There is a real problem, in that insurance firms do frequently not adjust rates to reflect realities. FEMA based low cost loans to rebuild may be compassionate, but they also let insurors get sloppy, knowing that the government will bail them out if an "unusual" load of damages happens, so they don't always charge realistically.
However, Florida has tightened up on building coads in most municipal areas repeatedly. It's just that all those buildings that were grandfathered in haven't all been blown away yet. (That and trailer parks).
A better example of your point than Fla. is Lousiana, and parts of Georgia and Miss. These states have all tended not to revise building codes for hurricane country, perhaps because they expect Fla. to block for them. California, where rural codes haven't been adjusted nearly as much, is also probably doing worse than you suggest, because it's more than drought for south, mudslides for north, it's often alternating drought induced forest fires and rain induced mud-slides in the same parts of the state.
The Coriolis effect is one factor in shaping cyclic convection currents. The sun itself is a factor - solar warming is an energy source that has a built in gradient, and so creates the potential difference in this case. Even a slowly rotating or even non-rotating earth would have the same potential for heat to flow from the hottest parts to cooler ones. However, the exact speed at which heat would be transferred would vary widely in such cases.
Remember, convection isn't a true zero sum game by itself. If heat is carried away more slowly from warm areas, they also radiate heat back to space at night faster to help balance out. If the ocean currents move significant warm water out of the hottest areas in less than a full day's rotation, they cause more mixing with cooler water and move it too, doing their work lesss efficiently, so only the average amount of energy transfered has to equal the average amount the sun dumped into the area. Even things like cloud cover and the resulting local albedo are part of a series of feedback loops that makes this system meta-stable.
Planetary rotation tends to make lots of little interlaced convection cells into a few big ones, but various features, like submarine topography, how steep the thermal gradients become, and probably even 'chaotic' effects, all let the system switch between meta-stable modes.
Climatologists mostly hope thae 'chaos' effects aren't as significant as they are for weather, because the butterfly effect stops sounding as cool when it's " A codfish farts, and two weeks later..." instead of pretty stuff that Jeff Goldblum can use for pick up lines.
Unfortunately, the geologic record shows some of these modes seem to include ones where the gulf stream flattens out a lot towards the equator, or breaks away from either the European or North American coastlines so that it becomes more triangular rather than extending to about the same latitudes on both sides. This is based on such measurements as thickness of sedements deposited in the same layers, and types of fossil species found during ice ages, so there's some guesswork included, but it looks like the way to bet.
Since some of the planetary heat transfer processes don't go fast enough to keep up with the 24 hour warming and cooling cycle, or even the seasonal ones, Those areas where slow transfer rates predominate can get hotter or colder even though the average isn't moving the same way. If the system was actually getting close to equilibrium at any point, the seasons wouldn't lag months behind when the planet is closest to the Sun.
Actually, there IS some controversy, including a weird conspiracy theory, about Lennon's death, but for once, the standard weird conspiracy theory doesn't involve the FBI, or the U.S. Government in general.
This one runs approximately as follows.
1 Charles Manson based his Helter-Skelter massacree scheme on the Beatles song from the White album
2. Sharon Tate gets killed by the Manson family as part of that scheme.
3. Sharon Tate was married to director Roman Polanski.
4. Polanski directed the film 'Rosemary's Baby'.
5. Rosemary's Baby was filmed (in part) in the Dakota Building (The rest was shot in the studio).
6. Lennon lived in the Dakota Building, and was shot just outside it.
7. Supposedly, the first report of Lennon's being shot came from the then current occupants of the appartment where Rosmary's Baby was filmed. (This last claim is the only one in the chain that looks iffy).
It all adds up to a chain of strange coincidences, that don't even point to a particular bunch of conspiritors, or suggest a motive. People have looked to see if the little weasel who killed John Lennon could be tied to the Mansonites, to organized Satanism, or to anything else, and found basically nothing, but that doesn't keep people from trying to put it together into a controversy. It's a fair bet that the FBI files will have nothing that sheds any light on this, and that people will keep looking anyway.
There's a theoretical maxim that perfectly efficient encoding (including encription) resembles white noise. How close to that does anything actually get? Anyone out there care to respond - how much cheaper would it be for the FBI simply to prove that a file was originally non-random data, now encripted, as opposed to actually cracking that encription.
The older law was already rediculous as was. It is unbalanced because of its cibvil clauses and impact on civil suits, before we even look at the actual criminal penalties.
That version included a five times multiple for maximum financial penalties if simple willfulness could be proved. Remember, normally, even proving criminal standards of negligence, or actual larcenous or even homicidal intent only gets a person a possible 3x multiple in a civil action. Going to "knowingneess" as a standard is even looser than the existing "willfulness", and yes, that's rediculous.
If this law is just, then when someobody gets drunk and plows into some dish installer's parked work van, the van owner should be able to sue for 5x damages, simply because the drunk knew he was drinking, without having to prove the drunk also knew getting drunk could cause accidents, or that he made a consious decision to drive while aware that he might be impaired, and especially without having to face that tougher hurdle of establishing criminal neglegence to the point where the drunk can be charged as well as sued.
Unless you and I can do it too, that 5x and looser standards rule makes us second class citizen s when it comes to protecting our livelyhoods.
Urging people not to break the law is all well and good, and I'm not advocating that a law against distributing other people's copyrighted works is wrong in general. A properly written law, that provides genuinely equal protection, is something I would personally both obey and support. But, if you are not a stockholder in an IP based corporation, this particular law is another step towards treating your livelyhood as less important and worthy of protection than that of those stockholders.
You've made some very good points, particularly the one about candidates having successfully held lesser offices and worked their ways up to be taken seriously. I'd add to that - a successful term as state governor is one of the best credentials for the top job, usually worth much more in the average voter's eyes than having been a senator.
I also liked the point about working at cross purposes.
"Three small parties which each get 5% of the vote can be dismissed as the lunatic fringe and accomplish nothing. One medium-sized party which gets 15% of the vote is going to be taken seriously."
The level that should be taken seriously should get smaller when the winning party barely slips by. Get a 72% majority, and it seems natural enough to ignore the rest of the parties. At that point, the winner can brag they have a clear mandate, and won by a landslide.
Win by 1,400 votes nationwide (just for example), and there's really only one rational option. I don't like to throw out that word, rational, too easily, because it sounds like I am making an emotional arguement (Everyone agree with me, so you're rational too), but here's why it seems the other choice is genuinely irrational:
The winner has to reach out and try to draw some people from the other parties for next time, or they are choosing to govern without being able to claim a clear mandate for their actions. Every law they pass will go on record as being what 49% of the poeple wanted. Unless they act to change something, they are gambling that they will get lucky, over and over, every time they try to pass a bill, and that none of the other parties will act successfully to change something in their favor before the next election. Can you imagine a football team winning several games in overtime, and deciding they didn't need to recruit new talent, train harder, and try to become a team that had the game sewn up by the third quarter, cause overtime was good enough? The ignore the losers alternative becomes deciding that 51% of the people are just stupid or crazy, and both should and can safely be ignored. That last proposition is the worst.
This last election, I expected whomever won to try hard to draw some new voters in from the major opposition, the small parties, and even some of the special issue independant voters, to solidify their power base. It didn't happen that way. I really hope there is some threshold below 50% where the two big parties will take a minority party seriously, but unlike you, I increasingly doubt it. It's become the core belief of both major parties that they have the system all to themselves.
Re:New addition to the Patriot Act?
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You're the one using words like always. You're the one who makes another blanket assertion here:
"People who know enough about the subject to contribute meaningfully to such a discussion are either industry experts, or successful entrepeneurs, or both."
What, no one who doesn't fit the industry's definition of expert or who has lots of money is to be allowed the privledge of being treated as though he has a brain? (Or maybe you're using "successful enterprenures" in the sense that they are willing to study the matter properly before they invest, and to put their money where their mouth is afterwards, which I grant you is a much better test for whether their opinion might be worth something, but still not really infalliable).
There's one person here using these categorical "always"'s and implicit nevers, and there's one person here talking about oversimplifying. Trouble is, that one person is you in both cases.
How did I oversimplify anything? I didn't try to discuss the whole issue of nuclear proliferation, I pointed out that a number of experts didn't discuss the risks that it turns out resulted (at least in part) from their plan to ban breeder/spent fuel recycling related technologies, and a number of non-experts did.
That's pretty much a simple, almost monolithic fact (I can think of a couple of conditions and limitations if we were to discuss it in detail, so I won't claim it's always, universally true, but to go into them would make an already long post huge - If you want to present examples of experts who did mention something, or to haggle over whether someone like Tom Clancy should be counted as an expert instead of an outsider, or something like that, then you'd better resign yourself to taking 10 posts each to say what either of us has tried to say in one. I'd argue that I'm not oversimplifying, there, I'm stuck with the limitations of the medium, just as you are).
I presented that fact as a single counterexample that, in this case, proves your too generallzed assertion has to be restticted to stay within the facts.
If you say "There are no black swans", and I produce one, that isn't an oversimplification, it's a counter-proof by example, and you would be better off adjusting your claim to "Black swans are very rare, the vast majority are of other colors."
Now, if you'd said that it was unlikely an amateur, posting on/. would shed more light than heat on a tecnical issue, and it got increasingly unlikely when they obviously didn't even read the (fine) article, and even more unlikely when they weren't presenting any facts to support their holding a particular opinion,(or words to that effect), I would have gladly agreed with you without such reservations. You're just taking your counterclaim too far.
Where we differ is, I believe that out of hundreds of such things as/. posts, a few good ideas will likely emerge, not zero good ideas. Some person, who is not an expert in a given field, will possibly have knowledge of some apparently unrelated area, and will make an intuitive leap and achieve a new synthesis of ideas. With dozens or hundreds of forums, magazine and newspaper coverage of the new technology as it develops, and an open political system, the odds of that increase to near certanty.
I also believe that experts aren't infallible, and that closed door planning, dissmissing the opinions of non-experts as NEVER worth considering, and a general top-down social control strategy all make the chance the experts will screw up higher and higher.
Re:New addition to the Patriot Act?
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"Is it really possible that the experts in this field have overlooked the simple and obvious problems that occurred to such a useless amateur as myself?
The answer is always "no"."
Oh come on. If that was true, then the experts who banned recycling spent fuel to keep enriched plutonium out of the hands of terrorists knew that there would be the 'simple' and 'obvious' problem that all that unrecycled waste could be used to make dirty bombs by terrorists too technically inept to make real nukes. Remember, the U.S. ban was proposed by a number of people with expert credentials, and even signed into law by the only president we have that was a graduate of the Nuclear Navy program, and could actually claim to be an expert himself. The first people to mention the dirty bomb risk appear to all be SF authors without physics degrees, and so technically not experts.
I don't support any new technology because some expert assures me he has considered all the risks and benefits, I support some because those same experts haven't done any better in the past, and so the old technologies aren't any better balanced to our needs, so we need some new ones even wit hsome risks. This looks to be a possibly effective new technology IF certain conditions are met. To know this for sure enough to take those words like "possibly" and "if" out takes more than blindly trusting the experts, it takes reading up on it enough to count as one of the experts yourself. (Starting with this article as you and others point out, but by no means ending there).
You were doing fine in reccomending the poster both learn a little humility, and RTFA, but let's not take it to "the answer is always".
And when someone starts assigning ontologies, will it be "Constitutional scholars describe the constitution.", Law professors describe the constitution.", or "the U.S. Supreme Court describes the constitution.", (or maybe even "Congress describes the constitution.")?.
Which is the winning ontology re. natural selection, the cladistic taxonomist's, or the molecular micro-biologist's?
It will be interesting to see if the semantic web can allow the best ones of such clashing ontologies to rise to the top. Hell, it will be interesting to see if any one viewpoint ever rises to the top, or if they just continue to bump against each other perpetually.
What if one day, you take a stand on a political issue, and someone announces that you spent a suspicious amount of time near an adult book store that lies near the intersection of your routes to and from job, gym, and grocery store? A few carefully selected words to the local police and you can end up on their pedophile watch list. Will it inconvenience you if the local police keep checking to see if you have an alibi for one crime after another, and regularly verify your story with your boss, spouse, neighbors, and Nautilus coach?
What if someone at that gym is caught dealing steroids, and the times you visit the gym, fit a pattern with his, (or can be fitted with one by a sufficiently skilled analyst),suggesting you might also be a drug dealer?
Technology is increasing the ways of making you look guilty by association. Hey, you posted political sentiments on slashdot, and I responded. Now, if you get into trouble, I'll probably get a call from the FBI asking how much I know about Giant Ape Skeleton's real name and activities. (and Vice Versa). Data mining can find such links, and yet only a small portion of the public, and probably less of the officials using the tools, know when to disregard such trivial links.
Both parody and satire count as protected speech. The distinction's more because parody and satire cases have different precident cases backing them up, so the exact level of protection is different.
The problem for satire cases right now may be seen in one recent case:
"Dr. Seuss Enterprises v. Penguin Books USA Penguin Books published a poetic account of the O.J. Simpson trial in a book titled, The Cat NOT in the Hat! A Parody by Dr. Juice. The 9th Circuit held that the book did not parody The Cat in the Hat, but simply retold the Simpson story. Therefore, there was no fair-use defense, and the book was deemed a copyright infringement."
Note that case was originally a ruling on a Parody claim, but a lot of people seem to think the decision, as worded, has severe impact on Satire based claims. This whole issue will doubltless come up again in further cases, at least until the supremes issue a ruling as definitive as in Fallwell.
I figured that sneaky or honest, Bill knows that when you're worth 60 billion dollars, SOMEONE will realize it's worth a cool million just to read your e-mail. If he's not saying or doing anything the DOJ could use against him, he still has corporate rivals.
Martha, on the other hand, is definitely worth enough for someone to spend a few tens of thousands trying to snoop on her. She spoke like that wasn't a consideration (even for Bill, let alone lil' ole' her), and I'd argue that she actually believed what she said. If she didn't recognize that she was up to something in the market where a lack of security could come back to bite her, she's like a typical clueless PC user is about viruses and firewalls, but on a larger scale.
Maybe it didn't play a specific role in her conviction, maybe it did, but it at least showed something's wrong with her general attitiude on tech.
Personally, If the DOJ investigates me, the agent in charge better bring extra coffee, cause those reports are gonna be boreing as hell. Still, since I've got the spare routers and wire, and a house modern enough to have put in metal wireing channels in the subflooring, I see no reason to go wireless at home.
I've recommended local candidates for office use hardwired systems for their campaign headquarters (If you've ever seen how dirty a little municipal election for Sherriff can get, I think that will make sense - when the incumbant gets a list of contributers to his oppponent's campaign and starts having his deputies harrass them, it gets pretty vicious.). There are lots of reasons to avoid wireless, and not all that many advantages to using it.
"there are a lot of people that cannot even handle everyday life."
Me thinks "Yes, but why are they all on my internet?"
Are you advocating getting those people basic communications? Or putting them on Prozac? If you're talking environmental clean up, basic health care, true quality education, or various other somethings we really need to make time for, you have a fair point.
But, there not much point in not spending anything on luxuries until absolutely everybody can handle everyday life. Some people can't handle life even with lots of resources thrown at their particular problems.
Martha Stewart once described Bill Gates' mansion, and how it had all the rooms wired for high speed networking, with Cat 5 and better running inside concrete channels. Se made some sort of joke about how maybe Bill hadn't heard of wireless. (Sorry I don't remember the exact quote - if anyone has it, please post).
One of the two people mentioned above has been sentenced to a federal prison, and one of them hasn't. That COULD reflect their actual conduct, or it COULD be just random luck.
I see some people are already addressing how flammable H2 is (or realtively isn't), so I'' just touch on the Hindenburg disaster. Just to emphasize that the flames didn't spread as fast as the video footage would suggest, the footage most people have seen begins to show flames a little more than 4 full minutes after the fire was reported. The final body count on the Hindenburg wasn't as bad as typical for a similarly loaded heavier than air craft crash. It just happened before we ever had a heavier than air crash that big.
From a report only a few hours after the disaster: "Out of ninety-seven persons aboard, about twelve passengers are known to be saved and thirty-seven of the crew are alive, some injured to various degrees."
From the final report: "Thirty-six lost their lives: thirteen passengers, twenty-two crewmen, and one civilian member of the ground crew."
(61 of the people on board were crew - she was traveling with only 36 passengers).
Most people who have seen the film footage assume nobody made it out of that inferno alive. It's given Hydrogen an undeserved (IMHO) bad rep for 67 years.
Incidentally, The Lakehurst Historical Society prefers the spelling HindenbUrg, although the other form with an "E" is not uncommon, even in newspapers and naval reports of the time.
Copyright was originally seen as the transfer of a natural right. If no law resticts you, it's natural law that says you can make a copy of someone else's work. Natural law doesn't let you copy someone's work one second after you die, let alone 70 years. The constitution originally transferred a right.
How can an artist be awarded life+70 protection? The +70 can't be transferred, it must instead be a new right, manufactured, by congress. So who does that new right belong to first? Congress!
If the old copyright law was repealed, who did the right revert to? The people, by natural law. If the new copyright law is repealed, to whom do the rigths revert? Does the +70 simply vanish, or does congress claim it still exists, and now reverts to the government? Artists should be very afraid of claims that the current set up is in their favor. An incentive for a sufficiently corrupt government to steal your work is never in your favor, long term.
Copyright on work for hire, done to the specifications of a corporation, is 99 years after the work's being established in a fixed form. It doesn't matter in such cases, how long the corporation itself 'lives'.
Disney also has a low cost approach to the customer to replacing damaged CDs and DVDs that reflects them not trying to have it both ways. (Where "it" is claiming the 'consumer' bought a physical medium when that suits the copyright holder, then claiming the 'consumer' is only liscencing an IP item whenever that would be in the holder's favor). Send a damaged DVD back to Disney, and you will get a replacement at a cost that really is pretty close to the cost of the physical medium and shipping and handling charges. Disney could probably manage that department with an eye towards doing even better by their loyal customers, but several of the other big IP firms are much worse.
Please don't encourage the pagans to do the Lion thing again. As C. S. Lewis (sort of) said, They have this thing called the press now, and it will probably blame you for raising the lion's collesterol.
I won't say it's unreasonable, but it's compareing apples and oranges. There are three common things that get lumped under IP, and a few less common ones such as trade secrets that get thrown in there sometimes. These are Patents, Copyrights, and Trademarks. If you start comparing the three, it makes as much sense to say "Trademarks last forever, why doesn't copyright?" as to say "Patents only last 20 years, why doesn't copyright?". This is one reason to fight the whole concept of IP - the people pushing it really want Patents that don't require disclosing everything involved, Trademarks that don't have to be defended to keep them, and Patents and Copyrights that never expire. They want to own Patmarkenrites, which have all of the advantages and none of the costs of the things the rest of us deal with.
I'll grant you that slavery was an important issue leading up to the US Civil war. "Not remotely related" is the same sort of claim that the holocaust revisionists make, and worth the same repect, i.e. none. In the South, the major propertarian class had the idea slavery was necessary for them to contiue in their positions. In the North, certainly many were motivated by genuine recognition of the fundamental rights and nature of man to oppose this.
At the same time, I could grant you your claim that there was no other factor important enough to make the South actually rescind the Union, but it still would be half the story. What about the factors driving the North? How many Iowa farm boys joined the forces of the North because they wanted personally to free the slaves, and how many because they didn't want Iowa to have to pay high tarrifs, shipping down the Mississippi river through what was becoming a forign power, that had already announced its intentions to tax them vigorously as part of the post-secession changes?
Reading enough of the writings on the Civil war to see how it was often sold in the North as a fight against the economic plans of the South might even suggest we shouldn't just claim only Slavery was an issue important enough to drive the south into open rebellion. Could it be that many in the South clung to slavery because it was seen as offsetting the same economic "inequities" that those planned tarrifs were also to offset? How often was slavery seen, not as an end in itself, but as a way of letting an agricultural society compete with an industrialized one? It's with 20-20 hindsight that we look back today and realize that there was no way to keep an industrial and a pre-industrial economy on an even level, but that was not the common wisdom of those times.
It's for such reasons, that, if you go to any of the battlefields of the Civil war today, you will see a memorial to the American dead, which includes all who fought on both sides.
You hook the machines up to a LAN and your level 2 machine starts telling the most generic machine it's not a generic anymore, its a level 6. They fight, over by the green dome. Then a random Dell PC gets eaten by a big weather balloon, and something about an old fashioned penny-farthing bicycle... pyramids with eyes... ape masks... and all your mainframes get Shatnered!
Please don't write a 130,000 page novel. Ever. My wife works at a bookstore, and she promises all her coworkers will find you and do... Well, just trust me, you'll sleep better not knowing... If you write anything that weighs more than the last Harry Potter is expected to weigh. By the way, what kind of music do you listen to while writing? (So she can have it declared dead). Thanks.
By the third sentence, that's nobody who isn't a lawyer, OR a developer who is doing something new or different in OSS. By the second paragraph, expand that again to include the people who represent companies that employ developers who are doing something new or different. Maybe you still don't need this book,but that is a fairly sizable sub-group of/. readership he's described.
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There is a real problem, in that insurance firms do frequently not adjust rates to reflect realities. FEMA based low cost loans to rebuild may be compassionate, but they also let insurors get sloppy, knowing that the government will bail them out if an "unusual" load of damages happens, so they don't always charge realistically.
However, Florida has tightened up on building coads in most municipal areas repeatedly. It's just that all those buildings that were grandfathered in haven't all been blown away yet. (That and trailer parks).
A better example of your point than Fla. is Lousiana, and parts of Georgia and Miss. These states have all tended not to revise building codes for hurricane country, perhaps because they expect Fla. to block for them. California, where rural codes haven't been adjusted nearly as much, is also probably doing worse than you suggest, because it's more than drought for south, mudslides for north, it's often alternating drought induced forest fires and rain induced mud-slides in the same parts of the state.
The Coriolis effect is one factor in shaping cyclic convection currents. The sun itself is a factor - solar warming is an energy source that has a built in gradient, and so creates the potential difference in this case. Even a slowly rotating or even non-rotating earth would have the same potential for heat to flow from the hottest parts to cooler ones. However, the exact speed at which heat would be transferred would vary widely in such cases.
Remember, convection isn't a true zero sum game by itself. If heat is carried away more slowly from warm areas, they also radiate heat back to space at night faster to help balance out. If the ocean currents move significant warm water out of the hottest areas in less than a full day's rotation, they cause more mixing with cooler water and move it too, doing their work lesss efficiently, so only the average amount of energy transfered has to equal the average amount the sun dumped into the area. Even things like cloud cover and the resulting local albedo are part of a series of feedback loops that makes this system meta-stable.
Planetary rotation tends to make lots of little interlaced convection cells into a few big ones, but various features, like submarine topography, how steep the thermal gradients become, and probably even 'chaotic' effects, all let the system switch between meta-stable modes.
Climatologists mostly hope thae 'chaos' effects aren't as significant as they are for weather, because the butterfly effect stops sounding as cool when it's " A codfish farts, and two weeks later..." instead of pretty stuff that Jeff Goldblum can use for pick up lines.
Unfortunately, the geologic record shows some of these modes seem to include ones where the gulf stream flattens out a lot towards the equator, or breaks away from either the European or North American coastlines so that it becomes more triangular rather than extending to about the same latitudes on both sides. This is based on such measurements as thickness of sedements deposited in the same layers, and types of fossil species found during ice ages, so there's some guesswork included, but it looks like the way to bet.
Since some of the planetary heat transfer processes don't go fast enough to keep up with the 24 hour warming and cooling cycle, or even the seasonal ones, Those areas where slow transfer rates predominate can get hotter or colder even though the average isn't moving the same way. If the system was actually getting close to equilibrium at any point, the seasons wouldn't lag months behind when the planet is closest to the Sun.
Actually, there IS some controversy, including a weird conspiracy theory, about Lennon's death, but for once, the standard weird conspiracy theory doesn't involve the FBI, or the U.S. Government in general.
This one runs approximately as follows.
1 Charles Manson based his Helter-Skelter massacree scheme on the Beatles song from the White album
2. Sharon Tate gets killed by the Manson family as part of that scheme.
3. Sharon Tate was married to director Roman Polanski.
4. Polanski directed the film 'Rosemary's Baby'.
5. Rosemary's Baby was filmed (in part) in the Dakota Building (The rest was shot in the studio).
6. Lennon lived in the Dakota Building, and was shot just outside it.
7. Supposedly, the first report of Lennon's being shot came from the then current occupants of the appartment where Rosmary's Baby was filmed. (This last claim is the only one in the chain that looks iffy).
It all adds up to a chain of strange coincidences, that don't even point to a particular bunch of conspiritors, or suggest a motive. People have looked to see if the little weasel who killed John Lennon could be tied to the Mansonites, to organized Satanism, or to anything else, and found basically nothing, but that doesn't keep people from trying to put it together into a controversy. It's a fair bet that the FBI files will have nothing that sheds any light on this, and that people will keep looking anyway.
There's a theoretical maxim that perfectly efficient encoding (including encription) resembles white noise. How close to that does anything actually get? Anyone out there care to respond - how much cheaper would it be for the FBI simply to prove that a file was originally non-random data, now encripted, as opposed to actually cracking that encription.
The older law was already rediculous as was. It is unbalanced because of its cibvil clauses and impact on civil suits, before we even look at the actual criminal penalties.
That version included a five times multiple for maximum financial penalties if simple willfulness could be proved. Remember, normally, even proving criminal standards of negligence, or actual larcenous or even homicidal intent only gets a person a possible 3x multiple in a civil action. Going to "knowingneess" as a standard is even looser than the existing "willfulness", and yes, that's rediculous.
If this law is just, then when someobody gets drunk and plows into some dish installer's parked work van, the van owner should be able to sue for 5x damages, simply because the drunk knew he was drinking, without having to prove the drunk also knew getting drunk could cause accidents, or that he made a consious decision to drive while aware that he might be impaired, and especially without having to face that tougher hurdle of establishing criminal neglegence to the point where the drunk can be charged as well as sued.
Unless you and I can do it too, that 5x and looser standards rule makes us second class citizen s when it comes to protecting our livelyhoods.
Urging people not to break the law is all well and good, and I'm not advocating that a law against distributing other people's copyrighted works is wrong in general. A properly written law, that provides genuinely equal protection, is something I would personally both obey and support. But, if you are not a stockholder in an IP based corporation, this particular law is another step towards treating your livelyhood as less important and worthy of protection than that of those stockholders.
You've made some very good points, particularly the one about candidates having successfully held lesser offices and worked their ways up to be taken seriously. I'd add to that - a successful term as state governor is one of the best credentials for the top job, usually worth much more in the average voter's eyes than having been a senator.
I also liked the point about working at cross purposes.
"Three small parties which each get 5% of the vote can be dismissed as the lunatic fringe and accomplish nothing. One medium-sized party which gets 15% of the vote is going to be taken seriously."
The level that should be taken seriously should get smaller when the winning party barely slips by. Get a 72% majority, and it seems natural enough to ignore the rest of the parties. At that point, the winner can brag they have a clear mandate, and won by a landslide.
Win by 1,400 votes nationwide (just for example), and there's really only one rational option. I don't like to throw out that word, rational, too easily, because it sounds like I am making an emotional arguement (Everyone agree with me, so you're rational too), but here's why it seems the other choice is genuinely irrational:
The winner has to reach out and try to draw some people from the other parties for next time, or they are choosing to govern without being able to claim a clear mandate for their actions. Every law they pass will go on record as being what 49% of the poeple wanted. Unless they act to change something, they are gambling that they will get lucky, over and over, every time they try to pass a bill, and that none of the other parties will act successfully to change something in their favor before the next election. Can you imagine a football team winning several games in overtime, and deciding they didn't need to recruit new talent, train harder, and try to become a team that had the game sewn up by the third quarter, cause overtime was good enough? The ignore the losers alternative becomes deciding that 51% of the people are just stupid or crazy, and both should and can safely be ignored. That last proposition is the worst.
This last election, I expected whomever won to try hard to draw some new voters in from the major opposition, the small parties, and even some of the special issue independant voters, to solidify their power base. It didn't happen that way. I really hope there is some threshold below 50% where the two big parties will take a minority party seriously, but unlike you, I increasingly doubt it. It's become the core belief of both major parties that they have the system all to themselves.
You're the one using words like always. You're the one who makes another blanket assertion here:
/. would shed more light than heat on a tecnical issue, and it got increasingly unlikely when they obviously didn't even read the (fine) article, and even more unlikely when they weren't presenting any facts to support their holding a particular opinion,(or words to that effect), I would have gladly agreed with you without such reservations. You're just taking your counterclaim too far.
/. posts, a few good ideas will likely emerge, not zero good ideas. Some person, who is not an expert in a given field, will possibly have knowledge of some apparently unrelated area, and will make an intuitive leap and achieve a new synthesis of ideas. With dozens or hundreds of forums, magazine and newspaper coverage of the new technology as it develops, and an open political system, the odds of that increase to near certanty.
"People who know enough about the subject to contribute meaningfully to such a discussion are either industry experts, or successful entrepeneurs, or both."
What, no one who doesn't fit the industry's definition of expert or who has lots of money is to be allowed the privledge of being treated as though he has a brain? (Or maybe you're using "successful enterprenures" in the sense that they are willing to study the matter properly before they invest, and to put their money where their mouth is afterwards, which I grant you is a much better test for whether their opinion might be worth something, but still not really infalliable).
There's one person here using these categorical "always"'s and implicit nevers, and there's one person here talking about oversimplifying. Trouble is, that one person is you in both cases.
How did I oversimplify anything? I didn't try to discuss the whole issue of nuclear proliferation, I pointed out that a number of experts didn't discuss the risks that it turns out resulted (at least in part) from their plan to ban breeder/spent fuel recycling related technologies, and a number of non-experts did.
That's pretty much a simple, almost monolithic fact (I can think of a couple of conditions and limitations if we were to discuss it in detail, so I won't claim it's always, universally true, but to go into them would make an already long post huge - If you want to present examples of experts who did mention something, or to haggle over whether someone like Tom Clancy should be counted as an expert instead of an outsider, or something like that, then you'd better resign yourself to taking 10 posts each to say what either of us has tried to say in one. I'd argue that I'm not oversimplifying, there, I'm stuck with the limitations of the medium, just as you are).
I presented that fact as a single counterexample that, in this case, proves your too generallzed assertion has to be restticted to stay within the facts.
If you say "There are no black swans", and I produce one, that isn't an oversimplification, it's a counter-proof by example, and you would be better off adjusting your claim to "Black swans are very rare, the vast majority are of other colors."
Now, if you'd said that it was unlikely an amateur, posting on
Where we differ is, I believe that out of hundreds of such things as
I also believe that experts aren't infallible, and that closed door planning, dissmissing the opinions of non-experts as NEVER worth considering, and a general top-down social control strategy all make the chance the experts will screw up higher and higher.
"Is it really possible that the experts in this field have overlooked the simple and obvious problems that occurred to such a useless amateur as myself?
The answer is always "no"."
Oh come on. If that was true, then the experts who banned recycling spent fuel to keep enriched plutonium out of the hands of terrorists knew that there would be the 'simple' and 'obvious' problem that all that unrecycled waste could be used to make dirty bombs by terrorists too technically inept to make real nukes. Remember, the U.S. ban was proposed by a number of people with expert credentials, and even signed into law by the only president we have that was a graduate of the Nuclear Navy program, and could actually claim to be an expert himself. The first people to mention the dirty bomb risk appear to all be SF authors without physics degrees, and so technically not experts.
I don't support any new technology because some expert assures me he has considered all the risks and benefits, I support some because those same experts haven't done any better in the past, and so the old technologies aren't any better balanced to our needs, so we need some new ones even wit hsome risks. This looks to be a possibly effective new technology IF certain conditions are met. To know this for sure enough to take those words like "possibly" and "if" out takes more than blindly trusting the experts, it takes reading up on it enough to count as one of the experts yourself. (Starting with this article as you and others point out, but by no means ending there).
You were doing fine in reccomending the poster both learn a little humility, and RTFA, but let's not take it to "the answer is always".
And when someone starts assigning ontologies, will it be "Constitutional scholars describe the constitution.", Law professors describe the constitution.", or "the U.S. Supreme Court describes the constitution.", (or maybe even "Congress describes the constitution.")?.
Which is the winning ontology re. natural selection, the cladistic taxonomist's, or the molecular micro-biologist's?
It will be interesting to see if the semantic web can allow the best ones of such clashing ontologies to rise to the top. Hell, it will be interesting to see if any one viewpoint ever rises to the top, or if they just continue to bump against each other perpetually.
What if one day, you take a stand on a political issue, and someone announces that you spent a suspicious amount of time near an adult book store that lies near the intersection of your routes to and from job, gym, and grocery store? A few carefully selected words to the local police and you can end up on their pedophile watch list. Will it inconvenience you if the local police keep checking to see if you have an alibi for one crime after another, and regularly verify your story with your boss, spouse, neighbors, and Nautilus coach?
What if someone at that gym is caught dealing steroids, and the times you visit the gym, fit a pattern with his, (or can be fitted with one by a sufficiently skilled analyst),suggesting you might also be a drug dealer?
Technology is increasing the ways of making you look guilty by association. Hey, you posted political sentiments on slashdot, and I responded. Now, if you get into trouble, I'll probably get a call from the FBI asking how much I know about Giant Ape Skeleton's real name and activities. (and Vice Versa). Data mining can find such links, and yet only a small portion of the public, and probably less of the officials using the tools, know when to disregard such trivial links.
Both parody and satire count as protected speech. The distinction's more because parody and satire cases have different precident cases backing them up, so the exact level of protection is different.
8 2196.htm?1c/
i es/topic.aspx?topic=parody_satire/
http://www.publaw.com/parody.html/
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/state/95
One of the most significant Satire related cases:
http://www.sexuality.org/l/wh/whfalwel.html/
The problem for satire cases right now may be seen in one recent case:
"Dr. Seuss Enterprises v. Penguin Books USA
Penguin Books published a poetic account of the O.J. Simpson trial in a book titled, The Cat NOT in the Hat! A Parody by Dr. Juice. The 9th Circuit held that the book did not parody The Cat in the Hat, but simply retold the Simpson story. Therefore, there was no fair-use defense, and the book was deemed a copyright infringement."
For source of this, see:
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/speech/librar
Note that case was originally a ruling on a Parody claim, but a lot of people seem to think the decision, as worded, has severe impact on Satire based claims. This whole issue will doubltless come up again in further cases, at least until the supremes issue a ruling as definitive as in Fallwell.
I figured that sneaky or honest, Bill knows that when you're worth 60 billion dollars, SOMEONE will realize it's worth a cool million just to read your e-mail. If he's not saying or doing anything the DOJ could use against him, he still has corporate rivals.
Martha, on the other hand, is definitely worth enough for someone to spend a few tens of thousands trying to snoop on her. She spoke like that wasn't a consideration (even for Bill, let alone lil' ole' her), and I'd argue that she actually believed what she said. If she didn't recognize that she was up to something in the market where a lack of security could come back to bite her, she's like a typical clueless PC user is about viruses and firewalls, but on a larger scale.
Maybe it didn't play a specific role in her conviction, maybe it did, but it at least showed something's wrong with her general attitiude on tech.
Personally, If the DOJ investigates me, the agent in charge better bring extra coffee, cause those reports are gonna be boreing as hell. Still, since I've got the spare routers and wire, and a house modern enough to have put in metal wireing channels in the subflooring, I see no reason to go wireless at home.
I've recommended local candidates for office use hardwired systems for their campaign headquarters (If you've ever seen how dirty a little municipal election for Sherriff can get, I think that will make sense - when the incumbant gets a list of contributers to his oppponent's campaign and starts having his deputies harrass them, it gets pretty vicious.). There are lots of reasons to avoid wireless, and not all that many advantages to using it.
"there are a lot of people that cannot even handle everyday life."
Me thinks "Yes, but why are they all on my internet?"
Are you advocating getting those people basic communications? Or putting them on Prozac?
If you're talking environmental clean up, basic health care, true quality education, or various other somethings we really need to make time for, you have a fair point.
But, there not much point in not spending anything on luxuries until absolutely everybody can handle everyday life. Some people can't handle life even with lots of resources thrown at their particular problems.
Martha Stewart once described Bill Gates' mansion, and how it had all the rooms wired for high speed networking, with Cat 5 and better running inside concrete channels. Se made some sort of joke about how maybe Bill hadn't heard of wireless. (Sorry I don't remember the exact quote - if anyone has it, please post).
One of the two people mentioned above has been sentenced to a federal prison, and one of them hasn't. That COULD reflect their actual conduct, or it COULD be just random luck.
I see some people are already addressing how flammable H2 is (or realtively isn't), so I'' just touch on the Hindenburg disaster. Just to emphasize that the flames didn't spread as fast as the video footage would suggest, the footage most people have seen begins to show flames a little more than 4 full minutes after the fire was reported. The final body count on the Hindenburg wasn't as bad as typical for a similarly loaded heavier than air craft crash. It just happened before we ever had a heavier than air crash that big.
From a report only a few hours after the disaster: "Out of ninety-seven persons aboard, about twelve passengers are known to be saved and thirty-seven of the crew are alive, some injured to various degrees."
From the final report: "Thirty-six lost their lives: thirteen passengers, twenty-two crewmen, and one civilian member of the ground crew."
(61 of the people on board were crew - she was traveling with only 36 passengers).
Most people who have seen the film footage assume nobody made it out of that inferno alive. It's given Hydrogen an undeserved (IMHO) bad rep for 67 years.
Incidentally, The Lakehurst Historical Society prefers the spelling HindenbUrg, although the other form with an "E" is not uncommon, even in newspapers and naval reports of the time.
Copyright was originally seen as the transfer of a natural right. If no law resticts you, it's natural law that says you can make a copy of someone else's work. Natural law doesn't let you copy someone's work one second after you die, let alone 70 years. The constitution originally transferred a right.
How can an artist be awarded life+70 protection? The +70 can't be transferred, it must instead be a new right, manufactured, by congress. So who does that new right belong to first? Congress!
If the old copyright law was repealed, who did the right revert to? The people, by natural law. If the new copyright law is repealed, to whom do the rigths revert? Does the +70 simply vanish, or does congress claim it still exists, and now reverts to the government? Artists should be very afraid of claims that the current set up is in their favor. An incentive for a sufficiently corrupt government to steal your work is never in your favor, long term.
Copyright on work for hire, done to the specifications of a corporation, is 99 years after the work's being established in a fixed form. It doesn't matter in such cases, how long the corporation itself 'lives'.
Disney also has a low cost approach to the customer to replacing damaged CDs and DVDs that reflects them not trying to have it both ways. (Where "it" is claiming the 'consumer' bought a physical medium when that suits the copyright holder, then claiming the 'consumer' is only liscencing an IP item whenever that would be in the holder's favor). Send a damaged DVD back to Disney, and you will get a replacement at a cost that really is pretty close to the cost of the physical medium and shipping and handling charges. Disney could probably manage that department with an eye towards doing even better by their loyal customers, but several of the other big IP firms are much worse.
Please don't encourage the pagans to do the Lion thing again. As C. S. Lewis (sort of) said, They have this thing called the press now, and it will probably blame you for raising the lion's collesterol.
I won't say it's unreasonable, but it's compareing apples and oranges. There are three common things that get lumped under IP, and a few less common ones such as trade secrets that get thrown in there sometimes. These are Patents, Copyrights, and Trademarks. If you start comparing the three, it makes as much sense to say "Trademarks last forever, why doesn't copyright?" as to say "Patents only last 20 years, why doesn't copyright?". This is one reason to fight the whole concept of IP - the people pushing it really want Patents that don't require disclosing everything involved, Trademarks that don't have to be defended to keep them, and Patents and Copyrights that never expire. They want to own Patmarkenrites, which have all of the advantages and none of the costs of the things the rest of us deal with.
I'll grant you that slavery was an important issue leading up to the US Civil war. "Not remotely related" is the same sort of claim that the holocaust revisionists make, and worth the same repect, i.e. none. In the South, the major propertarian class had the idea slavery was necessary for them to contiue in their positions. In the North, certainly many were motivated by genuine recognition of the fundamental rights and nature of man to oppose this.
At the same time, I could grant you your claim that there was no other factor important enough to make the South actually rescind the Union, but it still would be half the story. What about the factors driving the North? How many Iowa farm boys joined the forces of the North because they wanted personally to free the slaves, and how many because they didn't want Iowa to have to pay high tarrifs, shipping down the Mississippi river through what was becoming a forign power, that had already announced its intentions to tax them vigorously as part of the post-secession changes?
Reading enough of the writings on the Civil war to see how it was often sold in the North as a fight against the economic plans of the South might even suggest we shouldn't just claim only Slavery was an issue important enough to drive the south into open rebellion. Could it be that many in the South clung to slavery because it was seen as offsetting the same economic "inequities" that those planned tarrifs were also to offset? How often was slavery seen, not as an end in itself, but as a way of letting an agricultural society compete with an industrialized one? It's with 20-20 hindsight that we look back today and realize that there was no way to keep an industrial and a pre-industrial economy on an even level, but that was not the common wisdom of those times.
It's for such reasons, that, if you go to any of the battlefields of the Civil war today, you will see a memorial to the American dead, which includes all who fought on both sides.
You hook the machines up to a LAN and your level 2 machine starts telling the most generic machine it's not a generic anymore, its a level 6. They fight, over by the green dome. Then a random Dell PC gets eaten by a big weather balloon, and something about an old fashioned penny-farthing bicycle... pyramids with eyes... ape masks... and all your mainframes get Shatnered!
Please don't write a 130,000 page novel. Ever. My wife works at a bookstore, and she promises all her coworkers will find you and do... Well, just trust me, you'll sleep better not knowing... If you write anything that weighs more than the last Harry Potter is expected to weigh. By the way, what kind of music do you listen to while writing? (So she can have it declared dead). Thanks.
As Harrison Ford said to Mark Hammell right after they climbed out of the trash compactor "This ain't that kind of a movie, kid".
By the third sentence, that's nobody who isn't a lawyer, OR a developer who is doing something new or different in OSS. By the second paragraph, expand that again to include the people who represent companies that employ developers who are doing something new or different. Maybe you still don't need this book ,but that is a fairly sizable sub-group of /. readership he's described.