Because "we require" rarely means "we won't touch you with a bargepole unless you have". It's there to weed out the chaff who think they're not good enough or important enough to apply.
I've applied for numerous jobs that have "required" things like MCSE's and A+, and first-class degrees and I clearly state that I don't have them, but what I do have is X amount of experience doing Y.
The bright employers (i.e. the only type you *want* to work for anyway) pick it up and say "Oh, right, he's probably spent so long DOING the job, he never got around to paying the certification tax on a bit of paper to say he could do it." or "He was out earning a wage in this sector while our own guys were still in university playing with microcontrollers". The bad ones, of course, shove it off and it gets lost in the HR department because it "doesn't meet criteria".
I've also advised people to ignore this sort of thing in the past, so long as you *CAN* put forward a reasonable case of being suitable for the job anyway, and it's never perfect (there is no magic way to get a job) but it's helped a lot of them to get positions they didn't think they were good enough for. How many of the industry founding fathers and visionaries had PhD's or Masters? Nowhere near all, and they still got there.
Don't blatantly ignore high requirements, just substitute what you have instead (and, if you like, in your covering letter explain that: "Although I notice that the job requirements include X, I feel that my extensive expertise in position Y performing task Z should be sufficient to prove that I'm capable of performing to the standards required") if you think you have a shot of doing the JOB.
Applications processes are mainly about weeding out the vast number of applicants, but secondarily they are about YOU weeding out the vast number of jobs available. Because if your employer can't see that you can do the job, just because you have an absence of certain desired letters after your name, you probably don't want to work there anyway (and they probably will ignore your application, but the chances that they veto you for future posts because of your politely-worded ambition are vanishingly small... and again, those sort of people you just don't want to work for anyway).
That may be *why* they bothered emailing everyone. Because they aren't just interested in PhD's, but they just want a high standard of applicant. One who has those qualifications, or one who has the skills and knows how to get through a job application process by playing on them.
The worst that happens is they say No, and keep your information on file for future reference. The chances it will prejudice any future applications - a concern I've heard from the people I've given personal advice - are basically zero (do you really think HR departments keep years and years and years worth of applications that they are already TRYING to narrow down to just a few candidates from thousands and somehow and check them for every post? No.).
And, you never know, they might just say "Well, actually, you're not right for this particular position, but we are just about to advertise for X as well, and that's look more suited to you."
In job-hunting, there's nothing wrong with being ambitious, so long as you're honest. And even if they offer it you and you don't like the idea of working in a crowd full of bitter PhD's, or it's not better than your current job, again - you can so "no" just as easily as they can.
If you had a legal right to a domain name, you might be right. But you don't.
Similarly, you don't have a legal right to enter random countries, and they are quite welcome to tell you to go away (whether on the basis that they think you're there to work contrary to your visa, or you have previous convictions, or whatever)
It's not illegal to deny someone a domain name. No more illegal than denying them a trademark, or a particular phone number (or even phone access at all!).
The whole DNS system is a collection of private contracts to hand out naming rights within a virtual space. Hence why ICANN etc. can get people to pay them more money just by saying "Okay, let's have a new TLD!". Nobody is FORCING them to pay them money. Nobody has a legal obligation to buy those domains. And nobody has a legal obligation to fulfill those demands for domains if their contracts say so (and it hasn't been established to the contrary in a court of law).
This is like saying that me not giving you an email address at my domain is just as prejudicial. Er, no. It's my domain, my rules, and you either agree with them or not. Unless you have it in writing that I *guarantee* you those services, you can't do anything if I don't allow you to use them and/or stop you getting them in first place.
So let's not be stupid here. If you try to register a *car* with a rude number plate (licence plate to the Americans), it will get blocked in most countries (and they pre-filter those lists, but still will take yours away if it's deemed to be rude and they missed it!). Hell, some countries decide what you can put on a birth certificate. And places like Italy, it's almost impossible to get a domain name without a certified business presence in the country itself.
In comparison, a copyright infringer being denied a domain name in a country he has ZERO affiliation to is nothing.
I actually find it hilarious that people think that the US has involvement, if I'm honest. Chances are Gabon just doesn't want his type around. If he applied for a.uk, for instance, it would be denied the second he announced his intentions for it without even bothering to wait for the Americans to ask - it's a breach of Nominet policy.
It seems that a lot of the greats go downhill quite quickly. Peter Molyneaux used to be a god, not anymore. The other Elite programmer now has nothing to do with computers any more. Hell, even the Romero's and Carmack's of this world were in decline decades ago.
If anything, as I get older I understand that the secret to a hit game or a hit movie is nothing but sheer luck, and even pushing tripe until you get lucky. I mean, Angry Birds - it's a damn Scorched Earth clone with not-very-good graphics and a physics engine that's in a ton of 2D games and not very accurate.
And if game development is just hit-and-miss like that, with no real link to a particular designer's / programmer's actual talent (beyond being able to get the thing off the ground), then it pretty much follow than any / all "remake" attempts will come to a floundering halt with some absolute tripe (Duke Nukem Forever!).
I never really played Elite (I was too young, it was too difficult) but *always* loved the way it was programmed, what it could do, and the differences it explored in gameplay. But I don't think you can replicate that. Any Elite remake will be yet-another-space-game.
If you don't earn enough to take a taxi everywhere, then you'll be unlikely to ever afford a self-drive car even when they are legalised across your entire country.
Seriously, it's nice to dream, but you'll probably be retired before you can afford a self-drive car if you're not already earning enough money to. And that's ignoring the problems of insurances, recalls, etc. that are almost bound to hit the self-drive industry at some point after they are "approved".
You're more likely to work from home before that happens. You're more likely to be retired before it happens. You're more likely to afford your own taxi-journeys / personal chauffeur before you can afford one of those.
There is not, on planet Earth, a single company licensed to sell self-drive cars to the general public, or a licensing structure for them, or an insurance structure for them, or a liability structure for them (which, if established to go against the companies that make them, could destroy the market literally overnight).
We are actually technically closer to all owning our own all-in-one boat/car/plane vehicles than a self-drive car. Because you *can* buy one of those now, they *aren't* stupidly expensive, and you *can* get appropriate licensing / testing / insurance for them TODAY.
The problem with reading sci-fi is that you'll hardly ever get to experience the things you read about, and the ones you do will be quite boring and mundane and not what they could be ("Talk to anyone in the world over the airwaves!" - Yes, I can today, but that causes immense problems itself - spam calls, etc. - and costs a lot to do for no other reason than there's no international telecoms carrier, "Flying cars!" - we have them. But you still need FAA licensing, filing a flight plan, an runway to land on, etc.).
By most probabilities, it won't happen until you're too old to take advantage of it. Accept it, move on.
Each time I've moved house I've taken dozens of boxes of books. In terms of efficiency they are the worst possession I own because they take up lots of space, lots of weight, need specialist storage in the house (bookshelves, etc.) and I rarely refer to them.
And that's *with* myself only keeping books that I have some sort of attachment to. In terms of books for university, I had one throughout my entire BSc. And that was because it was marked as compulsory AND exercises were set from it AND lectures were based around its exact text. None of the other of my course books fulfilled those criteria so I had to buy it even though I had *zero* other books for the entire time I was studying. I gave it away the day I left university having only ever seen about 1-2% of the book (I had other calculus books that I'd inherited that were much better and more in-depth).
Compare and contrast to, say, a Kindle. No matter how many books you buy, it weighs the same and doesn't grow larger. You don't have to pack it specially, or account for its weight, or give it a shelf, or even take much care of it (the account is linked to the Kindle but NOT exclusively and you can buy another Kindle or even just load them onto your PC without hassle).
In terms of textbooks, they are things you will refer to rarely, will need to search quickly, will only require temporarily, and which are normally large, heavy and expensive. So why would anyone carry ten of them about rather than just a Kindle?
Physical books are now like physical CD's. They are a permanent record and a nice gift because of the physical, sentimental value of the object itself (which an eBook can't replicate). In terms of actual convenience, though, they are a hindrance. Especially when your requirement is fleeting, temporary, minuscule in terms of overall percentage of use, and unlikely to be something you WANT to pay for.
George: "It's a bit charred. Something something at once..PS, due to communication crisis, the shooting of carrier pigeons is now a court-martial offence. I don't see what's so funny about that, sir."
It took me nearly a day to get a "Active Directory Users and Computers" icon on my Windows 8 Pro VM.
- First I have to download RSAT. - It errors with random hex-code when run. - Much googling (and no help in the MS KB) later, I find out it doesn't like being on a mapped shared drive (which is what VMWare uses for it's shared drive with the host). - Copy to C:\, run it. - It installs without error, but nothing happens after (nothing in Windows Features related to remote admin tools, no new icons). - Much googling (and no help in the MS KB) later, it turns out I don't have the en_US language installed and it won't work without it (despite the computer being en_GB!) but will just die silently. - Go to install language, get empty language lists. - Think they must be on the CD, so point it at the original CD image. Nope. Nothing useful. - Much googling (and no help in the MS KB) later, it turns out that because I'd disabled Windows Search, it totally stops the list of languages populating. - Enabled Windows Search. - Installed language. - Still no joy. - Much googling (and no help in the MS KB) later, it turns out that because I have disabled Automatic Updates, it won't actually download the language pack (or error, or tell you that, or anything). - Re-enabled, got the language pack (150Mb!) - Reinstalled the MSU - Finally get "Users and Computers".
It doesn't shock me that in that mess of code there might be a security feature or two that's lax. I mean, seriously? Half the things had no error code or even message to say they weren't going to work or why and those that did provided zero useful information.
- You can't install an MSU from a network-mapped drive (even if it appears as a mapped drive Z:!) - You can't install RSAT with only en_GB enabled. - You can't even see the languages available without Windows Search enabled (WTF?) - You can't install a language without Automatic Updates enabled (Again, WTF?) - You have to know all this to get Users & Computers working (which, if I remember rightly, is installed by default on most "Pro" versions of Windows or at worst was an Add/Remove Windows Feature kind of deal from the initial install disk).
I'm not surprised, with that amount of cross-interaction between COMPLETELY unrelated components, complete lack of user feedback, and random interactions, that there's a few security problems cropping up.
And that's not even the worst experience I've had with a clean Windows 8 VM image from an official Windows 8 ISO with a proper Windows 8 Pro Product Key. I actually managed to BSOD the VM within hours of install, not by even doing anything remotely interesting.
And thus the biggest problem with the US jury system.
Why does anyone get a veto over who sits in the jury box?
In the UK, you are told to turn up for jury duty (you have no idea when or where until you're told). You are then told to wait. You are then put into a room for your court case (you have no idea which). You are asked if there's any reason you can't serve on a trial with Mr X or to do with company Y. Your name and address is read out to the court and recorded officially. If you're discovered to have lied about that information, you go to jail, and the trial is re-run without you.
There is no selection of jurors by lawyers. There is no way to ensure you're in a certain case. There is not even any way to ensure you are in court on a certain day. And there is no way to even say "I have 3 days of jury duty left, I can't take on a case that might before a jury for months". Once you're in, you're in until the end.
It means you are tried by 12 random people, not 12 people selected for their ability to win each side their case (or not).
As a lawyer, I'd select and approve the most gullible and stupid (as you hint at in your post) and be sure I hired a charismatic colleague to charm them.
Being tried in front of a "jury of your peers" does not mean you get to choose who you want your peers to be. Whoever those peers are, they have a legal obligation to PUT ASIDE their own knowledge of any matters that crop up and rule only on the evidence. This is the problem in the recent Apple case, for example, and happens whether you have jury selection or not. But at least with no jury selection allowed it's infinitely harder for a clever lawyer to stack a jury, and you stand a chance of getting some decent brains on the jury (and I would argue that the clever people ARE able to put aside their own feelings and knowledge and act only on the facts whereas the gullible morons will go for the nicest man who doesn't get angry, or convict the man who it was insinuated - and struck - was also a child molester, or equivalent)
The EU has had this for ten years and there's never been any problem enough to generate a reputation like you're suggesting.
You think identity theft is any less common in Europe than the US? Don't talk insane. The fact is, mobiles reported as stolen to the police are put on the database and blocked (and thus can't be reused without shipping them to, say, a non-compliant country who don't care about stolen mobiles).
If you want to report a mobile phone as stolen, you think they don't check that you owned it first? And if your mobile is marked as stolen "by accident", it will block calls and you will know instantly and you can prove you own it or not, and discuss it with your carrier.
I've known any amount of people have their phones stolen, blocked, the phones were then dumped AND RETURNED and they were unblocked and never affected by it. I've also had to personally report a phone stolen because it never arrived from the initial order. I had three months of fighting about contracts, etc. but it was listed on the IMEI blacklist within seconds so was useless to any thief (it would have cost more to hack / export than it would have to buy the damn phone).
The IMEI blacklists have been in operation for YEARS and this isn't a problem enough for ANYONE in the countries they operate it to consider worthy of report, and it works so well that people report them voluntarily even if they are just lost in the post, and the police and mobile companies add them the second they are asked to.
If you can false-report a phone as stolen, you have access to order a new phone, cancel the contract, up the contract, order additional services, reroute the number. You're already stuffed. If your number is blocked wrongfully, it takes only minutes to prove who you are to the same extent as modifying your contract itself, and that's enough to remove you from the list.
Not saying that it *can't* be done, but it's *not* a problem.
Any legal system with any respect for itself wouldn't allow "accidental" evidence like that. In fact, in most countries, that would immediately rule that piece of evidence inadmissible FOREVER.
Revealing the user to the COURT is what's required, not a fishing expedition. If you're wrong, you're wrong. And any user discovered in that fashion doing something NOT illegal has a cast-iron case of breach of privacy - not of the online host, but of the court itself.
All else fails, the host / court / independent lawyer for the commenter should ask for the response to be sealed but almost CERTAINLY it already would be anyway.
I feel sorry if you live in a "civilisation" that doesn't have legal basics like this already covered.
Yeah, the US would never interfere in foreign countries where they have no jurisdiction to get their hands on a suspected copyright-infringer, would they?
Gabon looks like just the kind of place that a little backhander and/or exchange of oil purchases could make anything happen.
Because I read the statement originally and thought it was unnecessarily pretentious and liable to land them in more trouble than if they'd just played ball.
UK courts don't take lightly to humour or parody aimed at themselves. Undermining the same court that found you guilty in the factual legal statement you were ordered by that court to publish is literally just sticking two fingers up.
And the statement itself? I read it when it first came out and couldn't make head nor tail of it (you can find it here: http://www.apple.com/uk/legal-judgement/). Even just the comparison to the German court - that was unnecessarily snarky and there's a reason that corporate legal statements all sound the same and don't try to be humorous or clever.
If they'd just done as ordered and stated the bit that other courts had disagreed, fair enough. But they word it in "smart-arse" and that was always liable to make more fuss. And now, for their efforts to minimise customer damage, they are now in the news again for failing to comply with the original court order.
Well done, Apple. Keep it up. Because though you probably don't, I'd be quite interested to see just how far a UK court would go to drill you into the ground if you kept it up.
But are you suggesting that it's illegal to gather evidence by asking a court for a court order to reveal the data of visits recorded to a website?
Evidence-gathering isn't restricted to just what you are freely given. If it was, almost everyone would get away with crimes.
What you're implying is that if I raid a bank, and the court orders the shop across the street to reveal its CCTV records of that day, that's somehow prejudicial to justice?
- Juror suspected of perjury. - Court issues order to place that published posts which have a reasonable chance of providing evidence of said perjury, to provide the bare minimum of information to identify the poster. - If it's not him, end of case. - If it is him, file for mistrial, pursue conviction against him.
Why is this news? This is bog-standard legal procedure for any medium whatsoever (e.g. newspaper letters page would be the same, or CCTV of him in a pub meeting the defendant, or whatever).
Because "The Internet" means you should be anonymous, untraceable and able to commit criminal acts? Is that the logic?
And, unfortunately, software has little or no responsibility if it gets it wrong while a human does.
Don't think you'll see a CEO jailed any time soon because the company had inadequate testing procedures and they ran a kid over. Money will change hands, regulations will tighten, but people inside a software-producing company going to jail when their product fails? Very rare.
The other thing about humans is they have a superior (if slower) decision making capability. If you've seen the movie I-Robot (hardly Asimov-related, really, but not the point) you are given an example. The problem is that the computer follows orders, which aren't always ideal in all situations.
I'd rather crash into the cardboard box in the alleyway, or mount the kerb (if it's clear) than not get out of the way of the out-of-control juggernaut heading towards me that braking or staying still won't avoid.
Because MS make more money from the EU market and sell more goods/services to it than anywhere else. Yes, that includes the US. You're second. Same as in a lot of IT markets. Hell, some of the gaming markets you're not even third.
You can piss them off if you like, but that's the LARGEST market they deal with. Same for Google, eBay and lots of other companies that deal internationally.
Ignore the fine and they seize your assets (i.e. freeze your bank accounts), which means zero effective business in that region. That's billions of Euros lost every year because you got stroppy and didn't pay a fine that you were legally required to pay.
Think that's fiction? They were >50% of your assets, sales and money (i.e. anything stored in the EU, or held by the EU, or sold to the EU) overnight is no small thing. And if you do business in the EU, you're liable to EU taxes and law (including fines) NO MATTER WHAT, so they'd literally just get other countries to take that from your bank account and pay it, no matter where you tried to hide it.
And, as it was, the US investigated this same matter and decided not to do anything. The EU investigated it and charged them billions. AND THEY PAID. Because it's the most incredibly stupid thing in the world not to. The EU literally have the power to say "No, you can't sell Windows" if they like.
Because nobody has taken Apple to court and proved they are abusing monopolism of a market.
Simple as that. Doesn't even mean they *aren't* doing just that. But nobody has bothered to take them to court for it. And it's not just governments that can do that, but their competitors too.
You don't carbon-copy things. That just makes a brain, or a virtual brain, not a computer-that's-as-good-as-a-brain, which is what we're discussing.
But the neuronal connections (10,000 per neuron, constantly changing) and time-slices that you'd need to get even close to simulating the number of interactions in an ant's brain when it smells a certain scent-trail? You might JUST about be able to approach that complexity if you turned the whole Earth into a computer with the nanoscale technology.
It's not a question of brute-force, or shrinking down, it's seriously an order-of-magnitude number of orders-of-magnitude out in terms of the complexity required to do something useful (and the criteria for that I'm setting deliberately low).
Sure, there are more efficient ways of doing things (hence computers manipulate numbers faster than anyone on earth even could), but this isn't about efficiency. This is about complexity, which is the opposite end of the scale. We just don't have enough complexity in any earth-based system built on technology big enough to put into chips and powered by electricity to do anything close to even a theoretically-more-efficient amount of intelligence.
The scale is immense. Of course, we can perform huge numbers of amazing tricks (face-recognition, etc.) but in terms of getting somewhere where we can replace a human with a computer on any significant task and not notice? Orders of magnitude away.
You're talking billions of computers with 10's of thousands of connections to each other than can be programmatically changed at will and operate at the speed-of-light to even be able to approach the equivalent of a brain of a small mammal, if you're lucky. It's a different kind of technology, yes, but it's the complexity of what we have in our heads and the complexity of "emulating" that via what we have in our computers that really blow the idea out of the water for centuries to come.
Hell, a couple of large A* searches can pull a modern computer to its knees with even the most efficient code. And, in terms of complexity, that's nothing and is optimised to their preferred method of data processing.
No, your phone does edge detection to get a series of numbers. There's a HUGE difference between that and actual intelligence.
I can program a computer in seconds to do maths that's beyond any human's capability to work out in their lifetime. That's not intelligence.
Now if you could say on each image that "this is me", "this isn't me", and it could build up a database of people that should and should not be authorised and OVER TIME learn on it's own without just having a bunch of statistics like "> 20% green = > 90% probability", then you'd have some mild form of intelligence. Otherwise you just have heuristics, which are 0.000001% of how actual intelligence operates.
What you're describing is a black box that gets an answer right in one scenario when fed with ALL available data. I have no data regarding what my father looks like if he dressed up in drag and shaved his head and I looked at him from the back - but I'd stand a pretty damn good chance of recognising him if he did that and my brain got that fresh, never-before-seen data.
Computers currently only form patterns that you inform them could exist in the data (in some way). They never form patterns of their own, but even pigeons are capable of that. Feed a pigeon at certain times of the day and it associates *SOMETHING* that happens at that time of day with feeding. Literally, it gets "superstitious" and does things like bang its head on a wall because that happened to coincide with feeding last time. It posits a theory, tests it repeatedly, takes that new data into account, and changes the theory as necessary. And that's a pigeon.
Computers, currently, do NOT do this, unless informed to do this, which is another matter entirely. Humans are not numbers-crunchers and computers are not hard-wired biological circuits joined by physical processes dependent on billions of interactions that change every second. Although either one can simulate the other, to some degree, it's difficult, long-winded, and like trying to play Half Life 3 on a Turing machine.
You'll be lucky to simulate a gram of matter to any significant accuracy, and the higher-level simulations (neural networks, etc.) are seriously lacking in their ability, and to model how a brain of any significant size works you're honestly looking at supercomputers the size of the planet with current technology.
Just throwing power at a problem like modelling the brain isn't going to make anything happen any time soon.
If we can accurately model an ant's brain, down to the individual neuron, in the next 100 years or so, I'll be impressed. If we can make an artificial algorithm of any kind that can surpass the learning ability and intelligence of your average kid up to being a teenager (so at least ten years of TRAINING them to do every task a human could do, and them handling it as well as a teenager could, from ZERO initial information), with the largest computers in the world for the next 100 years, I'll be impressed.
A brain is more than N CPU's executing X amount of cycles per second. Simulating that in any significant or useful way puts orders of magnitude on a task already out of range of the human race as a whole dedicating itself to ONLY doing that.
Consider this: You put a computer on the Internet with a "blank" memory. By ten years, even with *some* guidance, if it manages to learn to read and understand most Wikipedia articles just by learning what's come through it, that is INCREDIBLY impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a friend who works in a German power plant, in the back end handling coal orders, deliveries, etc.
Never been so busy, apparently.
Because "we require" rarely means "we won't touch you with a bargepole unless you have". It's there to weed out the chaff who think they're not good enough or important enough to apply.
I've applied for numerous jobs that have "required" things like MCSE's and A+, and first-class degrees and I clearly state that I don't have them, but what I do have is X amount of experience doing Y.
The bright employers (i.e. the only type you *want* to work for anyway) pick it up and say "Oh, right, he's probably spent so long DOING the job, he never got around to paying the certification tax on a bit of paper to say he could do it." or "He was out earning a wage in this sector while our own guys were still in university playing with microcontrollers". The bad ones, of course, shove it off and it gets lost in the HR department because it "doesn't meet criteria".
I've also advised people to ignore this sort of thing in the past, so long as you *CAN* put forward a reasonable case of being suitable for the job anyway, and it's never perfect (there is no magic way to get a job) but it's helped a lot of them to get positions they didn't think they were good enough for. How many of the industry founding fathers and visionaries had PhD's or Masters? Nowhere near all, and they still got there.
Don't blatantly ignore high requirements, just substitute what you have instead (and, if you like, in your covering letter explain that: "Although I notice that the job requirements include X, I feel that my extensive expertise in position Y performing task Z should be sufficient to prove that I'm capable of performing to the standards required") if you think you have a shot of doing the JOB.
Applications processes are mainly about weeding out the vast number of applicants, but secondarily they are about YOU weeding out the vast number of jobs available. Because if your employer can't see that you can do the job, just because you have an absence of certain desired letters after your name, you probably don't want to work there anyway (and they probably will ignore your application, but the chances that they veto you for future posts because of your politely-worded ambition are vanishingly small... and again, those sort of people you just don't want to work for anyway).
That may be *why* they bothered emailing everyone. Because they aren't just interested in PhD's, but they just want a high standard of applicant. One who has those qualifications, or one who has the skills and knows how to get through a job application process by playing on them.
The worst that happens is they say No, and keep your information on file for future reference. The chances it will prejudice any future applications - a concern I've heard from the people I've given personal advice - are basically zero (do you really think HR departments keep years and years and years worth of applications that they are already TRYING to narrow down to just a few candidates from thousands and somehow and check them for every post? No.).
And, you never know, they might just say "Well, actually, you're not right for this particular position, but we are just about to advertise for X as well, and that's look more suited to you."
In job-hunting, there's nothing wrong with being ambitious, so long as you're honest. And even if they offer it you and you don't like the idea of working in a crowd full of bitter PhD's, or it's not better than your current job, again - you can so "no" just as easily as they can.
http://xkcd.com/16/
(Although, to be honest, using that as humour to stop you posting 30-year-old Python quotes is almost beginning to suffer the same problem).
If you had a legal right to a domain name, you might be right. But you don't.
Similarly, you don't have a legal right to enter random countries, and they are quite welcome to tell you to go away (whether on the basis that they think you're there to work contrary to your visa, or you have previous convictions, or whatever)
It's not illegal to deny someone a domain name. No more illegal than denying them a trademark, or a particular phone number (or even phone access at all!).
The whole DNS system is a collection of private contracts to hand out naming rights within a virtual space. Hence why ICANN etc. can get people to pay them more money just by saying "Okay, let's have a new TLD!". Nobody is FORCING them to pay them money. Nobody has a legal obligation to buy those domains. And nobody has a legal obligation to fulfill those demands for domains if their contracts say so (and it hasn't been established to the contrary in a court of law).
This is like saying that me not giving you an email address at my domain is just as prejudicial. Er, no. It's my domain, my rules, and you either agree with them or not. Unless you have it in writing that I *guarantee* you those services, you can't do anything if I don't allow you to use them and/or stop you getting them in first place.
So let's not be stupid here. If you try to register a *car* with a rude number plate (licence plate to the Americans), it will get blocked in most countries (and they pre-filter those lists, but still will take yours away if it's deemed to be rude and they missed it!). Hell, some countries decide what you can put on a birth certificate. And places like Italy, it's almost impossible to get a domain name without a certified business presence in the country itself.
In comparison, a copyright infringer being denied a domain name in a country he has ZERO affiliation to is nothing.
I actually find it hilarious that people think that the US has involvement, if I'm honest. Chances are Gabon just doesn't want his type around. If he applied for a .uk, for instance, it would be denied the second he announced his intentions for it without even bothering to wait for the Americans to ask - it's a breach of Nominet policy.
It seems that a lot of the greats go downhill quite quickly. Peter Molyneaux used to be a god, not anymore. The other Elite programmer now has nothing to do with computers any more. Hell, even the Romero's and Carmack's of this world were in decline decades ago.
If anything, as I get older I understand that the secret to a hit game or a hit movie is nothing but sheer luck, and even pushing tripe until you get lucky. I mean, Angry Birds - it's a damn Scorched Earth clone with not-very-good graphics and a physics engine that's in a ton of 2D games and not very accurate.
And if game development is just hit-and-miss like that, with no real link to a particular designer's / programmer's actual talent (beyond being able to get the thing off the ground), then it pretty much follow than any / all "remake" attempts will come to a floundering halt with some absolute tripe (Duke Nukem Forever!).
I never really played Elite (I was too young, it was too difficult) but *always* loved the way it was programmed, what it could do, and the differences it explored in gameplay. But I don't think you can replicate that. Any Elite remake will be yet-another-space-game.
If you don't earn enough to take a taxi everywhere, then you'll be unlikely to ever afford a self-drive car even when they are legalised across your entire country.
Seriously, it's nice to dream, but you'll probably be retired before you can afford a self-drive car if you're not already earning enough money to. And that's ignoring the problems of insurances, recalls, etc. that are almost bound to hit the self-drive industry at some point after they are "approved".
You're more likely to work from home before that happens. You're more likely to be retired before it happens.
You're more likely to afford your own taxi-journeys / personal chauffeur before you can afford one of those.
There is not, on planet Earth, a single company licensed to sell self-drive cars to the general public, or a licensing structure for them, or an insurance structure for them, or a liability structure for them (which, if established to go against the companies that make them, could destroy the market literally overnight).
We are actually technically closer to all owning our own all-in-one boat/car/plane vehicles than a self-drive car. Because you *can* buy one of those now, they *aren't* stupidly expensive, and you *can* get appropriate licensing / testing / insurance for them TODAY.
The problem with reading sci-fi is that you'll hardly ever get to experience the things you read about, and the ones you do will be quite boring and mundane and not what they could be ("Talk to anyone in the world over the airwaves!" - Yes, I can today, but that causes immense problems itself - spam calls, etc. - and costs a lot to do for no other reason than there's no international telecoms carrier, "Flying cars!" - we have them. But you still need FAA licensing, filing a flight plan, an runway to land on, etc.).
By most probabilities, it won't happen until you're too old to take advantage of it. Accept it, move on.
Each time I've moved house I've taken dozens of boxes of books. In terms of efficiency they are the worst possession I own because they take up lots of space, lots of weight, need specialist storage in the house (bookshelves, etc.) and I rarely refer to them.
And that's *with* myself only keeping books that I have some sort of attachment to. In terms of books for university, I had one throughout my entire BSc. And that was because it was marked as compulsory AND exercises were set from it AND lectures were based around its exact text. None of the other of my course books fulfilled those criteria so I had to buy it even though I had *zero* other books for the entire time I was studying. I gave it away the day I left university having only ever seen about 1-2% of the book (I had other calculus books that I'd inherited that were much better and more in-depth).
Compare and contrast to, say, a Kindle. No matter how many books you buy, it weighs the same and doesn't grow larger. You don't have to pack it specially, or account for its weight, or give it a shelf, or even take much care of it (the account is linked to the Kindle but NOT exclusively and you can buy another Kindle or even just load them onto your PC without hassle).
In terms of textbooks, they are things you will refer to rarely, will need to search quickly, will only require temporarily, and which are normally large, heavy and expensive. So why would anyone carry ten of them about rather than just a Kindle?
Physical books are now like physical CD's. They are a permanent record and a nice gift because of the physical, sentimental value of the object itself (which an eBook can't replicate). In terms of actual convenience, though, they are a hindrance. Especially when your requirement is fleeting, temporary, minuscule in terms of overall percentage of use, and unlikely to be something you WANT to pay for.
George: "It's a bit charred. Something something at once..PS, due to communication crisis, the shooting of carrier pigeons is now a court-martial offence. I don't see what's so funny about that, sir."
According to The Reg, the reception in the UK was a little more lukewarm:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/02/ipad_mini_queue/
"UK iPad Mini FRENZY: Queues stretch SEVERAL FEET from till" (till = checkout).
It took me nearly a day to get a "Active Directory Users and Computers" icon on my Windows 8 Pro VM.
- First I have to download RSAT.
- It errors with random hex-code when run.
- Much googling (and no help in the MS KB) later, I find out it doesn't like being on a mapped shared drive (which is what VMWare uses for it's shared drive with the host).
- Copy to C:\, run it.
- It installs without error, but nothing happens after (nothing in Windows Features related to remote admin tools, no new icons).
- Much googling (and no help in the MS KB) later, it turns out I don't have the en_US language installed and it won't work without it (despite the computer being en_GB!) but will just die silently.
- Go to install language, get empty language lists.
- Think they must be on the CD, so point it at the original CD image. Nope. Nothing useful.
- Much googling (and no help in the MS KB) later, it turns out that because I'd disabled Windows Search, it totally stops the list of languages populating.
- Enabled Windows Search.
- Installed language.
- Still no joy.
- Much googling (and no help in the MS KB) later, it turns out that because I have disabled Automatic Updates, it won't actually download the language pack (or error, or tell you that, or anything).
- Re-enabled, got the language pack (150Mb!)
- Reinstalled the MSU
- Finally get "Users and Computers".
It doesn't shock me that in that mess of code there might be a security feature or two that's lax. I mean, seriously? Half the things had no error code or even message to say they weren't going to work or why and those that did provided zero useful information.
- You can't install an MSU from a network-mapped drive (even if it appears as a mapped drive Z:!)
- You can't install RSAT with only en_GB enabled.
- You can't even see the languages available without Windows Search enabled (WTF?)
- You can't install a language without Automatic Updates enabled (Again, WTF?)
- You have to know all this to get Users & Computers working (which, if I remember rightly, is installed by default on most "Pro" versions of Windows or at worst was an Add/Remove Windows Feature kind of deal from the initial install disk).
I'm not surprised, with that amount of cross-interaction between COMPLETELY unrelated components, complete lack of user feedback, and random interactions, that there's a few security problems cropping up.
And that's not even the worst experience I've had with a clean Windows 8 VM image from an official Windows 8 ISO with a proper Windows 8 Pro Product Key. I actually managed to BSOD the VM within hours of install, not by even doing anything remotely interesting.
And thus the biggest problem with the US jury system.
Why does anyone get a veto over who sits in the jury box?
In the UK, you are told to turn up for jury duty (you have no idea when or where until you're told). You are then told to wait. You are then put into a room for your court case (you have no idea which). You are asked if there's any reason you can't serve on a trial with Mr X or to do with company Y. Your name and address is read out to the court and recorded officially. If you're discovered to have lied about that information, you go to jail, and the trial is re-run without you.
There is no selection of jurors by lawyers. There is no way to ensure you're in a certain case. There is not even any way to ensure you are in court on a certain day. And there is no way to even say "I have 3 days of jury duty left, I can't take on a case that might before a jury for months". Once you're in, you're in until the end.
It means you are tried by 12 random people, not 12 people selected for their ability to win each side their case (or not).
As a lawyer, I'd select and approve the most gullible and stupid (as you hint at in your post) and be sure I hired a charismatic colleague to charm them.
Being tried in front of a "jury of your peers" does not mean you get to choose who you want your peers to be. Whoever those peers are, they have a legal obligation to PUT ASIDE their own knowledge of any matters that crop up and rule only on the evidence. This is the problem in the recent Apple case, for example, and happens whether you have jury selection or not. But at least with no jury selection allowed it's infinitely harder for a clever lawyer to stack a jury, and you stand a chance of getting some decent brains on the jury (and I would argue that the clever people ARE able to put aside their own feelings and knowledge and act only on the facts whereas the gullible morons will go for the nicest man who doesn't get angry, or convict the man who it was insinuated - and struck - was also a child molester, or equivalent)
You miss the point.
The EU has had this for ten years and there's never been any problem enough to generate a reputation like you're suggesting.
You think identity theft is any less common in Europe than the US? Don't talk insane. The fact is, mobiles reported as stolen to the police are put on the database and blocked (and thus can't be reused without shipping them to, say, a non-compliant country who don't care about stolen mobiles).
If you want to report a mobile phone as stolen, you think they don't check that you owned it first? And if your mobile is marked as stolen "by accident", it will block calls and you will know instantly and you can prove you own it or not, and discuss it with your carrier.
I've known any amount of people have their phones stolen, blocked, the phones were then dumped AND RETURNED and they were unblocked and never affected by it. I've also had to personally report a phone stolen because it never arrived from the initial order. I had three months of fighting about contracts, etc. but it was listed on the IMEI blacklist within seconds so was useless to any thief (it would have cost more to hack / export than it would have to buy the damn phone).
The IMEI blacklists have been in operation for YEARS and this isn't a problem enough for ANYONE in the countries they operate it to consider worthy of report, and it works so well that people report them voluntarily even if they are just lost in the post, and the police and mobile companies add them the second they are asked to.
If you can false-report a phone as stolen, you have access to order a new phone, cancel the contract, up the contract, order additional services, reroute the number. You're already stuffed. If your number is blocked wrongfully, it takes only minutes to prove who you are to the same extent as modifying your contract itself, and that's enough to remove you from the list.
Not saying that it *can't* be done, but it's *not* a problem.
"Fruit of the poisonous tree."
Any legal system with any respect for itself wouldn't allow "accidental" evidence like that. In fact, in most countries, that would immediately rule that piece of evidence inadmissible FOREVER.
Revealing the user to the COURT is what's required, not a fishing expedition. If you're wrong, you're wrong. And any user discovered in that fashion doing something NOT illegal has a cast-iron case of breach of privacy - not of the online host, but of the court itself.
All else fails, the host / court / independent lawyer for the commenter should ask for the response to be sealed but almost CERTAINLY it already would be anyway.
I feel sorry if you live in a "civilisation" that doesn't have legal basics like this already covered.
Yeah, the US would never interfere in foreign countries where they have no jurisdiction to get their hands on a suspected copyright-infringer, would they?
Gabon looks like just the kind of place that a little backhander and/or exchange of oil purchases could make anything happen.
"The domain name associated with the website Me.ga has been seized pursuant to an order issued by the U.S. District Court"
(or equivalent).
Because I read the statement originally and thought it was unnecessarily pretentious and liable to land them in more trouble than if they'd just played ball.
UK courts don't take lightly to humour or parody aimed at themselves. Undermining the same court that found you guilty in the factual legal statement you were ordered by that court to publish is literally just sticking two fingers up.
And the statement itself? I read it when it first came out and couldn't make head nor tail of it (you can find it here: http://www.apple.com/uk/legal-judgement/). Even just the comparison to the German court - that was unnecessarily snarky and there's a reason that corporate legal statements all sound the same and don't try to be humorous or clever.
If they'd just done as ordered and stated the bit that other courts had disagreed, fair enough. But they word it in "smart-arse" and that was always liable to make more fuss. And now, for their efforts to minimise customer damage, they are now in the news again for failing to comply with the original court order.
Well done, Apple. Keep it up. Because though you probably don't, I'd be quite interested to see just how far a UK court would go to drill you into the ground if you kept it up.
It is. Nobody's charged him yet.
But are you suggesting that it's illegal to gather evidence by asking a court for a court order to reveal the data of visits recorded to a website?
Evidence-gathering isn't restricted to just what you are freely given. If it was, almost everyone would get away with crimes.
What you're implying is that if I raid a bank, and the court orders the shop across the street to reveal its CCTV records of that day, that's somehow prejudicial to justice?
News why?
- Juror suspected of perjury.
- Court issues order to place that published posts which have a reasonable chance of providing evidence of said perjury, to provide the bare minimum of information to identify the poster.
- If it's not him, end of case.
- If it is him, file for mistrial, pursue conviction against him.
Why is this news? This is bog-standard legal procedure for any medium whatsoever (e.g. newspaper letters page would be the same, or CCTV of him in a pub meeting the defendant, or whatever).
Because "The Internet" means you should be anonymous, untraceable and able to commit criminal acts? Is that the logic?
And, unfortunately, software has little or no responsibility if it gets it wrong while a human does.
Don't think you'll see a CEO jailed any time soon because the company had inadequate testing procedures and they ran a kid over. Money will change hands, regulations will tighten, but people inside a software-producing company going to jail when their product fails? Very rare.
The other thing about humans is they have a superior (if slower) decision making capability. If you've seen the movie I-Robot (hardly Asimov-related, really, but not the point) you are given an example. The problem is that the computer follows orders, which aren't always ideal in all situations.
I'd rather crash into the cardboard box in the alleyway, or mount the kerb (if it's clear) than not get out of the way of the out-of-control juggernaut heading towards me that braking or staying still won't avoid.
Welcome to the 21st Century.
The EU has had this for over a decade.
Because MS make more money from the EU market and sell more goods/services to it than anywhere else. Yes, that includes the US. You're second. Same as in a lot of IT markets. Hell, some of the gaming markets you're not even third.
You can piss them off if you like, but that's the LARGEST market they deal with. Same for Google, eBay and lots of other companies that deal internationally.
Ignore the fine and they seize your assets (i.e. freeze your bank accounts), which means zero effective business in that region. That's billions of Euros lost every year because you got stroppy and didn't pay a fine that you were legally required to pay.
Think that's fiction? They were >50% of your assets, sales and money (i.e. anything stored in the EU, or held by the EU, or sold to the EU) overnight is no small thing. And if you do business in the EU, you're liable to EU taxes and law (including fines) NO MATTER WHAT, so they'd literally just get other countries to take that from your bank account and pay it, no matter where you tried to hide it.
And, as it was, the US investigated this same matter and decided not to do anything. The EU investigated it and charged them billions. AND THEY PAID. Because it's the most incredibly stupid thing in the world not to. The EU literally have the power to say "No, you can't sell Windows" if they like.
Because nobody has taken Apple to court and proved they are abusing monopolism of a market.
Simple as that. Doesn't even mean they *aren't* doing just that. But nobody has bothered to take them to court for it. And it's not just governments that can do that, but their competitors too.
You don't carbon-copy things. That just makes a brain, or a virtual brain, not a computer-that's-as-good-as-a-brain, which is what we're discussing.
But the neuronal connections (10,000 per neuron, constantly changing) and time-slices that you'd need to get even close to simulating the number of interactions in an ant's brain when it smells a certain scent-trail? You might JUST about be able to approach that complexity if you turned the whole Earth into a computer with the nanoscale technology.
It's not a question of brute-force, or shrinking down, it's seriously an order-of-magnitude number of orders-of-magnitude out in terms of the complexity required to do something useful (and the criteria for that I'm setting deliberately low).
Sure, there are more efficient ways of doing things (hence computers manipulate numbers faster than anyone on earth even could), but this isn't about efficiency. This is about complexity, which is the opposite end of the scale. We just don't have enough complexity in any earth-based system built on technology big enough to put into chips and powered by electricity to do anything close to even a theoretically-more-efficient amount of intelligence.
The scale is immense. Of course, we can perform huge numbers of amazing tricks (face-recognition, etc.) but in terms of getting somewhere where we can replace a human with a computer on any significant task and not notice? Orders of magnitude away.
You're talking billions of computers with 10's of thousands of connections to each other than can be programmatically changed at will and operate at the speed-of-light to even be able to approach the equivalent of a brain of a small mammal, if you're lucky. It's a different kind of technology, yes, but it's the complexity of what we have in our heads and the complexity of "emulating" that via what we have in our computers that really blow the idea out of the water for centuries to come.
Hell, a couple of large A* searches can pull a modern computer to its knees with even the most efficient code. And, in terms of complexity, that's nothing and is optimised to their preferred method of data processing.
No, your phone does edge detection to get a series of numbers. There's a HUGE difference between that and actual intelligence.
I can program a computer in seconds to do maths that's beyond any human's capability to work out in their lifetime. That's not intelligence.
Now if you could say on each image that "this is me", "this isn't me", and it could build up a database of people that should and should not be authorised and OVER TIME learn on it's own without just having a bunch of statistics like "> 20% green = > 90% probability", then you'd have some mild form of intelligence. Otherwise you just have heuristics, which are 0.000001% of how actual intelligence operates.
What you're describing is a black box that gets an answer right in one scenario when fed with ALL available data. I have no data regarding what my father looks like if he dressed up in drag and shaved his head and I looked at him from the back - but I'd stand a pretty damn good chance of recognising him if he did that and my brain got that fresh, never-before-seen data.
Computers currently only form patterns that you inform them could exist in the data (in some way). They never form patterns of their own, but even pigeons are capable of that. Feed a pigeon at certain times of the day and it associates *SOMETHING* that happens at that time of day with feeding. Literally, it gets "superstitious" and does things like bang its head on a wall because that happened to coincide with feeding last time. It posits a theory, tests it repeatedly, takes that new data into account, and changes the theory as necessary. And that's a pigeon.
Computers, currently, do NOT do this, unless informed to do this, which is another matter entirely. Humans are not numbers-crunchers and computers are not hard-wired biological circuits joined by physical processes dependent on billions of interactions that change every second. Although either one can simulate the other, to some degree, it's difficult, long-winded, and like trying to play Half Life 3 on a Turing machine.
Not even close.
You'll be lucky to simulate a gram of matter to any significant accuracy, and the higher-level simulations (neural networks, etc.) are seriously lacking in their ability, and to model how a brain of any significant size works you're honestly looking at supercomputers the size of the planet with current technology.
Just throwing power at a problem like modelling the brain isn't going to make anything happen any time soon.
If we can accurately model an ant's brain, down to the individual neuron, in the next 100 years or so, I'll be impressed. If we can make an artificial algorithm of any kind that can surpass the learning ability and intelligence of your average kid up to being a teenager (so at least ten years of TRAINING them to do every task a human could do, and them handling it as well as a teenager could, from ZERO initial information), with the largest computers in the world for the next 100 years, I'll be impressed.
A brain is more than N CPU's executing X amount of cycles per second. Simulating that in any significant or useful way puts orders of magnitude on a task already out of range of the human race as a whole dedicating itself to ONLY doing that.
Consider this: You put a computer on the Internet with a "blank" memory. By ten years, even with *some* guidance, if it manages to learn to read and understand most Wikipedia articles just by learning what's come through it, that is INCREDIBLY impressive.