in italy people wants to give up their freedom and be wiretapped
This law is about the criminals and mafiosi in the government making sure they are not wiretapped. Living in a country where the mafia rules with impunity hardly fits my definition of freedom.
this law doesn't ban wiretapping per se
Yes it does. It puts into place so many obstacles that it will be extremely difficult to wiretap criminals. There was talk of a maximum limit of 75 days, for example. Suppose a child is abducted (kidnapping as a means to extortion is no longer as common as in the 80s, but not so outlandish either): the kidnappers must simply wait 75 days (not such a long time for a kidnapping) and then contact the family. The prosecutors will not be able to figure out where they are calling from or what they are saying.
Also, the law says that you can wiretap someone only when you have "substantial evidence" that he is the culprit. However if you have substantial evidence you arrest him, you don't wiretap him. Wiretapping is to gather info. You can also place bugs in a place only when you are sure that a crime will take place there. But how do you know that? And would you bug a place instead of simply arresting the criminals if you knew already of the crime?
Then, if some useful wiretaps are miraculously obtained, the second part of the law kicks in: publication is forbidden until the politicians find a way to bury the case, leaving the public in the dark.
First off, kdawson is only writing what the article wrote, so he is not at fault.
Others, such as "Libero", "Il Foglio", "Italia Oggi", were regularly in newsstands as well.
Libero is owned by the corrupt Angelucci family, and hardly qualifies as a newspaper—it's more a propaganda leaflet. Il Foglio is owned by Berlusconi's wife. Italia Oggi is a minor newspaper with less than 25,000 copies sold nationwide.
the fault lies in judges and their collaborators, who like to "spread" news even before investigations are complete
I call bullshit. You are spouting berlusconite propaganda. There is not one single instance of this situation ever happening. Spit out a counterexample if you can. It would not make any sense for a prosecutor to publish secret material and to warn the people they are investigating.
Sometimes personal details (completely irrelevant to the matter) make it to the newspapers, tarnishing reputations
Really? So why doesn't the law target exactly the publication of information that is not relevant to the public? I'd like to remind readers here that Berlusconi also owns Chi, a sort of National Enquirer, that is based only on gossip. News outlets of the Berlusconi family have also been used as a weapon by Berlusconi to hit hard the director of Avvenire (the catholic bishops' newspaper), Dino Boffo, with completely fabricated accusations of homosexuality and sexual harassment, because he was not lenient enough on Berlusconi's sex life. So here's who is really "tarnishing reputations".
in all countries of the world a judge must grant permission to wiretap
No. Even setting aside despotic regimes, in the US the NSA can wiretap as much as they want. In Italy, on the other hand, wiretapping must be requested by one prosecutor and approved by a judge (who is not the same as in the trial) and there are no legal exceptions to this. Illegal exceptions include Berlusconi's friends in Telecom Italia, who provided him details on the communications of leaders of the opposition parties, which he published in his (brother's) newspaper.
nobody is allowed to have access to the evidence that is being collected for security of the investigation itself and for privacy of other parties involved
Neither is in Italy. However, when the investigations are over, all evidence must become public. This is a cardinal principle of civil rights: you cannot have a trial on secret evidence.
for sure no journalists never publish that on the newspaper before the trial or even the investigations is closed.
Uh, Monica Lewinsky anyone? Any journalist will, and should, publish anything that is provably true. Doing otherwise is betraying his mission.
In case you don't understand what is happening: corrupt government does not want citizens to know about its corruption. Corrupt government(s) already passed laws over the past several years that make it almost impossible to jail anybody for corruption and similar charges, mostly through shortening of statutory terms (that in Italy run also through the trial and its appeals). Corrupt government still looks corrupt because evidence is being published through newspapers, even if corrupt members of government are pretty sure not to go to jail. Corrupt government makes law ("it's for your privacy!") so that journalists still telling the people that the government is corrupt will have to shut up.
Note: I really, really hate Berlusconi, but this is not only his fault: the "opposition" Democratic Party also want this law (they had it in their electoral program in 2008), because they are just as corrupt, even though they pretend they don't like it to score cheap political points.
So, here you have it: you can make despotic laws in the name of privacy.
why should you be better rewardeed because you were born more healthy
Because my DNA is better and positively contributes to the gene pool. That is a major asset for any country or social group. Most royalty are known to have crappy DNA because of centuries of in-breeding.
or with greater IQ
You aren't born with IQ no more than you are born with muscles. You have to exercise the brain to develop it. Barring insanity or genetic problems, your IQ reflects your effort.
The Finanzamt is essentially a bloated beast, 4 times the size of the IRS with respect to population.
The comparison is unfair. According to Wikipedia (which we know is inerrant) 95% of taxes in Germany are to the federation; German states collect much less taxation than US states, and their taxation rights are limited. In particular, the German VAT goes to the federation, whereas sales tax in the US go to the states or other local authorities (IIRC).
A fair comparison would be summing up all the federal and state Finanzämter and comparing with the sum of the IRS and local tax authorities in the US.
Are radioactive isotopes harder to remove than your generic chocolate stain?
Considering most radioactive isotopes are heavy metals with a relatively "fuzzy" chemistry, which can easily become soft acids, yes, it's tougher than chocolate, as any student who attended an inorganic-chemistry course could confirm you. Ever tried removing stains of Mercurochrome?
That's funny. I am researcher and work with math and plotting software on a professional basis, and even when I need Matlab to do the work (e.g. if I have to use nlinfit), I always prefer to export the data to.mat and plot in Octave. Gnuplot's output generally looks better when exported to EPS/PDF.
Gnuplot does not allow to do GUI editing: that's a big plus, because I am forced, every time, to write a script: I know that if I don't write it, I will miss it later when I want to change something (it always happens). Also, it is much easier in Octave to specify a font (-F:Palatino, for example) than in Matlab: possibly not on top of your list of priorities, but when I wrote my PhD thesis I wanted to write everything with the same font: Matlab plots require you to edit the EPS source.
3D plots are slow, difficult and complicated things to create.
Curious. I just published an article with several 3D plots (which I usually eschew), and it was not really more difficult to get things done in Octave than in Matlab.
3D data is all but ungraphable on Linux systems anyway
I call bullshit, you never really tried. Have a look at matplotlib. And, that aside, Matlab is available on Linux too.
[People] want the original author to be able to own the work. I think this is related to the fact that in our culture we really don't like plagiarism.
It seems to me you are thinking more something along the lines of trademark rather than copyright law, to protect certain "franchises" such as Tolkien's world. I don't think people care at all that e-books of Gone with the Wind are being copied and distributed.
Personally, I think that if your sister was so upset about that sequel, she should simply ignore it. If it were possible to block such derivative works, we would not have the Aeneid, since it builds on the Iliad.
The problem is that the context in which you mean 10 GB or 10 GiB is exactly the same. Hence the need for standards. You may live in the US, but anyone who was in high school everywhere else on Earth understands the prefixes k, M, and G as powers of 10.
Just so a few morons won't be confused?
Those "few morons" to be confused are the consumers whose money is likely paying your salary. kB, MB and GB are not the names of registries in assembly language, they are units to be displayed prominently on consumer products. I can imagine a similar reaction when metrication was introduced in Germany in the 19th century, where every city had its definition of "pound".
Different chemical compound block different bandwidths of radiation. Water's band saturated, so adding water will have no effect; also, as others have already pointed out, water vapour can condense into rain, whereas CO2 cannot. The range of wavelengths blocked by CO2 is not saturated, which means that increasing CO2 will also increase energy holdup.
I got interested and read a few passages. I am convinced it is a forgery, and of bad quality at that. One hilarious passage read:
[...] Bill Gates opens new "Windows" each year, and "Dolly," the cloned sheep, proves that mankind is now planning to take the place of God the Creator.
Only a conservative Christian could write such a passage. A PLA colonel would avoid religious references entirely, and surely would not write about a single creating entity. There is some material on Wikipedia about this book, but it is very self-referential.
They would even bring back stoning for adulatory [...]
Why, this is the most intelligent and insightful idea I have ever seen! You must be indeed a person of exceptional intellect for *OUCH* *AARGH* Stop it by Jehovah! *gets stoned to death*
I thought they called them "correctional institutions" for a reason. Granted, in practice they still go by the principle of punishment, but in theory they nominally should try to correct people. Of course the system does not do it because less crime means less inmates, less inmates means less money from state authorities for companies managing prisons (not sure in how many states they are privatised). And, less crime would mean it would be less easy to scare people into draconian, patently insane laws like three strikes law.
I am dyslexic, and writing on paper at any decent speed pretty much takes my full attention, [...]
Nice troll, but dyslexia is a neurological disorder that affects reading, not writing. Anyway, if you remember which keys to press you can also remember which letters to draw. Your problem is that you type much more often than you write with a pen, and is nicely cured by exercise. Unless you have another neurological conditions, other than or in addition to dyslexia.
So if man makes 29 gigatons or so of CO2 per year, and nature pumps out 600+ how much can we affect it by modifying the US production?
Assuming for a moment you did not take those numbers out of your posterior, nature before the industrial revolution was at equilibrium, meaning it pumped out 600 and pumped back in 600 (e.g. plant growth). Then, human activities with 29 Gtons would tip that balance and accumulate CO2 in the atmosphere, which cannot be absorbed by nature (whose capacity is 600, not 629).
Ultimately, it is because an inordinate amount of carbon was extracted from the earth as coal and oil, way faster that the geological scale that would have occurred in nature.
The reason many researchers, especially climate scientists, are not so happy about divulging their models and data is that they can be sued by crackpots, as it has already happened. Even if they are proven right, a lawsuit is an expensive business. I can already imagine hordes of Exxon sockpuppets suing any random climate scientist they don't like.
Granting immunity from lawsuit should make them more willing to share data. Anyway, if something really bad is found in the research, the researcher will have their reputation tarnished, which in the environment is bad enough to ruin a career.
By the way: I am a researcher, and I attached the source code of my models in the PDF version of my PhD dissertation.
Y'know, that was my reason for using tabs. Now I prefer spaces for the same reason: I don't want to allow anyone to edit the code with 2-spaces indent, lest they nest code in 5 or 6 levels.
Also, with tabs you cannot enforce a maximum width of, say, 80 characters per line (which is great: you can have several editor windows side by side).
In the present Italian electoral system, about 2-3 people decide who will be a candidate for parliament (party leaders). Voters can only choose between parties, not single candidates. Add to that the fact that the "opposition" of Italy's Democratic Party is ludicrously weak (and, I suspect, several of its leaders are on Berlusconi's payroll). Whenever the present opposition was in power, they always "forgot" to pass laws to either strip Berlusconi of his media empire, or to ban him out of politics until he sells; they even left alone one of his major TV stations, Rete 4, which was broadcasting illegally.
Italy resembles more and more the GDR: control of media, check (not complete, but enough to control 50% of the people); illegal wiretapping operations on opposition, check (last week, government covered on grounds of "safety of the state" a wiretapping scandal in private companies); kidnapping and torture, check (with the help of the CIA, an imam was kidnapped from Milan and extensively tortured in Egypt). Only thing different is that the judiciary is somewhat holding out because of the constitutional checks and balances, so we are going more for a kleptocracy than for a re-edition of fascism.
Only good thing about Berlusconi is that he surrounds himself with idiots, who will not try or be able to take his place. At least when the son of a bitch finally dies, his system should crumble. I have no more faith in the possibility of simply voting him out.
[...] Marco Pantani in the Tour in 2002, no helmet. I'm guessing he is well aware of the risk.
Taking risk assessment tips from a constantly doped biker who died of cocaine overdose seems slightly preposterous to me.
Then again, wearing helmets depends also on conditions. When I lived in Norway and I had to bike up- and downhill often, sharing the road with cars on snow and ice, I always wore a helmet. Now I live in Germany, in a place as flat as a very, very flat place, with a lot of bike lanes, and I do not.
Radioactivity is a concentration problem. Radioactivity, just like chemical pollution, is dangerous only beyond a certain threshold: we are right now exposed to cosmic rays, but that is not a cause of cancer, because our bodies can handle that level of radioactivity: they evolved for millions of years in this environment.
Coal plants may well generate a large cumulative amount of radioactivity, but since that is so highly dispersed, that has no adverse effects whatsoever (which cannot be said of other by-products of coal plants).
Please occlude the fornication up and refrain from parroting factoids of dubious parentage when the discussion is about arguments you do not understand.
It's nice to see how Slashdot's libertarian groupthink does a complete protectionist flipover when it's the IT jobs on the line. This is the competition, stupid! Work harder and shut up.
I would really like to see a guy run against Obama in 2012 on the premise of reclaiming our outsourced jobs, canceling all worker visas, banning of outsourcing, banning of multinational corporations, and fighting illegal immigration with the greater enthusiasm than drugs and terrorism.
And I would like to see which corporation would fund his campaign.
The fact is, the people of the US were better off when we were mostly isolationist [...]
You don't get it, do you? It's not about the people, it's about the money. People with money are better off with illegal people around whom they can hire at slave-like conditions. That brings down the wage level of the entire market. You, sir, count nothing because you don't have enough money, and that is a fault. Don't like it? Move to Canada, hippie.
(This post could contain traces of irony. And nuts.)
Slashdot Mirror
This law is about the criminals and mafiosi in the government making sure they are not wiretapped. Living in a country where the mafia rules with impunity hardly fits my definition of freedom.
Yes it does. It puts into place so many obstacles that it will be extremely difficult to wiretap criminals. There was talk of a maximum limit of 75 days, for example. Suppose a child is abducted (kidnapping as a means to extortion is no longer as common as in the 80s, but not so outlandish either): the kidnappers must simply wait 75 days (not such a long time for a kidnapping) and then contact the family. The prosecutors will not be able to figure out where they are calling from or what they are saying.
Also, the law says that you can wiretap someone only when you have "substantial evidence" that he is the culprit. However if you have substantial evidence you arrest him, you don't wiretap him. Wiretapping is to gather info. You can also place bugs in a place only when you are sure that a crime will take place there. But how do you know that? And would you bug a place instead of simply arresting the criminals if you knew already of the crime?
Then, if some useful wiretaps are miraculously obtained, the second part of the law kicks in: publication is forbidden until the politicians find a way to bury the case, leaving the public in the dark.
First off, kdawson is only writing what the article wrote, so he is not at fault.
Libero is owned by the corrupt Angelucci family, and hardly qualifies as a newspaper—it's more a propaganda leaflet. Il Foglio is owned by Berlusconi's wife. Italia Oggi is a minor newspaper with less than 25,000 copies sold nationwide.
I call bullshit. You are spouting berlusconite propaganda. There is not one single instance of this situation ever happening. Spit out a counterexample if you can. It would not make any sense for a prosecutor to publish secret material and to warn the people they are investigating.
Really? So why doesn't the law target exactly the publication of information that is not relevant to the public? I'd like to remind readers here that Berlusconi also owns Chi, a sort of National Enquirer, that is based only on gossip. News outlets of the Berlusconi family have also been used as a weapon by Berlusconi to hit hard the director of Avvenire (the catholic bishops' newspaper), Dino Boffo, with completely fabricated accusations of homosexuality and sexual harassment, because he was not lenient enough on Berlusconi's sex life. So here's who is really "tarnishing reputations".
No. Even setting aside despotic regimes, in the US the NSA can wiretap as much as they want. In Italy, on the other hand, wiretapping must be requested by one prosecutor and approved by a judge (who is not the same as in the trial) and there are no legal exceptions to this. Illegal exceptions include Berlusconi's friends in Telecom Italia, who provided him details on the communications of leaders of the opposition parties, which he published in his (brother's) newspaper.
Neither is in Italy. However, when the investigations are over, all evidence must become public. This is a cardinal principle of civil rights: you cannot have a trial on secret evidence.
Uh, Monica Lewinsky anyone? Any journalist will, and should, publish anything that is provably true. Doing otherwise is betraying his mission.
In case you don't understand what is happening: corrupt government does not want citizens to know about its corruption. Corrupt government(s) already passed laws over the past several years that make it almost impossible to jail anybody for corruption and similar charges, mostly through shortening of statutory terms (that in Italy run also through the trial and its appeals). Corrupt government still looks corrupt because evidence is being published through newspapers, even if corrupt members of government are pretty sure not to go to jail. Corrupt government makes law ("it's for your privacy!") so that journalists still telling the people that the government is corrupt will have to shut up.
Note: I really, really hate Berlusconi, but this is not only his fault: the "opposition" Democratic Party also want this law (they had it in their electoral program in 2008), because they are just as corrupt, even though they pretend they don't like it to score cheap political points.
So, here you have it: you can make despotic laws in the name of privacy.
I'll bite...
Because my DNA is better and positively contributes to the gene pool. That is a major asset for any country or social group. Most royalty are known to have crappy DNA because of centuries of in-breeding.
You aren't born with IQ no more than you are born with muscles. You have to exercise the brain to develop it. Barring insanity or genetic problems, your IQ reflects your effort.
The comparison is unfair. According to Wikipedia (which we know is inerrant) 95% of taxes in Germany are to the federation; German states collect much less taxation than US states, and their taxation rights are limited. In particular, the German VAT goes to the federation, whereas sales tax in the US go to the states or other local authorities (IIRC).
A fair comparison would be summing up all the federal and state Finanzämter and comparing with the sum of the IRS and local tax authorities in the US.
Considering most radioactive isotopes are heavy metals with a relatively "fuzzy" chemistry, which can easily become soft acids, yes, it's tougher than chocolate, as any student who attended an inorganic-chemistry course could confirm you. Ever tried removing stains of Mercurochrome?
That's funny. I am researcher and work with math and plotting software on a professional basis, and even when I need Matlab to do the work (e.g. if I have to use nlinfit), I always prefer to export the data to .mat and plot in Octave. Gnuplot's output generally looks better when exported to EPS/PDF.
Gnuplot does not allow to do GUI editing: that's a big plus, because I am forced, every time, to write a script: I know that if I don't write it, I will miss it later when I want to change something (it always happens). Also, it is much easier in Octave to specify a font (-F:Palatino, for example) than in Matlab: possibly not on top of your list of priorities, but when I wrote my PhD thesis I wanted to write everything with the same font: Matlab plots require you to edit the EPS source.
Curious. I just published an article with several 3D plots (which I usually eschew), and it was not really more difficult to get things done in Octave than in Matlab.
I call bullshit, you never really tried. Have a look at matplotlib. And, that aside, Matlab is available on Linux too.
It seems to me you are thinking more something along the lines of trademark rather than copyright law, to protect certain "franchises" such as Tolkien's world. I don't think people care at all that e-books of Gone with the Wind are being copied and distributed.
Personally, I think that if your sister was so upset about that sequel, she should simply ignore it. If it were possible to block such derivative works, we would not have the Aeneid, since it builds on the Iliad.
The problem is that the context in which you mean 10 GB or 10 GiB is exactly the same. Hence the need for standards. You may live in the US, but anyone who was in high school everywhere else on Earth understands the prefixes k, M, and G as powers of 10.
Those "few morons" to be confused are the consumers whose money is likely paying your salary. kB, MB and GB are not the names of registries in assembly language, they are units to be displayed prominently on consumer products. I can imagine a similar reaction when metrication was introduced in Germany in the 19th century, where every city had its definition of "pound".
Different chemical compound block different bandwidths of radiation. Water's band saturated, so adding water will have no effect; also, as others have already pointed out, water vapour can condense into rain, whereas CO2 cannot. The range of wavelengths blocked by CO2 is not saturated, which means that increasing CO2 will also increase energy holdup.
I got interested and read a few passages. I am convinced it is a forgery, and of bad quality at that. One hilarious passage read:
Only a conservative Christian could write such a passage. A PLA colonel would avoid religious references entirely, and surely would not write about a single creating entity. There is some material on Wikipedia about this book, but it is very self-referential.
At best, it is heavily mistranslated.
Why, this is the most intelligent and insightful idea I have ever seen! You must be indeed a person of exceptional intellect for *OUCH* *AARGH* Stop it by Jehovah! *gets stoned to death*
I thought they called them "correctional institutions" for a reason. Granted, in practice they still go by the principle of punishment, but in theory they nominally should try to correct people. Of course the system does not do it because less crime means less inmates, less inmates means less money from state authorities for companies managing prisons (not sure in how many states they are privatised). And, less crime would mean it would be less easy to scare people into draconian, patently insane laws like three strikes law.
Nice troll, but dyslexia is a neurological disorder that affects reading, not writing. Anyway, if you remember which keys to press you can also remember which letters to draw. Your problem is that you type much more often than you write with a pen, and is nicely cured by exercise. Unless you have another neurological conditions, other than or in addition to dyslexia.
Assuming for a moment you did not take those numbers out of your posterior, nature before the industrial revolution was at equilibrium, meaning it pumped out 600 and pumped back in 600 (e.g. plant growth). Then, human activities with 29 Gtons would tip that balance and accumulate CO2 in the atmosphere, which cannot be absorbed by nature (whose capacity is 600, not 629).
Ultimately, it is because an inordinate amount of carbon was extracted from the earth as coal and oil, way faster that the geological scale that would have occurred in nature.
No, it was an industry shill trying to intimidate a respectable scientist who had caught him in a lie through legal threats.
Libel, for instance.
The reason many researchers, especially climate scientists, are not so happy about divulging their models and data is that they can be sued by crackpots, as it has already happened. Even if they are proven right, a lawsuit is an expensive business. I can already imagine hordes of Exxon sockpuppets suing any random climate scientist they don't like.
Granting immunity from lawsuit should make them more willing to share data. Anyway, if something really bad is found in the research, the researcher will have their reputation tarnished, which in the environment is bad enough to ruin a career.
By the way: I am a researcher, and I attached the source code of my models in the PDF version of my PhD dissertation.
Y'know, that was my reason for using tabs. Now I prefer spaces for the same reason: I don't want to allow anyone to edit the code with 2-spaces indent, lest they nest code in 5 or 6 levels.
Also, with tabs you cannot enforce a maximum width of, say, 80 characters per line (which is great: you can have several editor windows side by side).
In the present Italian electoral system, about 2-3 people decide who will be a candidate for parliament (party leaders). Voters can only choose between parties, not single candidates. Add to that the fact that the "opposition" of Italy's Democratic Party is ludicrously weak (and, I suspect, several of its leaders are on Berlusconi's payroll). Whenever the present opposition was in power, they always "forgot" to pass laws to either strip Berlusconi of his media empire, or to ban him out of politics until he sells; they even left alone one of his major TV stations, Rete 4, which was broadcasting illegally.
Italy resembles more and more the GDR: control of media, check (not complete, but enough to control 50% of the people); illegal wiretapping operations on opposition, check (last week, government covered on grounds of "safety of the state" a wiretapping scandal in private companies); kidnapping and torture, check (with the help of the CIA, an imam was kidnapped from Milan and extensively tortured in Egypt). Only thing different is that the judiciary is somewhat holding out because of the constitutional checks and balances, so we are going more for a kleptocracy than for a re-edition of fascism.
Only good thing about Berlusconi is that he surrounds himself with idiots, who will not try or be able to take his place. At least when the son of a bitch finally dies, his system should crumble. I have no more faith in the possibility of simply voting him out.
Taking risk assessment tips from a constantly doped biker who died of cocaine overdose seems slightly preposterous to me.
Then again, wearing helmets depends also on conditions. When I lived in Norway and I had to bike up- and downhill often, sharing the road with cars on snow and ice, I always wore a helmet. Now I live in Germany, in a place as flat as a very, very flat place, with a lot of bike lanes, and I do not.
... Yet you present no citation. Seems it's the usual urban myth then.
I think you need a "fucking education", sir.
Radioactivity is a concentration problem. Radioactivity, just like chemical pollution, is dangerous only beyond a certain threshold: we are right now exposed to cosmic rays, but that is not a cause of cancer, because our bodies can handle that level of radioactivity: they evolved for millions of years in this environment.
Coal plants may well generate a large cumulative amount of radioactivity, but since that is so highly dispersed, that has no adverse effects whatsoever (which cannot be said of other by-products of coal plants).
Please occlude the fornication up and refrain from parroting factoids of dubious parentage when the discussion is about arguments you do not understand.
It's nice to see how Slashdot's libertarian groupthink does a complete protectionist flipover when it's the IT jobs on the line. This is the competition, stupid! Work harder and shut up.
And I would like to see which corporation would fund his campaign.
You don't get it, do you? It's not about the people, it's about the money. People with money are better off with illegal people around whom they can hire at slave-like conditions. That brings down the wage level of the entire market. You, sir, count nothing because you don't have enough money, and that is a fault. Don't like it? Move to Canada, hippie.
(This post could contain traces of irony. And nuts.)