I've often thought that if it's economically viable to go to the trouble of all that engineering for offshore oil exploration, extraction and processing, surely it's viable to build vast offshore wind farms
I think the keyword here is "vast."
The permanent offshore rig is more or less a terminal.
Impressive in size - but still a single, relatively compact, structure. That is not going to be true of a wind farm.
I can't always tell when my wife has her belt on in the car when I'm sitting next to her (it blends in with the color of clothing she wears most frequently), how the fuck is the cop going to do so from afar?
He doesn't have to see anything.
It's a public road. It's a random safety check.
Need glasses?
You'd better be wearing them too.
You don't have a right to drive on the public roads, you only have a license.
If you're ever on a jury in the United States, the legal system will wrongly try to convince you that they're either guilty or not guilty, but there is a third way: nullification or veto powers.
God.
This is dumb.
In a civil trial the jury makes a simple finding of fact for the plaintiff or defendant.
The entire process of a modern jury trial is intended to strip a case of its emotion. It doesn't always work that way, of course.
But Hearts and Flowers it ain't.
The juror will be typically be middle aged, middle class, small-C conservative.
In the federal system, the panel will more or less be a creation of the judge - and a judge almost by definition is a middle aged small-C conservative. He is looking for men and women who have come to do a job and not to play the system.
The size of the federal jury pool and the element of randomness in its selection does not favor the lone nullifier.
He probably won't get a case he gives a damn about. He almost certainly won't give a damn about you.
Nullification - of course - has always cut both ways.
The black American through almost the whole of our history could tell you that much.
But I have always been a little bit puzzled about why the geek thinks a jury will be any way inclined to throw a lifeline out to him.
The geek builds castles in the air. He whines. He wheedles. He lies like a rug. He could have settled this business quickly and cheaply and saved everyone a lot of trouble.
Sorry NewYorkCountryLawyer, In the "real world", the case would not have been dismissed. It would've ended with a guilty verdict in small claims court.
In the real world, this defendant settles out of court.
Copyrights are anchored in the federal constitution and statutes.
But - most importantly - file sharing is treated as an unlicensed wholesale distribution. That is why why you end up in the federal system.
You are talking real money here.
There is no such thing as a federal small claims court outside of "territorial" jurisdictions like Washington D.C.
Because the extent of the distribution is difficult to determine, statutory damages become an option.
That is a dangerous, dangerous thing for a defendant whose case is factually weak or who can be expected to perform poorly on the stand.
The defense has all but conceded that Thomas lied on the stand.
That she tampered with evidence.
Thomas is the iceberg.
The geek is the Titanic and it's time to man the boats.
Downloads default to your "shared files" folder. Shared files default to "share."
Which to a jury means exactly what you think it does.
There is neat little progress graph which shows which files are on the move and which are waiting in line.
You have a nickname.
You can chat with other users.
There is an option to scan the shared files of other users - and scoop up all you can eat.
There are options to set limits on your upstream and downstream traffic. When you try to close the program, you will warned if files are still in transit.
What Kazaa does and how it works is perfectly transparent.
In civil law, you are responsible for the consequences which can be reasonably be expected to follow from your actions.
That you shut your eyes to the truth is not a defense.
Stupid is not a defense.
But being too clever by half will sink you.
The geek is Wile E. Coyote - Super Genius - in court. He expects the system to roll over and play dead just because he says so.
Of course, some sort of plausible deniability encryption a la Truecrypt would also be good, in case the secret police catch you with your phone.
"We have ways of making you talk."
Plausible denial means nothing to the guy with a set of alligator clips, an old-school inverter and a honking big battery.
The real spy hates spy tech.
Each additional layer of complication introduces new risks. If he can send a message in the clear he will. What he really needs is a method or a system so familiar and mundane that no one gives it a second thought.
Until you write Fahrenheit 451, I wouldn't be so quick to call Ray Bradbury an idiot, no matter what he says about the internet.
Bradbury also wrote The Veldt. The first significant story about the hazards of deep immersion in interactive entertainment: particularly for children.
Writers of Bradbury's generation have some very interesting and perceptive things to say about "cocooning -" social isolation and a pathologically extended adolescence reinforced by the new technologies of instant communication.
I agree; what an idiot. There's more useful, educational information instantly available on the internet than any library in the world will ever hold. Just because he's too old and blind to find anything other than Yahoo games doesn't mean that the internet is distracting and meaningless
The library organizes information. It attempts to separate the meaningful from the meaningless. It is outward looking - not inward looking.
In following the threads here on the Thomas case - some things become painfully obvious:
The geek doesn't understand the most basic distinctions between civil and criminal law.
He doesn't understand evidence, the burden of proof.
He doesn't know how a jury is selected. He doesn't understand the roles played by the plaintiff and defendant, the judge, the jury, the court of appeals.
It is easier for him to find refuge in talk of conspiracies, in talk of corruption.
The geek has access to infinite information - or at least thinks he does.
But mostly he listens to himself. He tunes out dissenting voices. He doesn't ask the right questions - and again and again he makes the same mistakes.
I'm sure Wikipedia alone has orders of magnitude more educational reading material than you could read going to the library three times a week for generations.
But why are you sure?
The geek likes big numbers. The geek trusts big numbers. The number of apps in his distro's repository. The number of pages in his Wiki....
That summary made no sense. I read it twice and still couldn't figure out what point the author was trying to make so I wasn't even interested in the linked article.
At least you can read the summary.
What I see are comments obscured by countless fragments of what Slashdot laughingly calls its standards-compliant graphical elements.
Linux has come a long way and it is ready for the average user. Yes, Joe-six-pack can use linux with a 15 minute tutorial in the basics. I just want to scream knowing that Microsoft is still undermining the market and retarding progress!
The MSDOS and Windows PC has been in the home and SOHO markets since 1980.
Close enough to thirty years as makes no difference.
He may occasionally need an emulator like ScummVM. But, for all practical purposes, the entire MSDOS and Windows back list is available to his 64 bit Quad Core Win 7 system. Gog.com for the good old games.
The best in freeware, the best in shareware, the best in proprietary and closed-source, the best in FOSS.
No barriers. No lectures. The Windows world is a global marketplace, with the ethics and values of the thieves bazaar.
That is what makes it so much fun. The geek tends to come across as the Salvation Army Band - a self-righteous and humorless Carry A. Nation preaching outside the old-time Irish saloon.
The mass market OEM Linux PC is a bottom feeder - and a piss-poor showcase for Linux.
The refurbished $750 Vista desktop at Tiger is quad-core - perhaps a Phenom or i7.
8 GB of DDR2 or DDR3 RAM. 1 TB of primary storage on one or two drives, with front panel cartridge mounts for one or more USB drives. Entry level NVIDIA DX10 graphics or better with integrated HDMI audio and video. WiFi a given. The Blu-Ray player. Not a burner. Not quite yet.
The power supply and the video card probably not your first choice. But once the system knows your usage patterns, this bird is going to fly.
'In much the same way that homebrew computer science built the world we live in today, garage biology can affect the future we make for ourselves
The homebrew era of the PC lasted a little more than two years.
By 1977 Apple and Microsoft are in place - and the PC is a clearly defined and easily recognizable commercial product no later than the mid-eighties.
I don't know where the notion of a homebrewed computer science comes from. The clearly dominant players here are the military, the big university and corporate research giants like Bell Labs and IBM.
I should have added that the NET Act criminalizes non-commercial infringement.
The rights holder has never been required to establish a motive for an infringement in a civil case. It doesn't matter why you stole your neighbor's cat - it only matters that you did steal your neighbor's cat.
When you realise that the minimum statutory penalty for copying a CD is higher than the maximum penalty for stealing the CD, you see quite how messed up copyright law has become.
You steal a CD from WalMart.
Retail value $20.
You upload the rip to 15 million of your closest friends on the P2P nets.
The day you received the subpoena it was still being read out of your shared files folder.
Retail value $1 per track at iTunes.
Plus whatever punitive damages seem appropriate for the unlicensed wholesale distribution.
Thomas was certainly painted as a victim in media coverage
That is how is she was painted here.
But that isn't how the jury saw her - not the first time around and not the second.
There is a world beyond the blog.
It has its own rules and its own values - and in that world the geek doesn't fare so well.
I wonder myself whether the defense DELIBERATELY anticipated a huge defeat in not refuting evidence or calling expert witnesses
That would be just plain stupid.
The trial court or the appellate court is free to scale back the verdict without ever reaching the "due process" question.
It is also free to say that the finder of fact has twice reached the same conclusion - and is unlikely to reach any other conclusion no matter how many times the case is retried.
"Artists" who think that one weekend's work and a year or two of sacrifices and chances should allow them to live luxuriously for years after get no sympathy for me.
and in the next sentence the geek will complain that a pointy-haired bastard thought his code was worthless because he made it look so easy.
but if it is the geek owns the code - what then?
in the right moment, that could make him the author of MBASIC and Bill Gates.
the engineer working for Pixar will live to see his name in the end credits - he may even have a cameo on the extras DVD or Blu-Ray disk.
perhaps his grandchildren will be around to greet Nemo or WALL-E on their centennial, be invited to the Smithsonian or Lincoln Center.
when the geek looks at Steamboat Willie - his imagination dead-ends at the thought of producing a sequel.
Artists have never been able to make a substantial income from record (or sheet music) sales.
I like to see some proof of that.
There are - realistically - only so many dates you can play, only so many venues that will yield a significant return
The small jazz ensemble needs an intimate club to play in - not Yankee Stadium. But recording these sessions means that you can still reach a global audience.
Artists like Bing Crosby were essentially a studio product.
The microphone dramatically extended their careers and created a sense of intimacy that is difficult to capture on stage.
It can be hard to picture the geek as an adult - because his world view still seems framed by adolescence.
The grace and maturity of an aging artist is often a more than fair exchange for a sometimes flawed performance
That does not mean he can bear the rigors of a concert tour that would be hell on a kid just out of school.
It is simply damned wasteful to lose talent at that level.
One sentence- Steamboat Willie is STILL under copyright!
Steamboat Willie is eight minutes of silent era sight gags linked by a thin narrative thread. Filmed on nitrate stock, it was projected with synchronized sound on a phonographic disk.
The copyright on Steamboat Willie protects that single incarnation of the Mouse. When it expires you get the right to distribute the short - if you can find unprotected primary sources. Try MoMA or The Library of Congress.
You get the right to produce derivatives based on Steamboat Willie - and only Steamboat Willie.
You do not get to use the trademarked character designs. You do not get the Phantom Blot - and the "steel-belted" Mouse of the comic pages.
MGM did rather well with Tom and Jerry. Paul Terry with Mighty Mouse. To be successful in this business, you had to find your own way.
Slashdot Mirror
I've often thought that if it's economically viable to go to the trouble of all that engineering for offshore oil exploration, extraction and processing, surely it's viable to build vast offshore wind farms
I think the keyword here is "vast."
The permanent offshore rig is more or less a terminal.
Impressive in size - but still a single, relatively compact, structure. That is not going to be true of a wind farm.
"clean" coal (aka carbon sequestration) as a pipe dream
Can someone please tell me what coal is if it is not carbon sequestration?
however, the stories I've read/heard on the subject all seem to involve these cameras being installed and the yellow duration being shortened
This has the flavor of an urban legend. I would begin by asking - for example - whether or not it is your state DOT that sets the timing.
Based on traffic counts and other criteria.
I can't always tell when my wife has her belt on in the car when I'm sitting next to her (it blends in with the color of clothing she wears most frequently), how the fuck is the cop going to do so from afar?
He doesn't have to see anything.
It's a public road. It's a random safety check.
Need glasses?
You'd better be wearing them too.
You don't have a right to drive on the public roads, you only have a license.
If people are dumb enough to drive without a seat belt, then why should the rest of society care?
Because society has to clean up the mess you leave behind. It's more than that splotch you left behind on the road.
Did you have a wife and kids? That's half - and likely more than half - of their support, gone, poof. Pension fund? Life insurance?
The numbers had better add up, because if they don't, you've added four or five more people to the welfare rolls.
The seat belt isn't there just to keep you from being injured - it is there to help keep you in control of your car.
To prevent the accident.
If you're ever on a jury in the United States, the legal system will wrongly try to convince you that they're either guilty or not guilty, but there is a third way: nullification or veto powers.
God.
This is dumb.
In a civil trial the jury makes a simple finding of fact for the plaintiff or defendant.
The entire process of a modern jury trial is intended to strip a case of its emotion. It doesn't always work that way, of course.
But Hearts and Flowers it ain't.
The juror will be typically be middle aged, middle class, small-C conservative.
In the federal system, the panel will more or less be a creation of the judge - and a judge almost by definition is a middle aged small-C conservative. He is looking for men and women who have come to do a job and not to play the system.
The size of the federal jury pool and the element of randomness in its selection does not favor the lone nullifier.
He probably won't get a case he gives a damn about. He almost certainly won't give a damn about you.
Nullification - of course - has always cut both ways.
The black American through almost the whole of our history could tell you that much.
But I have always been a little bit puzzled about why the geek thinks a jury will be any way inclined to throw a lifeline out to him.
The geek builds castles in the air. He whines. He wheedles. He lies like a rug. He could have settled this business quickly and cheaply and saved everyone a lot of trouble.
Sorry NewYorkCountryLawyer, In the "real world", the case would not have been dismissed. It would've ended with a guilty verdict in small claims court.
In the real world, this defendant settles out of court.
Copyrights are anchored in the federal constitution and statutes.
But - most importantly - file sharing is treated as an unlicensed wholesale distribution. That is why why you end up in the federal system.
You are talking real money here.
There is no such thing as a federal small claims court outside of "territorial" jurisdictions like Washington D.C.
Because the extent of the distribution is difficult to determine, statutory damages become an option.
That is a dangerous, dangerous thing for a defendant whose case is factually weak or who can be expected to perform poorly on the stand.
The defense has all but conceded that Thomas lied on the stand.
That she tampered with evidence.
Thomas is the iceberg.
The geek is the Titanic and it's time to man the boats.
Speaking of misinformation, you're full of shit.
Please.
Kazaa is a file-sharing program.
Downloads default to your "shared files" folder. Shared files default to "share."
Which to a jury means exactly what you think it does.
There is neat little progress graph which shows which files are on the move and which are waiting in line.
You have a nickname.
You can chat with other users.
There is an option to scan the shared files of other users - and scoop up all you can eat.
There are options to set limits on your upstream and downstream traffic. When you try to close the program, you will warned if files are still in transit.
What Kazaa does and how it works is perfectly transparent.
In civil law, you are responsible for the consequences which can be reasonably be expected to follow from your actions.
That you shut your eyes to the truth is not a defense.
Stupid is not a defense.
But being too clever by half will sink you.
The geek is Wile E. Coyote - Super Genius - in court. He expects the system to roll over and play dead just because he says so.
this could provide the perfect opportunity to further open up and standardize the web.
Innovation and standards often pull in opposite directions.
There are always cracks in the façade. Opportunities for the entrepreneur. The committee moves too damn slow.
I don't think the geek imagined the web evolving as it has - into communities like MySpace, Twitter, and so on.
It would be easy to imagine Windows media and gaming coalescing around portals like Windows Live! and Steam.
By the time the geek standardizes the hell out of the web the real action will have moved elsewhere.
Of course, some sort of plausible deniability encryption a la Truecrypt would also be good, in case the secret police catch you with your phone.
"We have ways of making you talk."
Plausible denial means nothing to the guy with a set of alligator clips, an old-school inverter and a honking big battery.
The real spy hates spy tech.
Each additional layer of complication introduces new risks. If he can send a message in the clear he will. What he really needs is a method or a system so familiar and mundane that no one gives it a second thought.
Until you write Fahrenheit 451, I wouldn't be so quick to call Ray Bradbury an idiot, no matter what he says about the internet.
Bradbury also wrote The Veldt. The first significant story about the hazards of deep immersion in interactive entertainment: particularly for children.
Writers of Bradbury's generation have some very interesting and perceptive things to say about "cocooning -" social isolation and a pathologically extended adolescence reinforced by the new technologies of instant communication.
I agree; what an idiot. There's more useful, educational information instantly available on the internet than any library in the world will ever hold. Just because he's too old and blind to find anything other than Yahoo games doesn't mean that the internet is distracting and meaningless
The library organizes information. It attempts to separate the meaningful from the meaningless. It is outward looking - not inward looking.
In following the threads here on the Thomas case -
some things become painfully obvious:
The geek doesn't understand the most basic distinctions between civil and criminal law.
He doesn't understand evidence, the burden of proof.
He doesn't know how a jury is selected.
He doesn't understand the roles played by the plaintiff and defendant, the judge, the jury, the court of appeals.
It is easier for him to find refuge in talk of conspiracies, in talk of corruption.
The geek has access to infinite information - or at least thinks he does.
But mostly he listens to himself. He tunes out dissenting voices. He doesn't ask the right questions - and again and again he makes the same mistakes.
I'm sure Wikipedia alone has orders of magnitude more educational reading material than you could read going to the library three times a week for generations.
But why are you sure?
The geek likes big numbers. The geek trusts big numbers. The number of apps in his distro's repository. The number of pages in his Wiki....
That summary made no sense. I read it twice and still couldn't figure out what point the author was trying to make so I wasn't even interested in the linked article.
At least you can read the summary.
What I see are comments obscured by countless fragments of what Slashdot laughingly calls its standards-compliant graphical elements.
Linux has come a long way and it is ready for the average user. Yes, Joe-six-pack can use linux with a 15 minute tutorial in the basics. I just want to scream knowing that Microsoft is still undermining the market and retarding progress!
The MSDOS and Windows PC has been in the home and SOHO markets since 1980.
Close enough to thirty years as makes no difference.
He may occasionally need an emulator like ScummVM. But, for all practical purposes, the entire MSDOS and Windows back list is available to his 64 bit Quad Core Win 7 system. Gog.com for the good old games.
The best in freeware, the best in shareware, the best in proprietary and closed-source, the best in FOSS.
No barriers. No lectures. The Windows world is a global marketplace, with the ethics and values of the thieves bazaar.
That is what makes it so much fun. The geek tends to come across as the Salvation Army Band - a self-righteous and humorless Carry A. Nation preaching outside the old-time Irish saloon.
The mass market OEM Linux PC is a bottom feeder - and a piss-poor showcase for Linux.
The refurbished $750 Vista desktop at Tiger is quad-core - perhaps a Phenom or i7.
8 GB of DDR2 or DDR3 RAM. 1 TB of primary storage on one or two drives, with front panel cartridge mounts for one or more USB drives. Entry level NVIDIA DX10 graphics or better with integrated HDMI audio and video. WiFi a given. The Blu-Ray player. Not a burner. Not quite yet.
The power supply and the video card probably not your first choice. But once the system knows your usage patterns, this bird is going to fly.
'In much the same way that homebrew computer science built the world we live in today, garage biology can affect the future we make for ourselves
The homebrew era of the PC lasted a little more than two years.
By 1977 Apple and Microsoft are in place -
and the PC is a clearly defined and easily recognizable commercial product no later than the mid-eighties.
I don't know where the notion of a homebrewed computer science comes from. The clearly dominant players here are the military, the big university and corporate research giants like Bell Labs and IBM.
I should have added that the NET Act criminalizes non-commercial infringement.
The rights holder has never been required to establish a motive for an infringement in a civil case. It doesn't matter why you stole your neighbor's cat - it only matters that you did steal your neighbor's cat.
What happened to infringement needing to have some sort of commercial or otherwise monetary gain?
That loophole was closed with the passage of the NET [No Electronic Theft] Act in 1997. NET Act
When you realise that the minimum statutory penalty for copying a CD is higher than the maximum penalty for stealing the CD, you see quite how messed up copyright law has become.
You steal a CD from WalMart.
Retail value $20.
You upload the rip to 15 million of your closest friends on the P2P nets.
The day you received the subpoena it was still being read out of your shared files folder.
Retail value $1 per track at iTunes.
Plus whatever punitive damages seem appropriate for the unlicensed wholesale distribution.
I think they should subpoena the jury and ask them exactly how they came up with $2M in damages.
Let me introduce you to the concept of "statutory damages."
There is a formula written into the law.
The jury plugs in the numbers and does the math. It is generally pretty cut-and-dried.
There might be a multiplier - based on the jury's assessment of the plaintiff's misconduct -
which is why it is not a good thing to be caught in a lie.
You do not want to take a case that is factually weak to trial if statutory damages are a realistic possibility.
It gives the plaintiff two very good chances to hit the ball out of the park.
Or just maybe Thomas is the iceberg who sank the the Geek's Titanic.
Thomas was certainly painted as a victim in media coverage
That is how is she was painted here.
But that isn't how the jury saw her - not the first time around and not the second.
There is a world beyond the blog.
It has its own rules and its own values - and in that world the geek doesn't fare so well.
I wonder myself whether the defense DELIBERATELY anticipated a huge defeat in not refuting evidence or calling expert witnesses
That would be just plain stupid.
The trial court or the appellate court is free to scale back the verdict without ever reaching the "due process" question.
It is also free to say that the finder of fact has twice reached the same conclusion - and is unlikely to reach any other conclusion no matter how many times the case is retried.
So much for the drama. Your case is now dead.
"Artists" who think that one weekend's work and a year or two of sacrifices and chances should allow them to live luxuriously for years after get no sympathy for me.
and in the next sentence the geek will complain that a pointy-haired bastard thought his code was worthless because he made it look so easy.
but if it is the geek owns the code - what then?
in the right moment, that could make him the author of MBASIC and Bill Gates.
the engineer working for Pixar will live to see his name in the end credits - he may even have a cameo on the extras DVD or Blu-Ray disk.
perhaps his grandchildren will be around to greet Nemo or WALL-E on their centennial, be invited to the Smithsonian or Lincoln Center.
when the geek looks at Steamboat Willie - his imagination dead-ends at the thought of producing a sequel.
it is envy that drives him. not talent.
Ratatouille lies beyond him.
Artists have never been able to make a substantial income from record (or sheet music) sales.
I like to see some proof of that.
There are - realistically - only so many dates you can play, only so many venues that will yield a significant return
The small jazz ensemble needs an intimate club to play in - not Yankee Stadium. But recording these sessions means that you can still reach a global audience.
Artists like Bing Crosby were essentially a studio product.
The microphone dramatically extended their careers and created a sense of intimacy that is difficult to capture on stage.
It can be hard to picture the geek as an adult - because his world view still seems framed by adolescence.
The grace and maturity of an aging artist is often a more than fair exchange for a sometimes flawed performance
That does not mean he can bear the rigors of a concert tour that would be hell on a kid just out of school.
It is simply damned wasteful to lose talent at that level.
One sentence- Steamboat Willie is STILL under copyright!
Steamboat Willie is eight minutes of silent era sight gags linked by a thin narrative thread. Filmed on nitrate stock, it was projected with synchronized sound on a phonographic disk.
The copyright on Steamboat Willie protects that single incarnation of the Mouse. When it expires you get the right to distribute the short - if you can find unprotected primary sources. Try MoMA or The Library of Congress.
You get the right to produce derivatives based on Steamboat Willie - and only Steamboat Willie.
You do not get to use the trademarked character designs. You do not get the Phantom Blot - and the "steel-belted" Mouse of the comic pages.
MGM did rather well with Tom and Jerry. Paul Terry with Mighty Mouse. To be successful in this business, you had to find your own way.
Short of a jury of 12 Slashdot copyright infringement advocates advocating jury nullification, I can't see how any other result was ever possible.
It strikes me that the geek never sees the other side of "jury nullification:"
That after three days of listening to his bullshit on the stand they just might be in a mood to smack him down - hard.