There is no such thing as Freedom of speech or press legally in the UK, get used to it.
Not true.
Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms
as amended by Protocol No. 11
Rome, 4.XI.1950
Article 9 - Freedom of thought, conscience and religion1
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.
Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Article 10 - Freedom of expression
Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
Ok, I'm about as conservative as they come, but I would really like to see governments keep their damn hands out of censorship or regulating any kind of media. If people want to watch BBC's biased coverage, GOOD! Let them. If there's a demand for something else, another station will fill it. It's the same as the senator guy from Alaska wanting to regulate cable and satellites. I say leave it all alone and let the media market self-regulate.
Let's look at what's wrong with this:
1: The BBC is funded by the British taxpayer.
2: The BBC is (in Britain at least) a public sector organisation that has always been regulated in accordance with a charter agreed between itself and the government.
3: The BBC is required BY BRITITSH LAW to provided UNBIASED political broadcasting.
4: The BBC is not subjected to market pressures. The main bulk of its operation is not funded by advertising or by consumer purchase, but by a tax on owning a TV set in Britain which is paid regardless of whether you actually use the BBC.
5: The BBC is not directly censored by any organisation outside the BBC.
The overt purpose of funding the BBC is to provide unbiased news, politics, public sector broadcasting as well as entertainment and educational programming that might otherwise not be available. The negotiation of the charter with the BBC is to ensure that it fulfils this purpose, and that it regulates itself in accordance with its purpose.
Since everyone was debating what art is, and can a computer do it, I've decided to go for the single definitive source about this "art" thing. The dictionary. To be precise, the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. So, here it is:
Main Entry: 2art
Pronunciation: 'ärt
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old French, from Latin art-, ars -- more at ARM
1 : skill acquired by experience, study, or observation .
Can a computer gain a skill by experience, study or observation? Not yet. So, no on this definition.
2 a : a branch of learning: (1) : one of the humanities (2) plural : LIBERAL ARTS b archaic : LEARNING, SCHOLARSHIP
Nope.
3 : an occupation requiring knowledge or skill
The computer program doesn't have knowledge or skill. ( the programmer might have, so the program might be art but the output isn't).So nope.
4 a : the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects; also : works so produced b (1) : FINE ARTS (2) : one of the fine arts (3) : a graphic art
The computer isn't conscious. So nope.
5 a archaic : a skillful plan b : the quality or state of being artful
Nope.
6 : decorative or illustrative elements in printed matter
The output of a computer program can be decorative and can be printed. Therefore, the output is art.
So, there. The answer from the definitve source. The output of a computer program can be art.
If anything it cost the Britishers their entire empire to bring down the Germany's world conquest campaign. They paid the highest price of all.
While I am british and proud of our efforts in WWII, I have to take exception to this. The casualty figures speak volumes.
(http://ww2bodycount.netfirms.com/)
For soldiers:
British Empire and Commonwealth 452,000
Soviet Union 13,600.000
For civilians:
British Empire and Commonwealth 60.000
Soviet Union 7.700.000
While the US and other allies helped, the single most important factor that kept the UK in the war and allowed to the defeat of hitler was the soviet union.
In the meantime Iraq is actually having free and open elections so democracy will arrive.
The lessons of history shows that just because you have free and open elections doesn't necessarily mean that the nutbars won't win power. Weimar Germany shows that - it was one of the most democratic states in europe until the crises that lead the NSDAP bstrds into power. And what will the US and UK do if democracy leads to power by groups that sponsor state terrorism?
Is whether the license gives developers in OS products a perpetual right to use the patent, or could sun take the rights away at some point stopping projects that rely on them from producing new releases?
Since human intelligence is vaguely understood at best, it is necessary to come to a more comprehensive understanding of human intelligence before we can even attempt at making a decent replica (or simulacra for that matter) of it.
The other question is whether we should be aiming at simulating human intelligence at all, or whether looking at the concept of machine intelligence would be a better idea.
Computers are fundamentally different than humans: they have different sences, work at different speeds in different ways, have different mortality criteria (i.e. die in a different way), and have different methods of reproduction. Consequently, any real machine intelligence is likely to be different to human intelligence to a greater extent than human intelligence is different to chicken intelligence.
Actually, the difficult part is escaping the building you live in when there is a power cut. Or securing national defence when some nutbar cracker gets into the traffic control system and shuts it down. Or securing your right of privacy when the government can hack into your home and ask your toilet how many times you've gone recently. Or trying to eat pizza when your buggy fridge thinks that you've got too many in the freezer because some programmer had drunk too much coffee and had a deadline.
When you program computers for a living, you know that computers rely on people, and that people make mistakes. I quite like doors as a technology: I've never had a blue screen of death with a door. Before we replace things that work with things that don't always work, maybe we should think a little?
Actually, the limiting factor most likely to stop Moores law is one that is already biting: heat. As microchips clock speed increases, they tend to produce more heat and operate at higer frequencies. The first microwave computer has yet to be produced, but it won't be long until I can cook my pizza as I program.
Some institutional investors are "complete idiots" in the sense that their investment trust does not try to buy the best shares. They try to match the average growth of an index by buying a weighted number of shares in the index*. Such fund managers would purchase google even if they personally thought that the share was rubbish (and would ditch it when the share loses enough value).
* The theory is that on average it is impossible to beat an efficient market, and so the best way to perform the other investment funds is to reduce the charges associated with choosing shares.
My question is: How can the German Library break the copy protection when it is illegal to produce tools to do it?
I would have thought the article tells you this. The german government wrote into law an exception that said that the German Library could produce and own tools to do it since it was impossible to carry out their legal functions without such an excemption. I would assume that this is legal since their is an excemption in the EU copyright directive to allow member states to make such exceptions (e.g)
(34) Member States should be given the option of providing for certain exceptions or limitations for cases such as educational and scientific purposes, for the benefit of public institutions such as libraries and archives,....
The estimated cost of fire arms related violence in south Manchester is £5 million each year(http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/crrs13 bn.pdf ). There were 1,200 gun crime offences and 6 fatalities in Manchester last year (http://newswww.bbc.net.uk/1/hi/uk/3774553.stm).
This said, gun crime is still a very small percentage of crime ( 0.5%. of all recorded crime in Manchester ) and firearms offences include possession.
National statistics can be seen at http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF05.htm . Note that the number of people injured by guns in England and Wales has increased from 2164
To 4556 since 1989 with murders involving gun crime from 45 to 81 in the same period. Increasingly harsh sentences have had no obvious effects on the figures.
You are right to say that gun crime is normally limited to illegal gangs (mostly drug addicts) and organised criminals.
I'm British. So, with respect to the UK (which is still part of Europe despite appearances:)
Common people and citizens have NO guns...
Wrong. Guns are heavily regulated, and have to be locked away with the ammo in a separate place. But some people have rifles or handguns.
Burglars have no guns.
Wrong. When I lived in Manchester, it was possible for a criminal to buy unregistered guns very cheaply. In fact, gun crime has significantly increased in the last few years since gun ownership became far more heavily regulated.
My understanding of the reason that gun ownership was enshrined in the constitution was that it was meant to give US citizens the ability to revolt against the US government if it ever infringed the basic democratic rights of citizens. It was not for self-defence against criminals; that is just a useful by-product.
caused it. Places where they measure temperature and rainfall the most are areas that are developed the most
Actually, the places with the most long term record of rainfall and pollution are the least developed in the world. They are the north and south poles, where core samples can show relative snow fall (i.e. rainfall) and greenhouse gasses/other forms of pollution. One of the people I worked with did a PhD in the 1980's that showed that there have been substantial increases to the average temperature over the last 5,000 years.
... Whereas, in the UK nobody uses the NI number (the local equivalent of the Social Security Number) since huge numbers of people have multiple numbers due to government incompetence and individual fraud.
Actually, IIRC, scientists have already measured a drop in both the salinity of the atlantic ocean, and a drop in the volume of water moving in the gulf stream.
Where people disagree is the effect that this would have on the climate. Most scientists seem to think that the temperature drops will be counteracted by increases in temperature due to global warming, leading to worse winters in the UK and northern europe but leaving them inhabitable. Some scientists are worried that the gulf stream might change direction towards the ice caps so increasing the rate of ice melting. Others are worried that if the gulf stream stops, it would reduce the temperature in northern europe enough to cause a new ice age, something that would have major effects on a global scale. No one actually knows.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/science_natu re/the_day_after_tomorrow.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/impact/gulf_stream.sh tml
Sending an e-mail to the maker is one thing, but posting it online, no matter how much of semi-good-intentioned drama queen you are, is reckless or malicious.
Except that advertising problems to the public can be the only way get the manufacturer to fix their software. On more than one occasion I've reported a problem and not seen it fixed in subsequent releases. Should we keep silent forever? And sometimes even though the company has produced a fix no one knows about it for months or years. Publicity can be a good thing for the consumer even if it is not always a good thing for the producer.
The rumours might be accurate in part, but perhaps terribly inaccurate in other ways - and could significantly undermine the true products if they're seen as inferior to the imaginary ones. If that's the case, I can see why people at Apple would be upset...
IANAL but I always thought that the purpose of Trade Secret law is to protect a company against people informing competitors of TRUE information (i.e. Trade Secrets) not FALSE information. The legal defence against false information is Libel or Slander...
Take off that American blindfold of yours.
there are plenty of countries where the age of consent is much much lower.
Firstly, the age of concent is not really relevant in a situation where the pornography is being sold without the concent of the girl. And the actual crime these people have been arested for is not underage sex, but distributing pornography
There is a second issue lurking in the article. That of prison conditions. Is it really right to lock a man up with 70 other untried defendants before he is even found guilty? I think not.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no such thing as Freedom of speech or press legally in the UK, get used to it.
Not true.
Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms
as amended by Protocol No. 11
Rome, 4.XI.1950
Article 9 - Freedom of thought, conscience and religion1
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.
Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Article 10 - Freedom of expression
Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
Err... they rebelled about not having representatives in partliament...
Ok, I'm about as conservative as they come, but I would really like to see governments keep their damn hands out of censorship or regulating any kind of media. If people want to watch BBC's biased coverage, GOOD! Let them. If there's a demand for something else, another station will fill it. It's the same as the senator guy from Alaska wanting to regulate cable and satellites. I say leave it all alone and let the media market self-regulate.
Let's look at what's wrong with this:
1: The BBC is funded by the British taxpayer.
2: The BBC is (in Britain at least) a public sector organisation that has always been regulated in accordance with a charter agreed between itself and the government.
3: The BBC is required BY BRITITSH LAW to provided UNBIASED political broadcasting.
4: The BBC is not subjected to market pressures. The main bulk of its operation is not funded by advertising or by consumer purchase, but by a tax on owning a TV set in Britain which is paid regardless of whether you actually use the BBC.
5: The BBC is not directly censored by any organisation outside the BBC.
The overt purpose of funding the BBC is to provide unbiased news, politics, public sector broadcasting as well as entertainment and educational programming that might otherwise not be available. The negotiation of the charter with the BBC is to ensure that it fulfils this purpose, and that it regulates itself in accordance with its purpose.
Google frontpage: ~4KB HTML
MSN frontpage: umbteen kilobytes of clutter, flash, and totally irrelevant BS.
guess which one im gonna pull up for a simple web search.
The one that produces results that match your search most often. The size of the MSN homepage isn't that much of an issue to anyone with broadband.
Since everyone was debating what art is, and can a computer do it, I've decided to go for the single definitive source about this "art" thing. The dictionary. To be precise, the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. So, here it is:
Main Entry: 2art
Pronunciation: 'ärt
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old French, from Latin art-, ars -- more at ARM
1 : skill acquired by experience, study, or observation
. Can a computer gain a skill by experience, study or observation? Not yet. So, no on this definition.
2 a : a branch of learning: (1) : one of the humanities (2) plural : LIBERAL ARTS b archaic : LEARNING, SCHOLARSHIP
Nope.
3 : an occupation requiring knowledge or skill
The computer program doesn't have knowledge or skill. ( the programmer might have, so the program might be art but the output isn't).So nope.
4 a : the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects; also : works so produced b (1) : FINE ARTS (2) : one of the fine arts (3) : a graphic art
The computer isn't conscious. So nope.
5 a archaic : a skillful plan b : the quality or state of being artful
Nope.
6 : decorative or illustrative elements in printed matter
The output of a computer program can be decorative and can be printed. Therefore, the output is art.
So, there. The answer from the definitve source. The output of a computer program can be art.
If anything it cost the Britishers their entire empire to bring down the Germany's world conquest campaign. They paid the highest price of all.
While I am british and proud of our efforts in WWII, I have to take exception to this. The casualty figures speak volumes.
(http://ww2bodycount.netfirms.com/)
For soldiers:
British Empire and Commonwealth 452,000
Soviet Union 13,600.000
For civilians:
British Empire and Commonwealth 60.000
Soviet Union 7.700.000
While the US and other allies helped, the single most important factor that kept the UK in the war and allowed to the defeat of hitler was the soviet union.
In the meantime Iraq is actually having free and open elections so democracy will arrive.
The lessons of history shows that just because you have free and open elections doesn't necessarily mean that the nutbars won't win power. Weimar Germany shows that - it was one of the most democratic states in europe until the crises that lead the NSDAP bstrds into power. And what will the US and UK do if democracy leads to power by groups that sponsor state terrorism?
Is whether the license gives developers in OS products a perpetual right to use the patent, or could sun take the rights away at some point stopping projects that rely on them from producing new releases?
Since human intelligence is vaguely understood at best, it is necessary to come to a more comprehensive understanding of human intelligence before we can even attempt at making a decent replica (or simulacra for that matter) of it.
The other question is whether we should be aiming at simulating human intelligence at all, or whether looking at the concept of machine intelligence would be a better idea.
Computers are fundamentally different than humans: they have different sences, work at different speeds in different ways, have different mortality criteria (i.e. die in a different way), and have different methods of reproduction. Consequently, any real machine intelligence is likely to be different to human intelligence to a greater extent than human intelligence is different to chicken intelligence.
Actually, the difficult part is escaping the building you live in when there is a power cut. Or securing national defence when some nutbar cracker gets into the traffic control system and shuts it down. Or securing your right of privacy when the government can hack into your home and ask your toilet how many times you've gone recently. Or trying to eat pizza when your buggy fridge thinks that you've got too many in the freezer because some programmer had drunk too much coffee and had a deadline.
When you program computers for a living, you know that computers rely on people, and that people make mistakes. I quite like doors as a technology: I've never had a blue screen of death with a door. Before we replace things that work with things that don't always work, maybe we should think a little?
Actually, the limiting factor most likely to stop Moores law is one that is already biting: heat. As microchips clock speed increases, they tend to produce more heat and operate at higer frequencies. The first microwave computer has yet to be produced, but it won't be long until I can cook my pizza as I program.
Or you could just remap the shortcuts to something better for the Dvorak.
Some institutional investors are "complete idiots" in the sense that their investment trust does not try to buy the best shares. They try to match the average growth of an index by buying a weighted number of shares in the index*. Such fund managers would purchase google even if they personally thought that the share was rubbish (and would ditch it when the share loses enough value).
* The theory is that on average it is impossible to beat an efficient market, and so the best way to perform the other investment funds is to reduce the charges associated with choosing shares.
Only on slashdot would someone write code in an imaginary language, get told that it would crash, and then post a revised version.
My question is: How can the German Library break the copy protection when it is illegal to produce tools to do it?
....
I would have thought the article tells you this. The german government wrote into law an exception that said that the German Library could produce and own tools to do it since it was impossible to carry out their legal functions without such an excemption. I would assume that this is legal since their is an excemption in the EU copyright directive to allow member states to make such exceptions (e.g)
(34) Member States should be given the option of providing for certain exceptions or limitations for cases such as educational and scientific purposes, for the benefit of public institutions such as libraries and archives,
You forgot the most obvious option:
10) Microsoft.
Lets justify what I said, then.
3 bn.pdf ). There were 1,200 gun crime offences and 6 fatalities in Manchester last year (http://newswww.bbc.net.uk/1/hi/uk/3774553.stm).
The estimated cost of fire arms related violence in south Manchester is £5 million each year(http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/crrs1
This said, gun crime is still a very small percentage of crime ( 0.5%. of all recorded crime in Manchester ) and firearms offences include possession.
National statistics can be seen at http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF05.htm . Note that the number of people injured by guns in England and Wales has increased from 2164 To 4556 since 1989 with murders involving gun crime from 45 to 81 in the same period. Increasingly harsh sentences have had no obvious effects on the figures.
You are right to say that gun crime is normally limited to illegal gangs (mostly drug addicts) and organised criminals.
I'm British. So, with respect to the UK (which is still part of Europe despite appearances :)
Common people and citizens have NO guns...
Wrong. Guns are heavily regulated, and have to be locked away with the ammo in a separate place. But some people have rifles or handguns.
Burglars have no guns.
Wrong. When I lived in Manchester, it was possible for a criminal to buy unregistered guns very cheaply. In fact, gun crime has significantly increased in the last few years since gun ownership became far more heavily regulated.
My understanding of the reason that gun ownership was enshrined in the constitution was that it was meant to give US citizens the ability to revolt against the US government if it ever infringed the basic democratic rights of citizens. It was not for self-defence against criminals; that is just a useful by-product.
caused it. Places where they measure temperature and rainfall the most are areas that are developed the most
Actually, the places with the most long term record of rainfall and pollution are the least developed in the world. They are the north and south poles, where core samples can show relative snow fall (i.e. rainfall) and greenhouse gasses/other forms of pollution. One of the people I worked with did a PhD in the 1980's that showed that there have been substantial increases to the average temperature over the last 5,000 years.
... Whereas, in the UK nobody uses the NI number (the local equivalent of the Social Security Number) since huge numbers of people have multiple numbers due to government incompetence and individual fraud.
Actually, IIRC, scientists have already measured a drop in both the salinity of the atlantic ocean, and a drop in the volume of water moving in the gulf stream. Where people disagree is the effect that this would have on the climate. Most scientists seem to think that the temperature drops will be counteracted by increases in temperature due to global warming, leading to worse winters in the UK and northern europe but leaving them inhabitable. Some scientists are worried that the gulf stream might change direction towards the ice caps so increasing the rate of ice melting. Others are worried that if the gulf stream stops, it would reduce the temperature in northern europe enough to cause a new ice age, something that would have major effects on a global scale. No one actually knows. http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/science_natu re/the_day_after_tomorrow.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/impact/gulf_stream.sh tml
Sending an e-mail to the maker is one thing, but posting it online, no matter how much of semi-good-intentioned drama queen you are, is reckless or malicious.
Except that advertising problems to the public can be the only way get the manufacturer to fix their software. On more than one occasion I've reported a problem and not seen it fixed in subsequent releases. Should we keep silent forever? And sometimes even though the company has produced a fix no one knows about it for months or years. Publicity can be a good thing for the consumer even if it is not always a good thing for the producer.
The rumours might be accurate in part, but perhaps terribly inaccurate in other ways - and could significantly undermine the true products if they're seen as inferior to the imaginary ones. If that's the case, I can see why people at Apple would be upset...
IANAL but I always thought that the purpose of Trade Secret law is to protect a company against people informing competitors of TRUE information (i.e. Trade Secrets) not FALSE information. The legal defence against false information is Libel or Slander...
Um, my immediate thought was "is it really a good idea to dig a hole into a volcano that could destroy most of America?"
Take off that American blindfold of yours. there are plenty of countries where the age of consent is much much lower.
Firstly, the age of concent is not really relevant in a situation where the pornography is being sold without the concent of the girl. And the actual crime these people have been arested for is not underage sex, but distributing pornography
There is a second issue lurking in the article. That of prison conditions. Is it really right to lock a man up with 70 other untried defendants before he is even found guilty? I think not.