You certainly are tending to throw around the word terrorism, i.e. "economic terrorism". That's particularly useful in a case like the Boston Tea Party, where physical damages themselves were limited to the tea itself and one (1) padlock - no humans injured or even briefly restrained. If that caused anybody to experience real terror, they were a Nervous Nelly, so of course, we're left with economic terrorism instead of the real kind. Then there's "you cross the line that distinguishes between "peaceably assembling" and "committing an overt act of terrorism."". There's no line there, instead there is a tremendously broad gap, wherein some acts may not even be criminal at all, and others be criminal but still fall far, far short of terrorism. You go on to give breaking noise ordinances and disobeying the restrictions of your assembly permit as examples of terrorist acts. To you, I say "BOO!", doubtless causing you to soil yourself in blind unreasoning fear.
And if the factions in Iraq are truly intent on civil war, they'll wait as long as needed to have one.
In the Balkans, the USSR sat heavily on efforts to start ethnic cleansing, civil wars, and all related struggles for most of the 20th century. Except for Greece and Yugoslavia they were damned near totally controlled as part of the Warsaw pact. Yugoslavia had plenty of its own bad behavior, even with a need to build ties with the west if it was to remain independent of the Soviet Union, and in later years, when Albania tried to go its own way, it was effectively forced to ally with the PRC, who similarly discouraged ethnic struggles and internal warfare.
Despite this externally imposed 60 to 80 year cooling down period, look at how much things boiled up as soon as the lid was off the kettle. And in the longer perspective of history examples abound where people keep resurecting hundreds of years old grudges. How many U.S. voters realize that 'stay the course' is likely to be a more than 80 year commitment, just judging by European history? Add in the behavior displayed by several Arab nations where they still invoke the crusades as though they were yesterday, and 80 years is a comparative eyeblink.
What scares me is I mentioned the meetings with the press and common people the Nixon administration faked, and less than 48 hours later, FEMA very blatantly fakes a press conference. I was going by the CIA's huge budget increases for 'domestic publicity modification' over the last few years, but here's a specific example, practically dropping out of the sky into my lap to prove my point.
That's precisely why Parallel Universe enter into it. Nothing has to determine one set of values for the constants if there exists an infinite number of universes that encompass all possible values and combinations. Most of these universes would be extremely short lived, as so many of these combinations would be unable to support an expansion. For every universe that might inflate and last for billions or trillions of years, there might well be something like 1x10^73 universes that perish in picoseconds as gravity crushes them back into their own big bangs. For every universe that can sustain the complexity needed for life, there might be 10^138 ones that can't possibly. Of course take away an an infinite number of short lived, non-life-bearing universes from infinity and you are still left with an infinite number of universes.
One model for a "random constant generator" is the idea that black holes pinch off from their parent universe and the contents undergo cosmic inflation and form whole new universes. That idea was fairly interesting to cosmologists back when this Parallel Universe thing began, not so likely in their estimation now. There are other models involving virtual particle fluctuations in the vacuum or collapse of a something called a false vacuum that are more popular today.
Definitely, there are some models of God that would imply He's just as unobservable, at least within the Scientific Method, as parallel universes. I'm not sure I agree with them though. For example there's the argument that God, being all powerful, can fudge any experimental results as He desires. This sounds reasonable, but think about what it implies. For example, if an alien species exists with say, 50x the neurons in their brains as humans have, they could overwhelmingly likely trick us into observing whatever they want, so aliens much smarter than humans would be an untestable theory to explain any phenomenon whatsoever. The same would apply to aliens that have had a technological civilization for a great deal longer than we have. How much smarter or more developed do aliens have to be before there's absolutely no chance we can study them in any way they don't want us to? How much before doing science on them's extremely unlikely to work even if it's still theoretically possible? Taken to an an extreme, this principle would make it unscientific for an anatomist to think he could learn anything from dissecting Einstein's brain unless he was as smart as Einstein, but most of us would assume it fails somewhere short of that point. But where?
It's become the de-facto assumption that God can't be treated as just another legitimate hypothesis, but as far as I know, the idea that there might be aliens either much smarter or much more technologically advanced than we are is not considered unscientific on the same grounds. If we're going to treat God as a special case, then (to paraphrase Dr. Sagan) why not treat the universe, or SETI, or any other subject as a special case?
Dr. Guth (who originated the inflationary model that's becoming the new standard model) has said that the idea parellel universe could ever interact with this one (to be observed) is a "loony science fiction fan idea, not real science". Several people doing string theory have said similar things, and it's a basic assumption of Brane theory that an observation would involve destroying all the organization of both universes, in a wave of anihilation propagating at the speed of light (so technically you could observe it, but you won't be around long enough for your nervous system to record it, let alone for peer review). Most of the professionals popularizing the field seem to mean parallel in much the manner of parallel lines in Euclidean geometry, that is, they NEVER meet. Admittedly, the people actually doing the work have more mixed opinions on that analogy.
For one, Dr. Hawking has said, since "Brief History", that he doesn't know if they could in principle be observed or not, although he leans to them being masked in a manner much like black hole singularities. He's also not sure but what the theory doesn't really need to predict parallel universes to function. That's something like what he was aiming at in postulating an imaginary time axis in the first place. However, his caution is still rather the exception.
No, I said some scientists quite deliberately argue that testability is no longer a criteria for whether a prediction is scientific. They have supported including these predictions as scientific theories while explicitly acknowledging they are untestable. They have also argued in effect that Occam's Razor is not a logical principle, although most of them will hem and haw if pressed on that point.
In addition, there is no false dichotomy here. This is based on the exact statements of people such as Sagan, Guth and Hawking, who have said repeatedly and in dozens of sources that these values absolutely must be randomly determined, even though the math then leads inexorably to that infinite sheath of untestable predictions. Hawking himself has admitted to this being a mistaken assumption, and formally apologized for it. Claiming that what I have proposed is a false dichotomy is the same as claiming something can be not random and simultaneously not non-random.
But go ahead, reduce everything I said to a wildly distorted sound-bite and then try to refute that, if it's easier for you.
But that's just what literally thousands of scientists have avoided doing when it comes to creation itself (not nearly all of them, but a surprising number of the more vocal ones).
The current cosmological models (those close to THE STANDARD MODEL) assume that many fundamental constants are randomly determined in the pre-inflationary period. As a result, they predict that there must be an infinite number of parallel universes. There is no observational evidence for these universes - the only reason they theoretically exist is that the theory says initial values for such things as the fine structure constant (alpha), the cosmological constant, Planck's constant etc. MUST be random, and if this is so, the alternate universes simply MUST exist. Any theory proposed that says these values may be determined non-randomly is considered to deviate greatly from the standard model on that count alone.
Now, I'd be rather more comfortable if more of these same scientists were saying "We don't know if the values are randomly created at the start or if there is something hidden that fixes these values, and we don't make any predictions about unobservable phenomina." Unfortunately, while there are plenty of Cosmologists who are saying just that, the overwhelming majority of people who don't actually have a degree in Cosmology but claim to be spokespeople for the scientific community because they have some other degree (i.e. Dr. Sagan, whose work was in planetology and Xeno-biology, not astrophysics or cosmology , Dr. Dawkins, whose work is in Molecular Biology and Memetics) are saying they know, and that the way they know is "Science!".
As for me, if I have to choose between believing in a) just one unobserved but in principle observable God or b) an infinite number of unobservable even in principle parallel universes, I must pick a). I'd really rather not pick at all, but something that makes an unlimited number of self-lableled untestable predictions is simply not a scientific theory at all.
Plus Science uses certain methods of logic, but those are not, themselves scientific. Occam's razor for example, is a phenomenally useful tool, but it's not science, rather it's part of a broader logical tradition that greatly predates the scientific method.
Science is not something which is totally self creating, self sustaining, and able to bring itself into existence from nothing by its own fiat. Rather, it's built on older pillars of thought. As you point out there cannot be a scientific proof that the scientific method itself, done correctly, has to produce true, accurate, or non-contradictory results. It's a non-scientific belief, one that proceeds from certain logical inferences, but logic and science are not the same thing.
Similarly, not only is the belief that the universe is intelligible something outside of science itself, but science has made many of us doubt that the universe is necessarily intelligible, at least to a merely human brain. Intelligible in principle but not necessarily in practice.
Many of the greatest arguments that the universe is a Cosmos, organized under a single set of universal rules, as opposed to a Chaos, with no fundamental ordering principles, are arguments from philosophy, and specifically religious philosophy.
Probably if Nixon had stalled for a time and then admitted some people in his committee to reelect had gone off on their own, and claimed he would clean it up, he would have been left to serve out his term. Nixon had several strikes against him that increased the seriousness of Watergate. 1. He was managing an unpopular war. 2. He'd claimed to have some secret plans that he couldn't reveal to fix the US's problems. There was a real spike in claims that the public would just have to trust its Executive branch, as so many things had to be kept secret. After 4+ years, more and more people were questioning why his administration couldn't reveal at least some more details. 3. He was arranging meetings with carefully picked members of the public and press, and trying to spin it so that these looked like spontaneous encounters where he had to field tough questions. That claim too was unraveling. 4. Corruption in his administration was known to extend to Agnew. It's hard to claim you were ignorant of acts by minor functionaries when one of them is your 2nd in command.
So there's two main differences between the Nixon administration and this one. 1. The press isn't asking the same kind of tough questions they asked Nixon. 2. The Vice President hasn't been charged with anything yet (probably because the press isn't asking tough questions there either).
You can clearly see the human brain has some compartmentalization, with structures that seem superficially the same as older structures underlying more moder ones. What takes more analysis is to see where the older structures simply have to be retrofitted with adaptations that make them deeply compatible with the newer ones.
For example, human speech probably evolved over the last million years or less (I'm being generous by most biologists opinions - now that the best estimate for a common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees has been pushed back to 7 million years, a full million for speech no longer seems like it's pushing the available total time, but there are plenty of evolutionary biologists who would stick with estimates as short as 200,000 years). In the newer brain, complex centers built up, allowing simpler proto-speech, with only protonouns or command sounds, to incorporate modifiers such as clear verb-noun distinctions, and eventually tensed verbs, as well as adjectives, adverbs and such. All human language ends up with things in common, because they are hardwired.
What's not as obvious is that the very most primitive centers of the brain had to be modified, so that breathing could better facilitate speech. The human ability to use the last bit of air in ones lungs to gasp out a warning is a small demonstration of how one of our deepest brain structures evolved quite a bit in recent times. Those structures were only recently found, after being predicted by the argument I just gave and others. There are many other cases like them, but these things don't change the large scale appearance of the older brain enough to be at all obvious before actual electrical mapping of the living brain was developed.
Essentially, whether this is a 'patchwork' is a question of which methods we use to study the brain.
You have no idea who he is, do you? He really is a world class expert in this subject. It's like you just read an article about Einstein and said "this 'famous physicist' seems...".
This man managed to fake the qualifications to pass as a commercial airline pilot, and drew a paycheck for it, for several years, got certified on new planes, etc. (he was 15 when he started this). Then he did the same thing as a fake doctor, practiced medicine, got on a major hospital's board certified physicians list, and again drew his paycheck for years, and so on. All while simultaneously juggling half a dozen other scams that stole literally millions from institutions such as Wells Fargo, American Express, etc. back when millions was real money.
Your 'not actually drawn in crayon' line is exceptionally off base, as he actually synthesized the special inks used for printing 'magnetic' checks, had a complete list of sources for paper stocks used by various financial institutions (and could identify them on sight) and has demonstrated that he can duplicate all the special inks used right up to the current generation of U.S. currency. There are plastic bars running across US money now, because it's one thing he had a great deal of trouble forging with just common civil resources. He also knew every time delay in verification for checks, where the borders between different financial regions and districts were, and how to use all of it to keep himself from getting caught. Yes, he finally slipped up, but only after getting away with literally hundreds or thousands of times as much as Mitnick or Poulson.
Because he did most of his crimes as a minor, he served only a few years, and ended up being hired to show the various institutions how he did it once he got out.
So an association of businesses just invoked the "All I said was "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?"" defense to justify themselves, and now a bunch of mere peasant slashdotters are pointing up how they are acting like a historical tyrant because they're too dumb to realize the king has a divine right to oppress them?
It sounds fantastic, but I almost believe this story. Paying someone just $15,000 and thinking it would both make a major dent in their problems and get the kind of service they would need is all of a piece with 'living in a dream world'. The pattern fits - the MPAA has shown in other actions that they would think it's smart to spend lots on politicians, but hire somebody technical with the promise a good job and a pay off in chump change. Look at the small companies they have picked to implement various DRM schemes, and how easily those schemes have failed.
In unrelated news, NASA has hired New Jersey laundrymat owner Marco Delgrepio to create a permanent lunar colony. For now, they're only offering him $15,000, but if he just beats some invading space aliens by uploading a virus from his apple powerbook, he'll get a car. It's a really nice car.
But the demand is going to vary by flight, just as the demand for a flight itself varies. The airlines have been unable to run all flights with 100% full seats, and that alone will affect how many people will pay for this service. There's no magic point where most customers will reliably think they got their money's worth. One time, the customer will be paying extra on a half full flight where everyone gets their baggage quickly anyway, and if he's 25th in line to take advantage of the premium offer, see no real benefit. The next time, the customer will be on a packed flight, extra people will take advantage of the service because the delays look likely to be longer, and he still won't see any net gain.
The company can't just charge more per unit and make the same money, because the demand for the extra service is far more elastic than the demand for air travel itself. Double the price, and you don't get half the customers, but some number far less than half. The optimal set-point for short term profit is well within the zone that produces long term dissatisfaction, and costs you profits overall.
If someone is a stockholder, and plans to hold the airline for the long term, then fire whomever suggested this idiocy, and do it with the claim his extreme incompetence justifies not paying out on any golden parachute clause he may have. If someone is a stockholder and plans to loot and dump the company, then by all means they should continue - this is a very good part of such a scheme.
So, IOW, we've elected a bunch of spineless Senators.
Worse, we've elected a bunch of senators who expect their party to gain all the powers Bush has usurped. I'm actually leaning just a trifle towards Democrat of late because there have been at least some real efforts to reign in the abuses, and we have a few true statesmen (of either gender) up there, but it looks like the party as a whole has decided to keep everything Bush is about to leave them.
"People are always so keen to argue the finer points and wording of the law if it lets them carry on taking other peoples stuff for free, but when your house gets burgled, and the guy gets off with a technicality, are you equally anal about defining guilt?"
No, when my house was burgled, the perp sold one of my stereo components at a flea market, and I'm proud to say I did just what you advocate - I nagged the cops until they prosecuted the college student who bought it and it cost him so much he had to drop out. I agree with you totally, figuring he was probably just an innocent bystander would have been anal, and the only non-anal definition is "they're all guilty, castrate them all with a dull spoon!" We never caught the burglar, but we sent somebody elss to jail for something at least vaguely related, so justice was done, totally non-anally. Thank goodness hangin' judge Bob agreed with me.
You just sincerely defined high standards for protecting innocent people as anal and used a tremendously fictitious example to support it (When was the last burglary case you actually heard of where the law let the criminal go free on a technicality? Burglary? It's a well established area of law, where several states have recently adopted laws letting you flat out kill the criminal in defense of your property - what are you claiming is a mere technicality?). I reckon the site might have made money on ads, and its business model definitely seems to have been to attract viewers with links to outside content. I don't yet know if they preferred copyrighted content or not, or if they just ignored copyright issues, or not, just as I don't know if they made a real effort to take down infringing links or made only a token effort. Things like that should come out at a trial.
I also don't know if they broke a law yet or not. There's a real difference between providing easy access to (other people's) copyrighted content, and making a criminal's task easier merely as an inadvertent consequence. If I teach your burglar to drive, I've increased the number of houses he can get to - is that somehow accessory to burglary? Helping people find a local cocaine dealer for the purpose of buying his drugs is a conspiracy, but having taught that dealer's high school chemistry class isn't, and helping someone find him for some other reason isn't likely either, and that's not a technicality, it's common sense. It seems obvious to me that the law in question doesn't say "Providing easy access to copyrighted content is illegal." It probably runs several pages, at least. The "especially if you don't..." part definitely isn't law - the DMCA says something more like "especially if you don't comply with the detailed take-down procedure when the owner follows it.", and the DMCA is definitely a lot longer than a paragraph - guess those extra 13 pages are all just technicalities. Or do you know for a fact that the British equivalent is a real short law with no 'technicalities' included?
Considering there are entire alt.binaries... groups that have nothing but legitimate content, shutting them down on the basis of starting with "alt.binaries" looks like prior restraint, or for a private organization, a chilling effect on first amendment rights.
I suppose that a few of the radio shows in alt.binaries.british.old.time.radio might be still under copyright, but most have doubtless expired, and the very word british in the group's name ought to be a clue as to an American organization's legal standing. There's a binaries group for discussing Scientology - something like alt.binaries.junk.religion.by.dead.sf.author, or similar. Or take alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.1920's - is that full of still copyrighted content? Marvel or DC may have standing to sue somebody relating to groups distributing old comics, but how on earth does the RIAA have any authority to get involved in that situation? What RIAA content gets distributed in any alt.binaries....nasa group, or any of several alt.binaries groups with linux in their names? How could the RIAA justify including such groups in a ban on the whole type?
If the RIAA has legitimate rights here, they still ought to be limited to specific groups that are at least mostly full of still copyrighted, RIAA member owned content. It seems like if the RIAA actually uses the alt.binaries category as a whole in its filings, any person could come forward as a friend of the court and give a list of literally hundreds of usenet alt.binaries groups that have nothing to do with the RIAA's member's products and thus the RIAA would be shooting themselves in the foot to ask for such broad restraints.
(Several terms above are left uncapitalized that normally should be treated as proper nouns or acronyms (British, NASA, etc.) - that's not me, that's just how usenet works).
All you have to do is show there there is some reason for you to believe they are legit.
Which is one reason why Usenet related infringement should be a very tough sell to a jury for the RIAA.
There are over a dozen major top level groupings such as rec. (for recreation), that make up the Usenet domains, and lots of slightly more minor ones like the microsoft.foo.bar groups. Of these, only a small percentage of the alt. groups are likely to have any infringing content at all. There are alt.binaries groups by the thousands which archive all totally legitimate content. Even a group as esoteric as alt.binaries.fractal.art may hold 300,000 posts on a long retention server, all overwhelmingly likely to be from people who own their own work and are distributing it legitimately.
Against these, there are some groups that may have some mislabeled work - i.e. I download from an alt. stock photos group frequently, and much of what's posted there has attached model releases, creator's permissions, and legal paperwork included as needed, but conceivably, not 100% of the pictures are actually stock, not every claim to have a model release for stock photos with a human subject is true, and so there could be something. If there is, it's overwhelmingly rare. I should be subject to the same legal standards there as for any other source of stock photos - that is, just using that source should not make it any more likely I've intentionally violated something than if I buy a CD of stock photos from a commercial source.
Finally, there's some groups that are specifically set up to hold wares, etc. A small fraction of the total groups, trivially small, probably less than 0.5 % overall by name. I'm sure some of them get a relative lot of traffic by number of posts, and since movies and music are generally huge files, by volume, but there are so many other groups, including so many legitimate binary groups, that traffic will always be a minority of posts, and is probably always going to be a minority of the actual by volume bits moving through usenet, even if a bunch of people start posting full DVDs.
I would happily demonstrate for the RIAA all the steps needed to download such an item using the most commonly used newsgroup software (still overwhelmingly Outlook Express), assemble all the pieces and do a huge lot of error correction to replace missing or garbled parts, but by the time I could show a jury how it was done, the jurors would all have died of boredom, the CD or whatever would be out of copyright, the plaintiff's great grand children would have great grandchildren of their own, and probably the sun would have already become a red giant. I'm wondering if the RIAA really thinks usenet piracy is all that widespread, because there would just about have to be a commercial usenet program that has sold, say, 300 Million copies if this were true. Assembling a 5 part small PDF in OE is an exercise in pain management, and most usenet servers will lose one part in five so it's likely to be futile anyway. Using OE for an MP3 that might be 80 parts or so would be a cheap alternative to beating yourself senseless with a rake. Using it for a full DVD that might be 10,000 parts would be a lifetime commitment to the rake. As far as I know, dedicated usenet software is a tiny niche market, and there are no coders reporting 300 thousand sales, or for that matter 30,000, let alone 300 million. Is this problem 1/1,000th as big as the RIAA is making it sound?
There's also some stupid, joke newsgroups, i.e. "alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk or alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork" that have no traffic at all normally, and some of these sometimes get used to hide wares, but this isn't like broadcasting the wares, as only a very small group of people would know when such a group was being used for storage. and no one else would think of looking there. I'd love to see a RIAA lawyer read the name of such a group with a straight face and explain why they ever looked there for the infringement.
The RICO act is found under Title 18, which is where the government normally puts Federal criminal law. It's pretty fair to argue in general that anything in Title 18 is supposed to be focused on criminal acts, not applied broadly to a mixture of criminal and civil cases.
Congress included mail and wire fraud as applicable crimes in RICO's definition. They didn't include what's frequently called law fraud, which is probably how we should best classify the acts in this case. Wire and Mail fraud have been interpreted very broadly in a number of previous cases, both RICO and non, and so they will probably stretch to fit again, but it may not be a natural fit. It's somewhat like the charge of Kidnapping. Kidnapping has been used when a victim was moved just a short distance, say from one building to another on the same block, but that's not how the law was originally envisioned and it sometimes appears to be selectively applied when the prosecutor wants to add charges, or the base crime appears loathsome and abominable to the public.
Because of this, a number of recent RICO cases have set new limits for when RICO can apply to what start out as normal civil cases - of interest are:
* Evans v. City of Chicago, 434 F.3d 916 (7th Cir. 2006)
This cases set some standards for how serious an injury to business or property needed to be before the damages should be called irrecoverable, as that word applied to RICO.
* Odom v. Microsoft Corp., 486 F.3d 541 ( 9th Cir. 2007)
This case concerned the distinctions between enterprise activities and racketeering activities, and obviously is particularly applicable to another Microsoft case. Microsoft may invoke some of these distinctions as a means of claiming their intent was to comply all along with existing law.
* United States v. Daidone, 471 F.3d 371 (2d Cir. 2006)
This case offers a number of relatedness tests that have become more commonly used in subsequent cases.
You could use the thing to run any light; or better yet charge a small battery so you have power on demand.
I got a couple of battery re-chargers for AA - C and 9 volt, and started recharging for all my flashlights, MP3 players, and such a few years ago. Last year, I rigged them to a small solar array, so those apps are now completely off the grid. I cold probably have used a very small wind turbine just as well, or an adaptation of a widget like the one in the article. With a good supply of batteries, I can afford to wait a bit for a sunny day, so solar's what I went with. I doubt I'm saving the environment much, if at all, given manufacturing costs of the devices, but I keep seeing the whole idea dismissed on the basis of that one argument about ecological fitness, or related argeuments about scaling.
Meanwhile, if the local power grid goes down for a day or three, I have some things which will still run, including a bit of light and an emergency radio.
It's like another, 1,000 year older tech adaptation. I also have a fireplace in my house. I don't heat with it on any regular basis, but I have a hinge mounted, cast iron widget with a hook on the end that can swing over the fire, so I can cook over it pretty expediously. The fireplace is never going to be an energy efficient way of routine heating for millions of people now using gas or electric heat. It doesn't fix any of the current problems related to old infrastructure, global warming, and overpopulation. Scaling arguments are actually negative (if we all go back to burning wood, we'll screw up the environment more, not less), but my fireplace will keep a few people warm or a very cold night without power, and even give them some hot soup or cocoa. If we do have a lengthy outage in the winter, The chimney's clean, I have a couple of ricks of wood already cut, and an axe if I need more, and we'll probably not just manage for ourselves, but put up the little old lady across the street on our couch, take some hot soup to another neighbor or two, and so on. Plus the radios mean I'll know what sort of problem it is early, and can plan. I'll know if the problem is expected to last long enough that I'd better conserve the chainsaw for real emergencies, etc.
I'm not even sure but what that IS a potential huge net ecological savings. People who cope on their own if the big, gridded systems go down aren't as likely to be a drain on emergency services. What's the carbon footprint of a helicopter rescue operation?
I'm starting to think scaling arguments are mostly rubbish anyway. Whenever we start addressing scaling, we're talking about getting up to sizes where someone can centralize the production, and rent services to the common people. A stable, long term sustainable, ecologically sound system shouldn't assume centralized control is desirable, in fact, all other things being equal, it's a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but once we turn all that rock into Computronium, then she will love us!
I like it: "Stealization". Let's spredulate this meme.
You certainly are tending to throw around the word terrorism, i.e. "economic terrorism".
That's particularly useful in a case like the Boston Tea Party, where physical damages themselves were limited to the tea itself and one (1) padlock - no humans injured or even briefly restrained. If that caused anybody to experience real terror, they were a Nervous Nelly, so of course, we're left with economic terrorism instead of the real kind.
Then there's "you cross the line that distinguishes between "peaceably assembling" and "committing an overt act of terrorism."". There's no line there, instead there is a tremendously broad gap, wherein some acts may not even be criminal at all, and others be criminal but still fall far, far short of terrorism. You go on to give breaking noise ordinances and disobeying the restrictions of your assembly permit as examples of terrorist acts. To you, I say "BOO!", doubtless causing you to soil yourself in blind unreasoning fear.
And if the factions in Iraq are truly intent on civil war, they'll wait as long as needed to have one.
In the Balkans, the USSR sat heavily on efforts to start ethnic cleansing, civil wars, and all related struggles for most of the 20th century. Except for Greece and Yugoslavia they were damned near totally controlled as part of the Warsaw pact. Yugoslavia had plenty of its own bad behavior, even with a need to build ties with the west if it was to remain independent of the Soviet Union, and in later years, when Albania tried to go its own way, it was effectively forced to ally with the PRC, who similarly discouraged ethnic struggles and internal warfare.
Despite this externally imposed 60 to 80 year cooling down period, look at how much things boiled up as soon as the lid was off the kettle. And in the longer perspective of history examples abound where people keep resurecting hundreds of years old grudges. How many U.S. voters realize that 'stay the course' is likely to be a more than 80 year commitment, just judging by European history? Add in the behavior displayed by several Arab nations where they still invoke the crusades as though they were yesterday, and 80 years is a comparative eyeblink.
What scares me is I mentioned the meetings with the press and common people the Nixon administration faked, and less than 48 hours later, FEMA very blatantly fakes a press conference. I was going by the CIA's huge budget increases for 'domestic publicity modification' over the last few years, but here's a specific example, practically dropping out of the sky into my lap to prove my point.
That's precisely why Parallel Universe enter into it. Nothing has to determine one set of values for the constants if there exists an infinite number of universes that encompass all possible values and combinations. Most of these universes would be extremely short lived, as so many of these combinations would be unable to support an expansion. For every universe that might inflate and last for billions or trillions of years, there might well be something like 1x10^73 universes that perish in picoseconds as gravity crushes them back into their own big bangs. For every universe that can sustain the complexity needed for life, there might be 10^138 ones that can't possibly. Of course take away an an infinite number of short lived, non-life-bearing universes from infinity and you are still left with an infinite number of universes.
One model for a "random constant generator" is the idea that black holes pinch off from their parent universe and the contents undergo cosmic inflation and form whole new universes. That idea was fairly interesting to cosmologists back when this Parallel Universe thing began, not so likely in their estimation now. There are other models involving virtual particle fluctuations in the vacuum or collapse of a something called a false vacuum that are more popular today.
Definitely, there are some models of God that would imply He's just as unobservable, at least within the Scientific Method, as parallel universes. I'm not sure I agree with them though. For example there's the argument that God, being all powerful, can fudge any experimental results as He desires. This sounds reasonable, but think about what it implies. For example, if an alien species exists with say, 50x the neurons in their brains as humans have, they could overwhelmingly likely trick us into observing whatever they want, so aliens much smarter than humans would be an untestable theory to explain any phenomenon whatsoever. The same would apply to aliens that have had a technological civilization for a great deal longer than we have. How much smarter or more developed do aliens have to be before there's absolutely no chance we can study them in any way they don't want us to? How much before doing science on them's extremely unlikely to work even if it's still theoretically possible? Taken to an an extreme, this principle would make it unscientific for an anatomist to think he could learn anything from dissecting Einstein's brain unless he was as smart as Einstein, but most of us would assume it fails somewhere short of that point. But where?
It's become the de-facto assumption that God can't be treated as just another legitimate hypothesis, but as far as I know, the idea that there might be aliens either much smarter or much more technologically advanced than we are is not considered unscientific on the same grounds. If we're going to treat God as a special case, then (to paraphrase Dr. Sagan) why not treat the universe, or SETI, or any other subject as a special case?
Dr. Guth (who originated the inflationary model that's becoming the new standard model) has said that the idea parellel universe could ever interact with this one (to be observed) is a "loony science fiction fan idea, not real science". Several people doing string theory have said similar things, and it's a basic assumption of Brane theory that an observation would involve destroying all the organization of both universes, in a wave of anihilation propagating at the speed of light (so technically you could observe it, but you won't be around long enough for your nervous system to record it, let alone for peer review). Most of the professionals popularizing the field seem to mean parallel in much the manner of parallel lines in Euclidean geometry, that is, they NEVER meet. Admittedly, the people actually doing the work have more mixed opinions on that analogy.
For one, Dr. Hawking has said, since "Brief History", that he doesn't know if they could in principle be observed or not, although he leans to them being masked in a manner much like black hole singularities. He's also not sure but what the theory doesn't really need to predict parallel universes to function. That's something like what he was aiming at in postulating an imaginary time axis in the first place. However, his caution is still rather the exception.
No, I said some scientists quite deliberately argue that testability is no longer a criteria for whether a prediction is scientific. They have supported including these predictions as scientific theories while explicitly acknowledging they are untestable. They have also argued in effect that Occam's Razor is not a logical principle, although most of them will hem and haw if pressed on that point.
In addition, there is no false dichotomy here. This is based on the exact statements of people such as Sagan, Guth and Hawking, who have said repeatedly and in dozens of sources that these values absolutely must be randomly determined, even though the math then leads inexorably to that infinite sheath of untestable predictions. Hawking himself has admitted to this being a mistaken assumption, and formally apologized for it. Claiming that what I have proposed is a false dichotomy is the same as claiming something can be not random and simultaneously not non-random.
But go ahead, reduce everything I said to a wildly distorted sound-bite and then try to refute that, if it's easier for you.
We didn't do it! Errr, Ummm, I mean...
Oh Fnord, they're on to me!
But that's just what literally thousands of scientists have avoided doing when it comes to creation itself (not nearly all of them, but a surprising number of the more vocal ones).
The current cosmological models (those close to THE STANDARD MODEL) assume that many fundamental constants are randomly determined in the pre-inflationary period. As a result, they predict that there must be an infinite number of parallel universes. There is no observational evidence for these universes - the only reason they theoretically exist is that the theory says initial values for such things as the fine structure constant (alpha), the cosmological constant, Planck's constant etc. MUST be random, and if this is so, the alternate universes simply MUST exist. Any theory proposed that says these values may be determined non-randomly is considered to deviate greatly from the standard model on that count alone.
Now, I'd be rather more comfortable if more of these same scientists were saying "We don't know if the values are randomly created at the start or if there is something hidden that fixes these values, and we don't make any predictions about unobservable phenomina." Unfortunately, while there are plenty of Cosmologists who are saying just that, the overwhelming majority of people who don't actually have a degree in Cosmology but claim to be spokespeople for the scientific community because they have some other degree (i.e. Dr. Sagan, whose work was in planetology and Xeno-biology, not astrophysics or cosmology , Dr. Dawkins, whose work is in Molecular Biology and Memetics) are saying they know, and that the way they know is "Science!".
As for me, if I have to choose between believing in a) just one unobserved but in principle observable God or b) an infinite number of unobservable even in principle parallel universes, I must pick a). I'd really rather not pick at all, but something that makes an unlimited number of self-lableled untestable predictions is simply not a scientific theory at all.
Plus Science uses certain methods of logic, but those are not, themselves scientific. Occam's razor for example, is a phenomenally useful tool, but it's not science, rather it's part of a broader logical tradition that greatly predates the scientific method.
Science is not something which is totally self creating, self sustaining, and able to bring itself into existence from nothing by its own fiat. Rather, it's built on older pillars of thought. As you point out there cannot be a scientific proof that the scientific method itself, done correctly, has to produce true, accurate, or non-contradictory results. It's a non-scientific belief, one that proceeds from certain logical inferences, but logic and science are not the same thing.
Similarly, not only is the belief that the universe is intelligible something outside of science itself, but science has made many of us doubt that the universe is necessarily intelligible, at least to a merely human brain. Intelligible in principle but not necessarily in practice.
Many of the greatest arguments that the universe is a Cosmos, organized under a single set of universal rules, as opposed to a Chaos, with no fundamental ordering principles, are arguments from philosophy, and specifically religious philosophy.
Probably if Nixon had stalled for a time and then admitted some people in his committee to reelect had gone off on their own, and claimed he would clean it up, he would have been left to serve out his term. Nixon had several strikes against him that increased the seriousness of Watergate.
1. He was managing an unpopular war.
2. He'd claimed to have some secret plans that he couldn't reveal to fix the US's problems. There was a real spike in claims that the public would just have to trust its Executive branch, as so many things had to be kept secret. After 4+ years, more and more people were questioning why his administration couldn't reveal at least some more details.
3. He was arranging meetings with carefully picked members of the public and press, and trying to spin it so that these looked like spontaneous encounters where he had to field tough questions. That claim too was unraveling.
4. Corruption in his administration was known to extend to Agnew. It's hard to claim you were ignorant of acts by minor functionaries when one of them is your 2nd in command.
So there's two main differences between the Nixon administration and this one.
1. The press isn't asking the same kind of tough questions they asked Nixon.
2. The Vice President hasn't been charged with anything yet (probably because the press isn't asking tough questions there either).
You can clearly see the human brain has some compartmentalization, with structures that seem superficially the same as older structures underlying more moder ones. What takes more analysis is to see where the older structures simply have to be retrofitted with adaptations that make them deeply compatible with the newer ones.
For example, human speech probably evolved over the last million years or less (I'm being generous by most biologists opinions - now that the best estimate for a common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees has been pushed back to 7 million years, a full million for speech no longer seems like it's pushing the available total time, but there are plenty of evolutionary biologists who would stick with estimates as short as 200,000 years). In the newer brain, complex centers built up, allowing simpler proto-speech, with only protonouns or command sounds, to incorporate modifiers such as clear verb-noun distinctions, and eventually tensed verbs, as well as adjectives, adverbs and such. All human language ends up with things in common, because they are hardwired.
What's not as obvious is that the very most primitive centers of the brain had to be modified, so that breathing could better facilitate speech. The human ability to use the last bit of air in ones lungs to gasp out a warning is a small demonstration of how one of our deepest brain structures evolved quite a bit in recent times. Those structures were only recently found, after being predicted by the argument I just gave and others. There are many other cases like them, but these things don't change the large scale appearance of the older brain enough to be at all obvious before actual electrical mapping of the living brain was developed.
Essentially, whether this is a 'patchwork' is a question of which methods we use to study the brain.
this 'famous criminal' seems
You have no idea who he is, do you? He really is a world class expert in this subject. It's like you just read an article about Einstein and said "this 'famous physicist' seems...".
This man managed to fake the qualifications to pass as a commercial airline pilot, and drew a paycheck for it, for several years, got certified on new planes, etc. (he was 15 when he started this). Then he did the same thing as a fake doctor, practiced medicine, got on a major hospital's board certified physicians list, and again drew his paycheck for years, and so on. All while simultaneously juggling half a dozen other scams that stole literally millions from institutions such as Wells Fargo, American Express, etc. back when millions was real money.
Your 'not actually drawn in crayon' line is exceptionally off base, as he actually synthesized the special inks used for printing 'magnetic' checks, had a complete list of sources for paper stocks used by various financial institutions (and could identify them on sight) and has demonstrated that he can duplicate all the special inks used right up to the current generation of U.S. currency. There are plastic bars running across US money now, because it's one thing he had a great deal of trouble forging with just common civil resources. He also knew every time delay in verification for checks, where the borders between different financial regions and districts were, and how to use all of it to keep himself from getting caught. Yes, he finally slipped up, but only after getting away with literally hundreds or thousands of times as much as Mitnick or Poulson.
Because he did most of his crimes as a minor, he served only a few years, and ended up being hired to show the various institutions how he did it once he got out.
So an association of businesses just invoked the "All I said was "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?"" defense to justify themselves, and now a bunch of mere peasant slashdotters are pointing up how they are acting like a historical tyrant because they're too dumb to realize the king has a divine right to oppress them?
It sounds fantastic, but I almost believe this story. Paying someone just $15,000 and thinking it would both make a major dent in their problems and get the kind of service they would need is all of a piece with 'living in a dream world'. The pattern fits - the MPAA has shown in other actions that they would think it's smart to spend lots on politicians, but hire somebody technical with the promise a good job and a pay off in chump change. Look at the small companies they have picked to implement various DRM schemes, and how easily those schemes have failed.
In unrelated news, NASA has hired New Jersey laundrymat owner Marco Delgrepio to create a permanent lunar colony. For now, they're only offering him $15,000, but if he just beats some invading space aliens by uploading a virus from his apple powerbook, he'll get a car. It's a really nice car.
But the demand is going to vary by flight, just as the demand for a flight itself varies. The airlines have been unable to run all flights with 100% full seats, and that alone will affect how many people will pay for this service. There's no magic point where most customers will reliably think they got their money's worth. One time, the customer will be paying extra on a half full flight where everyone gets their baggage quickly anyway, and if he's 25th in line to take advantage of the premium offer, see no real benefit. The next time, the customer will be on a packed flight, extra people will take advantage of the service because the delays look likely to be longer, and he still won't see any net gain.
The company can't just charge more per unit and make the same money, because the demand for the extra service is far more elastic than the demand for air travel itself. Double the price, and you don't get half the customers, but some number far less than half. The optimal set-point for short term profit is well within the zone that produces long term dissatisfaction, and costs you profits overall.
If someone is a stockholder, and plans to hold the airline for the long term, then fire whomever suggested this idiocy, and do it with the claim his extreme incompetence justifies not paying out on any golden parachute clause he may have. If someone is a stockholder and plans to loot and dump the company, then by all means they should continue - this is a very good part of such a scheme.
So, IOW, we've elected a bunch of spineless Senators.
Worse, we've elected a bunch of senators who expect their party to gain all the powers Bush has usurped.
I'm actually leaning just a trifle towards Democrat of late because there have been at least some real efforts to reign in the abuses, and we have a few true statesmen (of either gender) up there, but it looks like the party as a whole has decided to keep everything Bush is about to leave them.
"People are always so keen to argue the finer points and wording of the law if it lets them carry on taking other peoples stuff for free, but when your house gets burgled, and the guy gets off with a technicality, are you equally anal about defining guilt?"
..." part definitely isn't law - the DMCA says something more like "especially if you don't comply with the detailed take-down procedure when the owner follows it.", and the DMCA is definitely a lot longer than a paragraph - guess those extra 13 pages are all just technicalities. Or do you know for a fact that the British equivalent is a real short law with no 'technicalities' included?
No, when my house was burgled, the perp sold one of my stereo components at a flea market, and I'm proud to say I did just what you advocate - I nagged the cops until they prosecuted the college student who bought it and it cost him so much he had to drop out. I agree with you totally, figuring he was probably just an innocent bystander would have been anal, and the only non-anal definition is "they're all guilty, castrate them all with a dull spoon!" We never caught the burglar, but we sent somebody elss to jail for something at least vaguely related, so justice was done, totally non-anally. Thank goodness hangin' judge Bob agreed with me.
You just sincerely defined high standards for protecting innocent people as anal and used a tremendously fictitious example to support it (When was the last burglary case you actually heard of where the law let the criminal go free on a technicality? Burglary? It's a well established area of law, where several states have recently adopted laws letting you flat out kill the criminal in defense of your property - what are you claiming is a mere technicality?).
I reckon the site might have made money on ads, and its business model definitely seems to have been to attract viewers with links to outside content. I don't yet know if they preferred copyrighted content or not, or if they just ignored copyright issues, or not, just as I don't know if they made a real effort to take down infringing links or made only a token effort. Things like that should come out at a trial.
I also don't know if they broke a law yet or not. There's a real difference between providing easy access to (other people's) copyrighted content, and making a criminal's task easier merely as an inadvertent consequence. If I teach your burglar to drive, I've increased the number of houses he can get to - is that somehow accessory to burglary? Helping people find a local cocaine dealer for the purpose of buying his drugs is a conspiracy, but having taught that dealer's high school chemistry class isn't, and helping someone find him for some other reason isn't likely either, and that's not a technicality, it's common sense. It seems obvious to me that the law in question doesn't say "Providing easy access to copyrighted content is illegal." It probably runs several pages, at least. The "especially if you don't
Considering there are entire alt.binaries... groups that have nothing but legitimate content, shutting them down on the basis of starting with "alt.binaries" looks like prior restraint, or for a private organization, a chilling effect on first amendment rights.
I suppose that a few of the radio shows in alt.binaries.british.old.time.radio might be still under copyright, but most have doubtless expired, and the very word british in the group's name ought to be a clue as to an American organization's legal standing. There's a binaries group for discussing Scientology - something like alt.binaries.junk.religion.by.dead.sf.author, or similar. Or take alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.1920's - is that full of still copyrighted content? Marvel or DC may have standing to sue somebody relating to groups distributing old comics, but how on earth does the RIAA have any authority to get involved in that situation? What RIAA content gets distributed in any alt.binaries....nasa group, or any of several alt.binaries groups with linux in their names? How could the RIAA justify including such groups in a ban on the whole type?
If the RIAA has legitimate rights here, they still ought to be limited to specific groups that are at least mostly full of still copyrighted, RIAA member owned content. It seems like if the RIAA actually uses the alt.binaries category as a whole in its filings, any person could come forward as a friend of the court and give a list of literally hundreds of usenet alt.binaries groups that have nothing to do with the RIAA's member's products and thus the RIAA would be shooting themselves in the foot to ask for such broad restraints.
(Several terms above are left uncapitalized that normally should be treated as proper nouns or acronyms (British, NASA, etc.) - that's not me, that's just how usenet works).
http://www.style.org/unladenswallow/
Here, and have all four capitols of Assyria while you're at it.
All you have to do is show there there is some reason for you to believe they are legit.
Which is one reason why Usenet related infringement should be a very tough sell to a jury for the RIAA.
There are over a dozen major top level groupings such as rec. (for recreation), that make up the Usenet domains, and lots of slightly more minor ones like the microsoft.foo.bar groups. Of these, only a small percentage of the alt. groups are likely to have any infringing content at all. There are alt.binaries groups by the thousands which archive all totally legitimate content. Even a group as esoteric as alt.binaries.fractal.art may hold 300,000 posts on a long retention server, all overwhelmingly likely to be from people who own their own work and are distributing it legitimately.
Against these, there are some groups that may have some mislabeled work - i.e. I download from an alt. stock photos group frequently, and much of what's posted there has attached model releases, creator's permissions, and legal paperwork included as needed, but conceivably, not 100% of the pictures are actually stock, not every claim to have a model release for stock photos with a human subject is true, and so there could be something. If there is, it's overwhelmingly rare. I should be subject to the same legal standards there as for any other source of stock photos - that is, just using that source should not make it any more likely I've intentionally violated something than if I buy a CD of stock photos from a commercial source.
Finally, there's some groups that are specifically set up to hold wares, etc. A small fraction of the total groups, trivially small, probably less than 0.5 % overall by name. I'm sure some of them get a relative lot of traffic by number of posts, and since movies and music are generally huge files, by volume, but there are so many other groups, including so many legitimate binary groups, that traffic will always be a minority of posts, and is probably always going to be a minority of the actual by volume bits moving through usenet, even if a bunch of people start posting full DVDs.
I would happily demonstrate for the RIAA all the steps needed to download such an item using the most commonly used newsgroup software (still overwhelmingly Outlook Express), assemble all the pieces and do a huge lot of error correction to replace missing or garbled parts, but by the time I could show a jury how it was done, the jurors would all have died of boredom, the CD or whatever would be out of copyright, the plaintiff's great grand children would have great grandchildren of their own, and probably the sun would have already become a red giant. I'm wondering if the RIAA really thinks usenet piracy is all that widespread, because there would just about have to be a commercial usenet program that has sold, say, 300 Million copies if this were true. Assembling a 5 part small PDF in OE is an exercise in pain management, and most usenet servers will lose one part in five so it's likely to be futile anyway. Using OE for an MP3 that might be 80 parts or so would be a cheap alternative to beating yourself senseless with a rake. Using it for a full DVD that might be 10,000 parts would be a lifetime commitment to the rake. As far as I know, dedicated usenet software is a tiny niche market, and there are no coders reporting 300 thousand sales, or for that matter 30,000, let alone 300 million. Is this problem 1/1,000th as big as the RIAA is making it sound?
There's also some stupid, joke newsgroups, i.e. "alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk or alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork" that have no traffic at all normally, and some of these sometimes get used to hide wares, but this isn't like broadcasting the wares, as only a very small group of people would know when such a group was being used for storage. and no one else would think of looking there. I'd love to see a RIAA lawyer read the name of such a group with a straight face and explain why they ever looked there for the infringement.
Google specifically does not mirror the binary groups.
From their FAQ:
"Can I access binary Usenet content on Google Groups?"
"No. Google Groups does not archive any binary Usenet content."
For those who don't know what binary groups are yet, I'd like to add "These aren't the binaries you're looking for... (waves hand)"
The RICO act is found under Title 18, which is where the government normally puts Federal criminal law. It's pretty fair to argue in general that anything in Title 18 is supposed to be focused on criminal acts, not applied broadly to a mixture of criminal and civil cases.
Congress included mail and wire fraud as applicable crimes in RICO's definition. They didn't include what's frequently called law fraud, which is probably how we should best classify the acts in this case. Wire and Mail fraud have been interpreted very broadly in a number of previous cases, both RICO and non, and so they will probably stretch to fit again, but it may not be a natural fit. It's somewhat like the charge of Kidnapping. Kidnapping has been used when a victim was moved just a short distance, say from one building to another on the same block, but that's not how the law was originally envisioned and it sometimes appears to be selectively applied when the prosecutor wants to add charges, or the base crime appears loathsome and abominable to the public.
Because of this, a number of recent RICO cases have set new limits for when RICO can apply to what start out as normal civil cases - of interest are:
* Evans v. City of Chicago, 434 F.3d 916 (7th Cir. 2006)
This cases set some standards for how serious an injury to business or property needed to be before the damages should be called irrecoverable, as that word applied to RICO.
* Odom v. Microsoft Corp., 486 F.3d 541 ( 9th Cir. 2007)
This case concerned the distinctions between enterprise activities and racketeering activities, and obviously is particularly applicable to another Microsoft case. Microsoft may invoke some of these distinctions as a means of claiming their intent was to comply all along with existing law.
* United States v. Daidone, 471 F.3d 371 (2d Cir. 2006)
This case offers a number of relatedness tests that have become more commonly used in subsequent cases.
You could use the thing to run any light; or better yet charge a small battery so you have power on demand.
I got a couple of battery re-chargers for AA - C and 9 volt, and started recharging for all my flashlights, MP3 players, and such a few years ago. Last year, I rigged them to a small solar array, so those apps are now completely off the grid. I cold probably have used a very small wind turbine just as well, or an adaptation of a widget like the one in the article. With a good supply of batteries, I can afford to wait a bit for a sunny day, so solar's what I went with. I doubt I'm saving the environment much, if at all, given manufacturing costs of the devices, but I keep seeing the whole idea dismissed on the basis of that one argument about ecological fitness, or related argeuments about scaling.
Meanwhile, if the local power grid goes down for a day or three, I have some things which will still run, including a bit of light and an emergency radio.
It's like another, 1,000 year older tech adaptation. I also have a fireplace in my house. I don't heat with it on any regular basis, but I have a hinge mounted, cast iron widget with a hook on the end that can swing over the fire, so I can cook over it pretty expediously. The fireplace is never going to be an energy efficient way of routine heating for millions of people now using gas or electric heat. It doesn't fix any of the current problems related to old infrastructure, global warming, and overpopulation. Scaling arguments are actually negative (if we all go back to burning wood, we'll screw up the environment more, not less), but my fireplace will keep a few people warm or a very cold night without power, and even give them some hot soup or cocoa. If we do have a lengthy outage in the winter, The chimney's clean, I have a couple of ricks of wood already cut, and an axe if I need more, and we'll probably not just manage for ourselves, but put up the little old lady across the street on our couch, take some hot soup to another neighbor or two, and so on. Plus the radios mean I'll know what sort of problem it is early, and can plan. I'll know if the problem is expected to last long enough that I'd better conserve the chainsaw for real emergencies, etc.
I'm not even sure but what that IS a potential huge net ecological savings. People who cope on their own if the big, gridded systems go down aren't as likely to be a drain on emergency services. What's the carbon footprint of a helicopter rescue operation?
I'm starting to think scaling arguments are mostly rubbish anyway. Whenever we start addressing scaling, we're talking about getting up to sizes where someone can centralize the production, and rent services to the common people. A stable, long term sustainable, ecologically sound system shouldn't assume centralized control is desirable, in fact, all other things being equal, it's a bad thing.