I've always wondered about why people don't seem to get that fake IDs can be used for more than just getting into bars. And in that, far more serious things. I had my own experience with having to provide an ID in a case where it was not needed or useful to them. I bought an account with Hostgator once and they had a policy of not allowing you to use a shell account without providing a faxed copy of your driver's license.
What has using a "shell account" got to do with driving a car in the first place?
I argued with the system administrator there that it was a useless policy as it doesn't prove anything as IDs can be faked. And especially with the low quality of a fax, how could they tell. I could easily put in fake details using any simple image editor. He actually responded saying something like "If I can prevent one security breach, then the policy is worth it.".
This statement or variations like "If giving the police all sorts of arbitritary (and easily abused powers) prevents a terrorist attack then it is worth it..." appear to be indicative of bogus security measures. Of course the advocates never bother to consider if doing A will actually do anything stop B, let alone that A might be worst than B.
If you have no money when a reasonable product is offered to you and you can copy it for free, the reasonable price isn't going to prevent a copyright violation.
However such a person was never a "potential customer" in the first place. In the worst case senario the seller/publisher/etc has lost nothing. (The same actually applies even if someone had the money but would have either copied for free or done without it). It's also possible for "pirate copies" to generate actual sales which would never have otherwise existed without any additional marketing cost.
Unfortunately "Big Media"(TM) don't have a very good track record in differentiating between illegal downloaders, and legal ones, so people are naturally going to over react to a story like this.
Nor do the entities allegedly identifying "illegal downloaders", who have even managed to finger "non downloaders" even the occasional "couldn't download even if they wanted to"... It really was bad timing for this news to come out so soon after the results of the University of Washington's study:)
They've called the campaign a 'program of education', and that they're not comfortable shutting down or reporting suspected activities without concrete proof.
In which case presumably VM won't object to being educated that the BPI's actions are never going to provide "concrete proof". Indeed they could be about as accurate as random selection.
The internet is a new and powerful means of communication that IS HAVING very similar political implications as the Printing Press when it was new.
One thing to remember is that copyright was originally invented to control usage of the printing press.
The people speaking out can, and are, have their voices heard without any geographical or temporal limits (copying no longer requires time like it did).
There are a couple of other important differences with the printing press things only tended to be cheap if you wanted many copies of exactly the same thing, much the same also applied to audio and video recordings as well as broadcast media. Thus we ended up with record/movie/radio/TV companies following similar business models to those originally developed for books, newspapers, etc. Where the Internet is different is that making copies is trivially cheap even on a one off basis and it makes little difference if the copy is being made 5 metres or 5 million metres away. There is no need to ship a physical piece of media and even the fastest method of shipping a piece of media (which people from a few hundred years ago would regard as very quick) is considerably slower than that which can be achieved using the Internet to send data. The really interesting thing is that the separation of "content" from "media" hasn't suddenly happened. It's a process which has been ongoing for at least the last 30 years. Which is plenty of time for "established players" to come up with new ideas. Instead there has been lobbying for longer copyright terms (ignoring that once the average person is unlikely to live long enough for the term to expire then extending it is meaningless) and stronger penalties (ignoring that if you can put someone in debt for life it dosn't matter what they might still owe when they die).
The three strikes "solution" is problematic however; because suddenly a corporation is policing something. And that is more worrying than anything else.
The actual issue here is that a third party (the BPI) wants to be able to tell ISPs who they can and can't have as customers. With all the risk being on behalf of the ISP. An ISP can be sued for breach of contract if they start cutting people off without good reason. Indeed for this to happen is more or less indiciative of there not being any actual evidence of wrongdoing in the first place, since if the BPI actually had evidence they could take court action themselves.
We should not be willing to let Music companies decide who gets to use the internet but that's what Virgin is doing. Only a complete moron would trust the music industry at this point, but they would be wrong even if they were telling the truth.
Even if the BPI were likely to be moderatly competent at investigation if would be foolish for Virgin Media to trust them very much. All the evidence indicates that their so called "evidence" is likely to be less trustworthy than anything the average government minister might say on television news.
The motivation for this was to compete against BSkyB, but the side effect was to cause the loss of Sky One and Sky News (a bit pathetic because Sky News can still be viewed using broadband, if only in 10 minute segments),
Even more ironic Sky News is still of "Freeview"...
Biodiversity is the logical result of a lack of bio-adversity. Bio-adversity, or a period of stress as we are now seeing, will weed out the species less able to adapt. Darwin has never been disproven in this aspect of his observations and conclusions. The most disturbing aspect to most "extremists" is that the change is "man-made." Guess what? Man is part of the biosphere. I'm not advocating that we abandon restraint or forgo seeking knowledge about our planet, only that we realize that we are bound to impact our planet, so long as humans survive, innovate and flatulate.
One of the major ways in which humans have (and continue to) affect biodiversity is through a process known as agriculture. Farms tend to be considerably less biodiverse compared with whatever was there before. Ironically urban environments can be highly biodiverse due to parks and gardens.
Having worked on both an organic farm (yes, for bulk produce) and a farm that spreads pig effluent as fertilizer for broadacre crops, I can tell you this is wrong.
I've had farmers not 15 miles away from that organic farm tell me it is impossible, so I understand why you would think so, but I assure you it can be done.
Petroleum fertilizers are a very recently innovation. Yet intensive agriculture has happened many times in history.
Stop thinking about growing fuel from soil. This is a basically wrongheaded thing to do, especially with the methods of farming in use today.
Ethanol from food is an especially daft idea.
Biodiesel is a direct replacement for petrodiesel; Butanol is a direct replacement for gasoline (it can go in your existing gasoline-powered vehicle without ill effect - in fact, it reduces emissions. And it can be made from any organic material.)
An ideal biofuel is one which you can mix in any ratio with an existing petrofuel.
Propane and natural gas can be supplemented by the use of Methane which can be recaptured from sewage treatment.
"Natural gas" is methane. Any machine designed to run on methane isn't going to care if it's fuel comes from a petro-chemical source, methane hydrates, sewage (human or other animal), rotting garbage, etc, etc.
Often this methane is simply flared off and wasted instead of being captured and used. What a waste of carbon load.
Especially since it can be used to power the sewage treatment plant, cutting gas and electricity bills.
The big difference is that those 25000 taps in the Netherlands are all approved by a (sort-of) independent body ('rechter-commisaris', not sure of the english term for that, but it's an oversight judge). Those numbers are all out in the open. In the USA, the whole FISA thing is in shambles.
There's also the issue of how long does the tap go on for and how much oversight there is. As well as how that 25,000 number relates to telephone numbers and/or people. Also if permission is granted to tap someone's phone initially for a week then that permission is extended does this count as one or two "taps".
Then they need to make it so it's easy to switch social security numbers if someone is working under yours and not paying taxes (assuming you can prove this of course).
Or even simpler not using SSN's for anything other than their intended purpose in the first place.
We're already in the arguably slightly ridiculous situation where someone 1hr under the AoC is still legally a child, and last time I checked porn downloads didn't come with digitally signed Authentic VeriSign Porn Star Birth Certificates (it becomes even more confusing when you realise that the AoC for sex and/or porn is different across much of even just the western world), so when the situation does arise expect people to undergo trial by mudslinging and "guilty until proven innocent/no smoke without fire" hysteria before the law catches up with technology.
There are places where the the minimum age for a "porn model/actor" is higher than an applicable Age of Consent. As well as it even being the case that people have been prosecuted for taking pictures of themselves...
But the law doesn't say you're entitled to be assisted by someone sworn to secrecy. I mean, do you want to have to tell me what you want to vote, and then have me mark that down for you? What if I'm your neighbor? What if I'm your mother?
Then maybe you should choose someone else to assist you... Of course if you are enough of a fool that you will always vote the way someone else tells you then maybe you shouldn't be voting in the first place.
Sucks for anyone who has a disability, though. They don't get to exercise their legal voting rights, because your system does not allow them anonymous, private voting.
You'd need a highly complex machine to even begin to address the many possible disabilities people could have. Especially of it happens that making something easy for one specific disability is mutually incompatable with another disability/able bodied person. A simpler option would be to allow the disabled person to appoint a proxy.
CG child porn doesn't harm children in its production, because its production doesn't actually involve children. And following the analogy, consumption of CG child porn would encourage the production of more child porn, but given the fact that you can produce it without running afoul of the law, you'd get more CG than real child porn produced.
The argument for banning CG "child porn" (and presumably that produced entirely by a human artist) tends to be either that it is difficult to distinguish from actual photographs or that photographs can me modified in such a way which is difficult to tell from CGI.
There have been many studies that show that all pron can have a very bad effect. Of course you will have any number of people on Slashdot jump up and say that they look at porn and haven't committed any sex crimes.
There is still the "correlation does not equate to causation". As well as it being easy to produce a "study" which shows a correlation between something common and something uncommon. To open another can of worms "sex crimes" can include both very common sex acts and even things which have nothing to do with sex.
You know what has always pissed me off about McCain and his cohorts (and many others too) when talking about terrorism? Calling it "Islamic terrorism".
The "Mainstream Media" have been on about this for years, even before "911".
There's no fricking practical need in the world to throw that "Islamic" adjective on there. It sounds great because there's some implied racism associated with Muslims and Islam but it really rubs me the wrong way.
It is however popular with Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, athiest, etc terrorists (and potential terrorists).
How about we focus on terrorism in general? How about we make it hard for ANYONE to perpetrate terror attacks on our country?
That would require lots of "backpeddling" on the part of a great many people. There's also the problem that a genuine attempt to deal with terrorists would catch the "wrong sort" of people.
There's a good reason for single use containers for food: Hygene. Actually, to get those glass bottles clean you had to create more waste, in terms of rather aggressive cleaning agents, than you create with plastic bottles.
There are places where bottles, including those made of plastic are reusable. Note that new bottles tend to be washed (and in the case of those holding carbonated beverages pressure tested) immediatly prior to filling anyway.
I tried to argue myself into that I "needed" originals due to the better picture quality (not lower resolution, just lower bitrate, but anyway.), but well, I didn't. What matters is if the movie are any good or not, not as much in how it looks.
The human vision system involves a lot of "signal processing", which also explains optical illusions. In many cases a VHS recording of a technically passable broadcast is "good enough".
Slashdot Mirror
I've always wondered about why people don't seem to get that fake IDs can be used for more than just getting into bars. And in that, far more serious things. I had my own experience with having to provide an ID in a case where it was not needed or useful to them. I bought an account with Hostgator once and they had a policy of not allowing you to use a shell account without providing a faxed copy of your driver's license.
What has using a "shell account" got to do with driving a car in the first place?
I argued with the system administrator there that it was a useless policy as it doesn't prove anything as IDs can be faked. And especially with the low quality of a fax, how could they tell. I could easily put in fake details using any simple image editor. He actually responded saying something like "If I can prevent one security breach, then the policy is worth it.".
This statement or variations like "If giving the police all sorts of arbitritary (and easily abused powers) prevents a terrorist attack then it is worth it..." appear to be indicative of bogus security measures. Of course the advocates never bother to consider if doing A will actually do anything stop B, let alone that A might be worst than B.
If you have no money when a reasonable product is offered to you and you can copy it for free, the reasonable price isn't going to prevent a copyright violation.
However such a person was never a "potential customer" in the first place. In the worst case senario the seller/publisher/etc has lost nothing. (The same actually applies even if someone had the money but would have either copied for free or done without it).
It's also possible for "pirate copies" to generate actual sales which would never have otherwise existed without any additional marketing cost.
Unfortunately "Big Media"(TM) don't have a very good track record in differentiating between illegal downloaders, and legal ones, so people are naturally going to over react to a story like this.
:)
Nor do the entities allegedly identifying "illegal downloaders", who have even managed to finger "non downloaders" even the occasional "couldn't download even if they wanted to"...
It really was bad timing for this news to come out so soon after the results of the University of Washington's study
They've called the campaign a 'program of education', and that they're not comfortable shutting down or reporting suspected activities without concrete proof.
In which case presumably VM won't object to being educated that the BPI's actions are never going to provide "concrete proof". Indeed they could be about as accurate as random selection.
The internet is a new and powerful means of communication that IS HAVING very similar political implications as the Printing Press when it was new.
One thing to remember is that copyright was originally invented to control usage of the printing press.
The people speaking out can, and are, have their voices heard without any geographical or temporal limits (copying no longer requires time like it did).
There are a couple of other important differences with the printing press things only tended to be cheap if you wanted many copies of exactly the same thing, much the same also applied to audio and video recordings as well as broadcast media. Thus we ended up with record/movie/radio/TV companies following similar business models to those originally developed for books, newspapers, etc.
Where the Internet is different is that making copies is trivially cheap even on a one off basis and it makes little difference if the copy is being made 5 metres or 5 million metres away. There is no need to ship a physical piece of media and even the fastest method of shipping a piece of media (which people from a few hundred years ago would regard as very quick) is considerably slower than that which can be achieved using the Internet to send data.
The really interesting thing is that the separation of "content" from "media" hasn't suddenly happened. It's a process which has been ongoing for at least the last 30 years. Which is plenty of time for "established players" to come up with new ideas. Instead there has been lobbying for longer copyright terms (ignoring that once the average person is unlikely to live long enough for the term to expire then extending it is meaningless) and stronger penalties (ignoring that if you can put someone in debt for life it dosn't matter what they might still owe when they die).
The three strikes "solution" is problematic however; because suddenly a corporation is policing something. And that is more worrying than anything else.
The actual issue here is that a third party (the BPI) wants to be able to tell ISPs who they can and can't have as customers. With all the risk being on behalf of the ISP. An ISP can be sued for breach of contract if they start cutting people off without good reason. Indeed for this to happen is more or less indiciative of there not being any actual evidence of wrongdoing in the first place, since if the BPI actually had evidence they could take court action themselves.
We should not be willing to let Music companies decide who gets to use the internet but that's what Virgin is doing. Only a complete moron would trust the music industry at this point, but they would be wrong even if they were telling the truth.
Even if the BPI were likely to be moderatly competent at investigation if would be foolish for Virgin Media to trust them very much. All the evidence indicates that their so called "evidence" is likely to be less trustworthy than anything the average government minister might say on television news.
The motivation for this was to compete against BSkyB, but the side effect was to cause the loss of Sky One and Sky News (a bit pathetic because Sky News can still be viewed using broadband, if only in 10 minute segments),
Even more ironic Sky News is still of "Freeview"...
Biodiversity is the logical result of a lack of bio-adversity. Bio-adversity, or a period of stress as we are now seeing, will weed out the species less able to adapt. Darwin has never been disproven in this aspect of his observations and conclusions. The most disturbing aspect to most "extremists" is that the change is "man-made." Guess what? Man is part of the biosphere. I'm not advocating that we abandon restraint or forgo seeking knowledge about our planet, only that we realize that we are bound to impact our planet, so long as humans survive, innovate and flatulate.
One of the major ways in which humans have (and continue to) affect biodiversity is through a process known as agriculture. Farms tend to be considerably less biodiverse compared with whatever was there before. Ironically urban environments can be highly biodiverse due to parks and gardens.
Having worked on both an organic farm (yes, for bulk produce) and a farm that spreads pig effluent as fertilizer for broadacre crops, I can tell you this is wrong.
I've had farmers not 15 miles away from that organic farm tell me it is impossible, so I understand why you would think so, but I assure you it can be done.
Petroleum fertilizers are a very recently innovation. Yet intensive agriculture has happened many times in history.
Stop thinking about growing fuel from soil. This is a basically wrongheaded thing to do, especially with the methods of farming in use today.
Ethanol from food is an especially daft idea.
Biodiesel is a direct replacement for petrodiesel; Butanol is a direct replacement for gasoline (it can go in your existing gasoline-powered vehicle without ill effect - in fact, it reduces emissions. And it can be made from any organic material.)
An ideal biofuel is one which you can mix in any ratio with an existing petrofuel.
Propane and natural gas can be supplemented by the use of Methane which can be recaptured from sewage treatment.
"Natural gas" is methane. Any machine designed to run on methane isn't going to care if it's fuel comes from a petro-chemical source, methane hydrates, sewage (human or other animal), rotting garbage, etc, etc.
Often this methane is simply flared off and wasted instead of being captured and used. What a waste of carbon load.
Especially since it can be used to power the sewage treatment plant, cutting gas and electricity bills.
The big difference is that those 25000 taps in the Netherlands are all approved by a (sort-of) independent body ('rechter-commisaris', not sure of the english term for that, but it's an oversight judge). Those numbers are all out in the open. In the USA, the whole FISA thing is in shambles.
There's also the issue of how long does the tap go on for and how much oversight there is. As well as how that 25,000 number relates to telephone numbers and/or people. Also if permission is granted to tap someone's phone initially for a week then that permission is extended does this count as one or two "taps".
That just because the U.S. keeps their terrorists offshore, so they don't taint the statistics.
And may be better at calling them something else compared with the Dutch.
Then they need to make it so it's easy to switch social security numbers if someone is working under yours and not paying taxes (assuming you can prove this of course).
Or even simpler not using SSN's for anything other than their intended purpose in the first place.
We're already in the arguably slightly ridiculous situation where someone 1hr under the AoC is still legally a child, and last time I checked porn downloads didn't come with digitally signed Authentic VeriSign Porn Star Birth Certificates (it becomes even more confusing when you realise that the AoC for sex and/or porn is different across much of even just the western world), so when the situation does arise expect people to undergo trial by mudslinging and "guilty until proven innocent/no smoke without fire" hysteria before the law catches up with technology.
There are places where the the minimum age for a "porn model/actor" is higher than an applicable Age of Consent. As well as it even being the case that people have been prosecuted for taking pictures of themselves...
But the law doesn't say you're entitled to be assisted by someone sworn to secrecy. I mean, do you want to have to tell me what you want to vote, and then have me mark that down for you? What if I'm your neighbor? What if I'm your mother?
Then maybe you should choose someone else to assist you...
Of course if you are enough of a fool that you will always vote the way someone else tells you then maybe you shouldn't be voting in the first place.
Sucks for anyone who has a disability, though. They don't get to exercise their legal voting rights, because your system does not allow them anonymous, private voting.
You'd need a highly complex machine to even begin to address the many possible disabilities people could have. Especially of it happens that making something easy for one specific disability is mutually incompatable with another disability/able bodied person.
A simpler option would be to allow the disabled person to appoint a proxy.
CG child porn doesn't harm children in its production, because its production doesn't actually involve children. And following the analogy, consumption of CG child porn would encourage the production of more child porn, but given the fact that you can produce it without running afoul of the law, you'd get more CG than real child porn produced.
The argument for banning CG "child porn" (and presumably that produced entirely by a human artist) tends to be either that it is difficult to distinguish from actual photographs or that photographs can me modified in such a way which is difficult to tell from CGI.
There have been many studies that show that all pron can have a very bad effect. Of course you will have any number of people on Slashdot jump up and say that they look at porn and haven't committed any sex crimes.
There is still the "correlation does not equate to causation". As well as it being easy to produce a "study" which shows a correlation between something common and something uncommon. To open another can of worms "sex crimes" can include both very common sex acts and even things which have nothing to do with sex.
While 9/11 still needs lots and lots and lots of re-examination.
More the case that it needs examination and investigation.
I don't think it's fair to take the foxnewsbushgovernment version as the truth.
A fundermental problem is that the whole "Al Quada did it" claim follows the pattern of a "nutjob conspiracy theory".
Societies tend to skip over their own sins, either due to a lack of self-awareness or a genuine desire to cover up their own atrocities.
Societies also tend to have taboos, which can also be backed by legal codes.
It's a familiar pattern. The arrival of American intervention has often signaled the end of democracy for Arab nations, not the beginning.
In other parts of the world too, notably South and Central America.
You know what has always pissed me off about McCain and his cohorts (and many others too) when talking about terrorism? Calling it "Islamic terrorism".
The "Mainstream Media" have been on about this for years, even before "911".
There's no fricking practical need in the world to throw that "Islamic" adjective on there. It sounds great because there's some implied racism associated with Muslims and Islam but it really rubs me the wrong way.
It is however popular with Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, athiest, etc terrorists (and potential terrorists).
How about we focus on terrorism in general? How about we make it hard for ANYONE to perpetrate terror attacks on our country?
That would require lots of "backpeddling" on the part of a great many people. There's also the problem that a genuine attempt to deal with terrorists would catch the "wrong sort" of people.
There's a good reason for single use containers for food: Hygene. Actually, to get those glass bottles clean you had to create more waste, in terms of rather aggressive cleaning agents, than you create with plastic bottles.
There are places where bottles, including those made of plastic are reusable.
Note that new bottles tend to be washed (and in the case of those holding carbonated beverages pressure tested) immediatly prior to filling anyway.
I tried to argue myself into that I "needed" originals due to the better picture quality (not lower resolution, just lower bitrate, but anyway.), but well, I didn't. What matters is if the movie are any good or not, not as much in how it looks.
The human vision system involves a lot of "signal processing", which also explains optical illusions. In many cases a VHS recording of a technically passable broadcast is "good enough".