It's not about how much you like it, it's about how you define yourself. You can love things, but when you start thinking and describing yourself in terms of that thing, you're not in healthy territories. I hobby should be something you do, not something you are. You can call yourself a "Brony" or "Trekkie" and not have any dramas, but by doing so you're moving awfully close to an edge. Life is about balance and no single part of it should define who you are.
Non obsessives don't call themselves Bronies, or Trekkies, or Whovians, they don't define themselves based on what they like, they say "I like Star Trek" or "I like Doctor Who" (I presume that's what a Whovian is) or "I like My Little Pony".
When any interest(and that includes more socially acceptable interests like sports, sex, and alcohol) starts to define you, you're at the very least verging on engaging in some seriously unhealthy behavior. This is even more true when you're dealing with what might be considered socially unacceptable interests, because the sort of low level border line people tend to be pushed the other way by social pressure, but the social unacceptability of the interest isn't really the issue.
Personally I don't really give a crap if you like My Little Pony. I'll admit that I think that adults liking children's television shows is a little bit weird, but different strokes for different folks. So long as you're not hurting other people I don't really care what you do. However, calling yourself a "Brony" and giving people "Brohoofs" in all likelihood indicates some rather serious issues, sadly not uncommon issues, but issues none the less.
Essentially the point is that despite every attempt to make tanking more newbie friendly(and removing threat was actually a really good decision) or to entice them to tank, people aren't tanking and to a lesser extent aren't healing. This meant that DPS queues are 30-40 minutes, healers are about 5-10 and tanks don't have a queue. So they introduced multi-player content which didn't require a tank or healer, which I didn't actually have a problem with, dailies and repeating them on my alts is most of the reason I quit.
The issue with scenarios came when they didn't add any more dungeons in any of the content patches and basically made it clear it was unlikely they were going to do so. I like tanking and they're both totally useless in scenarios. So you switch to your undergeared dps spec, and join a spam fest to get a chest which may or may not have an item you want in it and get some valour you can't spend because you haven't done enough bloody dailies. This of course means that any non raid tanks and healers will essentially disappear because being one is just being a drain on the group which will mean they can't undo their scenario choice later(see Cataclysm and trying to make threat matter again).
Fundamentally speaking I think the game is dying, not because it's as old as it is, not because it's full of cruft and weird decisions or even because people are sick of it(I wasn't), but because they've stopped really investing in it. Dailies aren't really all that fun, but they're "content" to keep people occupied. Scenarios, even the better ones aren't as fun as dungeons and are even less repeatable, but they're a lot cheaper and easier to make. People have been complaining about WoW being moved to the "B" team for years, but as someone who has played since Vanilla I never really saw it until Mists of Pandaria. I liked Wrath, I even liked Cata, but feeling like if I didn't dedicate all of my play time to dailies I'd fall hopelessly behind(and perhaps more importantly have access to almost zero crafting recipes), it isn't fun. If I have an hour and a half to play I don't want to spend that whole hour and a half doing "kill X, find Y" quests I've done 50 times before.
It's just not fun anymore. I've played for years, but I just can't motivate myself to log in anymore, as soon as the year I signed up for for free D3 is done, I'm unsubbing.
I want to want to play it, it's given me years of fun and they've even put some neat things in, but between having to spend all my play time repeating the same damned set of dailies and the fact that they've essentially ditched dungeons in favor of scenarios(I get that wait times for non tanks/healers were out of control and that scenarios are cheaper to build, but scenarios are simply not fun), there's just nothing to motivate me.
To make the game accessible they've essentially ruined it for everyone, the gated content and reputations make the time investment too high for casuals and the content is too simple and repetitive for hardcore players.
You're analyzing the wrong thing, just like the original study.
We know that people text while driving and while holding the phone. We know this is relatively common. We know that this isn't particularly safe(how many accidents it actually causes I don't know). This is pretty much a done deal.
People may or may not text partially hands free, I've personally never seen anyone do it while inside the car with them, nor does it make any particular sense, I sure as hell don't push buttons on my phone to make hands free calls. Whether they do so is largely immaterial and the fact that it is not significantly safer than texting without hands free while useful from a perspective of completeness isn't hugely surprising(taking your eyes off the road is a recipe for disaster and taking a hand off the wheel is going to make responding to an emergency somewhat more difficult at best).
What we don't know is whether, assuming people text in a completely hands free manner(ie both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road), is it much than texting in the traditional manner. This is the interesting question because if it is, we can say that it is and hopefully encourage people to move towards using this technique. Banning people from touching their phones is all well and good, but given enforcement is going to be fairly minimal, getting people to stop doing what they want is going to be somewhat challenging. If on the other hand we can say to people "hey, if you use the feature your phone already has you can still text with your friends, but you can do it in a way that is X times safer, we might be able to change behavior. By saying "hands free texting is just as dangerous" especially when you haven't actually proven that, you're just saying "keep texting like you are because any change won't make things any better". People are really poor at judging low probability high impact risks, so barring a cop on every street corner or blocking texting within a vehicle for everyone, we're probably not going to stop it.
Is that the common method of hands free texting? I've never seen anyone do it(I've seen people text not hands free, but that's not what this was testing either) and the fact that holding onto your phone and looking at it is dangerous doesn't seem like a particularly revolutionary concept to me. The interesting question is "is hands free texting safer than non hands free texting? Whether people are actually doing it that way is largely beside the point when it comes to setting up legislation. In parts of Australia it is illegal to even touch your phone while driving, which makes this kind of texting already illegal, but what about legitimate hands free? Does that need to be regulated to or is it ok?
As for Mythbusters, I'd specifically mentioned it in my previous point as another example of "testing the wrong damned thing", they aren't the only people to have done this particular experiment(drive people through an obstacle course while making them have a conversation requiring detailed attention), but they're probably the example most folks have seen.
Fundamentally the point is that the headlines off this study say "Hands free texting isn't safer", but if you're holding the damned phone in your hand and pressing buttons it's not bloody hands free is it? We can have a discussion about how many people actually text hands free, or whether hands free actually works properly, but that doesn't change the fact that the "findings" of this study are both unsurprising and not what has been claimed.
I'm assuming that because I've never seen anyone trying to solve math problems while driving their car through an obstacle course(or anywhere else for that matter) and when I do talk on my phone hands free, I stop listening to the person when I need to pay attention to the road. The Mythbuster's driving tests prove that you can't solidly focus on the road and solidly focus on driving simultaneously, while an interesting if not unexpected result, this doesn't actually test what people actually do and if you want to prove something is dangerous you need to actually test it.
Hands free texting may be massively dangerous, it may not, the test they did doesn't prove one way or another because it doesn't test hands free texting, it tests a slightly less involved version of hand texting.
In terms of your personal attack on me, I don't text while driving, hands free or otherwise and I wouldn't be dramatically surprised if hands free texting isn't massively safer than non hands free version, I just wish people would actually fucking test the thing they're claiming. Test people driving having ordinary conversations, test people using actual hands free, and in an ideal world actually take the results you get and extrapolate them to real driving conditions(ie, if talking on the phone hands free increases the time before you react by half a second, how often do people actually encounter circumstances where that matters and could those circumstances be dealt with better by maintaining a larger follow distance?). How many deaths does hands free talking on the phone actually cause? From what I can see looking at the road toll statistics there hasn't been any kind of significant upward movement since cell phones became popular, if anything the road toll appears to be going down.
Do I like talking on the phone when I'm driving, yes, yes I do, it makes my boring commutes less boring and allows me to keep in touch with my family that live on the other side of the world(my commute is perfectly timed for calling them). Will I consider reasonable evidence that doing so is significantly increasing my likelihood of endangering myself and/or others? Of course I will, but I won't accept another bogus study where they test circumstances which are different than anything anyone ever does then claim the end of the world based on something they didn't actually test and work to ban yet another thing. The way we're going now they'll have to ban phones, radios and other people from our cars and then we still won't actually react quickly enough, or still won't see the oncoming car, or will go apeshit bored and start daydreaming and become even less safe.
The test is valid, but the conclusions drawn from it are utter bullshit. This study proves, not hugely surprisingly, that removing the actual typing process doesn't significantly improve the safety of drivers. What everyone has drawn from this is that hands free texting isn't safer than regular texting. That may or may not actually be the case, but this study doesn't come close to proving it one way or the other.
It's a bit like when they Mythbusters did the hands free driving stuff, the studies aren't wrong as such, but given most people don't pay have conversations requiring that level of concentration whlie driving it doesn't really prove what they tried to conclude.
It's always a more complicated issue that it's made out to be on this damned site.
As everyone on this site should know, the police can't just bust down doors whenever the hell they want to, they need a warrant, which means they need evidence they can take before a judge. GPS coordinates of the laptop are in most scenarios insufficient to achieve this. Under the best of circumstances the error range on a non military grade GPS unit is too high and a laptop indoors is far from the best of circumstances. Even if the house is the only one for miles(incredibly unlikely anywhere in London), the GPS isn't accurate enough to place them inside the house just near it. Judges can and should laugh this sort of shit out of court.
Aside from that, unless they get lucky and walk in on a treasure trove of stolen loot and/or drugs and guns, the best the police are likely to be able to do is a shot at receipt of stolen property which at the resale value of a second hand laptop is a slap on the wrist. I know we think our precious precious tech is worth killing for, but it's not.
TL;DR for the police this is a gigantic fishing expedition which will cost them time and money for an offender who hasn't actually hurt anyone and probably won't get any substantial punishment even if they can pin the crime on him. Get bashed over the head and provide them with the same evidence and they'll probably be checking it out, but having your shiny stolen is a first world problem.
Getting the identity of whoever is responsible for an internet account is not a criminal charge and really only requires probably cause. There's some justification, given the similarity of the nature of the evidence and the relatively low burden of proof required that lawsuits for the purpose of identification can and should be joined. We don't really want to waste the courts time with a thousand instances of "we have this IP downloading this file at this time" "Ok, here's a court order to find out who it is", you'd really get no opportunity to test the evidence at all at that point.
Lawsuits for damages against multiple plaintiffs however should be illegal unless the plaintiffs were acting in collusion, which you'd then have to prove(for a criminal example it would potentially be Ok to charge a group of people for a group activity like a lynching. You'd have to individually prove the people were there, but it seems idiotic to prove what happened a dozen times over. File sharing isn't like that though.
Not really. In any legal system you're going to have two parties who don't agree on what the outcome ought to be and if you penalize someone for trying to get justice when they acted in good faith you're always going to crush the little guy. It doesn't really matter whether you have lawyers or some sort of perfect judge listening the arguments, it's always going to come down to a scenario where people act in good faith but are wrong. If we punish those people it will stifle legitimate grievances and if we don't we'll always have a disproportionate cost incurred by the defendant because they have more to lose.
The costs of attacking vs defending are actually pretty similar(in fact I'd suggest that someone like Sony actually spends vastly more in legal fees than most of the people they sue). The major cost difference is the cost of losing, it's much more expensive for someone defending against a lawsuit to lose than it is for someone initiating a lawsuit to lose.
This is deliberate, by design, and necessary. If you penalize people for losing lawsuits you basically create a world which is worse than the one we're in. Sony can afford to pay a million dollars if they lose a lawsuit, Joe Blogs can't. If you try to only penalize "vexatious" lawsuits and you don't set the burden of proof extremely high then again it's Joe Blogs who does't have a team of lawyers on retainer to wiggle him round the law who loses out.
Just about the only thing you could do is to put a penalty for losing which is proportional to the amount you can afford to pay, but even that's got some seriously scary consequences. It's pretty much impossible to except in the most extreme of circumstances to prove that someone is acting in bad faith, and given that it's also virtually impossible to penalize bad faith lawsuits without simultaneously penalizing good faith lawsuits.
I know there's a sub section of Slashdot who thinks that all lawsuits are bad, but you don't really want to live in a world without any, at least not one populated by humans.
The problem isn't really about journals in your field, if the journal is in your field you're more than capable of filtering the wheat from the chaff regardless of its source.
The issue is that putting "Journal of _____" as a reference adds a degree of credibility. It does so because it's supposed to indicate that a whole bunch of people who actually know what they're talking about looked at the article in question and at the very least didn't laugh. I like to believe I'm reasonably intelligent, but if I'd read one of your papers on whatever obscure branch of DNA technology you were a world expert in, I'd have a fairly difficult time determining if you were making it up. Plenty of people know a lot less than I do, so they'd probably have no hope whatsoever.
Essentially the issue we're dealing with is that when you reference a journal there is an unwritten statement saying "a bunch of experts agree with this idea or at least think it has merit", and in a lot of cases this is false advertising.
Except of course that unless you are an expert in a particular field your "web of trust" is really likely to just be a list of sources which support what you already believe. If you believe AGW is a crock you'll trust journals which agree with you as opposed to ones which don't.
The basis of trust in journals is peer review, that is to say it's a web of trust, but it's a web of trust generated by people who know what they're god damned talking about as opposed to a web of trust I create based on my own biases and paranoia. Unless you're an expert in the field I couldn't care less who "you" trust.
The thing is we're not talking about the idiots in the mainstream media vs the idiots with blogs, we're talking about scientific journals and the thing which differentiates the two is peer review.
Without peer review, the publication of a scientific study, no matter how well researched is no different than anything you read in the newspaper. That is to say it's just some idiots opinion. Having just some idiot's opinion come out of something which claims to be a scientific journal is a scary prospect for everyone. From a matter of practicality none of us have the expertise to personally read every scientific paper we might see referenced somewhere, let alone actually properly analyse it and try to replicate the results. We trust the reference because the journal has credibility, because it's supposed to be peer reviewed. If we can't tell the difference between peer reviewed and non peer reviewed journals then we're left essentially with the options of trusting everything we see referenced or nothing we see referenced, neither of which is good for creating an informed society.
And replace it with what exactly? How far back does RedHat actively support, or any Linux provider for that matter. I sincerely doubt anyone is providing free commercial support for decade old versions of their OS.
The bigger issue for corporations is actually licensing anyway, and that was caused by Windows 8. Windows comes with a minus two version license which up until last year allowed everyone to install XP on a machine they bought with Windows 7 without paying anything extra. New equipment is now coming with Win 8 installed on it which only allows you to go back to Vista unless you pay extra per machine or have software assurance.
Company which hasn't made anything of note in years shut down.
Seriously folks, LucasArts has made some of the greatest games I've ever played, but how long does that keep the lights on? It's not like the brand even has that much value anymore.
Except of course GST is 10% which is actually less than sales tax in some US states, import taxes on software are, to the best of my knowledge, virtually non existent, and for all the consumer protection laws here, our software warranties are absolutely identical to those of the US. In some instances(Steam for instance) the company doesn't even have a physical presence here.
Even if all those things actually added dramatically to the cost, some of these products are in excess of double the US prices while our dollar is actually worth more. The honest truth is that every single companies real answer is the same as Microsoft's, the Australian economy is doing quite well and a long history of significantly lower exchange rates has made Australians accustomed to substantially higher prices. Customers are willing and able to pay a higher price and so companies charge them a higher price.
Think of the armistice like an employment contract. You can always get out of that contract by quitting, even if the contract has terms of notice, it's still entirely doable. You can't however decide the contract is null and void and continue working for the company, at last not unilaterally.
Similarly, North Korea can reignite the Korean war, but they can't invalidate the armistice without doing so, at least not unilaterally. North Korea doesn't want an actual war, they just want to change the terms of the peace.
Well, if you are a US citizen you are required by law to disclose the amounts and locations of all foreign bank accounts once their combined value surpasses $US 10,000. This is regardless of your place of residence or any dual nationality you may possess and is distinct and separate from your obligation to report all foreign income to the IRS and pay any applicable tax on it, again regardless of your country of residence or citizenship status therein. As I understand it you don't even have to have ever actually set foot on US soil at any point in your life for this to be the case.
This is a bullshit law(and costs me a crap load in accountancy fees), but it is the law. It also apparently predates 9/11 by several decades though the heat has been turned up somewhat over the last few years.
Realistically at this point, do you think anyone but South Korea would actually care? China showing expansionist tendencies would be slightly unnerving, and South Korea would be unhappy about the impact on a unified Korea, but do you really think that aside from some strongly worded public speeches anyone would give a rats? China are a lot less insane and a lot less dangerous than NK and can solve everyone's problems.
The problem with the standard model is and always has been that there's no way of unifying what happens at the planetary scale with what happens at the subatomic scale. We have theories to explain both individually, but no theory to explain both together. To the best of my understanding(which isn't very deep I confess) the Higgs doesn't actually provide that theory.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about how much you like it, it's about how you define yourself. You can love things, but when you start thinking and describing yourself in terms of that thing, you're not in healthy territories. I hobby should be something you do, not something you are. You can call yourself a "Brony" or "Trekkie" and not have any dramas, but by doing so you're moving awfully close to an edge. Life is about balance and no single part of it should define who you are.
Non obsessives don't call themselves Bronies, or Trekkies, or Whovians, they don't define themselves based on what they like, they say "I like Star Trek" or "I like Doctor Who" (I presume that's what a Whovian is) or "I like My Little Pony".
When any interest(and that includes more socially acceptable interests like sports, sex, and alcohol) starts to define you, you're at the very least verging on engaging in some seriously unhealthy behavior. This is even more true when you're dealing with what might be considered socially unacceptable interests, because the sort of low level border line people tend to be pushed the other way by social pressure, but the social unacceptability of the interest isn't really the issue.
Personally I don't really give a crap if you like My Little Pony. I'll admit that I think that adults liking children's television shows is a little bit weird, but different strokes for different folks. So long as you're not hurting other people I don't really care what you do. However, calling yourself a "Brony" and giving people "Brohoofs" in all likelihood indicates some rather serious issues, sadly not uncommon issues, but issues none the less.
Essentially the point is that despite every attempt to make tanking more newbie friendly(and removing threat was actually a really good decision) or to entice them to tank, people aren't tanking and to a lesser extent aren't healing. This meant that DPS queues are 30-40 minutes, healers are about 5-10 and tanks don't have a queue. So they introduced multi-player content which didn't require a tank or healer, which I didn't actually have a problem with, dailies and repeating them on my alts is most of the reason I quit.
The issue with scenarios came when they didn't add any more dungeons in any of the content patches and basically made it clear it was unlikely they were going to do so. I like tanking and they're both totally useless in scenarios. So you switch to your undergeared dps spec, and join a spam fest to get a chest which may or may not have an item you want in it and get some valour you can't spend because you haven't done enough bloody dailies. This of course means that any non raid tanks and healers will essentially disappear because being one is just being a drain on the group which will mean they can't undo their scenario choice later(see Cataclysm and trying to make threat matter again).
Fundamentally speaking I think the game is dying, not because it's as old as it is, not because it's full of cruft and weird decisions or even because people are sick of it(I wasn't), but because they've stopped really investing in it. Dailies aren't really all that fun, but they're "content" to keep people occupied. Scenarios, even the better ones aren't as fun as dungeons and are even less repeatable, but they're a lot cheaper and easier to make. People have been complaining about WoW being moved to the "B" team for years, but as someone who has played since Vanilla I never really saw it until Mists of Pandaria. I liked Wrath, I even liked Cata, but feeling like if I didn't dedicate all of my play time to dailies I'd fall hopelessly behind(and perhaps more importantly have access to almost zero crafting recipes), it isn't fun. If I have an hour and a half to play I don't want to spend that whole hour and a half doing "kill X, find Y" quests I've done 50 times before.
It's just not fun anymore. I've played for years, but I just can't motivate myself to log in anymore, as soon as the year I signed up for for free D3 is done, I'm unsubbing.
I want to want to play it, it's given me years of fun and they've even put some neat things in, but between having to spend all my play time repeating the same damned set of dailies and the fact that they've essentially ditched dungeons in favor of scenarios(I get that wait times for non tanks/healers were out of control and that scenarios are cheaper to build, but scenarios are simply not fun), there's just nothing to motivate me.
To make the game accessible they've essentially ruined it for everyone, the gated content and reputations make the time investment too high for casuals and the content is too simple and repetitive for hardcore players.
You're analyzing the wrong thing, just like the original study.
We know that people text while driving and while holding the phone. We know this is relatively common. We know that this isn't particularly safe(how many accidents it actually causes I don't know). This is pretty much a done deal.
People may or may not text partially hands free, I've personally never seen anyone do it while inside the car with them, nor does it make any particular sense, I sure as hell don't push buttons on my phone to make hands free calls. Whether they do so is largely immaterial and the fact that it is not significantly safer than texting without hands free while useful from a perspective of completeness isn't hugely surprising(taking your eyes off the road is a recipe for disaster and taking a hand off the wheel is going to make responding to an emergency somewhat more difficult at best).
What we don't know is whether, assuming people text in a completely hands free manner(ie both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road), is it much than texting in the traditional manner. This is the interesting question because if it is, we can say that it is and hopefully encourage people to move towards using this technique. Banning people from touching their phones is all well and good, but given enforcement is going to be fairly minimal, getting people to stop doing what they want is going to be somewhat challenging. If on the other hand we can say to people "hey, if you use the feature your phone already has you can still text with your friends, but you can do it in a way that is X times safer, we might be able to change behavior. By saying "hands free texting is just as dangerous" especially when you haven't actually proven that, you're just saying "keep texting like you are because any change won't make things any better". People are really poor at judging low probability high impact risks, so barring a cop on every street corner or blocking texting within a vehicle for everyone, we're probably not going to stop it.
Is that the common method of hands free texting? I've never seen anyone do it(I've seen people text not hands free, but that's not what this was testing either) and the fact that holding onto your phone and looking at it is dangerous doesn't seem like a particularly revolutionary concept to me. The interesting question is "is hands free texting safer than non hands free texting? Whether people are actually doing it that way is largely beside the point when it comes to setting up legislation. In parts of Australia it is illegal to even touch your phone while driving, which makes this kind of texting already illegal, but what about legitimate hands free? Does that need to be regulated to or is it ok?
As for Mythbusters, I'd specifically mentioned it in my previous point as another example of "testing the wrong damned thing", they aren't the only people to have done this particular experiment(drive people through an obstacle course while making them have a conversation requiring detailed attention), but they're probably the example most folks have seen.
Fundamentally the point is that the headlines off this study say "Hands free texting isn't safer", but if you're holding the damned phone in your hand and pressing buttons it's not bloody hands free is it? We can have a discussion about how many people actually text hands free, or whether hands free actually works properly, but that doesn't change the fact that the "findings" of this study are both unsurprising and not what has been claimed.
I'm assuming that because I've never seen anyone trying to solve math problems while driving their car through an obstacle course(or anywhere else for that matter) and when I do talk on my phone hands free, I stop listening to the person when I need to pay attention to the road. The Mythbuster's driving tests prove that you can't solidly focus on the road and solidly focus on driving simultaneously, while an interesting if not unexpected result, this doesn't actually test what people actually do and if you want to prove something is dangerous you need to actually test it.
Hands free texting may be massively dangerous, it may not, the test they did doesn't prove one way or another because it doesn't test hands free texting, it tests a slightly less involved version of hand texting.
In terms of your personal attack on me, I don't text while driving, hands free or otherwise and I wouldn't be dramatically surprised if hands free texting isn't massively safer than non hands free version, I just wish people would actually fucking test the thing they're claiming. Test people driving having ordinary conversations, test people using actual hands free, and in an ideal world actually take the results you get and extrapolate them to real driving conditions(ie, if talking on the phone hands free increases the time before you react by half a second, how often do people actually encounter circumstances where that matters and could those circumstances be dealt with better by maintaining a larger follow distance?). How many deaths does hands free talking on the phone actually cause? From what I can see looking at the road toll statistics there hasn't been any kind of significant upward movement since cell phones became popular, if anything the road toll appears to be going down.
Do I like talking on the phone when I'm driving, yes, yes I do, it makes my boring commutes less boring and allows me to keep in touch with my family that live on the other side of the world(my commute is perfectly timed for calling them). Will I consider reasonable evidence that doing so is significantly increasing my likelihood of endangering myself and/or others? Of course I will, but I won't accept another bogus study where they test circumstances which are different than anything anyone ever does then claim the end of the world based on something they didn't actually test and work to ban yet another thing. The way we're going now they'll have to ban phones, radios and other people from our cars and then we still won't actually react quickly enough, or still won't see the oncoming car, or will go apeshit bored and start daydreaming and become even less safe.
The test is valid, but the conclusions drawn from it are utter bullshit. This study proves, not hugely surprisingly, that removing the actual typing process doesn't significantly improve the safety of drivers. What everyone has drawn from this is that hands free texting isn't safer than regular texting. That may or may not actually be the case, but this study doesn't come close to proving it one way or the other.
It's a bit like when they Mythbusters did the hands free driving stuff, the studies aren't wrong as such, but given most people don't pay have conversations requiring that level of concentration whlie driving it doesn't really prove what they tried to conclude.
It's always a more complicated issue that it's made out to be on this damned site.
As everyone on this site should know, the police can't just bust down doors whenever the hell they want to, they need a warrant, which means they need evidence they can take before a judge. GPS coordinates of the laptop are in most scenarios insufficient to achieve this. Under the best of circumstances the error range on a non military grade GPS unit is too high and a laptop indoors is far from the best of circumstances. Even if the house is the only one for miles(incredibly unlikely anywhere in London), the GPS isn't accurate enough to place them inside the house just near it. Judges can and should laugh this sort of shit out of court.
Aside from that, unless they get lucky and walk in on a treasure trove of stolen loot and/or drugs and guns, the best the police are likely to be able to do is a shot at receipt of stolen property which at the resale value of a second hand laptop is a slap on the wrist. I know we think our precious precious tech is worth killing for, but it's not.
TL;DR for the police this is a gigantic fishing expedition which will cost them time and money for an offender who hasn't actually hurt anyone and probably won't get any substantial punishment even if they can pin the crime on him. Get bashed over the head and provide them with the same evidence and they'll probably be checking it out, but having your shiny stolen is a first world problem.
There's some gray area there.
Getting the identity of whoever is responsible for an internet account is not a criminal charge and really only requires probably cause. There's some justification, given the similarity of the nature of the evidence and the relatively low burden of proof required that lawsuits for the purpose of identification can and should be joined. We don't really want to waste the courts time with a thousand instances of "we have this IP downloading this file at this time" "Ok, here's a court order to find out who it is", you'd really get no opportunity to test the evidence at all at that point.
Lawsuits for damages against multiple plaintiffs however should be illegal unless the plaintiffs were acting in collusion, which you'd then have to prove(for a criminal example it would potentially be Ok to charge a group of people for a group activity like a lynching. You'd have to individually prove the people were there, but it seems idiotic to prove what happened a dozen times over. File sharing isn't like that though.
Not really. In any legal system you're going to have two parties who don't agree on what the outcome ought to be and if you penalize someone for trying to get justice when they acted in good faith you're always going to crush the little guy. It doesn't really matter whether you have lawyers or some sort of perfect judge listening the arguments, it's always going to come down to a scenario where people act in good faith but are wrong. If we punish those people it will stifle legitimate grievances and if we don't we'll always have a disproportionate cost incurred by the defendant because they have more to lose.
It's not by mistake, it's by necessity.
The costs of attacking vs defending are actually pretty similar(in fact I'd suggest that someone like Sony actually spends vastly more in legal fees than most of the people they sue). The major cost difference is the cost of losing, it's much more expensive for someone defending against a lawsuit to lose than it is for someone initiating a lawsuit to lose.
This is deliberate, by design, and necessary. If you penalize people for losing lawsuits you basically create a world which is worse than the one we're in. Sony can afford to pay a million dollars if they lose a lawsuit, Joe Blogs can't. If you try to only penalize "vexatious" lawsuits and you don't set the burden of proof extremely high then again it's Joe Blogs who does't have a team of lawyers on retainer to wiggle him round the law who loses out.
Just about the only thing you could do is to put a penalty for losing which is proportional to the amount you can afford to pay, but even that's got some seriously scary consequences. It's pretty much impossible to except in the most extreme of circumstances to prove that someone is acting in bad faith, and given that it's also virtually impossible to penalize bad faith lawsuits without simultaneously penalizing good faith lawsuits.
I know there's a sub section of Slashdot who thinks that all lawsuits are bad, but you don't really want to live in a world without any, at least not one populated by humans.
The problem isn't really about journals in your field, if the journal is in your field you're more than capable of filtering the wheat from the chaff regardless of its source.
The issue is that putting "Journal of _____" as a reference adds a degree of credibility. It does so because it's supposed to indicate that a whole bunch of people who actually know what they're talking about looked at the article in question and at the very least didn't laugh. I like to believe I'm reasonably intelligent, but if I'd read one of your papers on whatever obscure branch of DNA technology you were a world expert in, I'd have a fairly difficult time determining if you were making it up. Plenty of people know a lot less than I do, so they'd probably have no hope whatsoever.
Essentially the issue we're dealing with is that when you reference a journal there is an unwritten statement saying "a bunch of experts agree with this idea or at least think it has merit", and in a lot of cases this is false advertising.
Except of course that unless you are an expert in a particular field your "web of trust" is really likely to just be a list of sources which support what you already believe. If you believe AGW is a crock you'll trust journals which agree with you as opposed to ones which don't.
The basis of trust in journals is peer review, that is to say it's a web of trust, but it's a web of trust generated by people who know what they're god damned talking about as opposed to a web of trust I create based on my own biases and paranoia. Unless you're an expert in the field I couldn't care less who "you" trust.
The thing is we're not talking about the idiots in the mainstream media vs the idiots with blogs, we're talking about scientific journals and the thing which differentiates the two is peer review.
Without peer review, the publication of a scientific study, no matter how well researched is no different than anything you read in the newspaper. That is to say it's just some idiots opinion. Having just some idiot's opinion come out of something which claims to be a scientific journal is a scary prospect for everyone. From a matter of practicality none of us have the expertise to personally read every scientific paper we might see referenced somewhere, let alone actually properly analyse it and try to replicate the results. We trust the reference because the journal has credibility, because it's supposed to be peer reviewed. If we can't tell the difference between peer reviewed and non peer reviewed journals then we're left essentially with the options of trusting everything we see referenced or nothing we see referenced, neither of which is good for creating an informed society.
And replace it with what exactly? How far back does RedHat actively support, or any Linux provider for that matter. I sincerely doubt anyone is providing free commercial support for decade old versions of their OS.
The bigger issue for corporations is actually licensing anyway, and that was caused by Windows 8. Windows comes with a minus two version license which up until last year allowed everyone to install XP on a machine they bought with Windows 7 without paying anything extra. New equipment is now coming with Win 8 installed on it which only allows you to go back to Vista unless you pay extra per machine or have software assurance.
Company which hasn't made anything of note in years shut down.
Seriously folks, LucasArts has made some of the greatest games I've ever played, but how long does that keep the lights on? It's not like the brand even has that much value anymore.
Except of course GST is 10% which is actually less than sales tax in some US states, import taxes on software are, to the best of my knowledge, virtually non existent, and for all the consumer protection laws here, our software warranties are absolutely identical to those of the US. In some instances(Steam for instance) the company doesn't even have a physical presence here.
Even if all those things actually added dramatically to the cost, some of these products are in excess of double the US prices while our dollar is actually worth more. The honest truth is that every single companies real answer is the same as Microsoft's, the Australian economy is doing quite well and a long history of significantly lower exchange rates has made Australians accustomed to substantially higher prices. Customers are willing and able to pay a higher price and so companies charge them a higher price.
Was a reference to point 3 when you were talking about WMD's as a justification for war. They're only a justification for war when they don't exist.
The metaphor works better if your boss is you pretend your boss is a total pushover.
That said, the issue you're having is assuming that a metaphor works on all levels, which they never do.
You're missing the point.
Think of the armistice like an employment contract. You can always get out of that contract by quitting, even if the contract has terms of notice, it's still entirely doable. You can't however decide the contract is null and void and continue working for the company, at last not unilaterally.
Similarly, North Korea can reignite the Korean war, but they can't invalidate the armistice without doing so, at least not unilaterally. North Korea doesn't want an actual war, they just want to change the terms of the peace.
Not quite. The bigger issue, aside from China is that while Iraq was supposedly building WMDs, North Korea actually has them.
Well, if you are a US citizen you are required by law to disclose the amounts and locations of all foreign bank accounts once their combined value surpasses $US 10,000. This is regardless of your place of residence or any dual nationality you may possess and is distinct and separate from your obligation to report all foreign income to the IRS and pay any applicable tax on it, again regardless of your country of residence or citizenship status therein. As I understand it you don't even have to have ever actually set foot on US soil at any point in your life for this to be the case.
This is a bullshit law(and costs me a crap load in accountancy fees), but it is the law. It also apparently predates 9/11 by several decades though the heat has been turned up somewhat over the last few years.
Realistically at this point, do you think anyone but South Korea would actually care? China showing expansionist tendencies would be slightly unnerving, and South Korea would be unhappy about the impact on a unified Korea, but do you really think that aside from some strongly worded public speeches anyone would give a rats? China are a lot less insane and a lot less dangerous than NK and can solve everyone's problems.
The problem with the standard model is and always has been that there's no way of unifying what happens at the planetary scale with what happens at the subatomic scale. We have theories to explain both individually, but no theory to explain both together. To the best of my understanding(which isn't very deep I confess) the Higgs doesn't actually provide that theory.