I don't really seem a big thing with automatically checking this via reading their numberplate.
Because it's use doesn't stop with tax and insurance. People are now getting arrested for their beliefs. e.g. the people arrested in the days before the royal wedding on the basis that they were republicans and were thought likely to demonstrate.
Don't sleep walk into a fascist state.
Are you on crack?
What the fuck does a camera that automatically fines drivers for not paying road tax have to do with a police officer deciding to overstep the mark and arrest people for no reason?
By cars, I expect you mean the ANPR cameras that check for valid tax and insurance. These are always accompanied by signs letting you know they're there, just like speed cameras.
Even if you are right, and I don't know that you are: In what way does the existence of signs make it in any way OK? In case you've forgotten, in 2001, the state had lots of signs saying "Big Brother is watching you."
If you have no tax or vehicle insurance in the UK and are driving on the roads then you are a criminal. Cut and dried.
Everyone in the UK is required to display a valid UK tax disk in their windscreen. I don't really seem a big thing with automatically checking this via reading their numberplate.
BTW, a great many police cars here now have this built in to the dash too so it bleeps very loudly and alerts the policeman driving to come and arrest you.
From a long-view, it is better to get over our pathological fear of socialist programs and use some moderate application of them to preserve a happy balance before we slip too far down that slope.
I quite agree with this actually, but I have always felt I was in the minority in thinking like this.
Not corrupt. Just blood hounds looking for "revenue streams", trying to "monetize" everything.
Yup, but anything other than this is a bit too close to communism or socialism for a great many people so we are stuck with it.
Squeeze "mo' money" out of Netflix, Youtube, etc. In the old days these would be a bunch of mobsters. Now they're businessmen (not the 'fatherly neighborhood businessman' kind), but one-percenters.
"If you look after the pennies the pounds will look after themselves".
It has been demonstrated time and again that education decreases birth rate, partly by decreasing religious membership, as the people who are breeding the fastest in particular are overwhelmingly members of a religion that tells them to be fruitful and multiply... but partly because people understand the consequences of their actions.
I am not sure any such things has been demonstrated.
It is more likely in my mind that as you educate people you also usually improve their overall standard of living and health at the same time. This means a drop off in infant mortality and that means people do not need to have as many kids as they actually start expecting them all to survive to adulthood.
These things are all wrapped up together and interrelated so separating them and deducing which causes what to happen is much harder than you seem to imply.
Unless you've got a programmer that has some kind of severe debilitating autism, there's absolutely no reason not to take him on your sales calls, if you know technical questions are going to be asked.
What about the myriad of techies with a serious sense of entitlement and feel that "going to meet clients is not their job"?
The main reason not to take developers on sales calls is simple: The developer does not want to go and he knows that since there is such a shortage of decent developers on the market he has a lot of power to either refuse to do things he doesn't want to or even worse, deliberately make a total hash of it safe in the knowledge that firing him for being a prick is difficult unless you can prove it was deliberate.
That is not to say that all developers are like this, far from it as I have worked with some who are amazing at liaising with customers and would upsell new services to existing clients far better that the sales guys themselves. For many developers though they just view this as dirty or something, they enjoy writing code and getting them to do anything outside their comfort zone is like getting blood of out a stone.
The problem is that when you are hiring a developer you have to balance the skills you need against the budget you have. It would be great to only ever hire the stand out brilliant candidates who can do everything that is asked of them. The problem is that these candidates are generally expensive, even if you get them cheap initially as they are straight out of college they are still going to be expensive in a year or two when they have a bit more experience on their CV.
If you hire someone who is excellent at the 99% of the job that they need to do most often but simply can't be arsed learning the remaining 1% they can often still be an ok employee, and their reluctance to learn the 1% means they never earn as much as they could do so they are cheaper to employ. That is not to say there are not problems with this approach, but it is often very appealing to people pull the purse strings as they see it as great way of saving money.
If you have a need to do some presale technical work it is often cheaper to just hire one or two all expensive ambitious rounders and then give them a job title like "Pre-sales engineer" rather than hire an entire dev team full of them. This way you can keep most of your development team stacked with cheap code monkeys.
How about training local citizens for the job, at low or no cost to them.
The problem with this is that they are often a pain in the arse:)
Firstly, local citizens that go through the US university system generally have an attitude of entitlement. This is especially true of fresh graduates who have no idea how work actually is, just their preconceptions they picked up off TV.
Foreign workers without Green Cards are much more compliant workers as they know that if they screw around and get fired they may also get deported. This also makes it much harder for them to enforce the employment rights they do have as they might be out of the country before they get a chance should they be terminated without due process.
Then there is the money side of things. People on temporary work visas are generally supporting a family back home. That requires less remuneration that a US citizen would need to support a family in the US so they are happier to work for a lower wage.
Of course this means the US sending lots of money overseas and that is actually bad for the countries economy as a whole compared to if it is all spent in the US. It is also bad for the economy though if US companies can't fill vacancies without offering more money, that pushes up everyones wages as a knock on effect and puts too much power in the hands of the workers, not the company directors and shareholders.
No, you have your head in the sand. Although there are more Christians than Muslims, the number of religiously-motivated violent attacks by Muslims today far outweighs religiously-motivated attacks by Christians.
Currently, there are religiously-motivated wars and attacks in Mali, Kenya, Nigeria. There are religiously-motivated bombings, suicide attacks, etc. in Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, Phillipines, Thailand. I could probably think of 100 examples in the last year if pressed.
On the Christian side, I can think of Brevik and the Oklahoma CIty bomber and maybe some attacks on abortion providers. Very small-scale indeed compared to Islamic religious violence.
This might not actually be down to religion of course, it might be that the countries you mention as being Muslim are also desperately poor, shit holes where life is cheap anyway. There would be a crap load more Breviek's in the west if we were suffering the mortality rate from starvation and disease that half the African nations suffer.
Thankfully though we are far less likely to die of starvation, so we work hard and make our countries even richer with our ideas and thus benefit future generations even more. This is not because Islam is in some way evil though. Christianity was just as backward in its day but it learnt from the chronic fuckups like imprisoning Galileo and learnt to be more accommodating of new scientific ideas.
Islam had the advantage initially of being more accommodating to ideas like the world being round to start with so has had less of a driver to change. Now the fact that it got fewer things so provably wrong initially though means that there is less of a driver for new interpretations.
Tell me something, between Christianity and Islam, which one of the two has committed nearly 19,000 terrorist attacks since 9/11? I'll give you a hint, it's not Christianity.
To the mods now. Refute the point, and don't be an intellectual coward and moderate something because you don't like it.
There have certainly been plenty of pro-christian terrorist attacks in my part the world (UK), but mostly in the years before 9-11. The IRA (terrorists) are fighting for a free Ireland but very much under the banner of catholicism. The english they are fighing are very much protestant and they have done their fair share of terrorist acts too.
The reality is that religion has been used as a tool to motivate people to violence for centuries. Generally the people doing the motivating do not really believe in the religion though, they are just using it as a convenient route to power.
Both Christianity and Islam recognise Christ as a profit / visionary / son of god / whatever and Christ had some very things to say about goodwill to all men, being merciful, and treating other as you would wish to be treated yourself. Think of how Christ commanded his disciples to not seek revenge on the Romans when he was crucified.
People with hatred of another group of people often block those teachings out though as they are too set on vengeance for some wrong committed against them in the past.
Do not blame Christianity or Islam for this though, blame the people who cannot forgive:
You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. (Matthew 5:38–39, NRSV)
In Islam you have:
“In the Torah We prescribed for them a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, an equal wound for a wound: if anyone forgoes this out of charity, it will serve as atonement for his bad deeds. Those who do not judge according to what God has revealed are doing grave wrong.” (Qurn 5:45)
That still implies to me that the ideal is to not take revenge for wrongs against you, especially if you have some "bad deeds" of your own to atone for (who doesn't?)
What is sad is if there is another major conflict we are gonna be the Germans in WWII, with VERY expensive and fussy as hell aircraft in very few numbers whereas anybody we go against will probably have Russian tech, which means the MiG 29 at something like 30 million a pop or the SU27 at 60. Compare this to a minimum of 250 million a pop for the F35 and you can see any enemy will just be able to spam us right out of the sky.
You might be right, but the problem is that the US way is based more on not loosing pilots rather than aircraft.
Firstly pilots take millions of dollars to train so the value of them is actually more aligned with the value of the aircraft than you think. Secondly the people of the US have been reluctant to see high casualty figures since the vietnam war went sideways. This was one of the problems the US faced in Vietnam, US casualty figures were constantly declared to the people whereas the veitcong could lose millions and nobody knew apart from the US.
The currently policy is to move further and further away from manned missions when ever possible so that you can keep quiet when you are losing an engagement and not tell the folks back home.
You had me up until that last one. Saudi Arabia is a staunch US ally.
The US sells them vast amounts of US military hardware every year and if the US government had any sort of problem with the utter lack of any democracy there it could bankrupt them very quickly by not buying their oil. Of course that will never happen though as the US would rather Saudi stayed as friendly monarchy with a shit human rights record as most of the general populace are muslim and would probably elect a bunch extremist anti-american nutters if given half the chance.
Also, when considering the wonderful US stance on human rights you might consider that that only applies to US citizens. The folks who have been held in Guantanamo bay might not have such a great opinion on the US and it's marvellous human rights record. Another group of people not exactly happy would be the families of children killed by Israel when they fired US made and paid for incendiary missiles at Gaza.
That is not to say that other countries you quote are better, far from it. My point is only that often these things look very different depending on which people are fucking you over. The US has often been party to installing utterly non-democratic oppressive regimes in countries in recent history just to benefit US companies economically.
This is maybe a reason to consider tempering a single countries control with some sort of body where no one country had absolute control. You might even use the model the US uses for it's own internal governance (constitutional democracy or whatever) where countries got a proportional vote depending on online presence. Big changes that went against certain core principles could even then be blocked by a certain percentage voting against. It make not make for a freer internet but at least might bog the governing body down in so much bureaucracy that it didn't get any less free at least.
This might make it a little harder for RIAA and whoever to boot sites off the net for enabling piracy or whatever.
And btw, why should they not be on the council again in 2013? They are no longer a dictatorship and are making great strives towards democracy now that Gadafi is gone.
You did realise that was what it said on the link you posted didn't you? Here is the story stating they will be re-admitted:
I didn't vote last week as I left for a train to London before 7am, and didn't get back til after 10pm. First election I've missed.
]
Wow, me too. I was in London for the whole week though due to work. Why don't we have our elections on Sundays like France does? It is such a pain in the arse having them during the week for people who work away from home a lot.
Virgin had no option but to comply with the court order that was issued. If they had ignored it, they would've been fined hundreds of thousands of pounds - probably even more than that.
BT haven't blocked it (yet), neither have O2.
BT haven't been on the receiving end of a court order yet. When they are they will. They have actually been given more time for some reason.
O2 have been given instruction to by the courts so are probably just pissing about for as long as possible before they implement it. This may mean that they actually implement a more effective block than the trivial to bypass joke that Virgin have apparently implemented. Of course anything the try is probably just going to be akin to big game of a whack-a-mole anyway.
Most PLC's exist to make money so have to obey the law in case they get fined. If they don't they the shareholders get antsy and boot the directors out replacing them with people who will toe the line. The only way this doesn't happen is if the company thinks it is in the their financial interest to pay the fines rather than comply.
The upshot of all this is that trying to take revenge on a company for doing what they are required to do by law is childish and most likely ineffective at getting anything changed anyway. If you want to stop this, then you need to get the UK government to pass laws abolishing copyright or whatever in order to make what the piratebay provide within the letter and spirit of the law. The best way to go about this is to convince a majority of the british public that copyright is no longer needed or useful in digital age.
The best people to start with are probably your parents, or their friends as they are most likely to vote (young people vote less so politicians listen to them less). If we cannot convince the older generation that copyright needs to be abolished than we have to live with it as this is what democracy is all about.
I have just searched on the web and cannot find a single meaningful survey of public opinion on whether we should abolish copyright law. My personal opinion though is that most people would actually support some kind of copyright law, even if they did want it changed to allow consumers more freedom to use works they had paid for.
The problem DDOS attacks on a legitimate business is that it actually makes people associate the people who support copyright reform with vandalism when they do not get their way. In a democracy that is not useful at all.
Good to know the North Koreans have extra money to send to the Russians and can afford to maintain jamming trucks.
It's not "extra money" it's a policy called military first or some such crap. Basically it means the people can go starve if the army needs the money for a new toy.
Ah, one last thing, the Supreme Court demands that capital punishment is handed down by objective criteria. Wonder how many service man have been sentenced to DR that commited multiple murders on the local population. Happened many times, and these guys usually get just a slap on the hand.
What's even more relevant is that these service men or women should often be tried and sentenced in the country where the crime is committed. Especially in cases where the US has an extradition treaty with the country in question and would,expect to be able to extradite any criminals it wanted to stand trial in the US. The US policy seems to be though that their own law usurps any other countries (recently it seems to usurp the US constitution so that should not be too surprising).
This is a fine attitude to take if you intend to impose it by force, but it completely fails to let you take any sort of moral high ground. This does not help win any hearts and minds of the local populace so has a habit of encouraging terrorism amongst them, especially if there is mass unemployment and people feel like they have nothing better to do than blow themselves up anyway.
Whether APis are copyrightable is a matter for professional bodies in computing to consider, such as the ACM and IEEE, not judges nor politicians. It's a technical matter.
And if this technical matter were decided at the professional body level, then this entire farce would have been avoided, because professionals in the discipline would not be stupid enough to deny interoperability by making APIs copyrightable.
Neither the judge nor (even less) the jury have the skill and background to make a sound decision in this area.
Normally I ignore AC's but in this case you hit the nail completely on the head.
This is ta big problem facing our society now: that juries made up of laymen or judges are expect to rule on things they have no clue about and the time taken to educate them is simply unfeasible.
I have been developing software professionally for a decade or so (3 decades if you count when I first learnt basic) and I still have a great deal to learn. I would still have to sit down and draw on much of my experience when it came to deciding this case. I do not see how someone who has just completed coding 101 could really understand the full implications of their decision, let alone someone who has not even got that far.
I also do not think that a sensible decision is that likely if the jury are only able to base it on which witness the sound of liked better.
It would be like basing who runs a country based on a some sort of popularity contest. Oh crap, we actually do that as well:(
Another possibility, which I do not personally like or advocate, is DRM, which does not need copyright protection to function. Valve seems to be doing OK with Steam.
And an even more lucrative possibility if copyright law didn't exist would be for me to make my money selling a hack that let you download games from steam without paying for them. Wow, if I could make something so easy anyone could use that would be very popular. It might not help the PC games market in the long run though but would let me get rich quick.
Intellectual property is a completely artificial construct, not a natural right at all.
So is money, at least it is in the incarnation we ended up with.
Unfortunately although the figures showing in my online banking account are a completely artificial construct, I still need a certain amount of them in order to keep myself alive. I also was very stupid in my youth and chose being a software developer as a career and so I only earn money by creating another completely artificial construct. It is very hard for me to now retrain as a farmer or carpenter without me or my family starving in the process.
Without copyright you could take my work and use it without giving me any reward for having created it. That does not seem right to me for some reason.
This is to not to say that I entirely support RIAA and MAFIAA and whoever else, but I do still see the need to maintain some form of law that protects people right to earn money from designing complex creations like software.
In future when 3D Printers improve it will be the case that you can build any number of an item if you have the original plan, but that plan will involve a great deal of work in order to create. This will necessitate the end of money as a concept, but we are not there yet and until we get there we need a way to balance things so people who create physical items like the food we need to live can trade with the people who specialise in creating ideas as both are needed in order to further the human race.
Worse than that. What the judge is saying is effectively that because you choose to disclose things about yourself, that it is reasonable for police to force me to disclose those same things about myself.
Rights do not cease to be rights merely because the majority of people do not exercise them; so long as even one person considers something to be private, the state has no legitimate authority to treat it otherwise unless failure to do so would pose an immediate threat of grave harm to another person. Period.
I think you maybe slightly misunderstood what he was saying. From his summary:
Which is to say that the concerns that have been raised about the erosion of our right to privacy are, indeed, legitimate, but misdirected. The danger here is not Big Brother; the government, and especially Congress, have been commendably restrained, all things considered. The danger comes from a different source altogether. In the immortal words of Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
I think what he is actually saying is that if you want to keep a secret, then don't tell anyone about it. If you do disclose things about yourself, then don't be surprised if it comes back to haunt you.
The crux of this is that we often disclose very personal secrets about our private lives in ways that we think are completely anonymous. The thing is though that they are often not as anonymous as we think. For example I can post to slashdot as an account not tied to my real name (this one is), but someone who worked at my company could easily snoop on my internet traffic to figure out and hence remove my anonymity. They could then be forced to pass that information on to government or do so off their own back.
The judge seems to think the issue here is really that I have signed a contract that allowed in the small print my employer to snoop on all my internet traffic for whatever reason they liked, not that government was given that information by my employer when it asked. He obviously neglects to acknowledge that I do not have a huge amount of choice when signing some employment contracts.
By the way, this is not necessarily to say I agree that these laws are right. I think the idea that a private citizen can carry a concealed firearm on a public street (or in a bar of all places) is absolutely retarded but I would not for one second deny that certain states legally allow it.
The trick with all laws is to recognise that as society and technology can change, and that sometimes laws have to change too.
Picture this. It happened a few years ago, and was likely perpetrated by British agents.
Not quite.
I am guessing you mean Abdelhakim Belhadj (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdelhakim_Belhadj)
It was most likely the flying him half way round the world bit was perpetrated by US Agents since the US has the infrastructure to do this (ie, the black flights program). Us British just provided the land that the his rendition flight refuelled at and the information on where to kidnap him from. Not that this makes us any less complicit but you might as well be factually accurate:)
That is your tax money that is given to Israel to spend as they see fit on US military toys. They US then gets to see them tested in a live fire environment, often against Russian gear that was sold to the various Arab states like Iran.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really seem a big thing with automatically checking this via reading their numberplate.
Because it's use doesn't stop with tax and insurance. People are now getting arrested for their beliefs. e.g. the people arrested in the days before the royal wedding on the basis that they were republicans and were thought likely to demonstrate.
Don't sleep walk into a fascist state.
Are you on crack?
What the fuck does a camera that automatically fines drivers for not paying road tax have to do with a police officer deciding to overstep the mark and arrest people for no reason?
By cars, I expect you mean the ANPR cameras that check for valid tax and insurance. These are always accompanied by signs letting you know they're there, just like speed cameras.
Even if you are right, and I don't know that you are: In what way does the existence of signs make it in any way OK? In case you've forgotten, in 2001, the state had lots of signs saying "Big Brother is watching you."
If you have no tax or vehicle insurance in the UK and are driving on the roads then you are a criminal. Cut and dried.
Everyone in the UK is required to display a valid UK tax disk in their windscreen. I don't really seem a big thing with automatically checking this via reading their numberplate.
BTW, a great many police cars here now have this built in to the dash too so it bleeps very loudly and alerts the policeman driving to come and arrest you.
From a long-view, it is better to get over our pathological fear of socialist programs and use some moderate application of them to preserve a happy balance before we slip too far down that slope.
I quite agree with this actually, but I have always felt I was in the minority in thinking like this.
Not corrupt. Just blood hounds looking for "revenue streams", trying to "monetize" everything.
Yup, but anything other than this is a bit too close to communism or socialism for a great many people so we are stuck with it.
Squeeze "mo' money" out of Netflix, Youtube, etc. In the old days these would be a bunch of mobsters. Now they're businessmen (not the 'fatherly neighborhood businessman' kind), but one-percenters.
"If you look after the pennies the pounds will look after themselves".
It has been demonstrated time and again that education decreases birth rate, partly by decreasing religious membership, as the people who are breeding the fastest in particular are overwhelmingly members of a religion that tells them to be fruitful and multiply... but partly because people understand the consequences of their actions.
I am not sure any such things has been demonstrated.
It is more likely in my mind that as you educate people you also usually improve their overall standard of living and health at the same time. This means a drop off in infant mortality and that means people do not need to have as many kids as they actually start expecting them all to survive to adulthood.
These things are all wrapped up together and interrelated so separating them and deducing which causes what to happen is much harder than you seem to imply.
Unless you've got a programmer that has some kind of severe debilitating autism, there's absolutely no reason not to take him on your sales calls, if you know technical questions are going to be asked.
What about the myriad of techies with a serious sense of entitlement and feel that "going to meet clients is not their job"?
The main reason not to take developers on sales calls is simple: The developer does not want to go and he knows that since there is such a shortage of decent developers on the market he has a lot of power to either refuse to do things he doesn't want to or even worse, deliberately make a total hash of it safe in the knowledge that firing him for being a prick is difficult unless you can prove it was deliberate.
That is not to say that all developers are like this, far from it as I have worked with some who are amazing at liaising with customers and would upsell new services to existing clients far better that the sales guys themselves. For many developers though they just view this as dirty or something, they enjoy writing code and getting them to do anything outside their comfort zone is like getting blood of out a stone.
The problem is that when you are hiring a developer you have to balance the skills you need against the budget you have. It would be great to only ever hire the stand out brilliant candidates who can do everything that is asked of them. The problem is that these candidates are generally expensive, even if you get them cheap initially as they are straight out of college they are still going to be expensive in a year or two when they have a bit more experience on their CV.
If you hire someone who is excellent at the 99% of the job that they need to do most often but simply can't be arsed learning the remaining 1% they can often still be an ok employee, and their reluctance to learn the 1% means they never earn as much as they could do so they are cheaper to employ. That is not to say there are not problems with this approach, but it is often very appealing to people pull the purse strings as they see it as great way of saving money.
If you have a need to do some presale technical work it is often cheaper to just hire one or two all expensive ambitious rounders and then give them a job title like "Pre-sales engineer" rather than hire an entire dev team full of them. This way you can keep most of your development team stacked with cheap code monkeys.
How about training local citizens for the job, at low or no cost to them.
The problem with this is that they are often a pain in the arse :)
Firstly, local citizens that go through the US university system generally have an attitude of entitlement. This is especially true of fresh graduates who have no idea how work actually is, just their preconceptions they picked up off TV.
Foreign workers without Green Cards are much more compliant workers as they know that if they screw around and get fired they may also get deported. This also makes it much harder for them to enforce the employment rights they do have as they might be out of the country before they get a chance should they be terminated without due process.
Then there is the money side of things. People on temporary work visas are generally supporting a family back home. That requires less remuneration that a US citizen would need to support a family in the US so they are happier to work for a lower wage.
Of course this means the US sending lots of money overseas and that is actually bad for the countries economy as a whole compared to if it is all spent in the US. It is also bad for the economy though if US companies can't fill vacancies without offering more money, that pushes up everyones wages as a knock on effect and puts too much power in the hands of the workers, not the company directors and shareholders.
No, you have your head in the sand. Although there are more Christians than Muslims, the number of religiously-motivated violent attacks by Muslims today far outweighs religiously-motivated attacks by Christians.
Currently, there are religiously-motivated wars and attacks in Mali, Kenya, Nigeria. There are religiously-motivated bombings, suicide attacks, etc. in Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, Phillipines, Thailand. I could probably think of 100 examples in the last year if pressed.
On the Christian side, I can think of Brevik and the Oklahoma CIty bomber and maybe some attacks on abortion providers. Very small-scale indeed compared to Islamic religious violence.
This might not actually be down to religion of course, it might be that the countries you mention as being Muslim are also desperately poor, shit holes where life is cheap anyway. There would be a crap load more Breviek's in the west if we were suffering the mortality rate from starvation and disease that half the African nations suffer.
Thankfully though we are far less likely to die of starvation, so we work hard and make our countries even richer with our ideas and thus benefit future generations even more. This is not because Islam is in some way evil though. Christianity was just as backward in its day but it learnt from the chronic fuckups like imprisoning Galileo and learnt to be more accommodating of new scientific ideas.
Islam had the advantage initially of being more accommodating to ideas like the world being round to start with so has had less of a driver to change. Now the fact that it got fewer things so provably wrong initially though means that there is less of a driver for new interpretations.
Tell me something, between Christianity and Islam, which one of the two has committed nearly 19,000 terrorist attacks since 9/11? I'll give you a hint, it's not Christianity.
To the mods now. Refute the point, and don't be an intellectual coward and moderate something because you don't like it.
There have certainly been plenty of pro-christian terrorist attacks in my part the world (UK), but mostly in the years before 9-11. The IRA (terrorists) are fighting for a free Ireland but very much under the banner of catholicism. The english they are fighing are very much protestant and they have done their fair share of terrorist acts too.
The reality is that religion has been used as a tool to motivate people to violence for centuries. Generally the people doing the motivating do not really believe in the religion though, they are just using it as a convenient route to power.
Both Christianity and Islam recognise Christ as a profit / visionary / son of god / whatever and Christ had some very things to say about goodwill to all men, being merciful, and treating other as you would wish to be treated yourself. Think of how Christ commanded his disciples to not seek revenge on the Romans when he was crucified.
People with hatred of another group of people often block those teachings out though as they are too set on vengeance for some wrong committed against them in the past.
Do not blame Christianity or Islam for this though, blame the people who cannot forgive:
You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. (Matthew 5:38–39, NRSV)
In Islam you have:
“In the Torah We prescribed for them a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, an equal wound for a wound: if anyone forgoes this out of charity, it will serve as atonement for his bad deeds. Those who do not judge according to what God has revealed are doing grave wrong.” (Qurn 5:45)
That still implies to me that the ideal is to not take revenge for wrongs against you, especially if you have some "bad deeds" of your own to atone for (who doesn't?)
What is sad is if there is another major conflict we are gonna be the Germans in WWII, with VERY expensive and fussy as hell aircraft in very few numbers whereas anybody we go against will probably have Russian tech, which means the MiG 29 at something like 30 million a pop or the SU27 at 60. Compare this to a minimum of 250 million a pop for the F35 and you can see any enemy will just be able to spam us right out of the sky.
You might be right, but the problem is that the US way is based more on not loosing pilots rather than aircraft.
Firstly pilots take millions of dollars to train so the value of them is actually more aligned with the value of the aircraft than you think. Secondly the people of the US have been reluctant to see high casualty figures since the vietnam war went sideways. This was one of the problems the US faced in Vietnam, US casualty figures were constantly declared to the people whereas the veitcong could lose millions and nobody knew apart from the US.
The currently policy is to move further and further away from manned missions when ever possible so that you can keep quiet when you are losing an engagement and not tell the folks back home.
Compared to N. Korea, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia?
You had me up until that last one. Saudi Arabia is a staunch US ally.
The US sells them vast amounts of US military hardware every year and if the US government had any sort of problem with the utter lack of any democracy there it could bankrupt them very quickly by not buying their oil. Of course that will never happen though as the US would rather Saudi stayed as friendly monarchy with a shit human rights record as most of the general populace are muslim and would probably elect a bunch extremist anti-american nutters if given half the chance.
Also, when considering the wonderful US stance on human rights you might consider that that only applies to US citizens. The folks who have been held in Guantanamo bay might not have such a great opinion on the US and it's marvellous human rights record. Another group of people not exactly happy would be the families of children killed by Israel when they fired US made and paid for incendiary missiles at Gaza.
That is not to say that other countries you quote are better, far from it. My point is only that often these things look very different depending on which people are fucking you over. The US has often been party to installing utterly non-democratic oppressive regimes in countries in recent history just to benefit US companies economically.
This is maybe a reason to consider tempering a single countries control with some sort of body where no one country had absolute control. You might even use the model the US uses for it's own internal governance (constitutional democracy or whatever) where countries got a proportional vote depending on online presence. Big changes that went against certain core principles could even then be blocked by a certain percentage voting against. It make not make for a freer internet but at least might bog the governing body down in so much bureaucracy that it didn't get any less free at least.
This might make it a little harder for RIAA and whoever to boot sites off the net for enabling piracy or whatever.
We're talking about the same United Nations that has Libya on its Human Rights Council. What do you think is going to happen?
How are we supposed to take your post seriously on a geek discussion site if you cant even post a link properly?
The link you wanted to post was here:
Libya
And btw, why should they not be on the council again in 2013? They are no longer a dictatorship and are making great strives towards democracy now that Gadafi is gone.
You did realise that was what it said on the link you posted didn't you? Here is the story stating they will be re-admitted:
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=40438&Cr=libya&Cr1
They were kicked off the council for clamping down on their own citizens at the start of the arab spring.
Wouldn't frying the stock marker help the economy?
Nope, frying all the stock market traders would help the economy :)
I didn't vote last week as I left for a train to London before 7am, and didn't get back til after 10pm. First election I've missed.
]
Wow, me too. I was in London for the whole week though due to work. Why don't we have our elections on Sundays like France does? It is such a pain in the arse having them during the week for people who work away from home a lot.
Virgin had no option but to comply with the court order that was issued. If they had ignored it, they would've been fined hundreds of thousands of pounds - probably even more than that.
BT haven't blocked it (yet), neither have O2.
BT haven't been on the receiving end of a court order yet. When they are they will. They have actually been given more time for some reason.
http://www.ion.icaew.com/itcounts/24534
O2 have been given instruction to by the courts so are probably just pissing about for as long as possible before they implement it. This may mean that they actually implement a more effective block than the trivial to bypass joke that Virgin have apparently implemented. Of course anything the try is probably just going to be akin to big game of a whack-a-mole anyway.
Most PLC's exist to make money so have to obey the law in case they get fined. If they don't they the shareholders get antsy and boot the directors out replacing them with people who will toe the line. The only way this doesn't happen is if the company thinks it is in the their financial interest to pay the fines rather than comply.
The upshot of all this is that trying to take revenge on a company for doing what they are required to do by law is childish and most likely ineffective at getting anything changed anyway. If you want to stop this, then you need to get the UK government to pass laws abolishing copyright or whatever in order to make what the piratebay provide within the letter and spirit of the law. The best way to go about this is to convince a majority of the british public that copyright is no longer needed or useful in digital age.
The best people to start with are probably your parents, or their friends as they are most likely to vote (young people vote less so politicians listen to them less). If we cannot convince the older generation that copyright needs to be abolished than we have to live with it as this is what democracy is all about.
I have just searched on the web and cannot find a single meaningful survey of public opinion on whether we should abolish copyright law. My personal opinion though is that most people would actually support some kind of copyright law, even if they did want it changed to allow consumers more freedom to use works they had paid for.
The problem DDOS attacks on a legitimate business is that it actually makes people associate the people who support copyright reform with vandalism when they do not get their way. In a democracy that is not useful at all.
Good to know the North Koreans have extra money to send to the Russians and can afford to maintain jamming trucks.
It's not "extra money" it's a policy called military first or some such crap. Basically it means the people can go starve if the army needs the money for a new toy.
Ah, one last thing, the Supreme Court demands that capital punishment is handed down by objective criteria. Wonder how many service man have been sentenced to DR that commited multiple murders on the local population. Happened many times, and these guys usually get just a slap on the hand.
What's even more relevant is that these service men or women should often be tried and sentenced in the country where the crime is committed. Especially in cases where the US has an extradition treaty with the country in question and would,expect to be able to extradite any criminals it wanted to stand trial in the US. The US policy seems to be though that their own law usurps any other countries (recently it seems to usurp the US constitution so that should not be too surprising).
This is a fine attitude to take if you intend to impose it by force, but it completely fails to let you take any sort of moral high ground. This does not help win any hearts and minds of the local populace so has a habit of encouraging terrorism amongst them, especially if there is mass unemployment and people feel like they have nothing better to do than blow themselves up anyway.
Whether APis are copyrightable is a matter for professional bodies in computing to consider, such as the ACM and IEEE, not judges nor politicians. It's a technical matter.
And if this technical matter were decided at the professional body level, then this entire farce would have been avoided, because professionals in the discipline would not be stupid enough to deny interoperability by making APIs copyrightable.
Neither the judge nor (even less) the jury have the skill and background to make a sound decision in this area.
Normally I ignore AC's but in this case you hit the nail completely on the head.
This is ta big problem facing our society now: that juries made up of laymen or judges are expect to rule on things they have no clue about and the time taken to educate them is simply unfeasible.
I have been developing software professionally for a decade or so (3 decades if you count when I first learnt basic) and I still have a great deal to learn. I would still have to sit down and draw on much of my experience when it came to deciding this case. I do not see how someone who has just completed coding 101 could really understand the full implications of their decision, let alone someone who has not even got that far.
I also do not think that a sensible decision is that likely if the jury are only able to base it on which witness the sound of liked better.
It would be like basing who runs a country based on a some sort of popularity contest. Oh crap, we actually do that as well :(
No he won't. But that's ok, because you're a sinner, and so you deserve all the viruses you're getting.
God only worked like that in the old testament.
What is this "writing" thing that everybody is talking about?
Its like that "signing your name" thing people make you do occasionally only with lots more of it and different, more complicated patterns.
Another possibility, which I do not personally like or advocate, is DRM, which does not need copyright protection to function. Valve seems to be doing OK with Steam.
And an even more lucrative possibility if copyright law didn't exist would be for me to make my money selling a hack that let you download games from steam without paying for them. Wow, if I could make something so easy anyone could use that would be very popular. It might not help the PC games market in the long run though but would let me get rich quick.
Intellectual property is a completely artificial construct, not a natural right at all.
So is money, at least it is in the incarnation we ended up with.
Unfortunately although the figures showing in my online banking account are a completely artificial construct, I still need a certain amount of them in order to keep myself alive. I also was very stupid in my youth and chose being a software developer as a career and so I only earn money by creating another completely artificial construct. It is very hard for me to now retrain as a farmer or carpenter without me or my family starving in the process.
Without copyright you could take my work and use it without giving me any reward for having created it. That does not seem right to me for some reason.
This is to not to say that I entirely support RIAA and MAFIAA and whoever else, but I do still see the need to maintain some form of law that protects people right to earn money from designing complex creations like software.
In future when 3D Printers improve it will be the case that you can build any number of an item if you have the original plan, but that plan will involve a great deal of work in order to create. This will necessitate the end of money as a concept, but we are not there yet and until we get there we need a way to balance things so people who create physical items like the food we need to live can trade with the people who specialise in creating ideas as both are needed in order to further the human race.
Worse than that. What the judge is saying is effectively that because you choose to disclose things about yourself, that it is reasonable for police to force me to disclose those same things about myself.
Rights do not cease to be rights merely because the majority of people do not exercise them; so long as even one person considers something to be private, the state has no legitimate authority to treat it otherwise unless failure to do so would pose an immediate threat of grave harm to another person. Period.
I think you maybe slightly misunderstood what he was saying. From his summary:
Which is to say that the concerns that have been raised about the erosion of our right to privacy are, indeed, legitimate, but misdirected. The danger here is not Big Brother; the government, and especially Congress, have been commendably restrained, all things considered. The danger comes from a different source altogether. In the immortal words of Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
I think what he is actually saying is that if you want to keep a secret, then don't tell anyone about it. If you do disclose things about yourself, then don't be surprised if it comes back to haunt you.
The crux of this is that we often disclose very personal secrets about our private lives in ways that we think are completely anonymous. The thing is though that they are often not as anonymous as we think. For example I can post to slashdot as an account not tied to my real name (this one is), but someone who worked at my company could easily snoop on my internet traffic to figure out and hence remove my anonymity. They could then be forced to pass that information on to government or do so off their own back.
The judge seems to think the issue here is really that I have signed a contract that allowed in the small print my employer to snoop on all my internet traffic for whatever reason they liked, not that government was given that information by my employer when it asked. He obviously neglects to acknowledge that I do not have a huge amount of choice when signing some employment contracts.
By the way, this is not necessarily to say I agree that these laws are right. I think the idea that a private citizen can carry a concealed firearm on a public street (or in a bar of all places) is absolutely retarded but I would not for one second deny that certain states legally allow it.
The trick with all laws is to recognise that as society and technology can change, and that sometimes laws have to change too.
Picture this. It happened a few years ago, and was likely perpetrated by British agents.
Not quite.
I am guessing you mean Abdelhakim Belhadj (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdelhakim_Belhadj)
It was most likely the flying him half way round the world bit was perpetrated by US Agents since the US has the infrastructure to do this (ie, the black flights program). Us British just provided the land that the his rendition flight refuelled at and the information on where to kidnap him from. Not that this makes us any less complicit but you might as well be factually accurate :)
As far as Israel is concerned, I also doubt he would stand in the way of selling munitions to our allies.
Of course not, but I was talking about the $3 billion dollars per year that the US gives to Israel in military aid.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/foreign_aid.html
That is your tax money that is given to Israel to spend as they see fit on US military toys. They US then gets to see them tested in a live fire environment, often against Russian gear that was sold to the various Arab states like Iran.