatiya Janata Party lost 56 seats in parliament in local elections in the northern states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh in recent months. That's a significant swing in popular support from last spring, and it may mean India is getting as tired of Modi as, for instance, Hungary is of Viktor Orban...
TFS quotes Newsweek's Christopher Grough facepalmingly:
The makers of PUBG sent down the banhammer Thursday afternoon...
<rant>
In today's version of journalism, apparently it's idiots mangling idioms all the way down. We've got "on the wrong tact" nitwits, some random, even number of "sheets to the wind" lunkheads, and now what I'd guess is a recently-graduated journo major who seems eager to add "send down the (varietal)hammer" to the list.
In terms of visiting discipline or punishment on people or organizations, hammers are never "sent down." Ever. They can be brought down. They can be dropped. But, unless they're intended as a gift to be used by the recipient, rather than wielded by an authority against their target, they're never merely "sent," because that would be stupid. And ineffective, at best.
"Hey, you! You've been cheating! Here's a hammer, for you to use as you wish. That should teach you... !"
We may be seeing Microsoft getting a taste of its own medicine.
No, we are seeing Microsoft getting a taste of its own medicine.
Back in the 1990's, when Billg was running the show, web pages built with Microsoft tools would routinely omit the closing <html> tag. IE was designed to ignore that egregious violation of the HTML standard, but it reliably crashed Netscape Navigator.
What do you think are the chances that little gotcha! was accidental... ?
You do realize this article is in fact an analysis of these materials and their accessible quantities and the determination that THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH OF THEM for the demand required through 2050. Abundant within the Earth's crust isn't particularly meaningful, we can't get to all the earths crust by a long shot and not all of what we can get to is easily accessible or cheaply accessible and even if we can get to it easily and cheaply we can still only pull it out so fast.
The major problems with the supply of rare earths are:
1. Their ores most commonly occur intermixed with uranite, so refining them entails the production of radioactive waste, and
2. They are not yet commonly recycled.
There's no real getting around the radioactive waste issue (although, if widespread support for licensing and constructing new nuclear power plants develops over the coming decades, I expect that REE separation and refining operations will become a routine feature of any new uranite refining and processing plants). However, as demand ramps up, there are plenty of existing piles of uranite tailings that have not thus far been seen as economically viable sources of REE that I expect will eventually be processed for them, as prices continue to rise.
There're also bound to be large-scale efforts to extract REE ores from undersea deposits, the mining of which has thus far been considered unaffordable. Again, as scarcity (particularly of praseodymium and neodymium) drives their price up, it's inevitable that seabottom mines will become important new sources. Likewise, recycling REE from discarded tech devices will eventually become viable - and very likely mandatory.
The thing is, there's plenty of REE, especially in the deep crust and upper mantle. It's just expensive and difficult to extract. Increasing demand will take care of the former roadblock, and experience in deep mining eventually will reduce the latter to a manageable level.
But, yes. It's going to get expensive in here, RSN. Will that stop either the development of ever newer and more powerful consumer tech or that of green energy sources to replace fossil fuels?
I can confirm they grow back after burns (had a smooth spot on my finger for a while), but it was a relatively minor surface burn. I would assume a 2nd and definitely a 3rd degree burn would not grow back.
First degree burn == reddening of the skin, some swelling. No loss of fingerprints.
Second degree burn == severe blistering of burned area. Skin heals completely in time. No loss of fingerprints.
Third degree burn == surface tissue destroyed. Replaced with permanent scar tissue. Fingerprints don't reappear.
Fourth degree burn == deep tissue (muscles, connective tissue, organs, etc.) destroyed. Usually fatal. Skin transplant required to fully close wounds. Fingers usually burned to (and sometimes through) bones, with amputation required.
(Prior to the Vietnam War, fourth degree burns weren't defined, because victims of them died on the scene. It took napalm-caused wounds to create the category, because napalm sticks to the skin and it will usually burn until the napalm itself is consumed. Victims' wounds are typically confined to the area where the napalm adhered... )
An interesting selection of examples, especially if they are meant to correspond to categories of "misinformation".
They obviously are so intended. You're just being coy here.
"Flat earthers" probably get little support these days, as belief that the Earth is an oblate spheroid has a great deal of evidence behind it.
You are far out of touch with the conspiracy theorist community, which is the source of almost all the actually-fake news. New World Order conspiracists - and, particularly, those who espouse the view that billionaire Zionists make up the heart of the Illuminati conspiracy to enslave the world - and flat-earthers, along with fanatic AGP deniers, fundamentalist Christian apocalytics, and garden-variety white nationalists are treated with equal seriousness in those precincts.
Just as a "for-instance," there's a user whose handle is "roflcopter2110 on The Pirate Bay who posts torrents of "documentaries" that cover the spectrum of conspiracist idiocy. In recent months, flat-earth nonsense makes up close to half of it. Then there's professional conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, who, likewise, gives credence to flat-earthism, along with claiming that mass shootings are elaborately-staged frauds, featuring paid "crisis actors" pretending to be survivors and grieving relatives of the victims, pushing Christian millenialism, insisting the Apollo Program's moon landings were faked on a CIA soundstage, and, of course, continuing to pound his desk and shout about the also-supposedly-CIA-masterminded "false flag" 9/11 attacks being a plot by "the government" to frighten the masses into accepting whatever load of horseapples the White House cares to shovel out.
I'd like to say, "You can't make this stuff up," but I can't, because it's crystal clear that those people actually do exactly that.
"Anti-vaxxers" (presumably meaning people who are concerned that some vaccinations may cause harm) are rather different, as there may well be evidence supporting their position. Moreover, there is a lot of complexity in the issue: which vaccination exactly (or what combination), given to whom under what circumstances?
There is zero evidence in support of anti-vaxxers. There's a tiny percentage of patients who have allergic reactions to vaccinations, but that's it.
Andrew Wakefield, the scumbag gastroenterologist who authored the Lancet article which was the genesis of the "MMR vaccinations cause autism" meme, was convicted of intentional fraud by a Britsh court for altering data to support his hypothesis, abuse of autistic children - by failing to obtain informed consent from their parents for highly-invasive (and medically-unnecessary) colonoscopies and lumbar punctures - and conspiring to profit from his fraud. He was subsequently stripped of his license to practice medicine.
He's not in prison, for some reason, but his study was comprehensively debunked, and The Lancet voluntarily withdrew it, and apologized to its subscribers for having published it in the first place.
The anti-vaxxing movement in the USA has been led by Jenny McCarthy, an ex-Playmate of the Year, and B-movie actress with no medical or scientific credentials of any kind, who also pimps chelation therapy as a cure for autism. Interestingly enough, she pushes that because of Mark and David Geier's claim that chelation could reverse autism caused by timerosol (a compound based on mercury that was used to extend the shelf-life of MMR vaccine prior to 2001). In fact, however, there is zero evidence that timerosol causes autism, and the fact that autism rates in vaccinated children have not declined in the years since it was removed from MMR is compelling evidence that it it does not.
I'm a little baffled by the premise here - are you claiming that the First Amendment protects robocalling by politicians because it's political speech, but doesn't protect robocalls from the Jehovah's Witnesses or Planned Parenthood? Not that I've ben robocalled by either of those groups, but why not? If it's Amazon robocalling to tell me about a sale, is that the part of the spectrum where the problem is? How about the American Nazi party robocalling me to tell me about their beliefs and an upcoming rally? Please help me understand why carving out an exception for my senator to robocall me is protected, but these other forms of free speech are not.
Try reading my post again. I explained why political calls are already exempt from robocall prohibitions. It's not my opinion. It's a fact. Federal courts have ruled that such calls are exempt from, for instance, California's law that requires a human being initiate a robocall, and ask the person receiving it for permission to play the recording.
The fact that that law is routinely flouted is entirely beside the point - which is that Federal courts have repeatedly ruled (and their rulings have been upheld every time they've been challenged) that calls from candidates seeking elected office enjoy immunity from such restrictions. As for the other examples you cite, calls from religious and public benefit organizations aren't political in nature, so they don't qualify for the same protections. Calls from Nazis - or any other affinity group - likewise are not inherently political in nature, and don't get the same protection, either.
If, otoh, a candidate for public office who happened to be a Nazi were to choose to campaign via robocall, his or her calls for that specific purpose would, indeed, be granted legal shelter from anti-robocall legislation.
In my reading, this has little to nothing to do with the Constitution, despite your claims.
I don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about your reading. It has everything to do with the First Amendment. So saith legal precedent. And it doesn't matter whether you agree with those precedents, either, because you are not a member of SCOTUS - which is the only body that could overturn them.
Hell, I don't agree with the courts' logic - and that, too, doesn't matter.
As Mr. Bumble famously remarked, "The law is an ass... "
Individuals own and pay for their own phones. That's their podium/forum. 3rd parties have no first amendment rights to their/our phones only their own.
So, if politicians were interested in fixing it you could require all 'legal' robocalls to have a standard identifier as a robocall, and a further category one for the type. Then mandate a method for choosing whether to get those calls controlled by the recipient. I'd like both a do not call list and a user controlled filter, possibly based on a new secure caller ID. (could be normal caller ID on the user end, so long as the telco verifies accuracy)
So you can filter 'RoboPol' from ringing your phone, but allow 'RoboDR' or 'RoboAppointment' so you can get appointment reminders or pharmacy notices that your prescription is ready. i.e. keep the things useful to you
You can require that political calls of any kind must identify the source in an accurate way without any misleading naming or obfuscation of the source. The groups involved must be identified, and name shell games are probibited. i.e. a new shell group every week so they seem to be from a different source, or calls designed to annoy you by groups naming themselves in a way designed to mislead to smear their opposition should be prohibited.
I like the idea. Unfortunately, implementing it is nowhere near as straightforward as you might like. Among other problems, your proposed restrictions - which, again, I think are perfectly reasonable, and would probably garner widespread public support - impinge on existing laws (and regulations, which are actually a different thing than laws) that fall outside of the scope of telecommunications legislation. As a for-instance, IRS regulations regarding 501(c)(4) organizations.
Perhaps more importantly, there is quite obviously no will among the political class to reform laws against robocalls to institute a requirement for flags of the sort you propose.
It might, however, be worth contacting the offices of senators Markey and Thune to put your idea on record. (Should you decide to do so, I strongly suggest it be via snailmail. Pols pay significantly more attention to physical letters than they do to email, both because it leaves an actual paper trail, and because it is an indicator of how seriously the writer takes the issue. Writing and printing out a letter, addressing an envelope, and spending money - albeit mere pocket change - on a stamp requires a lot more effort and determination than just firing off an email.
Were you to do so, I'd advise explaining the technical issues in language pitched at a sixth-grade reading level, because senatorial staffers rarely are tech-saavy enough to be able to determine whether tech-based legislative proposals from constituents are worth passing along to more senior staffmembers or, indeed, to the senator for whom they work. The simpler and more straightforward the language, the less likely the response is to consist merely of a form letter of thanks, assuring you of the senator's interest in the topic, and his (or her - but, in this instance, we're specifically talking about two male senators) commitment to serving his constituents. The key is to get whoever is responsible for drafting telecom legislation (which will definitely not be the senator himself) to look at your idea, instead of it being just another entry in the slush pile that some hapless intern relegates to the "file and forget" stack...
and they'll have an exemption for political calls...
Yes, they will.
"They" will, because of the First Amendment's free speech guarantee. It is a long-established principle in American jurisprudence that political speech is granted extraordinary protections. Robocalls on behalf of candidates for elected office fall into that category, and will thus receive exemption from any strictures placed on commercial robocallers. By legal precedent, commercial speech is granted the lowest level of protection from government censorship under First Amendment principles, whereas political speech in general - including artwork that expresses a political viewpoint or social commentary, as well as campaign robocalls - enjoys the highest level of protection.
Note that courts have long held that First Amendment prohibitions on government censorship extends to government bodies, and elected and appointed officials at all levels of goverment from the Federal to the hyper-local. A village council has no more right to prohibit protected forms of speech than does Congress. On the other hand, it has also been firmly established by the courts that governments are under no obligation to provide a platform for political speech, unless they are compelled to do so by state or local law. Thus, as a relevant example, in California, city councils are required to provide a period for public comment at their meetings, but they are permitted to limit the length of time any individual speaker is alotted. Most therefore have rules limiting comments by uninvited speakers - which is to say, "the general public" - to 3 minutes. (That limit is not universally enforced - but, when it is, it must apply equally to everyone who chooses to speak during the public comment period.)
Railing at politicians for carving out exemptions from robocalling for themselves indicates a lack of understanding of the effect of the First Amendment on the ability of legislators to restrict political speech. They can and will specifically exempt calls of a political nature from robocalling - but, if they did not do so, rest assured that the first pol that's cited for violating the shiny, new restrictions they try to emplace will promptly sue them for violating his or her right to free speech.
He (or she) will, without question, win that lawsuit - and the judge who hears the case might well rule the entire law to be unconstitutional, and unenforceable...
The leading hypothesis for the Biblical flood is the inundation of the Black Sea basin as interglacial rising sea levels caused the Mediterranean to spill over through the Bosphorus. The timing would have been about right for the Old Testament.
Mmm - no. On both counts.
There's considerable controversy about whether the Black Sea Deluge was a sudden, catastropic event, or one that took place more slowly, forcing inhabitants of the basin to evacuate, but not instantly drowning them. There are experts of equal qualification on both sides of the debate, and it has not been resolved in any definitive way.
Meanwhile, the Flood Myth is a feature of many ancient civilizations' mythologies. The Sumerian version includes a man who overheard the gods planning the inundation in time to build a boat large enough to save himself, his family, and their chattels from the catastrophe.
Regardless, as Wikipedia notes, most academic scholars concur that what we refer to as the Book of Genesis was written after the hostages taken by Nebuchadnezzar in the 6th century BCE retuned from their captivity in Babylon with the gift of literacy. The Black Sea Deluge was therefore not even close to contemporaneous with the "record" of the Hebrew version of the flood myth - because there was none.
(Note that the much-bruited date of October 23, 4004 BCE for the Biblical creation comes from the work of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armaugh and Prelate of All Ireland, who calculated it based on the genealogy of Old Testament testament figures, as well as using Babylonian, Greek, and Roman sources to establish the starting date of Amel-Marduk's reign as King of Babylon. He also determined the birth of Jesus took place in 5 CE (because that was the year Herod the Great died). All of which was wasted effort, of course, because Methuselah (to choose only one of the figures upon which his dating scheme relied), if he ever existed, could not possibly have lived to be 900 year old. Nor could any of the other multi-century lifespans upon which his calculations depended have been accurate.)
The Old Testament, as a chronological document, is utterly unreliable. And, while the Hebrews' oral mythology certainly predates the return from Babylonian exile, the written form of the Torah probably did not exist before that time, so it's impossible to know how much of the Genesis flood story was a native Hebrew myth, and how much of it was informed by Babylonian and/or Sumerian myths to which the exiles had been exposed during their sojourn in Babylon...
The last thing we want is Google owning yet another layer of the Web stack!
Exactly which part of the IETF process gives Google "ownership" of QUIC? The part where a working group composed of networking engineers who work for a whole bunch of different companies have spent months figuring out how to bolt this new protocol onto the existing IP stack, or the part where it's been kicked upstairs to the full HTTP working group with a recommendation that it be adopted as the basis of the next iteration of the protocol? Because neither of those decisions is anywhere close to final, yet, and the current version of QUIC - which Google actually uses internally - works well.
Or is it the fact that you're making shit up to trigger Google-haters's paranoia?
Further down in this discussion, ewhac provides the following link to a longish, quite intelligent discussion of what's wrong with TCP/IP in a ubiquitously-connected world (hint: the original design of the TCP protocol entirely failed to anticipate the mobile web - among many, many other shortcomings - and it now consists of a multi-layered kludge of, essentially, patches to enable it to function in an environment that is physically and logically completely unlike the bus-centric Ethernet networks it was developed to internetwork), and, just as importantly, an insightful discussion of why IPv6 has still not taken over the world, almost 30 years on, and probably never will:
Toward the end, the author talks about QUIC as a possible, elegant solution to the problem of creating a reliable, low-latency handover of session streams to enable a device whose IP address is constantly changing (i.e. - a mobile device that's, you know, in motion) to keep those data streams active in a much more elegant way than the current, provider-centric, dogshit-slow LTE protocol is capable of doing. And he goes to pains to point out that there are other possible solutions, as well, because that article is more than a year old, now, whereas the Mobile HTTP Working Group's recommendation that QUIC be the basis of the HTTP/3 standard is brand, spanking new.
(Just to be clear, it's not LTE itself that has the latency problem. It's the way LTE copes with constantly-changing IP addresses at the client end, as its signal gets handed off from one cell tower to the next.)
Mobile IP is a mess. Something has to be done about it. TCP is an increasingly-tottering kludge. Something has to be done about that, as well. IPv6 won't the panacea it's been advertised as, because its authors didn't anticipate the mobile Internet, either - and any fix is going to have to be a bolt-on, which is exactly the IPv4 problem IPv6 was supposed to eliminate.
Look, folks, internetworking has always been a moving target. As Niels Bohr phrased the old, Danish proverb, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." That earlier generations of working network engineers failed to forsee the exact nature of the internetworked world we currently inhabit is profoundly unsurprising. But universal adoption of mobile, Internet nodes for personal communication is a reality with which the current crop of networking gurus must deal. Given that fact, we can either accept a hodgepodge of vendor-proprietary solutions, none of which is especially satisfactory, or tackle the problem as a general one that requires a universal, non-proprietary solution.
The Mobile HTTP Working Group consists of experts who have been studying the problem for a long time, and who are focused on trying to solve real-world issues the solutions to which are only going to become more urgent as time goes on. By contrast, most of the bleating on this forum is from users who have little familiarity with those problems and no meaningful technical expertise to infor
Slashdot Mirror
https://slashdot.org/~Shaitan noted:
Another interesting tidbit which has been true of the many states I've lived in. Responding to a verbal threat with force but less than deadly force almost universally has the result of you being considered the guilty party.
As Mr. Bumble opined in Dickens's novel Oliver Twist, "... the law is an ass."
And in other news from the Department of Irony ...
stealth_finger observed:
As it started with
"You're a great man," the scammer cajoled. "You was a judge, you was an attorney, you was a basketball player, you were in the U.S. Navy, homeland security. I know everything about you. I even seen your photograph, and I seen your precious wife.
I would have taken that to be complimentary designed to lower the defences of the potential victim. He's just saying he's looked into they guy obviously that would include photos and from the context he is saying the guys wife is pretty, thats it. Sure it sounds vaguely threatening out of context and written down but that doesn't make it a threat. And seeing as the guy was apparently in Jamaica where is the threat?
To me, it sounds a lot like an obsessed stalker, rather than a fan. Also, Webster is in his 90's, so I doubt the wannabe scammer was saying his wife was pretty. "Precious," again, comes across as vaguely threatening in the context of his call, to me. Tone of voice would make the difference as to which interpretation the judge felt was correct, of course - and it seems clear that the FBI recorded the second call, so the judge would have actually heard it, as we have not.
Your comment that "the guy was apparently in Jamaica" leads me to suspect you're not American. If you were, you would be as familiar with - and as frustrated by - the ever-increasing barrage of scam calls from phone numbers spoofed to appear as though they originate from local exchanges that we who live here have to endure, as the FCC sits with folded hands, doing absolutely nothing to stem the deluge.
On SS7, nobody can tell you're a Jamaican scammer ...
I posited:
I'm pretty sure the judge viewed, "I know everything about you. I even seen your photograph, and I seen your precious wife," as an implied threat, à la, "Nice wife you have there. Pity if anything happened to her."
But concluded:
"I agree that he was never in any personal danger ..."
Prompting Shaitan to point out:
Sure but if you threaten to kill someone who turns out to be Navy seal it is still the same crime as threatening to kill the sweet old lady from 2B. Now if said seal or old lady kills you alleging they feared for their life considerations like that matter.
You're correct on both points. A threat is a threat, no matter who it's directed at. Responding to a threat with deadly force may or may not be treated as justifiable homicide, depending not only on the self-defense capabilities of the person being threatened, but on other circumstances, such as the credibility of the threat, the other options (short of deadly force) that were available to the target of the threat at the moment he/she acted, and - very importantly - the state of his or her mind at the time.
But issuing a threat constitutes simple assault under American jurisprudence, regardless. And doing so while in the process of committing a felony crime against the target of that threat is an act that the presiding judge may consider deserving of an "enhancement" to the sentence for the original felony - as clearly happened in this case.
Full disclosure: IANAL. I don't even watch any of the 57 flavors of Lawn Order. So there ... !
ShanghaiBill misstated:
Indeed. According to the summary, the judge slapped an extra two years onto the sentence because of who the perp targeted.
Prompting PopeRatzo to opine:
I'm pretty sure that the extra two years was for being really really stupid.
Actually, I think the extra 2 years was for what the judge (rightly, IMnsHO) viewed as an implied threat by the scammer.
Or does, "I know everything about you. I even seen your photograph, and I seen your precious wife," strike you guys as mere innocent banter ... ?
An Anonymous Coward opined:
The director never really had potential to be a victim. However this guy won't be targeting other potential victims, it will make make some people think twice before becoming a criminal as well which has positive benefit on society for us all.
I'm pretty sure the judge viewed, "I know everything about you. I even seen your photograph, and I seen your precious wife," as an implied threat, à la, "Nice wife you have there. Pity if anything happened to her."
However, given Webster's career - and his reaction to this idiot's attempt to scam him - I agree that he was never in any personal danger ...
ShanghaiBill opined:
This is a good thing. We need to stop obsessing about Mars. Once humanity moves off-earth, the dumbest thing we could do is settle onto another planetary surface. We would just be moving from one gravity well to another. The asteroids should be our colonial target.
I could not more heartily agree.
Mars gravity is less than 40% of Earth's - but that's still a pretty major barrier to launching anything (people, for instance) from its surface into orbit, where an actual spaceship (i.e. - one that was built in zero g, and designed to shuttle stuff from orbit around one gravity well to orbit around another, without itself ever actually landing on a planetary surface) can transport it across interplanetary space. By contrast, even Ceres (the largest object in the asteroid belt) has only a sixth the gravity of Luna - not weak enough for a human to be able to achieve orbit by jumping off its surface, but also not strong enough to require enormous amounts of reaction mass for such a spacecraft to reach escape velocity.
C-type asteroids (aka "carbonaceous chondrites") should be excellent sources of organic raw materials for manufacturing plastics, etc. M-types are likely to be rich sources of highly-corrosion-resistant nickel-iron (aka "meteoric iron"), easily transformed into structural material (easy, because it doesn't need to be smelted). And 16 Psyche - to which NASA will be launching a probe in 2022 - may well be lousy with radionuclides and other heavy metals (think "rare earth elements") for reactor fuel and high-tech, microgravity manufacturing.
Yes, there will be plenty of challenges involved in establishing a permanent human presence in the asteroid belt - but the same is absolutely true of Mars, which offers all the disadvantages of colonizing a planet, and (ubiquitously-available sub-surface water aside) very few of the pluses.
As I see it, the major attraction of colonizing Mars is the "romance" (which is to say, "the public's awareness of and interest in") of the destination. Even people who have zero interest in space know it's the prime candidate for an eventually-self-sustaining human colony. By contrast, mention colonizing the asteroid belt, and most people will respond, "Why would you want to do that?" closely followed by "Is that even possible?"
Way back in the 1960's, I read Raymond Z. Gallun's book The Planet Strappers, a young adult novel about a group of teenagers who share the goal of becoming asteroid pioneers. It presupposes relatively-inexpensive launch-to-orbit technology, a permanent, multi-facility human presence on the Moon that provides fuel and resources for the kind of spaceships I mentioned earlier, and a network of orbital facilities, including shipyards and drydocks for them. The protagonist and his friends are able to earn enough money on the Moon to purchase low-cost, personal spacecraft called "bubbs" to then pilot to the asteroid belt (which already has a substantial, permanent human presence) to attempt to make their fortunes and achieve their shared dream. It's a vastly-underappreciated gem of 60's-era "hard" science fiction (which is now in the public domain!) and I heartily recommend it to everyone who isn't an aspiring anti-space-colonization troll.
Full disclosure: in light of the knowledge we now have about conditions in space, Gallun's "bubbs" wouldn't work, of course (not just because each is powered by a pocket nuclear reactor, but because the cosmic ray flux in interplanetary space, outside the protection of Earth's magnetosphere, is too high for humans to survive the long periods of exposure required to reach the asteroid belt in what, essentially, is a plastic bubble), but his book opened my eyes to the advantages in easy access to essential resources that colonizing asteroids, rather than planetary surfaces could provide.
And I still think that's where we ought to be focusing our efforts ...
Mr. Dollar Ton observed:
We (and they, too) have known this for years, if not for decades.
What "we" have known for years is anecdotal and inferential in nature. This, by contrast, is a formal study. As in "science?"
Okay, "statistics."
Either way, it's a non-anecdotal, evidence-based study. And, yes, there are other such studies, including one from 2014 that concluded, depending on when unauthorized copies appear on torrent sites, piracy can actually help box office revenues. Others - primarily ones sponsored by and paid for by the MPAA - have concluded that piracy mostly hurts international (i.e. - non-USA) box office tallies. However, that damage disappears if the film's international release coincides with its U.S. rollout, so its negative effect is likely due to impatience on the part of foreign audiences.
The point is that independent researchers who are not beholden to the industry for their financing have concluded that (again, depending on when in a film's release cycle pirate copies begin to appear) piracy's effects on box office receipts can be negligible to mildly positive. That, in turn, should be taken as evidence that delaying a movie's release in international markets is a losing strategy for movie production companies seeking to maximize their theatrical revenue - but it probably won't be, because the study's conclusion is not a straighforward "piracy==bad" ...
The deathless prose quoted in TFS was burped up by one Erin Winick, who, believe it or not, bills herself as an Associate Editor for MIT's Technology Review newsletter. This despite her seeming inability to comprehend basic English grammar or unwillingness to proofread the writing that appears over her byline. Or both.
We truly live in an age of wonder - as in "I wonder who hired this illiterate dimwit ... ?
AxeTheMax reminisced:
Way back when I was a boy and the fear was a new ice age and not hothouse earth, I used to make simple radios. I lived in north London about 5 miles from the BBC Brookmans Park transmitters. With a 25m long wire aerial, a simple tuner and no battery or other power, it was possible to get enough volume on a earphone for two or three people to gather round and listen to it to the main BBC channels, i.e. without putting it into your ear. Couldn't do the same with any of my small speakers though.
When my family moved to the Dayton, Ohio area in 1971, our first residence was a single-family rental the back yard of which ended at the fence around WHIO-FM's transmitter tower. My brother mounted bookshelf-style speakers (which I believe had 6-inch woofers) for his 8-track player (!) on the wall of his bedroom, at the back of the house. With his sound system powered down, you could clearly hear WHIO's broadcast over those speakers.
When I hear people (who inevitably also falsely claim to be gluten-intolerant) insist that EMF from cell towers a half-mile or more from them somehow makes them sick, I just laugh and point ...
nightcats speculated:
Preoccupation with The Face: what if these apps were called something different, like Brainbook and Heart-time? What if they were designed to explore what is deeper than appearance, mere image? Would they have a different ethos, a different cultural focus, a different user base and therefore a more sensitive development model? But okay, words mean little anymore, I suppose it's a silly question in this culture.
First of all, words do have meaning - in fact, many of them have multiple meanings. (When there's more than one definition for a term, in the sense which it is used is typically obvious from the context in which it appears - but I digress.)
Apple appropriated the compound term "face time," eliminated the space between the two words, and used it as the name of its video calling app. The original term, however, significantly predates social media. Dictionary.com gives three, somewhat related definitions of "face time." Other online dictionaries list the same three definitions/senses, although some of them order those definitions differently, which is important only because the convention is that definitions are listed in order of the frequency with which they occur in everyday use. (The Urban Dictionary lists several additional slang definitions, most of which are variations on the use of "face time" as a euphemism for oral sex.)
Before Apple turned it into an app name, "face time" was most often used to mean face-to-face contact, as opposed to voice calls, emails, or other means of communication, and, used in that sense, it traces back to 1990 or thereabouts. (Merriam-Webster traces "face time" used in the sense of celebrities "appearing in front of the media or on television" to 1978, but that usage was basically confined to the entertainment industry and its associated publications.) Apple's useage is an attempt to equate video calling with face-to-face conversation for millenials and grandparents.
Facebook derived its name from the "facebooks" of campus fraternities and sororities, which are a kind of cross between a yearbook and a membership roster for participants in fratority life. (It's kind of ironic that the social media company is so aggressive about throwing cease-and-desist orders at commercial uses of the words "face" or "book" by other online sites, when the fact is that Zuckerberg appropriated a widely-used campus slang term for his own company's name - but I don't think that guy is capable of appreciating, or even understanding irony.)
What you're bemoaning is the narcissism and self-involvement of smartphone-and-social-media users (the ranks of which are not exclusively confined to milennials, although they do make up its largest sub-demographic). I think it's a legitimate concern, but what I take issue with is your assumption that these face-plus-whatever compound terms derive from a focus on the individual self that is somehow reflective of a cultural sea change.
I don't think it is. I think people have always been self-absorbed, going all the way back to Lucy. Every creative person I've ever met certainly is (to be an artist, you pretty much have to be a narcissist, because your choice of profession is predicated on the bedrock assumption that the works you produce are compelling enough to persuade people to pay you for them). Social media and smartphones have simply enabled and legitimized that fundamental human predisposition - and, unfortunately, helicopter parenting has validated it for the millennial generation.
We're human. The tendency towards excessive self-involvement is baked into our genes. Learning to resist it isn't easy for any of us - and it's especially hard for kids whose parents insisted on bubble-wrapping them, while assuring them all the while that the smell of their feces is as fresh as a summer ham ...
doubledown00 pointed out:
The newest diet fad is "intermittent fasting". 20 years ago it was "skipping breakfast" and was bad for you.
This is purely anecdotal evidence, of course, but I'm an insuliin-dependent, Type II diabeitc. I've been "daytime fasting" (fasting a minimum of 16 hours each day) for about 8 months now.
My weight is down about 40 lbs since I began this regimen. Just as importantly, I now need only half as much insulin per day as I did before I began fasting during the day. In fact, I have to be especially careful with my Lantus intake, because hypoglycemia is a fucking drag.
Oh, and I "cheat" on weekends by eating sparingly during the day, to reward myself for exercising the required self-discipline during the week.
YMMV - but it probably won't, as long as you stick to the schedule ...
I stated:
but Steve Jobs isn't to blame for the walled garden concept
Which prompted thegarbz to respond:
He certainly is to blame. The examples you cite are from an archaic time and were limited to specific contracts between specific people. These situtations existed as corporate contracts and affected few people outside of large corporations.
Computing evolved into a more general case and the world ended up with devices at the fingertips of every normal person. Steve Jobs is to blame from introducing the walled garden concept at this general level which is orders of magnitude worse than a few ultra rich companies trying to screw each other out of service contracts.
As far as I'm concerned, you're drawing a distinction without a meaningful difference.
Granted that, in the 1970's and early 80's the computing world and the business world were, from a commercial perspective, practically identical, my point is that the walled garden as a business plan was utterly ubiquitoius. It wasn't the dominant paradigm - it was the only paradigm. All Jobs did was to appropriate that business model and apply it to the consumer market. Others (including what was left of Wang, interestingly enough) attempted it, but their products tended to be aimed at niche markets, rather than at affluent consumers, and they weren't lucrative enough to let those players get very fat, or grow very large.
Jobs simply realized that certain types of users would see his walled garden as a positive thing - and that those very users were the ones who were most willing to pay a premium price for computer devices whose interfaces were designed to be as simple and non-threatening as possible. So he built a prison for them that's so plush they never see the bars - and they paid him handsomely for that favor.
It wasn't built for you. It sure as Hell wasn't built for me. But the people for whom it was built love it, and would fight you, if you tried to take it away from them ...
b0s0z0ku applauded:
Well said -- Apple practically invented the walled garden and computing as a prison.
Not even. Not at all, in fact.
Once upon a time, there was a company called Wang that owned the word processing market. If you wanted to use computers to process words, there really wasn't any choice, at least in a corporate environment at the departmental level or above. And, much like Oracle's sales model, buying into Wang meant hiring ridiculously-overpriced consultants to create document templates and teach your staff how to use their proprietary, terminal-based network and software. You even had to buy printers from them, because there were no third-party products that worked with Wang's hardware ecosystem.
Oh, and you didn't actually get to buy Wang systems - you could only lease them. And, boy, were they expensive to lease, even discounting things like support contracts and having to pay Wang technicians to install upgrades and patches.
Before that, there was IBM and its competitors in the mainframe market, with their proprietary hardware and software systems and their own legions of consultants and product support engineers.
Steve Jobs learned about closed computer ecosystems from the real pioneers in the field. In fact, it's only because in 1981, or thereabouts, the same IBM that kept such an iron grip on its mainframe environment inexplicably decided to open its PC architecture to third-party vendors that we've gotten used to open standards for personal computing hardware and the OSes that control it. Otherwise, closed gardens would be the rule, rather than the exception for the consumer and small-business computing markets.
I don't have a lot of good things to say about the current version of Apple, but Steve Jobs isn't to blame for the walled garden concept - it existed long before he was even conceived ...
biggaijin observed:
It looks like the world's largest democracy is coming into some bumpy times. Clearly, the UK does want to control its people just as Orwell predicted, but until now the Indian government has not been visibly interested in this sort of control. It's ver sad, and very bad news for the people of India.
Modi's government has displayed repressive and authoritarian tendencies from day one. Luckily, as Al Jazeera reports, his Bharatiya Janata Party lost 56 seats in parliament in local elections in the northern states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh in recent months. That's a significant swing in popular support from last spring, and it may mean India is getting as tired of Modi as, for instance, Hungary is of Viktor Orban ...
TFS quotes Newsweek's Christopher Grough facepalmingly:
The makers of PUBG sent down the banhammer Thursday afternoon ...
<rant>
In today's version of journalism, apparently it's idiots mangling idioms all the way down. We've got "on the wrong tact" nitwits, some random, even number of "sheets to the wind" lunkheads, and now what I'd guess is a recently-graduated journo major who seems eager to add "send down the (varietal)hammer" to the list.
In terms of visiting discipline or punishment on people or organizations, hammers are never "sent down." Ever. They can be brought down. They can be dropped. But, unless they're intended as a gift to be used by the recipient, rather than wielded by an authority against their target, they're never merely "sent," because that would be stupid. And ineffective, at best.
"Hey, you! You've been cheating! Here's a hammer, for you to use as you wish. That should teach you ... !"
</rant>
Sooner Boomer pointed out:
I just read "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson. It's about infinite copyright. Story seems rather appropriate.
http://www.spiderrobinson.com/...
And it's worth noting that Spider deliberately chose to copyright Melancholy Elephants in the public domain.
It's free to read - and it will stay that way, permanently ...
Pentium100 mused:
We may be seeing Microsoft getting a taste of its own medicine.
No, we are seeing Microsoft getting a taste of its own medicine.
Back in the 1990's, when Billg was running the show, web pages built with Microsoft tools would routinely omit the closing <html> tag. IE was designed to ignore that egregious violation of the HTML standard, but it reliably crashed Netscape Navigator.
What do you think are the chances that little gotcha! was accidental ... ?
Shaitan remonstrated:
You do realize this article is in fact an analysis of these materials and their accessible quantities and the determination that THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH OF THEM for the demand required through 2050. Abundant within the Earth's crust isn't particularly meaningful, we can't get to all the earths crust by a long shot and not all of what we can get to is easily accessible or cheaply accessible and even if we can get to it easily and cheaply we can still only pull it out so fast.
The major problems with the supply of rare earths are:
1. Their ores most commonly occur intermixed with uranite, so refining them entails the production of radioactive waste, and
2. They are not yet commonly recycled.
There's no real getting around the radioactive waste issue (although, if widespread support for licensing and constructing new nuclear power plants develops over the coming decades, I expect that REE separation and refining operations will become a routine feature of any new uranite refining and processing plants). However, as demand ramps up, there are plenty of existing piles of uranite tailings that have not thus far been seen as economically viable sources of REE that I expect will eventually be processed for them, as prices continue to rise.
There're also bound to be large-scale efforts to extract REE ores from undersea deposits, the mining of which has thus far been considered unaffordable. Again, as scarcity (particularly of praseodymium and neodymium) drives their price up, it's inevitable that seabottom mines will become important new sources. Likewise, recycling REE from discarded tech devices will eventually become viable - and very likely mandatory.
And it's not as though the Dutch study's conclusions are exactly news. People who follow that sector are well aware that demand is already outstripping the available supply - and that disparity is swiftly growing.
The thing is, there's plenty of REE, especially in the deep crust and upper mantle. It's just expensive and difficult to extract. Increasing demand will take care of the former roadblock, and experience in deep mining eventually will reduce the latter to a manageable level.
But, yes. It's going to get expensive in here, RSN. Will that stop either the development of ever newer and more powerful consumer tech or that of green energy sources to replace fossil fuels?
Signs point to "No" ...
Nidi62 related:
I can confirm they grow back after burns (had a smooth spot on my finger for a while), but it was a relatively minor surface burn. I would assume a 2nd and definitely a 3rd degree burn would not grow back.
First degree burn == reddening of the skin, some swelling. No loss of fingerprints.
Second degree burn == severe blistering of burned area. Skin heals completely in time. No loss of fingerprints.
Third degree burn == surface tissue destroyed. Replaced with permanent scar tissue. Fingerprints don't reappear.
Fourth degree burn == deep tissue (muscles, connective tissue, organs, etc.) destroyed. Usually fatal. Skin transplant required to fully close wounds. Fingers usually burned to (and sometimes through) bones, with amputation required.
(Prior to the Vietnam War, fourth degree burns weren't defined, because victims of them died on the scene. It took napalm-caused wounds to create the category, because napalm sticks to the skin and it will usually burn until the napalm itself is consumed. Victims' wounds are typically confined to the area where the napalm adhered ... )
Archtech posited:
An interesting selection of examples, especially if they are meant to correspond to categories of "misinformation".
They obviously are so intended. You're just being coy here.
"Flat earthers" probably get little support these days, as belief that the Earth is an oblate spheroid has a great deal of evidence behind it.
You are far out of touch with the conspiracy theorist community, which is the source of almost all the actually-fake news. New World Order conspiracists - and, particularly, those who espouse the view that billionaire Zionists make up the heart of the Illuminati conspiracy to enslave the world - and flat-earthers, along with fanatic AGP deniers, fundamentalist Christian apocalytics, and garden-variety white nationalists are treated with equal seriousness in those precincts.
Just as a "for-instance," there's a user whose handle is "roflcopter2110 on The Pirate Bay who posts torrents of "documentaries" that cover the spectrum of conspiracist idiocy. In recent months, flat-earth nonsense makes up close to half of it. Then there's professional conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, who, likewise, gives credence to flat-earthism, along with claiming that mass shootings are elaborately-staged frauds, featuring paid "crisis actors" pretending to be survivors and grieving relatives of the victims, pushing Christian millenialism, insisting the Apollo Program's moon landings were faked on a CIA soundstage, and, of course, continuing to pound his desk and shout about the also-supposedly-CIA-masterminded "false flag" 9/11 attacks being a plot by "the government" to frighten the masses into accepting whatever load of horseapples the White House cares to shovel out.
I'd like to say, "You can't make this stuff up," but I can't, because it's crystal clear that those people actually do exactly that.
"Anti-vaxxers" (presumably meaning people who are concerned that some vaccinations may cause harm) are rather different, as there may well be evidence supporting their position. Moreover, there is a lot of complexity in the issue: which vaccination exactly (or what combination), given to whom under what circumstances?
There is zero evidence in support of anti-vaxxers. There's a tiny percentage of patients who have allergic reactions to vaccinations, but that's it.
Andrew Wakefield, the scumbag gastroenterologist who authored the Lancet article which was the genesis of the "MMR vaccinations cause autism" meme, was convicted of intentional fraud by a Britsh court for altering data to support his hypothesis, abuse of autistic children - by failing to obtain informed consent from their parents for highly-invasive (and medically-unnecessary) colonoscopies and lumbar punctures - and conspiring to profit from his fraud. He was subsequently stripped of his license to practice medicine.
He's not in prison, for some reason, but his study was comprehensively debunked, and The Lancet voluntarily withdrew it, and apologized to its subscribers for having published it in the first place.
The anti-vaxxing movement in the USA has been led by Jenny McCarthy, an ex-Playmate of the Year, and B-movie actress with no medical or scientific credentials of any kind, who also pimps chelation therapy as a cure for autism. Interestingly enough, she pushes that because of Mark and David Geier's claim that chelation could reverse autism caused by timerosol (a compound based on mercury that was used to extend the shelf-life of MMR vaccine prior to 2001). In fact, however, there is zero evidence that timerosol causes autism, and the fact that autism rates in vaccinated children have not declined in the years since it was removed from MMR is compelling evidence that it it does not.
https://slashdot.org/~jeffporcaro inquired:
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I'm a little baffled by the premise here - are you claiming that the First Amendment protects robocalling by politicians because it's political speech, but doesn't protect robocalls from the Jehovah's Witnesses or Planned Parenthood? Not that I've ben robocalled by either of those groups, but why not? If it's Amazon robocalling to tell me about a sale, is that the part of the spectrum where the problem is? How about the American Nazi party robocalling me to tell me about their beliefs and an upcoming rally? Please help me understand why carving out an exception for my senator to robocall me is protected, but these other forms of free speech are not.
Try reading my post again. I explained why political calls are already exempt from robocall prohibitions. It's not my opinion. It's a fact. Federal courts have ruled that such calls are exempt from, for instance, California's law that requires a human being initiate a robocall, and ask the person receiving it for permission to play the recording.
The fact that that law is routinely flouted is entirely beside the point - which is that Federal courts have repeatedly ruled (and their rulings have been upheld every time they've been challenged) that calls from candidates seeking elected office enjoy immunity from such restrictions. As for the other examples you cite, calls from religious and public benefit organizations aren't political in nature, so they don't qualify for the same protections. Calls from Nazis - or any other affinity group - likewise are not inherently political in nature, and don't get the same protection, either.
If, otoh, a candidate for public office who happened to be a Nazi were to choose to campaign via robocall, his or her calls for that specific purpose would, indeed, be granted legal shelter from anti-robocall legislation.
In my reading, this has little to nothing to do with the Constitution, despite your claims.
I don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about your reading. It has everything to do with the First Amendment. So saith legal precedent. And it doesn't matter whether you agree with those precedents, either, because you are not a member of SCOTUS - which is the only body that could overturn them.
Hell, I don't agree with the courts' logic - and that, too, doesn't matter.
As Mr. Bumble famously remarked, "The law is an ass ... "
Spamalope posited:
Individuals own and pay for their own phones. That's their podium/forum. 3rd parties have no first amendment rights to their/our phones only their own.
So, if politicians were interested in fixing it you could require all 'legal' robocalls to have a standard identifier as a robocall, and a further category one for the type. Then mandate a method for choosing whether to get those calls controlled by the recipient. I'd like both a do not call list and a user controlled filter, possibly based on a new secure caller ID. (could be normal caller ID on the user end, so long as the telco verifies accuracy)
So you can filter 'RoboPol' from ringing your phone, but allow 'RoboDR' or 'RoboAppointment' so you can get appointment reminders or pharmacy notices that your prescription is ready. i.e. keep the things useful to you
You can require that political calls of any kind must identify the source in an accurate way without any misleading naming or obfuscation of the source. The groups involved must be identified, and name shell games are probibited. i.e. a new shell group every week so they seem to be from a different source, or calls designed to annoy you by groups naming themselves in a way designed to mislead to smear their opposition should be prohibited.
I like the idea. Unfortunately, implementing it is nowhere near as straightforward as you might like. Among other problems, your proposed restrictions - which, again, I think are perfectly reasonable, and would probably garner widespread public support - impinge on existing laws (and regulations, which are actually a different thing than laws) that fall outside of the scope of telecommunications legislation. As a for-instance, IRS regulations regarding 501(c)(4) organizations.
Perhaps more importantly, there is quite obviously no will among the political class to reform laws against robocalls to institute a requirement for flags of the sort you propose.
It might, however, be worth contacting the offices of senators Markey and Thune to put your idea on record. (Should you decide to do so, I strongly suggest it be via snailmail. Pols pay significantly more attention to physical letters than they do to email, both because it leaves an actual paper trail, and because it is an indicator of how seriously the writer takes the issue. Writing and printing out a letter, addressing an envelope, and spending money - albeit mere pocket change - on a stamp requires a lot more effort and determination than just firing off an email.
Were you to do so, I'd advise explaining the technical issues in language pitched at a sixth-grade reading level, because senatorial staffers rarely are tech-saavy enough to be able to determine whether tech-based legislative proposals from constituents are worth passing along to more senior staffmembers or, indeed, to the senator for whom they work. The simpler and more straightforward the language, the less likely the response is to consist merely of a form letter of thanks, assuring you of the senator's interest in the topic, and his (or her - but, in this instance, we're specifically talking about two male senators) commitment to serving his constituents. The key is to get whoever is responsible for drafting telecom legislation (which will definitely not be the senator himself) to look at your idea, instead of it being just another entry in the slush pile that some hapless intern relegates to the "file and forget" stack ...
An Anonymous Coward predicted:
and they'll have an exemption for political calls...
Yes, they will.
"They" will, because of the First Amendment's free speech guarantee. It is a long-established principle in American jurisprudence that political speech is granted extraordinary protections. Robocalls on behalf of candidates for elected office fall into that category, and will thus receive exemption from any strictures placed on commercial robocallers. By legal precedent, commercial speech is granted the lowest level of protection from government censorship under First Amendment principles, whereas political speech in general - including artwork that expresses a political viewpoint or social commentary, as well as campaign robocalls - enjoys the highest level of protection.
Note that courts have long held that First Amendment prohibitions on government censorship extends to government bodies, and elected and appointed officials at all levels of goverment from the Federal to the hyper-local. A village council has no more right to prohibit protected forms of speech than does Congress. On the other hand, it has also been firmly established by the courts that governments are under no obligation to provide a platform for political speech, unless they are compelled to do so by state or local law. Thus, as a relevant example, in California, city councils are required to provide a period for public comment at their meetings, but they are permitted to limit the length of time any individual speaker is alotted. Most therefore have rules limiting comments by uninvited speakers - which is to say, "the general public" - to 3 minutes. (That limit is not universally enforced - but, when it is, it must apply equally to everyone who chooses to speak during the public comment period.)
Railing at politicians for carving out exemptions from robocalling for themselves indicates a lack of understanding of the effect of the First Amendment on the ability of legislators to restrict political speech. They can and will specifically exempt calls of a political nature from robocalling - but, if they did not do so, rest assured that the first pol that's cited for violating the shiny, new restrictions they try to emplace will promptly sue them for violating his or her right to free speech.
He (or she) will, without question, win that lawsuit - and the judge who hears the case might well rule the entire law to be unconstitutional, and unenforceable ...
Applehu Akbar claimed:
The leading hypothesis for the Biblical flood is the inundation of the Black Sea basin as interglacial rising sea levels caused the Mediterranean to spill over through the Bosphorus. The timing would have been about right for the Old Testament.
Mmm - no. On both counts.
There's considerable controversy about whether the Black Sea Deluge was a sudden, catastropic event, or one that took place more slowly, forcing inhabitants of the basin to evacuate, but not instantly drowning them. There are experts of equal qualification on both sides of the debate, and it has not been resolved in any definitive way.
Meanwhile, the Flood Myth is a feature of many ancient civilizations' mythologies. The Sumerian version includes a man who overheard the gods planning the inundation in time to build a boat large enough to save himself, his family, and their chattels from the catastrophe.
Regardless, as Wikipedia notes, most academic scholars concur that what we refer to as the Book of Genesis was written after the hostages taken by Nebuchadnezzar in the 6th century BCE retuned from their captivity in Babylon with the gift of literacy. The Black Sea Deluge was therefore not even close to contemporaneous with the "record" of the Hebrew version of the flood myth - because there was none.
(Note that the much-bruited date of October 23, 4004 BCE for the Biblical creation comes from the work of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armaugh and Prelate of All Ireland, who calculated it based on the genealogy of Old Testament testament figures, as well as using Babylonian, Greek, and Roman sources to establish the starting date of Amel-Marduk's reign as King of Babylon. He also determined the birth of Jesus took place in 5 CE (because that was the year Herod the Great died). All of which was wasted effort, of course, because Methuselah (to choose only one of the figures upon which his dating scheme relied), if he ever existed, could not possibly have lived to be 900 year old. Nor could any of the other multi-century lifespans upon which his calculations depended have been accurate.)
The Old Testament, as a chronological document, is utterly unreliable. And, while the Hebrews' oral mythology certainly predates the return from Babylonian exile, the written form of the Torah probably did not exist before that time, so it's impossible to know how much of the Genesis flood story was a native Hebrew myth, and how much of it was informed by Babylonian and/or Sumerian myths to which the exiles had been exposed during their sojourn in Babylon ...
zidium screeched:
The last thing we want is Google owning yet another layer of the Web stack!
Exactly which part of the IETF process gives Google "ownership" of QUIC? The part where a working group composed of networking engineers who work for a whole bunch of different companies have spent months figuring out how to bolt this new protocol onto the existing IP stack, or the part where it's been kicked upstairs to the full HTTP working group with a recommendation that it be adopted as the basis of the next iteration of the protocol? Because neither of those decisions is anywhere close to final, yet, and the current version of QUIC - which Google actually uses internally - works well.
Or is it the fact that you're making shit up to trigger Google-haters's paranoia?
Further down in this discussion, ewhac provides the following link to a longish, quite intelligent discussion of what's wrong with TCP/IP in a ubiquitously-connected world (hint: the original design of the TCP protocol entirely failed to anticipate the mobile web - among many, many other shortcomings - and it now consists of a multi-layered kludge of, essentially, patches to enable it to function in an environment that is physically and logically completely unlike the bus-centric Ethernet networks it was developed to internetwork), and, just as importantly, an insightful discussion of why IPv6 has still not taken over the world, almost 30 years on, and probably never will:
The world in which IPv6 was a good design
Toward the end, the author talks about QUIC as a possible, elegant solution to the problem of creating a reliable, low-latency handover of session streams to enable a device whose IP address is constantly changing (i.e. - a mobile device that's, you know, in motion) to keep those data streams active in a much more elegant way than the current, provider-centric, dogshit-slow LTE protocol is capable of doing. And he goes to pains to point out that there are other possible solutions, as well, because that article is more than a year old, now, whereas the Mobile HTTP Working Group's recommendation that QUIC be the basis of the HTTP/3 standard is brand, spanking new.
(Just to be clear, it's not LTE itself that has the latency problem. It's the way LTE copes with constantly-changing IP addresses at the client end, as its signal gets handed off from one cell tower to the next.)
Mobile IP is a mess. Something has to be done about it. TCP is an increasingly-tottering kludge. Something has to be done about that, as well. IPv6 won't the panacea it's been advertised as, because its authors didn't anticipate the mobile Internet, either - and any fix is going to have to be a bolt-on, which is exactly the IPv4 problem IPv6 was supposed to eliminate.
Look, folks, internetworking has always been a moving target. As Niels Bohr phrased the old, Danish proverb, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." That earlier generations of working network engineers failed to forsee the exact nature of the internetworked world we currently inhabit is profoundly unsurprising. But universal adoption of mobile, Internet nodes for personal communication is a reality with which the current crop of networking gurus must deal. Given that fact, we can either accept a hodgepodge of vendor-proprietary solutions, none of which is especially satisfactory, or tackle the problem as a general one that requires a universal, non-proprietary solution.
The Mobile HTTP Working Group consists of experts who have been studying the problem for a long time, and who are focused on trying to solve real-world issues the solutions to which are only going to become more urgent as time goes on. By contrast, most of the bleating on this forum is from users who have little familiarity with those problems and no meaningful technical expertise to infor