If you don't have other reasons to dig trenches etc, then wireless is typically far cheaper because the installation costs are zero.
The installation costs of wireless are certainly not zero, especially if there isn't an existing power supply or structure to attach the equiptment to. Just that it tends to be cheaper than running cables, in most situations.
The point is they shouldn't have had 1 case of "dead" or "no computer".
Especially if the dead person has been dead some time.
Instead they should have had stone hard evidence that those PEOPLE, not computers, or IP addresses were trading songs. Instead, they rely on easy to lie data.
They'd need hard evidence if the idea was to actually fight these cases in court. If the majority of people "settle" they will still be ahead on money even if the judge laughs what's left out of court. The only way this can fail (to make money) is if a judge cites them for contempt of court and imposes a huge fine.
Another piece of New Jersey legislation requires business owners to disclose to the public whether or not they have ties to organized crime.
Depending what the definition of "ties" happens to be just about any business will have some connection, just by virtue of doing business and especially if they pay any kind of taxes.
Common sense does not apply "online".
Everything is different, and there needs to be new laws when something is "online".
OK, enough with the sarcasm, but WTF is up with an online dating bill?
"hammer" meet "nail head":)
Singles bars don't do background checks. Neither do the personals in the newspaper. I would assume that things like magazines that are dedicated to "alternate" lifestyles, swinging, wife-swapping, and every fetish you could imagine don't do background checks.
What about "dating agencies" who are not "online".
Lots of people meet people at work and school, and most employers and schools don't do background checks.
Where these are done the motivation tends to be very different from the kind of " background check" you might expect with respect to a "dating agency". Wonder if there should first be background checks for those running such businesses. Before considering any for their clients, especially if these are not being carried out by a regulated third party.
While you're generally correct, the third item is not correct. The BSA is a duly designated representative of the copyright holders with power of attorney to prosecute infringement claims. So, that part is perfectly legitimate (under US law, anyway). It's no different than hiring a private law firm to do the same thing.
But it probably is not unreasonable to ask them to produce proof of this...
Also, I'd point out that users of software from BSA-affiliated companies generally agree as part of the license to submit to audits on demand as a condition of the license.
What happens if the entity which accepted an EULA isn't the "user"? There's also a basic problem that some EULAs make little sense when the owner or user is a "corporate person".
Using proprietary commercial software is a huge legal and fiscal liability for a company.
Something which tends to be ignored with so called Total Cost of Ownership studies.
If the company cannot devote sufficient resources to dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's to be 100% certain it's compliant, it probably shouldn't touch the stuff.
And to deal with situations where your lawyer says one thing and the vendor says something else when it comes to the definition of "compliance".
Online music is also changing to plain unencumbered formats, away from DRMy ones. The DRM -doesn't- stop piracy, and it prevents a lot of otherwise honest customers from shopping.
If anything it encourages piracy. Since the pirate copies don't have DRM and are thus more valuable to the customer. It's also the case that the "pirates" don't tend to want to restrict distribution by grography, thus it can quite often be the case that the choice is between "pirate" copy and no copy.
There are crazy people.
Carzy people will kill other people. You can't stop the crazy people without becoming a totalitarian police state and taking away freedoms from everyone.
Which isn't actually possible. If freedoms were taken away from eveyone there'd be no police and indeed no rulers... In any real world totalitarian police state said "crazy people" are likely to wind up joining the police force...
This is the core fallacy of fear mongering: Taking a rare or non-existent threat and treating it as credible.
Also known as "movie plot threats", some of which wouldn't even make a decent movie.
It turns out there are thousands of really cheap ways for small groups to cripple modern society. Criminals are really good at coming up with them, and so are think tanks the government pays to research such things.
Indeed anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together can probably think of a few.
Guess what: there is no way to prevent them! But - amazingly, none of these scenarios are happening. There is a lot more to it than "I can think of it so it must be scary."
You also need people prepared to do them, of which there dosn't appear to be that many...
Do you put your PC in a bathtub to dissipate its waste heat? Given the lack of technical information in both the article and the Hyperion site, I'm just speculating, but with the small size of the reactor it may be feasible to dissipate the heat through the air.
How much airflow are you going to need to deal with 27 thousand million joules per second?
Yeah, no one would be silly enough to rename "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance" (NMR) into "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" (MRI) despite referring to the nucleus of the cell not the nucleus of an atom, nevermind anything radioactive.
It does refer to the resonance of atomic nuclii. Mostly hydrogen IIRC, thus "Proton Resonance Imaging" (PRI) would probably be more accurate than MRI.
Because people don't like things with the words "Nuclear" or "Reactor" anywhere close to them.
Never mind that "reactor" can also refer to a container where chemical reactions take place. Especially on an industrial scale. As well as being the common term in some parts of the world for a jet engine.
Yet it has been proven over and over throughout history that whenever you give someone a nonlethal weapon, they're more likely to use them than a lethal weapon, even though its supposed to be a replacement for the lethal weapon.
Assuming there is such a thing as a "non lethal weapon", as opposed to a "less lethal weapon". The more often a weapon get used the more likely there are to be serious and fatal injuries resulting from its use.
And not surprisingly, this has happened with tasers, too; police are using them in absurd circumstances, even in some cases when the subject did nothing beyond verbal defiance, and worse, in cases where someone was "acting suspicious", such as in a recent case where an Egyptian man was tasered on a bus without any provocation--yet these were supposed to be used as replacements for guns, not as general-purpose weapons to put down anyone who looks suspicious!
It dosn't help either when you have police held to a lower standard than members of the public when it comes to violence. Able to literally "get away with murder" in some cases.
Predators aren't going away any time soon. On the other hand, the rights of the people all around the world appear to be.
Does taking away people's civil rights make it harder for such "predators", make no difference to them or make things easier for them. Given the apparent inability of many politicans to critically evaluate proposed legislation, something which should be a fundermental part of their job, it wouldn't exactly be suprising for laws intended to "protect children" to do the exact opposite.
The only thing that making an entirely separate distribution grid for wind power would achieve is to ensure that the power being delivered to a particular point was 100% wind-generated. As soon as it enters the common grid, though, it's mixed with "brown power" (fossil fuel generated, as opposed to "green power").
Building a power grid exclusivly for wind power isn't that "green" anyway. Sooner or later you will simply be duplicating existing power lines for no good reason.
History has repeatedly proven that when a government asks its citizens to give up liberties it is working against making society safer but more absolute and submissive. Can you provide with any example where people who gave up their freedoms became safer?
To make things a little easier, myths and legands acceptable, anywhere on the planet any time...
I can cite alot of counterexamples: nazi/fascist/communist governments that miserably failed in all fronts, including safety (the state safety-keeping apparatus turned against the citizens).
Counterexamples are trivially easy to find. Yet somehow those advocating handing lots of power over to the state think things will be different "this time". Which is one of the definitions of insanity.
Then you'd expect to find plenty of historical evidence to make the case. N.B. regardless of if you are killed by a terrorist bomb or guns fired by armed police you are equally dead.
Is it worth it -- is there a balance of some sort to be found?
In which case such a balance needs to be arrived at by rational thinking. The answer is certainly not "more power to the state, less power to the public". An alternative approach would be to repeal some laws (especially one's which actually do more harm than good to society) so that the police can concentrate more of "terrorists". Possibly with increased oversight of the police to check that that they were actually doing this. Thus you have a possible way to make life more difficult for terrorists whilst increasing "civil liberties" and decreasing the power of the state.
People always repeat the "he who sacrifices liberty for security..." line, but what would a better solution be? Zero policing? No laws? Absolute freedom? Would that mean complete chaos and anarchy, and if so, is the freedom still worth it? Why?
This looks rather like the "fallacy of the excluded middle"...
Apparently the Senate was concerned that the UK might use the treaty to extradite IRA members who had fled to the US and that would apparently be a bad thing.
They were concerned that a treaty which was publically claimed to be about extraditing terrorists might be used to extradite terrorists... Slashdot really needs a moderation for "ironic".
Governments often tell us that there is some threat that they want to protect us from, and if we just give up a little bit of our freedom they will make society much safer. We fall for this trick over and over again.
There's a couple of associated tricks. People who repeatedly lie gaining and maintaining trust. Together with the idea that if this protection "fails" then it must be because insufficent freedoms were transfered from the public to the state. Maybe someone should make a documentry about this kind of thing with a catchy title like "The Power of Nightmares"...
Of course there are the usual, broad categories (terrorist, pedophiles, criminals, etc.) that make it sound as the sensible thing to do, but once you grant such sweeping powers, what's preventing the police to use them to spy on political opponents, activists, or anyone else who just happens to "think different"?
Also is the relationship between their usage with respect of these catagories likely to be "and", "or" or "xor". Historical precident tends towards "xor".
In Germany, secret searches of homes are prohibited. IRC, they have to happen in the presence of a member the household, or a neighbour. The telephone, mail and internet communication are not part of the home, and can be secretly monitored under the observation of a judge. The suspect has to be informed afterwards. The home enjoys a much stronger constitutional protection than communication.
Considering recent history you'd expect the average German to have little time for officials overstepping their bounds.
Of course, the ministry of interior and the police argue, that they can't stop the terrorists, if they can't secretly hack the computer and monitor their communication.
What they omit to say is that it wouldn't actually help much even if they were seriously interested in stopping terrorists who were dangerous to the public.
And of course, it will only be used for severe crimes. Normal people have nothing to fear.
Those claiming "Stasi 2.0" probably have the best grasp of history here.
In the case of the "Federal Trojan", it was decided in 02/07 that such measures are illegal to conduct, and decisions made by the Bundesverfassungsgericht are equivalent to laws. So what they're doing now, they're keeping the discussion (and the fear-mongering) alive and continue to develop the trojan despite it being illegal, in an effort to undermine that decision. Most notorious for this behaviour is, of all people, our Minister of Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble. He repeatedly clamored and still clamors for this and other measures which are explicitely forbidden by the Grundgesetz and the Bundesverfassungsgericht, for example shooting down abducted planes. He's one of the single largest threats to what he has to protect by job description, namely the Grundgesetz.
Does German law have the concept of "high treason"?
In a city where even McDonald's offer free wifi for the price of a cheeseburger (not to mention the schweet municipal wifi project rumored to be in the works), this typically represents what De Gaulle said about the French right-wing politicians: the most stupid in the world.
There's some tough competition when it comes to "most stupid politicans in the world". Do French right wingers have some special advantage, like negative IQs?
Slashdot Mirror
Risk moving the whole thing in front of Judge Judy and hope to confuse her?
That would be a very big risk considering she dosn't suffer fools gladly and attempting to confuse her is more likely to just annoy her...
If you don't have other reasons to dig trenches etc, then wireless is typically far cheaper because the installation costs are zero.
The installation costs of wireless are certainly not zero, especially if there isn't an existing power supply or structure to attach the equiptment to. Just that it tends to be cheaper than running cables, in most situations.
The point is they shouldn't have had 1 case of "dead" or "no computer".
Especially if the dead person has been dead some time.
Instead they should have had stone hard evidence that those PEOPLE, not computers, or IP addresses were trading songs. Instead, they rely on easy to lie data.
They'd need hard evidence if the idea was to actually fight these cases in court. If the majority of people "settle" they will still be ahead on money even if the judge laughs what's left out of court. The only way this can fail (to make money) is if a judge cites them for contempt of court and imposes a huge fine.
Another piece of New Jersey legislation requires business owners to disclose to the public whether or not they have ties to organized crime.
Depending what the definition of "ties" happens to be just about any business will have some connection, just by virtue of doing business and especially if they pay any kind of taxes.
Common sense does not apply "online".
:)
Everything is different, and there needs to be new laws when something is "online".
OK, enough with the sarcasm, but WTF is up with an online dating bill?
"hammer" meet "nail head"
Singles bars don't do background checks. Neither do the personals in the newspaper. I would assume that things like magazines that are dedicated to "alternate" lifestyles, swinging, wife-swapping, and every fetish you could imagine don't do background checks.
What about "dating agencies" who are not "online".
Lots of people meet people at work and school, and most employers and schools don't do background checks.
Where these are done the motivation tends to be very different from the kind of " background check" you might expect with respect to a "dating agency". Wonder if there should first be background checks for those running such businesses. Before considering any for their clients, especially if these are not being carried out by a regulated third party.
While you're generally correct, the third item is not correct. The BSA is a duly designated representative of the copyright holders with power of attorney to prosecute infringement claims. So, that part is perfectly legitimate (under US law, anyway). It's no different than hiring a private law firm to do the same thing.
But it probably is not unreasonable to ask them to produce proof of this...
Also, I'd point out that users of software from BSA-affiliated companies generally agree as part of the license to submit to audits on demand as a condition of the license.
What happens if the entity which accepted an EULA isn't the "user"? There's also a basic problem that some EULAs make little sense when the owner or user is a "corporate person".
Using proprietary commercial software is a huge legal and fiscal liability for a company.
Something which tends to be ignored with so called Total Cost of Ownership studies.
If the company cannot devote sufficient resources to dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's to be 100% certain it's compliant, it probably shouldn't touch the stuff.
And to deal with situations where your lawyer says one thing and the vendor says something else when it comes to the definition of "compliance".
Online music is also changing to plain unencumbered formats, away from DRMy ones. The DRM -doesn't- stop piracy, and it prevents a lot of otherwise honest customers from shopping.
If anything it encourages piracy. Since the pirate copies don't have DRM and are thus more valuable to the customer. It's also the case that the "pirates" don't tend to want to restrict distribution by grography, thus it can quite often be the case that the choice is between "pirate" copy and no copy.
There's still plenty of people who HUNT with crossbows because they consider it more challenging than using a rifle
There's also the issue of a crossbow not making a loud bang which scares things away and can damage the hunter's hearing.
There are crazy people.
Carzy people will kill other people.
You can't stop the crazy people without becoming a totalitarian police state and taking away freedoms from everyone.
Which isn't actually possible. If freedoms were taken away from eveyone there'd be no police and indeed no rulers... In any real world totalitarian police state said "crazy people" are likely to wind up joining the police force...
This is the core fallacy of fear mongering: Taking a rare or non-existent threat and treating it as credible.
Also known as "movie plot threats", some of which wouldn't even make a decent movie.
It turns out there are thousands of really cheap ways for small groups to cripple modern society. Criminals are really good at coming up with them, and so are think tanks the government pays to research such things.
Indeed anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together can probably think of a few.
Guess what: there is no way to prevent them! But - amazingly, none of these scenarios are happening. There is a lot more to it than "I can think of it so it must be scary."
You also need people prepared to do them, of which there dosn't appear to be that many...
Do you put your PC in a bathtub to dissipate its waste heat? Given the lack of technical information in both the article and the Hyperion site, I'm just speculating, but with the small size of the reactor it may be feasible to dissipate the heat through the air.
How much airflow are you going to need to deal with 27 thousand million joules per second?
Yeah, no one would be silly enough to rename "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance" (NMR) into "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" (MRI) despite referring to the nucleus of the cell not the nucleus of an atom, nevermind anything radioactive.
It does refer to the resonance of atomic nuclii. Mostly hydrogen IIRC, thus "Proton Resonance Imaging" (PRI) would probably be more accurate than MRI.
Because people don't like things with the words "Nuclear" or "Reactor" anywhere close to them.
Never mind that "reactor" can also refer to a container where chemical reactions take place. Especially on an industrial scale. As well as being the common term in some parts of the world for a jet engine.
Yet it has been proven over and over throughout history that whenever you give someone a nonlethal weapon, they're more likely to use them than a lethal weapon, even though its supposed to be a replacement for the lethal weapon.
Assuming there is such a thing as a "non lethal weapon", as opposed to a "less lethal weapon". The more often a weapon get used the more likely there are to be serious and fatal injuries resulting from its use.
And not surprisingly, this has happened with tasers, too; police are using them in absurd circumstances, even in some cases when the subject did nothing beyond verbal defiance, and worse, in cases where someone was "acting suspicious", such as in a recent case where an Egyptian man was tasered on a bus without any provocation--yet these were supposed to be used as replacements for guns, not as general-purpose weapons to put down anyone who looks suspicious!
It dosn't help either when you have police held to a lower standard than members of the public when it comes to violence. Able to literally "get away with murder" in some cases.
Predators aren't going away any time soon. On the other hand, the rights of the people all around the world appear to be.
Does taking away people's civil rights make it harder for such "predators", make no difference to them or make things easier for them. Given the apparent inability of many politicans to critically evaluate proposed legislation, something which should be a fundermental part of their job, it wouldn't exactly be suprising for laws intended to "protect children" to do the exact opposite.
The only thing that making an entirely separate distribution grid for wind power would achieve is to ensure that the power being delivered to a particular point was 100% wind-generated. As soon as it enters the common grid, though, it's mixed with "brown power" (fossil fuel generated, as opposed to "green power").
Building a power grid exclusivly for wind power isn't that "green" anyway. Sooner or later you will simply be duplicating existing power lines for no good reason.
History has repeatedly proven that when a government asks its citizens to give up liberties it is working against making society safer but more absolute and submissive. Can you provide with any example where people who gave up their freedoms became safer?
To make things a little easier, myths and legands acceptable, anywhere on the planet any time...
I can cite alot of counterexamples: nazi/fascist/communist governments that miserably failed in all fronts, including safety (the state safety-keeping apparatus turned against the citizens).
Counterexamples are trivially easy to find. Yet somehow those advocating handing lots of power over to the state think things will be different "this time". Which is one of the definitions of insanity.
Well, what if it DOES make society safer?
Then you'd expect to find plenty of historical evidence to make the case. N.B. regardless of if you are killed by a terrorist bomb or guns fired by armed police you are equally dead.
Is it worth it -- is there a balance of some sort to be found?
In which case such a balance needs to be arrived at by rational thinking. The answer is certainly not "more power to the state, less power to the public".
An alternative approach would be to repeal some laws (especially one's which actually do more harm than good to society) so that the police can concentrate more of "terrorists". Possibly with increased oversight of the police to check that that they were actually doing this. Thus you have a possible way to make life more difficult for terrorists whilst increasing "civil liberties" and decreasing the power of the state.
People always repeat the "he who sacrifices liberty for security..." line, but what would a better solution be? Zero policing? No laws? Absolute freedom? Would that mean complete chaos and anarchy, and if so, is the freedom still worth it? Why?
This looks rather like the "fallacy of the excluded middle"...
So the US government supports terrorism.
IIRC the US is one of only two UN member states who refuses to condem state sponsorship of terrorism (the other one being somewhere in Asia).
Presumably only if it is done by white people with cute accents.
Not unless you consider Central and South America to be inhabited by "white people with cute accents".
Apparently the Senate was concerned that the UK might use the treaty to extradite IRA members who had fled to the US and that would apparently be a bad thing.
They were concerned that a treaty which was publically claimed to be about extraditing terrorists might be used to extradite terrorists... Slashdot really needs a moderation for "ironic".
Governments often tell us that there is some threat that they want to protect us from, and if we just give up a little bit of our freedom they will make society much safer. We fall for this trick over and over again.
There's a couple of associated tricks. People who repeatedly lie gaining and maintaining trust. Together with the idea that if this protection "fails" then it must be because insufficent freedoms were transfered from the public to the state.
Maybe someone should make a documentry about this kind of thing with a catchy title like "The Power of Nightmares"...
Of course there are the usual, broad categories (terrorist, pedophiles, criminals, etc.) that make it sound as the sensible thing to do, but once you grant such sweeping powers, what's preventing the police to use them to spy on political opponents, activists, or anyone else who just happens to "think different"?
Also is the relationship between their usage with respect of these catagories likely to be "and", "or" or "xor". Historical precident tends towards "xor".
In Germany, secret searches of homes are prohibited. IRC, they have to happen in the presence of a member the household, or a neighbour. The telephone, mail and internet communication are not part of the home, and can be secretly monitored under the observation of a judge. The suspect has to be informed afterwards. The home enjoys a much stronger constitutional protection than communication.
Considering recent history you'd expect the average German to have little time for officials overstepping their bounds.
Of course, the ministry of interior and the police argue, that they can't stop the terrorists, if they can't secretly hack the computer and monitor their communication.
What they omit to say is that it wouldn't actually help much even if they were seriously interested in stopping terrorists who were dangerous to the public.
And of course, it will only be used for severe crimes. Normal people have nothing to fear.
Those claiming "Stasi 2.0" probably have the best grasp of history here.
In the case of the "Federal Trojan", it was decided in 02/07 that such measures are illegal to conduct, and decisions made by the Bundesverfassungsgericht are equivalent to laws. So what they're doing now, they're keeping the discussion (and the fear-mongering) alive and continue to develop the trojan despite it being illegal, in an effort to undermine that decision. Most notorious for this behaviour is, of all people, our Minister of Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble. He repeatedly clamored and still clamors for this and other measures which are explicitely forbidden by the Grundgesetz and the Bundesverfassungsgericht, for example shooting down abducted planes. He's one of the single largest threats to what he has to protect by job description, namely the Grundgesetz.
Does German law have the concept of "high treason"?
In a city where even McDonald's offer free wifi for the price of a cheeseburger (not to mention the schweet municipal wifi project rumored to be in the works), this typically represents what De Gaulle said about the French right-wing politicians: the most stupid in the world.
There's some tough competition when it comes to "most stupid politicans in the world". Do French right wingers have some special advantage, like negative IQs?