Ooops, when I first quick scanned that a significant part of Sweden was white, I didn't catch that you were talking about your map link, and thought you were either talking racial composition or permanent snowline. Either way, I'd have Para-Modded you +1 underSTated, unless you're a native of Iceland.
There are people even in the ultra-rich group that range from pretty decent to really good people, not just "rich" but !!!rich!!!. What's the most serious complaint you could make about Warren Buffet? Sam Walton seems to have been a better man with all his money in one place than all his heirs put together are now with that money divided among them. Do we really wnat to soak preople like those two? (Or worse, stand them up against the wall?)
What's screwing the rest of us though, is that a good chunk of our rich (speaking of the US), simultaneously want a small government that won't limit them, and a big government that will limit their competitiors, or those uppity consumers, or whomever. Right now, too much money is in the hands of people who want a fundamental paradox.
All too many of the ones that own the high speed networking systems want a government with enough power to choke off their competition, and simultaneously one that won't use that power to bring in non-profit solutions, regardless of percieved need. So we have rich owners of telecoms who want a huge federal budget (just so it goes to things like awarding them area wide monopolies and huge parts of the EM spectrum, paying the FCC to throttle their competition, and covering just their side of the court costs in prosecuting civil offenses), and are simultaneously sueing municipal governments to block them running pipes that last mile.
Imagine if the early electrical companies had simultaneously stopped rural electrification because it was government interference and successfully fought to make underwriter's laboratories a federalized sub-department of the patent office, and where the US would be today with that attitude prevailing. We are going to see that same sort of effect on our countery in 40 years or so, because of what's happening right now.
We can probably bet on aliens that develop artificial electromagnetic based signalling, that they will have passed through some form of basic economy, with counting to inventory and perhaps to sell items. Where iI think we might make too many assumptions is in expecting their math to have developed from there in roughly the same sequence and for similar reasons.
There's a book called "Where Mathematics Comes From", by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez that suggests that we developed the positive integers largely to deal with counting and selling goods, and probably invented fractions of some sort before seeing any need for negative numbers.
The idea is when you get to zero apples to sell, you don't naturally think of zero so much as you think "Its time to go home" The authors propose we thought of negative numbers largely because of needing them to compute travel distances, as a barter economy doesn't really imply them, but distances along a road model a natural version of a number line. If home town is arbitrary zero, we start needing negative numbers to explain how other towns relate to each other.
They make a good case that some of what we think of as very basic math was developed in response to rather arbitrary social situations.
(As an odd example, imagine the Roman empire instituting reforms in the way it treated slaves, because nobody with any choice in the matter could be persuaded to do math with Roman numerals. Eventually, it became a case of pro-reform senators trying to ensure slaves who could figure the interest on a million Sisterces loan were protected from at least the worst abuses, and anti -reform senators recommending allowing them to use something approximating arabic numbers instead so the system could continue as it was).
The books goes on to show what sort of problems required such inventions as irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, and eventually transfinites and infinitesimals and such. The author's examples of historical contingency driving new mathematics strongly suggests (to me at least), that we can't rely on hypothetical aliens even to think a "universal" marker, such as prime numbers or the Fibbonachi series, is a good way to label a deliberate interspecies broadcast, or to be looking for that from us. In the same way, our expectation that they are at least somewhat likely to pick a simple multiple of the hydrogen frequency may not help at all.
Greg Bear's novel - Anvil of Stars: One of the highly technological alien races is made up of tube-like creatures that group together by the dozen or so to form the actual aliens. Individual tubes when seperated are smart enough to play chess once taught, but it takes whole aliens to understand why a tube shouldn't starve itself to death just because it lost a game of chess.
Sure, the aliens understand math, probably far better than we do. Trouble is, they don't see why we think there's someting different about integers... To them, all the really useful math is done with smears.
Yes a few of their more theoretical types can describe the existing arrangement of Earth, Jupiter, et. al., other than as the sum of umpty-ump probable arrangemments of solar system contents, but most of them can model the whole thing as a probablistic, verb like function just about as fast as they can index the one arrangement that is actual, so what we mean by instantiation is not a big deal to them.
Bear actuually makes a pretty good arguement for integer math being both (somewhat) arbitrary and (somewhat) perceptual.
Boise doubtless told SCO to limit their discussion of the case in the press once litigation started. Once the case is over, there's nothing to stop them from blameing the whole loss on Darl's big mouth and being widely believed. This isn't The Devil's Advocate - nobody bats 1000.
Just about all imitations involve two things that are very alike in some ways and yet very different in others. Judges (are supposed to)look at just which areas are similar, and in a lawsuit over copyright, trademark, or patent, normally expect all parties to admit that some are and some aren't. Then the imitator claims that the differences are the important areas and the originator claims that the similarities are the important thing, and the judge makes the hopefully final call.
"this country was founded in part by Christians who were fleeing oppression by other fucking christians. Then of course they started burning innocent people alive."
If you are referring to Salem, the witch trials resulted in several people being hanged, and one man (Giles Corey) being pressed to death between boards laden with heavy stones. No witch burnings were conducted in America. (Not that these alternatives were necessarily any less barbaric, just different).
There are about a jillion clock programs for windows that call the NIST clocks on a regular schedule of your choice and adjust the PC. Most of them are freeware. Some of them work with a clock display on desktop, some with the existing clock in the systray. I recomend Beatnik, at
http://www.somedec.com/
free, skinnable, and stable, and no I don't have any connection to the author except using it and some of his other freeware.
However, the OP apparently doesn't want to do something like that. I confess, I'm not sure why. If he has a box whose clock drifts by 5 min a day and that once daily ping is eating up substantial time on his connection, the answer is to get a new box or a faster connection. If my clock naturally drifted by 5 minutes a day, I'd want to correct about every 4 hours or so, or maybe I'd just immediatly try replacing the Mobo battery in case that was a sign it was going stale. Maybe I'm missing something there, and he just doesn't want to go through the process manually, but it sounds like he's more wanting to not do it at all.
Really loved your point 1b. Gotta disagree with your point 2.
"The average basketball superstar probably earns 1000 times minimum wage."
Average is a term that can be applied to basketball players, but it becomes an oxymoron when applied only to the superstars of the game. One way to have lots of eager young (easily controlable) people trying to get into sports or music or acting or writing is to have a few highly successful winners at the top - Shaq, Brittany, Tom Cruise, Stephen King. The average person in such a job may be making minimum wage or even worse.
It's more instructive to compare average salleries for NBA pro basketball, or to look at both the maximum and the minimum, and maybe to include the second tier of teams below the NBA.
Martha didn't get away with much at all, so far. For a stock market insider deal that probably didn't do significant real damage to any outsider's profits for the year, she is already paying enough to discourage others. Now if the apeal gets her off completely, that might be a little light.
Enron, though, isn't settled yet an given just how many thousands of people lost pension plans or other little slices of their lives to Ken Lay and his bunch, justice might well involve pouring lighter fluid over good ole Ken and dragging him behind a Dodge Durango by his left testicle past a bunch of his victims with boxes and boxes of matches. Anything less is just a slap on the wrist.
A supposedly true story I heard about Martha is she talked about Bill Gates's new house, and said something along the lines of "He's got armored wiring channels running through all that concrete for connecting up his home network - why doesn't he just use wireless networking". Maybe that's one of the reasons she's looking at an orange jumpsuit and he isn't.
China and North Korea both have a reputation for not cooperating with the rest of the net. In both cases, it actually looks like they are fairly cooperative with shutting down poorly administered machines, very cooperative with going after those rackets that are not cutting the government in for a piece of the action, and very UNcooperative if the racket is being run by the local precinct administrator's cousin.
In North Korea's case especially, there are lots of unconfirmed rumors from local sources that the very cooperative cases involve taking the undesirable out in front of the building where he was arrested, putting a 9 mm slug through the back of his head, and leaving the body in a roadside ditch. What they do with unsecured machine level problems is more likely a lecture that the owner is making them look bad, but they alledgedly snoop around for anything else including porn if the owner is not on their special nice list.
Dispite some similar rumors about the hacker/spammer death penalty in China, they have enough prosecuted cases in their records to suggest the usual penalty there is more likely a few years in a work camp than death. If they do shoot the spammer, it's probably for political activity, but over their they really do bill family members for the bullet. For a phishing scam like the one you mention, it's likely that the ISP passed your info on to the government, and one or more people are serving 10 years or so each, which actually sounds pretty fair, although Chinese labor camps aren't exactly club feds.
I do not think that word means what you think it means - but just in case you are right, please post a link to the pictures of spontanious adult human reproduction by fission.:-) - Aside from that, good theory about what may have been going on.
The point in selective enforcement is that only the "monkeys" end up getting convicted, at all. Do they deserve to be locked up? The only rational answer unfortunately sounds like waffling, that is yes AND no.
If you steal only one car, should you still be tried for Grand Theft Auto? IF THE LAW IS ADMINISTERED FAIRLY, yes, you deserve to be locked up. If the state keeps letting the guy who owned that chop shop where you delivered the car slip away, or giving him a slap on the wrist compared to what they give you, then you DON"T deserve to be locked up. "Deserve" implies a justice system that can be fair and unbiased. Not slam-dunking the head of a racket while prosecuting the "monkeys" is ipso-facto proof of the system's not being able to administer justice, and if there is no justice, then words like deserve lose their meaning.
(I'm not referring to an isolated case where the court screws up here, so much as when the court screws up habitually in favor of the head-monkey's type of people. I'm not trying to argue than anything less than perfection totally destroys the process of justice, just that the imperfections can get big enough to destroy it.)
So do these particular monkeys deserve to be locked up? The head-monkey appears to have defaulted bail. Some judge both set that bail low enough the head-monkey could make it, and 'missunderestimated' the chance the head-monkey was a flight risk. The judge has therefore made two mistakes that relate to how fairly he is going to try the rest of the monkeys, before he even begins their trials. Just offhand, I think that judge needs to bend over backwards to avoid taking the head-monkey's flight out on the rank-and-file-monkeys when it comes to sentencing.
As you point out, the monkeys can try turning state's evidence on the head-monkey, but they may not get off any easier. Sometimes it works as you suggest, and sometimes the DA doesn't think there is much chance of finding that tricky head-monkey, so sometimes that's how the system doesn't work, and all the little monkeys are basically screwed, and will get maximum sentences even if they cooperate, as the state wants to punish SOMEBODY.
There is nothing in the system that _necessarily_ rewards the monkeys for cooperating with the authorities, or for showing signs of remorse, or that demands the judge show leniency even just to correct the judge's own mistakes. A lot of times, people administering the system try to do what seems fair in such cases - sometimes they do not.
Our sympathies (at least for many of us) are not for the monkey who did the crime and has to pay the time, but for the monkey who may get extra time to cover for the judge's mistakes and not just his own.
I always figured 1 person would end up in the best shape of their life and a bunch of others would turn into couch potatos who yell "pedal faster!" a lot. But it would lend new meaning to phrases such as "Sci Fi channel's the Prisoner Marathon".
This is basically an IIRC (if I recall correctly), but for those of you wanting to know what humans can do along these lines...
1. With a stationary bicycle hooked up to a small generator, a human who is classified as in moderate shape can power a 13 inch black and white television at about an even rate - pedal for half an hour, watch for half an hour.
2. it takes a near olympic grade athelete to power a 19 inch color set continuously and even then, it's a for a single half hour program or less. Mere mortal cyclists can charge a battery and get about a half hour of TV for over an hour's pedalling.
3. Those first two examples are based on 1980's era designs. These days, half an hour of cycling should be able to charge a laptop battery for about 4 hours use, or load up all the rechargeable batteries for several portable music players and portable game systems, and a bit extra for your flashlights.
I'd document these claims in detail and with rigor, but really, the frackin article started off with frackin hamsters and I just thought of a really dumb joke - see my next post.
The Roman Catholic system actually tends to reflect the ideas of quality, realism, and depth (granted - all often within the limits of certain moral biases, particularly about sex).
RC censors operate under rules where they are expected to look at West Side Story, recognize that it's based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, that the musical score is a skilled orchestral work and integral to the creation as a whole, and that there's an added message about racial and class intolerance that makes a number of profound moral points, and take such things into account in rating the film, while the current US system is expected to simply notice an underage romance is involved, and tack on some standardized points. Enough points for gang violence, knives being shown, and deaths and it's PG-13, a few more and its an R, and a "message" is often irrelevant to the final result.
Yes, except for tense. We have already been making synthetic rubies and blue sapphires under laboratory conditions for at least 50 years now. Google for "synthetic ruby" if you dare.
If that's the case, the numbers will fall pretty close to the middle of the income spectrum, and it will look, at least superficially, like the RIAA isn't targeting any particular economic or ethnic class. Detailed statistical analysis may prove different, but it won't be simple enough to make a case to the general public, and all the RIAA needs to do is hire a good statistical analyst as an expert witness to tangle things up beyond sorting out in any countersuit.
If you're right, it would be better for anyone considering a class action suit to concentrate on such issues as what interogatives the RIAA sent to the plantiffs during the cases, or try to get someone inside the industry to leak some internal-use-only memoranda on their procedures or something along those lines.
However, it is still costing the RIAA more than they get back to follow up each case. The RIAA's model seems more focused on deterrence than actually profiting from extortion, so it would be interesting to start from the assumption that deterrence is their intent, figure out what sort of procedural systems they have evolved from that, and see how well they've covered themselves against the sort of bias claims I've mentioned in this thread.
Your points about "odd coincidences" in the cases you specifically remember are interesting, and I take them for worth more than just anomalies, but unless someone does the math, we'll never really know. I have noticed several possible patterns in the examples mentioned in the press, just as you have, but those are too easily explained away in court as flukes unless someone also has some overall numbers to back them up.
"don't bore me with your equivocation about how copyright infringement isn't theft"
If you think ALL the news media will treat any group presenting a claim about bias in RIAA actions as the equivalent of pirates, then don't bore me with your equivocation of calling them the News anymore instead of the Orwellian Newspeakers.
"Even if the distribution of plaintiffs agrees with the local income stats, they might still be targeting poor people by choosing poor locations to sue."
If they did that, the median income of the people they picked might match the local average, but it would fall well below the national average, so that's the fact you would want to present in the newspapers.
There's also other interesting ways to spin this. If they use such a method, Georgetown, Aspen, and various other rich locales might not show up at all in their choices, while Watts or the worst parts of Chicago might be way over represented. If there's a strong bias towards avoiding sueing those wealthy enough to fight the charge in court on the RIAA's part, it will show up, one way or the other.
One advantage I didn't mention in the first post, is if any reputable institution makes such a claim, the RIAA will doubtless want to claim that they are biased or their methodology is flawed. That's relatively easy in court to turn into an arguement that the government's own numbers are the flaw, or to shoot down by showing the study used a straight forward methodology and trusted the Fed's figures on poverty and median income. The RIAA won't get much cooperation from a Federal judge if they try to advance such a defense as biased federal figures.
"Does income correlate with willingness or ability to commit copyright infringement?"
Let the RIAA argue that there IS some bias introduced there if they want. Opposed organizations can argue whichever side the RIAA omits. If the RIAA claims that rich people don't bother to commit copyright violations as they can easily afford legal copies, the counter arguement is really poor people don't commit copyright violations as they can't afford good home computers and high speed access. Don't worry about arguements that wealthier people may tend to choose certain ISPs over others, because such arguements are too trivial to win cases, either in the courts or in the area of public opinion.
There are several thousand cases now to analyze. If the RIAA is actually selecting poorer than avarage plantiffs (as some here have alledged), this will show quickly in proper statistical analysis (plot the location of the plantiff on a map, look in the government's poverty index to see what the average inocome in that location is, assign points to an appropriate scale, i.e. 1 point/1,000 $ US).
If it's there, and can be statistically proven, the next step is to tell the media the RIAA is selectively targeting poor people. A good strong piece of evidence, like RIAA plantiffs averageing 20% below median income, deserves a nice simple "National Enquirer" type headline, like "RIAA out to crush the working class", don't you think? Offer the press a chance for one like that, and some of them will bite.
While you're at it you could analyze those plantiffs on ethnic lines if they are willing to share the data. If the RIAA has selectively targeted poor people, it would be very hard for them to avoid having selectively targeted minorities at the same time, although they could possibly have deliberately thrown out a percentage of minority cases to avoid the appearance. I'd suggest if this proves fruitful, rather than contacting the media directly with the allegation that the RIAA is selectively targeting black people, you let the NAACP bring the allegation, as in such case, there WILL be a class action countersuit filed, but it will have 22,000,000 members.
Of course, it's possible there is no consistant pattern. In this case, wait until a couple of months go by where the numbers of plantiffs that are poor or minority is statistically high, and then make the claim "In recent months, the RIAA has switched tactics, to selectively target poorer people."
According to the article, earlier results include those measured with "so called paraconical pendula". It's shocking to think that we have allowed ersatz paraconical pendula to be used in place of the genuine articles.
Mr. President, we must spend whatever is necessary to close the paraconical pendula gap.
"Anyone that's worked with security, databases or identity management should be well aware of the fact that certain key values occur in populations to the point of being meaningless."
You mean as if if the problem was Adulterers not Terrorists, and for some reason the government kept thinking all those "John Smith's" in the hotel registers were real names?
Slashdot Mirror
Ooops, when I first quick scanned that a significant part of Sweden was white, I didn't catch that you were talking about your map link, and thought you were either talking racial composition or permanent snowline. Either way, I'd have Para-Modded you +1 underSTated, unless you're a native of Iceland.
There are people even in the ultra-rich group that range from pretty decent to really good people, not just "rich" but !!!rich!!!. What's the most serious complaint you could make about Warren Buffet? Sam Walton seems to have been a better man with all his money in one place than all his heirs put together are now with that money divided among them. Do we really wnat to soak preople like those two? (Or worse, stand them up against the wall?)
What's screwing the rest of us though, is that a good chunk of our rich (speaking of the US), simultaneously want a small government that won't limit them, and a big government that will limit their competitiors, or those uppity consumers, or whomever. Right now, too much money is in the hands of people who want a fundamental paradox.
All too many of the ones that own the high speed networking systems want a government with enough power to choke off their competition, and simultaneously one that won't use that power to bring in non-profit solutions, regardless of percieved need. So we have rich owners of telecoms who want a huge federal budget (just so it goes to things like awarding them area wide monopolies and huge parts of the EM spectrum, paying the FCC to throttle their competition, and covering just their side of the court costs in prosecuting civil offenses), and are simultaneously sueing municipal governments to block them running pipes that last mile.
Imagine if the early electrical companies had simultaneously stopped rural electrification because it was government interference and successfully fought to make underwriter's laboratories a federalized sub-department of the patent office, and where the US would be today with that attitude prevailing. We are going to see that same sort of effect on our countery in 40 years or so, because of what's happening right now.
We can probably bet on aliens that develop artificial electromagnetic based signalling, that they will have passed through some form of basic economy, with counting to inventory and perhaps to sell items. Where iI think we might make too many assumptions is in expecting their math to have developed from there in roughly the same sequence and for similar reasons.
There's a book called "Where Mathematics Comes From", by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez that suggests that we developed the positive integers largely to deal with counting and selling goods, and probably invented fractions of some sort before seeing any need for negative numbers.
The idea is when you get to zero apples to sell, you don't naturally think of zero so much as you think "Its time to go home" The authors propose we thought of negative numbers largely because of needing them to compute travel distances, as a barter economy doesn't really imply them, but distances along a road model a natural version of a number line. If home town is arbitrary zero, we start needing negative numbers to explain how other towns relate to each other.
They make a good case that some of what we think of as very basic math was developed in response to rather arbitrary social situations.
(As an odd example, imagine the Roman empire instituting reforms in the way it treated slaves, because nobody with any choice in the matter could be persuaded to do math with Roman numerals. Eventually, it became a case of pro-reform senators trying to ensure slaves who could figure the interest on a million Sisterces loan were protected from at least the worst abuses, and anti -reform senators recommending allowing them to use something approximating arabic numbers instead so the system could continue as it was).
The books goes on to show what sort of problems required such inventions as irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, and eventually transfinites and infinitesimals and such. The author's examples of historical contingency driving new mathematics strongly suggests (to me at least), that we can't rely on hypothetical aliens even to think a "universal" marker, such as prime numbers or the Fibbonachi series, is a good way to label a deliberate interspecies broadcast, or to be looking for that from us. In the same way, our expectation that they are at least somewhat likely to pick a simple multiple of the hydrogen frequency may not help at all.
"A higher culture will understand math"
Greg Bear's novel - Anvil of Stars: One of the highly technological alien races is made up of tube-like creatures that group together by the dozen or so to form the actual aliens. Individual tubes when seperated are smart enough to play chess once taught, but it takes whole aliens to understand why a tube shouldn't starve itself to death just because it lost a game of chess.
Sure, the aliens understand math, probably far better than we do. Trouble is, they don't see why we think there's someting different about integers... To them, all the really useful math is done with smears.
Yes a few of their more theoretical types can describe the existing arrangement of Earth, Jupiter, et. al., other than as the sum of umpty-ump probable arrangemments of solar system contents, but most of them can model the whole thing as a probablistic, verb like function just about as fast as they can index the one arrangement that is actual, so what we mean by instantiation is not a big deal to them.
Bear actuually makes a pretty good arguement for integer math being both (somewhat) arbitrary and (somewhat) perceptual.
Boise doubtless told SCO to limit their discussion of the case in the press once litigation started. Once the case is over, there's nothing to stop them from blameing the whole loss on Darl's big mouth and being widely believed. This isn't The Devil's Advocate - nobody bats 1000.
(IANAL)(BITIOSGH*)
*But I think I'm on safe grounds here.
Just about all imitations involve two things that are very alike in some ways and yet very different in others. Judges (are supposed to)look at just which areas are similar, and in a lawsuit over copyright, trademark, or patent, normally expect all parties to admit that some are and some aren't. Then the imitator claims that the differences are the important areas and the originator claims that the similarities are the important thing, and the judge makes the hopefully final call.
"this country was founded in part by Christians who were fleeing oppression by other fucking christians. Then of course they started burning innocent people alive."
If you are referring to Salem, the witch trials resulted in several people being hanged, and one man (Giles Corey) being pressed to death between boards laden with heavy stones. No witch burnings were conducted in America. (Not that these alternatives were necessarily any less barbaric, just different).
There are about a jillion clock programs for windows that call the NIST clocks on a regular schedule of your choice and adjust the PC. Most of them are freeware. Some of them work with a clock display on desktop, some with the existing clock in the systray. I recomend Beatnik, at http://www.somedec.com/ free, skinnable, and stable, and no I don't have any connection to the author except using it and some of his other freeware. However, the OP apparently doesn't want to do something like that. I confess, I'm not sure why. If he has a box whose clock drifts by 5 min a day and that once daily ping is eating up substantial time on his connection, the answer is to get a new box or a faster connection. If my clock naturally drifted by 5 minutes a day, I'd want to correct about every 4 hours or so, or maybe I'd just immediatly try replacing the Mobo battery in case that was a sign it was going stale. Maybe I'm missing something there, and he just doesn't want to go through the process manually, but it sounds like he's more wanting to not do it at all.
Really loved your point 1b. Gotta disagree with your point 2.
"The average basketball superstar probably earns 1000 times minimum wage."
Average is a term that can be applied to basketball players, but it becomes an oxymoron when applied only to the superstars of the game. One way to have lots of eager young (easily controlable) people trying to get into sports or music or acting or writing is to have a few highly successful winners at the top - Shaq, Brittany, Tom Cruise, Stephen King. The average person in such a job may be making minimum wage or even worse.
It's more instructive to compare average salleries for NBA pro basketball, or to look at both the maximum and the minimum, and maybe to include the second tier of teams below the NBA.
Martha didn't get away with much at all, so far. For a stock market insider deal that probably didn't do significant real damage to any outsider's profits for the year, she is already paying enough to discourage others. Now if the apeal gets her off completely, that might be a little light.
Enron, though, isn't settled yet an given just how many thousands of people lost pension plans or other little slices of their lives to Ken Lay and his bunch, justice might well involve pouring lighter fluid over good ole Ken and dragging him behind a Dodge Durango by his left testicle past a bunch of his victims with boxes and boxes of matches. Anything less is just a slap on the wrist.
A supposedly true story I heard about Martha is she talked about Bill Gates's new house, and said something along the lines of "He's got armored wiring channels running through all that concrete for connecting up his home network - why doesn't he just use wireless networking". Maybe that's one of the reasons she's looking at an orange jumpsuit and he isn't.
China and North Korea both have a reputation for not cooperating with the rest of the net. In both cases, it actually looks like they are fairly cooperative with shutting down poorly administered machines, very cooperative with going after those rackets that are not cutting the government in for a piece of the action, and very UNcooperative if the racket is being run by the local precinct administrator's cousin.
In North Korea's case especially, there are lots of unconfirmed rumors from local sources that the very cooperative cases involve taking the undesirable out in front of the building where he was arrested, putting a 9 mm slug through the back of his head, and leaving the body in a roadside ditch. What they do with unsecured machine level problems is more likely a lecture that the owner is making them look bad, but they alledgedly snoop around for anything else including porn if the owner is not on their special nice list.
Dispite some similar rumors about the hacker/spammer death penalty in China, they have enough prosecuted cases in their records to suggest the usual penalty there is more likely a few years in a work camp than death. If they do shoot the spammer, it's probably for political activity, but over their they really do bill family members for the bullet. For a phishing scam like the one you mention, it's likely that the ISP passed your info on to the government, and one or more people are serving 10 years or so each, which actually sounds pretty fair, although Chinese labor camps aren't exactly club feds.
"They might have 'incremented' themselves."
:-) - Aside from that, good theory about what may have been going on.
I do not think that word means what you think it means - but just in case you are right, please post a link to the pictures of spontanious adult human reproduction by fission.
The point in selective enforcement is that only the "monkeys" end up getting convicted, at all. Do they deserve to be locked up? The only rational answer unfortunately sounds like waffling, that is yes AND no.
If you steal only one car, should you still be tried for Grand Theft Auto? IF THE LAW IS ADMINISTERED FAIRLY, yes, you deserve to be locked up. If the state keeps letting the guy who owned that chop shop where you delivered the car slip away, or giving him a slap on the wrist compared to what they give you, then you DON"T deserve to be locked up. "Deserve" implies a justice system that can be fair and unbiased. Not slam-dunking the head of a racket while prosecuting the "monkeys" is ipso-facto proof of the system's not being able to administer justice, and if there is no justice, then words like deserve lose their meaning.
(I'm not referring to an isolated case where the court screws up here, so much as when the court screws up habitually in favor of the head-monkey's type of people. I'm not trying to argue than anything less than perfection totally destroys the process of justice, just that the imperfections can get big enough to destroy it.)
So do these particular monkeys deserve to be locked up? The head-monkey appears to have defaulted bail. Some judge both set that bail low enough the head-monkey could make it, and 'missunderestimated' the chance the head-monkey was a flight risk. The judge has therefore made two mistakes that relate to how fairly he is going to try the rest of the monkeys, before he even begins their trials. Just offhand, I think that judge needs to bend over backwards to avoid taking the head-monkey's flight out on the rank-and-file-monkeys when it comes to sentencing.
As you point out, the monkeys can try turning state's evidence on the head-monkey, but they may not get off any easier. Sometimes it works as you suggest, and sometimes the DA doesn't think there is much chance of finding that tricky head-monkey, so sometimes that's how the system doesn't work, and all the little monkeys are basically screwed, and will get maximum sentences even if they cooperate, as the state wants to punish SOMEBODY.
There is nothing in the system that _necessarily_ rewards the monkeys for cooperating with the authorities, or for showing signs of remorse, or that demands the judge show leniency even just to correct the judge's own mistakes. A lot of times, people administering the system try to do what seems fair in such cases - sometimes they do not.
Our sympathies (at least for many of us) are not for the monkey who did the crime and has to pay the time, but for the monkey who may get extra time to cover for the judge's mistakes and not just his own.
I always figured 1 person would end up in the best shape of their life and a bunch of others would turn into couch potatos who yell "pedal faster!" a lot. But it would lend new meaning to phrases such as "Sci Fi channel's the Prisoner Marathon".
Can I get these fricken hamsters with self powered fricken laser beams on their fricken heads?
This is basically an IIRC (if I recall correctly), but for those of you wanting to know what humans can do along these lines...
1. With a stationary bicycle hooked up to a small generator, a human who is classified as in moderate shape can power a 13 inch black and white television at about an even rate - pedal for half an hour, watch for half an hour.
2. it takes a near olympic grade athelete to power a 19 inch color set continuously and even then, it's a for a single half hour program or less. Mere mortal cyclists can charge a battery and get about a half hour of TV for over an hour's pedalling.
3. Those first two examples are based on 1980's era designs. These days, half an hour of cycling should be able to charge a laptop battery for about 4 hours use, or load up all the rechargeable batteries for several portable music players and portable game systems, and a bit extra for your flashlights.
I'd document these claims in detail and with rigor, but really, the frackin article started off with frackin hamsters and I just thought of a really dumb joke - see my next post.
The Roman Catholic system actually tends to reflect the ideas of quality, realism, and depth (granted - all often within the limits of certain moral biases, particularly about sex).
RC censors operate under rules where they are expected to look at West Side Story, recognize that it's based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, that the musical score is a skilled orchestral work and integral to the creation as a whole, and that there's an added message about racial and class intolerance that makes a number of profound moral points, and take such things into account in rating the film, while the current US system is expected to simply notice an underage romance is involved, and tack on some standardized points. Enough points for gang violence, knives being shown, and deaths and it's PG-13, a few more and its an R, and a "message" is often irrelevant to the final result.
You go right ahead, I'm patenting e-orange, e-red, ...
Yes, except for tense. We have already been making synthetic rubies and blue sapphires under laboratory conditions for at least 50 years now. Google for "synthetic ruby" if you dare.
If that's the case, the numbers will fall pretty close to the middle of the income spectrum, and it will look, at least superficially, like the RIAA isn't targeting any particular economic or ethnic class. Detailed statistical analysis may prove different, but it won't be simple enough to make a case to the general public, and all the RIAA needs to do is hire a good statistical analyst as an expert witness to tangle things up beyond sorting out in any countersuit.
If you're right, it would be better for anyone considering a class action suit to concentrate on such issues as what interogatives the RIAA sent to the plantiffs during the cases, or try to get someone inside the industry to leak some internal-use-only memoranda on their procedures or something along those lines.
However, it is still costing the RIAA more than they get back to follow up each case. The RIAA's model seems more focused on deterrence than actually profiting from extortion, so it would be interesting to start from the assumption that deterrence is their intent, figure out what sort of procedural systems they have evolved from that, and see how well they've covered themselves against the sort of bias claims I've mentioned in this thread.
Your points about "odd coincidences" in the cases you specifically remember are interesting, and I take them for worth more than just anomalies, but unless someone does the math, we'll never really know. I have noticed several possible patterns in the examples mentioned in the press, just as you have, but those are too easily explained away in court as flukes unless someone also has some overall numbers to back them up.
"don't bore me with your equivocation about how copyright infringement isn't theft"
If you think ALL the news media will treat any group presenting a claim about bias in RIAA actions as the equivalent of pirates, then don't bore me with your equivocation of calling them the News anymore instead of the Orwellian Newspeakers.
"Even if the distribution of plaintiffs agrees with the local income stats, they might still be targeting poor people by choosing poor locations to sue."
If they did that, the median income of the people they picked might match the local average, but it would fall well below the national average, so that's the fact you would want to present in the newspapers.
There's also other interesting ways to spin this. If they use such a method, Georgetown, Aspen, and various other rich locales might not show up at all in their choices, while Watts or the worst parts of Chicago might be way over represented. If there's a strong bias towards avoiding sueing those wealthy enough to fight the charge in court on the RIAA's part, it will show up, one way or the other.
One advantage I didn't mention in the first post, is if any reputable institution makes such a claim, the RIAA will doubtless want to claim that they are biased or their methodology is flawed. That's relatively easy in court to turn into an arguement that the government's own numbers are the flaw, or to shoot down by showing the study used a straight forward methodology and trusted the Fed's figures on poverty and median income. The RIAA won't get much cooperation from a Federal judge if they try to advance such a defense as biased federal figures.
"Does income correlate with willingness or ability to commit copyright infringement?"
Let the RIAA argue that there IS some bias introduced there if they want. Opposed organizations can argue whichever side the RIAA omits. If the RIAA claims that rich people don't bother to commit copyright violations as they can easily afford legal copies, the counter arguement is really poor people don't commit copyright violations as they can't afford good home computers and high speed access. Don't worry about arguements that wealthier people may tend to choose certain ISPs over others, because such arguements are too trivial to win cases, either in the courts or in the area of public opinion.
There are several thousand cases now to analyze. If the RIAA is actually selecting poorer than avarage plantiffs (as some here have alledged), this will show quickly in proper statistical analysis (plot the location of the plantiff on a map, look in the government's poverty index to see what the average inocome in that location is, assign points to an appropriate scale, i.e. 1 point/1,000 $ US).
If it's there, and can be statistically proven, the next step is to tell the media the RIAA is selectively targeting poor people. A good strong piece of evidence, like RIAA plantiffs averageing 20% below median income, deserves a nice simple "National Enquirer" type headline, like "RIAA out to crush the working class", don't you think? Offer the press a chance for one like that, and some of them will bite.
While you're at it you could analyze those plantiffs on ethnic lines if they are willing to share the data. If the RIAA has selectively targeted poor people, it would be very hard for them to avoid having selectively targeted minorities at the same time, although they could possibly have deliberately thrown out a percentage of minority cases to avoid the appearance. I'd suggest if this proves fruitful, rather than contacting the media directly with the allegation that the RIAA is selectively targeting black people, you let the NAACP bring the allegation, as in such case, there WILL be a class action countersuit filed, but it will have 22,000,000 members.
Of course, it's possible there is no consistant pattern. In this case, wait until a couple of months go by where the numbers of plantiffs that are poor or minority is statistically high, and then make the claim "In recent months, the RIAA has switched tactics, to selectively target poorer people."
According to the article, earlier results include those measured with "so called paraconical pendula". It's shocking to think that we have allowed ersatz paraconical pendula to be used in place of the genuine articles.
Mr. President, we must spend whatever is necessary to close the paraconical pendula gap.
"Anyone that's worked with security, databases or identity management should be well aware of the fact that certain key values occur in populations to the point of being meaningless."
You mean as if if the problem was Adulterers not Terrorists, and for some reason the government kept thinking all those "John Smith's" in the hotel registers were real names?