Gold has intrinsic value based on its scarcity and usefulness.
What is the usefulness of gold that makes it intrinsically valuable? Can I eat a lump of gold? Or build a shelter using it? Use it to heat or light my home? Can gold purify my drinking water, or cure me if I'm ill?
Apart from a few specialist industrial applications, the only uses of gold are decorative, and "ooh, shiny" doesn't strike me as a particularly good basis for arguing that something is intrinsically valuable. (I'm ignoring the use of gold as currency or a store of wealth, since that presupposes that it is valuable, which begs the question of why gold is intrinsically valuable.)
Living as part of a society inherently involves making trade-offs for the greater good. Public services (such as law enforcement, fire fighting, national defence) require funding, which implies taxation and therefore a restriction on your freedom to send your money on whatever you want. Unless you reject entirely the concept of the state in favour of anarchy, you are accepting certain restrictions on your freedom that give collective benefits.
When he was lying on the ground refusing to move, the appropriate response from the police is not to give him repeated electric shocks, it is to pick him up (one to each limb, like this) and carry him out. The purpose of a taser is to subdue a violent person, not to force someone who is passively resisting to comply.
So are coffee, cakes, and most biscuits (but not chocolate coated biscuits, which lead to a court case over whether Jaffa Cakes, which are the size and shape of a biscuit, are biscuits or cakes. The tax man lost.)
Even better, popcorn is standard rated (17.5%) but corn for popping is zero rated. Yay for lazyness taxes!
So your basic idea is that the the ISP should trust outside sources but not the customers?
No, the ISPs should look at the evidence supplied by the outside source (who, in this case is the BPI claiming copyright infringment, but could euqally be me reporting a customer of theirs sending spam or hosting a phishing website,) try to confirm it for themselves, and ask the customer about it. They should then make a decision based on all of those factors.
If the BPI doesn't even go to court, what would the reasonability be about there being an illegal activity?
It can be perfectly reasonable to believe criminal activity has taken place without anything going to court - for example, whoever it was who cut through my bike lock and nicked my bike last summer committed theft but there's no chance they'll be done for it, or consider the people I know who regularly smoke cannabis who are committing a criminal offence (posession) but are unlikely to ever be prosecuted for it.
>The way this works, the BPI is asking the ISP's to enforce their Acceptable Use
>Policies. Since the AUP's UK users agree to are pretty draconian in order to get
>internet access, the ISP has the right to terminate our accounts at any time
>based upon breach of them. Of course, the ISP's don't actually monitor the
>traffic as such, because then they might be expected to catch all of the dodgy
>traffic going across their wires.
And how would the ISP now if you breached the contract in this particular case? Because someone just tells them they think that is the case? Should an ISP (or any part that enters into a contract) just accept any notice of breach by anyone? Of course not.
An ISP can, and should, listen to complaints about the behaviour of its customers from anyone. They should not, of course, do anything unless the complaint includes good enough evidence that the customer has breached thwe contact between them and the ISP. When I send a complaint to an ISP about a spammer on their network, I include as much evidence as I can, and I would assume that the BPI have done the same.
In this particular case, the relevant part is if you do something illegal, only the police or courts can decide if you have done so. Unless they say so, you have not commited an illegal activity and hence have not breached the contract no matter how many outsiders may say so.
What makes you say that? The contract between ISP and customer could quite easily be worded in a way which mean that the ISP doesn't have to wait for a court to decide before they can cut off the customer. For example, my own ISP's terms of use state: 9.2 You shall not use the Services...to send, knowingly receive, upload, download, use or re-use any material which is...in breach of any copyright. 9.3 We shall have the right to enforce such provisions set out in paragraph 9.2 above by suspending or terminating in whole or in part the provision of the affected Services at our option to you if we reasonably believe that you are in breach of such obligations. (Emphasis mine.)
They don't need to go to court, they don't need to be able to prove it beyond reasonable doubt, they only need to have a reasonable belief that a customer is in breach of that section (which also covers things like sending spam) to terminate service for that customer.
>Of course, the customer could start a civil suit against the ISP for breach of
>contract (good luck with that!),
Quite easy, they have a contract for an internet service and is not geting any at all. How hard is THAT?
You're missing a bit - they have a contract for an internet service that is conditional on them not doing certain things and is not geting any at all. Looking again at my ISP's terms, to be successful in a case for breach of contract against the ISP, a customer would have to show that on the balance of probabilities the ISP's belief that they had breached that section wasn't reasonable.
i'm sure all they had to do is ask google and they would've complied. some people (and companies) like to bitch (file lawsuit) first / think later (or not at all).
According to the article they did ask, and Google said that they couldn't do it: "Van Laere said he was told by Google that Web sites with illegal content would be removed from their index, but that it couldn't tweak the Suggest feature." Interesting how being sued can suddenly make the impossible possible...
Oh, how I long for the day when the word "Phonographic" can be used in a Slashdot article without that lame excuse for a joke being made. But that day's not going to come, it is?
Fair point, but saying he "predicted" it sounds cooler than saying he "guessed" it:-)
Interestingly (for some value of interesting) all of the last five days had been guessed, and so had all of next week, but the four days in between (2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th) had no guesses. If it had taken an hour longer for the 1 million mark to be reached, no-one's guess would have been correct.
As an AC has mentioned, redirects are not included in the article count. Figures from December had 35% of articles tagged as stubs, and an average of 2798 bytes per article.
... and it's interesting that so many of the contestants are Welsh. Bless 'em!
It's probably just that their minds are a bit wooly...
(I'd like to apologise to any Welse readers who this may have offended, here's a little something to make it up.
If UK law doesn't considered this sort of computer act to be illegal what else isn't? What is illegal?
The Computer Misuse Act 1990 created three offences: unauthorised access to computer material, unauthorised access with intent to commit or facilitate commission of further offences, and unauthorised modification of computer material. In this case, the judge ruled that a DoS isn't an unauthorised modification because the modification to the server caused by each individual email was authorised. Earlier this year, there was a bill proposed in parliament which would have made DoS attacks illegal, but the general election got in the way.
No, this is a company which sells subdomains of the domain name uk.com. It is no different from the owners of dyndns.org or cjb.net offering subdomains of their domain names.
Does that "loser" pays policy work even if the loser is a defendent? I can understand if the loser is the plaintiff, but a defendent?
Potentially, yes. Any order to pay costs is at the court's discretion, and it's not even necessarily the theoretical loser who pays. For example, footballer Bruce Grobbelaar sued newspaper The Sun for libel after it claimed he had taken bribes to fix matches. (He did take the money, but it couldn't be proved that he was actually involved in any match-fixing.) After appealing all the way to the House of Lords, Grobbelaar won, but was awarded just £1 damages, and he was ordered to pay The Sun's costs. (See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2515889.stm)
That is an extreme example, but it does show how it's not quite as simple as "loser pays" suggests.
the average hash length is 2, compared to 3 for the plaintexts.
If a length field has to be stored along with the hashes, the average increases by the size of the length field. Since the lengths are up to three digits, we need a two-bit length field, and by prepending the length on to your original hash, we get:
And now the average hash length is 4 (i.e. longer than the plaintexts), and the best case has no decrease in the number of bits compared to the plaintext.
If you have n distinct symbols, then to represent each one with a unique bit string, you must use, on average, log2(n) bits per symbol. Lossless compression works by exploiting the fact that not all symbols occur with equal frequency, and assigns shorter symbols to more frequent symbols. But any lossless compression system must have some inputs that result in an output larger than the input, otherwise there would have to be different inputs which generate the same "compressed" output, and so a correct decompression would be impossible.
I am going on the emails sent by Bristol Indymedia to the Bristol Social Forum mailing list, and what I remember from the site before it went down.
My understanding is that at this point they informed the police that they *didn't have the information*, so couldn't hand it over.
This email to BSF, on the 24th, says "the solicitor contacted CID [i.e. the police] on the 21st to inform them that they could not have the server, or access to it". Comments on UK Indymedia state that no IP logs are kept; the person who contacted police apparently said there were logs. Maybe I misinterpreted the statement by Bristol Indymedia.
There's also some doubt over whether or not he was arrested -- the account I saw said he was simply "helping with enquiries" (which probably means he *would* be arrested if he refused to help, but hasn't been yet).
From the message to BSF announcing the seizure: "They seized from the property the persons personal computer, as well as the Bristol Indymedia server. The member of the [Bristol Indymedia] collective has also been taken into custody, although his partner was told this was just for a 'chat' and he'd be home soon!?" To me, the wording "taken into custody" means he was arrested. Also, someone posting on UK Indymedia under then name "Friend of BIM" has refered to this person as having been arrested.
The FBI issue a supoena to Rackspace (A US-based hosting company, who were hosting the Indymedia servers in their UK facility.)
Rackspace co-operate with the FBI, and hand over the servers
As far as I know, no information about what the Swiss and Italians wanted from the servers was released, but it has been suggested that is was relted to photos from the 2003 Switzerland G8 summit.
The Bristol seizure yesterday:
An anonymous author post this message, on 17th June:
with the G8 on the horizon, we looked for a simple yet effective way to stick two fingers up to this oil-addicted society.we found one! a train that carries brand-new cars from portbury dock nr avonmouth through the avon gorge to ashton and bedminster to desperse at temple meads for the rest of the country. Some
questions that came into our little minds were:is portbury dock fianancially-competative? [yes], who paid for the tracks and maintance from portbury to parson St bedminster?. has anyone ever seen a passenger train on this route?,and sitting on a hot coach because you can't afford hiked-up train fayres, you see yet more new cars you can't afford to buy being transported by rail,to consume more oil, that our enviroment can't take. So we did an oxygen-grab as a kind of work-out
up to the summit.Lifting and then dropping rocks onto useless pieces of metal.[17/06/05] We are feeling fit now for the greedy-ate, we suggest others should take aim and practice. The forth-coming event around gleneagles will not automatically mean a head-on confrontation with the old-bill, they have more spiteful weapons than us, so let us side step them and unbalance them using our minds. good luck stay free, S.P. ray.
(copy & paste from my Firefox cache.) This post was hidden within 24 hours, for violating Bristol Indymedia (BIM) policy. (I don't know exactly when it was hidden.)
An individual with a history of conflict and disagreement with BIM then contacted police about the post, since it hints that the poster threw rocks at trains, or the cargo on trains, or the train tracks ("dropping rocks onto useless pieces of metal.")
Police initally contacted BIM last monday, 20th June. BIM take legal advice.
Police request IP logs from a BIM member on 21th June.
Later on the 21st, BIM inform police via their solicitor that they will not voluntarily hand over and information. (NB: for non-Brits, a solicitor is a type of lawyer.) BIM also inform Indymedia UK at this point, and contact Liberty
Yesterday, 27th June, police visit the home of the BIM member who hosted the server with a search warrant, and seize the BIM server and the individual's own computer, and arrest the BIM member.
Various posters on Indymedia sites have suggested that police may be trying to shut down Indymedia sites in the run up to the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, next month. I doubt that, in general, that is the case (Indymedia sites can be quite helpful to police, since they can use them to find out about planned actions, and spot people bragging about what they've done.) This appears to me to be more like someone with a grudge against Bristol Indymedia causing the police to act a bit excessively in a criminal investigation.
You miss the point. There are people who do subscribe to mailing lists and then report those same lists as spam when they no longer want to be on those lists. That is:
user@example.com subscribes to a list
Some time passes, during which the user receives list mail...
The user decides they don't want that list email any more. But the user doesn't unsubscribe from the list, they report the list mail as spam.
(Optional) Mailing list & its operator get blocked as spammers, despite doing nothing wrong, on the basis of retarded luser's report.
Spam is not defined as "any email that I don't want", it is unsolicated bulk/commercial email.
Slashdot Mirror
Apart from a few specialist industrial applications, the only uses of gold are decorative, and "ooh, shiny" doesn't strike me as a particularly good basis for arguing that something is intrinsically valuable. (I'm ignoring the use of gold as currency or a store of wealth, since that presupposes that it is valuable, which begs the question of why gold is intrinsically valuable.)
Living as part of a society inherently involves making trade-offs for the greater good. Public services (such as law enforcement, fire fighting, national defence) require funding, which implies taxation and therefore a restriction on your freedom to send your money on whatever you want. Unless you reject entirely the concept of the state in favour of anarchy, you are accepting certain restrictions on your freedom that give collective benefits.
When he was lying on the ground refusing to move, the appropriate response from the police is not to give him repeated electric shocks, it is to pick him up (one to each limb, like this) and carry him out. The purpose of a taser is to subdue a violent person, not to force someone who is passively resisting to comply.
And what, exactly, is creating something original, if not being "the first one to get there"?
So are coffee, cakes, and most biscuits (but not chocolate coated biscuits, which lead to a court case over whether Jaffa Cakes, which are the size and shape of a biscuit, are biscuits or cakes. The tax man lost.)
Even better, popcorn is standard rated (17.5%) but corn for popping is zero rated. Yay for lazyness taxes!
It can be perfectly reasonable to believe criminal activity has taken place without anything going to court - for example, whoever it was who cut through my bike lock and nicked my bike last summer committed theft but there's no chance they'll be done for it, or consider the people I know who regularly smoke cannabis who are committing a criminal offence (posession) but are unlikely to ever be prosecuted for it.
9.2 You shall not use the Services...to send, knowingly receive, upload, download, use or re-use any material which is...in breach of any copyright.
9.3 We shall have the right to enforce such provisions set out in paragraph 9.2 above by suspending or terminating in whole or in part the provision of the affected Services at our option to you if we reasonably believe that you are in breach of such obligations. (Emphasis mine.)
They don't need to go to court, they don't need to be able to prove it beyond reasonable doubt, they only need to have a reasonable belief that a customer is in breach of that section (which also covers things like sending spam) to terminate service for that customer. You're missing a bit - they have a contract for an internet service that is conditional on them not doing certain things and is not geting any at all. Looking again at my ISP's terms, to be successful in a case for breach of contract against the ISP, a customer would have to show that on the balance of probabilities the ISP's belief that they had breached that section wasn't reasonable.
According to their version comparision chart, they offer a freeware version for non-commercial use, which has most of the features of the pro version.
From their website, they gave a Sims expansion pack a 12 rating on Monday, because it "contains moderate sex references", they gave a game based on CSI a 15 for "bloody forensic detail", and a poker game was rated PG because of its "gambling theme".
Oh, how I long for the day when the word "Phonographic" can be used in a Slashdot article without that lame excuse for a joke being made. But that day's not going to come, it is?
Fair point, but saying he "predicted" it sounds cooler than saying he "guessed" it :-)
Interestingly (for some value of interesting) all of the last five days had been guessed, and so had all of next week, but the four days in between (2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th) had no guesses. If it had taken an hour longer for the 1 million mark to be reached, no-one's guess would have been correct.
As an AC has mentioned, redirects are not included in the article count. Figures from December had 35% of articles tagged as stubs, and an average of 2798 bytes per article.
No, this is a company which sells subdomains of the domain name uk.com. It is no different from the owners of dyndns.org or cjb.net offering subdomains of their domain names.
Maybe you're confusing uk.com with co.uk.
That is an extreme example, but it does show how it's not quite as simple as "loser pays" suggests.
If a length field has to be stored along with the hashes, the average increases by the size of the length field. Since the lengths are up to three digits, we need a two-bit length field, and by prepending the length on to your original hash, we get:And now the average hash length is 4 (i.e. longer than the plaintexts), and the best case has no decrease in the number of bits compared to the plaintext.
If you have n distinct symbols, then to represent each one with a unique bit string, you must use, on average, log2(n) bits per symbol. Lossless compression works by exploiting the fact that not all symbols occur with equal frequency, and assigns shorter symbols to more frequent symbols. But any lossless compression system must have some inputs that result in an output larger than the input, otherwise there would have to be different inputs which generate the same "compressed" output, and so a correct decompression would be impossible.
The ahimsa seizure last October:
- Swiss and Italian authorities made a request ot the USA under Mutual Legal Assisstance Treaties
- The FBI issue a supoena to Rackspace (A US-based hosting company, who were hosting the Indymedia servers in their UK facility.)
- Rackspace co-operate with the FBI, and hand over the servers
As far as I know, no information about what the Swiss and Italians wanted from the servers was released, but it has been suggested that is was relted to photos from the 2003 Switzerland G8 summit.The Bristol seizure yesterday:
- An anonymous author post this message, on 17th June:
(copy & paste from my Firefox cache.) This post was hidden within 24 hours, for violating Bristol Indymedia (BIM) policy. (I don't know exactly when it was hidden.)
- An individual with a history of conflict and disagreement with BIM then contacted police about the post, since it hints that the poster threw rocks at trains, or the cargo on trains, or the train tracks ("dropping rocks onto useless pieces of metal.")
- Police initally contacted BIM last monday, 20th June. BIM take legal advice.
- Police request IP logs from a BIM member on 21th June.
- Later on the 21st, BIM inform police via their solicitor that they will not voluntarily hand over and information. (NB: for non-Brits, a solicitor is a type of lawyer.) BIM also inform Indymedia UK at this point, and contact Liberty
- Yesterday, 27th June, police visit the home of the BIM member who hosted the server with a search warrant, and seize the BIM server and the individual's own computer, and arrest the BIM member.
Various posters on Indymedia sites have suggested that police may be trying to shut down Indymedia sites in the run up to the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, next month. I doubt that, in general, that is the case (Indymedia sites can be quite helpful to police, since they can use them to find out about planned actions, and spot people bragging about what they've done.) This appears to me to be more like someone with a grudge against Bristol Indymedia causing the police to act a bit excessively in a criminal investigation.I can't. It's in this fuzzy blur.
Well, of course, because the Windows system isn't spending half its time recompiling everything.
</blatent anti-gentooism>
- user@example.com subscribes to a list
- Some time passes, during which the user receives list mail...
- The user decides they don't want that list email any more. But the user doesn't unsubscribe from the list, they report the list mail as spam.
- (Optional) Mailing list & its operator get blocked as spammers, despite doing nothing wrong, on the basis of retarded luser's report.
Spam is not defined as "any email that I don't want", it is unsolicated bulk/commercial email.