It has always been like this: If you stand out, speak up or just ascend the soapbox (physically) someone might actually notice, and this someone might be your future employer, or know your future employer - or similar. Same thing today on the internet. Sure, it is easier to dig up old 'soapbox events', but at the same time there are so many more of them made by everybody else, so it's getting much harder to find the relevant ones. The net result is always about the same - most people will not be 'found out' in any major way.
Having a unique birth name might seem a disadvantage, but all the blogs I've ever been to uses nicknames and thus nothing is revealed anyway. That is unless you yourself disclose something personal (apart from your opinion of course), but then you're just either stupid or don't care. But the same with reader's comments in newspapers that could be said to be the equivivalent before the internet - you've always had the option of remaining anonymous; you just had to ask for it. As long as the newspaper had your name, they usually happily complied.
What is true though is that we need to educate people about giving out too much personal information. Children are getting there though due to the pedophile threat, but adults need to be aware as well. Don't stop participating, just think about what you reveal about yourself, that's it. Actually just: Use common sense... Too bad common sense isn't all that.. common...;)
...they think they solve the terrorism problem by impairing the intercommunication between the cells and between the organisations and possible recruits. It doesn't work! - It never has!
The only thing that works is taking out the organisations themselves - the leaders in particular. We know who they are and often where they are. Arrest or kill these people and the rest will die. It worked flawlessly in West Germany against RAF, Bader Meinhof and whatever they were called - as soon as the leaders were taken out, the rest died quickly and quietly.
It will also work now as these people we fear now are even more mindless robots controlled and manipulated by their leaders. They know nothing about reality but live in their closed and very limited world. Forcing them out into the real world will open their eyes and break the hold.
If the allegations about not paying for the music are correct, the people behind AllOfMP3 must have made a profit beyond belief. Sure some fund have gone to pay for servers, hosting and staff, plus some bribes I'm sure, but there must still be an enormous profit that must have made the owners incredibly rich. And if you are rich in Russia (and not on the Polonium 210 recipient waiting list) you can get away with everything, including simply moving the entire business elsewhere. So it must be just a matter of finding out what the new name will be and start shopping again.
The real troublesome issue here is that we again have seen the US bullying another nation into line, closely aided by (MP/RI)AA. We saw it with the highly illegal raid on The Pirate Bay in Sweden which was the result of government level pressure and thus a conflict between the separated powers (trias politica). We see the same here because there has been no trial against AllOfMP3 and thus their legality has not been questioned the proper way. That is the real thing that must be stopped.
What is the most troublesome thing about this verdict is that it has been established that ISPs must act as police in matters completely unrelated to their business - that IFPI has a dispute with AOM relating to copyright issues in Russia should not in any way affect how danish ISPs do business with their own customers in Denmark. I cannot understand how this court ruled AOM illegal as it must be legal until proved otherwise, and that can only happen in a russian court because AOM is a russian company located in Russia - and it hasn't so it must be legal in Russia and thus in Denmark.
But back to the real topic - in Denmark all ISPs have also opted in to a blocking system against child pornography. This system is dns-based so it's child's play (!) to circumvent.
Denmark (believe it or not) - because there is a 'voluntary' system (all ISPs participate anyway) to block access to known pedophile sites, and a court order for ISPs (Tele2 so far) to block access to allofmp3.com because IFPI belives it sells unauthorized copies of music. The matter is currently under appeal to a higher court, which suspends the banning order awaiting the decision. The ISPs intends to take the appeals onwards to higher courts as needed because they believe that the dispute between IFPI and allofmp3.com is a private matter they need to resolve between themselves, and that the blocking order is pure censorship intended to circumvent the international judicial system.
Anyway - if a court, which is representative of the government and its laws, orders censorship, the country would qualify for the list of countries with censorship, right? - I'd say so.
Someone on the article site claims that since nothing you do on the net is private, it doesn't matter that the CIA may be looking over everybody's shoulder. That statement is wrong on two accounts:
1) CIA is a US intelligence organisation. The net is international where the US has zero juristriction. Therefore it is very wrong if the CIA snoops on Europeans for instance.
2) You can be private on the net. Takes some effort but can be done. Today where most people are out in the open, using these hiding methods will call attention to you, which is why more people must be educated to the thought of hiding their activities even though they have nothing to hide. This way everybody regains their privacy.
Now, I'm sure a horde of people will rush in and say that need the CIA to snoop in order to protect us from [foe-of-today:terrorists]. Wrong. The terrorists are detectable through many other means. They go to terrorist meetings, they consort with other known terrorists, they receive training, they receive and distribute propaganda and so on. Stop them there and you don't need to snoop on the net. Face it, almost all the 9-11 terrorists were known in advance and they all behaved in ways that had attracted attention from all the right people. That coordination failed miserably is another story, but that has also been addressed afterwards. But they could be identified long before they were ready to become a threat and therefore they could be stopped back then as well. But nobody saw the big picture and nobody had the balls to act with partial information.
Lone lunatics (think: The Unabomber) are a different story but most of these don't have anybody to talk to (usually they don't trust anybody else) so net-snooping won't help there either.
In other words, CIA waste their time snooping on the net. There will simply be too many false positives. I mean, just the other day I got curious and looked up several types of explosives using google and wikipedia. That would probably trigger a red flag somewhere and all for nothing. I have no intention of ever getting near such things, but if the CIA waste resources on something that innocent, something else might slip through the cracks and that's dumb.
So, CenturyTel has exclusive rights to offer telecommunications service to Lake George. And they're not selling.
The obvious solution to this and other monopolies (think market exclusivities for film/music) is downright simple: Make sure the legislation includes a clause saying that any monopoly or exclusivity is null and void where not used on full market terms. In other words: If CenturyTel isn't providing DSL, someone else can, despite their 'exclusive rights'. They can't even provide a crappy basic service because if someone else wants to provide ADSL2 in the area then CenturyTel either have to do so themselves or allow someone else to do it. They simply have to keep up or drop out, losing the exclusivity.
Same thing with movies and music... If a movie isn't released in one region, import from another region and resale should be open for anyone else. Today this is actually not allowed (in Europe at least) because the rights owner can decide to keep certain titles off the market (for a while or forever) in a specific region, and they actively work to enforce this, believe it or not. Fortunately there are several loopholes so we Europeans are able to obtain the titles we want, even if they are not released here.
The majority of the energy that the world consumes today is from non-renewable sources - coal, oil, uranium and so on. These sources of energy will be depleted eventually. In 100 years oil will be scarce, easily-extractable uranium may be in short supply and coal, although still plentiful, may not be used as widely for energy as it is now.
There is enough uranium to power the entire worlds energy needs for several centuries even when these needs grow at the same rate as the global population. There are gigantic supplies locate in places where extraction may be harder than the easiest locations today but very far from impossible. Take Greenland who sits on top of the worlds (by far) richest uranium supply but they simply refuse to mine it - because they can, and they don't have to.
Now, the core issue is that the wisest way to spend money combatting CO2-emmissions is not to *reduce* emmisions but to *replace* them. We need cars and planes. Making gasoline burn more efficient can be done to a certain extent but not nearly far enough. We need something else to power our cars and planes. Driving and flying less may also have an effect but our transport needs grows so that's not an option. So, alternative fuels are nessesary and while the technology isn't ready yet, it will be soon.
But this means that we need to have patience - we simply can't do much about those emmisions right now except encourage innovation and development of these alternatives. Do note that I don't endorse any particular technology - there are many good ideas out there and the important thing is to make sure that we don't rush into anything before we are ready. The replacement technology must be comparable to gasoline in power and range, somehting which electricity isn't as yet. Current batteries are simply not good enough to provide the range and speed people needs, and for planes it is so far out of the question it is ridiculous.
But cars can be electric if batteries are improved a lot. Electric motors can easily match combustion engines in both power and durability. We know this from trains that have used electric propulsion for a century. So with much better batteries we can add solar power as a recharge method. There's not enough power in sunlight to provide realtime power to a car with a whole family inside in need of travelling at a speed comparable to a car of today. But the car can be charged while not in use and if the batteries are good enough, it will take us as far as we need to go on that charge and then while the travellers rest it can be recharged again. Sure, a lot of rest is done at night but there nothing preventing the recharge station from recharging itself during the day and then provide a charge from the storage at night.
Alternate fuels for combustion engines may also prove to be the way to go. Done right it may provide the fuel for planes which currently cannot be electric due to batteries and weight considerations. Some think of replacing cargo planes with modern airships that require hydrogen for lift and only a small amount of power for actual travel, easily supplied by electricity generated from solar power.
Just because he 'confessed' to breaking the law doesn't mean he actually broke the law.
Also, a BitTorrent tracker has absolutely nothing to do with copyright violations! - Those that upload torrents and those downloading them *may* be breaking some laws, but the tracker itself holds no data and thus cannot in any way break any laws.
If they did, we end up in an absurd situation - for instance would all automobile manufacturers and resellers long ago have been convicted for aiding and abetting countless murders, robberies and so on, not to mention their central role in all DUI-cases...
Why isn't this so then? - Well, for one only the copyright area has people crazy enough to push for absurd convictions and prosecution of their own customers, but also most people would say that an automobile has many legal uses and it is abused when used in connection with a crime... but wait! - that is exactly the case with BitTorrent trackers as well. They were invented to provide a more efficient means of download the often fairly huge Linux/BSD distros, and then someone abused the technology to seed illegal materials.
We don't ban cars even though almost all robberies involve a getaway car - they most likely could not have been executed without a car. Why ban BitTorrent when the technology is used primarily for legal purposes (I downloaded FireFox 2.0 yesterday through BitTorrent for instance) and it's not even so that most illegal filesharing is using BitTorrent; actually BitTorrent is only a minor niche compared to the huge dedicated P2P networks.
If the zombie hordes are getting smarter and they still require stupid humans to provide the medium for their existence, how long will it be before the zombies are smarter than the people owning the computers they live on? - Or has this actually happened already?
Obesity leads to poor health which leads to diffuculty in concentration, stress, lower attention span etc.
Maybe in the average population but not always... I've been overweight most of my teenage and adult life and I'm never sick - no allergies, no asthma, no diabethic problems, almost never truly sick (need for bed rest) but I do get a cold now and then (about once a year). Haven't had the flu for over a decade. I've got a fairly high IQ (quite a bit over Mensa entry requirements) and have never had any problems concentrating or multitasking. I'm a university graduate.
My parents weren't poor by any means but they were overweight as well. And smokers. My dad I suspect has about the same IQ as me although his age (just under 80) tend to numb it a little bit these days, and he has also been overweight most of his life. He's also never sick - when he retired after 52 years he had only had 7 sick days in all that time.
I think the correlation is the reverse - that low IQ tend to result in simpler jobs which cause less income which leads to lower quality diets which leads to overweight and obesity. The other way around simply doesn't work in my opinion because there's far too many exceptions just in the people around me in my own life.
Product activation. If I tried to sell you my car, but insisted on keeping the starter-kill remote, you'd tell me to go jump in the lake. For some reason, people don't subject Microsoft to the same scrutiny.
It has to do with the huge scarecrow called 'intellectual property'... For some reason the propaganda in this area has succeeded like no other, and both politicians and regular people actually believe in the 'fight piracy' mantra even though the measures almost never come anywhere close to beginning to make a dent in the actual piracy. This is why both the US and the EU gladly embrace massive unyielding monopolies in this field while they combat all other forms of monopolies and fixed-price cartels vigorously. Very contradictory... and sad because it's so futile and dumb.
It's actually very simple: As the Earth has seen substantially warmer and cooler periods as far back as millions of years before humans ever lit the first fire, something else is capable of changing the climate on a massive scale. This 'something else' has not been fully explained nor understood yet (lots of guesses though).
Now, if the average global temperature is really going up (all evidence presented so far is based on either guesswork, approximations or unproved theories), it is most unlikely that human activity is the reason for this, simply because even greater changes has happened before where no human could possibly have influenced it. It's Occam's razor in action: The simplest explaination is that previous change repeats itself, not that something new is doing the same thing, and this cannot be ruled out unless the historic changes is fully explained and understood.
My personal opinion is that if we caused the change, it is the result of 100-150 years of fossil fuel burning, and thus any reversal will require a timeframe on the same scale. Thus, our money is much better spent at adapting to the change, not trying to reverse it. Should we reverse it simply through the normal technological development (nothing forced), it will do no harm having adapted. But using all resources on reversing the change instead of adapting and too late realizing that we still have 95 years of climate problems and no money left to adapt, we're in even more trouble.
If you wanted to keep your music to yourself, you wouldn't put it on the Internet at all.
Exactly!!!
What is the difference between playing a song from your favorite MP3-player or playing it from the webpage? - Or sharing it or the URL to the webpage? - Making a song 'unsavable' is just a stupid way of exercising ultimate control. Doesn't make any difference but 'as creator I want to be in control and decide how and when' or something along those lines.
Make up your mind: Do you want to let other hear your music or not. If yes, let them. If not, keep it to yourself. It really is that simple.
Any concept designed to prevent normal and flexible use of digital music deserve to be broken.
What we need to do is come to the realization that the ONLY way to make technically fragile public transit work is to promote an atmosphere where people do not want to attack us, instead of trying to prevent the few who do from being able to. "They" will always be able to, especially with increasingly cheap and effective technology.
Pleasing everybody requires unconditional sacrifices and the trouble with the (extremist) muslims are that they will only accept unconditional surrender to their point of view. They don't want a Palestine, they want Israel wiped from the face of the Earth and Palestine in its place. They don't want us to accept their way of life, they want us to conform to their way of life, no exceptions. As long as we insist on human rights, freedom of religion and so on, we're an abomination that needs to be eradicated. There is no way to please without giving up everything we cherish, and that is just not an option for the vast majority of the western world.
So the option of not annoying anyone enough for them to feel the need to attack us with terrorism is quite simply a non-option. We have to accept that in order for us to defend our basic principles someone out there is going to feel wronged and might resort to violence and terrorism. And sometimes terrorists attack without any other reason than their base philosophy - just think of Brigatto Rosso, Bader Meinhof, Rote Armé Fraktion etc. - they did their terrorism solely as a starting point for their so-called revolution.
We therefore have to plan for terror defense in any case. It is obvious and logical. The trouble comes from executing this defense in a manner that doesn't erode civil or human rights. Nobody has gotten that right yet.
I don't think a court would call the lawsuits harassment.
Well, it is harassment in laymans terms. Not only has it never been proven that there is a single cent of loss from file sharing, but RIAA sue completely indiscriminately, including long dead people, 80-year old grandmothers that never owned a computer and so on. It's not a dispute of settlement, it's purely business: Protecting their outdated business models and laying a foundation for later suits. Each time someone pays up, they can state admission of guilt and assign a value to the otherwise nonexistant loss.
...so the vast majority of windows users are going to move over to IE7 with-in a year or two.
Only those using XP (or Vista)... IE7 will not be availiable to people running W2K or older Windows versions, and W2K still holds a huge share of the users (50%+) so I expect these people to switch to Firefox or Opera instead of paying $$$ for an upgrade of the so-called OS in order to use tabs or a more standards compliant browser, now that Microsoft has decided to give them the finger instead of a new browser.
Encryption should be on EVERYTHING, be it legal or not.
Exactly. I routinely encrypt my harddrives for that very reason. There's not much illegal stuff there except for the occasional temporary movie (or mp3) downloaded in order to watch it (or listen to it) while everybody's talking about it, not when it suits the companies to release it here (usually months later). If the movie or song is crap it is deleted right away. If it is good, I hang on to it until I actually can buy it. Then it is deleted and I make my own rip.
Anyway, the encryption is there only to make it hard for anyone going through my data to discover anything without my cooperation. And I will only cooperate if I accept the reasons for them wanting it. In other words, I want the right to exclusively decide who's to access those data and who's not. I'm not hiding something, I'm hiding everything. After all, the government sits on many exabytes of so-called secret information that really belong to all of us, and if they can decide that we the people shouldn't have access, we certainly can and should decide to deny them access to our data as well. It's simply the principle of it.
Now, I wasn't advocating anything in particular when making that post - I was only commenting on the climate in which this debate is conducted and the pseudo-religious aspects of the arguments presented by at least one side of the issue.
But it is no secret that personally I stress the use of caution when reacting to anything, which includes this apparent man-made global warming. Way too often we see the quick fixes to be anything but fixes, because in the rush to implement, important things are overlooked both in the issue itself and the proposed solution.
I am not in any way convinced that cutting back on CO2-emmisions will fix anything now. I think we're 100 years too late on that account if the warming is man-made. I think the best course of action now is to adapt to the changes we think is coming. This will save us regardless of the true cause of warming (natural or man-made). Spending fortunes on cutting back CO2-emmisions will not help us if the warming turns out to be entirely natural, or requiring more than CO2-cutbacks.
It is also important not to loose too much economic surplus in this initial effort because if everything we know turns out to be wrong (and our efforts wasted), we'll urgently need the money to survive without a trip back around the stone age.
The oil companies and right-wing have poured millions for many years into discrediting global warming and environmentalists in general.
Now, I don't particulary support the oil companies (don't even own a car, and I even walk most places as 'suggested' in this spoof) but I think the global warming scare has been blown so much out of proportion that it has begun to look a lot like a religious cult where facts and reality has stopped being important at all, and the core idea is bigger than anything.
Nobody stops up anymore and questions anything. It is now considered a fact carved in stone that global warming occurs, that it is entirely man-made and that the right action by man absolutely will fix everything. It is heresy to even consider that some or all of the effects seen might be the result of some natural process not understood completely. It is downright blasphemy to even hint that the suggested actions intended to fix things actually might make things worse (due to lack of understanding of the deeper issues).
I think it's time for some serious de-programming here.
At work we've set up a combination of SpamAssassin and Spamhaus. Personally I've went from about 10 spams per day to about 1 every two weeks.
Amazing! - We've been using that combo for a long time and I get about 5-10 spams AN HOUR coming through the filters (and about the same amount caught). This is all personalized spam sent to one specific email address. That address was used in the past for a few newsgroup postings, a few technical forums and it was listed on a webpage some time ago. No spam sent to it was ever opened with an unsafe email client, i.e. no phone-home webbug activity possible to verify it. The mailserver it lives on never supported VRFY.
My experience is that current spam has defeated both the Razor system and the Bayes system as well by simply making each spam extremely unique in every part of the content (and headers too). We get the best blockage using the old but still trusty RBLs (excluding SPEWS which lists way too much).
If the action should be justified, we're talking an army of kids armed with chainsaws and other powertools cutting down dozens of trees while they yelled obscene words and tortured the wildlife encountered. Three children breaking off a few branches by hand should never EVER result in any form of police action. Why call the police and not just go to the tree and tell the kids to please stop? - It's not like these kids looked like hardline gang members (picture available in the article)... But I guess it's easier to call the cops and exaggerate enough for them to come.
Hmmm... I wonder whether the report that caused the police response where akin to the first variant decribed above ("Help, a gang of kids are destroying or cherry trees!") or something else. Anyway, I sure once the police actually showed up they had to make up something in order not to look too stupid. They failed miserably though.
Oh sure, they kidnapped 2 Israeli soldiers, how could I forget! But is that reason enough to slaughter 450+ civilians? If a para-military group in Canada kidnaps 2 people, do you start bombing Toronto?
No, you ask Toronto to find and arrest and hand over those who did it, freeing the hostages in the process. Then the kidnappers get prosecuted and that's that.
Israel did ask the Lebanese government to help freeing the kidnapped soldiers but they couldn't or wouldn't help. Then Israel had to go do it themselves, but the restance from the kidnappers forced an escalation into a full military conflict.
Slashdot Mirror
It has always been like this: If you stand out, speak up or just ascend the soapbox (physically) someone might actually notice, and this someone might be your future employer, or know your future employer - or similar. Same thing today on the internet. Sure, it is easier to dig up old 'soapbox events', but at the same time there are so many more of them made by everybody else, so it's getting much harder to find the relevant ones. The net result is always about the same - most people will not be 'found out' in any major way.
;)
Having a unique birth name might seem a disadvantage, but all the blogs I've ever been to uses nicknames and thus nothing is revealed anyway. That is unless you yourself disclose something personal (apart from your opinion of course), but then you're just either stupid or don't care. But the same with reader's comments in newspapers that could be said to be the equivivalent before the internet - you've always had the option of remaining anonymous; you just had to ask for it. As long as the newspaper had your name, they usually happily complied.
What is true though is that we need to educate people about giving out too much personal information. Children are getting there though due to the pedophile threat, but adults need to be aware as well. Don't stop participating, just think about what you reveal about yourself, that's it. Actually just: Use common sense... Too bad common sense isn't all that.. common...
...they think they solve the terrorism problem by impairing the intercommunication between the cells and between the organisations and possible recruits. It doesn't work! - It never has!
The only thing that works is taking out the organisations themselves - the leaders in particular. We know who they are and often where they are. Arrest or kill these people and the rest will die. It worked flawlessly in West Germany against RAF, Bader Meinhof and whatever they were called - as soon as the leaders were taken out, the rest died quickly and quietly.
It will also work now as these people we fear now are even more mindless robots controlled and manipulated by their leaders. They know nothing about reality but live in their closed and very limited world. Forcing them out into the real world will open their eyes and break the hold.
If the allegations about not paying for the music are correct, the people behind AllOfMP3 must have made a profit beyond belief. Sure some fund have gone to pay for servers, hosting and staff, plus some bribes I'm sure, but there must still be an enormous profit that must have made the owners incredibly rich. And if you are rich in Russia (and not on the Polonium 210 recipient waiting list) you can get away with everything, including simply moving the entire business elsewhere. So it must be just a matter of finding out what the new name will be and start shopping again.
The real troublesome issue here is that we again have seen the US bullying another nation into line, closely aided by (MP/RI)AA. We saw it with the highly illegal raid on The Pirate Bay in Sweden which was the result of government level pressure and thus a conflict between the separated powers (trias politica). We see the same here because there has been no trial against AllOfMP3 and thus their legality has not been questioned the proper way. That is the real thing that must be stopped.
What is the most troublesome thing about this verdict is that it has been established that ISPs must act as police in matters completely unrelated to their business - that IFPI has a dispute with AOM relating to copyright issues in Russia should not in any way affect how danish ISPs do business with their own customers in Denmark. I cannot understand how this court ruled AOM illegal as it must be legal until proved otherwise, and that can only happen in a russian court because AOM is a russian company located in Russia - and it hasn't so it must be legal in Russia and thus in Denmark.
But back to the real topic - in Denmark all ISPs have also opted in to a blocking system against child pornography. This system is dns-based so it's child's play (!) to circumvent.
Denmark (believe it or not) - because there is a 'voluntary' system (all ISPs participate anyway) to block access to known pedophile sites, and a court order for ISPs (Tele2 so far) to block access to allofmp3.com because IFPI belives it sells unauthorized copies of music. The matter is currently under appeal to a higher court, which suspends the banning order awaiting the decision. The ISPs intends to take the appeals onwards to higher courts as needed because they believe that the dispute between IFPI and allofmp3.com is a private matter they need to resolve between themselves, and that the blocking order is pure censorship intended to circumvent the international judicial system.
Anyway - if a court, which is representative of the government and its laws, orders censorship, the country would qualify for the list of countries with censorship, right? - I'd say so.
...only authorized republican-minded Diabold-techs can manipulate the results!
Someone on the article site claims that since nothing you do on the net is private, it doesn't matter that the CIA may be looking over everybody's shoulder. That statement is wrong on two accounts:
1) CIA is a US intelligence organisation. The net is international where the US has zero juristriction. Therefore it is very wrong if the CIA snoops on Europeans for instance.
2) You can be private on the net. Takes some effort but can be done. Today where most people are out in the open, using these hiding methods will call attention to you, which is why more people must be educated to the thought of hiding their activities even though they have nothing to hide. This way everybody regains their privacy.
Now, I'm sure a horde of people will rush in and say that need the CIA to snoop in order to protect us from [foe-of-today:terrorists]. Wrong. The terrorists are detectable through many other means. They go to terrorist meetings, they consort with other known terrorists, they receive training, they receive and distribute propaganda and so on. Stop them there and you don't need to snoop on the net. Face it, almost all the 9-11 terrorists were known in advance and they all behaved in ways that had attracted attention from all the right people. That coordination failed miserably is another story, but that has also been addressed afterwards. But they could be identified long before they were ready to become a threat and therefore they could be stopped back then as well. But nobody saw the big picture and nobody had the balls to act with partial information.
Lone lunatics (think: The Unabomber) are a different story but most of these don't have anybody to talk to (usually they don't trust anybody else) so net-snooping won't help there either.
In other words, CIA waste their time snooping on the net. There will simply be too many false positives. I mean, just the other day I got curious and looked up several types of explosives using google and wikipedia. That would probably trigger a red flag somewhere and all for nothing. I have no intention of ever getting near such things, but if the CIA waste resources on something that innocent, something else might slip through the cracks and that's dumb.
So, CenturyTel has exclusive rights to offer telecommunications service to Lake George. And they're not selling.
The obvious solution to this and other monopolies (think market exclusivities for film/music) is downright simple: Make sure the legislation includes a clause saying that any monopoly or exclusivity is null and void where not used on full market terms. In other words: If CenturyTel isn't providing DSL, someone else can, despite their 'exclusive rights'. They can't even provide a crappy basic service because if someone else wants to provide ADSL2 in the area then CenturyTel either have to do so themselves or allow someone else to do it. They simply have to keep up or drop out, losing the exclusivity.
Same thing with movies and music... If a movie isn't released in one region, import from another region and resale should be open for anyone else. Today this is actually not allowed (in Europe at least) because the rights owner can decide to keep certain titles off the market (for a while or forever) in a specific region, and they actively work to enforce this, believe it or not. Fortunately there are several loopholes so we Europeans are able to obtain the titles we want, even if they are not released here.
The majority of the energy that the world consumes today is from non-renewable sources - coal, oil, uranium and so on. These sources of energy will be depleted eventually. In 100 years oil will be scarce, easily-extractable uranium may be in short supply and coal, although still plentiful, may not be used as widely for energy as it is now.
There is enough uranium to power the entire worlds energy needs for several centuries even when these needs grow at the same rate as the global population. There are gigantic supplies locate in places where extraction may be harder than the easiest locations today but very far from impossible. Take Greenland who sits on top of the worlds (by far) richest uranium supply but they simply refuse to mine it - because they can, and they don't have to.
Now, the core issue is that the wisest way to spend money combatting CO2-emmissions is not to *reduce* emmisions but to *replace* them. We need cars and planes. Making gasoline burn more efficient can be done to a certain extent but not nearly far enough. We need something else to power our cars and planes. Driving and flying less may also have an effect but our transport needs grows so that's not an option. So, alternative fuels are nessesary and while the technology isn't ready yet, it will be soon.
But this means that we need to have patience - we simply can't do much about those emmisions right now except encourage innovation and development of these alternatives. Do note that I don't endorse any particular technology - there are many good ideas out there and the important thing is to make sure that we don't rush into anything before we are ready. The replacement technology must be comparable to gasoline in power and range, somehting which electricity isn't as yet. Current batteries are simply not good enough to provide the range and speed people needs, and for planes it is so far out of the question it is ridiculous.
But cars can be electric if batteries are improved a lot. Electric motors can easily match combustion engines in both power and durability. We know this from trains that have used electric propulsion for a century. So with much better batteries we can add solar power as a recharge method. There's not enough power in sunlight to provide realtime power to a car with a whole family inside in need of travelling at a speed comparable to a car of today. But the car can be charged while not in use and if the batteries are good enough, it will take us as far as we need to go on that charge and then while the travellers rest it can be recharged again. Sure, a lot of rest is done at night but there nothing preventing the recharge station from recharging itself during the day and then provide a charge from the storage at night.
Alternate fuels for combustion engines may also prove to be the way to go. Done right it may provide the fuel for planes which currently cannot be electric due to batteries and weight considerations. Some think of replacing cargo planes with modern airships that require hydrogen for lift and only a small amount of power for actual travel, easily supplied by electricity generated from solar power.
Just because he 'confessed' to breaking the law doesn't mean he actually broke the law.
Also, a BitTorrent tracker has absolutely nothing to do with copyright violations! - Those that upload torrents and those downloading them *may* be breaking some laws, but the tracker itself holds no data and thus cannot in any way break any laws.
If they did, we end up in an absurd situation - for instance would all automobile manufacturers and resellers long ago have been convicted for aiding and abetting countless murders, robberies and so on, not to mention their central role in all DUI-cases...
Why isn't this so then? - Well, for one only the copyright area has people crazy enough to push for absurd convictions and prosecution of their own customers, but also most people would say that an automobile has many legal uses and it is abused when used in connection with a crime... but wait! - that is exactly the case with BitTorrent trackers as well. They were invented to provide a more efficient means of download the often fairly huge Linux/BSD distros, and then someone abused the technology to seed illegal materials.
We don't ban cars even though almost all robberies involve a getaway car - they most likely could not have been executed without a car. Why ban BitTorrent when the technology is used primarily for legal purposes (I downloaded FireFox 2.0 yesterday through BitTorrent for instance) and it's not even so that most illegal filesharing is using BitTorrent; actually BitTorrent is only a minor niche compared to the huge dedicated P2P networks.
If the zombie hordes are getting smarter and they still require stupid humans to provide the medium for their existence, how long will it be before the zombies are smarter than the people owning the computers they live on? - Or has this actually happened already?
Obesity leads to poor health which leads to diffuculty in concentration, stress, lower attention span etc.
Maybe in the average population but not always... I've been overweight most of my teenage and adult life and I'm never sick - no allergies, no asthma, no diabethic problems, almost never truly sick (need for bed rest) but I do get a cold now and then (about once a year). Haven't had the flu for over a decade. I've got a fairly high IQ (quite a bit over Mensa entry requirements) and have never had any problems concentrating or multitasking. I'm a university graduate.
My parents weren't poor by any means but they were overweight as well. And smokers. My dad I suspect has about the same IQ as me although his age (just under 80) tend to numb it a little bit these days, and he has also been overweight most of his life. He's also never sick - when he retired after 52 years he had only had 7 sick days in all that time.
I think the correlation is the reverse - that low IQ tend to result in simpler jobs which cause less income which leads to lower quality diets which leads to overweight and obesity. The other way around simply doesn't work in my opinion because there's far too many exceptions just in the people around me in my own life.
Product activation. If I tried to sell you my car, but insisted on keeping the starter-kill remote, you'd tell me to go jump in the lake. For some reason, people don't subject Microsoft to the same scrutiny.
It has to do with the huge scarecrow called 'intellectual property'... For some reason the propaganda in this area has succeeded like no other, and both politicians and regular people actually believe in the 'fight piracy' mantra even though the measures almost never come anywhere close to beginning to make a dent in the actual piracy. This is why both the US and the EU gladly embrace massive unyielding monopolies in this field while they combat all other forms of monopolies and fixed-price cartels vigorously. Very contradictory... and sad because it's so futile and dumb.
It's actually very simple: As the Earth has seen substantially warmer and cooler periods as far back as millions of years before humans ever lit the first fire, something else is capable of changing the climate on a massive scale. This 'something else' has not been fully explained nor understood yet (lots of guesses though).
Now, if the average global temperature is really going up (all evidence presented so far is based on either guesswork, approximations or unproved theories), it is most unlikely that human activity is the reason for this, simply because even greater changes has happened before where no human could possibly have influenced it. It's Occam's razor in action: The simplest explaination is that previous change repeats itself, not that something new is doing the same thing, and this cannot be ruled out unless the historic changes is fully explained and understood.
My personal opinion is that if we caused the change, it is the result of 100-150 years of fossil fuel burning, and thus any reversal will require a timeframe on the same scale. Thus, our money is much better spent at adapting to the change, not trying to reverse it. Should we reverse it simply through the normal technological development (nothing forced), it will do no harm having adapted. But using all resources on reversing the change instead of adapting and too late realizing that we still have 95 years of climate problems and no money left to adapt, we're in even more trouble.
If you wanted to keep your music to yourself, you wouldn't put it on the Internet at all.
Exactly!!!
What is the difference between playing a song from your favorite MP3-player or playing it from the webpage? - Or sharing it or the URL to the webpage? - Making a song 'unsavable' is just a stupid way of exercising ultimate control. Doesn't make any difference but 'as creator I want to be in control and decide how and when' or something along those lines.
Make up your mind: Do you want to let other hear your music or not. If yes, let them. If not, keep it to yourself. It really is that simple.
Any concept designed to prevent normal and flexible use of digital music deserve to be broken.
What we need to do is come to the realization that the ONLY way to make technically fragile public transit work is to promote an atmosphere where people do not want to attack us, instead of trying to prevent the few who do from being able to. "They" will always be able to, especially with increasingly cheap and effective technology.
Pleasing everybody requires unconditional sacrifices and the trouble with the (extremist) muslims are that they will only accept unconditional surrender to their point of view. They don't want a Palestine, they want Israel wiped from the face of the Earth and Palestine in its place. They don't want us to accept their way of life, they want us to conform to their way of life, no exceptions. As long as we insist on human rights, freedom of religion and so on, we're an abomination that needs to be eradicated. There is no way to please without giving up everything we cherish, and that is just not an option for the vast majority of the western world.
So the option of not annoying anyone enough for them to feel the need to attack us with terrorism is quite simply a non-option. We have to accept that in order for us to defend our basic principles someone out there is going to feel wronged and might resort to violence and terrorism. And sometimes terrorists attack without any other reason than their base philosophy - just think of Brigatto Rosso, Bader Meinhof, Rote Armé Fraktion etc. - they did their terrorism solely as a starting point for their so-called revolution.
We therefore have to plan for terror defense in any case. It is obvious and logical. The trouble comes from executing this defense in a manner that doesn't erode civil or human rights. Nobody has gotten that right yet.
I don't think a court would call the lawsuits harassment.
Well, it is harassment in laymans terms. Not only has it never been proven that there is a single cent of loss from file sharing, but RIAA sue completely indiscriminately, including long dead people, 80-year old grandmothers that never owned a computer and so on. It's not a dispute of settlement, it's purely business: Protecting their outdated business models and laying a foundation for later suits. Each time someone pays up, they can state admission of guilt and assign a value to the otherwise nonexistant loss.
...so the vast majority of windows users are going to move over to IE7 with-in a year or two.
Only those using XP (or Vista)... IE7 will not be availiable to people running W2K or older Windows versions, and W2K still holds a huge share of the users (50%+) so I expect these people to switch to Firefox or Opera instead of paying $$$ for an upgrade of the so-called OS in order to use tabs or a more standards compliant browser, now that Microsoft has decided to give them the finger instead of a new browser.
And 67.32% of all statistics are made up... ;)
Encryption should be on EVERYTHING, be it legal or not.
Exactly. I routinely encrypt my harddrives for that very reason. There's not much illegal stuff there except for the occasional temporary movie (or mp3) downloaded in order to watch it (or listen to it) while everybody's talking about it, not when it suits the companies to release it here (usually months later). If the movie or song is crap it is deleted right away. If it is good, I hang on to it until I actually can buy it. Then it is deleted and I make my own rip.
Anyway, the encryption is there only to make it hard for anyone going through my data to discover anything without my cooperation. And I will only cooperate if I accept the reasons for them wanting it. In other words, I want the right to exclusively decide who's to access those data and who's not. I'm not hiding something, I'm hiding everything. After all, the government sits on many exabytes of so-called secret information that really belong to all of us, and if they can decide that we the people shouldn't have access, we certainly can and should decide to deny them access to our data as well. It's simply the principle of it.
Now, I wasn't advocating anything in particular when making that post - I was only commenting on the climate in which this debate is conducted and the pseudo-religious aspects of the arguments presented by at least one side of the issue.
But it is no secret that personally I stress the use of caution when reacting to anything, which includes this apparent man-made global warming. Way too often we see the quick fixes to be anything but fixes, because in the rush to implement, important things are overlooked both in the issue itself and the proposed solution.
I am not in any way convinced that cutting back on CO2-emmisions will fix anything now. I think we're 100 years too late on that account if the warming is man-made. I think the best course of action now is to adapt to the changes we think is coming. This will save us regardless of the true cause of warming (natural or man-made). Spending fortunes on cutting back CO2-emmisions will not help us if the warming turns out to be entirely natural, or requiring more than CO2-cutbacks.
It is also important not to loose too much economic surplus in this initial effort because if everything we know turns out to be wrong (and our efforts wasted), we'll urgently need the money to survive without a trip back around the stone age.
The oil companies and right-wing have poured millions for many years into discrediting global warming and environmentalists in general.
Now, I don't particulary support the oil companies (don't even own a car, and I even walk most places as 'suggested' in this spoof) but I think the global warming scare has been blown so much out of proportion that it has begun to look a lot like a religious cult where facts and reality has stopped being important at all, and the core idea is bigger than anything.
Nobody stops up anymore and questions anything. It is now considered a fact carved in stone that global warming occurs, that it is entirely man-made and that the right action by man absolutely will fix everything. It is heresy to even consider that some or all of the effects seen might be the result of some natural process not understood completely. It is downright blasphemy to even hint that the suggested actions intended to fix things actually might make things worse (due to lack of understanding of the deeper issues).
I think it's time for some serious de-programming here.
At work we've set up a combination of SpamAssassin and Spamhaus. Personally I've went from about 10 spams per day to about 1 every two weeks.
Amazing! - We've been using that combo for a long time and I get about 5-10 spams AN HOUR coming through the filters (and about the same amount caught). This is all personalized spam sent to one specific email address. That address was used in the past for a few newsgroup postings, a few technical forums and it was listed on a webpage some time ago. No spam sent to it was ever opened with an unsafe email client, i.e. no phone-home webbug activity possible to verify it. The mailserver it lives on never supported VRFY.
My experience is that current spam has defeated both the Razor system and the Bayes system as well by simply making each spam extremely unique in every part of the content (and headers too). We get the best blockage using the old but still trusty RBLs (excluding SPEWS which lists way too much).
If the action should be justified, we're talking an army of kids armed with chainsaws and other powertools cutting down dozens of trees while they yelled obscene words and tortured the wildlife encountered. Three children breaking off a few branches by hand should never EVER result in any form of police action. Why call the police and not just go to the tree and tell the kids to please stop? - It's not like these kids looked like hardline gang members (picture available in the article)... But I guess it's easier to call the cops and exaggerate enough for them to come.
Hmmm... I wonder whether the report that caused the police response where akin to the first variant decribed above ("Help, a gang of kids are destroying or cherry trees!") or something else. Anyway, I sure once the police actually showed up they had to make up something in order not to look too stupid. They failed miserably though.
Oh sure, they kidnapped 2 Israeli soldiers, how could I forget! But is that reason enough to slaughter 450+ civilians? If a para-military group in Canada kidnaps 2 people, do you start bombing Toronto?
No, you ask Toronto to find and arrest and hand over those who did it, freeing the hostages in the process. Then the kidnappers get prosecuted and that's that.
Israel did ask the Lebanese government to help freeing the kidnapped soldiers but they couldn't or wouldn't help. Then Israel had to go do it themselves, but the restance from the kidnappers forced an escalation into a full military conflict.