Not only that, but it needs to be safe to use the public charging infrastructure--for example, you can't have them ever getting put in places where it's a Bad Idea to be if you're not local unless you're plunking them down like gas stations. Are you totally sure you'd like to spend 20-30min in the middle of the night in a town you don't know and not able to GTFO if needed?
You are? Okay. Go ask some friends who are not straight, white cismales about how they're going to feel about it. Hint: The answer will probably be "...yeeeah no." (If I get a bad feeling from a gas station? If I absolutely must get fuel there I will get a gallon before GTFOing but seriously I don't want to get raped and/or murdered because I happen to not be a cishet white man. One of the major reasons you keep a charged cell phone with you when travelling if you're not one is precisely so you can call for roadside assistance from a party you can trust.)
Fun fact: I know my sensible sedan is 100% capable of a trip through the back country where I live...and it's pretty rough back country.
The problem here is that the summary itself is...well, let me quote the abstract:
We find that the energy requirements of 87% of vehicle-days could be met by an existing, affordable electric vehicle. This percentage is markedly similar across diverse cities, even when per capita gasoline consumption differs significantly. We also find that for the highest-energy days, other vehicle technologies are likely to be needed even as batteries improve and charging infrastructure expands. Car sharing or other means to serve this small number of high-energy days could play an important role in the electrification and decarbonization of transportation.
I don't know exactly what Nature Energy's...quality is, though given that it is a branch of Nature I'm willing to grant it a decent amount of credibility--which is probably why the abstract doesn't make any claims about electric vehicles being able to completely replace traditional vehicles, but rather that they can take over most of the needs in cities.
I'm not shelling out the money to make it past the paywall, but it looks very likely that their population is about as diverse as a KKK meeting--they explicitly say that they only looked at cities, and I'm inclined to bet that all of these cities were large metropolitan cities where at least a decent chunk if not all of that 87% of vehicle-days could be handled by a good public-transit system.
This is actually a very lovely example of a study that might as well have been very intentionally designed to prove a theory--by ensuring that anything that might be...inconvenient to their theory wasn't likely to be in fact involved, which means that of course they chose populations where range would be a 'fringe use,' and the wording means that 'evacuating the city' is a fringe use too. The study also means that they don't actually have to address the minor fact that 'car sharing or other means' might not be practical on those 'small number of high-energy days.'
Like any law, it'd depend on how it was written--for example, if the law says you can charge only postage on the basis that under normal circumstances handling ought to be a negligible cost due to automation, then you should be able to make it quite hard for anybody to justify charging $100 for forwarding notices...especially if they can be asked to explain how they managed to make mere postage cost that much to the court. "Do you feel it somehow necessary, perhaps, to send each notice lovingly packaged in a special envelope that includes an artisanal brick?" (And, well, it might get notices sent to the middle man needing nothing more than the correct address applied before being sent on--postage already paid.)
Personally, I'd prefer overall the simplest solution: instead of fees for forwarding notices, just explicitly make bad DMCA claims subject to the same consequences faced for pretty much any other sort of bad claim made to the court. There's penalties for other forms of frivolous and vexatious litigation, and there seems no particularly good reason for the unquestioned assumption of competence and good faith with DMCA-related litigation. Well, aside from the practical and effective barrier created by the fact that Rightscorp and the ilk can afford a bevvy of ambulance chasers to make it very costly for anybody to actually fight them unless the claim's so absurd that you can get the judge to laugh it out of court, but that's a general problem with the civil process in the US...
The issue with the extortion is the negligent notices and the practices--this is not 'you scratched my car,' this is 'me claiming that you scratched my car (with you not being able to verify this was even possible and having no idea what evidence I might have to support my claim), demanding $20,000 (when that's significantly above what the repair will cost), and you not being able to afford to defend yourself against my army of bottom-feeding ambulance chasers.'
The 'demanding significantly more than the cost of the necessary paint job' thing is an outright equivalent to something I remember having come out, too. I do remember a court outright determining when somebody challenged the amount that Rightscorp or one of its relatives was suing for. The court did take as given that their claim on the number of lost sales was correct...but then calculated exactly just how much they'd have made on said sales using the price they were selling the song for on iTunes. The amount was significantly lower. (If you want the case, find it yourself.)
I honestly don't think it ought to be necessary to sue anybody for the cost of handling negligent notices. Aside from the rather basic fact that the volume of negligent notices ought to have hit the threshold for a failure of due diligence, something lawyers are supposed to practice on these sort of things, it seems reasonable to require the party sending them out cover the costs--they can tack it onto what they ask for when they win, if nothing else.
The way the DMCA process is written, the party making the claim doesn't really face much penalty for effectively lying to the court--while the risky and difficult task of defending yourself against false claims can be quite costly and you're unlikely to get Rightscorp or their ilk having to pick up the tab for that.
Also, there is no way that implementing a handful of automated filters equates to the ability to exercise effective editorial control over the entire Internet.
This is pretty much what Rightscorp seems to want, though, but it would be interesting if somebody argued that what they are demanding you do is as reasonable as trying to sue a corpse back to life--and thus the entire thing, right down to asking if the laws says they can demand it, is an utter waste of the court's time and needs to be treated as such.
Unlike the popular Slashdot opinion I am all for Intellectual Property rights...
I don't think that Slashdot readers want to abolish Intellectual Property rights completely. We just want reasonable terms. Start with copyright duration. Author's death + 70 years would be ridiculous if it wasn't true.
This. We don't have any problem with the spec of intellectual properly and copyright, we have problem with the implementation. While we have many frivolous ones, the patent system is actually a great idea - it allows people protection to turn a profit, and thereafter turns it into the public domain. By making copyrights last almost 150 years, in some cases, you completely stunt our cultural development - do you think the Greeks and Romans would have had such a rich literature if they had to wait 150 years before they could retell a story? Do you think the US would have become a world power if everything had been locked up and restricted by the various European countries?
Honestly I'd just start with adding a requirement that for all of the current protections you've got to provide a digital archival copy to the LOC & maintain some way for people attempting to locate you as the owner of that IP. The digital archival copy should serve as both legally establishing a date and content, and to ensure a copy exists to enter the public domain. Digital will be easier to store and preserve, probably.
The latter would simply neatly solve the orphan works problem: If you don't make an effort to be identifiable, you lose your claim permanently. You might get arguments when the problem is nobody's quite sure who owns it but multiple parties are willing to come forward and fight over it...but that happens with real estate, too, and has for thousands of years. I'm pretty sure we've got a decent idea how to sort that problem out...
Rightscorp *already* won in court. They sued Cox, the fifth largest ISP in the country. To fix the situation, a few words need to be added to the relevant law, the DMCA.
While we're at it, also adding a significant penalty for filing negligent DMCA notices would go aa LONG way to fixing the other problems related to the issues the act was intended to address.
Honestly, I suspect at this point it might be worth floating a law that basically says that the moment your demands to somebody to settle gets hard to distinguish from extortion? It will automatically result in you losing the case, possibly with you having to pay for everybody's legal costs. That, and basically point out that we need to let a third party be assured that they're safe--if you're going to insist Alice, who has an established reputation of borderline-at-best extortion via lawsuit, be helped to reach Bob by Charlie? Then Charlie should be absolutely safe legally if this time Alice finally faces criminal charges.
Note that I'm suggesting this across the board, too--you might well have an easier time getting this into law if you have it be just civil suits in general, especially since I suspect you could sell it to companies as protecting their asses too. After all, they might not always be playing Alice...
The question here is if a EULA actually can include consent to this, or if it's in the region where the consent must be explicit--with no questions whatsoever about if you knowingly agreed or not. Either way, however, this has all the makings of a massive PR disaster...and a good amount of data getting trolled. After all, if the toy can't tell if it's interacting with a human, I could see some owners deliberately trolling the company by getting their laundry (among other things) off...
Honestly, while I'm not British, I do have to agree with the view that this is a half-assed way of having a public service--just tax everybody, if you're going to do it at all. Ignoring the fact that they are flat-out admitting to engaging to mass surveillance--and assuming their claims are the complete and accurate truth--it still raises some serious questions on if the BBC's programming needs to be changed if enough people can be caught by the vans to hit the break-even point.
If the vans can't hit the break-even point? It's an unjustifiable waste of public money, and the fig leaf of justification for invading the public's privacy ought to depend on it not being that.
Meanwhile, if the vans are doing anything other than exactly what they're claiming they're doing? It is an unjustifiable invasion of privacy, and we can know this precisely because they're not admitting to it.
Personally? I figure it's not even going to be passing the 'does only what they claim it does' test, and wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if monitoring for people streaming vid is at the bottom of the vans' priorities...
I acknowledge not having rigorously defined 'supports'. Without one of these USB OTG or Lightning NICs that you linked, a device does not support Ethernet. So let me ask a second question:
What fraction of smartphone and tablet users own a compatible NIC?
I don't know what the number is in England, but I expect that that fraction is about to distinctly increase. Not all devices do support USB OTG at least, but the fraction of those in use are going to drop either way--if nothing else, as they age out, though this might help accelerate the process.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough: If you're registered to vote you are almost certainly on the list of people eligible to be called for jury duty and the judge can have your ass arrested if you don't turn up or ask to be excused and 'cannot get through security' is not on the list of accepted reasons. Merely getting arrested can and regularly does cost the poor their jobs.
You imply that my mother, who is a house wife, has never needed an ID--don't know how to break it to you, but she regularly needs her ID because she does this thing called 'buy alcohol,' needs to be able to pick up her prescriptions, and has been called for jury duty. She also was, when I was younger, the person who got me places which required doing this thing known as 'driving' and she, like most housewives, did most of the regular household buying, which in most of the US requires some driving. (In fact, they typically do more driving than their spouse, and have more say in the household spending--if you think most are kept home barefoot and pregnant, you need to leave your basement or cave more.)
I'm pretty sure most college students now do have a driver's license, at this point; the schools that I've gotten ID from wouldn't issue a student ID unless you had a valid government-issued photo ID already, actually, and one required I have two forms of ID before they'd hand it over. (More importantly, if you're eligible to to vote in the area, you should be able to obtain ID, and if you're not, you're going to be using an absentee ballot to vote at home.) Also, being in college doesn't automatically get you out of jury duty and I'm not expecting anybody to be eager to find out if their school ID is accepted.
I'm not sure quite how you think homeless are going to be assigned to a voting district since those are done by address, and you might want to think through what you've just basically said about how you don't want the homeless to be able to get jobs, which can be a major step towards being not homeless. Also, think a bit about just how badly getting called for jury duty is going to go for somebody who is homeless...
People without a government-issued photo ID are currently in all but the most literal sense disenfranchised. If you actually care? Do something actually useful, like starting pressuring the state to make sure access to the most basic ID is something everybody has--for free, and if this means the DMV must start being better about processing people through quickly and have extra hours and days open? Then that needs to happen.
Back in 1937, a large constituency of the economically marginal blacks in the deep south would have been involved in subsistence farming, which in the extreme case can almost function as a cash-free economy.
I would argue that things are worse for the poor now. Subsistence farmers could trivially raise a small amount of extra income by raising their prices slightly. They had some degree of control over their income, albeit not infinitely (because of supply and demand). Most of the poor now don't have that ability; they get paid a fixed wage and rarely have opportunities to take overtime voluntarily. For them, every extra dollar matters.
That would actually be outright good reason to have it so every effort is made to provide everybody eligible--let's go with 18+-and-citizen as a baseline, ideally 16+-and-resident (citizen or not)--a basic ID, for free. Somebody posted a partial list of stuff you need an ID to do--but left off things like opening a bank account and pawning stuff, both of which are super-helpful if every dollar matters. (Have you seen how much check cashing places take as their cut?)
I had to show my SS card when I got my first job and I was a W-2 employee there. If you've had a new employer since the 80s, then yeah, they are in violation of federal law--and you might want to find or replace your SS card if you're thinking of switching jobs & will remain a W-2 employee despite the change of employer.
Photo ID is rather useful if you need to cash a check, though, since most banks require you show one even if you've got an account with them--as long as you're getting cash during the transaction.
In the US, IDs are issued by the individual states, so pretty much all programs are going to be for one state, assuming the state itself doesn't just already waive fee if you provide evidence that you can't afford the money.
Politically, though? If requiring having one to vote is what it takes to get states to agree to act like people have a right to one...then it's what we should do, because in the US there's a lot of things you need an ID to do that you ought to have a right to one already. (So yes, this means I do think the fee for the most basic one should be $0, and every effort made to ensure people can get one if they don't have one.)
Funny, I've heard from DAs tales of people who don't exist or did but are very, very long-dead who are (were?) on the voting lists, and every so often it hits the news that a cat/dog/dead-for-a-looong-time person got found out as being on the voting lists. I know distinctly that the cat was supposedly registered to vote simply to show how little effort is made to ensure that, well, the individual is a living person old enough to vote--and it ought to have been painfully obvious that the cat was, in point of fact, a cat. (When somebody processes the voting registration of a Mittens, I think it's safe to say that there is a problem--and it was only ever found out because the cat was called for jury duty.)
Remember the old joke about Chicago, where the living and the dead vote.
People without driver's licenses are the most likely to forget a special ID used only once very two years. And that tilts towards poor people more often than not, and towards urban core areas (rich or poor). And those people tilt more Democrat as well. So there's a bias built into the statistics that way too.
Are you kidding? I had a non-driver's license for ages. Try cashing a check without some form of legal ID. Try walking into a courthouse without that. Try getting a new copy of your social security card--so you can get a job--without one. (Most of the things they accept other than legal photo ID can't be obtained easily without it--and if you think keeping track of a card 'used only once very two years' might be hard for some people, most of those you will use even less...)
Oh, and you can totally use one of those things when buying beer & cigarettes, at the adult store, and at the pharmacy to pick up medicine. I'm not even sure it was noticed when I did do...parts of that list while using that ID that it wasn't a driver's license.
There's a lot of things you actually do need a legal ID for, and the thing you really ought to be concerned about is that nobody has complained about those requiring ID because it discriminates against the poor--and at least two of these I'd say are ultimately going to be more important to them than voting.
If nothing else? If you're registered to vote you can be called jury duty, and as far as I can tell it's your problem if you don't have the ID required to make it through security--but you can be in legal trouble for not showing up. That ought to have been enough to require the state make at least some extra effort to ensure everybody can obtain one...
Honestly, I think the most amusing thing is how much stupid there seems to be going on with PoodleCorp. Between some of the groups Pokemon Go is popular with and apparently having their real names locatable in this data dump...
In some cases, which might with the right arguments include this, you can convince the court that the it's not important as the only way to be sufficiently incompetent is intentional effort--that the only way they could not know is by intentionally not checking. (It sounds like this will hit recovery partitions too, and those are almost certainly common enough that M$ should be making sure those will keep working...)
Just a quick note: I'm pretty sure that having the Olympics as THE premier event in your sport is, as of now, definitely harmful. It being harmful in the past is up for debate, but...
Does the IOC force athletes to sign any kind of waiver?
I don't know for certain but I would be very surprised if they didn't have some sort of waiver of liability. That sort of thing is pretty standard on every sporting event I've ever entered. I can't imagine the Olympics would be any different. There probably is a similar waiver for the national governing bodies as well. High level athletics involves a shocking number of lawyers believe it or not.
IANAL, but I'm aware that under certain circumstances--such as you basically being pressured into signing the waiver of liability, and not really free to walk away--waivers of liability are very interesting wastes of paper as far as the court is concerned. They can also be challenged, with success, on the grounds that this is not in fact a liability that can be waivered--basically, that Alice can't sign a paper saying Bob isn't responsible for something because the law itself says that Bob is responsible.
Just curious whether IOC is liable when an athlete gets sick from having to compete in water that a reasonable person would realize is not safe?
Problem is that the athlete always has the option to withdraw. It might be different if the IOC represented the water as clean when it wasn't but there seems to be little doubt in this case. You can't sign a waiver to permit a fraud but that's not in play here. So it's sort of a case of swim at your own risk. What astonishes me is that the IOC is willing to ignore all this negative press for something that could pretty easily have been avoided merely by doing a venue change. There has to be some clean water somewhere in Brazil.
From what I hear, the overlap between 'places with clean water in Brazil' and 'places capable and willing to hold the Olympics' has little if any overlap.
However, the IOC's behavior re: Rio is probably the best argument on why it needs to be just a 'respected event' instead of 'THE premier event' for any sport--if the IOC is going to just do nothing about the rather valid health and safety concerns people have? Then it is essential that all athletes have an alternate competition.
Something I've not seen mentioned yet, but am quite aware of is that some sports have very narrow windows where people can manage to perform at the levels required for the Olympics--you're more likely to have to retire from competition than manage to qualify for the next summer or winter Olympics in four years.
Actually, I'm pretty sure "home blind" is referring to a type of cognitive bias--I can't say for sure if confirmation bias, observer-expectancy effect, overconfidence effect, selective perception, something else, or a combination of any/all. In the case of our hypothetical personal trainer, what they're doing by hiring another personal trainer is ensuring that their assumptions and beliefs in the effectiveness of their routine for themselves won't blind them to reality--that they've got third-party confirmation that they're doing well.
It also ensures you've a spotter, which is a thing that you can't really do on your own unless you manage to possess multiple physical bodies.
Most lawyers I know probably would consider the situation before deciding if they hire another lawyer--they might arrange for a consult instead (a general sanity check, basically) or just come to the conclusion that hiring a specialist is a better use of their time and money. If it's something pretty clean-cut, though, they might not bother with anything more than maybe an informal consult of 'buy you a drink' sort if they're really cautious before going ahead.
Disagree. How is my company going to recover damages from an employee who turned out to be ensuring contracts went to his beloved (read: expensively incompetent) nephew who supplied us with dangerously defective goods?
Yes, criminal charges may well be involved, but this is a situation where it's not either/or but both--civil court is where the victims have to go to get their money back, and it's quite rare for any monetary penalty in criminal court to not get pocketed by the government.
Yes, but so is yours. At least so far as Russia is concerned, China, whatever, but your record on Russia, no, no, wrong.
Let's see, shall we?
Let's start with Russia! The Russian Revolution was basically the product of a bunch of intellectuals once again thinking they knew what was best for everybody--this was a recurring problem in Russia, and the nasty thing is that the intellectuals actually had repeatedly made things worse.
Uh no. Unless by intellectuals, you mean the ruling nobility who had gotten into the whole war with Germany. Which in turn had lead to massive economic deprivation and shortages which the public naturally detested. And they kept losing.
Ah, I see, you think it started in the 20th century! Nope, try the 19th century, and the Narodnaya Volya.
(Protip: Don't assassinate the reformist liberal Czar because he didn't wave a magic wand and make society recognize your intellectual superiority to everybody. That claim is definitely false if you're doing it in the bizzare hope that the peasants you've been trying to get to rise up will do so--they're not stupid.)
Protip: Don't claim the Czar was a reformist liberal when he wasn't (Nicholas had continually resisted reforms, or backed out on promises that he had made), or that he was assassinated, when he was driven from power and then executed, right after you claimed to be historically accurate. Assassination tends to refer to a rather different set of circumstances, and Nicholas the II was a devoted autocrat who only begrudgingly allowed any reforms. And even then, he often sought to limit their impact, or even reverse them.
Try Czar Alexander II of Russia, who was assassinated by Narodnaya Volya who believed it was their duty as enlightened individuals to lead the peasantry into revolution...and didn't quite understand that 'peasant' is not a fancy word for 'foolish and easily-led human.' This led to the sheer irony of Czar Alexander II's death. He was a major reformer, but Narodnaya Volya decided to blow him up because he was disassembling the power of the ruling classes too slowly for their tastes. He wasn't driven from power than 'executed'--though I know there's questions of the validity of orders wipe out Czar Nicholas II.
Czar Alexander II was blown up.
And by blown up, I mean three bombs got thrown at him in succession.
I'm pretty damn sure that counts as an assassination.
The nasty thing is, this is considered a major reason why his son Czar Alexander III and his grandson Czar Nicholas II resisted reforms. Both of them were alive at the time and would have gotten to see Alexander II as he lay bleeding out--both legs blow off, his face mutilated and his stomach torn open.
In fact, just before his death Czar Alexander II had completed plans to create the Duma, and his son's very first act on taking the throne was to cancel it, figuring that liberalization seemed to just encourage the foamy-mouthed revolutionaries so it was time to try something else.
If Czar Alexander II had lived even a little longer? Things would have been very different.
The problem in Russia is basically fixing things needed to take some time--but you had a huge number of people who wanted magic fixes or for everything to stay the same. The serfs--those bond slaves you mention--were freed in the 1860s and some of the rail infrastructure needed to do things like send grain to some far corner where people were starving was only just starting to be a thing. They were industrializing at a very rapid pace--but, well, once again you had an intellectual class that confused factories for mushrooms and thought rail just laid itself, and missed that you actually do
Let's start with Russia! The Russian Revolution was basically the product of a bunch of intellectuals once again thinking they knew what was best for everybody--this was a recurring problem in Russia, and the nasty thing is that the intellectuals actually had repeatedly made things worse. (Protip: Don't assassinate the reformist liberal Czar because he didn't wave a magic wand and make society recognize your intellectual superiority to everybody. That claim is definitely false if you're doing it in the bizzare hope that the peasants you've been trying to get to rise up will do so--they're not stupid.)
The problem in Russia is basically fixing things needed to take some time--but you had a huge number of people who wanted magic fixes or for everything to stay the same. The serfs--those bond slaves you mention--were freed in the 1860s and some of the rail infrastructure needed to do things like send grain to some far corner where people were starving was only just starting to be a thing. They were industrializing at a very rapid pace--but, well, once again you had an intellectual class that confused factories for mushrooms and thought rail just laid itself, and missed that you actually do want a bit of time for things to stabilize between reforms.
Now, for China. I know a bit more about East Asia since that was more my thing, so this is going to be kind of long...
Let's start with the Boxer Rebellion at about 1900--some of the events surrounding this was pretty much taken by the Chinese as a sign that the Mandate of Heaven had been lost by the current Imperial line. A damn good part of this could be laid at the feet of Empress Dowager Cixi who was very against reform--to the point of seizing power when the Guangxu Emperor tried to actually emperor to the point of introducing reforms. Foreign powers (not just the Western nations) had been increasingly bringing new ideas in and forcing unequal treaties, but China pretty much chose the worst way to deal with this.
There's a lot things that can be said about Empress Dowager Cixi, including that you can lay at her feet the demise of Imperial China. She was stuck somewhere in the 1700s mentally--and the Boxers while reactionary were not exactly for her government. Around the time of the Boxer Rebellion, in fact, she had made pretty much a sudden 180 turn and started allying with them instead of suppressing them. Cixi basically was the Imperial version of a controlling stage mother...and quite possibly the sort that they make horror movies about, too.
But this is all beside the point: The entire ruling class you're talking about had pretty much collapsed as the consequences of history and had done so in 1912. At that point Imperial China ended officially and the Republic of China started, and the Chinese Communists came into power later via civil war instead of a revolution. There's actually ongoing argument on if the Chinese Civil War has legally ended, incidentally, so it's more of an ongoing cold war that nobody wants to talk about...
Anyway. By the point the communists came to power in China? The nobility, what there was of one, had pretty much crumbled via infighting by the time the Chinese Civil War started--seriously, Imperial China had imploded in the end, and a huge part of the problem was 'Foreigners bringing in new ideas that disrupted the ossified bureaucratic class.' A decent amount of it has survived, though, since China's ruling classes included the bureaucracy and the only thing that really has changed is the titles. (Also, these were the people who tended to have the most contact with foreigners and bribery was not always required--some of them actually had clued in that China might maybe want to join the 19th century before it had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century... Late Imperial China was, basically, that old man who yells at the kids to get off 'his' lawn except he's senile a
The kind of computer power governments, Google and Amazon can wield are one of the two magic components the Soviets lacked. How to prevent a Stalin style autocratic regime was the other one.
Actually, I'd say magic is pretty accurate here--no matter how much computer power you throw at it, predicting the future with sufficient reliability for a planned economy to work smoothly requires magic, though it's a more likely magic than the magic required to prevent a Stalin-style autocratic regime. You might manage to get a collective leadership in charge of your totalitarian regime, but unless you want to bet that infighting will keep them busy enough to give people much freedom...that's not much better, and the infighting might well up the body count and overall suffering.
Picking someone with some social conservative views undercuts Trump
Nobody with even remotely conservative views will vote for Hillary.
She's also bleeding off people who are definitely democrats. This might be an election where "None of the above" would just need to be on the ballot to win the Presidency.
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Not only that, but it needs to be safe to use the public charging infrastructure--for example, you can't have them ever getting put in places where it's a Bad Idea to be if you're not local unless you're plunking them down like gas stations. Are you totally sure you'd like to spend 20-30min in the middle of the night in a town you don't know and not able to GTFO if needed?
You are? Okay. Go ask some friends who are not straight, white cismales about how they're going to feel about it. Hint: The answer will probably be "...yeeeah no." (If I get a bad feeling from a gas station? If I absolutely must get fuel there I will get a gallon before GTFOing but seriously I don't want to get raped and/or murdered because I happen to not be a cishet white man. One of the major reasons you keep a charged cell phone with you when travelling if you're not one is precisely so you can call for roadside assistance from a party you can trust.)
Fun fact: I know my sensible sedan is 100% capable of a trip through the back country where I live...and it's pretty rough back country.
The problem here is that the summary itself is...well, let me quote the abstract:
We find that the energy requirements of 87% of vehicle-days could be met by an existing, affordable electric vehicle. This percentage is markedly similar across diverse cities, even when per capita gasoline consumption differs significantly. We also find that for the highest-energy days, other vehicle technologies are likely to be needed even as batteries improve and charging infrastructure expands. Car sharing or other means to serve this small number of high-energy days could play an important role in the electrification and decarbonization of transportation.
I don't know exactly what Nature Energy's...quality is, though given that it is a branch of Nature I'm willing to grant it a decent amount of credibility--which is probably why the abstract doesn't make any claims about electric vehicles being able to completely replace traditional vehicles, but rather that they can take over most of the needs in cities.
I'm not shelling out the money to make it past the paywall, but it looks very likely that their population is about as diverse as a KKK meeting--they explicitly say that they only looked at cities, and I'm inclined to bet that all of these cities were large metropolitan cities where at least a decent chunk if not all of that 87% of vehicle-days could be handled by a good public-transit system.
This is actually a very lovely example of a study that might as well have been very intentionally designed to prove a theory--by ensuring that anything that might be...inconvenient to their theory wasn't likely to be in fact involved, which means that of course they chose populations where range would be a 'fringe use,' and the wording means that 'evacuating the city' is a fringe use too. The study also means that they don't actually have to address the minor fact that 'car sharing or other means' might not be practical on those 'small number of high-energy days.'
Like any law, it'd depend on how it was written--for example, if the law says you can charge only postage on the basis that under normal circumstances handling ought to be a negligible cost due to automation, then you should be able to make it quite hard for anybody to justify charging $100 for forwarding notices...especially if they can be asked to explain how they managed to make mere postage cost that much to the court. "Do you feel it somehow necessary, perhaps, to send each notice lovingly packaged in a special envelope that includes an artisanal brick?" (And, well, it might get notices sent to the middle man needing nothing more than the correct address applied before being sent on--postage already paid.)
Personally, I'd prefer overall the simplest solution: instead of fees for forwarding notices, just explicitly make bad DMCA claims subject to the same consequences faced for pretty much any other sort of bad claim made to the court. There's penalties for other forms of frivolous and vexatious litigation, and there seems no particularly good reason for the unquestioned assumption of competence and good faith with DMCA-related litigation. Well, aside from the practical and effective barrier created by the fact that Rightscorp and the ilk can afford a bevvy of ambulance chasers to make it very costly for anybody to actually fight them unless the claim's so absurd that you can get the judge to laugh it out of court, but that's a general problem with the civil process in the US...
The issue with the extortion is the negligent notices and the practices--this is not 'you scratched my car,' this is 'me claiming that you scratched my car (with you not being able to verify this was even possible and having no idea what evidence I might have to support my claim), demanding $20,000 (when that's significantly above what the repair will cost), and you not being able to afford to defend yourself against my army of bottom-feeding ambulance chasers.'
The 'demanding significantly more than the cost of the necessary paint job' thing is an outright equivalent to something I remember having come out, too. I do remember a court outright determining when somebody challenged the amount that Rightscorp or one of its relatives was suing for. The court did take as given that their claim on the number of lost sales was correct...but then calculated exactly just how much they'd have made on said sales using the price they were selling the song for on iTunes. The amount was significantly lower. (If you want the case, find it yourself.)
I honestly don't think it ought to be necessary to sue anybody for the cost of handling negligent notices. Aside from the rather basic fact that the volume of negligent notices ought to have hit the threshold for a failure of due diligence, something lawyers are supposed to practice on these sort of things, it seems reasonable to require the party sending them out cover the costs--they can tack it onto what they ask for when they win, if nothing else.
The way the DMCA process is written, the party making the claim doesn't really face much penalty for effectively lying to the court--while the risky and difficult task of defending yourself against false claims can be quite costly and you're unlikely to get Rightscorp or their ilk having to pick up the tab for that.
Also, there is no way that implementing a handful of automated filters equates to the ability to exercise effective editorial control over the entire Internet.
This is pretty much what Rightscorp seems to want, though, but it would be interesting if somebody argued that what they are demanding you do is as reasonable as trying to sue a corpse back to life--and thus the entire thing, right down to asking if the laws says they can demand it, is an utter waste of the court's time and needs to be treated as such.
I don't think that Slashdot readers want to abolish Intellectual Property rights completely. We just want reasonable terms. Start with copyright duration. Author's death + 70 years would be ridiculous if it wasn't true.
This. We don't have any problem with the spec of intellectual properly and copyright, we have problem with the implementation. While we have many frivolous ones, the patent system is actually a great idea - it allows people protection to turn a profit, and thereafter turns it into the public domain. By making copyrights last almost 150 years, in some cases, you completely stunt our cultural development - do you think the Greeks and Romans would have had such a rich literature if they had to wait 150 years before they could retell a story? Do you think the US would have become a world power if everything had been locked up and restricted by the various European countries?
Honestly I'd just start with adding a requirement that for all of the current protections you've got to provide a digital archival copy to the LOC & maintain some way for people attempting to locate you as the owner of that IP. The digital archival copy should serve as both legally establishing a date and content, and to ensure a copy exists to enter the public domain. Digital will be easier to store and preserve, probably.
The latter would simply neatly solve the orphan works problem: If you don't make an effort to be identifiable, you lose your claim permanently. You might get arguments when the problem is nobody's quite sure who owns it but multiple parties are willing to come forward and fight over it...but that happens with real estate, too, and has for thousands of years. I'm pretty sure we've got a decent idea how to sort that problem out...
Rightscorp *already* won in court. They sued Cox, the fifth largest ISP in the country. To fix the situation, a few words need to be added to the relevant law, the DMCA.
While we're at it, also adding a significant penalty for filing negligent DMCA notices would go aa LONG way to fixing the other problems related to the issues the act was intended to address.
Honestly, I suspect at this point it might be worth floating a law that basically says that the moment your demands to somebody to settle gets hard to distinguish from extortion? It will automatically result in you losing the case, possibly with you having to pay for everybody's legal costs. That, and basically point out that we need to let a third party be assured that they're safe--if you're going to insist Alice, who has an established reputation of borderline-at-best extortion via lawsuit, be helped to reach Bob by Charlie? Then Charlie should be absolutely safe legally if this time Alice finally faces criminal charges.
Note that I'm suggesting this across the board, too--you might well have an easier time getting this into law if you have it be just civil suits in general, especially since I suspect you could sell it to companies as protecting their asses too. After all, they might not always be playing Alice...
The question here is if a EULA actually can include consent to this, or if it's in the region where the consent must be explicit--with no questions whatsoever about if you knowingly agreed or not. Either way, however, this has all the makings of a massive PR disaster...and a good amount of data getting trolled. After all, if the toy can't tell if it's interacting with a human, I could see some owners deliberately trolling the company by getting their laundry (among other things) off...
Honestly, while I'm not British, I do have to agree with the view that this is a half-assed way of having a public service--just tax everybody, if you're going to do it at all. Ignoring the fact that they are flat-out admitting to engaging to mass surveillance--and assuming their claims are the complete and accurate truth--it still raises some serious questions on if the BBC's programming needs to be changed if enough people can be caught by the vans to hit the break-even point.
If the vans can't hit the break-even point? It's an unjustifiable waste of public money, and the fig leaf of justification for invading the public's privacy ought to depend on it not being that.
Meanwhile, if the vans are doing anything other than exactly what they're claiming they're doing? It is an unjustifiable invasion of privacy, and we can know this precisely because they're not admitting to it.
Personally? I figure it's not even going to be passing the 'does only what they claim it does' test, and wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if monitoring for people streaming vid is at the bottom of the vans' priorities...
I acknowledge not having rigorously defined 'supports'. Without one of these USB OTG or Lightning NICs that you linked, a device does not support Ethernet. So let me ask a second question:
What fraction of smartphone and tablet users own a compatible NIC?
I don't know what the number is in England, but I expect that that fraction is about to distinctly increase. Not all devices do support USB OTG at least, but the fraction of those in use are going to drop either way--if nothing else, as they age out, though this might help accelerate the process.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough: If you're registered to vote you are almost certainly on the list of people eligible to be called for jury duty and the judge can have your ass arrested if you don't turn up or ask to be excused and 'cannot get through security' is not on the list of accepted reasons. Merely getting arrested can and regularly does cost the poor their jobs.
You imply that my mother, who is a house wife, has never needed an ID--don't know how to break it to you, but she regularly needs her ID because she does this thing called 'buy alcohol,' needs to be able to pick up her prescriptions, and has been called for jury duty. She also was, when I was younger, the person who got me places which required doing this thing known as 'driving' and she, like most housewives, did most of the regular household buying, which in most of the US requires some driving. (In fact, they typically do more driving than their spouse, and have more say in the household spending--if you think most are kept home barefoot and pregnant, you need to leave your basement or cave more.)
I'm pretty sure most college students now do have a driver's license, at this point; the schools that I've gotten ID from wouldn't issue a student ID unless you had a valid government-issued photo ID already, actually, and one required I have two forms of ID before they'd hand it over. (More importantly, if you're eligible to to vote in the area, you should be able to obtain ID, and if you're not, you're going to be using an absentee ballot to vote at home.) Also, being in college doesn't automatically get you out of jury duty and I'm not expecting anybody to be eager to find out if their school ID is accepted.
I'm not sure quite how you think homeless are going to be assigned to a voting district since those are done by address, and you might want to think through what you've just basically said about how you don't want the homeless to be able to get jobs, which can be a major step towards being not homeless. Also, think a bit about just how badly getting called for jury duty is going to go for somebody who is homeless...
People without a government-issued photo ID are currently in all but the most literal sense disenfranchised. If you actually care? Do something actually useful, like starting pressuring the state to make sure access to the most basic ID is something everybody has--for free, and if this means the DMV must start being better about processing people through quickly and have extra hours and days open? Then that needs to happen.
I would argue that things are worse for the poor now. Subsistence farmers could trivially raise a small amount of extra income by raising their prices slightly. They had some degree of control over their income, albeit not infinitely (because of supply and demand). Most of the poor now don't have that ability; they get paid a fixed wage and rarely have opportunities to take overtime voluntarily. For them, every extra dollar matters.
That would actually be outright good reason to have it so every effort is made to provide everybody eligible--let's go with 18+-and-citizen as a baseline, ideally 16+-and-resident (citizen or not)--a basic ID, for free. Somebody posted a partial list of stuff you need an ID to do--but left off things like opening a bank account and pawning stuff, both of which are super-helpful if every dollar matters. (Have you seen how much check cashing places take as their cut?)
I had to show my SS card when I got my first job and I was a W-2 employee there. If you've had a new employer since the 80s, then yeah, they are in violation of federal law--and you might want to find or replace your SS card if you're thinking of switching jobs & will remain a W-2 employee despite the change of employer.
Photo ID is rather useful if you need to cash a check, though, since most banks require you show one even if you've got an account with them--as long as you're getting cash during the transaction.
In the US, IDs are issued by the individual states, so pretty much all programs are going to be for one state, assuming the state itself doesn't just already waive fee if you provide evidence that you can't afford the money.
Politically, though? If requiring having one to vote is what it takes to get states to agree to act like people have a right to one...then it's what we should do, because in the US there's a lot of things you need an ID to do that you ought to have a right to one already. (So yes, this means I do think the fee for the most basic one should be $0, and every effort made to ensure people can get one if they don't have one.)
Funny, I've heard from DAs tales of people who don't exist or did but are very, very long-dead who are (were?) on the voting lists, and every so often it hits the news that a cat/dog/dead-for-a-looong-time person got found out as being on the voting lists. I know distinctly that the cat was supposedly registered to vote simply to show how little effort is made to ensure that, well, the individual is a living person old enough to vote--and it ought to have been painfully obvious that the cat was, in point of fact, a cat. (When somebody processes the voting registration of a Mittens, I think it's safe to say that there is a problem--and it was only ever found out because the cat was called for jury duty.)
Remember the old joke about Chicago, where the living and the dead vote.
People without driver's licenses are the most likely to forget a special ID used only once very two years. And that tilts towards poor people more often than not, and towards urban core areas (rich or poor). And those people tilt more Democrat as well. So there's a bias built into the statistics that way too.
Are you kidding? I had a non-driver's license for ages. Try cashing a check without some form of legal ID. Try walking into a courthouse without that. Try getting a new copy of your social security card--so you can get a job--without one. (Most of the things they accept other than legal photo ID can't be obtained easily without it--and if you think keeping track of a card 'used only once very two years' might be hard for some people, most of those you will use even less...)
Oh, and you can totally use one of those things when buying beer & cigarettes, at the adult store, and at the pharmacy to pick up medicine. I'm not even sure it was noticed when I did do...parts of that list while using that ID that it wasn't a driver's license.
There's a lot of things you actually do need a legal ID for, and the thing you really ought to be concerned about is that nobody has complained about those requiring ID because it discriminates against the poor--and at least two of these I'd say are ultimately going to be more important to them than voting.
If nothing else? If you're registered to vote you can be called jury duty, and as far as I can tell it's your problem if you don't have the ID required to make it through security--but you can be in legal trouble for not showing up. That ought to have been enough to require the state make at least some extra effort to ensure everybody can obtain one...
Honestly, I think the most amusing thing is how much stupid there seems to be going on with PoodleCorp. Between some of the groups Pokemon Go is popular with and apparently having their real names locatable in this data dump...
In some cases, which might with the right arguments include this, you can convince the court that the it's not important as the only way to be sufficiently incompetent is intentional effort--that the only way they could not know is by intentionally not checking. (It sounds like this will hit recovery partitions too, and those are almost certainly common enough that M$ should be making sure those will keep working...)
Just a quick note: I'm pretty sure that having the Olympics as THE premier event in your sport is, as of now, definitely harmful. It being harmful in the past is up for debate, but...
Does the IOC force athletes to sign any kind of waiver?
I don't know for certain but I would be very surprised if they didn't have some sort of waiver of liability. That sort of thing is pretty standard on every sporting event I've ever entered. I can't imagine the Olympics would be any different. There probably is a similar waiver for the national governing bodies as well. High level athletics involves a shocking number of lawyers believe it or not.
IANAL, but I'm aware that under certain circumstances--such as you basically being pressured into signing the waiver of liability, and not really free to walk away--waivers of liability are very interesting wastes of paper as far as the court is concerned. They can also be challenged, with success, on the grounds that this is not in fact a liability that can be waivered--basically, that Alice can't sign a paper saying Bob isn't responsible for something because the law itself says that Bob is responsible.
Just curious whether IOC is liable when an athlete gets sick from having to compete in water that a reasonable person would realize is not safe?
Problem is that the athlete always has the option to withdraw. It might be different if the IOC represented the water as clean when it wasn't but there seems to be little doubt in this case. You can't sign a waiver to permit a fraud but that's not in play here. So it's sort of a case of swim at your own risk. What astonishes me is that the IOC is willing to ignore all this negative press for something that could pretty easily have been avoided merely by doing a venue change. There has to be some clean water somewhere in Brazil.
From what I hear, the overlap between 'places with clean water in Brazil' and 'places capable and willing to hold the Olympics' has little if any overlap.
However, the IOC's behavior re: Rio is probably the best argument on why it needs to be just a 'respected event' instead of 'THE premier event' for any sport--if the IOC is going to just do nothing about the rather valid health and safety concerns people have? Then it is essential that all athletes have an alternate competition.
Something I've not seen mentioned yet, but am quite aware of is that some sports have very narrow windows where people can manage to perform at the levels required for the Olympics--you're more likely to have to retire from competition than manage to qualify for the next summer or winter Olympics in four years.
Actually, I'm pretty sure "home blind" is referring to a type of cognitive bias--I can't say for sure if confirmation bias, observer-expectancy effect, overconfidence effect, selective perception, something else, or a combination of any/all. In the case of our hypothetical personal trainer, what they're doing by hiring another personal trainer is ensuring that their assumptions and beliefs in the effectiveness of their routine for themselves won't blind them to reality--that they've got third-party confirmation that they're doing well.
It also ensures you've a spotter, which is a thing that you can't really do on your own unless you manage to possess multiple physical bodies.
Most lawyers I know probably would consider the situation before deciding if they hire another lawyer--they might arrange for a consult instead (a general sanity check, basically) or just come to the conclusion that hiring a specialist is a better use of their time and money. If it's something pretty clean-cut, though, they might not bother with anything more than maybe an informal consult of 'buy you a drink' sort if they're really cautious before going ahead.
Disagree. How is my company going to recover damages from an employee who turned out to be ensuring contracts went to his beloved (read: expensively incompetent) nephew who supplied us with dangerously defective goods?
Yes, criminal charges may well be involved, but this is a situation where it's not either/or but both--civil court is where the victims have to go to get their money back, and it's quite rare for any monetary penalty in criminal court to not get pocketed by the government.
Wow...the history's pretty inaccurate here.
Yes, but so is yours. At least so far as Russia is concerned, China, whatever, but your record on Russia, no, no, wrong.
Let's see, shall we?
Let's start with Russia! The Russian Revolution was basically the product of a bunch of intellectuals once again thinking they knew what was best for everybody--this was a recurring problem in Russia, and the nasty thing is that the intellectuals actually had repeatedly made things worse.
Uh no. Unless by intellectuals, you mean the ruling nobility who had gotten into the whole war with Germany. Which in turn had lead to massive economic deprivation and shortages which the public naturally detested. And they kept losing.
Ah, I see, you think it started in the 20th century! Nope, try the 19th century, and the Narodnaya Volya.
(Protip: Don't assassinate the reformist liberal Czar because he didn't wave a magic wand and make society recognize your intellectual superiority to everybody. That claim is definitely false if you're doing it in the bizzare hope that the peasants you've been trying to get to rise up will do so--they're not stupid.)
Protip: Don't claim the Czar was a reformist liberal when he wasn't (Nicholas had continually resisted reforms, or backed out on promises that he had made), or that he was assassinated, when he was driven from power and then executed, right after you claimed to be historically accurate. Assassination tends to refer to a rather different set of circumstances, and Nicholas the II was a devoted autocrat who only begrudgingly allowed any reforms. And even then, he often sought to limit their impact, or even reverse them.
Try Czar Alexander II of Russia, who was assassinated by Narodnaya Volya who believed it was their duty as enlightened individuals to lead the peasantry into revolution...and didn't quite understand that 'peasant' is not a fancy word for 'foolish and easily-led human.' This led to the sheer irony of Czar Alexander II's death. He was a major reformer, but Narodnaya Volya decided to blow him up because he was disassembling the power of the ruling classes too slowly for their tastes. He wasn't driven from power than 'executed'--though I know there's questions of the validity of orders wipe out Czar Nicholas II.
Czar Alexander II was blown up.
And by blown up, I mean three bombs got thrown at him in succession.
I'm pretty damn sure that counts as an assassination.
The nasty thing is, this is considered a major reason why his son Czar Alexander III and his grandson Czar Nicholas II resisted reforms. Both of them were alive at the time and would have gotten to see Alexander II as he lay bleeding out--both legs blow off, his face mutilated and his stomach torn open.
In fact, just before his death Czar Alexander II had completed plans to create the Duma, and his son's very first act on taking the throne was to cancel it, figuring that liberalization seemed to just encourage the foamy-mouthed revolutionaries so it was time to try something else.
If Czar Alexander II had lived even a little longer? Things would have been very different.
The problem in Russia is basically fixing things needed to take some time--but you had a huge number of people who wanted magic fixes or for everything to stay the same. The serfs--those bond slaves you mention--were freed in the 1860s and some of the rail infrastructure needed to do things like send grain to some far corner where people were starving was only just starting to be a thing. They were industrializing at a very rapid pace--but, well, once again you had an intellectual class that confused factories for mushrooms and thought rail just laid itself, and missed that you actually do
Wow...the history's pretty inaccurate here.
Let's start with Russia! The Russian Revolution was basically the product of a bunch of intellectuals once again thinking they knew what was best for everybody--this was a recurring problem in Russia, and the nasty thing is that the intellectuals actually had repeatedly made things worse. (Protip: Don't assassinate the reformist liberal Czar because he didn't wave a magic wand and make society recognize your intellectual superiority to everybody. That claim is definitely false if you're doing it in the bizzare hope that the peasants you've been trying to get to rise up will do so--they're not stupid.)
The problem in Russia is basically fixing things needed to take some time--but you had a huge number of people who wanted magic fixes or for everything to stay the same. The serfs--those bond slaves you mention--were freed in the 1860s and some of the rail infrastructure needed to do things like send grain to some far corner where people were starving was only just starting to be a thing. They were industrializing at a very rapid pace--but, well, once again you had an intellectual class that confused factories for mushrooms and thought rail just laid itself, and missed that you actually do want a bit of time for things to stabilize between reforms.
Now, for China. I know a bit more about East Asia since that was more my thing, so this is going to be kind of long...
Let's start with the Boxer Rebellion at about 1900--some of the events surrounding this was pretty much taken by the Chinese as a sign that the Mandate of Heaven had been lost by the current Imperial line. A damn good part of this could be laid at the feet of Empress Dowager Cixi who was very against reform--to the point of seizing power when the Guangxu Emperor tried to actually emperor to the point of introducing reforms. Foreign powers (not just the Western nations) had been increasingly bringing new ideas in and forcing unequal treaties, but China pretty much chose the worst way to deal with this.
There's a lot things that can be said about Empress Dowager Cixi, including that you can lay at her feet the demise of Imperial China. She was stuck somewhere in the 1700s mentally--and the Boxers while reactionary were not exactly for her government. Around the time of the Boxer Rebellion, in fact, she had made pretty much a sudden 180 turn and started allying with them instead of suppressing them. Cixi basically was the Imperial version of a controlling stage mother...and quite possibly the sort that they make horror movies about, too.
But this is all beside the point: The entire ruling class you're talking about had pretty much collapsed as the consequences of history and had done so in 1912. At that point Imperial China ended officially and the Republic of China started, and the Chinese Communists came into power later via civil war instead of a revolution. There's actually ongoing argument on if the Chinese Civil War has legally ended, incidentally, so it's more of an ongoing cold war that nobody wants to talk about...
Anyway. By the point the communists came to power in China? The nobility, what there was of one, had pretty much crumbled via infighting by the time the Chinese Civil War started--seriously, Imperial China had imploded in the end, and a huge part of the problem was 'Foreigners bringing in new ideas that disrupted the ossified bureaucratic class.' A decent amount of it has survived, though, since China's ruling classes included the bureaucracy and the only thing that really has changed is the titles. (Also, these were the people who tended to have the most contact with foreigners and bribery was not always required--some of them actually had clued in that China might maybe want to join the 19th century before it had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century... Late Imperial China was, basically, that old man who yells at the kids to get off 'his' lawn except he's senile a
The kind of computer power governments, Google and Amazon can wield are one of the two magic components the Soviets lacked. How to prevent a Stalin style autocratic regime was the other one.
Actually, I'd say magic is pretty accurate here--no matter how much computer power you throw at it, predicting the future with sufficient reliability for a planned economy to work smoothly requires magic, though it's a more likely magic than the magic required to prevent a Stalin-style autocratic regime. You might manage to get a collective leadership in charge of your totalitarian regime, but unless you want to bet that infighting will keep them busy enough to give people much freedom...that's not much better, and the infighting might well up the body count and overall suffering.
Picking someone with some social conservative views undercuts Trump
Nobody with even remotely conservative views will vote for Hillary.
She's also bleeding off people who are definitely democrats. This might be an election where "None of the above" would just need to be on the ballot to win the Presidency.