A: Why the hell are treaties private? Shouldn't they be by law public documents?
What do those involved have to fear???
* Punishment for companies who know that their products are being used for copyright infringement, ALA Pirate's Bay, and don't try to stop it.
Does that include Microsoft:)
Taking steps towards international regulating bodies might be the first steps towards the end of spam, reduced botnets, phishing, international domain squatting, and other problems with the network right now.
In which case there would be no need to keep anything secret... Another thing it probably won't do is outlaw DRM, even though DRM encourages piracy.
It'd be infinitely better to get real political parties onboard with the ideas than play around with joke parties that will never have the power to implement their ideas.
I recall some 20 years ago journalists tried (and failed) to see if the public could tell the difference between some policies taken from manifestos and the daftest ideas they could come up with. Even "real" political parties often turn out to be bad jokes.
Sadly many nations are stuck in faux democracy two party politics where voters get to choose the lesser of two very similar evils.
Which often need to be called "The Thieves and Liers Party" & "The Liers and Thieves Party" were normal "truth in advertising" laws applied:)
The class action suit describes the agreement under which the laptops were provided; no mention is made of remote monitoring.
Even if it did an "agreement" can't allow something which is illegal. About the only difference such a thing should make is to the length of the prison sentence. i.e. trying to get someone to agree to be "bugged" means a longer stay in prison.
If it were my daughter's computer, I would not be talking about a class-action suit with a civil attorney. I would be sitting down at police HQ and the district attorney's office pursuing criminal charges against the individuals involved. They would need to face the felony charges that their behavior warranted.
So why are the several thousand people involved wasting time and money on a civil suit? Especially one which won't do much to punish those responsible even if they "win".
People will still get the RTMs and they will still have pirated copies out before launch just watch. The community of crackers is most times a lot smarter than the people who wrote the DRM in the first place.
If the people who wrote the DRM are smart they will put as little effort as possible into it. Since they can be certain it will be "cracked".
I don't think I've ever seen a 'scene' release that contained any kind of malware (apart from the occasional false positive due to the mechanisms involved); that's not to say that 3rd parties don't *replace* cracked files and keygens with malware and torrent them, but the people actually breaking the copy protection really don't seem to be involved in anything (additionally) nefarious. Besides, it's not in their interests; the scene groups largely do what they do for kudos and churning out malware-infected releases would seriously damage their reputation.
There have been cases of non pirated software coming with malware. Also various "DRM" mechanisms do qualify as malware. Most notably the Sony rootkit which could be exploited by third parties.
The #1 problem with recycling nuclear fuel is the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation (even more important with terrorist groups and rogue states wanting to get into the nuclear game)
Since the US already has nuclear weapons how is this even an issue?
Some claim its possible to make the output of the reprocessing process impossible to use for nuclear weapons but usable in a power reactor.
It's difficult to turn reactor fuel into something suitable to make any kind of nuclear weapon.
What's bad is that in a botnet's hands VBA has access to the entire computer, and not just to the document or its' folder. (yes, I know that there have been some improvements in that regard, but that depends more on the OS & application settings than on inherent VBA limitations)
You'd have thought by now there'd be a list of scripting functions which are mainly, even exclusivly, used by malware.
The web plugin should be retired and just force the pdf to open in the full reader.
Where the reader need not be the Adobe mess. It's also annoying when websites moan about the Adobe plugin not being present in the browser. When it's quite literally none of their business how the browser handles PDF files.
Remember when 1998 was supposed to be the hottest ever? Then that was debunked and it was 1934. Now Hansen & his asshats are saying they have massaged the data some more and it is 1998 again by a nose. I say so what? If it is a statistical tie it really doesn't matter, the Warmers were yelling the warming was "unprecedented" yet that doesn't square with a virtual tie with 1934 now does it? But saying 'It was just a cunthair higher than back in 1934' doesn't make a good argument for seizing trillions of dollars of economic output and redirecting it into politically connected pockets.
Even with all that effort you still have 1998 being only fractionally warmer than 64 years earlier. Which dosn't really agree with the theory of human C02 emmisions which have vastly increased. However 60 years is a credible time for a complete cycle of The Pacific decadal oscillation...
But I have one advantage there, AGW is probably the most extraordinary claim in the history of extraordinary claims and the proposed solution (seizing most of the world's wealth, eliminating most of the current industrial base, etc.) is so far beyond extraordinary I doubt any human language even has the proper vocabulary for describing it properly. I simply demand extraordinary evidence. Since the evidence offered to date is pathetic and weak I laugh at it and call it a silly thing for silly (or evil) people.
Most of that "evidence", whilst it may be evidence for "GW", dosn't really do much to address the "A" part. Even without the data manipulation (and even errors of arithmatic) you end up showing that Earth's climate changes. Something it's been doing ever since it has had a climate.
Don't you know? The party line is that they were just "local phenomena, not global." Of course, if you ask them if they have any evidence to back their assertions, they don't answer.
Probably because there is evidence that these were fairly widespread. I wonder if the "warmies" would like to explain how they consider if something is "global, not local":)
the global warming theorists are to the level of ridiculousness that "scientists" in the past were convinced that the earth was flat, or that the sun revolved around the earth.
The latter used complex mathematical models to try and make their theories match with reality too.
The "anti AGW folks" are doing a lot more than that, they are arguing against science, and denying reality.
This more appears to characterise the "warmies"/"AGW" lot. What the so called "climate scientists" have been doing looks very mich like "psudo-science".
Most importantly, they are trying to sabotage honest discussion and debate
Who is it who is claiming "the science is settled", "the debate is over", etc?
Even if "AGW" was false, don't you think that would be necessary anyway? Fossil fuels are in short supply - we don;t really have any option other than seeking new fuels, even if CO2 isn't an issue at all.
At best all the "carbon this", "carbon that" is a distraction. At worst it's part of the problem.
See, when you change historical data to make your model match current conditions, it's fraud. (AGW climatologists tend to throw out data that doesn't make sense to their models)
As well as manipulating whatever data does get used in strange ways. It's also interesting that the AGW advocates like to toss around the term "denier" when there's plenty of denial going on in the AGW camp. Be it to deny that the RWP, MWP, LIA even existed. Or to deny that placing sensitive neasuring equiptment near a heat source is likely to skew the results; that airports measure temperature for aviation purposes rather than to produce climate records; etc.
There are certain things that are science (easily verifiable).
1. That CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and its increased concentration does lead to overall increase in average temperature.
Ice cores show that CO2 concentration follows temperature. On the scale of the planet things are not as simple as they are in the lab.
2. That antropogenic CO2 emissions are proportionally large enough to significantly contribute to natural ones - enough so to change the atmospheric concentration balance in a pronounced way.
Since atmospheric CO2 appears to be an output of global temperature adding more is likely to make little or no difference. Also global temperature does not correspond well with human CO2 producing activities.
3. That solar activity is not a highly variable factor contributing in global average temperature in short to medium term.
The effects which are supposedly due to human activity are long term...
Yet - so many predictions made by AGW that did not come to be - but are just silently discarded and substituted with even more fearful headlines of events soon to come.
Kind of the same approach that most "psychics" use. In which case you'd test the proportion of correct predictions against those you'd expect from random chance.
The other side of the coin is "change for change's sake". If you perform an activity that doesn't require effort, change, or reduces your comfort, then you must be a slacker, even if the activity turns out to be the superior choice. Just because you think the human race is choosing the easy way, doesn't mean that the choice is wrong.
Change for its own sake carries its own set of risks.
I don't want us to respond to anthropogenic global warming as a disaster in the making until there is solid evidence that anthropogenic global warming is a disaster in the making.
If anything things are getting harder for the "warmies"/"alarmists". Whilst they never had much evidence for the "anthropogenic" bit even their claims for warming are looking suspect as more and more data manipulation (even inability to perform basic arithmatic) is discovered. That's before you even consider that the planet does not appear to behave in anything like the way these people claim it does.
They JUST figured this out!!!????
This is the problem with the green lords... they don't think ahead of the unintended consequences!
Which dosn't make them very "green" in practice.
I've HATED Corn based ethanol for YEARS... Everyone would point to some country in South America (Brazil?) about how good Ethanol was and the amount of fuel created etc... But that was end of process SUGAR CANE! NOT a major food source!
IIRC Brazil started from a position of an excess of sugarcane production. You also get more sugar, per amount of plant, from one which stores a lot of sugar in it's stem compared with one where you can only use the fruit/seeds. I wonder if "corn ethanol" came from the same bunch of idiots who though that High Fructose Corn Syrup was a suitable replacement for sucrose.
Er, you know what LLC stands for, right? They have limited liability; what they don't have is the ability to sell stock to raise money.
The original meaning on "limited liability" is that the liability of investors is limited to their investment in the company. (Which need not equate to however much they paid through a stock market.) It has (or at least had) nothing to do with the actions of the company or it's officers.
Regardless of how you may feel about taxes, it really isn't at issue. Here we have a company breaking the law, and using its influence to avoid the consequences, and to seek special treatment under the law.
In which case they should get "special treatment". Just not the kind the asked for instead they have the FBI and IRS come visit.
If you own just one copyright, you can, without committing perjury, send a DMCA notice to anyone's ISP demanding they take something down as an infringement of your copyright.
If you are sending a DMCA notice you most definitly do own one copyright. Since AFAIK DMCA notices are not exempt from copyright:)
If a human being had done this, we'd be charged with the felony crime of breaking and entering-
As well as burglary, since they removed the owners' property from the house.
BUT after all Bank of America isn't a human, are they?
When it comes to criminal law the idea of corporations as "people" tends to utterly fail. There's no holding a corporation in a jail before/during their trial, no such thing as bail conditions/curfew/etc which people still legally considered innocent can be subject to. Nor are there any prisons for corporations who are convicted.
Personally, I think that when stuff like this is done they should arrest the President of the corporation, process him and then throw him in a cell with the derelicts (make sure you do it on a long holiday weekend so he suffers for a few days).
Why just the president rather than the entire company executive?
Slashdot Mirror
A: Why the hell are treaties private? Shouldn't they be by law public documents?
:)
What do those involved have to fear???
* Punishment for companies who know that their products are being used for copyright infringement, ALA Pirate's Bay, and don't try to stop it.
Does that include Microsoft
Taking steps towards international regulating bodies might be the first steps towards the end of spam, reduced botnets, phishing, international domain squatting, and other problems with the network right now.
In which case there would be no need to keep anything secret... Another thing it probably won't do is outlaw DRM, even though DRM encourages piracy.
It'd be infinitely better to get real political parties onboard with the ideas than play around with joke parties that will never have the power to implement their ideas.
:)
I recall some 20 years ago journalists tried (and failed) to see if the public could tell the difference between some policies taken from manifestos and the daftest ideas they could come up with. Even "real" political parties often turn out to be bad jokes.
Sadly many nations are stuck in faux democracy two party politics where voters get to choose the lesser of two very similar evils.
Which often need to be called "The Thieves and Liers Party" & "The Liers and Thieves Party" were normal "truth in advertising" laws applied
They used a picture of the child in the case engaging in "improper behavior in the home" then confirmed to the child's father that this is true.
The question for the child's father is "Why didn't you call the cops?"
The class action suit describes the agreement under which the laptops were provided; no mention is made of remote monitoring.
Even if it did an "agreement" can't allow something which is illegal. About the only difference such a thing should make is to the length of the prison sentence. i.e. trying to get someone to agree to be "bugged" means a longer stay in prison.
If it were my daughter's computer, I would not be talking about a class-action suit with a civil attorney. I would be sitting down at police HQ and the district attorney's office pursuing criminal charges against the individuals involved. They would need to face the felony charges that their behavior warranted.
So why are the several thousand people involved wasting time and money on a civil suit? Especially one which won't do much to punish those responsible even if they "win".
People will still get the RTMs and they will still have pirated copies out before launch just watch. The community of crackers is most times a lot smarter than the people who wrote the DRM in the first place.
If the people who wrote the DRM are smart they will put as little effort as possible into it. Since they can be certain it will be "cracked".
I don't think I've ever seen a 'scene' release that contained any kind of malware (apart from the occasional false positive due to the mechanisms involved); that's not to say that 3rd parties don't *replace* cracked files and keygens with malware and torrent them, but the people actually breaking the copy protection really don't seem to be involved in anything (additionally) nefarious. Besides, it's not in their interests; the scene groups largely do what they do for kudos and churning out malware-infected releases would seriously damage their reputation.
There have been cases of non pirated software coming with malware. Also various "DRM" mechanisms do qualify as malware. Most notably the Sony rootkit which could be exploited by third parties.
The #1 problem with recycling nuclear fuel is the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation (even more important with terrorist groups and rogue states wanting to get into the nuclear game)
Since the US already has nuclear weapons how is this even an issue?
Some claim its possible to make the output of the reprocessing process impossible to use for nuclear weapons but usable in a power reactor.
It's difficult to turn reactor fuel into something suitable to make any kind of nuclear weapon.
What's bad is that in a botnet's hands VBA has access to the entire computer, and not just to the document or its' folder. (yes, I know that there have been some improvements in that regard, but that depends more on the OS & application settings than on inherent VBA limitations)
You'd have thought by now there'd be a list of scripting functions which are mainly, even exclusivly, used by malware.
The web plugin should be retired and just force the pdf to open in the full reader.
Where the reader need not be the Adobe mess. It's also annoying when websites moan about the Adobe plugin not being present in the browser. When it's quite literally none of their business how the browser handles PDF files.
maybe the FCC can ask them to give that $200 billion back,
Shouldn't that be plus interest, plus fines...
Remember when 1998 was supposed to be the hottest ever? Then that was debunked and it was 1934. Now Hansen & his asshats are saying they have massaged the data some more and it is 1998 again by a nose. I say so what? If it is a statistical tie it really doesn't matter, the Warmers were yelling the warming was "unprecedented" yet that doesn't square with a virtual tie with 1934 now does it? But saying 'It was just a cunthair higher than back in 1934' doesn't make a good argument for seizing trillions of dollars of economic output and redirecting it into politically connected pockets.
Even with all that effort you still have 1998 being only fractionally warmer than 64 years earlier. Which dosn't really agree with the theory of human C02 emmisions which have vastly increased. However 60 years is a credible time for a complete cycle of The Pacific decadal oscillation...
But I have one advantage there, AGW is probably the most extraordinary claim in the history of extraordinary claims and the proposed solution (seizing most of the world's wealth, eliminating most of the current industrial base, etc.) is so far beyond extraordinary I doubt any human language even has the proper vocabulary for describing it properly. I simply demand extraordinary evidence. Since the evidence offered to date is pathetic and weak I laugh at it and call it a silly thing for silly (or evil) people.
Most of that "evidence", whilst it may be evidence for "GW", dosn't really do much to address the "A" part. Even without the data manipulation (and even errors of arithmatic) you end up showing that Earth's climate changes. Something it's been doing ever since it has had a climate.
Don't you know? The party line is that they were just "local phenomena, not global." Of course, if you ask them if they have any evidence to back their assertions, they don't answer.
:)
Probably because there is evidence that these were fairly widespread. I wonder if the "warmies" would like to explain how they consider if something is "global, not local"
the global warming theorists are to the level of ridiculousness that "scientists" in the past were convinced that the earth was flat, or that the sun revolved around the earth.
The latter used complex mathematical models to try and make their theories match with reality too.
The "anti AGW folks" are doing a lot more than that, they are arguing against science, and denying reality.
This more appears to characterise the "warmies"/"AGW" lot. What the so called "climate scientists" have been doing looks very mich like "psudo-science".
Most importantly, they are trying to sabotage honest discussion and debate
Who is it who is claiming "the science is settled", "the debate is over", etc?
Even if "AGW" was false, don't you think that would be necessary anyway? Fossil fuels are in short supply - we don;t really have any option other than seeking new fuels, even if CO2 isn't an issue at all.
At best all the "carbon this", "carbon that" is a distraction. At worst it's part of the problem.
See, when you change historical data to make your model match current conditions, it's fraud. (AGW climatologists tend to throw out data that doesn't make sense to their models)
As well as manipulating whatever data does get used in strange ways. It's also interesting that the AGW advocates like to toss around the term "denier" when there's plenty of denial going on in the AGW camp. Be it to deny that the RWP, MWP, LIA even existed. Or to deny that placing sensitive neasuring equiptment near a heat source is likely to skew the results; that airports measure temperature for aviation purposes rather than to produce climate records; etc.
There are certain things that are science (easily verifiable).
1. That CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and its increased concentration does lead to overall increase in average temperature.
Ice cores show that CO2 concentration follows temperature. On the scale of the planet things are not as simple as they are in the lab.
2. That antropogenic CO2 emissions are proportionally large enough to significantly contribute to natural ones - enough so to change the atmospheric concentration balance in a pronounced way.
Since atmospheric CO2 appears to be an output of global temperature adding more is likely to make little or no difference. Also global temperature does not correspond well with human CO2 producing activities.
3. That solar activity is not a highly variable factor contributing in global average temperature in short to medium term.
The effects which are supposedly due to human activity are long term...
Yet - so many predictions made by AGW that did not come to be - but are just silently discarded and substituted with even more fearful headlines of events soon to come.
Kind of the same approach that most "psychics" use. In which case you'd test the proportion of correct predictions against those you'd expect from random chance.
The other side of the coin is "change for change's sake". If you perform an activity that doesn't require effort, change, or reduces your comfort, then you must be a slacker, even if the activity turns out to be the superior choice. Just because you think the human race is choosing the easy way, doesn't mean that the choice is wrong.
Change for its own sake carries its own set of risks.
I don't want us to respond to anthropogenic global warming as a disaster in the making until there is solid evidence that anthropogenic global warming is a disaster in the making.
If anything things are getting harder for the "warmies"/"alarmists". Whilst they never had much evidence for the "anthropogenic" bit even their claims for warming are looking suspect as more and more data manipulation (even inability to perform basic arithmatic) is discovered. That's before you even consider that the planet does not appear to behave in anything like the way these people claim it does.
They JUST figured this out!!!????
This is the problem with the green lords... they don't think ahead of the unintended consequences!
Which dosn't make them very "green" in practice.
I've HATED Corn based ethanol for YEARS... Everyone would point to some country in South America (Brazil?) about how good Ethanol was and the amount of fuel created etc... But that was end of process SUGAR CANE! NOT a major food source!
IIRC Brazil started from a position of an excess of sugarcane production. You also get more sugar, per amount of plant, from one which stores a lot of sugar in it's stem compared with one where you can only use the fruit/seeds.
I wonder if "corn ethanol" came from the same bunch of idiots who though that High Fructose Corn Syrup was a suitable replacement for sucrose.
Er, you know what LLC stands for, right? They have limited liability; what they don't have is the ability to sell stock to raise money.
The original meaning on "limited liability" is that the liability of investors is limited to their investment in the company. (Which need not equate to however much they paid through a stock market.) It has (or at least had) nothing to do with the actions of the company or it's officers.
Regardless of how you may feel about taxes, it really isn't at issue. Here we have a company breaking the law, and using its influence to avoid the consequences, and to seek special treatment under the law.
In which case they should get "special treatment". Just not the kind the asked for instead they have the FBI and IRS come visit.
If you own just one copyright, you can, without committing perjury, send a DMCA notice to anyone's ISP demanding they take something down as an infringement of your copyright.
:)
If you are sending a DMCA notice you most definitly do own one copyright. Since AFAIK DMCA notices are not exempt from copyright
Unless the law has changed recently, all DMCA notices must contain the signature of the complaining party.
In law a "signature" can be a corporate letterhead, a stamp, seal, etc. The term is not restricted to being someone's handwritten name.
If a human being had done this, we'd be charged with the felony crime of breaking and entering-
As well as burglary, since they removed the owners' property from the house.
BUT after all Bank of America isn't a human, are they?
When it comes to criminal law the idea of corporations as "people" tends to utterly fail. There's no holding a corporation in a jail before/during their trial, no such thing as bail conditions/curfew/etc which people still legally considered innocent can be subject to. Nor are there any prisons for corporations who are convicted.
Personally, I think that when stuff like this is done they should arrest the President of the corporation, process him and then throw him in a cell with the derelicts (make sure you do it on a long holiday weekend so he suffers for a few days).
Why just the president rather than the entire company executive?