For the moment, I am afraid that we have to set aside anecdotal reports of climate change. Where I was, the winter of 1999-2000 was bloody cold. Summer of 2001, meanwhile, was hot, humid, and miserable. I put my trust in weather data that have been gathered around the world over the last century or more that do indeed show a warming trend and an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
That said, it has not been firmly established that anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gases are solely responsible for earth's increasing temperature. Indeed, the preponderance of current evidence suggests that it is at best a combination of human-induced and 'natural' effects.
Nevertheless, we should act now to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Earth's climate is an exceptionally complex system, and we shouldn't be tinkering with it--intentionally or not--without a better understanding of how it works. Traditionally, humans have only sought to impose limits on pollutants once problems have become painfully evident. This has left us with numerous costly and toxic legacies. By voluntarily imposing limits on emissions now, we seek to prevent problems that have not yet come about.
There has been much to-do about the potential costs associated with the Kyoto protocol and other efforts to curb emissions. Not nearly enough has been said about the potential savings associated with disasters that never have to come about.
Condoms are a contraceptive device...Isn't it self-evident that condoms are designed from the very beginning to increase the rate of non-reproductive sex?
On the other hand, more guns is not going to have a huge effect on the number of morally banckrupt thugs (unless by 'killing', you mean clay targets and geese). Guns are not a contraceptive, but rather a tool.
Guns and condoms are both tools.
Question: Since you've chosen to describe guns as purely recreational devices, which pastime seems healthier psychologically--simulated reproduction for fun or simulated killing for fun?
Aside: The conservative right tends (not always, but often) to find sex education objectionable, and gun ownership appropriate. Meanwhile, simulated killing with simulated weapons in modern computer games is hotly debated--it's only okay if you're killing simulated terrorists. Interesting.
but most readers familiar with the way science "works" won't be all that shocked. Scientific results are frequently altered or completely made up for one reason. Money
Most science is funded by a sponsorship of some kind. Very little is done out of the scientist pocket. Because of this, science becomes a sort of business model. As long as the scientist is producing results, his funding continues. See where this is going?
Erm. You neglect a few key points. First, (most) scientists like to publish interesting--or even controversial--results. It enhances their standing among their peers, and often leads to promotion, job offers, and better funding.
If the results they publish do not suit the whims of their current industrial masters, there is often other funding to be had elsewhere. The flawed 'business model' you describe assumes that there is only one source of funding for only one preferred result. Usually competing interests will fund interesting research. In may nations, government funding is provided by agencies that operate at arms' length from politicians and are most concerned with doing good science.
Finally, if you make something up in science, you eventually get caught. It's the nature of the scientific method. Someone will check your work--often fairly soon after publication, if not before--and you will have some explaining to do. 'Because the United States Government says so' is not an acceptable proof, no matter what results they buy. Conclusions not based in fact will be challenged.
The printing press triggered a revolution. Benjamin Franklin was around about that time, in fact much of his success was due to writing his own newspaper. Instead of quoting the bible all the time (the only book around before then) people had ideas and could share them.
Not to knock Ben; he was a pretty sharp guy, and wrote some good stuff (not-so-good stuff, too, but hey--we all have off days.) Nevertheless, he lived in the eighteenth century, and most of his notable work came more than three centuries after the Gutenberg press. For that matter, social and scientific advances happened quite often well before the printing press. Athenian democracy appeared more than two thousand years ago but had more direct participation than any modern government. It enfranchised the same portion of its people as the United States government of Franklin's day. (Only adult males could vote; no women or slaves.)
New techniques for rapid communication do indeed make revolution easier to bring about, but the absence of 'modern' communcation tools by no means preclude its occurrence, nor necessarily lead to the social or scientific stagnation of a society.
...we should reduce our spending till such a device is produced. I think that every dollar spent today would produce 100 times the results if we waited until that time.
Right. Because the developments in aerospace, materials science, astronomy, and so forth that come directly or otherwise from the space program are not worth having now--we ought to wait fifty or a hundred years. Should we stop planning the Next Generation Space Telescope--or other space-based observatories--until it gets cheaper to put them in space?
We should evaluate proposed space missions for viability and based on potential scientific and economic spinoffs, not on savings associated with forty-year postponements for hypothetical technologies. Sometimes it is worth paying a premium to receive information sooner.
While we're at it, let's set the speed of light to 1 and try and normalize as many fundamental constants as possible.
This is already done--sort of--in quantum mechanics. Most problems can be restated in so-called atomic units where the electron charge is -1, Planck's constant (h-bar) is 1, the electron's mass is 1, and the unit length is the Bohr radius (a_nought). The unit of energy becomes the hartree, equal to e^2/a_0, which is 1 in this new system. Anyone who does much in the way of computational chemistry works almost exclusively in these units to get rid of all the messy conversions and constants.
Unfortunately, in atomic units the speed of light c is equal not to 1 but to the inverse of the fine structure constant alpha. Though this makes c a more manageable 137 (roughly) it's not quite down to one. Besides, these units aren't particularly useful on a human scale.
Upon further investigation, I should note that some astronomers and cosmologists do set c to be exactly 1. They also make use of such handly length scales as light-seconds. Erm.
It took decades to gain near-universal acceptance of the metric system, despite its advantages. Indeed, there still exist one or two backward nations that refuse to adopt SI. How do you propose we convince people to accept a system where the posted highway speed limit will be on the order of 0.0000001?
Science: Satellite Imagery Used to Trace Lewis & Clark Route
In other news, the Total Information Awareness office is stumped at the failure of their satellite tracking experiment. Researchers tentatively conclude that Lewis and Clark may have gone underground.
President Bush announced earlier today that he may "have no choice but to bomb Montana (further) back into the stone age" unless these potential terrorists are turned over to appropriate authorities.
Critics suggest that a search for a live target might prove more fruitful.
Right, all we have to do is monitor it for a few hundred million years and we'll have the whole story!!:)
You think you're kidding, but why is this such a bad idea? Why shouldn't we be making an effort to plan extremely long term research projects? Maybe millions of years is a bit extreme, but how about centuries? Or even decades? What can we get started on?
Humanity doesn't shy away from engineering projects that will require decades or even longer. We have run informal experiments on these timescales, as well.
Why not plan for the future? Leave a legacy of science to future generations. Even if the original purpose of an experiment is superceded, the data collected can be valuable in ways we can't imagine. Let tomorrow's data miners unlock the secrets of the universe, instead of just developing new techniques to sell me crap.
Just goes to show you...It's really boring in Canada.
Tell me about it. At my school (University of Waterloo, in Ontario), we celebrated Halloween by blowing up pumpkins using liquid nitrogen. (Sealed vessels of liquid nitrogen can rupture catastrophically.) Here's a direct link to the video. It's rather low res (the video was captured using a digital camera from a safe(?) distance away) but you get the idea. I like the remark at 1:12: "That went right through our spectator area..."
Speaking of which, that's the last place you think of having cooling problems. Why not put the thing outside a save a few bucks?
What if his office is laid out with the monitor further than normal from his chair? Perhaps he likes to have the space in front of him for papers. Maybe (despite his youth) his near vision is going and he needs the monitor at arm's length.
Maybe the guy does design work at very high resolution and can't be bothered to turn it down for occasional web browsing. Just because tiny (albeit well-rendered) fonts meet your needs doesn't mean that they will meet everyone's.
Me, I browse in Opera, which has a handy little zoom adjustment in the upper right corner of the window. Handy if type on a page is too small, or there is an object too large to fit on the screen. Most pages are comfortable for me to read, but every so often I'm glad that adjustment option is there.
What's the point? Why not make a more efficient mechanical generator to convert directly to electricity instead?
I dunno--maybe because the movie would be too hard to sell if the geothermal power plants rose up to overthrow their robotic oppressors, on a world where the humans had been killed off centuries previous because they were too inefficient.
Re:There's no point to this article...
on
Euro DMCA Fails
·
· Score: 2
So in effect the wonderful EU system they have now is in all essence the same as the United states... The fed's make a law and the states HAVE to follow them...
so what do we call the european nations now? The unites States of Europe?
How about the "European Union"? I coulda' sworn that EU acronym thingy meant something...
If any of the countries in that group has any balls, they would reject the EU and recede from the group right now.
First, the word you're looking for is secede. Second, these countries voluntarily joined the EU, not that long ago. They have significantly more say in the actions of the EU as a whole than individual states do in the US. Finally, a question: does Michigan separate from the United States (or threaten to) every time the federal government does something stupid? Getting along with other nations sometimes requires patience and compromise--notions with which leaders of all nations should familiarize themselves.
With this piece of the puzzle they could finally off Adobe and their pesky little PDF format.
Why on earth would millions of businesses, governments, and individuals want to go to all the trouble of migrating billions of documents from PDF (designed for forms and printed documents) to a 'standard' that's best known for making web sites more annoying and slower to load--and is available on fewer platforms?
I think NASA should refute them, but not spend too much time on it. It should be easy quick and inexpensive to put together a dossier of information which non-paranoids would accept as reasonable evidence that it happened. Sell it for $19.95.
Is this necessary? The non-paranoid already believe that NASA has sent men to the Moon. And why charge twenty bucks for something that people can get for free Googling on the web?
Sure, if someone asks a NASA official about a purported Moon hoax, definitely their PR people should have an answer ready. NASA could compile a list of hoax debunking websites and link to them from one of their own pages. (Perhaps NASA should offer to host some of the best content--or not, maybe that would be fodder for the conspiracy theorists.) The answer to this sort of question obviously should also include the word, "asinine".
I just did the same. Got 5,580,000 results, only three hours later.
At that rate of growth, (50,000 bombs per hour, or about 14 bombs per second) there's going to be an awful lot of poor bastards at the FBI/CIA/NSA chasing noise...
As a professional journalist, I can tell you that they use that information you input to profile you and sell it to advertisers. Try posting a google cache link next time instead.
What harm does it do for them to ask?
They can better target their advertising...so what? They know who's reading their web site--great. Maybe they'll write more stories that I'm interested in. If the/. link warns of registration ahead, then I know that I have to trade some of my information for their information. They're trying to make a buck, just like everybody else. Good for them. I know that it will be used to advertise at me. Besides--the most important point is this:
I can choose to lie, or not. Usually I just wait for a no-reg link to appear in the comments. It saves me from all these little dilemmas. (Dilemmae?)
I ask your opinion--as a professional journalist--who is going to pay you for your work if news organizations have trouble making money?
The problem is if the tumour has already metastasized (spread to form new tumours in other locations) treatment is much more difficult. You can remove the affected lymph nodes and cut away visible tumours, but you're just buying time--there are microscopic tumours spread throughout the body that will gladly grow to replace their progenitors.
If you can treat early while the disease is still confined to the liver (or lungs, or kidneys) then excellent--prognosis is good. The problem with lung cancer is that it usually isn't detected until the patient (usually a smoker) is quite ill. IIRC, liver tumours are also often not caught early. And cancers often don't start in the liver--tumours in the liver are often metastases from tumours elsewhere.
Short of a marathon operation where doctors remove all of your internal organs for irradiation--then give the rest of your body a solid dose for good measure--metastatic cancer would be difficult to beat.
Finally, the surgery is very much like an organ transplant--the liver is harvested from and delivered to the same patient. As noted in the article, such surgeries can be very traumatic for the recipient. The cure could be worse than the disease if the patient has already been weakened by other surgeries, chemotherapy, or radiation.
That said, I don't mean to sound that pessimistic. One of the most difficult tasks in radiotherapy is planning dose delivery to ensure an even dose to a tumour volume that is mostly non-lethal to surrounding healthy tissue. Bones are a pain to deal with, and there are certain organs that just don't tolerate radiation well. (Too large a dose to the spinal cord causes paralysis, for example.) Being able to work with a bag of (pretty much) water would make treatment planning much easier. Treating the lungs is extremely difficult, because they're encased in bone (with the spinal cord up the back) and full of air...removing them and filling them with saline solution could make a world of difference in treatment of lung cancers.
Considering what a small market they're dealing with (those people who don't use IE and are willing to pay for a web browser)...
But I'm not paying for Opera. I have to ignore a little ad banner in the upper right corner, but that's not so bad. Yeah, it costs me a teeny tiny bit of bandwidth, but I've saved that much and more by suppressing all the annoying Flash/Java ads and popups. As an added bonus, I'm running it swiftly and happily on an old PII/300.
Wow. That is an excellent scam site. My hat's off to them. It's almost perfect.
They still don't seem to understand that poor spelling and grammar are a tip off, even aside from the lack of SSL etc. It is extremely difficult to find any sort of scam on the web that is completely sound, from an English standpoint. The first person singular pronoun "I" is always capitalized in English. The capitalization on this site is inconsistent even across the front page (look in the FAQ box, top right.) In their FAQ, they have used the non-word "acceptation". Oooh--so close to plausible, too. Bummer. I'm sure that with a little more effort they could develop a really first-rate scam. Why can't scammers ever hire a proofreader?
By the way--has anyone turned them in to Western Union? They're using WU's logo on the front page.
Yes, but nominally United States law doesn't extend into other countries. *cough* Sklyarov *cough* I don't see a problem with shutting down domestic sales of bootleg products--which is all that was mentioned in the article.
If they start going after legitimate resellers of used products and messing with doctrine of first sale, then/. should release its editorial hounds.
In this case, we should remember that Adobe backed from its initial claims and thus opened the way for a win for the Elcom. This will probably not be true for other cases...
I don't know. The reason why Adobe backed away from supporting the prosecution (and very quickly, I might add) was that they faced so much criticism so quickly after having charges laid. Any other software company is likely to face the same sort of public relations disaster if they try to bring DMCA charges against someone.
??AA will be a little more difficult, but I expect that significant public pressure could be brought to bear on their members as well.
Finally, many members of the United States judiciary (district attorneys and judges in some jurisdicions) are elected. This is an issue that could hurt them if they're seen to waste time on trivial prosecutions. Whether it's appropriate to for these to be elected offices is another issue...
The court system does not exist in a vacuum. If the first few charges brought under the DMCA are made difficult and frustrating to prosecute, we will see little further attempted enforcement of DMCA provisions.
So if a law is bad enough that it will be routinely dismissed in the lower courts, it will never get to the SC, and will never get overturned??
Well, if lower court judges regularly and consistently dismiss charges brought under a law, then eventually prosecutors will stop wasting their time.
This will lead either to amendments to the original legislation--which will then no doubt face constitutional challenge--or the law will effectively go away, because nobody bothers to enforce it.
It's not pretty, and it's not an ideal solution, but there are an awful lot of unenforced laws on the books. (This is a bad thing in and of itself, but that is a subject for another post.)
Slashdot Mirror
Why doesn't anyone post these links in the original article?
That said, it has not been firmly established that anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gases are solely responsible for earth's increasing temperature. Indeed, the preponderance of current evidence suggests that it is at best a combination of human-induced and 'natural' effects.
Nevertheless, we should act now to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Earth's climate is an exceptionally complex system, and we shouldn't be tinkering with it--intentionally or not--without a better understanding of how it works. Traditionally, humans have only sought to impose limits on pollutants once problems have become painfully evident. This has left us with numerous costly and toxic legacies. By voluntarily imposing limits on emissions now, we seek to prevent problems that have not yet come about.
There has been much to-do about the potential costs associated with the Kyoto protocol and other efforts to curb emissions. Not nearly enough has been said about the potential savings associated with disasters that never have to come about.
On the other hand, more guns is not going to have a huge effect on the number of morally banckrupt thugs (unless by 'killing', you mean clay targets and geese). Guns are not a contraceptive, but rather a tool.
Guns and condoms are both tools.
Question: Since you've chosen to describe guns as purely recreational devices, which pastime seems healthier psychologically--simulated reproduction for fun or simulated killing for fun?
Aside: The conservative right tends (not always, but often) to find sex education objectionable, and gun ownership appropriate. Meanwhile, simulated killing with simulated weapons in modern computer games is hotly debated--it's only okay if you're killing simulated terrorists. Interesting.
Most science is funded by a sponsorship of some kind. Very little is done out of the scientist pocket. Because of this, science becomes a sort of business model. As long as the scientist is producing results, his funding continues. See where this is going?
Erm. You neglect a few key points. First, (most) scientists like to publish interesting--or even controversial--results. It enhances their standing among their peers, and often leads to promotion, job offers, and better funding.
If the results they publish do not suit the whims of their current industrial masters, there is often other funding to be had elsewhere. The flawed 'business model' you describe assumes that there is only one source of funding for only one preferred result. Usually competing interests will fund interesting research. In may nations, government funding is provided by agencies that operate at arms' length from politicians and are most concerned with doing good science.
Finally, if you make something up in science, you eventually get caught. It's the nature of the scientific method. Someone will check your work--often fairly soon after publication, if not before--and you will have some explaining to do. 'Because the United States Government says so' is not an acceptable proof, no matter what results they buy. Conclusions not based in fact will be challenged.
Gutenberg's movable-type press was developed around 1440; the first edition of the Gutenberg Bible was in print by 1456. More than a thousand print shops were spread across Europe by 1500.
Not to knock Ben; he was a pretty sharp guy, and wrote some good stuff (not-so-good stuff, too, but hey--we all have off days.) Nevertheless, he lived in the eighteenth century, and most of his notable work came more than three centuries after the Gutenberg press. For that matter, social and scientific advances happened quite often well before the printing press. Athenian democracy appeared more than two thousand years ago but had more direct participation than any modern government. It enfranchised the same portion of its people as the United States government of Franklin's day. (Only adult males could vote; no women or slaves.)
New techniques for rapid communication do indeed make revolution easier to bring about, but the absence of 'modern' communcation tools by no means preclude its occurrence, nor necessarily lead to the social or scientific stagnation of a society.
Right. Because the developments in aerospace, materials science, astronomy, and so forth that come directly or otherwise from the space program are not worth having now--we ought to wait fifty or a hundred years. Should we stop planning the Next Generation Space Telescope--or other space-based observatories--until it gets cheaper to put them in space?
We should evaluate proposed space missions for viability and based on potential scientific and economic spinoffs, not on savings associated with forty-year postponements for hypothetical technologies. Sometimes it is worth paying a premium to receive information sooner.
This is already done--sort of--in quantum mechanics. Most problems can be restated in so-called atomic units where the electron charge is -1, Planck's constant (h-bar) is 1, the electron's mass is 1, and the unit length is the Bohr radius (a_nought). The unit of energy becomes the hartree, equal to e^2/a_0, which is 1 in this new system. Anyone who does much in the way of computational chemistry works almost exclusively in these units to get rid of all the messy conversions and constants.
Unfortunately, in atomic units the speed of light c is equal not to 1 but to the inverse of the fine structure constant alpha. Though this makes c a more manageable 137 (roughly) it's not quite down to one. Besides, these units aren't particularly useful on a human scale.
Upon further investigation, I should note that some astronomers and cosmologists do set c to be exactly 1. They also make use of such handly length scales as light-seconds. Erm.
It took decades to gain near-universal acceptance of the metric system, despite its advantages. Indeed, there still exist one or two backward nations that refuse to adopt SI. How do you propose we convince people to accept a system where the posted highway speed limit will be on the order of 0.0000001?
In other news, the Total Information Awareness office is stumped at the failure of their satellite tracking experiment. Researchers tentatively conclude that Lewis and Clark may have gone underground.
President Bush announced earlier today that he may "have no choice but to bomb Montana (further) back into the stone age" unless these potential terrorists are turned over to appropriate authorities.
Critics suggest that a search for a live target might prove more fruitful.
You think you're kidding, but why is this such a bad idea? Why shouldn't we be making an effort to plan extremely long term research projects? Maybe millions of years is a bit extreme, but how about centuries? Or even decades? What can we get started on?
Humanity doesn't shy away from engineering projects that will require decades or even longer. We have run informal experiments on these timescales, as well.
Why not plan for the future? Leave a legacy of science to future generations. Even if the original purpose of an experiment is superceded, the data collected can be valuable in ways we can't imagine. Let tomorrow's data miners unlock the secrets of the universe, instead of just developing new techniques to sell me crap.
Tell me about it. At my school (University of Waterloo, in Ontario), we celebrated Halloween by blowing up pumpkins using liquid nitrogen. (Sealed vessels of liquid nitrogen can rupture catastrophically.) Here's a direct link to the video. It's rather low res (the video was captured using a digital camera from a safe(?) distance away) but you get the idea. I like the remark at 1:12: "That went right through our spectator area..."
Speaking of which, that's the last place you think of having cooling problems. Why not put the thing outside a save a few bucks?
Where do you think we got the liquid nitrogen? ;)
(Note: words all off three or fewer characters, including the important ones.)
Maybe the guy does design work at very high resolution and can't be bothered to turn it down for occasional web browsing. Just because tiny (albeit well-rendered) fonts meet your needs doesn't mean that they will meet everyone's.
Me, I browse in Opera, which has a handy little zoom adjustment in the upper right corner of the window. Handy if type on a page is too small, or there is an object too large to fit on the screen. Most pages are comfortable for me to read, but every so often I'm glad that adjustment option is there.
I suspect that most people who know enough to deliberately disable HTTP Referrers also know enough to operate the back button on their browser.
I dunno--maybe because the movie would be too hard to sell if the geothermal power plants rose up to overthrow their robotic oppressors, on a world where the humans had been killed off centuries previous because they were too inefficient.
so what do we call the european nations now? The unites States of Europe?
How about the "European Union"? I coulda' sworn that EU acronym thingy meant something...
If any of the countries in that group has any balls, they would reject the EU and recede from the group right now.
First, the word you're looking for is secede. Second, these countries voluntarily joined the EU, not that long ago. They have significantly more say in the actions of the EU as a whole than individual states do in the US. Finally, a question: does Michigan separate from the United States (or threaten to) every time the federal government does something stupid? Getting along with other nations sometimes requires patience and compromise--notions with which leaders of all nations should familiarize themselves.
Why on earth would millions of businesses, governments, and individuals want to go to all the trouble of migrating billions of documents from PDF (designed for forms and printed documents) to a 'standard' that's best known for making web sites more annoying and slower to load--and is available on fewer platforms?
Is this necessary? The non-paranoid already believe that NASA has sent men to the Moon. And why charge twenty bucks for something that people can get for free Googling on the web?
Sure, if someone asks a NASA official about a purported Moon hoax, definitely their PR people should have an answer ready. NASA could compile a list of hoax debunking websites and link to them from one of their own pages. (Perhaps NASA should offer to host some of the best content--or not, maybe that would be fodder for the conspiracy theorists.) The answer to this sort of question obviously should also include the word, "asinine".
I just did the same. Got 5,580,000 results, only three hours later.
At that rate of growth, (50,000 bombs per hour, or about 14 bombs per second) there's going to be an awful lot of poor bastards at the FBI/CIA/NSA chasing noise...
What harm does it do for them to ask?
They can better target their advertising...so what? They know who's reading their web site--great. Maybe they'll write more stories that I'm interested in. If the /. link warns of registration ahead, then I know that I have to trade some of my information for their information. They're trying to make a buck, just like everybody else. Good for them. I know that it will be used to advertise at me. Besides--the most important point is this:
I can choose to lie, or not. Usually I just wait for a no-reg link to appear in the comments. It saves me from all these little dilemmas. (Dilemmae?)
I ask your opinion--as a professional journalist--who is going to pay you for your work if news organizations have trouble making money?
If you can treat early while the disease is still confined to the liver (or lungs, or kidneys) then excellent--prognosis is good. The problem with lung cancer is that it usually isn't detected until the patient (usually a smoker) is quite ill. IIRC, liver tumours are also often not caught early. And cancers often don't start in the liver--tumours in the liver are often metastases from tumours elsewhere.
Short of a marathon operation where doctors remove all of your internal organs for irradiation--then give the rest of your body a solid dose for good measure--metastatic cancer would be difficult to beat.
Finally, the surgery is very much like an organ transplant--the liver is harvested from and delivered to the same patient. As noted in the article, such surgeries can be very traumatic for the recipient. The cure could be worse than the disease if the patient has already been weakened by other surgeries, chemotherapy, or radiation.
That said, I don't mean to sound that pessimistic. One of the most difficult tasks in radiotherapy is planning dose delivery to ensure an even dose to a tumour volume that is mostly non-lethal to surrounding healthy tissue. Bones are a pain to deal with, and there are certain organs that just don't tolerate radiation well. (Too large a dose to the spinal cord causes paralysis, for example.) Being able to work with a bag of (pretty much) water would make treatment planning much easier. Treating the lungs is extremely difficult, because they're encased in bone (with the spinal cord up the back) and full of air...removing them and filling them with saline solution could make a world of difference in treatment of lung cancers.
But I'm not paying for Opera. I have to ignore a little ad banner in the upper right corner, but that's not so bad. Yeah, it costs me a teeny tiny bit of bandwidth, but I've saved that much and more by suppressing all the annoying Flash/Java ads and popups. As an added bonus, I'm running it swiftly and happily on an old PII/300.
They still don't seem to understand that poor spelling and grammar are a tip off, even aside from the lack of SSL etc. It is extremely difficult to find any sort of scam on the web that is completely sound, from an English standpoint. The first person singular pronoun "I" is always capitalized in English. The capitalization on this site is inconsistent even across the front page (look in the FAQ box, top right.) In their FAQ, they have used the non-word "acceptation". Oooh--so close to plausible, too. Bummer. I'm sure that with a little more effort they could develop a really first-rate scam. Why can't scammers ever hire a proofreader?
By the way--has anyone turned them in to Western Union? They're using WU's logo on the front page.
Yes, but nominally United States law doesn't extend into other countries. *cough* Sklyarov *cough* I don't see a problem with shutting down domestic sales of bootleg products--which is all that was mentioned in the article.
If they start going after legitimate resellers of used products and messing with doctrine of first sale, then /. should release its editorial hounds.
I don't know. The reason why Adobe backed away from supporting the prosecution (and very quickly, I might add) was that they faced so much criticism so quickly after having charges laid. Any other software company is likely to face the same sort of public relations disaster if they try to bring DMCA charges against someone.
??AA will be a little more difficult, but I expect that significant public pressure could be brought to bear on their members as well.
Finally, many members of the United States judiciary (district attorneys and judges in some jurisdicions) are elected. This is an issue that could hurt them if they're seen to waste time on trivial prosecutions. Whether it's appropriate to for these to be elected offices is another issue...
The court system does not exist in a vacuum. If the first few charges brought under the DMCA are made difficult and frustrating to prosecute, we will see little further attempted enforcement of DMCA provisions.
Well, if lower court judges regularly and consistently dismiss charges brought under a law, then eventually prosecutors will stop wasting their time.
This will lead either to amendments to the original legislation--which will then no doubt face constitutional challenge--or the law will effectively go away, because nobody bothers to enforce it.
It's not pretty, and it's not an ideal solution, but there are an awful lot of unenforced laws on the books. (This is a bad thing in and of itself, but that is a subject for another post.)