And hoodlum behavior is only going to be a problem until the owners get to deploy automated, armored, mobile area denial systems, using microwaves, lasers, infra-sound, or whatever. When this happens, they will not even need to bullshit us with the excuse "We are doing this because of minimum wages". Seriously, guys. If you were not doing it now with a $35K robot instead of a $15 minwage peon, you were going to do it five years from now with a $10K robot instead of a $5 minwage peon.
There is no way around it. A number of low skilled jobs will get replaced with a few medium skilled ones (designing, building and maintaining the robots) and a few low skilled ones (running them and dealing with extreme deviation customers)
As for society as a whole, it will either will have to focus on providing comfortable lifestyles for those who are superfluous, or decide that they are no worth bothering with, and tune the laws so that they are easy to put out of sight. And if you think that have-nots will small arms will scare violence professionals and engineers unfettered by laws, you are an idiot.
Last year, I did not give a fuck, as both me and my wife think we are going to be useful or wealthy for long enough (MIT grads, six digit jobs, comfortable, paid for home, etc...) Six days before my 50th birthday, my daughter was born, and now we are ecstatic, but scared shitless.
All of a sudden, "Fuck everyone, I got mine" is not longer a sound policy. Now I have to worry, should I try to guide her to Lego Technics or bogu and bokken... and for the first time in my life I feel that maybe I should have focused harder on making money instead of enjoying what I do for a living.
And my FIOS connection has become absolutely horrible since. Yesterday, I had a movie stop for buffering three times in the first hour - it was not so good, so I gave up at some point.
In the evening, my bandwidth is 1/10th of what it used to be. Between 12am and 2am, I experience periods of total inaccessibility.
I have more or less stopped gaming and I have a lot less time for movies as we recently had a baby girl. But a few years ago, I'd have been screaming bloody murder and would have been looking for alternatives. Now... meh.
Sure. We'll use the materials we do not have to build the space elevator to support the ships we do not have which will fly to the habitable planets we don't know about using FTL technology we think is impossible.
And how long until the colonized planets (terraformed? pacified? coming with pre-built infrastructure?) can produce anything that will be useful back on Earth? Of course, after being lifted to orbit with the space elevators on the colonized planet, carried on the ships refueled on the colonized planet, etc...
There is a reason the discussions on Facebook are a lot more interesting. The ones doing the discussing are unencumbered by knowledge and capacity for logical thought.
I cannot believe that you are serious. Of course, if you are, you are absolutely incapable of rational thought.
What on Earth makes you think that privatized, of all things, space travel will be used to ship people who are deemed useless on Earth to a planet that is likely to be much less hospitable to human life? If new planets are open to colonization, they will be the destination of the best and brightest, unless life there is one step up from Hell, in which case the colonists will be one step up from slaves.
One of three things will happen: - the ruling class will find it in its heart to provide some pittance to keep the 'obsolete' masses happy - the masses will raise up to kill and loot those they view as their oppressors, throwing society back to early industrial times at best - automated weapon systems will be good enough to isolate the powerful from the unneeded. The resources will stay on the obviously side of that divide.
Space travel will not change the above one little bit. If anything, it will exacerbate the divide between (1) those with power, (2) the people who can serve them, and (3) the rest. If you an in (1) good for you. If you are in (2) lets work together to try and remain useful. If you are in (3) good luck.
Shame on you to even suggest such a thing! It is illegal to design blinding weapons.
Within the power range the article is talking about (only about 150MJ in a gallon of aviofuel) the laser will be barely powerful enough to melt any amount of aluminum to get at the electronics behind it. It is clear that this weapon system is designed to disrupt sensors and optics. Any damage to pilots' (or civilians') eyes is just a side effect, which is A-OK, legally speaking... As I am sure any military lawyer will happily tell you.
This will be one of these 'nasty' weapons: Stage 1) We got them, everyone else is protesting them, but that's because they are backward savages who can't make them. Stage 2) We have to keep making those horrible weapons, because our evil enemies have developed and will hesitate to use them. Stage 3) There is an international treaty against those horrible, horrible weapons, but we will not sign it, because we know those no-good other nations will keep using them no matter what they've promised.
How much sarcastic am I? Frankly, dear, I have no clue.
You and I can play tick-tack-toe and unless one of us isn't paying any attention at all, whoever goes first will always be the winner.
I hope that tick-tack-toe is a different game involving ticks and tacks, and not the tic-tac-toe I know. Because if both players are over 5 years old and have an IQ over 50, the game I know is always drawn.
If it becomes possible, it will not be available to the like of us (I have over a million in savings, but I would rather spend them on my little girl)
Immortality for the rich will probably precipitate social strife like never before. At the end, the world will either end a police state or a place where immortality is banned. If there are ever rich people who extend their lives for hundreds of years, they will either do it secretly, or while ruling over sentients they consider even less human that the truly rich consider the rest of us.
Oh, yes, definitely, the manual for the Chinese drone should include all the relevant air safety laws for your location. Just like my Japanese Supra came with a copy of the California Driver Handbook. Oh, wait, it did not!
Knowing the applicable laws is the user's responsibility. The drone's documentation should contain what's applicable to the drone, not a compendium of all laws governing the use of airspace from the North to the South pole. Even if the local regulations required that the relevant laws are included with the drone, it would be probably left to the local distributor to do so.
I have not done that one, but I did something close.
When I came to the US, in the early 90s, I brought all the code I had ever written with me. It included some pretty interesting stuff (I did a lot of assembly programming in Bulgaria, in the late 80s) so it was compressed, encrypted, and contained a second, hidden archive that contained the really 'interesting' stuff.
I forgot the password... and I forgot it in the dumbest possible way - it was a longish English phrase, and my English at the time was bad enough that I did not know how to spell one of the words. By the time I needed some of the stuff, I had learned the correct spelling, and could not get to my code.
Much, much later, around 2012, I found the hard drive, and miraculously, it worked. I brute forced it, which I could have done much earlier, but it was never important enough, and it turned out that I had misspelled 'gnarly'. I had some good times going through my 30 year old stuff, as well as seeing what I considered indispensable software at the time. It's hard to believe that we used to write programs that did useful stuff and were less than 256 bytes long.
I wish people would make at least an attempt at informing themselves before they try to be authoritative about things they do not understand.
First of all, the Dushki in questions are Ms, which means that they are not from the Thirties. They date at the very least from the late Forties, and were manufactured well into the Eighties. I remember when we started replacing them in Bulgaria, and we were manufacturing the NSV (Nikitin-Sokolov-Volkov) ourselves. Countries that did not manufacture the superseding machine guns (NSV or Kord) must have kept theirs. In the early 2000s, the DShks were still one of the most common heavy machine gun. They are not obsolete by any means.
Second, those guns have proved themselves against relatively modern planes and helicopters, as the British (for some reason) have been learning through the Eighties, Nineties and Oughts.
Third, this heavy machine gun is a pretty solid piece of work. The barrel you have to keep keep replacing anyway, if you ever use it in earnest, but the rest of it is solid and lasts for long time. I remember tinkering with the three heavies we had in the 80s in Bulgaria, and the dushka was the one with the simplest, most solid inner workings.
Fourth, I am sure that GAU-19 and Kord are much superior, but those are probably orders of magnitude more expensive, and probably impossible to get unless you are well connected (which unfortunately describes the people in whose facilities ISIS goes shopping) So a DShk is still a very desirable machine gun, and in a completely different class from RPKs, let alone good ole AKs and their ilk.
So, no, these are not museum pieces, but rather effective death dealing machines.
Bad grammar aside, yes, seriously, the first thing that a totalitarian regime targets is loyalty to traditional entities, like religion, family, etc...
This is why sick aberrations like Pavlik Morozov are turned into martyrs, why organizations like all the stages of Communist Youth are created, why religion is undermined, infiltrated and presented as a kinky delusion.
The idea is to make the individual loyal to the state. How well does it work? It doesn't work on everyone. Most of those who keep their sense end up in positions of power, or at least in law enforcement. The rest, who lack the brains, or suffer from an overabundance of morals, end up in psychiatric facilities, or even in concentration camps.
I have played every PC Fallout game when it came out. I have finished and enjoyed every single one of them until Fallout 4. Fallout was a wonderful surprise, Fallout 2 was more of a great thing, Fallout Tactics was a interesting diversion that scratched my Jagged Alliance itch reasonably well, Fallout 3 was a mediocre transition to a new engine which grew, with the DLCs to a enjoyable game, and New Vegas was once again, pretty damn great.
I have not finished Fallout 4, I have no interest in doing so, and about every single thing about it annoyed me. By the way, I'm an MIT student, and I loved Boston (It helped that I went there from a colder climate)
That Fallout 4 can receive a game of the year award in a year that saw The Witcher 3 and Life is Strange come out? To me this simply underlines the utter irrelevance of the reviewers who awarded it.
The problem is that the USB drive can identify as a different kind of device, like a keyboard, run commands, download and install software, and even interact with the security modal screens.
My first result for "NUC small form" was Next Unit of Computing. It takes as much effort to highlight and search for "NUC small form" as it does for NUC.
Back in the 90s, I was on a business trip to a Czech manufacturing plant, and it had beer fountains on the floor, which workers were allowed to use. I was told there were some rules as to when and how, but the person telling me did not even know them, despite perusing the fountains freely.
I do not know whether it was common practice, and the beer was very weak, by Bulgarian standards. But it was during Commie times, so it couldn't have been too out of the ordinary. I wonder whether there are still plants like this,
Also, this is a prize for literature, not a prize for journalism. Literature is mostly fiction. It's even less damning than this. What the original poster remembers is the account of an interviewee, not something told in the author's voice.
Color me surprised than a woman who lost her husband over two weeks filled with agony may have a rather muddled recollection of the details.
So we have a maybe-not-so-reliable narrator and an award for fiction. Clearly a smoking gun!
In the late 80s, which was the last time I drove in Germany, I twice saw people being pulled over for hanging on the left of a car without passing quickly enough. Tellingly, it was non-German plates, both times.
I was myself nearly ticketed for waiting for someone to pull out of a parking spot instead of driving further into a parking structure. I had law enforcement papers at the time, so I got a free pass, but also quite a lecture. The Germans have amazingly strict driving laws, and few enough law breakers that they can actually enforce them. Here in the California, I see literally dozens of vehicles with obviously illegal modifications. You probably won't get pulled over for it, but if you are in an accident, you will regret having them.
I went to a lot of trouble to replace my 1990 Supra which was rear ended by cop (after I had enjoyed it for 18 years) I found one, rebuilt the engine, redesigned and milled, myself, replacements for almost every rotating part in the gear box, and am enjoying my daily commute a lot more than when I was doing it in a 460hp car that costs five times as much as what I've put in my 'new' old Supra.
Money spent on something that you enjoy is money well spent. Some people spent their cash on boats, others wears $10,000 watches, and even have walls covered by bookshelves holding comic books.
If all you care is about saving every dollar you make, you have a sad life. If you do have a hobby, I am sure that you can find people who think as little of it as you think of those of us who enjoy driving.
This said, I've driven a friend's Tesla for a few days, and although it can leave every car of mine in the dust, I did not particularly enjoy it. He had my Supra for these few days, and I think he enjoyed the experience more. Different strokes for different folks, though. His wife thinks that using a 30 years old I6 is a crime against Nature.
An asteroid that can cause an extinction level event will not be stopped by a nuke. It will not even be deflected to any useful amount, even if we had a way to deliver it far enough from Earth, and somehow detonate it exactly where it would do the most damage.
This is as if someone insisted on wearing his 9mm in a bar because it would come in handy when an alien fleet decides to take over Earth.
Yeah, and I think that the danger from any NEO that is small enough to be affected by those space based nukes is way, way, WAY less than the danger from space based nukes that can be seized, one way or another, by some nutcase... leaving aside the fact that those who thinks they are a good idea in the first place are nutbags themselves.
> to make sure you haven't misinterpreted anything, Glenn G didn't nuke anything
The original posted used "nuked" in the sense "demolished as if with a nuclear blast". He and you mean the same thing, but he is using an idiom that you may not have encountered before.
There is a document called something like "The European Electronic Commerce Directive", and the British have something that is supposed to satisfy it.
You have to admire the way the Sunday Times is brazenly trying to get its way: they delete the most blatant lies from the story on the their web site, they use copyright law to prevent people from quoting or displaying the original article, and now they only have to do something about the physical copies.
Hell, before the advent of the Internet it might have worked. It would have probably worked before printing. I bet some of the people involved regret the good old times when the peasants had no way of learning things on their own.
I wonder how much of a chance there is those times come back...
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And hoodlum behavior is only going to be a problem until the owners get to deploy automated, armored, mobile area denial systems, using microwaves, lasers, infra-sound, or whatever. When this happens, they will not even need to bullshit us with the excuse "We are doing this because of minimum wages". Seriously, guys. If you were not doing it now with a $35K robot instead of a $15 minwage peon, you were going to do it five years from now with a $10K robot instead of a $5 minwage peon.
There is no way around it. A number of low skilled jobs will get replaced with a few medium skilled ones (designing, building and maintaining the robots) and a few low skilled ones (running them and dealing with extreme deviation customers)
As for society as a whole, it will either will have to focus on providing comfortable lifestyles for those who are superfluous, or decide that they are no worth bothering with, and tune the laws so that they are easy to put out of sight. And if you think that have-nots will small arms will scare violence professionals and engineers unfettered by laws, you are an idiot.
Last year, I did not give a fuck, as both me and my wife think we are going to be useful or wealthy for long enough (MIT grads, six digit jobs, comfortable, paid for home, etc...) Six days before my 50th birthday, my daughter was born, and now we are ecstatic, but scared shitless.
All of a sudden, "Fuck everyone, I got mine" is not longer a sound policy. Now I have to worry, should I try to guide her to Lego Technics or bogu and bokken... and for the first time in my life I feel that maybe I should have focused harder on making money instead of enjoying what I do for a living.
And my FIOS connection has become absolutely horrible since. Yesterday, I had a movie stop for buffering three times in the first hour - it was not so good, so I gave up at some point.
In the evening, my bandwidth is 1/10th of what it used to be. Between 12am and 2am, I experience periods of total inaccessibility.
I have more or less stopped gaming and I have a lot less time for movies as we recently had a baby girl. But a few years ago, I'd have been screaming bloody murder and would have been looking for alternatives. Now... meh.
Sure. We'll use the materials we do not have to build the space elevator to support the ships we do not have which will fly to the habitable planets we don't know about using FTL technology we think is impossible.
And how long until the colonized planets (terraformed? pacified? coming with pre-built infrastructure?) can produce anything that will be useful back on Earth? Of course, after being lifted to orbit with the space elevators on the colonized planet, carried on the ships refueled on the colonized planet, etc...
There is a reason the discussions on Facebook are a lot more interesting. The ones doing the discussing are unencumbered by knowledge and capacity for logical thought.
I cannot believe that you are serious. Of course, if you are, you are absolutely incapable of rational thought.
What on Earth makes you think that privatized, of all things, space travel will be used to ship people who are deemed useless on Earth to a planet that is likely to be much less hospitable to human life? If new planets are open to colonization, they will be the destination of the best and brightest, unless life there is one step up from Hell, in which case the colonists will be one step up from slaves.
One of three things will happen:
- the ruling class will find it in its heart to provide some pittance to keep the 'obsolete' masses happy
- the masses will raise up to kill and loot those they view as their oppressors, throwing society back to early industrial times at best
- automated weapon systems will be good enough to isolate the powerful from the unneeded. The resources will stay on the obviously side of that divide.
Space travel will not change the above one little bit. If anything, it will exacerbate the divide between (1) those with power, (2) the people who can serve them, and (3) the rest. If you an in (1) good for you. If you are in (2) lets work together to try and remain useful. If you are in (3) good luck.
Shame on you to even suggest such a thing! It is illegal to design blinding weapons.
Within the power range the article is talking about (only about 150MJ in a gallon of aviofuel) the laser will be barely powerful enough to melt any amount of aluminum to get at the electronics behind it. It is clear that this weapon system is designed to disrupt sensors and optics. Any damage to pilots' (or civilians') eyes is just a side effect, which is A-OK, legally speaking... As I am sure any military lawyer will happily tell you.
This will be one of these 'nasty' weapons:
Stage 1) We got them, everyone else is protesting them, but that's because they are backward savages who can't make them.
Stage 2) We have to keep making those horrible weapons, because our evil enemies have developed and will hesitate to use them.
Stage 3) There is an international treaty against those horrible, horrible weapons, but we will not sign it, because we know those no-good other nations will keep using them no matter what they've promised.
How much sarcastic am I? Frankly, dear, I have no clue.
You and I can play tick-tack-toe and unless one of us isn't paying any attention at all, whoever goes first will always be the winner.
I hope that tick-tack-toe is a different game involving ticks and tacks, and not the tic-tac-toe I know. Because if both players are over 5 years old and have an IQ over 50, the game I know is always drawn.
Can't disagree, but none of these disqualifies it from being fantasy. Hell, I would use Harry Potter as the prime example of mediocre fantasy.
OK, I'll bite. What the Hell do you consider Harry Potter, if not fantasy?
If it becomes possible, it will not be available to the like of us (I have over a million in savings, but I would rather spend them on my little girl)
Immortality for the rich will probably precipitate social strife like never before. At the end, the world will either end a police state or a place where immortality is banned. If there are ever rich people who extend their lives for hundreds of years, they will either do it secretly, or while ruling over sentients they consider even less human that the truly rich consider the rest of us.
Oh, yes, definitely, the manual for the Chinese drone should include all the relevant air safety laws for your location. Just like my Japanese Supra came with a copy of the California Driver Handbook. Oh, wait, it did not!
Knowing the applicable laws is the user's responsibility. The drone's documentation should contain what's applicable to the drone, not a compendium of all laws governing the use of airspace from the North to the South pole. Even if the local regulations required that the relevant laws are included with the drone, it would be probably left to the local distributor to do so.
I have not done that one, but I did something close.
When I came to the US, in the early 90s, I brought all the code I had ever written with me. It included some pretty interesting stuff (I did a lot of assembly programming in Bulgaria, in the late 80s) so it was compressed, encrypted, and contained a second, hidden archive that contained the really 'interesting' stuff.
I forgot the password... and I forgot it in the dumbest possible way - it was a longish English phrase, and my English at the time was bad enough that I did not know how to spell one of the words. By the time I needed some of the stuff, I had learned the correct spelling, and could not get to my code.
Much, much later, around 2012, I found the hard drive, and miraculously, it worked. I brute forced it, which I could have done much earlier, but it was never important enough, and it turned out that I had misspelled 'gnarly'. I had some good times going through my 30 year old stuff, as well as seeing what I considered indispensable software at the time. It's hard to believe that we used to write programs that did useful stuff and were less than 256 bytes long.
I wish people would make at least an attempt at informing themselves before they try to be authoritative about things they do not understand.
First of all, the Dushki in questions are Ms, which means that they are not from the Thirties. They date at the very least from the late Forties, and were manufactured well into the Eighties. I remember when we started replacing them in Bulgaria, and we were manufacturing the NSV (Nikitin-Sokolov-Volkov) ourselves. Countries that did not manufacture the superseding machine guns (NSV or Kord) must have kept theirs. In the early 2000s, the DShks were still one of the most common heavy machine gun. They are not obsolete by any means.
Second, those guns have proved themselves against relatively modern planes and helicopters, as the British (for some reason) have been learning through the Eighties, Nineties and Oughts.
Third, this heavy machine gun is a pretty solid piece of work. The barrel you have to keep keep replacing anyway, if you ever use it in earnest, but the rest of it is solid and lasts for long time. I remember tinkering with the three heavies we had in the 80s in Bulgaria, and the dushka was the one with the simplest, most solid inner workings.
Fourth, I am sure that GAU-19 and Kord are much superior, but those are probably orders of magnitude more expensive, and probably impossible to get unless you are well connected (which unfortunately describes the people in whose facilities ISIS goes shopping) So a DShk is still a very desirable machine gun, and in a completely different class from RPKs, let alone good ole AKs and their ilk.
So, no, these are not museum pieces, but rather effective death dealing machines.
Bad grammar aside, yes, seriously, the first thing that a totalitarian regime targets is loyalty to traditional entities, like religion, family, etc...
This is why sick aberrations like Pavlik Morozov are turned into martyrs, why organizations like all the stages of Communist Youth are created, why religion is undermined, infiltrated and presented as a kinky delusion.
The idea is to make the individual loyal to the state. How well does it work? It doesn't work on everyone. Most of those who keep their sense end up in positions of power, or at least in law enforcement. The rest, who lack the brains, or suffer from an overabundance of morals, end up in psychiatric facilities, or even in concentration camps.
I have played every PC Fallout game when it came out. I have finished and enjoyed every single one of them until Fallout 4. Fallout was a wonderful surprise, Fallout 2 was more of a great thing, Fallout Tactics was a interesting diversion that scratched my Jagged Alliance itch reasonably well, Fallout 3 was a mediocre transition to a new engine which grew, with the DLCs to a enjoyable game, and New Vegas was once again, pretty damn great.
I have not finished Fallout 4, I have no interest in doing so, and about every single thing about it annoyed me. By the way, I'm an MIT student, and I loved Boston (It helped that I went there from a colder climate)
That Fallout 4 can receive a game of the year award in a year that saw The Witcher 3 and Life is Strange come out? To me this simply underlines the utter irrelevance of the reviewers who awarded it.
The problem is that the USB drive can identify as a different kind of device, like a keyboard, run commands, download and install software, and even interact with the security modal screens.
Your GoogleFu is weak, Anonymous man!
My first result for "NUC small form" was Next Unit of Computing. It takes as much effort to highlight and search for "NUC small form" as it does for NUC.
Back in the 90s, I was on a business trip to a Czech manufacturing plant, and it had beer fountains on the floor, which workers were allowed to use. I was told there were some rules as to when and how, but the person telling me did not even know them, despite perusing the fountains freely.
I do not know whether it was common practice, and the beer was very weak, by Bulgarian standards. But it was during Commie times, so it couldn't have been too out of the ordinary. I wonder whether there are still plants like this,
Also, this is a prize for literature, not a prize for journalism. Literature is mostly fiction.
It's even less damning than this. What the original poster remembers is the account of an interviewee, not something told in the author's voice.
Color me surprised than a woman who lost her husband over two weeks filled with agony may have a rather muddled recollection of the details.
So we have a maybe-not-so-reliable narrator and an award for fiction. Clearly a smoking gun!
In the late 80s, which was the last time I drove in Germany, I twice saw people being pulled over for hanging on the left of a car without passing quickly enough. Tellingly, it was non-German plates, both times.
I was myself nearly ticketed for waiting for someone to pull out of a parking spot instead of driving further into a parking structure. I had law enforcement papers at the time, so I got a free pass, but also quite a lecture. The Germans have amazingly strict driving laws, and few enough law breakers that they can actually enforce them. Here in the California, I see literally dozens of vehicles with obviously illegal modifications. You probably won't get pulled over for it, but if you are in an accident, you will regret having them.
For $500,000,000.00 in losses. Who knows how much of that money he actually managed to get his hands on?
If you were to break the San Fransisco bridge down, and sell it as scrap metal, you would make a lot less than the losses you'd be responsible for.
Exactly.
I went to a lot of trouble to replace my 1990 Supra which was rear ended by cop (after I had enjoyed it for 18 years) I found one, rebuilt the engine, redesigned and milled, myself, replacements for almost every rotating part in the gear box, and am enjoying my daily commute a lot more than when I was doing it in a 460hp car that costs five times as much as what I've put in my 'new' old Supra.
Money spent on something that you enjoy is money well spent. Some people spent their cash on boats, others wears $10,000 watches, and even have walls covered by bookshelves holding comic books.
If all you care is about saving every dollar you make, you have a sad life. If you do have a hobby, I am sure that you can find people who think as little of it as you think of those of us who enjoy driving.
This said, I've driven a friend's Tesla for a few days, and although it can leave every car of mine in the dust, I did not particularly enjoy it. He had my Supra for these few days, and I think he enjoyed the experience more. Different strokes for different folks, though. His wife thinks that using a 30 years old I6 is a crime against Nature.
An asteroid that can cause an extinction level event will not be stopped by a nuke. It will not even be deflected to any useful amount, even if we had a way to deliver it far enough from Earth, and somehow detonate it exactly where it would do the most damage.
This is as if someone insisted on wearing his 9mm in a bar because it would come in handy when an alien fleet decides to take over Earth.
Yeah, and I think that the danger from any NEO that is small enough to be affected by those space based nukes is way, way, WAY less than the danger from space based nukes that can be seized, one way or another, by some nutcase... leaving aside the fact that those who thinks they are a good idea in the first place are nutbags themselves.
> > So Glen G nuked the original article,
> to make sure you haven't misinterpreted anything, Glenn G didn't nuke anything
The original posted used "nuked" in the sense "demolished as if with a nuclear blast". He and you mean the same thing, but he is using an idiom that you may not have encountered before.
There is a document called something like "The European Electronic Commerce Directive", and the British have something that is supposed to satisfy it.
You have to admire the way the Sunday Times is brazenly trying to get its way: they delete the most blatant lies from the story on the their web site, they use copyright law to prevent people from quoting or displaying the original article, and now they only have to do something about the physical copies.
Hell, before the advent of the Internet it might have worked. It would have probably worked before printing. I bet some of the people involved regret the good old times when the peasants had no way of learning things on their own.
I wonder how much of a chance there is those times come back...