How many windows have you seen break? I work for a glass factory. I've seen thousands and thousands of lites of glass, both tempered and "raw" broken into pieces. We've probably processed over a million square feet of orders since I've been there.
While it's true that an untempered ("raw", in industry parlance) window will just crack into long, sharp and dangerous shards, properly tempered glass will break into tiny pieces. If you've seen that happen, you can rightfully call it "exploding" because that's exactly what it looks like.
Tempered glass is stressed, so it's sort of like popping a balloon. Even if the glass is lying flat on a table, when it pops (usually from something hitting an edge or corner), tiny pieces of glass leap into the air when it breaks. Pieces of glass will land several feet away from where the window broke.
To give you an idea of how much broken glass we deal with, I'll have you know that we usually clean it up with a shovel and ship tons of broken and scrap glass off to a recycler every few weeks.
So please don't complain about the word "exploded" unless you've seen what happens when two tempered lites bump into each other on a conveyor line. They honestly do explode.
If I pay to attend the party, things aren't quite that simple. You can't just take their money and then throw them out based on an unsubstantiated accusation from a third party.
Also, when AT&T is taking billions of dollars of our tax money to subsidize their services, they really, really can't claim to be an ordinary private business any more.
It's more like a private citizen banning you from going to the public park where he's holding a party based on someone's unsubstantiated allegations.
> That is why for people who use electric heat in the winter, the electric companies WON'T turn off the electricity. Why? They could kill that former customer. No heat + winter = illness or death.
A New Zealand utility company that cut off power to the home of a woman connected to an electric oxygen pump, leading to her death, has insisted it was not aware she was dependent on the machine.
While internet may not be at quite the same level of necessity, it's coming closer day by day. Are phones necessary? I'd say they are (911). The internet is gradually taking over for them. If the bandwidth for VoIP were there for everyone, the internet would probably have replaced phones already, except for cell phones (many of which come with internet access these days...).
> Just like you are free to buy internet access from someone who hasn't made a similar arrangement.
You DO realize that all the little ISPs are dependent on a few big ISPs, right?
And that there aren't very many damn ISPs around here at all. I'm in one of the five largest cities in America, and there aren't many options or I wouldn't be stuck with $120/month IDSL. Yes, I know that's absurdly unreasonable...
Also, even if businesses can terminate you for "any" reason, they can't do it for an illegal reason. And if you knew anything about law, you'd know that there are many such reasons. "Common sense" has never applied to law, but I question whether your notion of what businesses can do qualifies as sense, common or otherwise, in the first place.
Just because someone wrote it into a ToS that no one reads and which the public is required to accept as a matter of course, doesn't mean they can get away with it.
> Where does the constitution state that you're entitled to a jury trial before a private business can refuse to have you as a customer? Because I'm pretty sure it's not in there at all.
The 14th Amendment ought to apply, given that the telcos get all kinds of special rights from the government.
Also, internet access is only becoming more essential with time. It's not something you can just "cut off" simply. It's about one step away from banning people from using phones. You don't think it's necessary, but it's pretty much becoming necessary.
(And before anyone claims phones are unnecessary, I have one number for you: 911.)
> So at what point in the post above is proof offered that the ISP serving take down notices will ultimately lead said ISP snooping any and all data for any third party that asks for it?
Well, they HAVE to snoop on you to find out what MP3s you download. So does it really matter at that point who all they're willing to sell it to?
It's the mass spying we're against. It doesn't matter whether they do it for only the RIAA's sake or whether other media companies join the bandwagon. (Though it's hard to see how other companies would NOT try to join the bandwagon now that the RIAA has cut a deal like this.)
> A little research in the latest medical data (by your doctor) or you (on the Internet) will quickly reveal that having parameter 7 out-of-limit can lead to immediate doom. Or not - the research is inconclusive.
I thought that one of the benefits of monitoring all this crap even when you're (relatively) healthy was that we'd eventually get a better idea of which parameters were actually important and which ones are actually out of whack for our body, rather than for some hypothetical "baseline."
> Why is it that worms and viruses have better security than legitimate programs?
They're written by programmers who have more skill. "Insecure" viruses are quickly eliminated, so they have to be strong to survive. Conversely, weak but legitimate programs cling tenaciously to life on legacy systems until such time as competent sysadmins are able to exorcise them.
> Yeah, well, let him sue me and see how much DCMA applies in Greece or Ukraine or Russia or my country. Maybe he'll learn that DMCA applies only in US.
Strangely enough, many non-US providers obey DMCA notices even though they don't necessarily have to. It can be quite annoying at times, actually. But their logic is probably that they DO have copyright treaties with the USA and they don't want any legal trouble.
That said, there certainly are non-US hosts that ignore DMCA notices. The legal threats section on the Pirate Bay is particularly amusing.
I also found this news article about how this works in another case, which is more than a little disturbing. You're simply not allowed to have too much cash these days. They think it proves you're doing something illegal. Even if they're right most of the time, I think it's terrible what they can do to the innocent.
> Or, if I make a movie of myself and friend at a party, dancing on Prince's music, and I label it "Prince - Purple rain.avi" should IsoHunt remove it because it may be the actual video of the song or should IsoHunt staff be forced to download it and count how many seconds of Purple Rain actually are (if any) so that they can determine if it's fair use (less than 30 seconds of song) or not?
Thing is, Prince would still go after you for that even if it was clearly fair use. I base that on the fact that the Purple Weirdo who can't spell filed a DMCA Takedown Notice against a woman for a clip on YouTube of her baby dancing to a few seconds of one of his songs...
Let's put it this way: if you look at the firehose link, you will see that hessian == the "Defeat Globalism" guy. You know, the one who links to that "Amerika" site, and which many people have noted for linking out to racist sites and whatnot.
I guess he got a few too many links, because when this was tagged in the firehose, they changed the link to go to his Slashdot username, even though they missed one other story today. I think he used to go by Anti-Globalism, too, or something. But it's possible that's some other person.
This is rather old news. The Chinese have had slang used to bypass filters for a VERY long time now. (Note that the link is just for general slang, but there are several terms like "grass-mud horse" and "river crab" society in there.)
It's interesting how everyone is trying to merely "fix" the DRM rather than to remove the DRM. Sadly, "fixing" the DRM is no less of a DMCA violation, so please don't do either if you're subject to the DMCA.
But if you were going to violate the DMCA, why on earth would you want to "fix" the DRM even though you'd be left with no book whenever your Kindle dies, rather than decrypting it and having an unencrypted book you can read anywhere?
This goes double if you live somewhere there is no DMCA. Why would you put up with this crap if you're not legally obligated to?
> If 'pro-lifers' aren't up in arms about fertility clinics it is simply ignorant for them to be up in arms about stem cell research.
But they are up in arms about that. At least, the Catholics are.
If there isn't a massive outcry, it's because a lot of people honestly don't know what happens in fertility clinics.
And didn't you see the fuss over the 'octomom'? You may have noticed that her rationale was that she didn't want to throw any of them away (though her method for avoiding that was dangerously irresponsible).
> Hundreds of years ago, the religious also honestly believed based on biblical evidence that the Sun revolved around the Earth.
Yeah, except not. Didn't you ever take a history of science class?
At the time, the evidence they had made the theory that the Sun revolved around the Earth the weaker one. The theory you're repeating is widely claimed on the web, but it's so bad I'd say it's not even wrong.
For one, no one could measure stellar parallax (it's too small). I mean, how could you expect to claim that the Earth was moving if the stars didn't move enough to measure? How can you expect them to believe that, just because it simplifies some calculations, the Earth is actually moving even though you CAN'T see the stellar parallax (and they DID know that they should be able to see it).
The Bible had very little to do with it. Aristotle had a lot more. Please don't make up reasons why people believed things. We know the actual reasons people believed things. Although they were right (and eventually vindicated), they did not have enough evidence to prove their theories.
Thanks to thinking like this, we can expect that someday, we'll be ridiculed for thinking that [crackpot scientific theory that happens to be right] was ridiculous just because there was only a little bit of proof for it and a bunch of gaping holes in the theory no one had yet filled in.
It's called vivisection. They once did it to prisoners. In other words, you could be sentenced to death by vivisection (which was pretty horrible).
You can find several mentions of that here, in particular this part:
Vivisection has long been practiced on human beings. Herophilos, the "father of anatomy" and founder of the first medical school in Alexandria, was described by the church leader Tertullian as having vivisected at least 600 live prisoners. In recent times, the wartime programs of Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele, Shiro Ishii, founder of the Japanese military Unit 731, and Dr. Fukujiro Ishiyama at Kyushu Imperial University Hospital, conducted human vivisections on concentration camp prisoners in their respective countries during World War II.[23]
In November 2006, Doctor Akira Makino confessed to Kyodo news having performed surgery and amputations on condemned prisoners, including women and children in 1944 and 1945 while he was stationed on Mindanao.[24] In 2007, Doctor Ken Yuasa testified to the Japan Times that he believes at least 1,000 persons working for the ShÅwa regime, including surgeons, were involved in vivisections over mainland China.[25]
Human volunteers can consent to be subjects for invasive experiments which may involve, for example, the taking of tissue samples (biopsies), or other procedures which require surgery on the volunteer. These procedures must be approved by ethical review, and carried out in an approved manner that minimizes pain and long term health risks to the subject.[26] Despite this, the term is generally recognized as pejorative: one would never refer to life-saving surgery, for example, as "vivisection." The use of the term vivisection when referring to procedures performed on humans almost always implies a lack of consent.
I thought that having a monopoly was legal, but that protecting it via illegal means was not. What, exactly, has Google done to illegally protect the alleged monopoly?
Also, it's hard to see how they create a barrier to entry in the market. Any idiot can set up an online advertising agency and start making deals (and many idiots have done precisely that).
If you really want to argue against it, there are several events that are less survivable and more insurmountable:
* Heat death of the universe. * Proton decay.
We don't even have a theoretical way to survive these events. Make all the colonies you want, but it'll be damn hard to survive without stars... or protons. The good part is that these will take an absurdly long time to take place, so we can certainly live it up in the mean time.
Slashdot Mirror
> The windows didn't "explode", they "shattered".
How many windows have you seen break? I work for a glass factory. I've seen thousands and thousands of lites of glass, both tempered and "raw" broken into pieces. We've probably processed over a million square feet of orders since I've been there.
While it's true that an untempered ("raw", in industry parlance) window will just crack into long, sharp and dangerous shards, properly tempered glass will break into tiny pieces. If you've seen that happen, you can rightfully call it "exploding" because that's exactly what it looks like.
Tempered glass is stressed, so it's sort of like popping a balloon. Even if the glass is lying flat on a table, when it pops (usually from something hitting an edge or corner), tiny pieces of glass leap into the air when it breaks. Pieces of glass will land several feet away from where the window broke.
To give you an idea of how much broken glass we deal with, I'll have you know that we usually clean it up with a shovel and ship tons of broken and scrap glass off to a recycler every few weeks.
So please don't complain about the word "exploded" unless you've seen what happens when two tempered lites bump into each other on a conveyor line. They honestly do explode.
> The answer is still no, though.
If I pay to attend the party, things aren't quite that simple. You can't just take their money and then throw them out based on an unsubstantiated accusation from a third party.
Also, when AT&T is taking billions of dollars of our tax money to subsidize their services, they really, really can't claim to be an ordinary private business any more.
It's more like a private citizen banning you from going to the public park where he's holding a party based on someone's unsubstantiated allegations.
> That is why for people who use electric heat in the winter, the electric companies WON'T turn off the electricity. Why? They could kill that former customer. No heat + winter = illness or death.
I wish that were still true these days...
While internet may not be at quite the same level of necessity, it's coming closer day by day. Are phones necessary? I'd say they are (911). The internet is gradually taking over for them. If the bandwidth for VoIP were there for everyone, the internet would probably have replaced phones already, except for cell phones (many of which come with internet access these days...).
> Just like you are free to buy internet access from someone who hasn't made a similar arrangement.
You DO realize that all the little ISPs are dependent on a few big ISPs, right?
And that there aren't very many damn ISPs around here at all. I'm in one of the five largest cities in America, and there aren't many options or I wouldn't be stuck with $120/month IDSL. Yes, I know that's absurdly unreasonable...
Also, even if businesses can terminate you for "any" reason, they can't do it for an illegal reason. And if you knew anything about law, you'd know that there are many such reasons. "Common sense" has never applied to law, but I question whether your notion of what businesses can do qualifies as sense, common or otherwise, in the first place.
Just because someone wrote it into a ToS that no one reads and which the public is required to accept as a matter of course, doesn't mean they can get away with it.
> Where does the constitution state that you're entitled to a jury trial before a private business can refuse to have you as a customer? Because I'm pretty sure it's not in there at all.
The 14th Amendment ought to apply, given that the telcos get all kinds of special rights from the government.
Also, internet access is only becoming more essential with time. It's not something you can just "cut off" simply. It's about one step away from banning people from using phones. You don't think it's necessary, but it's pretty much becoming necessary.
(And before anyone claims phones are unnecessary, I have one number for you: 911.)
> So at what point in the post above is proof offered that the ISP serving take down notices will ultimately lead said ISP snooping any and all data for any third party that asks for it?
Well, they HAVE to snoop on you to find out what MP3s you download. So does it really matter at that point who all they're willing to sell it to?
It's the mass spying we're against. It doesn't matter whether they do it for only the RIAA's sake or whether other media companies join the bandwagon. (Though it's hard to see how other companies would NOT try to join the bandwagon now that the RIAA has cut a deal like this.)
> "Did you ever stop to think how silly and dangerous it is to walk around with absolutely no electrodes on our chests to keep our hearts beating?"
I might if I needed a pacemaker...
> A little research in the latest medical data (by your doctor) or you (on the Internet) will quickly reveal that having parameter 7 out-of-limit can lead to immediate doom. Or not - the research is inconclusive.
I thought that one of the benefits of monitoring all this crap even when you're (relatively) healthy was that we'd eventually get a better idea of which parameters were actually important and which ones are actually out of whack for our body, rather than for some hypothetical "baseline."
> Make me a damn sandwich
I thought you had to use sudo for that one...
> Why is it that worms and viruses have better security than legitimate programs?
They're written by programmers who have more skill. "Insecure" viruses are quickly eliminated, so they have to be strong to survive. Conversely, weak but legitimate programs cling tenaciously to life on legacy systems until such time as competent sysadmins are able to exorcise them.
> Yeah, well, let him sue me and see how much DCMA applies in Greece or Ukraine or Russia or my country. Maybe he'll learn that DMCA applies only in US.
Strangely enough, many non-US providers obey DMCA notices even though they don't necessarily have to. It can be quite annoying at times, actually. But their logic is probably that they DO have copyright treaties with the USA and they don't want any legal trouble.
That said, there certainly are non-US hosts that ignore DMCA notices. The legal threats section on the Pirate Bay is particularly amusing.
> I don't think that it's possible to sue a stack of cash, no matter how big it is.
Actually it is. I picked the first example I could find from a little Googling, but here's the docket for the United States of America v. Thirty Thousand Dollars ($30,000.00) In United States Currency for your reading pleasure.
I also found this news article about how this works in another case, which is more than a little disturbing. You're simply not allowed to have too much cash these days. They think it proves you're doing something illegal. Even if they're right most of the time, I think it's terrible what they can do to the innocent.
> Or, if I make a movie of myself and friend at a party, dancing on Prince's music, and I label it "Prince - Purple rain.avi" should IsoHunt remove it because it may be the actual video of the song or should IsoHunt staff be forced to download it and count how many seconds of Purple Rain actually are (if any) so that they can determine if it's fair use (less than 30 seconds of song) or not?
Thing is, Prince would still go after you for that even if it was clearly fair use. I base that on the fact that the Purple Weirdo who can't spell filed a DMCA Takedown Notice against a woman for a clip on YouTube of her baby dancing to a few seconds of one of his songs...
> Of course surrounding your lair with a water filled moat might not be the best idea if you are wanting to get rid of mosquitoes.
That's what lasers are for.
Let's put it this way: if you look at the firehose link, you will see that hessian == the "Defeat Globalism" guy. You know, the one who links to that "Amerika" site, and which many people have noted for linking out to racist sites and whatnot.
I guess he got a few too many links, because when this was tagged in the firehose, they changed the link to go to his Slashdot username, even though they missed one other story today. I think he used to go by Anti-Globalism, too, or something. But it's possible that's some other person.
> Oh and since you consider debt relief to be a human rights violation I can't wait to hear what you call forced homelessness and starvation.
"The American Way"?
This is rather old news. The Chinese have had slang used to bypass filters for a VERY long time now. (Note that the link is just for general slang, but there are several terms like "grass-mud horse" and "river crab" society in there.)
Yes, it's clever. But this isn't exactly new...
> > How many states are there?
> Three: Solid, Liquid, Gas.
How on Earth could you forget plasma or Bose-Einstein condensate!?
Much less all the other states ...
It's interesting how everyone is trying to merely "fix" the DRM rather than to remove the DRM. Sadly, "fixing" the DRM is no less of a DMCA violation, so please don't do either if you're subject to the DMCA.
But if you were going to violate the DMCA, why on earth would you want to "fix" the DRM even though you'd be left with no book whenever your Kindle dies, rather than decrypting it and having an unencrypted book you can read anywhere?
This goes double if you live somewhere there is no DMCA. Why would you put up with this crap if you're not legally obligated to?
> If 'pro-lifers' aren't up in arms about fertility clinics it is simply ignorant for them to be up in arms about stem cell research.
But they are up in arms about that. At least, the Catholics are.
If there isn't a massive outcry, it's because a lot of people honestly don't know what happens in fertility clinics.
And didn't you see the fuss over the 'octomom'? You may have noticed that her rationale was that she didn't want to throw any of them away (though her method for avoiding that was dangerously irresponsible).
> Hundreds of years ago, the religious also honestly believed based on biblical evidence that the Sun revolved around the Earth.
Yeah, except not. Didn't you ever take a history of science class?
At the time, the evidence they had made the theory that the Sun revolved around the Earth the weaker one. The theory you're repeating is widely claimed on the web, but it's so bad I'd say it's not even wrong.
For one, no one could measure stellar parallax (it's too small). I mean, how could you expect to claim that the Earth was moving if the stars didn't move enough to measure? How can you expect them to believe that, just because it simplifies some calculations, the Earth is actually moving even though you CAN'T see the stellar parallax (and they DID know that they should be able to see it).
The Bible had very little to do with it. Aristotle had a lot more. Please don't make up reasons why people believed things. We know the actual reasons people believed things. Although they were right (and eventually vindicated), they did not have enough evidence to prove their theories.
Thanks to thinking like this, we can expect that someday, we'll be ridiculed for thinking that [crackpot scientific theory that happens to be right] was ridiculous just because there was only a little bit of proof for it and a bunch of gaping holes in the theory no one had yet filled in.
It's called vivisection. They once did it to prisoners. In other words, you could be sentenced to death by vivisection (which was pretty horrible).
You can find several mentions of that here, in particular this part:
I thought that having a monopoly was legal, but that protecting it via illegal means was not. What, exactly, has Google done to illegally protect the alleged monopoly?
Also, it's hard to see how they create a barrier to entry in the market. Any idiot can set up an online advertising agency and start making deals (and many idiots have done precisely that).
If you really want to argue against it, there are several events that are less survivable and more insurmountable:
* Heat death of the universe.
* Proton decay.
We don't even have a theoretical way to survive these events. Make all the colonies you want, but it'll be damn hard to survive without stars... or protons. The good part is that these will take an absurdly long time to take place, so we can certainly live it up in the mean time.
> So go spend $700 on a phone system for the crisis line.
Call me crazy, but I'd just use a pay phone...