Three pieces of evidence. So long as windows uses a consolidated registry, every security violation that relies on the registry's existence has no analog on other systems. Linux, Snow Leopard, Google OS or whatever could become dozens of times more common and windows share could shrink to where Microsoft is the small minority vendor, and the count of registry exploits will remain disparate.
Ligaments will usually thicken up if you use the muscles, but there's a lag of about 4 to 9 months. The point where a ligament attaches to bone actually has to gain cross sectional area more than the rest of the ligament does. That will grow in most young adults, and probably grow somewhat even in older persons with the right exercise. Jack Lalanne claimed ligament growth eventually caught up even for people who started serious exercise in their 70's. So, my guess would be that this treatment could put people in a temporarily vulnerable zone, but with good sports medicine, that risk would be reasonable and eventually pass. Incidentally, there's some evidence even bone will thicken to match after about 2 to 3 years with the same exercise load. That's been reported by some bodybuilders including Frank Zane and Aaahnold, but is still controversial.
Fat people mostly have quite a bit of muscle in the legs and lower torso, because they have been building it moving their mass around, even if they are not very active. They don't tend towards muscle in the upper torso and arms. Going on a diet to lose weight usually results in loss of both fat and muscle mass. I've seem a few cases where a fat person managed to lose weight mostly by exercise, and it can be remarkable - i.e. a sedentary 260 lb. middle aged woman who could do 320 on the leg press machine from her first day at the gym. She didn't have a lot of endurance, dexterity, or upper body strength when she started, but legs? Yeah, she had those, and after eight months, she was down to 180, and could leg press over twice her weight, and kick higher than her head. I hope she's kept up with it since I saw her last, but even in the still chunky range, I'd estimate she was seriously lethal with those kicks if she ever needed to be.
I'm not so inclined to doubt. Recently, I ran across an auction catalog, and it had some antique glass fronted carved wood display cases in it. The difference between a typical set of these, and the specific set that was once in Cornelius Vanderbuilt's study holding his yachting trophies, is just about that ratio (a couple of hundred to 10,000). (Or so I'd judge by the typical antique store price vs their minimum opening bid). Sometimes, you get situations where only the top 10% of something looks to be worth anything at all, the top 1% is worth a lot more than 10 times that, and the very tip of the scale is stratospheric, and this may be one of them.
Comparing Chernobyl to any American commercial reactor and talking about what could happen, without mentioning the severe differences, is just like mentioning a prior dam failure, hinting at the imminent collapse of Boulder dam, and not mentioning the little detail that the prior dam was made of packed dirt and not concrete.
Whoops, it's Slashdot, better go with a car analogy:
It's like planting explosives under one make of car, claiming that model blows up more than another brand, and not mentioning the explosives part.
So what's the difference between film ending because of piracy and film ending because nobody has any spare income to afford entertainment? You want to sell 100 Million tickets in the US, better have at least 100 Million people with enough income to reasonably afford it. Means is more basic than intent. You can (maybe) change the minds of people who have intent to watch without paying, you can (maybe) convince them to buy your formula blockbuster without clocking in that predictable thrill-ride is an oxymoron, but you absolutely can't provide them with the means to buy a ticket and still make a profit.
Right now, the film industry is reaping the 'benefits' of real wages having remained static for most since the 1970's as taxes rose, savings declines, and credit moved from something good customers paid off quickly to a lifetime of working for the credit companies. The industry is far from the only one, but they get to blame the problems on pirates instead of looking at the other factors.
What about people who have some problem such as laggy connections and, not being too technically minded, make the jump in their minds to deep packet inspection being the hidden cause? Maybe deep packet inspection isn't even really slowing things down or glitching connections or whatever, but doesn't it sound like it would to the average person? What happens when these people think the real issue can be summed up as "This company is lying through their teeth to me", and not some technical explanation? So Virgin's most dumb but honest customers will be going to other ISPs? (And talking accordingly?)
And what about the people who decide they don't need high speed at all if they can't be a bandwidth hog? They aren't going to call support and say, "I'm a bandwidth hog and you probably are glad to get rid of me!", they're going to say something such as "My needs have decreased, and you want too much for the kind of service I need now." Virgin won't see their least valued customers leaving, they will see a mix of problem customers and others leaving.
Maybe over six months they lose 20% of their base. Half of that could be high demand, make problems users, great! But maybe the other half is bedrock customer base, moms and pops, and they are talking about how the company is like Sirius Cybernetics.
The deterrent effect just doesn't happen. Looking at actual death penalty convictions, there's so few cases where the prisoner has shown any ability to imagine what their life might be like a mere six months down the road, they just aren't capable of thinking, "Ten years from now, if I do X, I could end up getting a lethal injection like that guy.".
I don't see any way we could get the total time from arrest to execution down to six months in our legal system, and do anything remotely like justice. That's bad enough. But when so many of these cases can't even project six months ahead, any reasonable system of trial and punishment has zero deterrence.
We have a case just finishing up in my area. Multiple defendants tried separately, for two murders with lots of additional nastiness like rape and torture. Going by what the two defendants convicted so far have said in the televised trial footage. if a program had come on the TV showing someone convicted of the exact crime they were planning, and how it took less than a week to get from the trial, to the graphically televised three day execution by slow torture, they would have still done it. You could have a 99.9% conviction rate and rotting heads on spikes on every street corner these idiots walked past, and they still wouldn't believe it was going to eventually happen to them.
I'm not arguing for or against capital punishment, mind you, not taking a stand either way. I'm just saying a hope of deterrence shouldn't be why anyone decides to favor capital punishment, because the people who get it are just plain too stupid to deter.
To put it more simply. The icecaps can only melt until we are all out of ice. If they are absorbing some of the temperature rise, when they are all gone, the rise accelerates. The rain forests can only absorb some of the CO2 until we cut them all down, then it's oceanic algae blooms have to absorb it all, or maybe they can't.
Right, because all that carbon was laid down from sources that were all in the atmosphere at the exact same time. Those coal seams weren't laid down over millions of years, they were all built in an hour and fifteen minutes out of CO2 that was all in the air at the same time. I bow before your brilliant argument.
How does it stand to reason? Methane and cyanogen levels were enormously higher during the immediate post Hadean era, and remained somewhat high all the way to the precambrian. Does that say anything about modern life-forms tolerances for Cyanide? Oxygen levels were lower in the Cambrian, does that mean that modern life could get by just fine on 11% atmospheric O2? They reached 24% or so during the Jurassic. Does that mean modern forests wouldn't have massive wildfire problems if they rose that high again in your lifetime?
If you're going to throw around nebulous terms such as "the past" and "higher", don't you think you should know how long in the past, or how much higher, before you try to reason about it.
The word 'Gimp' is an insult, about on a level with 'Nigger', 'Kike', or 'Faggot', except it's aimed at the very group least likely to fight back. That's a reason.
If you knew this, you are a bully, who is now also a coward trying to pretend they didn't know it when called on it. And I mean real coward, not just AC. It's sniveling, it's loathsome, and if you ever grow the guts to express yourself in public that way, it will get you a punch in the face from the parents of many retarded or autistic kids out there.
If you didn't know this, either you are extremely clueless about a very common human situation, or English is about your fifth language.
I don't want to use software designed by either bullies or the terminally clueless. If I have anything to do with software adoption at a company (which believe it or not, I do), and you are that clueless, I know you could be equally clueless about keeping your promises, including any support contract you've signed, or you lie compulsively, or you have a seriously terminal intent to disrupt. None of these are what I want in a business relationship. My boss's boss picked Open Office and pushed aggressively for its adoption, and the company is now one of the early examples of OO's success in the enterprise, and the above is his position as well.
If Firefox was called Necrophile, and Safari was named Traitor, that would make your last point make sense. See the difference?
Morally wrong? Only so many apps will fit on a disk. There are always some that won't be included simply because of space. Ergo, by your argument, all distros are morally wrong because they haven't created the unlimited size Uber-DVD to distribute all possible good packages on. There are always limits imposed by nature itself, and those always create situations where choice is limited. The distributors have to pick and choose, and really, they have to consider how big different apps become, and whether that amount of space still justifies including them. How do you propose they avoid deciding that some apps have gone in the wrong direction, are becoming bloated, or just haven't kept up with what users want, as part of making this decision? Should they make a rule not to add any new apps no matter how useful simply to keep space for a particular old app? Do they look at, say, 23 Mb of space they still have available and say application X gets that much for their new version, and if they need more, we'll tell application Y it needs to give some up or be dropped, but we won't judge the quality of those changes for fear of labeling some program bloatware? Do you really mean to hold individual people responsible for the laws of nature in such ways?
If you sample power consumption several times an hour, 24 hours a day, for weeks, you have almost precisely zero chance of it being noticed. One person can do it, letting automation collect the data. It would be worth doing for a rather petty goal, as it costs you almost nothing. If you drive through a residential neighborhood several times an hour, 24 hours a day, for several weeks you have a very high chance someone will notice, and you need multiple accomplices to get some sleep, plus quite a bit of cash outlay. How is your 'lower tech' solution better again?
Which is why we should err on the side of caution. People saying this isn't a big deal are considering one or two simple scenarios and deciding on just that basis. It's just as possible that someone will figure out a maximal way to exploit this particular data, one that affects a great many people and has more serious consequences.
When people first became concerned over medical records privacy, DNA testing was still so expensive that it wasn't used by any state law enforcement, even in rape or murder cases. The federal government was the only entity likely to pay for full testing, and at that time was only interested in using the tests in a handful of cases such as possibly identifying deceased heads of state after explosive assassinations. People argued about what could go wrong if the wrong people got access to medical records, and every time someone brought up the DNA testing aspects, they were told "That's not a realistic scenario - no crook is going to spend millions of dollars to match DNA samples to these records". The US began changing its medical records laws with the idea that those laws didn't need to consider DNA issues, and the resulting laws were dated by the time they were ratified. We're seeing cracks in them now, as they weren't designed to take testing cheap enough that insurance companies might opt to use it routinely, into account.
Arguing that detailed power usage isn't that significant an information source, as it can't be used to cause serious harm, (for the poster's definition of serious), is spurious. All anyone can really honestly claim is "I have thought a bit, and I haven't come up with a misuse I think is practical and that is all that bad, yet.". That's different from "I've thought about it enough, and I've identified all the misuses possible, I know for certain which ones are implementable even by a serious, well trained and dedicated entity with tremendous resources, and this is safe."
Remember the film, Jurassic Park? They applied some simple math to make flocking behavior in their dino models look realistic. It works - just about everybody says the dinosaur flocking looks just like real flocking. Of course real biologists who have been trying to find the math behind real flocking have tested those equations the film makers used, and found some trivial little problem like you need to have faster than light telepathic communication between animal brains if you don't want the animals to get into a ridiculous gridlock once you add in some real environment modeling, but it sure looks like it's real flocking.
And I'm sure we'll get paramecium models or mitochondrion models, or whatever, which 'look just like' the real thing, but turn out to be built on math that has fundamental problems with the rest of reality and uses some cheap hack like omitting surface roughness or gravity to gloss over that part, many times before anyone gets an actual model. We'll see 'accurate' models of atomic nuclei that build all 13 stable elements (or all 1047). 'Accurate' models of natural selection that show only plants should evolve eyes will follow. Eventually, your sea slug will act just like a real one does when the liquid it swims in is molten Sodium, (but not, unfortunately, in water).
People will probably work some or most of these out. Accurate computer modeling of some events has happened, and many more will probably happen with advances in technology. Claiming that all of them will definitely work makes about as much sense as claiming all computer based aircraft models can safely skip the wind tunnel test stage of development.
Even outside the specific issue of transexual orientations.... Which seems more likely? 1. hormone mimicing substances will cause a largeish percentage of men to become well adjusted males with lower reproductive rates and some social norms we often consider feminine, but this won't screw up human breeding enough to cause anything as drastic as a population crash. A lack of aggression in males will have its positive side, and increased nurturing will be a significant one of them. 2. hormone mimicing substances will cause a largeish percentage of men to become very poorly adjusted males with lower reproductive rates and some fragmentary and mixed traits we often consider feminine, but those won't form a stable mental system for those unfortunates, and instead will result in men who simply can't fit in to ANY evolutionarily stable model of human social conduct. This in turn will screw up human breeding enough to cause a tremendous population crash even before it reaches levels where reproduction is physically blocked. The loss of desire to 'fraternise with the enemy' will make the 'war between the sexes' a genuinely violent business, much as it does in overcrowded rodent populations.
When I was a child of seven, my public librarian talked to me a bit, and gave me an adult card with a note to personnel that I was authorised to use the adult reading room, the music stacks, microfiche and all other facilities.
In high school, my swim team had to meet at the civic center pool about 1 PM to fit its schedule. Local people made the decision to move all of us to an 11 AM lunch, a decision that didn't need to be ratified by the superintendent of schools - in fact, it took only the team coach asking an assistant principal to set it up with the cafeteria staff, and they served 12 people an hour early to make it happen.
High school fencing was a club, (even though our club beat several college teams). We picked a schedule when the gym was empty, and had a couple of keys to it, which were carried at one point or another by just about everyone on the team, with no problems.
This was all 35 years or more ago. It seems totally absurd now to say practically every responsible adult I knew as a child bent 'the rules', knew which way to bend them, and it all worked pretty damned well, but that was the way of things.
You are aware Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon linguistics at Oxford, and wrote numerous papers on the Anglo-Saxon and earlier roots of just such words as Dwarf, aren't you. The quote you are characterising as fiction appears in his lecture notes to students and in substantially the same form in one of his scholarly publications. As one of the world's top half dozen leading experts in the field, it is to be hoped his instruction was not entirely fictional despite your claim.
'Lots of money' as in a few thousands in cash that will trigger a search based on the DEA's rules, and 'lots of money' as in mover and shaker who can easily afford good lawyers if hassled are so very different. Conflating the two does create a strawman, a purely hypothetical entity that you can substitute for real ones to have an easier time arguing your point. The people who travel with too much cash, and the people who make large donations to political campaigns and have their pictures taken with governors and presidents, are two overwhelmingly different groups with almost no overlap. Those of you who insist they belong together as one group, are, quite simply, wrong, and yes, it's a strawman argument to substitute the hypothetical person who has over a thousand in cash as also being the person who has the position and power to fight the TSA, and then claim that's what the original poster meant. Hell, it's practically a textbook example of a strawman attack. The moderations applied to Rookoon are therefore abusive, violations of the mod system, particularly the -1 troll on the above post.
The conservatives have spent how much on two wars? An honestly reported Defense budget, where costs such as medical care for wounded vets aren't shuffled over to HEW, makes military spending well more than 50% of the total. You could completely close all federal programs except prisons, war on drugs and defense, privatize everything there that you could, and you still have an incredibly bloated federal government at zero % liberalism.
And it was conservatives that rushed through the biggest single spending program ever, a bank bailout with no strings attached. The 'liberals' have spent less on this, taken more time for rational debate, and demanded more accountability. (And still ended up giving away our money to parasites and freeloaders, but at least at a slightly lower rate than your beloved conservatives).
You do know, don't you, that it's conservative drug war policy that drives over 90% of our foreign aid to South and Central America? See, when we give Colombia modern troop transport helicopters for anti-drug use, we have complaints from their neighbors that those choppers could be used for other activities, such as a nice little invasion, so we give the neighbors aid to buy more military hardware too, whether they have the same drug problems or not, until there's a balance of power restored. It's conservative mandated spending, and really spending driven by the DEA, but it gets blamed on the 'liberals', since it goes on the books as foreign aid, and 'everyone knows' that's them bleeding heart do-gooder types.
Education? No Child Left Behind is a conservative program. How much did it add to government controls and the tax and spend mentality? Has it worked?
Why are there now 17 federal agencies where there are firearms carrying agents (and yes that excludes the military)? Are liberals the ones giving out more guns to BATF, DEA, Dept. of the Interior, and so on, and how does that fit with getting government out of our lives?
It's the ISP's decision, for now. An ISP would have to decide to want common carrier status, set up its contracts so it could possibly legally qualify, and then present that claim to the government, including going to court if needed (where it becomes the court's decision). It's not the government's decision for now, because no part of the government is going to consider such a case as a hypothetical, only once a real ISP asks for it.
As you put it, ISPs don't really want that designation. It's not that "the system" has told them they can't have it, it's that they haven't asked, and I doubt that any will. OTOH, if complying with the DCMA to be shielded under its safe harbor rule becomes onerous enough, an ISP could decide common carrier protections are worth it.
And it's not like Bush had a Republican congress for most of both terms, right? And he didn't make that speech where he told congress immediate action was vitally necessary in under seven days or the whole economy was threatened with total collapse, did he? So let's, by all means, rewrite history to make it all the Democrat's fault.
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Three pieces of evidence. So long as windows uses a consolidated registry, every security violation that relies on the registry's existence has no analog on other systems. Linux, Snow Leopard, Google OS or whatever could become dozens of times more common and windows share could shrink to where Microsoft is the small minority vendor, and the count of registry exploits will remain disparate.
Ligaments will usually thicken up if you use the muscles, but there's a lag of about 4 to 9 months. The point where a ligament attaches to bone actually has to gain cross sectional area more than the rest of the ligament does. That will grow in most young adults, and probably grow somewhat even in older persons with the right exercise. Jack Lalanne claimed ligament growth eventually caught up even for people who started serious exercise in their 70's. So, my guess would be that this treatment could put people in a temporarily vulnerable zone, but with good sports medicine, that risk would be reasonable and eventually pass. Incidentally, there's some evidence even bone will thicken to match after about 2 to 3 years with the same exercise load. That's been reported by some bodybuilders including Frank Zane and Aaahnold, but is still controversial.
Fat people mostly have quite a bit of muscle in the legs and lower torso, because they have been building it moving their mass around, even if they are not very active. They don't tend towards muscle in the upper torso and arms. Going on a diet to lose weight usually results in loss of both fat and muscle mass. I've seem a few cases where a fat person managed to lose weight mostly by exercise, and it can be remarkable - i.e. a sedentary 260 lb. middle aged woman who could do 320 on the leg press machine from her first day at the gym. She didn't have a lot of endurance, dexterity, or upper body strength when she started, but legs? Yeah, she had those, and after eight months, she was down to 180, and could leg press over twice her weight, and kick higher than her head. I hope she's kept up with it since I saw her last, but even in the still chunky range, I'd estimate she was seriously lethal with those kicks if she ever needed to be.
All the 'E' and resulting dehydration is aging us fast - Another 50 year old who was 30 just a few weeks ago.
He said 'Arson' first, too! Come on Visigoths, get with the program - it's Rape, then Pillage! THEN Burn!
I'm not so inclined to doubt. Recently, I ran across an auction catalog, and it had some antique glass fronted carved wood display cases in it. The difference between a typical set of these, and the specific set that was once in Cornelius Vanderbuilt's study holding his yachting trophies, is just about that ratio (a couple of hundred to 10,000). (Or so I'd judge by the typical antique store price vs their minimum opening bid). Sometimes, you get situations where only the top 10% of something looks to be worth anything at all, the top 1% is worth a lot more than 10 times that, and the very tip of the scale is stratospheric, and this may be one of them.
Comparing Chernobyl to any American commercial reactor and talking about what could happen, without mentioning the severe differences, is just like mentioning a prior dam failure, hinting at the imminent collapse of Boulder dam, and not mentioning the little detail that the prior dam was made of packed dirt and not concrete.
Whoops, it's Slashdot, better go with a car analogy:
It's like planting explosives under one make of car, claiming that model blows up more than another brand, and not mentioning the explosives part.
So what's the difference between film ending because of piracy and film ending because nobody has any spare income to afford entertainment? You want to sell 100 Million tickets in the US, better have at least 100 Million people with enough income to reasonably afford it. Means is more basic than intent. You can (maybe) change the minds of people who have intent to watch without paying, you can (maybe) convince them to buy your formula blockbuster without clocking in that predictable thrill-ride is an oxymoron, but you absolutely can't provide them with the means to buy a ticket and still make a profit.
Right now, the film industry is reaping the 'benefits' of real wages having remained static for most since the 1970's as taxes rose, savings declines, and credit moved from something good customers paid off quickly to a lifetime of working for the credit companies. The industry is far from the only one, but they get to blame the problems on pirates instead of looking at the other factors.
What about people who have some problem such as laggy connections and, not being too technically minded, make the jump in their minds to deep packet inspection being the hidden cause? Maybe deep packet inspection isn't even really slowing things down or glitching connections or whatever, but doesn't it sound like it would to the average person? What happens when these people think the real issue can be summed up as "This company is lying through their teeth to me", and not some technical explanation? So Virgin's most dumb but honest customers will be going to other ISPs? (And talking accordingly?)
And what about the people who decide they don't need high speed at all if they can't be a bandwidth hog? They aren't going to call support and say, "I'm a bandwidth hog and you probably are glad to get rid of me!", they're going to say something such as "My needs have decreased, and you want too much for the kind of service I need now." Virgin won't see their least valued customers leaving, they will see a mix of problem customers and others leaving.
Maybe over six months they lose 20% of their base. Half of that could be high demand, make problems users, great! But maybe the other half is bedrock customer base, moms and pops, and they are talking about how the company is like Sirius Cybernetics.
The deterrent effect just doesn't happen. Looking at actual death penalty convictions, there's so few cases where the prisoner has shown any ability to imagine what their life might be like a mere six months down the road, they just aren't capable of thinking, "Ten years from now, if I do X, I could end up getting a lethal injection like that guy.".
I don't see any way we could get the total time from arrest to execution down to six months in our legal system, and do anything remotely like justice. That's bad enough. But when so many of these cases can't even project six months ahead, any reasonable system of trial and punishment has zero deterrence.
We have a case just finishing up in my area. Multiple defendants tried separately, for two murders with lots of additional nastiness like rape and torture. Going by what the two defendants convicted so far have said in the televised trial footage. if a program had come on the TV showing someone convicted of the exact crime they were planning, and how it took less than a week to get from the trial, to the graphically televised three day execution by slow torture, they would have still done it. You could have a 99.9% conviction rate and rotting heads on spikes on every street corner these idiots walked past, and they still wouldn't believe it was going to eventually happen to them.
I'm not arguing for or against capital punishment, mind you, not taking a stand either way. I'm just saying a hope of deterrence shouldn't be why anyone decides to favor capital punishment, because the people who get it are just plain too stupid to deter.
To put it more simply. The icecaps can only melt until we are all out of ice. If they are absorbing some of the temperature rise, when they are all gone, the rise accelerates. The rain forests can only absorb some of the CO2 until we cut them all down, then it's oceanic algae blooms have to absorb it all, or maybe they can't.
Right, because all that carbon was laid down from sources that were all in the atmosphere at the exact same time. Those coal seams weren't laid down over millions of years, they were all built in an hour and fifteen minutes out of CO2 that was all in the air at the same time. I bow before your brilliant argument.
How does it stand to reason?
Methane and cyanogen levels were enormously higher during the immediate post Hadean era, and remained somewhat high all the way to the precambrian. Does that say anything about modern life-forms tolerances for Cyanide? Oxygen levels were lower in the Cambrian, does that mean that modern life could get by just fine on 11% atmospheric O2? They reached 24% or so during the Jurassic. Does that mean modern forests wouldn't have massive wildfire problems if they rose that high again in your lifetime?
If you're going to throw around nebulous terms such as "the past" and "higher", don't you think you should know how long in the past, or how much higher, before you try to reason about it.
The word 'Gimp' is an insult, about on a level with 'Nigger', 'Kike', or 'Faggot', except it's aimed at the very group least likely to fight back. That's a reason.
If you knew this, you are a bully, who is now also a coward trying to pretend they didn't know it when called on it. And I mean real coward, not just AC. It's sniveling, it's loathsome, and if you ever grow the guts to express yourself in public that way, it will get you a punch in the face from the parents of many retarded or autistic kids out there.
If you didn't know this, either you are extremely clueless about a very common human situation, or English is about your fifth language.
I don't want to use software designed by either bullies or the terminally clueless. If I have anything to do with software adoption at a company (which believe it or not, I do), and you are that clueless, I know you could be equally clueless about keeping your promises, including any support contract you've signed, or you lie compulsively, or you have a seriously terminal intent to disrupt. None of these are what I want in a business relationship. My boss's boss picked Open Office and pushed aggressively for its adoption, and the company is now one of the early examples of OO's success in the enterprise, and the above is his position as well.
If Firefox was called Necrophile, and Safari was named Traitor, that would make your last point make sense. See the difference?
Morally wrong? Only so many apps will fit on a disk. There are always some that won't be included simply because of space. Ergo, by your argument, all distros are morally wrong because they haven't created the unlimited size Uber-DVD to distribute all possible good packages on. There are always limits imposed by nature itself, and those always create situations where choice is limited. The distributors have to pick and choose, and really, they have to consider how big different apps become, and whether that amount of space still justifies including them. How do you propose they avoid deciding that some apps have gone in the wrong direction, are becoming bloated, or just haven't kept up with what users want, as part of making this decision? Should they make a rule not to add any new apps no matter how useful simply to keep space for a particular old app? Do they look at, say, 23 Mb of space they still have available and say application X gets that much for their new version, and if they need more, we'll tell application Y it needs to give some up or be dropped, but we won't judge the quality of those changes for fear of labeling some program bloatware? Do you really mean to hold individual people responsible for the laws of nature in such ways?
If you sample power consumption several times an hour, 24 hours a day, for weeks, you have almost precisely zero chance of it being noticed. One person can do it, letting automation collect the data. It would be worth doing for a rather petty goal, as it costs you almost nothing. If you drive through a residential neighborhood several times an hour, 24 hours a day, for several weeks you have a very high chance someone will notice, and you need multiple accomplices to get some sleep, plus quite a bit of cash outlay. How is your 'lower tech' solution better again?
Which is why we should err on the side of caution. People saying this isn't a big deal are considering one or two simple scenarios and deciding on just that basis. It's just as possible that someone will figure out a maximal way to exploit this particular data, one that affects a great many people and has more serious consequences.
When people first became concerned over medical records privacy, DNA testing was still so expensive that it wasn't used by any state law enforcement, even in rape or murder cases. The federal government was the only entity likely to pay for full testing, and at that time was only interested in using the tests in a handful of cases such as possibly identifying deceased heads of state after explosive assassinations. People argued about what could go wrong if the wrong people got access to medical records, and every time someone brought up the DNA testing aspects, they were told "That's not a realistic scenario - no crook is going to spend millions of dollars to match DNA samples to these records". The US began changing its medical records laws with the idea that those laws didn't need to consider DNA issues, and the resulting laws were dated by the time they were ratified. We're seeing cracks in them now, as they weren't designed to take testing cheap enough that insurance companies might opt to use it routinely, into account.
Arguing that detailed power usage isn't that significant an information source, as it can't be used to cause serious harm, (for the poster's definition of serious), is spurious. All anyone can really honestly claim is "I have thought a bit, and I haven't come up with a misuse I think is practical and that is all that bad, yet.". That's different from "I've thought about it enough, and I've identified all the misuses possible, I know for certain which ones are implementable even by a serious, well trained and dedicated entity with tremendous resources, and this is safe."
Remember the film, Jurassic Park? They applied some simple math to make flocking behavior in their dino models look realistic. It works - just about everybody says the dinosaur flocking looks just like real flocking. Of course real biologists who have been trying to find the math behind real flocking have tested those equations the film makers used, and found some trivial little problem like you need to have faster than light telepathic communication between animal brains if you don't want the animals to get into a ridiculous gridlock once you add in some real environment modeling, but it sure looks like it's real flocking.
And I'm sure we'll get paramecium models or mitochondrion models, or whatever, which 'look just like' the real thing, but turn out to be built on math that has fundamental problems with the rest of reality and uses some cheap hack like omitting surface roughness or gravity to gloss over that part, many times before anyone gets an actual model. We'll see 'accurate' models of atomic nuclei that build all 13 stable elements (or all 1047). 'Accurate' models of natural selection that show only plants should evolve eyes will follow. Eventually, your sea slug will act just like a real one does when the liquid it swims in is molten Sodium, (but not, unfortunately, in water).
People will probably work some or most of these out. Accurate computer modeling of some events has happened, and many more will probably happen with advances in technology. Claiming that all of them will definitely work makes about as much sense as claiming all computer based aircraft models can safely skip the wind tunnel test stage of development.
Even outside the specific issue of transexual orientations....
Which seems more likely?
1. hormone mimicing substances will cause a largeish percentage of men to become well adjusted males with lower reproductive rates and some social norms we often consider feminine, but this won't screw up human breeding enough to cause anything as drastic as a population crash. A lack of aggression in males will have its positive side, and increased nurturing will be a significant one of them.
2. hormone mimicing substances will cause a largeish percentage of men to become very poorly adjusted males with lower reproductive rates and some fragmentary and mixed traits we often consider feminine, but those won't form a stable mental system for those unfortunates, and instead will result in men who simply can't fit in to ANY evolutionarily stable model of human social conduct. This in turn will screw up human breeding enough to cause a tremendous population crash even before it reaches levels where reproduction is physically blocked. The loss of desire to 'fraternise with the enemy' will make the 'war between the sexes' a genuinely violent business, much as it does in overcrowded rodent populations.
When I was a child of seven, my public librarian talked to me a bit, and gave me an adult card with a note to personnel that I was authorised to use the adult reading room, the music stacks, microfiche and all other facilities.
In high school, my swim team had to meet at the civic center pool about 1 PM to fit its schedule. Local people made the decision to move all of us to an 11 AM lunch, a decision that didn't need to be ratified by the superintendent of schools - in fact, it took only the team coach asking an assistant principal to set it up with the cafeteria staff, and they served 12 people an hour early to make it happen.
High school fencing was a club, (even though our club beat several college teams). We picked a schedule when the gym was empty, and had a couple of keys to it, which were carried at one point or another by just about everyone on the team, with no problems.
This was all 35 years or more ago. It seems totally absurd now to say practically every responsible adult I knew as a child bent 'the rules', knew which way to bend them, and it all worked pretty damned well, but that was the way of things.
You are aware Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon linguistics at Oxford, and wrote numerous papers on the Anglo-Saxon and earlier roots of just such words as Dwarf, aren't you. The quote you are characterising as fiction appears in his lecture notes to students and in substantially the same form in one of his scholarly publications. As one of the world's top half dozen leading experts in the field, it is to be hoped his instruction was not entirely fictional despite your claim.
'Lots of money' as in a few thousands in cash that will trigger a search based on the DEA's rules, and 'lots of money' as in mover and shaker who can easily afford good lawyers if hassled are so very different. Conflating the two does create a strawman, a purely hypothetical entity that you can substitute for real ones to have an easier time arguing your point. The people who travel with too much cash, and the people who make large donations to political campaigns and have their pictures taken with governors and presidents, are two overwhelmingly different groups with almost no overlap. Those of you who insist they belong together as one group, are, quite simply, wrong, and yes, it's a strawman argument to substitute the hypothetical person who has over a thousand in cash as also being the person who has the position and power to fight the TSA, and then claim that's what the original poster meant. Hell, it's practically a textbook example of a strawman attack. The moderations applied to Rookoon are therefore abusive, violations of the mod system, particularly the -1 troll on the above post.
The conservatives have spent how much on two wars? An honestly reported Defense budget, where costs such as medical care for wounded vets aren't shuffled over to HEW, makes military spending well more than 50% of the total. You could completely close all federal programs except prisons, war on drugs and defense, privatize everything there that you could, and you still have an incredibly bloated federal government at zero % liberalism.
And it was conservatives that rushed through the biggest single spending program ever, a bank bailout with no strings attached. The 'liberals' have spent less on this, taken more time for rational debate, and demanded more accountability. (And still ended up giving away our money to parasites and freeloaders, but at least at a slightly lower rate than your beloved conservatives).
You do know, don't you, that it's conservative drug war policy that drives over 90% of our foreign aid to South and Central America? See, when we give Colombia modern troop transport helicopters for anti-drug use, we have complaints from their neighbors that those choppers could be used for other activities, such as a nice little invasion, so we give the neighbors aid to buy more military hardware too, whether they have the same drug problems or not, until there's a balance of power restored. It's conservative mandated spending, and really spending driven by the DEA, but it gets blamed on the 'liberals', since it goes on the books as foreign aid, and 'everyone knows' that's them bleeding heart do-gooder types.
Education? No Child Left Behind is a conservative program. How much did it add to government controls and the tax and spend mentality? Has it worked?
Why are there now 17 federal agencies where there are firearms carrying agents (and yes that excludes the military)? Are liberals the ones giving out more guns to BATF, DEA, Dept. of the Interior, and so on, and how does that fit with getting government out of our lives?
It's the ISP's decision, for now. An ISP would have to decide to want common carrier status, set up its contracts so it could possibly legally qualify, and then present that claim to the government, including going to court if needed (where it becomes the court's decision). It's not the government's decision for now, because no part of the government is going to consider such a case as a hypothetical, only once a real ISP asks for it.
As you put it, ISPs don't really want that designation. It's not that "the system" has told them they can't have it, it's that they haven't asked, and I doubt that any will. OTOH, if complying with the DCMA to be shielded under its safe harbor rule becomes onerous enough, an ISP could decide common carrier protections are worth it.
And it's not like Bush had a Republican congress for most of both terms, right? And he didn't make that speech where he told congress immediate action was vitally necessary in under seven days or the whole economy was threatened with total collapse, did he? So let's, by all means, rewrite history to make it all the Democrat's fault.