No, football is based on the old British tradition of street-fighting with a ball in there somewhere, allegedly dating back to pre-Roman times when the game was played with a human head preserved in slaked lime and still played in that form (minus the head) in several English and Scots villages to this day. This doesn't challenge your basic point, but pedantry forbids I should let that one go by.
1933 is still a tad on the early side for jets - I believe Whittle was getting his first patent on the thing about then. The V1 engine was actually a rocket rather than a jet - the Third Reich never actually used jets, employing lqiuid-fuelled rockets instead, but by 1945 the first jet fighters were in use. The Gloster Meteor, as I recall.
I am a lawyer, I happen to have been advising on this one this morning, and you're right. The relevant law is to be found in Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 1998, Principle 8 of the eight principles listed there.
If you want to read it yourself, go to www.hmso.gov.uk and drill down to the legislation in question. I'd do an href but I can't be bothered.
I just looked through the Passport T&Cs (IAAL, btw, UK rather than US qualified) and there's one or two terms in there that would be unenforceable in english law (and probably in scots law as well), including the jurisdiction and choice of law clause as against a consumer.
Yes, Microsoft's T&Cs prohibit the use of their Passport service in most of the UK. If not all of it.
To use the lawyers' term of art, they can go pee up a rope.
Unlikely, as on further research I discover my remembrace was faulty. It was in fact repealed in 1973.
It may be that the police gave an order to the Brixton rioters to disperse that was reported as a reading of the Riot Act, but it certainly wasn't the Riot Act of 1715.
By the time of the Brixton Riots, Riot was in and of itself an offence - the Riot Act allowed the rioters (defined - this is the condensed version, the actual definition has more detail - 12 or more people behaving rowdily with common purpose) an hour to disperse. Nowadays, the police are entitled to just wade in and start making arrests.
Bzzzt. The Riot Act has been no more than a figure of speech in this country for a very, very long time indeed. If increasingly hazy memory serves it was repealed by the Public Order Act of 1936.
The Riot Act was, if read aloud to a riotous assembly, the authority of a justice of the peace to order a detachment of militia to fire into the crowd or, of cavalry, to charge with drawn sabres. I can think of two examples of its being used within thirty miles and two hundred years of where I sit (the Peterloo massacre and the Preston Chartist martyrs, both in the middle years of the 19th Century) and memories of the likes of that are among the reasons why we ibject so strongly to armed police in this country.
None of this touches the central point, though, which is that what's been done here is no different to posting mugshots of suspects on a post-office wall. There's witness, photographic and video evidence of them rioting and damaging property: the offenders are going to have to kiss prosecutorial ringpiece on any plea-bargain...
The doctrine you're missing is freedom of contract. The school is a commercial undertaking, with a product (education), customers (parents) and a price list. The school is free to provide that product to those customers on whatever terms it sees fit: those terms will be a tension between what it wants to get away with and what it must give up in order to remain competitive in the marketplace. Some regulations are imposed by law, but not a great many.
So, the kids have the freedom to say what they please, and the school has the freedom to decline to continue selling its services to their parents.
The situation is no different to a shopkeeper declining to sell you anything because you called him rude names in his shop - why should his freedom to do business with whom he pleases be restricted because your government isn't allowed to tell you what not to say?
And that, in a nutshell, is what is simultaneously right and wrong about free-market capitalism.
Wholly misconceived. It's not the underlying bitstream that's being banned, it's what you describe as the "implementation details", which is the human-readable meaning of a given bitstream in a context that includes the display of images.
It's perfectly possible to read the bitstream of a.jpg as a very, very large number devoid of anything other than its sui generis meaning as a number. It only becomes harmful (select your own value for harmful here) when the implementation of that number is as a jpg of a kind readable by an appropriately-configured machine as an image.
Our hypothetical large number is noise in the context of pure number, but signal in the context of a session with - say - paint shop pro.
There are occasional rumbles about this out of the EU competition authorities, but from the (miniscule) extent of the actual action being taken, I think they've been nobbled.
The problem is that Arts. 81 and 85 of the Treaty of Rome (which are what give competition law its bite in the EU) regulate trade within the EU and are interpreted almost wholly to mean trade and contractual provisions rather than technological limits.
The copy-protection racketeers are therefore safe provided they keep the EU within a single DVD Region (they do) and keep a paradigm shift from occurring.
They've got a useful weapon in the French, as well: all they have to do is tell the frog government that region-encoding makes it harder for people to import films in (*shudder*) English and they get all the support they want.
While I'm with Cringely on most of what he says in the article, the 15th Century longbow/arquebus (they didn't have muskets then, damn it!) comparison is a poor one. Essentially, firearms underperformed the longbow right up until the middle of the nineteenth century when breech-loading and mass-produced rifles made them faster and more accurate (hand-built muzzleloaders were slow and inconsistent) than the bow.
The reason that firearms replaced the bow some three hundred years before they were its technical equal was economic: an archer required years of training to have the accuracy and muscle development required to be any use at all in combat (archers can be identified from their skeletons, having asymmetric bone thickening in their arm bones) and have to be fit and well on the day as the physical effort required to discharge thirty arrows rapidly is huge.
A muzzle-loading musket, despite having a 2-metre circle of probable hit at fifty metres range and a rate of fire perhaps a tenth that of a longbow, has a *way* lower ammo cost, a training overhead of perhaps a fortnight (and you can teach it in an afternoon if your student is bright and you don't care if he hits anything), and no great strength or stamina required since the kinetic energy that does the damage doesn't come from the soldier's own muscle.
The solution to the technical difficulties is to use them en masse, mix them with pikes or give them bayonets for close work and fight on the defensive if at all you can.
Basically, the longbow was betamax to the musket's VHS...
Not entirely fair. British cuisine is superb: it's just impossible to serve economically in a restaurant without buggering it up completely - so much of it depends on coming straight from the oven to the table that you can't make the pre-preparation economies that restaurants have to make in order to serve food that the mass market can afford.
Bollocks. We're *humans*, for crying out loud. Conquest, exploitation and genocide is what we do best. Let's get to it, before the combined Kzinti-Dalek war fleet arives and catches us flat-footed.
And just to add a supporting note, a typical coal-fired power station dumps several tonnes of particulate uranium into the atmosphere every year. Even if Cassini had detonated on the launch pad, it would have been lost in the noise of the noise as regards both radiation and heavy metal pollution.
That's not really so big an issue. In the UK we manage hand-counts of 20-30 million votes at general elections, and the first results are in in two hours after the polls close (usually Chris Mullen's constituency, up Geordie way, who make it a point of pride to be fast, and since Mullen's had a majority to die for for twenty years, inaccuracies don't matter much).
Vote-counters aren't hired at a salary anyway: elections are too infrequent an event for anyone to make a living at it. Usually it's local government civil servants getting a spot of overtime payment here in the UK, and a dozen or so vote-counters can easily handle the votes of a constituency in which 30-40,000 votes are cast.
Election fraud is actually less of an issue with human counting: you've got to bribe or threaten every single counter in a voting district to make a difference, whereas with a machine count you only have to nobble the guy who oerhauls the machine on the night.
Yes, the US has a number of special quirks in the law on this point (I'm not qualified to practice anywhere in the US, but I know enough to comment. If you need specific advice, see someone local to you, eh?).
For a start, it's virtually impossible to sue for libel in the US: falsehood is treated as an element of the tort rather than, as elsewhere, truth being a defence. This means that the plaintiff has to prove a negative rather than the defendant having to give evidence of his assertion. The protestations of First-Amendment supporters to the contrary, this is Wrong (and the First Amendement doesn't even require it to be so).
Second, and this one's common across most of the common-law world, it's quite easy to claim qualified privilege (technical term, look it up if you're interested enough) in respect of credit reports, which means that the plaintiff has to prove malice, which is what it sounds like - you'd have to show that the CRA was out to get you personally.
Third, and here I stray off what I know personally, I hear reports that the CRAs have lobbied for legislative protection that keeps their customers from suing them.
Amen to that. Every single one of the items that Katz mentions would be illegal (in some cases to the point of criminality) in the UK and, as regards the Data Protection points, across the European Union.
Some inaccuracies there, at least as regards the UK. It was never a legal requirement here that one had to provide a photo and handwriting sample on applying for a job: some firms did ask for it, until the Commission for Racial Equality advertised for a suitable plaintiff to make an example of someone.
Furthermore, there are (in practice) no costs of action awarded in the Industrial Tribunals that hear racial-discrimination-by-employers cases, as a result of which cases can be brought almost entirely at the employer's risk.
As to criminal records, in the UK, we have the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, which provides that on the expiry of a term dependant on length of sentence after an offender's discharge from custody/payment of his fine, any disclosure of that conviction other than in the context of applying to join the police, to work with children or some other "sensitive" topics is actionable as malicious falsehood.
The Data Protection Act has been mentioned elsewhere in this discussion; there is also parallel legislation that specifically binds credit reference agencies (go look it up, I've given enough free advice for the day. Yes, IAAL).
I think that this is sufficient to indicate that once again, Katz has identified a uniquely US problem as a problem of the internet.
If Darwin was an economist?Actually, he explicitly acknowledged something of a debt in his thinking on evolution to Adam Smith, traditionally regarded as the first to describe and unreservedly advocate what became modern laissez-faire capitalism.
The Royal Navy used to pay on a 28-day cycle, giving its sailors thirteen paydays per year. They also used to use a 7-watch system, five watches of four hours and two "dog watches" of two hours apiece in the mid-afternoon, to ensure that a ship's divisions took a fair share of the night watches (the "bells" were rung on the half-hour, so a watch changed at eight bells) due to the odd number.
The big advantage of our current dating system is its incumbency: most of the world's economy by value uses it, and those who don't generally have to use it in a business context. Islam and the Jews may keep their ritual year to other calendars, but they still do business on our particular line of heritage from the common roots in Egypt and Babylon that all three systems share.
The french tried a root-and-branch reform of the calendar after the revolution. It failed utterly almost immediately, despite legislative efforts to the contrary: any frenchman who wanted to do business outside the country was forced to work on the gregorian calendar, and the rest didn't want to spend time and effort re-tooling. The metric system of measurement caught on, though.
The real reason they hate the US is that after they bankrupted themselves financing your revolution you made that pesky declaration of independence rather than becoming a french client state out of sheer gratitude. Grabbing Louisiana at fire-sale prices and then making a great deal of money out of it just added insult to injury in french eyes.
About the only way you could rub it in any further is by naming a few major landmarks after notable french defeats: most of the really good ones are gone (Trafalgar, Waterloo, Blenheim) and I imagine Dien Ben Phu Square is probably a bit near the quick for the US, but Washington DC could be suitably adorned with a "Napoleon Died A Lonely Death In Exile Avenue" at no great cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. Dodgy, is Europe. A foggy night in the Channel and the whole damn' place is cut off.
People interested in breaking in would still find a way - maybe.
On the other hand, anyone who needs to download a canned toolkit to break in probably couldn't do it without one.
No, football is based on the old British tradition of street-fighting with a ball in there somewhere, allegedly dating back to pre-Roman times when the game was played with a human head preserved in slaked lime and still played in that form (minus the head) in several English and Scots villages to this day. This doesn't challenge your basic point, but pedantry forbids I should let that one go by.
... a higher opinion of this man's engineering skills and intelligence if he'd planned an unmanned test first.
Bad enough you should ride in a vehicle with untested fabrication. Sheer lunacy to ride in one with untested design as well...
1933 is still a tad on the early side for jets - I believe Whittle was getting his first patent on the thing about then. The V1 engine was actually a rocket rather than a jet - the Third Reich never actually used jets, employing lqiuid-fuelled rockets instead, but by 1945 the first jet fighters were in use. The Gloster Meteor, as I recall.
Oddly enough, the one's I've dealt with all do make PRS and MIPS returns.
Whether those returns bear any relationship to reality is another question, mind.
I am a lawyer, I happen to have been advising on this one this morning, and you're right. The relevant law is to be found in Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 1998, Principle 8 of the eight principles listed there.
If you want to read it yourself, go to www.hmso.gov.uk and drill down to the legislation in question. I'd do an href but I can't be bothered.
I just looked through the Passport T&Cs (IAAL, btw, UK rather than US qualified) and there's one or two terms in there that would be unenforceable in english law (and probably in scots law as well), including the jurisdiction and choice of law clause as against a consumer.
Yes, Microsoft's T&Cs prohibit the use of their Passport service in most of the UK. If not all of it.
To use the lawyers' term of art, they can go pee up a rope.
Unlikely, as on further research I discover my remembrace was faulty. It was in fact repealed in 1973.
It may be that the police gave an order to the Brixton rioters to disperse that was reported as a reading of the Riot Act, but it certainly wasn't the Riot Act of 1715.
By the time of the Brixton Riots, Riot was in and of itself an offence - the Riot Act allowed the rioters (defined - this is the condensed version, the actual definition has more detail - 12 or more people behaving rowdily with common purpose) an hour to disperse. Nowadays, the police are entitled to just wade in and start making arrests.
Bzzzt. The Riot Act has been no more than a figure of speech in this country for a very, very long time indeed. If increasingly hazy memory serves it was repealed by the Public Order Act of 1936.
The Riot Act was, if read aloud to a riotous assembly, the authority of a justice of the peace to order a detachment of militia to fire into the crowd or, of cavalry, to charge with drawn sabres. I can think of two examples of its being used within thirty miles and two hundred years of where I sit (the Peterloo massacre and the Preston Chartist martyrs, both in the middle years of the 19th Century) and memories of the likes of that are among the reasons why we ibject so strongly to armed police in this country.
None of this touches the central point, though, which is that what's been done here is no different to posting mugshots of suspects on a post-office wall. There's witness, photographic and video evidence of them rioting and damaging property: the offenders are going to have to kiss prosecutorial ringpiece on any plea-bargain...
The doctrine you're missing is freedom of contract. The school is a commercial undertaking, with a product (education), customers (parents) and a price list. The school is free to provide that product to those customers on whatever terms it sees fit: those terms will be a tension between what it wants to get away with and what it must give up in order to remain competitive in the marketplace. Some regulations are imposed by law, but not a great many.
So, the kids have the freedom to say what they please, and the school has the freedom to decline to continue selling its services to their parents.
The situation is no different to a shopkeeper declining to sell you anything because you called him rude names in his shop - why should his freedom to do business with whom he pleases be restricted because your government isn't allowed to tell you what not to say?
And that, in a nutshell, is what is simultaneously right and wrong about free-market capitalism.
Wholly misconceived. It's not the underlying bitstream that's being banned, it's what you describe as the "implementation details", which is the human-readable meaning of a given bitstream in a context that includes the display of images.
It's perfectly possible to read the bitstream of a .jpg as a very, very large number devoid of anything other than its sui generis meaning as a number. It only becomes harmful (select your own value for harmful here) when the implementation of that number is as a jpg of a kind readable by an appropriately-configured machine as an image.
Our hypothetical large number is noise in the context of pure number, but signal in the context of a session with - say - paint shop pro.
There are occasional rumbles about this out of the EU competition authorities, but from the (miniscule) extent of the actual action being taken, I think they've been nobbled.
The problem is that Arts. 81 and 85 of the Treaty of Rome (which are what give competition law its bite in the EU) regulate trade within the EU and are interpreted almost wholly to mean trade and contractual provisions rather than technological limits.
The copy-protection racketeers are therefore safe provided they keep the EU within a single DVD Region (they do) and keep a paradigm shift from occurring.
They've got a useful weapon in the French, as well: all they have to do is tell the frog government that region-encoding makes it harder for people to import films in (*shudder*) English and they get all the support they want.
While I'm with Cringely on most of what he says in the article, the 15th Century longbow/arquebus (they didn't have muskets then, damn it!) comparison is a poor one. Essentially, firearms underperformed the longbow right up until the middle of the nineteenth century when breech-loading and mass-produced rifles made them faster and more accurate (hand-built muzzleloaders were slow and inconsistent) than the bow.
The reason that firearms replaced the bow some three hundred years before they were its technical equal was economic: an archer required years of training to have the accuracy and muscle development required to be any use at all in combat (archers can be identified from their skeletons, having asymmetric bone thickening in their arm bones) and have to be fit and well on the day as the physical effort required to discharge thirty arrows rapidly is huge.
A muzzle-loading musket, despite having a 2-metre circle of probable hit at fifty metres range and a rate of fire perhaps a tenth that of a longbow, has a *way* lower ammo cost, a training overhead of perhaps a fortnight (and you can teach it in an afternoon if your student is bright and you don't care if he hits anything), and no great strength or stamina required since the kinetic energy that does the damage doesn't come from the soldier's own muscle.
The solution to the technical difficulties is to use them en masse, mix them with pikes or give them bayonets for close work and fight on the defensive if at all you can.
Basically, the longbow was betamax to the musket's VHS...
Not entirely fair. British cuisine is superb: it's just impossible to serve economically in a restaurant without buggering it up completely - so much of it depends on coming straight from the oven to the table that you can't make the pre-preparation economies that restaurants have to make in order to serve food that the mass market can afford.
Bollocks. We're *humans*, for crying out loud. Conquest, exploitation and genocide is what we do best. Let's get to it, before the combined Kzinti-Dalek war fleet arives and catches us flat-footed.
And just to add a supporting note, a typical coal-fired power station dumps several tonnes of particulate uranium into the atmosphere every year. Even if Cassini had detonated on the launch pad, it would have been lost in the noise of the noise as regards both radiation and heavy metal pollution.
That's not really so big an issue. In the UK we manage hand-counts of 20-30 million votes at general elections, and the first results are in in two hours after the polls close (usually Chris Mullen's constituency, up Geordie way, who make it a point of pride to be fast, and since Mullen's had a majority to die for for twenty years, inaccuracies don't matter much).
Vote-counters aren't hired at a salary anyway: elections are too infrequent an event for anyone to make a living at it. Usually it's local government civil servants getting a spot of overtime payment here in the UK, and a dozen or so vote-counters can easily handle the votes of a constituency in which 30-40,000 votes are cast.
Election fraud is actually less of an issue with human counting: you've got to bribe or threaten every single counter in a voting district to make a difference, whereas with a machine count you only have to nobble the guy who oerhauls the machine on the night.
Single points of failure are a Bad Thing.
Yes, the US has a number of special quirks in the law on this point (I'm not qualified to practice anywhere in the US, but I know enough to comment. If you need specific advice, see someone local to you, eh?).
For a start, it's virtually impossible to sue for libel in the US: falsehood is treated as an element of the tort rather than, as elsewhere, truth being a defence. This means that the plaintiff has to prove a negative rather than the defendant having to give evidence of his assertion. The protestations of First-Amendment supporters to the contrary, this is Wrong (and the First Amendement doesn't even require it to be so).
Second, and this one's common across most of the common-law world, it's quite easy to claim qualified privilege (technical term, look it up if you're interested enough) in respect of credit reports, which means that the plaintiff has to prove malice, which is what it sounds like - you'd have to show that the CRA was out to get you personally.
Third, and here I stray off what I know personally, I hear reports that the CRAs have lobbied for legislative protection that keeps their customers from suing them.
Amen to that. Every single one of the items that Katz mentions would be illegal (in some cases to the point of criminality) in the UK and, as regards the Data Protection points, across the European Union.
Some inaccuracies there, at least as regards the UK. It was never a legal requirement here that one had to provide a photo and handwriting sample on applying for a job: some firms did ask for it, until the Commission for Racial Equality advertised for a suitable plaintiff to make an example of someone.
Furthermore, there are (in practice) no costs of action awarded in the Industrial Tribunals that hear racial-discrimination-by-employers cases, as a result of which cases can be brought almost entirely at the employer's risk.
As to criminal records, in the UK, we have the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, which provides that on the expiry of a term dependant on length of sentence after an offender's discharge from custody/payment of his fine, any disclosure of that conviction other than in the context of applying to join the police, to work with children or some other "sensitive" topics is actionable as malicious falsehood.
The Data Protection Act has been mentioned elsewhere in this discussion; there is also parallel legislation that specifically binds credit reference agencies (go look it up, I've given enough free advice for the day. Yes, IAAL).
I think that this is sufficient to indicate that once again, Katz has identified a uniquely US problem as a problem of the internet.
225 years ain't that long. Here in the UK ours has stood for a smidgeon over 700 years.
If Darwin was an economist?Actually, he explicitly acknowledged something of a debt in his thinking on evolution to Adam Smith, traditionally regarded as the first to describe and unreservedly advocate what became modern laissez-faire capitalism.
Boring, but true.
The Royal Navy used to pay on a 28-day cycle, giving its sailors thirteen paydays per year. They also used to use a 7-watch system, five watches of four hours and two "dog watches" of two hours apiece in the mid-afternoon, to ensure that a ship's divisions took a fair share of the night watches (the "bells" were rung on the half-hour, so a watch changed at eight bells) due to the odd number.
The big advantage of our current dating system is its incumbency: most of the world's economy by value uses it, and those who don't generally have to use it in a business context. Islam and the Jews may keep their ritual year to other calendars, but they still do business on our particular line of heritage from the common roots in Egypt and Babylon that all three systems share.
The french tried a root-and-branch reform of the calendar after the revolution. It failed utterly almost immediately, despite legislative efforts to the contrary: any frenchman who wanted to do business outside the country was forced to work on the gregorian calendar, and the rest didn't want to spend time and effort re-tooling. The metric system of measurement caught on, though.
The real reason they hate the US is that after they bankrupted themselves financing your revolution you made that pesky declaration of independence rather than becoming a french client state out of sheer gratitude. Grabbing Louisiana at fire-sale prices and then making a great deal of money out of it just added insult to injury in french eyes.
About the only way you could rub it in any further is by naming a few major landmarks after notable french defeats: most of the really good ones are gone (Trafalgar, Waterloo, Blenheim) and I imagine Dien Ben Phu Square is probably a bit near the quick for the US, but Washington DC could be suitably adorned with a "Napoleon Died A Lonely Death In Exile Avenue" at no great cost.