Police often say that ignorance of the law is no excuse, despite very frequently either flat-out lying about what the law is or misunderstanding it themselves
These being people who's job is law enforcement makes this a serious problem.
remember, they aren't lawyers, and lawyers often get it wrong too because it's a convoluted jumbled mess of precedent and sometimes vague statutes. The law is a giant, incomprehensible tangle of mumbo-jumbo, with legal precedents being treated like magic spells (uttered in Latin, no less). And with this structure, who wins? Why, the ones with the resources to hire experts...!
These need to even be "experts" in the matter at hand or even law. Hiring experts who can drag things out for ages can be highly effective.
By opting in to the ID card scheme, you opt in to the national ID register, providing huge amounts of personal information (including biometrics) to a centralised government database. The Gestapo and Stasi would have absolutely loved to have such a resource.
AFAIK these German organisations wern't renound for "leaking" data all over the place. And/Or being infiltrated by foreign spies. It might even be more secure to put this information up of Facebook:) At least you'd probably have a better idea of who can get at the information.
The big picture matters when it comes to government and electoral reform. For example, an elected second chamber based on PR, and an elected first chamber using AV rather than FPTP, would still be a big step up for democracy compared to what we have today.
More voting does not result in more democracy. It may even result in a less representative government if both chambers are being filled from the same group of people. Things might actually work better if ex MPs were removed from the Lords even if "life peers" were abolished entirely. (With any new hereditary peerages skipping 2 or 3 generations.) There's even the option of going "back to basics" with random selection of people. Which tends to ensure that legislators have to "eat their own dogfood".
It made perfect sense in my mind to do away with a driving licence completely one we were all legally forced to carry a photo ID.
Actually it dosn't. Since proving who you are is different from proving which (if any) motor vehicles you may operate on a public road.
I would have been happy to carry a single piece of state provided ID if it allowed me the freedom to travel anywhere in Europe without a passport and removed my need to pay for a new photo driving licence every ten years. ID cards in theory could have my life easier, but not in the form they were being implemented.
The more things a document can do the more it is likely to be misused. Multi-purpose "ID cards" make "identity theft" easier not harder.
Where they'll fall down is if they cut off contracted customers then insist that said customer continues to pay the contracted rate. They will fall down because the recording industry has been repeatedly shown to use unreliable evidence,
Courts tend to take a very dim view of suppliers expecting people to pay for nothing. It typically comes under "breach of contract".
If the user then litigates against the ISP for down time/costs they will (probably) win, since the ISP will have no actual evidence that the user violated any copyrights and hence ISP policy. The only way the ISP could come out of this winning is to insist that the "copyright holder" bring the user to court three times and prove to a court's satisfaction that the user was, in fact, infringing their rights.
Even in that situation the ISP might still have a tough time doing anything other than stopping service and charging.
Further to this, I could simply generate a script the repeatedly sends infringement notices to the ISP for every IP address in their allocated netblocks. No evidence necessary.
Unless you happened to be the right entity they'd just ignore you. They'd still ignore you even if you were a non "blessed" copyright holder who had reasonable evidence of copyright violations...
Yes, this bypasses any sort of due process, but that's the whole point. A 3 strikes law wouldn't need to exist if they were interested in following due process. If a court finds you guilty, 1 strike would be enough. This way, they don't need to bother with any of that "innocent until proven guilty" or "evidence" nonsense.
Also there is no risk to the "person" making the accusation. If you sue someone then they can countersue you. If you are a corporation and they are an individual things can easily wind up being more expensive for you. (Especially outside corporate friendly countries such as the USA).
Water, gas and electricity are already 'human rights', but utility companies have been able to cut off non-payers and abusers without issue.
Thing is that "abuse" in this context tends to mean something along the lines of tampering with the distribution system. e.g. bypassing the meter. Certainly not a poorly substantiated claim from a third party. You arn't going to get your gas or electricity cut off because the food you are cooking wasn't bought from a major supermarket. Nor is your electricity supplier likely to be interested if the videos/DVDs/etc are "pirate". About the only thing which might get you cut off would be if you had a "security system" consisting of an electric fence and/or flamethrowers, bu the complaint would have to come from the police...
I'm not Irish (I'm actually English), but I'm not sure about this.
Eircom are a private company, they can choose to do business with whoever they please.
But if they choose to do business they have to comply with the "law of the land" in respect of any contracts they enter into. Being a "private company" dosn't magically absolve them of this.
What they will be doing is cutting off service to people who they are told, by a third party firm, are sharing copyrighted music.
A third party firm who apparently face no consequences when they get it wrong. Which means they have even less reason to ensure they get things right.
There is no decision of legality here because a court is not involved. Were they cutting off people who had been found, by a court of law, to have shared their music in violation of Irish copyright law, then you could use the word 'illegally'.
Falsely accusing people of breaking the law does tend to have consequences. Especially when it's civil law (which may be why the entertainments industry wants to make copyright infringement criminal.)
My only problem with a "naive" use of Linux in a high school/college lab environment is that of course you have to lock down access and give them a fairly limited account to make sure someone doesn't start doing "bad things" to the machines...
This is really far more an issue of Windows. Since the Unix design is that users and administrators are separate, whereas in Windows the distinction is very blurred.
Hollywood, you can keep producing ridiculously expensive and wasteful movies, but you gotta come up with better excuses when you're losing money. It's never piracy. A good movie will make money no matter what, and it'll get advertised through filesharing around the world, faster than you apparently are able to do. Though it might not make a profit if you spent more than a small nation's budget to make it.
Given the strange accounting practices in Hollywood it's incredible that anyone has the slightest idea which movies make a profit and which make a loss.
That's faulty logic. Just because they haven't been caught doesn't mean they aren't criminals.
It's the "logic" behind lists of "sex offenders".
You can not rely on a database check to prove that someone is anything other than not in the database.
Even knowing someone is in the database may not be of much actual use for determining if someone is actually any kind of "threat".
There are plenty of criminals that have not been caught, for example nearly 40% of murders go unsolved in the USA.
It's also quite possible for a murder to be thought something else. e.g. there have been cases of serial poisoners who are only suspected once several people connected with them have died in the same way (or there has been a matter of luck in a nurse or doctor recognising the symptoms). There are plenty of ways in which someone could literally "get away with murder".
I'll go further. Anyone taking any public position at all should have to "submit"; including (especially) all law enforcement types. Heck, if the census-takers had all been DNA screened against the criminal database,
Any such screening is likely to show the actual false positive rate for the techniques. Which could cause problems for "forensic" use in future.
I'd worry a bit less about the possibility of my family letting them into the house.
What you have to let census takers into your house in your part of the world...
Most of the terrorist arrests in the US didn't even require a book. Thinking, i.e. "conspiring," was enough.
Unless it's the "wrong people" in which case only a "nutjob conspiracy theorist" would have anything against them:)
In fact the CIA recently decided to mark an American Islamic cleric for death, though he is not thought to have been--or even expected to be--directly involved with carrying out any terrorist attack
Given that the CIA has long been in the business of supporting and training terrorists they may have an "advantage" in knowing what to look for.
I have the feeling the conviction has more to do with a bunch of white supremacists holding large quantities of ricin, than that actual act of learning how to make it.
It's notable how these men are never called "terrorists" in the article... Especially since these convictions happened in the same week as a big fuss was made about arrests related to car fire in New York.
He only mentioned it made a crackling sound and moved very erratically...at first he thought it might be a UFO but then realized it was definitely from this earth.
So how did that help in identifying it? The term means Unidentified Flying Object...
Let us not fog this discussion with dismissives about hardware ownership, for this really has nothing to do with that. Instead, this about how companies treat the data you create.
Whilst the highlighting might be "data" notes are more "content".
And let me just say that there's are some useful aspects to having Amazon keep your data for you.
Suppose I have a Kindle (or, say, one of the requisite apps on some other hardware platform), and I've bought a few books for it that I've noted and highlighted. Suppose, then, that I lose my Kindle. Or it gets run over by a bus. Or stolen. Or dunked in a hot tub. Or whatever.
All I have to do is procure/install a new Kindle, enter the appropriate account identification, and my books and notes are transferred to the new device.
This dosn't require Amazon to allow access to whatever they store to anyone other than you. Indeed there's no good reason that it need be Amazon storing this...
And now all we need is to get loud-mouth aggressive "scientists" to stop labeling everyone they don't agree with as "nutball propaganda". The scientific method doesn't have "keep shouting the other guy down until he goes away" as part of the process. The scientific method doesn't resort to name calling and insult as a means of proving the hypothesis.
Such behaviour is fairly typical of politics. It's also very likely to be the case that when this happens the claim in question dosn't have much actual evidence to support it. Quite possibly that the advocate knows this to be the case but fears "losing face".
When I read this summary, I thought "hurray, the antagonistic, dogma-preaching 'scientists' were finally going to be told that debate IS allowed and questioning the data and methods IS allowed and you don't get to question the ethics of the guy with the opposing ideas just because he disagrees with you."
There's also the idea that only "climate scientists" are qualified to even say anything. It's not as if statistic experts can know about how best to use statistics, computer scientists can know how to write computer programs, historians and archaeologists might have some idea about past environmental conditions, etc.
And that's why every time you ask a strong AGW proponent to support his claims he resorts to name calling and saying things like "it's a fact" and "the debate is over". Never explain how you got to your conclusion, pretend the other guy is an idiot for asking, and you'll have "uneducated, scared, misinformed" people at your feet.
This is behaviour you don't tend to see from scientists in general. However you do tend to see from religious and political groups.
Slashdot Mirror
Police often say that ignorance of the law is no excuse, despite very frequently either flat-out lying about what the law is or misunderstanding it themselves
These being people who's job is law enforcement makes this a serious problem.
remember, they aren't lawyers, and lawyers often get it wrong too because it's a convoluted jumbled mess of precedent and sometimes vague statutes. The law is a giant, incomprehensible tangle of mumbo-jumbo, with legal precedents being treated like magic spells (uttered in Latin, no less). And with this structure, who wins? Why, the ones with the resources to hire experts...!
These need to even be "experts" in the matter at hand or even law. Hiring experts who can drag things out for ages can be highly effective.
As usual, slashdot missed the other informative story about how the Tetris Company never paid the real inventor anything.
:)
So they should presumably be known as the TCAA, since they'd then be in good company with their attitude towards "intellectual property".
By opting in to the ID card scheme, you opt in to the national ID register, providing huge amounts of personal information (including biometrics) to a centralised government database. The Gestapo and Stasi would have absolutely loved to have such a resource.
:) At least you'd probably have a better idea of who can get at the information.
AFAIK these German organisations wern't renound for "leaking" data all over the place. And/Or being infiltrated by foreign spies.
It might even be more secure to put this information up of Facebook
The big picture matters when it comes to government and electoral reform. For example, an elected second chamber based on PR, and an elected first chamber using AV rather than FPTP, would still be a big step up for democracy compared to what we have today.
More voting does not result in more democracy. It may even result in a less representative government if both chambers are being filled from the same group of people. Things might actually work better if ex MPs were removed from the Lords even if "life peers" were abolished entirely. (With any new hereditary peerages skipping 2 or 3 generations.)
There's even the option of going "back to basics" with random selection of people. Which tends to ensure that legislators have to "eat their own dogfood".
It made perfect sense in my mind to do away with a driving licence completely one we were all legally forced to carry a photo ID.
Actually it dosn't. Since proving who you are is different from proving which (if any) motor vehicles you may operate on a public road.
I would have been happy to carry a single piece of state provided ID if it allowed me the freedom to travel anywhere in Europe without a passport and removed my need to pay for a new photo driving licence every ten years. ID cards in theory could have my life easier, but not in the form they were being implemented.
The more things a document can do the more it is likely to be misused. Multi-purpose "ID cards" make "identity theft" easier not harder.
My point still stands though, most people just carry their photo driving licence with them anyway.
:)
Driving is not mandatory in the UK. It isn't even the case in the US...
How many people out there are really walking around with no form of ID?
You don't need "ID" to walk
The licencing laws here in Britain now requires all people under the age of 25 to be required to produce ID to buy booze as well.
Actually this has nothing to do with any law, it's a policy created by supermarkets.
Where they'll fall down is if they cut off contracted customers then insist that said customer continues to pay the contracted rate. They will fall down because the recording industry has been repeatedly shown to use unreliable evidence,
Courts tend to take a very dim view of suppliers expecting people to pay for nothing. It typically comes under "breach of contract".
If the user then litigates against the ISP for down time/costs they will (probably) win, since the ISP will have no actual evidence that the user violated any copyrights and hence ISP policy. The only way the ISP could come out of this winning is to insist that the "copyright holder" bring the user to court three times and prove to a court's satisfaction that the user was, in fact, infringing their rights.
Even in that situation the ISP might still have a tough time doing anything other than stopping service and charging.
Further to this, I could simply generate a script the repeatedly sends infringement notices to the ISP for every IP address in their allocated netblocks. No evidence necessary.
Unless you happened to be the right entity they'd just ignore you. They'd still ignore you even if you were a non "blessed" copyright holder who had reasonable evidence of copyright violations...
Yes, this bypasses any sort of due process, but that's the whole point. A 3 strikes law wouldn't need to exist if they were interested in following due process. If a court finds you guilty, 1 strike would be enough. This way, they don't need to bother with any of that "innocent until proven guilty" or "evidence" nonsense.
Also there is no risk to the "person" making the accusation. If you sue someone then they can countersue you. If you are a corporation and they are an individual things can easily wind up being more expensive for you. (Especially outside corporate friendly countries such as the USA).
Water, gas and electricity are already 'human rights', but utility companies have been able to cut off non-payers and abusers without issue.
Thing is that "abuse" in this context tends to mean something along the lines of tampering with the distribution system. e.g. bypassing the meter.
Certainly not a poorly substantiated claim from a third party.
You arn't going to get your gas or electricity cut off because the food you are cooking wasn't bought from a major supermarket. Nor is your electricity supplier likely to be interested if the videos/DVDs/etc are "pirate".
About the only thing which might get you cut off would be if you had a "security system" consisting of an electric fence and/or flamethrowers, bu the complaint would have to come from the police...
I'm not Irish (I'm actually English), but I'm not sure about this.
Eircom are a private company, they can choose to do business with whoever they please.
But if they choose to do business they have to comply with the "law of the land" in respect of any contracts they enter into.
Being a "private company" dosn't magically absolve them of this.
What they will be doing is cutting off service to people who they are told, by a third party firm, are sharing copyrighted music.
A third party firm who apparently face no consequences when they get it wrong. Which means they have even less reason to ensure they get things right.
There is no decision of legality here because a court is not involved. Were they cutting off people who had been found, by a court of law, to have shared their music in violation of Irish copyright law, then you could use the word 'illegally'.
Falsely accusing people of breaking the law does tend to have consequences. Especially when it's civil law (which may be why the entertainments industry wants to make copyright infringement criminal.)
My only problem with a "naive" use of Linux in a high school/college lab environment is that of course you have to lock down access and give them a fairly limited account to make sure someone doesn't start doing "bad things" to the machines...
This is really far more an issue of Windows. Since the Unix design is that users and administrators are separate, whereas in Windows the distinction is very blurred.
I think it's more of a case that software that actually analyzes data is voodoo.
So why should anyone trust it for any serious science?
It's helpful to be able to see exactly how someone got their results from the data.
If indeed the results actually come the data or if they are an artifact of the program processing it.
Finding old PCs that stay alive that long with a real UART etc. gets harder and harder, but here's to hoping that virtualization saves the day.
How is virtualization going to be much help when the issue is specific hardware requirements?
Don't get too far ahead of yourself, the only ones dead so far are SCO and HURD.
Is SCO actually dead now? They appeared to go through quite a time of being undead.
Hollywood, you can keep producing ridiculously expensive and wasteful movies, but you gotta come up with better excuses when you're losing money. It's never piracy. A good movie will make money no matter what, and it'll get advertised through filesharing around the world, faster than you apparently are able to do. Though it might not make a profit if you spent more than a small nation's budget to make it.
Given the strange accounting practices in Hollywood it's incredible that anyone has the slightest idea which movies make a profit and which make a loss.
That's faulty logic. Just because they haven't been caught doesn't mean they aren't criminals.
It's the "logic" behind lists of "sex offenders".
You can not rely on a database check to prove that someone is anything other than not in the database.
Even knowing someone is in the database may not be of much actual use for determining if someone is actually any kind of "threat".
There are plenty of criminals that have not been caught, for example nearly 40% of murders go unsolved in the USA.
It's also quite possible for a murder to be thought something else. e.g. there have been cases of serial poisoners who are only suspected once several people connected with them have died in the same way (or there has been a matter of luck in a nurse or doctor recognising the symptoms). There are plenty of ways in which someone could literally "get away with murder".
I'll go further. Anyone taking any public position at all should have to "submit"; including (especially) all law enforcement types. Heck, if the census-takers had all been DNA screened against the criminal database,
Any such screening is likely to show the actual false positive rate for the techniques. Which could cause problems for "forensic" use in future.
I'd worry a bit less about the possibility of my family letting them into the house.
What you have to let census takers into your house in your part of the world...
Most of the terrorist arrests in the US didn't even require a book. Thinking, i.e. "conspiring," was enough.
:)
Unless it's the "wrong people" in which case only a "nutjob conspiracy theorist" would have anything against them
In fact the CIA recently decided to mark an American Islamic cleric for death, though he is not thought to have been--or even expected to be--directly involved with carrying out any terrorist attack
Given that the CIA has long been in the business of supporting and training terrorists they may have an "advantage" in knowing what to look for.
No. Possession and distribution of a terrorist manual is an actual crime, not a thought crime.
It would be a very big surprise if the British Government does not produce and distribute "terrorist manuals".
If I were in the UK I'd start downloading and distributing the Anarchist Handbook via bittorrent just to challenge this ridiculous law.
If you were actually interested in terrorism it would make more sense to see if the (Real) IRA have a handbook.
I have the feeling the conviction has more to do with a bunch of white supremacists holding large quantities of ricin, than that actual act of learning how to make it.
It's notable how these men are never called "terrorists" in the article... Especially since these convictions happened in the same week as a big fuss was made about arrests related to car fire in New York.
He only mentioned it made a crackling sound and moved very erratically...at first he thought it might be a UFO but then realized it was definitely from this earth.
So how did that help in identifying it? The term means Unidentified Flying Object...
Let us not fog this discussion with dismissives about hardware ownership, for this really has nothing to do with that. Instead, this about how companies treat the data you create.
Whilst the highlighting might be "data" notes are more "content".
And let me just say that there's are some useful aspects to having Amazon keep your data for you. Suppose I have a Kindle (or, say, one of the requisite apps on some other hardware platform), and I've bought a few books for it that I've noted and highlighted. Suppose, then, that I lose my Kindle. Or it gets run over by a bus. Or stolen. Or dunked in a hot tub. Or whatever. All I have to do is procure/install a new Kindle, enter the appropriate account identification, and my books and notes are transferred to the new device.
This dosn't require Amazon to allow access to whatever they store to anyone other than you. Indeed there's no good reason that it need be Amazon storing this...
And now all we need is to get loud-mouth aggressive "scientists" to stop labeling everyone they don't agree with as "nutball propaganda". The scientific method doesn't have "keep shouting the other guy down until he goes away" as part of the process. The scientific method doesn't resort to name calling and insult as a means of proving the hypothesis.
Such behaviour is fairly typical of politics. It's also very likely to be the case that when this happens the claim in question dosn't have much actual evidence to support it. Quite possibly that the advocate knows this to be the case but fears "losing face".
When I read this summary, I thought "hurray, the antagonistic, dogma-preaching 'scientists' were finally going to be told that debate IS allowed and questioning the data and methods IS allowed and you don't get to question the ethics of the guy with the opposing ideas just because he disagrees with you."
There's also the idea that only "climate scientists" are qualified to even say anything. It's not as if statistic experts can know about how best to use statistics, computer scientists can know how to write computer programs, historians and archaeologists might have some idea about past environmental conditions, etc.
And that's why every time you ask a strong AGW proponent to support his claims he resorts to name calling and saying things like "it's a fact" and "the debate is over". Never explain how you got to your conclusion, pretend the other guy is an idiot for asking, and you'll have "uneducated, scared, misinformed" people at your feet.
This is behaviour you don't tend to see from scientists in general. However you do tend to see from religious and political groups.