I'm no lawyer, so please correct me if I'm missing your point, but section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 doesn't refer to a "terrorist publication", simply to "information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism".
I agree that textbooks wouldn't fall under the definition of terrorist publications that you quote from section 2 of the Terrorism Act 2006, but I think they could still easily fall within the scope of the 2000 act. The 2000 act also criminalises simple possession, whereas the 2006 act refers to dissemination.
Another user further down the page pointed out that an acceptable defence under UK law would simply be to have a reasonable 'non-terrorist' purpose for possession of the documents. Unfortunately that wasn't tested here, as the defendant pleaded guilty, but it appears (to me, at least) that he had a quite legitimate reason for owning the documents: he was running a small business selling them on CD.
The article seems to suggest that the court accepted that Brown "had no terrorist sympathies". His reason for possessing the information was to sell it for profit. Is there any reason that this would not be a legitimate defence?
Read the BBC link, it relates to a different case. The guy had collected together a bunch of information and was running a business selling CDs of it. Factual information, nothing more. He was charged with "collecting information that could have been used to prepare or commit acts of terrorism", "recklessly disseminating the information" and "transferring criminal property".
This is all despite the fact that "the court was told that Brown made tens of thousands of pounds from the business but had no terrorist sympathies". I see nothing in the article to suggest that the court believed his intent was anything other than that of making money.
Read the BBC link, it relates to a different case. The guy had collected together a bunch of information and was running a business selling CDs of it. Factual information, nothing more. He was charged with "collecting information that could have been used to prepare or commit acts of terrorism", "recklessly disseminating the information" and "transferring criminal property".
This is all despite the fact that "the court was told that Brown made tens of thousands of pounds from the business but had no terrorist sympathies". I see nothing in the article to suggest that the court believed his intent was anything other than that of making money.
What you're advocating is making most people criminals and then trusting the police to only arrest the ones who 'deserve it'.
Honestly, that method probably would result in more criminals being convicted, but it also vastly increases the power of the police to act without oversight. Anybody who pisses off an officer could quite easily and legitimately be convicted, despite having done nothing (really) wrong.
Read the first link - the BBC story is about a guy who simply collected and sold information, while the Telegraph story is about those who were caught using it.
The charge that the former pleaded guilty to was "collecting information that could have been used to prepare or commit acts of terrorism". It's an insanely broad law which can and (if history is anything to go by) will be used to stifle legitimate collection of factual information, not to mention the chilling effect from simply having it on the books.
Any number of things, not least the majority of university level science and engineering textbooks, could be extremely useful to terrorists. The law is probably there to be selectively applied to those who they can't get anything else on. Sure, it probably will rightly convict a few potentially dangerous people, but in doing so we are suffering a huge abridgement of our rights.
Or in short, everything is inferior about "green revolution" farming save for profit.
Profit drives everything. You may not like it, but that's the world that you live in.
If you realistically want change, you'll either need to start convincing people that they're harming their long term profitability for short term gain (which won't matter to those who intend to leave after the short term peak blows over), or make permaculture more profitable than factory farming in the short term.
Although I don't know about farming specifically, I'd suggest that the latter option is more plausible, based on what I've read in your post above. Either the cost of factory farming will rise due to legislation mandating that farmers pay to negate the damage they're doing to the land, technological advances will increase the profitability of permaculture farming, or the land damage caused by factory farming will cause yields (and therefore profits) to drop.
When the combination of those three factors makes permaculture the better business option I don't doubt that we'll see a boom in those farming methods. It sounds to me like that'll be a good thing for all of us.
What you can't expect, however, is for companies to act in a particular way simply because it's in the best interests of the population at large. If you're trying to bring about change by preaching the merits of your method you're unlikely to succeed, unless one of those merits happens to be increased profit (or perhaps decreased startup cost, allowing more competition). The way to effect real change is by using finance as the driving force.
I've sent a reasonable number of things from and to a variety of countries, and everything I've ever sent or received internationally has been required to carry a declaration of contents and value on the outside, regardless of the country of origin or destination.
Usually customs will accept this at face value, but they do have the right to open packages to check that false declarations are not being made. Their website has a little more detail, if you're interested. For comparison, US customs have very similar rights and procedures, as listed here.
In reality, it's not unusual for parcels to carry a false statement of value if, for example, you order something from Hong Kong on eBay. I doubt anyone would really be pulled up on something like that, either, but if a major company made a habit of it I'm sure there would be issues.
I don't know about this particular case, but it's not beyond the realms of possibility. I recall reading a while back that monitors with DVI inputs carry a higher import duty because the DVI connection classed them as a TV rather than a computer peripheral.
Hell, it doesn't even just apply to tech products. There was a rather drawn out legal case to decide whether or not a particular snack should be taxed as a cake or a biscuit.
Yes, and iTunes sells literally millions of tracks every day. Sure, piracy hasn't been wiped out, but low price music without ads or DRM seems to sell pretty successfully, even though the option not to pay is just a couple of clicks away. Spotify, which uses a free but ad supported streaming model for music, is also extremely popular here in the UK.
I'm unaware of a comparable service for video, though. Hulu and its ilk seem like a great idea - moving the standard ad-supported broadcast model onto the web seems very sensible and, as I mentioned, it seems to be working for Spotify. Unfortunately, though, they're still encumbered by archaic distribution agreements which mean they're only available in certain geographic regions.
Although what you say is true, the fact is that a combination of ingrained moral principle and slight fear of being caught do help push people towards the legit options, if all else is approximately equal.
Torrented shows are always going to be the superior option overall because of the price, but as iTunes and Hulu have demonstrated, people are willing to 'do the right thing' if they get a similar product. People are much less willing to pay a significant amount of money for a far inferior product.
Wait, no, I retract my previous reply to you! It's not a fair point!
I got myself a little confused, but you're comparing apples to oranges (no pun intended!).
My initial comparison was untaxed price to untaxed price, and the mark up is between 3% and 8% there. You're then talking about adding US sales tax and comparing that taxed price to the untaxed UK price.
For those wondering exactly what value is being added, perhaps having local retailers rather than international shipping / grey market retailer, shipping and distribution?
Nope. If I order online directly from outside the EU, I'm liable to pay UK VAT on the items I receive as they pass through customs. The threshold value for this to apply is pretty low, too - under £20 if I remember correctly.
Enforcement is a bit inconsistent, but if customs do slap you with a VAT bill you will then have the added pleasure of the courier company automatically paying it for you and levying a ~£10 fee for the privilege of doing so. They will then hold the parcel until you pay them both the VAT and their added charges.
I always consider sales tax in the US to be a bit of a non-issue on things like this, since (unless I'm mistaken) avoiding it is pretty trivial, by ordering online from a distributor in another state.
By replying to your post with a technical correction, I don't doubt that I'm setting myself up to make some obvious mistake, but anyway: the UK prices already include VAT, so by simply subtracting 17.5% of that total you're over counting the tax (as it's 17.5% of the base, untaxed price).
£429/1.175=£365.11, which is approximately $537.80. The mark up from the US prices seems to be around 8%. It's not terrible, I guess, and it's certainly not as bad as it used to be, but 8% on an already expensive product is still a reasonable chunk of change.
Most cameras in that class could take maybe a few hundred non-flash images (and the Eye-Fi is probably going to cut into that BIG TIME) and can't take external power supplies easily.
It might limit your choice of cameras slightly, but there are actually plenty of point-and-shoots that can run from AC adapters. The prefix that Canon uses for the kits is 'ACK'.
As with so many things, it's easier and safer for the companies to keep pumping out the same old products. Any innovations that do come about are pushed straight to the uber-niche end of the market where an extra few hundred dollars doesn't matter.
Luckily (and a little unusually), however, there are two pretty simple DIY option in this case. The first is to get a point-and-shoot for $200, load a custom firmware (I know some Canon models are particularly good for this) and write a quick script to take a shot every 'x' seconds, then throw in an Eye-Fi SD card to grab the pictures wirelessly. I haven't used an Eye-Fi card myself, so I don't know what happens when it gets full - maybe add another script in the camera to wipe the card every day or something.
The second is to get a firewire camera. No wireless on this option, but many consumer camcorders support firewire for control, not just for data transfer - I was using these years ago as extra high quality options for video conferencing, but I see no reason that they couldn't be rigged up for stills too.
The question is, how does one get a piece of software chosen for a job like this?
If the government is paying for crap like this anyway, it'd be nice if a cut were coming my way - I'm sure many of us here on/. are more than capable of putting together a better tool for the job (not to mention a website that doesn't look like it was put together by a colourblind child in 1997).
Luckily enough, we've got plenty of infrastructure dedicated to transmitting power from generators to our cities already. It's not like you can fit a coal fired plant in your back yard, either...
You're absolutely right that optics make a big difference (although something can be said for the impact of averaging the extra data from a poor but high res image, in some cases). Your preference for a 'real CCD' is outdated, though. CMOS is no longer synonymous with 'cheap crappy phone camera' - they come in several thousand dollar SLRs too, now!
Interesting point - I hadn't considered it like that. How does that account for the fact that so many things are manufactured abroad, though? If the product is manufactured in China under license of the US copyright holder, half the shipment goes straight to 'official' distributors in the US, and the other half is bought cheap in Russia and then imported to the US by a third party, it seems to cast a shadow on the concept that the product was not authorised for US sale.
There's also the fact that, in this particular case, Omega had no right to register the copyright on their logo in the first place. It should be a trademark, and thus the case would be a non-issue. Could still set an interesting precedent for games, CDs and movies, though.
Interesting. I couldn't find details anywhere of how big a warhead the Club-K can carry, but apparently it can hit Mach 3, which is also one of the things that makes the SS-N-22 so dangerous. Also found a £10,000,000 per container price tag, which doesn't seem to be mentioned elsewhere.
More importantly, though, what self respecting nation doesn't want to buy missiles that are advertised with the Pirates of the Carribean theme!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no lawyer, so please correct me if I'm missing your point, but section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 doesn't refer to a "terrorist publication", simply to "information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism".
I agree that textbooks wouldn't fall under the definition of terrorist publications that you quote from section 2 of the Terrorism Act 2006, but I think they could still easily fall within the scope of the 2000 act. The 2000 act also criminalises simple possession, whereas the 2006 act refers to dissemination.
Another user further down the page pointed out that an acceptable defence under UK law would simply be to have a reasonable 'non-terrorist' purpose for possession of the documents. Unfortunately that wasn't tested here, as the defendant pleaded guilty, but it appears (to me, at least) that he had a quite legitimate reason for owning the documents: he was running a small business selling them on CD.
The article seems to suggest that the court accepted that Brown "had no terrorist sympathies". His reason for possessing the information was to sell it for profit. Is there any reason that this would not be a legitimate defence?
To quote myself:
Read the BBC link, it relates to a different case. The guy had collected together a bunch of information and was running a business selling CDs of it. Factual information, nothing more. He was charged with "collecting information that could have been used to prepare or commit acts of terrorism", "recklessly disseminating the information" and "transferring criminal property".
This is all despite the fact that "the court was told that Brown made tens of thousands of pounds from the business but had no terrorist sympathies". I see nothing in the article to suggest that the court believed his intent was anything other than that of making money.
Read the BBC link, it relates to a different case. The guy had collected together a bunch of information and was running a business selling CDs of it. Factual information, nothing more. He was charged with "collecting information that could have been used to prepare or commit acts of terrorism", "recklessly disseminating the information" and "transferring criminal property".
This is all despite the fact that "the court was told that Brown made tens of thousands of pounds from the business but had no terrorist sympathies". I see nothing in the article to suggest that the court believed his intent was anything other than that of making money.
What you're advocating is making most people criminals and then trusting the police to only arrest the ones who 'deserve it'.
Honestly, that method probably would result in more criminals being convicted, but it also vastly increases the power of the police to act without oversight. Anybody who pisses off an officer could quite easily and legitimately be convicted, despite having done nothing (really) wrong.
Read the first link - the BBC story is about a guy who simply collected and sold information, while the Telegraph story is about those who were caught using it.
The charge that the former pleaded guilty to was "collecting information that could have been used to prepare or commit acts of terrorism". It's an insanely broad law which can and (if history is anything to go by) will be used to stifle legitimate collection of factual information, not to mention the chilling effect from simply having it on the books.
Any number of things, not least the majority of university level science and engineering textbooks, could be extremely useful to terrorists. The law is probably there to be selectively applied to those who they can't get anything else on. Sure, it probably will rightly convict a few potentially dangerous people, but in doing so we are suffering a huge abridgement of our rights.
[citation needed]
Or in short, everything is inferior about "green revolution" farming save for profit.
Profit drives everything. You may not like it, but that's the world that you live in.
If you realistically want change, you'll either need to start convincing people that they're harming their long term profitability for short term gain (which won't matter to those who intend to leave after the short term peak blows over), or make permaculture more profitable than factory farming in the short term.
Although I don't know about farming specifically, I'd suggest that the latter option is more plausible, based on what I've read in your post above. Either the cost of factory farming will rise due to legislation mandating that farmers pay to negate the damage they're doing to the land, technological advances will increase the profitability of permaculture farming, or the land damage caused by factory farming will cause yields (and therefore profits) to drop.
When the combination of those three factors makes permaculture the better business option I don't doubt that we'll see a boom in those farming methods. It sounds to me like that'll be a good thing for all of us.
What you can't expect, however, is for companies to act in a particular way simply because it's in the best interests of the population at large. If you're trying to bring about change by preaching the merits of your method you're unlikely to succeed, unless one of those merits happens to be increased profit (or perhaps decreased startup cost, allowing more competition). The way to effect real change is by using finance as the driving force.
I've sent a reasonable number of things from and to a variety of countries, and everything I've ever sent or received internationally has been required to carry a declaration of contents and value on the outside, regardless of the country of origin or destination.
Usually customs will accept this at face value, but they do have the right to open packages to check that false declarations are not being made. Their website has a little more detail, if you're interested. For comparison, US customs have very similar rights and procedures, as listed here.
In reality, it's not unusual for parcels to carry a false statement of value if, for example, you order something from Hong Kong on eBay. I doubt anyone would really be pulled up on something like that, either, but if a major company made a habit of it I'm sure there would be issues.
I don't know about this particular case, but it's not beyond the realms of possibility. I recall reading a while back that monitors with DVI inputs carry a higher import duty because the DVI connection classed them as a TV rather than a computer peripheral.
Hell, it doesn't even just apply to tech products. There was a rather drawn out legal case to decide whether or not a particular snack should be taxed as a cake or a biscuit.
Yes, and iTunes sells literally millions of tracks every day. Sure, piracy hasn't been wiped out, but low price music without ads or DRM seems to sell pretty successfully, even though the option not to pay is just a couple of clicks away. Spotify, which uses a free but ad supported streaming model for music, is also extremely popular here in the UK.
I'm unaware of a comparable service for video, though. Hulu and its ilk seem like a great idea - moving the standard ad-supported broadcast model onto the web seems very sensible and, as I mentioned, it seems to be working for Spotify. Unfortunately, though, they're still encumbered by archaic distribution agreements which mean they're only available in certain geographic regions.
Although what you say is true, the fact is that a combination of ingrained moral principle and slight fear of being caught do help push people towards the legit options, if all else is approximately equal.
Torrented shows are always going to be the superior option overall because of the price, but as iTunes and Hulu have demonstrated, people are willing to 'do the right thing' if they get a similar product. People are much less willing to pay a significant amount of money for a far inferior product.
Wait, no, I retract my previous reply to you! It's not a fair point!
I got myself a little confused, but you're comparing apples to oranges (no pun intended!).
My initial comparison was untaxed price to untaxed price, and the mark up is between 3% and 8% there. You're then talking about adding US sales tax and comparing that taxed price to the untaxed UK price.
For those wondering exactly what value is being added, perhaps having local retailers rather than international shipping / grey market retailer, shipping and distribution?
Nope. If I order online directly from outside the EU, I'm liable to pay UK VAT on the items I receive as they pass through customs. The threshold value for this to apply is pretty low, too - under £20 if I remember correctly.
Enforcement is a bit inconsistent, but if customs do slap you with a VAT bill you will then have the added pleasure of the courier company automatically paying it for you and levying a ~£10 fee for the privilege of doing so. They will then hold the parcel until you pay them both the VAT and their added charges.
That's a fair point.
I always consider sales tax in the US to be a bit of a non-issue on things like this, since (unless I'm mistaken) avoiding it is pretty trivial, by ordering online from a distributor in another state.
Also, since the summary presents the UK price as a percentage of the US one, here are the actual figures:
Wifi
16GB 32GB 64GB
108% 104% 107%
3G
16GB 32GB 64GB
105% 103% 106%
By replying to your post with a technical correction, I don't doubt that I'm setting myself up to make some obvious mistake, but anyway: the UK prices already include VAT, so by simply subtracting 17.5% of that total you're over counting the tax (as it's 17.5% of the base, untaxed price).
£429/1.175=£365.11, which is approximately $537.80. The mark up from the US prices seems to be around 8%. It's not terrible, I guess, and it's certainly not as bad as it used to be, but 8% on an already expensive product is still a reasonable chunk of change.
Most cameras in that class could take maybe a few hundred non-flash images (and the Eye-Fi is probably going to cut into that BIG TIME) and can't take external power supplies easily.
It might limit your choice of cameras slightly, but there are actually plenty of point-and-shoots that can run from AC adapters. The prefix that Canon uses for the kits is 'ACK'.
As with so many things, it's easier and safer for the companies to keep pumping out the same old products. Any innovations that do come about are pushed straight to the uber-niche end of the market where an extra few hundred dollars doesn't matter.
Luckily (and a little unusually), however, there are two pretty simple DIY option in this case. The first is to get a point-and-shoot for $200, load a custom firmware (I know some Canon models are particularly good for this) and write a quick script to take a shot every 'x' seconds, then throw in an Eye-Fi SD card to grab the pictures wirelessly. I haven't used an Eye-Fi card myself, so I don't know what happens when it gets full - maybe add another script in the camera to wipe the card every day or something.
The second is to get a firewire camera. No wireless on this option, but many consumer camcorders support firewire for control, not just for data transfer - I was using these years ago as extra high quality options for video conferencing, but I see no reason that they couldn't be rigged up for stills too.
The question is, how does one get a piece of software chosen for a job like this?
If the government is paying for crap like this anyway, it'd be nice if a cut were coming my way - I'm sure many of us here on /. are more than capable of putting together a better tool for the job (not to mention a website that doesn't look like it was put together by a colourblind child in 1997).
Luckily enough, we've got plenty of infrastructure dedicated to transmitting power from generators to our cities already. It's not like you can fit a coal fired plant in your back yard, either...
You're absolutely right that optics make a big difference (although something can be said for the impact of averaging the extra data from a poor but high res image, in some cases). Your preference for a 'real CCD' is outdated, though. CMOS is no longer synonymous with 'cheap crappy phone camera' - they come in several thousand dollar SLRs too, now!
Tesco [...] was importing them from countries outside the EU, which is forbidden without the consent of the manufacturer.
What's the logic behind making that illegal?
Interesting point - I hadn't considered it like that. How does that account for the fact that so many things are manufactured abroad, though? If the product is manufactured in China under license of the US copyright holder, half the shipment goes straight to 'official' distributors in the US, and the other half is bought cheap in Russia and then imported to the US by a third party, it seems to cast a shadow on the concept that the product was not authorised for US sale.
There's also the fact that, in this particular case, Omega had no right to register the copyright on their logo in the first place. It should be a trademark, and thus the case would be a non-issue. Could still set an interesting precedent for games, CDs and movies, though.
Interesting. I couldn't find details anywhere of how big a warhead the Club-K can carry, but apparently it can hit Mach 3, which is also one of the things that makes the SS-N-22 so dangerous. Also found a £10,000,000 per container price tag, which doesn't seem to be mentioned elsewhere.
More importantly, though, what self respecting nation doesn't want to buy missiles that are advertised with the Pirates of the Carribean theme!