...which was already publicly released elsewhere. If you are going to take down the caches of "private" information that was previously published for all to see,
Anyway there exist court orders to prevent "the press" republishing information which has previously been published elsewhere.
That's a good point. However, keep in mind that these are not just innocent people. They are people suspected of violating copyright law. Some people who get the notices are indeed innocent. Many are guilty.
Legally they are all innocent people. There is the principle that people are "innocent until proven guilty" (by a suitably competent court). Just because some individual accuses another individual of doing something wrong does not make them guility.
The problem is, the DMCA (which is what this is based off of) invokes some executive/judiciary power against people by anyone who spends the time/effort to write up a letter.
If it were that simple you'd expect to see individuals and small corps sending these kind of letters to big corps. e.g. SCO should be swimming in them, since they are commercially pirating Linux and making a big fuss about it.
If the RIAA or MPAA were to off and sue one of the people (what they'd have to do without the DMCA), you could countersue if the RIAA/MPAA was in error.
Often anyone sued can counter sue, regardless of merits or otherwise of the plaintiff's case.
Europe and the US has a history of never using each other standards. Just look at PAL/NTSC, NMT/APMS, GSM/DAMPS, Metric/Imperial, 110V60Hz/230V50Hz.
It isn't quite that simple, PAL is a derivative of NTSC. The French then came up with SECAM. The USA actually signed the Treaty of the Metre (pre Noah Webster) yet has never implimented it, the system actually used in the US is called "English" which is not the same as the Imperial system of measurements.
"It is great to see people and respected institutions standing up and saying this is wrong, a betrayal of our rights-- but can they make a difference?"
It certainly won't make a difference if they don't. The thing to remember that there are chaotic factors at work. It might be the first person to "sit at the front of the bus" or it might be the thousanth.
NK has acquired nuclear weapons and isn't even hiding them but wants the world to know it has them
They work better at detering attack that way.
I mean, come on, if any of that was true Bush certainly would have attacked NK and not Iraq, that did not have ties with terrorists, did not posess WMDs and certainly didn't engage in cyber warfare.
Why would Bush want to attack somewhere which actually has WMDs, it would be worst than Vietnam for the US "body" count.
It is always mentioned that if they came in too steep, they would burn up, and if they came in too shallow, they would skip off the atmosphere and return to space. For some reason, I never thought beyond that. Disaster if too steep. Disaster if too shallow. However, today I was thinking, that if they skipped off the atmosphere, they would merely return to orbit. Where's the big disaster in that. They would just fall back into the atmosphere later on.
This is after the command module has separated from the service module. Without the service module there is a very limited air supply for the crew.
Well, as a third option they also could have continued with the weapons inspections. Saddam was actually being fairly compliant with his entire country surrounded by hostile armies.
The last thing a country under threat of invasion needs is weapons inspectors letting the enemy know that the country dosn't have anything to defend itself with. It looks like the US allowed the weapons inspectors to do enough to be sure that Iraq could not repel an invasion or retaliate against its invaders.
However, were there good things that came from the war? Absolutely, the world is less one evil dictator
Now if only the US Government hadn't helped him in the first place...
and a people freed of his tyranny.
Instead they have foreign soldiers in their country, a puppet government and infrastructure which is in even more of a mess. The Iraqi people are certainly not "free".
Or it was a proactive action to remove a known regional threat. Saddam was a threat to his people and the region.
If this was the case you'd think that Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, Iran, etc would be those nations beating "wardrums" hardest. Rather than a country several thousand miles away, especially given that Iraq never had ICBMs or long range bombers.
And oh yeah, he got rid of a "brutal dictator" in the process... one that posed no credible threat to the U.S., and one of very many "brutal dictators" on this planet -- but the only one with so much delicious oil in his back yard.
Also one of the "brutal dictators" the US Government was only too happy to assist in the past. Without the support of one or other of the permenent members of the security council many dictators of the latter half of the 20th century might have been in power for a lot less time (assuming they would have come to power at all.) The US removing Hussein from Iraq is simply a case of the US cleaning up their own mess.
Ummm, didn't you forget something? The reports that Iraq submitted did not show that they destroyed all the weapons they were known to have.
Assuming the initial claims for the numbers of weapons were accurate. Iraqi scientists have said that they lied about weapons existing when the alternative was their own necks being on the line.
Whether or not you support the war, please get the facts straight. Saddam failed to comply with any of the resolutions.
So what plenty of states (including the US) are in contravention of UN resolutions. Some have been thumbing their nose at the UN for rather longer than a decade.
Diebold, bad, no no - don't do that again! Please? Please don't do that again?
More generally "Bad corp, don't do it again. (Or you'll get told off again.)" IIRC corporate crime is very damaging to both people and economies, yet most law enforcement ignores it.
Who, in your opinion, *does* know what's going on in Iraq? Allawi, their new leader, whose speeches are written for him by the White House who chose him for his past CIA work?
All this does is show Allawi to be an American puppet. Which is a conclusion many people, both inside and outside of Iraq, had already come to.
If you're genuinely interested in knowing what's really happening in the world, I would suggest looking beyond CNN, FOX, Wall Street journal and the New York Times. All of America's big media is owned by a very small group with very strong political leanings.
The real problem is not so much the strength of their leanings, but they all appear to be leaning in a similar direction. If they had strong, but highly varied, leanings it would be likely to encourage debate.
When you look to them, you only get one side of the story.
It would be more accurate to say "stories". Since there are many issues where mainstream media coverage, especially in the US, can be very one sided.
I'd say windows is like a house of cards, but that is too straight forward. Windoz is more like an ancient rustbucket of a car that stops running if you remove that plastic figurine of the Virgin Mary on the dash.
You probably don't even need to remove it. Just try and move t so you can see the road better. Microsoft deliberatly wrote "sphagetti code" into Windows, which is bad engineering for marketing reasons.
Actually, my impression is that Windows users aren't biased towards MS.
Windows users may or may not be. But there are Windows advocates of all kinds from the "Frothing at the mouth Religious Zealot" to the (supposedly) "independent".
They just have the impression that they have no choice. I think it sometimes makes them _harder_ to convince.
If they truely believe they have no choice then there is less need to "convince" them in the first place.
It's even worse when you start getting into the "developer" categories where a homepage and a quick reading of "Web Programming with PHP and MySQL" makes someone an expert in everything from database design/administration to system programming in C.
Database design is not not the same skill as programming, be it in C or SQL.
Unfortunately, 129I has another problem: the body likes to stockpile it in your thyroid (it can't tell the difference between it and regular iodine). A sufficient exposure will cause fatal thyroid cancer.
With a half life of nearly 16 million years the chances of getting cancer from from I129 decaying are remote, the C14 in the thyroid is probably more of a risk.
One of the waste products produced by nuclear reactors is Iodine-129. The half-life of I129 is 15.7 million years.
Nuclear waste is considered hazardous for at least 10x the half life. So I129 is hazardous for, um, about 157 million years.
Assuming that I129 is especially hazardous in the first place. The most danger comes from isotopes with medium half lives.
Rubidium 87 has a half-life of 47 billion (10^9) years (our soloar system is not yet 5 billion years old). Uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.5 Billion (10^9) years,
Which is why you find these isotopes naturally...Very long lived isotopes are not really a problem, life has been dealing with them since it first appeared.
Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 25.000 years.
This is why you don't find Pu239 naturally, though you do find it's daughter (U235) naturally.
It is practically impossible to guarantee a safe place for at least 7 half-lifes of Rubidium 87 or Uranium 238.
Naturally occuring Rubidium is around 28% Rb87 and 72% Rb85 AFAIK none of the uses of the element require removal of the radioactive isotope. Nor is U238 a "waste product".
The thing is, the stuff the hangs around the longest is also the least dangerous. If it takes 20,000 years for a half life, it emits a heck of a lot less energy per unit time than something that decays by the same number of electron/protons in say, a couple months (Radioactive iodine maybe?).
Typically spent fuel spends months to years cooling in a large tank of water. Before any kind of reprocessing even starts.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody's exactly sure why or how the FBI got warrants to take Indymedia's HDs,
Especially given that the disks were located in London. Why is a British court issuing warrents at the request of foreigners?
...which was already publicly released elsewhere. If you are going to take down the caches of "private" information that was previously published for all to see,
Anyway there exist court orders to prevent "the press" republishing information which has previously been published elsewhere.
That's a good point. However, keep in mind that these are not just innocent people. They are people suspected of violating copyright law. Some people who get the notices are indeed innocent. Many are guilty.
Legally they are all innocent people. There is the principle that people are "innocent until proven guilty" (by a suitably competent court). Just because some individual accuses another individual of doing something wrong does not make them guility.
The problem is, the DMCA (which is what this is based off of) invokes some executive/judiciary power against people by anyone who spends the time/effort to write up a letter.
If it were that simple you'd expect to see individuals and small corps sending these kind of letters to big corps. e.g. SCO should be swimming in them, since they are commercially pirating Linux and making a big fuss about it.
If the RIAA or MPAA were to off and sue one of the people (what they'd have to do without the DMCA), you could countersue if the RIAA/MPAA was in error.
Often anyone sued can counter sue, regardless of merits or otherwise of the plaintiff's case.
Europe and the US has a history of never using each other standards. Just look at PAL/NTSC, NMT/APMS, GSM/DAMPS, Metric/Imperial, 110V60Hz/230V50Hz.
It isn't quite that simple, PAL is a derivative of NTSC. The French then came up with SECAM. The USA actually signed the Treaty of the Metre (pre Noah Webster) yet has never implimented it, the system actually used in the US is called "English" which is not the same as the Imperial system of measurements.
"It is great to see people and respected institutions standing up and saying this is wrong, a betrayal of our rights-- but can they make a difference?"
It certainly won't make a difference if they don't. The thing to remember that there are chaotic factors at work. It might be the first person to "sit at the front of the bus" or it might be the thousanth.
The FCC does have the authority to regulate all transmitter and receiver hardware. That has always been within their purview.
But do they have any authority over what happens to signals after they have ceased to be freely radiating RF?
They have the right to regulate digital hardware, too, as every computer you buy has been certified by the FCC not to cause harmful interference.
That is only the function of the computer as a radio transmitter. It has nothing to do with the function of the hardware as digital computer.
NK has acquired nuclear weapons and isn't even hiding them but wants the world to know it has them
They work better at detering attack that way.
I mean, come on, if any of that was true Bush certainly would have attacked NK and not Iraq, that did not have ties with terrorists, did not posess WMDs and certainly didn't engage in cyber warfare.
Why would Bush want to attack somewhere which actually has WMDs, it would be worst than Vietnam for the US "body" count.
It is always mentioned that if they came in too steep, they would burn up, and if they came in too shallow, they would skip off the atmosphere and return to space. For some reason, I never thought beyond that. Disaster if too steep. Disaster if too shallow. However, today I was thinking, that if they skipped off the atmosphere, they would merely return to orbit. Where's the big disaster in that. They would just fall back into the atmosphere later on.
This is after the command module has separated from the service module. Without the service module there is a very limited air supply for the crew.
Well, as a third option they also could have continued with the weapons inspections. Saddam was actually being fairly compliant with his entire country surrounded by hostile armies.
The last thing a country under threat of invasion needs is weapons inspectors letting the enemy know that the country dosn't have anything to defend itself with.
It looks like the US allowed the weapons inspectors to do enough to be sure that Iraq could not repel an invasion or retaliate against its invaders.
However, were there good things that came from the war? Absolutely, the world is less one evil dictator
Now if only the US Government hadn't helped him in the first place...
and a people freed of his tyranny.
Instead they have foreign soldiers in their country, a puppet government and infrastructure which is in even more of a mess. The Iraqi people are certainly not "free".
Or it was a proactive action to remove a known regional threat. Saddam was a threat to his people and the region.
If this was the case you'd think that Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, Iran, etc would be those nations beating "wardrums" hardest. Rather than a country several thousand miles away, especially given that Iraq never had ICBMs or long range bombers.
And oh yeah, he got rid of a "brutal dictator" in the process... one that posed no credible threat to the U.S., and one of very many "brutal dictators" on this planet -- but the only one with so much delicious oil in his back yard.
Also one of the "brutal dictators" the US Government was only too happy to assist in the past.
Without the support of one or other of the permenent members of the security council many dictators of the latter half of the 20th century might have been in power for a lot less time (assuming they would have come to power at all.)
The US removing Hussein from Iraq is simply a case of the US cleaning up their own mess.
Ummm, didn't you forget something? The reports that Iraq submitted did not show that they destroyed all the weapons they were known to have.
Assuming the initial claims for the numbers of weapons were accurate. Iraqi scientists have said that they lied about weapons existing when the alternative was their own necks being on the line.
Whether or not you support the war, please get the facts straight. Saddam failed to comply with any of the resolutions.
So what plenty of states (including the US) are in contravention of UN resolutions. Some have been thumbing their nose at the UN for rather longer than a decade.
Diebold, bad, no no - don't do that again! Please? Please don't do that again?
More generally "Bad corp, don't do it again. (Or you'll get told off again.)"
IIRC corporate crime is very damaging to both people and economies, yet most law enforcement ignores it.
Who, in your opinion, *does* know what's going on in Iraq? Allawi, their new leader, whose speeches are written for him by the White House who chose him for his past CIA work?
All this does is show Allawi to be an American puppet. Which is a conclusion many people, both inside and outside of Iraq, had already come to.
If you're genuinely interested in knowing what's really happening in the world, I would suggest looking beyond CNN, FOX, Wall Street journal and the New York Times. All of America's big media is owned by a very small group with very strong political leanings.
The real problem is not so much the strength of their leanings, but they all appear to be leaning in a similar direction. If they had strong, but highly varied, leanings it would be likely to encourage debate.
When you look to them, you only get one side of the story.
It would be more accurate to say "stories". Since there are many issues where mainstream media coverage, especially in the US, can be very one sided.
I'd say windows is like a house of cards, but that is too straight forward. Windoz is more like an ancient rustbucket of a car that stops running if you remove that plastic figurine of the Virgin Mary on the dash.
You probably don't even need to remove it. Just try and move t so you can see the road better.
Microsoft deliberatly wrote "sphagetti code" into Windows, which is bad engineering for marketing reasons.
Actually, my impression is that Windows users aren't biased towards MS.
Windows users may or may not be. But there are Windows advocates of all kinds from the "Frothing at the mouth Religious Zealot" to the (supposedly) "independent".
They just have the impression that they have no choice. I think it sometimes makes them _harder_ to convince.
If they truely believe they have no choice then there is less need to "convince" them in the first place.
It's even worse when you start getting into the "developer" categories where a homepage and a quick reading of "Web Programming with PHP and MySQL" makes someone an expert in everything from database design/administration to system programming in C.
Database design is not not the same skill as programming, be it in C or SQL.
Unfortunately, 129I has another problem: the body likes to stockpile it in your thyroid (it can't tell the difference between it and regular iodine). A sufficient exposure will cause fatal thyroid cancer.
With a half life of nearly 16 million years the chances of getting cancer from from I129 decaying are remote, the C14 in the thyroid is probably more of a risk.
One of the waste products produced by nuclear reactors is Iodine-129. The half-life of I129 is 15.7 million years.
Nuclear waste is considered hazardous for at least 10x the half life. So I129 is hazardous for, um, about 157 million years.
Assuming that I129 is especially hazardous in the first place. The most danger comes from isotopes with medium half lives.
Rubidium 87 has a half-life of 47 billion (10^9) years (our soloar system is not yet 5 billion years old). Uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.5 Billion (10^9) years,
Which is why you find these isotopes naturally...Very long lived isotopes are not really a problem, life has been dealing with them since it first appeared.
Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 25.000 years.
This is why you don't find Pu239 naturally, though you do find it's daughter (U235) naturally.
It is practically impossible to guarantee a safe place for at least 7 half-lifes of Rubidium 87 or Uranium 238.
Naturally occuring Rubidium is around 28% Rb87 and 72% Rb85 AFAIK none of the uses of the element require removal of the radioactive isotope. Nor is U238 a "waste product".
The thing is, the stuff the hangs around the longest is also the least dangerous. If it takes 20,000 years for a half life, it emits a heck of a lot less energy per unit time than something that decays by the same number of electron/protons in say, a couple months (Radioactive iodine maybe?).
Typically spent fuel spends months to years cooling in a large tank of water. Before any kind of reprocessing even starts.
After all, in terms of simple loss of life, cars kill about the same number of people every year as a jumbo jet going down with all hands,
In terms of global fatalities a 747 going down every hour might kill less people.