There's an old adage: "a good crook is one that doesn't get caught".
Provided the admin knows their stuff I think there is little difference between the two these days ( XP vs Linux ). I also think the vast improvement in Windows has been driven by competition from *nix in general and Linux in particular. The reason you see so many windows drones is because that's what comes pre-installed when people buy a computer expecting it to be like an xbox, or a television, or an encyclopedia, ect. Many people don't really have a need for a PC when they buy one they are just intrigued by something that claims to do all these things and more.
These people don't even get discs with the O/S, they walk out with "a bargain" that (aside from the O/S and IE) has all the pre-loaded appliverstiments that the chain stores are paid to load on their machines, or for that matter pre-configured "support account" with admin rights (that one screwed the machine a novice freind of mine bought last year after he managed to hook it up and get online by himself). In other words the mass market is only vaugely aware that other O/S's exist and even then most would say "Apple" shortly followed by "is expensive".
Some people fight the windows adware/malware battles and come out wiser, most just try and keep the kids queit. I've been ploding along since the BBS days and like to think I can look after myself, but after 20yrs as a developer with experience in over a dozen O/S's and their countless versions I've come to learn that there is always someone "smarter".
Right, and if this is not enough to deter them then we will just have to introduce the death penalty.
Currently US jails are enjoying a population boom because people still haven't learnt how to read parking signs. Your authorities need to relax the chain a bit before it chokes the country.
Yeah, dammned nanny state teaching these kids to read and write so that they can be controlled by mass media, it's the reason we have so many stupid yet eloquent post on slashdot - give those spoilt brats a brush and put them back to work cleaning chimneys!/sarcasm
"I find it ironic - if the ozone hole was 30% BIGGER this year they'd be crying gloom and doom."
Excatly who are "they", most of the science I have read on this over the last decade or so says that the hole's dimentions vary quite a bit and any trend is weak at best. What scientists are doing here is attempting to check the hypothisis that if CFC's are now banned the hole should (in theory) shrink, I have not heard anyone seriously suggest any new measures to cut ozone depletion.
Meanwhile 1/5 of the Artic ice dissapeared this year but the story went off into a NW passage tangent. Trend or no trend that sort of change will have a significant impact on the climate. Not that it has anything to do with ozone mind you but the story is tagged with "aninconvienienttruth" (also nothing to do with ozone).
"Amazing how "news" can be twisted and presented totally differently depending on your intended goal."
In short there is only one way to reduce the "noise in the signal" and that is to educate (and be skeptical of) your own opinions on the issue(s).
This "soft-hard" thing you speak of is known as the system's "sensitivity", the associated maths is known as sensitivity analysis and can be used calculate risk/stratergy in all sorts of models including the Earth's climate, industrial robots, financial analysis, etc.
Having said that and with some experience of rough seas in a 20m trawler, auto navigation/steering is probably the easy part of crossing the Atlantic with such a small autonomous craft - there is a lot of crap and dead trees floating about out there so I suggest a maze solving algorithm using weighted threats detected on the radar (you will need to instal this as high up as you can:).
It gets worse when you consider the performance of radar on a 20m trawler (roughly 10m above the waterline) is serverly degraded in a 4-5m swell, while a tree trunk hiding in the next trough is not a real threat to a trawler it can make a hell of a loud bang and put a nasty dent in the steel plated hull. It would certainly certainly sink an unwary 4m yatch, I would say use a commercial life raft to avoid sinking but that has obvious propultion problems.
"but it really doesn't help the cause when - to a casual newsreader - an important test case seems to be about weed."
Seems to me a lot of "important test cases" are about social taboos, the woman in the bus, Larry Flynt, Roe vs Wade,....umm I forget but you know fair's fair an all..."casual newsreader" = bubble, bubble, toil and trouble...zzzzzzz.
"Have the usual suspects, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Google, been turning over information about these people?"
Quoting from the first post - "This travesty in Burma is a good chance for all of us living in luxury to get a little much-needed perspective on what real censorship looks like."
Think about that quote for a second and visualize the news reports of bloated monks floating face down in open drains. Do you really think the parinoid cult responsible for those murders sees AOL, Google, et-al, as anything but a THREAT to their cozy self isolation from the rest of the planet?
I doubt these companies even operate in Burma let alone knowingly assist the regime, aside from any problems with sanctions there is also zero commercial/political incentive for ANY corporation to invest in a country who's absolute rulers take what they want, when they want.
For example: They decided to cut the internet last week - it's gone the same day, do you think if those "evil" corporations were in Burma and were affected that they would get some sort of compensation for their losses? Do you think they would be given any sort of bussiness certainty in anything they did in the country?
I agree wholeheartedly with the first post, trying to paint corporations as the enablers of this kind of "evil" does nothing but trivialize the iron-fisted oppression the people of Burma have had to deal with for at least the last 45yrs.
"Maintaining any culture in some sort of static dimension isn't possible.
Nowhere does the GP say that it is, (s)he simply states that they are inseprable (ie: they "evolve" in tandem).
I am also assuming those willing to settle on a single universal language will be unwilling to give up English. Maybe in a couple of centuries we will evolve a global culture that speaks a single language that is a mix of several of the main languages in use today.
Yes you can definitely do it on older cars. Back in the 70's a mate of mine put an automatic 69 Holden Monaro into reverse at ~35mph, same symptoms plus some extreme fishtailing. As a passenger I didn't know what the fuck was going on....
"The only reason we are hearing about Burma and we didn't hear about places like East Timor is that Burma is *full* of natural gas." - Say what?
The dispute has now been settled, IMHO the 1974 Indonesian invasion of E. Timor was undertaken to boost Indonesian claims to the resources.
East Timor has not had an effective goverernment for a long time and was recently on the brink of anarchy, the junta in Burma is very effective at what it does - there is no way you can possibly see the two situations as even remotely similar.
In the EU and US "most timber comes from plantations now anyway" (pine plantations in Oz are a common sight too). France actually does have a 350yr cycle for their Oak trees and the US does gets most of it's timber from plantations that were once forests. It's a pretty sad and sorid story of corporate greed, political corruption and grinding poverty elsewhere.
"tree's grow back"
...but tropical and temperate rainforests don't unless great care is taken to sustain them, they are "valuable" to all of mankind and not just as a tourist attraction. Texaco in Bolivia, Shell in Nigeria, BHP in Papua, Exxon in Prince William sound, the collapse of Atlantic and other large fisheries, the ongoing "resource wars", rapidly dissapearing Artic ice, desertification, are all examples of what I would call the "accidental evils" of unregulated "global capitalisim" combined with an exponentialy growing "industrial revolution". This "economic system" has the fundemental flaw otherwise known as "the tradgedy of the commons", it fails to affix a reasonable value to the environment that makes it possible.We have seen a couple of billion new members added to this evolving "economic system" since India and China started doing our dirty work for a fraction of the "price" in the 80's.
I agree the attitudes of many corporations and the laws of many governments have improved markedly over the last decade or so, but we need "world leaders" and "economic systems" that can effectively deal with this "accidental evil" before it comes home to roost in every nation on a scale that makes Iraq look like a pub brawl.
In other words we cannot - as a species - continue to shit in our nest and avoid a massive "population crunch" this century.
You are correct in that many projects in the west now do this sort of thing routinely (with a mixed degree of success), however it's the "damn greenies" from the 70's & 80's you should thank for this minor improvement not the minning companies who still refuse to apply similar environmental standards when operating outside of western territory.
"I've personally seen sites 8 years out from rehab that you wouldn't know were mined....If it's all so terrible, i demand you turn off your damn computer and live in a cave."
Don't take this personally I am not against minning or miners - I'm against unessacary environmental destruction and pollution, I personally lost a job and a company provided house in the early 80's because a bunch of "bush bunnies" kept chaining themselves to bulldozers, the sawmill I was working at was told it could not renew it's lease on the old growth forest when the area was turned into Errindura national park (to the NW on the map). The logs that went thru the mill when I was there were up to 14' in diameter and were individually chosen by the state forestry dept, two trucks were required to carry the two logs from cut from the trunks of these trees. The logs were put on a specialised railway trolley and fed into the "breakdown saw" - a gigaintic band saw with a 12' jaw and 6" teeth.
I for one am now glad the "eco-terrorists" won that battle. I occasionaly get the chance to go and see these awe inspiring monsters still growing nearly 30yrs later thanks to the efforts of "smelly hippies" who's "kind" are still fighting to ban mountain ash harvests altogether. I don't agree with the "live in a cave faction" but I am of the opinion that if the tree takes 350yrs to reach maturity and mature trees are the backbone of the forrest then a 300-400yr harvest cycle would seem to be the shortest we could possibly sustain for any length of time.
The city commute can not compare to walking to the sawmill thru (literally) a carpet of firetail finches feeding on the small field between the two, the view the mill was spectacular (even by skyscraper standards) it sat at the peak of a valley where all you could see in every direction was tree covered mountains. I know I can regognise the areas that have been logged around the mill over the last hundred years even though to most it looks like a large pristine forrest.
If someone were to remove one of those mountains and very carefully fill up the hole afterwards, I am sure I could pick out where the site was eight years after "re-hab".
Although I largely agree with your post, I don't think it's the fault of the poor that the "industrial revolution" has been shitting in it's own nest since it's inception.
International politics that all too often resembles schoolyard politics is what is gumming up the works. Much of the damage done so far has been financed by the west for the west, developing nations want a "discount" for that damage and many third worlder's are already busy experiencing "Armageddon" in one form or another. The west has (until recently) largely avoided the GHG problem altogether by pretending it doesn't exist or shifting attention from "food supply" to "wet feet".
The US has been and still is "the biggest emitter of GHG". It's the political will to "do something" that is missing and this is particularly true for the US and Australia. US and AU "foreign policy" has consitently and effectively thrown roadblocks in front of any coherent plan or action simply because "national interest" means "sell more coal to China and India", ironically their publicly funded scientific comunities have been invaluable when it comes to identifying the problems, casuses and possible mitigation.
This doesn't mean it's all our fault either, almost every "developing nation" wants to sit it out until 2012 and the EU are (indirectly) wiping out Borneo's rain forest to supply them with bio-fuel to match their "green" targets. My point is that the problem affects ALL of mankind and therefore nationalistic politics rather than global commerce is the reason for society largely ignoring the threat.
10yrs ago people were widely ridiculed for claiming (as the IPCC did) GHG's had the potential to melt the Artic, in Febuary 2007 the IPCC predicted Artic sea ice would be gone between 2050-2100 with the "most likey scenario" around 2070, "alarmist" predictions made in April 2007 by NOAA said "2040-2060" - September's observations have demonstrated ALL the predictions are in fact wildly optomistic. Once the ice has gone it has been predicted (by "IPCC alarmists" of course) that the US breadbasket will have a lot more dust than dirt.
10yrs ago nobody though the SE Australian drought was anything but our normal patter pattern of droughts and flooding rains. It has turned into our worst, last year due to el-nino we expected above average rainfall in 2007. This year our storage dams are a fair bit lower than the same time last year, the fact that a 20% drop in rainfall results in a 60% drop in runoff into dams has compounded the problem. Australian state goverment's are scrambling to build de-sal plants, my state in particular has just announced a project for the world's second largest de-sal plant to supply Melbourne with water (unfortunately they ignored any possiblity of wave/tide power and simply situated it between the city and our coal fired generators). We had some (predicted) "above average rainfall" in the autum leading to record breaking floods, the floods were in Sydney and parts of Victoria/S.A and encouraged farmers in the SE to borrow more money to plant this year's crops, but the floods were nowhere near our major catchments and spring rain is yet again failing to reach our dried up breadbasket.
"Do people get released because of clean background checks? Truly?"
Yes, you may look like Charles Manson but if you have the fingerprints of someone else you are free to go.
"Besides, background checks is based on the view that people are inherently evil or good"
No, it's based on the fact the authorities "do not know you from Adam" and the observation that ordinary people who actually do "have something to hide" become expert liars when dealing with the authorities.
Part of "the solution" is: STOP locking up so many people for trivial offences.
I agree the GP has the wrong end of the stick but his post is factual (see my reply to it above), and contains no ad-homs that I can see. Modding it flaimbait just adds to the "political crap".
"Shouldn't the girl in question have had some form of licence agreement with the photographer in the first instance to prevent this sort of thing? The photographer has copyright of the image, he has issued it under a licence and the company has fully complied with the licence."
Common experience would seem to support that idea, every magazine stand I have ever seen trades off photo's of the "rich & famous" passed out in the gutter with their skirt araound thier ankles. Somehow I just don't see the courts having a great deal of symathy or patience for this complaint.
Does anyone in army of photographers that make up papparazi obtain permission to sell the photo?
Do the gossip magazines get permission to print what they have paid for?
As another poster pointed out, she could argue libel but then she needs to show that she had a reputation as a non-virgin and somehow the ads damaged it? Besides, the model who's legs appeared at the start of the movie "My stepmother is an alien" got $300 for the scene. When the movie was released billboards around the world had her legs on them. Same deal for the "screaming woman" on Pink Floyd's "Dark side of the moon", one of the biggest selling albums of all time. The work itself is worth jack shit in the grand scheme of things, she may have been able to stop it with a "model release" but by the sounds of it she could simply have said "don't put it on the net".
Slashdot Mirror
That's how open source is supposed to work - the alternative can be described as a series of financial, legal and political baseball riots.
There's an old adage: "a good crook is one that doesn't get caught".
Provided the admin knows their stuff I think there is little difference between the two these days ( XP vs Linux ). I also think the vast improvement in Windows has been driven by competition from *nix in general and Linux in particular. The reason you see so many windows drones is because that's what comes pre-installed when people buy a computer expecting it to be like an xbox, or a television, or an encyclopedia, ect. Many people don't really have a need for a PC when they buy one they are just intrigued by something that claims to do all these things and more.
These people don't even get discs with the O/S, they walk out with "a bargain" that (aside from the O/S and IE) has all the pre-loaded appliverstiments that the chain stores are paid to load on their machines, or for that matter pre-configured "support account" with admin rights (that one screwed the machine a novice freind of mine bought last year after he managed to hook it up and get online by himself). In other words the mass market is only vaugely aware that other O/S's exist and even then most would say "Apple" shortly followed by "is expensive".
Some people fight the windows adware/malware battles and come out wiser, most just try and keep the kids queit. I've been ploding along since the BBS days and like to think I can look after myself, but after 20yrs as a developer with experience in over a dozen O/S's and their countless versions I've come to learn that there is always someone "smarter".
Right, and if this is not enough to deter them then we will just have to introduce the death penalty.
Currently US jails are enjoying a population boom because people still haven't learnt how to read parking signs. Your authorities need to relax the chain a bit before it chokes the country.
Google is your friend
Yeah, dammned nanny state teaching these kids to read and write so that they can be controlled by mass media, it's the reason we have so many stupid yet eloquent post on slashdot - give those spoilt brats a brush and put them back to work cleaning chimneys! /sarcasm
"I find it ironic - if the ozone hole was 30% BIGGER this year they'd be crying gloom and doom."
Excatly who are "they", most of the science I have read on this over the last decade or so says that the hole's dimentions vary quite a bit and any trend is weak at best. What scientists are doing here is attempting to check the hypothisis that if CFC's are now banned the hole should (in theory) shrink, I have not heard anyone seriously suggest any new measures to cut ozone depletion.
Meanwhile 1/5 of the Artic ice dissapeared this year but the story went off into a NW passage tangent. Trend or no trend that sort of change will have a significant impact on the climate. Not that it has anything to do with ozone mind you but the story is tagged with "aninconvienienttruth" (also nothing to do with ozone).
"Amazing how "news" can be twisted and presented totally differently depending on your intended goal."
In short there is only one way to reduce the "noise in the signal" and that is to educate (and be skeptical of) your own opinions on the issue(s).
This "soft-hard" thing you speak of is known as the system's "sensitivity", the associated maths is known as sensitivity analysis and can be used calculate risk/stratergy in all sorts of models including the Earth's climate, industrial robots, financial analysis, etc.
:).
Having said that and with some experience of rough seas in a 20m trawler, auto navigation/steering is probably the easy part of crossing the Atlantic with such a small autonomous craft - there is a lot of crap and dead trees floating about out there so I suggest a maze solving algorithm using weighted threats detected on the radar (you will need to instal this as high up as you can
It gets worse when you consider the performance of radar on a 20m trawler (roughly 10m above the waterline) is serverly degraded in a 4-5m swell, while a tree trunk hiding in the next trough is not a real threat to a trawler it can make a hell of a loud bang and put a nasty dent in the steel plated hull. It would certainly certainly sink an unwary 4m yatch, I would say use a commercial life raft to avoid sinking but that has obvious propultion problems.
"but it really doesn't help the cause when - to a casual newsreader - an important test case seems to be about weed."
Seems to me a lot of "important test cases" are about social taboos, the woman in the bus, Larry Flynt, Roe vs Wade,....umm I forget but you know fair's fair an all..."casual newsreader" = bubble, bubble, toil and trouble...zzzzzzz.
I drove my new car out of the sales yard without looking and got cleaned up by a truck, obviously it's the car's fault.
"Have the usual suspects, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Google, been turning over information about these people?"
Quoting from the first post - "This travesty in Burma is a good chance for all of us living in luxury to get a little much-needed perspective on what real censorship looks like."
Think about that quote for a second and visualize the news reports of bloated monks floating face down in open drains. Do you really think the parinoid cult responsible for those murders sees AOL, Google, et-al, as anything but a THREAT to their cozy self isolation from the rest of the planet?
I doubt these companies even operate in Burma let alone knowingly assist the regime, aside from any problems with sanctions there is also zero commercial/political incentive for ANY corporation to invest in a country who's absolute rulers take what they want, when they want.
For example: They decided to cut the internet last week - it's gone the same day, do you think if those "evil" corporations were in Burma and were affected that they would get some sort of compensation for their losses? Do you think they would be given any sort of bussiness certainty in anything they did in the country?
I agree wholeheartedly with the first post, trying to paint corporations as the enablers of this kind of "evil" does nothing but trivialize the iron-fisted oppression the people of Burma have had to deal with for at least the last 45yrs.
"Maintaining any culture in some sort of static dimension isn't possible.
Nowhere does the GP say that it is, (s)he simply states that they are inseprable (ie: they "evolve" in tandem).
I am also assuming those willing to settle on a single universal language will be unwilling to give up English. Maybe in a couple of centuries we will evolve a global culture that speaks a single language that is a mix of several of the main languages in use today.
"you could make water climb up hill using no moving parts"
Someone beat you to it
Yes you can definitely do it on older cars. Back in the 70's a mate of mine put an automatic 69 Holden Monaro into reverse at ~35mph, same symptoms plus some extreme fishtailing. As a passenger I didn't know what the fuck was going on....
Exactly, but when the big end of town talks about self-regulation I don't think they envision the general population taking part.
"The only reason we are hearing about Burma and we didn't hear about places like East Timor is that Burma is *full* of natural gas." - Say what?
The dispute has now been settled, IMHO the 1974 Indonesian invasion of E. Timor was undertaken to boost Indonesian claims to the resources.
East Timor has not had an effective goverernment for a long time and was recently on the brink of anarchy, the junta in Burma is very effective at what it does - there is no way you can possibly see the two situations as even remotely similar.
"because your consciousness follows the universes in which you're still alive"
Finally, a scientific explaination for all the zombies I encounter during the morning peak hour.
In the EU and US "most timber comes from plantations now anyway" (pine plantations in Oz are a common sight too). France actually does have a 350yr cycle for their Oak trees and the US does gets most of it's timber from plantations that were once forests. It's a pretty sad and sorid story of corporate greed, political corruption and grinding poverty elsewhere.
...but tropical and temperate rainforests don't unless great care is taken to sustain them, they are "valuable" to all of mankind and not just as a tourist attraction. Texaco in Bolivia, Shell in Nigeria, BHP in Papua, Exxon in Prince William sound, the collapse of Atlantic and other large fisheries, the ongoing "resource wars", rapidly dissapearing Artic ice, desertification, are all examples of what I would call the "accidental evils" of unregulated "global capitalisim" combined with an exponentialy growing "industrial revolution". This "economic system" has the fundemental flaw otherwise known as "the tradgedy of the commons", it fails to affix a reasonable value to the environment that makes it possible.We have seen a couple of billion new members added to this evolving "economic system" since India and China started doing our dirty work for a fraction of the "price" in the 80's.
"tree's grow back"
I agree the attitudes of many corporations and the laws of many governments have improved markedly over the last decade or so, but we need "world leaders" and "economic systems" that can effectively deal with this "accidental evil" before it comes home to roost in every nation on a scale that makes Iraq look like a pub brawl.
In other words we cannot - as a species - continue to shit in our nest and avoid a massive "population crunch" this century.
You are correct in that many projects in the west now do this sort of thing routinely (with a mixed degree of success), however it's the "damn greenies" from the 70's & 80's you should thank for this minor improvement not the minning companies who still refuse to apply similar environmental standards when operating outside of western territory.
"I've personally seen sites 8 years out from rehab that you wouldn't know were mined....If it's all so terrible, i demand you turn off your damn computer and live in a cave."
Don't take this personally I am not against minning or miners - I'm against unessacary environmental destruction and pollution, I personally lost a job and a company provided house in the early 80's because a bunch of "bush bunnies" kept chaining themselves to bulldozers, the sawmill I was working at was told it could not renew it's lease on the old growth forest when the area was turned into Errindura national park (to the NW on the map). The logs that went thru the mill when I was there were up to 14' in diameter and were individually chosen by the state forestry dept, two trucks were required to carry the two logs from cut from the trunks of these trees. The logs were put on a specialised railway trolley and fed into the "breakdown saw" - a gigaintic band saw with a 12' jaw and 6" teeth.
I for one am now glad the "eco-terrorists" won that battle. I occasionaly get the chance to go and see these awe inspiring monsters still growing nearly 30yrs later thanks to the efforts of "smelly hippies" who's "kind" are still fighting to ban mountain ash harvests altogether. I don't agree with the "live in a cave faction" but I am of the opinion that if the tree takes 350yrs to reach maturity and mature trees are the backbone of the forrest then a 300-400yr harvest cycle would seem to be the shortest we could possibly sustain for any length of time.
The city commute can not compare to walking to the sawmill thru (literally) a carpet of firetail finches feeding on the small field between the two, the view the mill was spectacular (even by skyscraper standards) it sat at the peak of a valley where all you could see in every direction was tree covered mountains. I know I can regognise the areas that have been logged around the mill over the last hundred years even though to most it looks like a large pristine forrest.
If someone were to remove one of those mountains and very carefully fill up the hole afterwards, I am sure I could pick out where the site was eight years after "re-hab".
Although I largely agree with your post, I don't think it's the fault of the poor that the "industrial revolution" has been shitting in it's own nest since it's inception.
International politics that all too often resembles schoolyard politics is what is gumming up the works. Much of the damage done so far has been financed by the west for the west, developing nations want a "discount" for that damage and many third worlder's are already busy experiencing "Armageddon" in one form or another. The west has (until recently) largely avoided the GHG problem altogether by pretending it doesn't exist or shifting attention from "food supply" to "wet feet".
The US has been and still is "the biggest emitter of GHG". It's the political will to "do something" that is missing and this is particularly true for the US and Australia. US and AU "foreign policy" has consitently and effectively thrown roadblocks in front of any coherent plan or action simply because "national interest" means "sell more coal to China and India", ironically their publicly funded scientific comunities have been invaluable when it comes to identifying the problems, casuses and possible mitigation.
This doesn't mean it's all our fault either, almost every "developing nation" wants to sit it out until 2012 and the EU are (indirectly) wiping out Borneo's rain forest to supply them with bio-fuel to match their "green" targets. My point is that the problem affects ALL of mankind and therefore nationalistic politics rather than global commerce is the reason for society largely ignoring the threat.
10yrs ago people were widely ridiculed for claiming (as the IPCC did) GHG's had the potential to melt the Artic, in Febuary 2007 the IPCC predicted Artic sea ice would be gone between 2050-2100 with the "most likey scenario" around 2070, "alarmist" predictions made in April 2007 by NOAA said "2040-2060" - September's observations have demonstrated ALL the predictions are in fact wildly optomistic. Once the ice has gone it has been predicted (by "IPCC alarmists" of course) that the US breadbasket will have a lot more dust than dirt.
10yrs ago nobody though the SE Australian drought was anything but our normal patter pattern of droughts and flooding rains. It has turned into our worst, last year due to el-nino we expected above average rainfall in 2007. This year our storage dams are a fair bit lower than the same time last year, the fact that a 20% drop in rainfall results in a 60% drop in runoff into dams has compounded the problem. Australian state goverment's are scrambling to build de-sal plants, my state in particular has just announced a project for the world's second largest de-sal plant to supply Melbourne with water (unfortunately they ignored any possiblity of wave/tide power and simply situated it between the city and our coal fired generators). We had some (predicted) "above average rainfall" in the autum leading to record breaking floods, the floods were in Sydney and parts of Victoria/S.A and encouraged farmers in the SE to borrow more money to plant this year's crops, but the floods were nowhere near our major catchments and spring rain is yet again failing to reach our dried up breadbasket.
US notches world's highest incarceration rate
"Do people get released because of clean background checks? Truly?"
Yes, you may look like Charles Manson but if you have the fingerprints of someone else you are free to go.
"Besides, background checks is based on the view that people are inherently evil or good"
No, it's based on the fact the authorities "do not know you from Adam" and the observation that ordinary people who actually do "have something to hide" become expert liars when dealing with the authorities.
Part of "the solution" is: STOP locking up so many people for trivial offences.
I agree the GP has the wrong end of the stick but his post is factual (see my reply to it above), and contains no ad-homs that I can see. Modding it flaimbait just adds to the "political crap".
You are absolutely correct but I also agree with the GP.
The "political crap" is directly under the summary, ie: in the tags and replies.
"No, its not! Drugs are illegal, music is not."
I thought music was a drug?
"Shouldn't the girl in question have had some form of licence agreement with the photographer in the first instance to prevent this sort of thing? The photographer has copyright of the image, he has issued it under a licence and the company has fully complied with the licence."
Common experience would seem to support that idea, every magazine stand I have ever seen trades off photo's of the "rich & famous" passed out in the gutter with their skirt araound thier ankles. Somehow I just don't see the courts having a great deal of symathy or patience for this complaint.
Does anyone in army of photographers that make up papparazi obtain permission to sell the photo?
Do the gossip magazines get permission to print what they have paid for?
As another poster pointed out, she could argue libel but then she needs to show that she had a reputation as a non-virgin and somehow the ads damaged it? Besides, the model who's legs appeared at the start of the movie "My stepmother is an alien" got $300 for the scene. When the movie was released billboards around the world had her legs on them. Same deal for the "screaming woman" on Pink Floyd's "Dark side of the moon", one of the biggest selling albums of all time. The work itself is worth jack shit in the grand scheme of things, she may have been able to stop it with a "model release" but by the sounds of it she could simply have said "don't put it on the net".