Even if we accept that argument, the number of people on Kazaa was irrelevant. Even IF you could be convicted for selling drugs without actually actively carrying out a single transaction (you can't, which is why there's the separate "carrying with intent to sell" in many jurisdictions), you still would not be sentenced based on an assumption that since you were selling you must have sold to anyone present in the city that day. For starters, most people wouldn't be aware of you, and most people wouldn't want what you were selling.
At the very least, even IF (and I don't agree, no matter what the judge said) she carried out copyright infringement merely by making the tracks available, whether she shared with one person or a million would to me be vital information to the jury in setting the damages.
If I was on that jury I'd have refused to find her liable without proof of distribution, and reasonable estimates of the number. Particularly as nothing distributed or a couple of copies transferred could mean it was genuinely not done with intent, whereas documentation of sharing a large number of tracks over an extended period of time might actually be worth punishing.
So that must be why the US has so low crime rates then? Oh, that's right, you don't. If you can actually find any actual data that show causation between tougher punishment and lower crime rates, I'd love to see it.
I didn't think the movies fit my experience of the books, but in hindsight I believe his interpretation is more true to the books than mine. I think it largely stems from him making it much more of an "grown up" experience than what I saw the book as. The movies were gloomy - reinforced by the soundtrack and the level of color saturation -, but the books never seemed that way to me. I read LOTR for the first time when I was around 13, and that probably has colored my impression of it a it.
The scary thing about the UK is how many ordinary people actually think the Human Rights Act (which is pretty limited and watered down to start with) should actually be abolished, because there's a view that it lets people "get away" with too much stuff they don't like or restricts the government too much (such as, you know, preventing inhumane treatment of prisoners...)
It's an image perpetuated by media, enhanced by the fact that the best selling newspapers etc. in the UK are tabloids specializing in particularly venomous sensationalism, and obviously stories about how "normal people" have been helped by the Human Rights Act incite far less anger (and so fewer sales) than stories about how some "evil" (by middle England standards) person have been given right to do something that doesn't sit well with the mobs.
Do I agree with the cookbook being under the terrorism law? No, but at least it is clear who is responsible for it (Labour party/Blair), it is clearly banned, not just not in stock at the local library.
No, it is not clearly banned. The law on purpose was made so vague that it allows the government to claim almost anything as being in violation of the law, and leave it to the court to sort out whether or not they think it's ridiculous. Lets really hope the courts actually have the sense to reign this in (one of the redeeming factors of the UK legal system is that in the face of power hungry politicians there is a history of judges that are willing to blatantly look for loopholes to reinterpret the laws more narrowly than they were intended).
To show just how confusing this situation in, notice that this boy was charged, but as someone else has pointed out the book is for sale at Amazon.
Funny. Look at Europe. The telecoms industry is more regulated, but in order to ensure more competition.
Some examples:
Local Loop Unbundling: The telcos in most European countries are required by law to allow other providers to put equipment in the branch offices to allow these providers to reach customers on raw copper or fibre at close to cost OR to rent "raw" ADSL connections to any end user (assuming the end user has asked for it of course). In the UK for example, the result is that we have a huge choice of ADSL providers that offer internet access via British Telecom's ADSL network (BT provides the ADSL connection, the ISP provides all other services), as well as providers that compete on speed and offers speed far in excess of BT by investing in newer/more expensive equipment to place in BT's network. One provider even offers TV channels and video on demand over ADSL
The same is true for phone connections in many European countries - it's not like in the US where it's restricted to long distance. I can pick any number of providers for the full phone service.
Virtual cellphone operators: In many countries cellphone operators are under the same restrictions, and anyone owning masts are legally obliged to either rent out space in the masts for equipment, or rent out capacity in their network or both at prices where the maximum is strictly regulated. Combine that with restrictions on locking phones (and in some countries restriction on the number of months of contractual lock-in) and you see a flourishing market for operators ranging from completely virtual to smaller operators that only own their own equipment in the large cities - Norway alone (4.5 million people) have tens of cellphone operators.
These are examples where more regulation have led to more competition and customer choice, because the alternative makes it far too easy for a single operator to gain a stranglehold on the market. It has also led to the dominating operators to innovate because they need to make the bulk of their profits from value added services when they can't milk people based on owning the cables alone (in Norway, for example, the former public telco Telenor has to sell access to their copper network to their own retail arm at the same prices as they resell to everyone else and they're not allowed to have more than a certain profit margin on the network side).
Random mutations are either a corruption or loss of information.
Sadly you've confused natural selection with a random process. A random mutation on its own on average causes corruption or loss of information, true. However, a random mutation combined with a selection method that favors an increase in information will over time cause an increase in information. No matter how much you try you'll have a hell of a hard time finding any situation in nature where there aren't any forms of selection in action
That selection combined with randomness can increase information is trivial to demonstrate - in fact there are lots of programs that do, in the form of genetic algorithms.
In principle the law states you are not allowed to store privacy related data without a clear cause. Just storing because you can store is not enough. Every citizen has the right to ask what data you store about him and can even ask you to delete it. Failure to do so can result in a law suite and if you store information you don't need for the agreed upon cause you will loose.
And for those who don't know: This is the case in all EU (and EEA) countries. It is a result of the implementation of the EU Data Privacy Directive, which is overall very good. The exact implementation vary from country to country, and the national courts interpretations of what is private data also vary, so this court decision can NOT be treated as precedent in other EU countries (not even sure if it can be treated as precedent in Germany), but the general principles apply.
However, the bar for showing you have reasonable grounds for storing data are relatively low - if you use the IP addresses for tracking down abuse of your system, for example, and you don't keep them excessively long, you're likely to be in the clear in most or all EU countries.
If you want to keep possibly personal information for a long while, your odds of avoiding problems also dramatically diminish if you reduce the scope (filter and store only information that is actually specifically relevant to your objectives, for example).
The line is generally anything that reproduce the conversation in a way that let you prove that the conversation took place and/or it's content, which generally is taken to mean an audio and/or video recording.
Notes etc. aren't covered anywhere I know of for the same reason.
It has to do with expectation of privacy, often extrapolated from what you would expect in a face to face conversation - it's reasonably to expect that people will be able to take quite accurate notes, so it's usually legal. It's generally reasonable to assume that people aren't recording most conversations.
You could of course argue that people who have something to hide should assume they may be recorded, but often people don't realize when they are talking to someone they can't trust or they don't realize when the person on the other side may have an interest in recording. Hence the restrictions on recording in a lot of countries.
This is clearly a subjective judgment, however, and that's one of the reasons there are so many jurisdictions where it IS legal as well.
There's a huge difference between arresting and punishing someone for a crime that hasn't happened yet, and sending a police officer around to ask someone what they are doing, or to observe and be ready to intervene if someone does something illegal.
If the system for example could recognize signs of someone being followed, it might be enough to dispatch a police car to drive past or ask the person being followed if they want assistance to help avoid a lot of serious crimes from being committed.
Now, there's still room for abuse (train the system to recognize likely politically unpopular groups and send police to intimidate, for example), but that doesn't automatically mean that there can't be ways of making this system useful without making it intrusive.
I was responding to a comment where not having to leave his kid around "some wacko" was presented as an argument for his wife staying at home, and I simply pointed out that on average a kid is more likely to be at risk around relatives and close friends of the family. You can chose to not believe that all you want, but it's well documented, and a few simple searches should show up some research.
I assume when you say "Maybe the percent is high because they spend most of their time with close relatives?" you mean "as opposed to their parents". However, the same NSPCC survey cited parents and siblings as by far the most frequent offenders, followed by other close relatives, followed by friends of the family. If that was not what you meant, and you meant "close relatives including their parents", then that makes my point for me, that leaving your kids in daycare is at least no more dangerous than leaving them with family or friends.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with a parent staying at home to look after their kids (though, as I said, there is a lot of debate about whether it's the best alternative - kids in daycare on average develop better social skills earlier for example), but that using the risk of anything happening to the kid as an argument for it is completely bogus.
To correct myself before anyone else does: The RPI does NOT include house price increases... National Statistics does maintain stats on that too, but it's kept separate.
Inflation numbers are national averages, based on national averages for what you spend your money on, and so the impact will vary a lot depending on where you live and the patterns of consumption. Also beware that many countries publish different inflation numbers that include or exclude housing costs, and when they do housing costs they might have different numbers for the national average vs. only taking into account mortgages.
For an illustration on how this makes a huge difference: We bought a house three years ago. We recently got it valued, and the value had increased by 30% in those three years. Now, in my case since we bought it hasn't affected us much - in fact I pay less on my mortgage for a 3 bedroom house today than I did in rent for the small two bedroom flat we lived in three years ago. But if we'd been renting, and rental prices had gone up by the same amount, it would've affected us a lot. So for people living here (UK, specifically London in my case), the higher percentage of their salary gets eaten up by housing, the higher their "personal inflation" is, since housing costs have increased far more than most other components of the official inflation numbers.
Here, that means that two groups are seeing significantly different impacts than average: Really low income earners, because their housing costs are likely to be a very high percent of their income, and really high income earners who've chosen to go overboard housing wise... I don't have much sympathy for the latter, but for everyone falling in the former category, national information numbers are likely to mean very little unless you adjust for the higher effect of house price changes.
(and my favorite pet peeve: house price increases are BAD for house-owners too, unless you're in a situation where you want to trade down the next time you move, as it means a larger/better house is likely to increase more than your current house - it drives me crazy when idiots go on about how great it is that their house is increasing in value, unless it's a very localized increase)
You guys are all happy your currency is worth 2x US dollars, however that means you have inflation which is 'bad'
No, it means the dollar has been nosediving over the last few years. You'll note the dollar has lost ground against almost all major currencies over the last few years, not just against the pound. Inflation in the UK has been consistently low for the last decade at least.
Growth has been slow for a couple of years, but the low rates of inflation is a trend that significantly predates slowdown in growth.
I haven't looked up the exact rates for the last seven years to check the GP's number, but according to the UK's National Statistics, the retail price index (RPI), which is the highest level UK inflation rate (it includes house price increases, which significantly increase it for the last ten years - the government likes to cite the "consumer price index"/CPI instead) was been under 4% a year every year from 1992 to 2004 (last year covered in the report I looked at). The total RPI for 1990 to 2004 rose 48%, and include relatively high inflation years 1990 and 1991. As far as I am aware, 2005-2007 have been lower than average for the last decade. Given 48% over 14 years, and a trend down in inflation, and the fact that it's compounding, as you pointed out, I'd be very surprised if it was higher than 22% for the last 7 years.
For comparison, in the same 14 year period that inflation was 48% total for, average salaries in the UK rose by 82%
and I don't ever have to worry about some wacko being around my kids.
Hate to burst your bubble, but a few years ago the NSPCC in the UK published a report showing that 75% of all abuse of children in the UK is carried out by close relatives or close friends of the family. I'd be very surprised if the situation in other developed countries is much different. The vast majority of violence and murders of children are also carried out by family members and friends. The idea of crimes against children being mostly carried out by strangers is a myth - it is more rational to be worried about leaving your kids with family members or close friends than sending them off to daycare.
As for it being better for your kids in general, that's something that's definitively up for debate. It's pretty well accepted that kids in daycare tends to get better social skills from higher levels of interaction with other kids, for example.
What I don't get is why, outside of the caches (which have configurable limits), they don't use an arena based allocator on a per tab basis, with some separate arenas for shared stuff, like plugins and UI. Doing that would both make leak detection a lot easier (see which arenas keep growing over time), and would make leaks tolerable (close the offending tab, and the whole arena gets thrown out - problem solved). It's an OLD method, and it works well as a last resort safeguard against leaks.
So you're one of the lucky ones. This has been one of the problems in getting this problem recognized as such - a lot of people have kept insisting it's not a problem, because it hasn't affected them.
And there IS a "close all tabs", at least on a per window basis: function: File, Close Window. If you mean "close all but one", just open a new window and close the old one.
It's perfectly possible to allow early deallocation in many or most cases (depending on performance/complexity tradeoffs) without causing any problem with dangling pointers.
Either you can let the compiler do static analysis to determine points where it is legal to deallocate (in that paper they also insert the free operation automatically as well, and see a significant reduction in overall memory usage), or you can support "weak pointers" (pointers that, whether via an extra indirection or a flag etc. can be checked for liveness of the object, or you can use ref-counting and only allow frees when there's only one reference, or you can let the compiler trace any variables free'd backwards and throw an error if at any point there's a chance of leaving a dangling pointer, or you can do a mark phase on the free call (potentially very expensive, though).
There are good reasons to do at least the static analysis, as the linked to paper shows - it's extra work compile time to significantly improve resource usage at runtime - a good trade-off.
But several of these options (ref-counted smart pointers, weak pointers etc.) are common idioms in C++ when dealing with allocation patterns where RAII and simple scoped smart pointers isn't sufficient.
Slashdot Mirror
I know RTFA'ing isn't fashionable, but go RTFA anyway. Who said anything about "average drivers"?
That is very different from hinting at it in your answers (and answering a direct question about it).
At the very least, even IF (and I don't agree, no matter what the judge said) she carried out copyright infringement merely by making the tracks available, whether she shared with one person or a million would to me be vital information to the jury in setting the damages.
If I was on that jury I'd have refused to find her liable without proof of distribution, and reasonable estimates of the number. Particularly as nothing distributed or a couple of copies transferred could mean it was genuinely not done with intent, whereas documentation of sharing a large number of tracks over an extended period of time might actually be worth punishing.
At least your dog would be unlikely to pass more draconian laws. I'd vote for him over several of the likely alternatives.
It's an image perpetuated by media, enhanced by the fact that the best selling newspapers etc. in the UK are tabloids specializing in particularly venomous sensationalism, and obviously stories about how "normal people" have been helped by the Human Rights Act incite far less anger (and so fewer sales) than stories about how some "evil" (by middle England standards) person have been given right to do something that doesn't sit well with the mobs.
No, it is not clearly banned. The law on purpose was made so vague that it allows the government to claim almost anything as being in violation of the law, and leave it to the court to sort out whether or not they think it's ridiculous. Lets really hope the courts actually have the sense to reign this in (one of the redeeming factors of the UK legal system is that in the face of power hungry politicians there is a history of judges that are willing to blatantly look for loopholes to reinterpret the laws more narrowly than they were intended).
To show just how confusing this situation in, notice that this boy was charged, but as someone else has pointed out the book is for sale at Amazon.
Some examples:
These are examples where more regulation have led to more competition and customer choice, because the alternative makes it far too easy for a single operator to gain a stranglehold on the market. It has also led to the dominating operators to innovate because they need to make the bulk of their profits from value added services when they can't milk people based on owning the cables alone (in Norway, for example, the former public telco Telenor has to sell access to their copper network to their own retail arm at the same prices as they resell to everyone else and they're not allowed to have more than a certain profit margin on the network side).
Sadly you've confused natural selection with a random process. A random mutation on its own on average causes corruption or loss of information, true. However, a random mutation combined with a selection method that favors an increase in information will over time cause an increase in information. No matter how much you try you'll have a hell of a hard time finding any situation in nature where there aren't any forms of selection in action
That selection combined with randomness can increase information is trivial to demonstrate - in fact there are lots of programs that do, in the form of genetic algorithms.
And for those who don't know: This is the case in all EU (and EEA) countries. It is a result of the implementation of the EU Data Privacy Directive, which is overall very good. The exact implementation vary from country to country, and the national courts interpretations of what is private data also vary, so this court decision can NOT be treated as precedent in other EU countries (not even sure if it can be treated as precedent in Germany), but the general principles apply.
However, the bar for showing you have reasonable grounds for storing data are relatively low - if you use the IP addresses for tracking down abuse of your system, for example, and you don't keep them excessively long, you're likely to be in the clear in most or all EU countries.
If you want to keep possibly personal information for a long while, your odds of avoiding problems also dramatically diminish if you reduce the scope (filter and store only information that is actually specifically relevant to your objectives, for example).
Notes etc. aren't covered anywhere I know of for the same reason.
It has to do with expectation of privacy, often extrapolated from what you would expect in a face to face conversation - it's reasonably to expect that people will be able to take quite accurate notes, so it's usually legal. It's generally reasonable to assume that people aren't recording most conversations.
You could of course argue that people who have something to hide should assume they may be recorded, but often people don't realize when they are talking to someone they can't trust or they don't realize when the person on the other side may have an interest in recording. Hence the restrictions on recording in a lot of countries.
This is clearly a subjective judgment, however, and that's one of the reasons there are so many jurisdictions where it IS legal as well.
On the other hand they have too many damn lakes.
Not really. He's just stretched the words out to illustrate someone saying the sentence in anger.
Because he doesn't want to lose the data when the power goes or the machine crashes.
If the system for example could recognize signs of someone being followed, it might be enough to dispatch a police car to drive past or ask the person being followed if they want assistance to help avoid a lot of serious crimes from being committed.
Now, there's still room for abuse (train the system to recognize likely politically unpopular groups and send police to intimidate, for example), but that doesn't automatically mean that there can't be ways of making this system useful without making it intrusive.
I assume when you say "Maybe the percent is high because they spend most of their time with close relatives?" you mean "as opposed to their parents". However, the same NSPCC survey cited parents and siblings as by far the most frequent offenders, followed by other close relatives, followed by friends of the family. If that was not what you meant, and you meant "close relatives including their parents", then that makes my point for me, that leaving your kids in daycare is at least no more dangerous than leaving them with family or friends.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with a parent staying at home to look after their kids (though, as I said, there is a lot of debate about whether it's the best alternative - kids in daycare on average develop better social skills earlier for example), but that using the risk of anything happening to the kid as an argument for it is completely bogus.
To correct myself before anyone else does: The RPI does NOT include house price increases... National Statistics does maintain stats on that too, but it's kept separate.
For an illustration on how this makes a huge difference: We bought a house three years ago. We recently got it valued, and the value had increased by 30% in those three years. Now, in my case since we bought it hasn't affected us much - in fact I pay less on my mortgage for a 3 bedroom house today than I did in rent for the small two bedroom flat we lived in three years ago. But if we'd been renting, and rental prices had gone up by the same amount, it would've affected us a lot. So for people living here (UK, specifically London in my case), the higher percentage of their salary gets eaten up by housing, the higher their "personal inflation" is, since housing costs have increased far more than most other components of the official inflation numbers.
Here, that means that two groups are seeing significantly different impacts than average: Really low income earners, because their housing costs are likely to be a very high percent of their income, and really high income earners who've chosen to go overboard housing wise... I don't have much sympathy for the latter, but for everyone falling in the former category, national information numbers are likely to mean very little unless you adjust for the higher effect of house price changes.
(and my favorite pet peeve: house price increases are BAD for house-owners too, unless you're in a situation where you want to trade down the next time you move, as it means a larger/better house is likely to increase more than your current house - it drives me crazy when idiots go on about how great it is that their house is increasing in value, unless it's a very localized increase)
No, it means the dollar has been nosediving over the last few years. You'll note the dollar has lost ground against almost all major currencies over the last few years, not just against the pound. Inflation in the UK has been consistently low for the last decade at least.
Growth has been slow for a couple of years, but the low rates of inflation is a trend that significantly predates slowdown in growth.
I haven't looked up the exact rates for the last seven years to check the GP's number, but according to the UK's National Statistics, the retail price index (RPI), which is the highest level UK inflation rate (it includes house price increases, which significantly increase it for the last ten years - the government likes to cite the "consumer price index"/CPI instead) was been under 4% a year every year from 1992 to 2004 (last year covered in the report I looked at). The total RPI for 1990 to 2004 rose 48%, and include relatively high inflation years 1990 and 1991. As far as I am aware, 2005-2007 have been lower than average for the last decade. Given 48% over 14 years, and a trend down in inflation, and the fact that it's compounding, as you pointed out, I'd be very surprised if it was higher than 22% for the last 7 years.
For comparison, in the same 14 year period that inflation was 48% total for, average salaries in the UK rose by 82%
Hate to burst your bubble, but a few years ago the NSPCC in the UK published a report showing that 75% of all abuse of children in the UK is carried out by close relatives or close friends of the family. I'd be very surprised if the situation in other developed countries is much different. The vast majority of violence and murders of children are also carried out by family members and friends. The idea of crimes against children being mostly carried out by strangers is a myth - it is more rational to be worried about leaving your kids with family members or close friends than sending them off to daycare.
As for it being better for your kids in general, that's something that's definitively up for debate. It's pretty well accepted that kids in daycare tends to get better social skills from higher levels of interaction with other kids, for example.
What I don't get is why, outside of the caches (which have configurable limits), they don't use an arena based allocator on a per tab basis, with some separate arenas for shared stuff, like plugins and UI. Doing that would both make leak detection a lot easier (see which arenas keep growing over time), and would make leaks tolerable (close the offending tab, and the whole arena gets thrown out - problem solved). It's an OLD method, and it works well as a last resort safeguard against leaks.
And there IS a "close all tabs", at least on a per window basis: function: File, Close Window. If you mean "close all but one", just open a new window and close the old one.
No. Those of us suffering actual memory leaks have been through that and half a dozen other changes without seeing any difference.
Either you can let the compiler do static analysis to determine points where it is legal to deallocate (in that paper they also insert the free operation automatically as well, and see a significant reduction in overall memory usage), or you can support "weak pointers" (pointers that, whether via an extra indirection or a flag etc. can be checked for liveness of the object, or you can use ref-counting and only allow frees when there's only one reference, or you can let the compiler trace any variables free'd backwards and throw an error if at any point there's a chance of leaving a dangling pointer, or you can do a mark phase on the free call (potentially very expensive, though).
There are good reasons to do at least the static analysis, as the linked to paper shows - it's extra work compile time to significantly improve resource usage at runtime - a good trade-off.
But several of these options (ref-counted smart pointers, weak pointers etc.) are common idioms in C++ when dealing with allocation patterns where RAII and simple scoped smart pointers isn't sufficient.