Of course, we're also offering to sell them jet fighters. Presumably, at least part of the US government is convinced that the Indians can be trusted with them if such an offer has been made...
How much money have you spent on entertainment? Eating out when you could have cooked for yourself? Buying books? Buying hardware? Paying for DSL? Travelling? Are you sure that you couldn't afford it if you saved for it?
For one bit, there's inertia. It costs time and effort to switch, and this will only increase if you're needing to share files with other people who haven't switched. If you're in a field where everybody else -- say, designers and their clients -- are freely tossing multi-layer PSD files, you'd better be able to handle them well, for instance. If you need to hire more people and you need to retrain *them* because you're not using the utterly dominant app, this increases your business costs and perhaps lowers your appeal to potential employees. And so forth.
Likewise, given the choice between two "free" items -- but one of which normally costs several hundred dollars and is a polished, professional product which is dominant in the industry and the other a considerably more obscure product with a vastly different interface -- many will choose the former due to the perception (regardless of its accuracy) that the former is superior.
Furthermore, I might note that there are already budget versions -- see Photoshop Elements, and the competing Paint Shop Pro, for instance. And for light photo editing, there are others such as Picture Window Pro or so forth. Your average digital snapshooter doesn't need the full functionality of Photoshop CS2, nor even the Gimp, but that probably won't stop him from downloading Photoshop.
No. People have stolen just about anything, no matter how cheap, so long as they think that they won't get caught. They will continue to do so no matter how cheap something is, because there will always be an element which cares about getting something at the minimum possible cost ignoring all other considerations.
It would not surprise me if Yahoo! paid the RIAA more than the charged the users, in aggregate. It'd still make business sense if this cost allowed them to charge more for advertising (more eyeballs, perhaps more click-through) and the increase in ad revenue more than offset the deficit in undercharging users.
In most cases, the results would be obvious: either it's a case of mistaken identity (either of the operator of the machine, or of the nature of the files being offered) or an open-and-shut case, since generally speaking the laws and precedents are very clear that putting things online for the whole world to download is not fair use.
The ambiguities might only arise if the machine appears to have been compromised to the degree that the machine's owner can plausibly argue that he was unaware of what was going on, or similar unusual circumstances. If you put Brittany Spears' latest piece on KaZaA without prior authorization, you're probably going down no matter how good your lawyer is. He might argue about the punishment not fitting the crime, but your guilt is going to be pretty clear according to the law -- it's contributory copyright infringement.
Bear in mind that Yahoo! intends to get far more than $5 per user. You can't really infer that because Yahoo! only charges that amount, that the RIAA must be getting at most that.
Fundamentally, their customers are advertisers, not their users. It wouldn't surprise me if they were willing to offer a downloading service even *at a loss* in terms of user fees versus licensing fees, if they profit more by having a larger membership base and (they might hope) more people following their ads. It's the same reason why they and Google each provide free e-mail accounts, which clearly must be below their cost; they make money by selling your eyeballs to advertisers, and they can still profit based on ad revenue.
Bad analogy, since your system is configured to do one thing and one thing only: make copies. Not lend; make copies.
Unless your P2P system obliterates all other copies in any form that are in your possession upon a single download, it's not a loan; it's a duplication service. As such, you also don't deserve any presumption that "well, I didn't mean for them to copy it" because it's not just a significant use, but the only one.
Dead wrong. Criminal prosecutions involve fines. Civil suits involve damages, both compensatory and punitive.
Google the Ford Pinto cases, for instance. A jury once awarded $125M to a single plaintiff (Richard Grimshaw) in a civil suit against Ford, although the ward was later reduced to $3.5M by the judge.
Of some tangential relevance, the Carter Center's report on the Venezuelan recall vote, which involved e-voting machines that produced paper receipts for verification: http://cartercenter.org/doc1801.htm
Your post was quite clear; arguing that representatives should essentially collate the votes of their voters and follow them. The technical means for doing so isn't particularly interesting if one doesn't like the intent.
I'm arguing that this is exactly counter to the purpose of having a representative republic in the first place, and that there are quite reasonable grounds for not having representatives do this.
It works -- somewhat -- for publicly-owned corporations. But not terribly well; you still see overly cozy relationships between board members and executives, for instance, and it's very rare for a shareholder revolt to actually succeed. Hence boards, though nominally reflective of their shareholders, not infrequently act against shareholder interest in such things as approving excessive compensation for CEOs and similar positions. It can take a heavyweight owner such as a government pension plan, dissident board member, executive or mutual fund manager to beat the general pro-board, pro-executive inertia.
They're bound by the 14th and 15th Amendments. The former covers equal protection and due process of law, the latter explicitly mentions race, color and previous condition of servitude.
Thus, while at one time blacks/were/ prohibited from voting in a number of jurisdictions (even when they were counted as 3/5 people for electoral-college purposes), you can't anymore -- at any level, local, state or Federal. For the same reason, you can't effectively disenfranchise a race by race-based gerrymandering, but you ARE permitted to to partisan-based gerrymandering.
Theoretically, stripping felons of their right to vote isn't a violation of equal protection so long as it's not only policy but law and not applied ex-post-facto. Objections to it might come from either the angle that it's cruel or unusual, or that the specification of felonies is discriminatory (if, for instance, 80% of criminal incidents classified as felonies just happened to be committed by a specific minority group forming 15% of the population that might be more than slightly suspicious -- race-based disenfranchisement).
The nation's rather evenly split, so you wouldn't have to have a nationwide conspiracy to affect a nationwide election. Pennsylvania, for instance, is close enough that if the Democratic machines that have run Pittsburgh and Philadelphia for decades were utterly corrupt, they might swing Pennsylvania. And Pennsylvania is a winner-take-all state which also gets a decent number of electoral votes, so that'd have a significant impact when the margins would ordinarily be tight. You'd just need to target some swing states, and possibly major metro areas in those swing states depending on population distribution.
Yippee. There's a reason why we have a representative republic and not a phone-a-vote democracy.
It'd be rather unlikely to get a remotely reasonable foreign policy from the masses, for instance, considering how improbable it would be that they'd be informed about the topics at hand. Go ask random people walking on the street about what the US or NATO should be doing about the continued failure to apprehend General Mladic or to form governments that do/not/ need the direct supervision of a UN supremo in the former Yugoslav republic, and see if you find people who even remember who Mladic and Karazdic are.
For that matter, go ask people about whether we should be extraditing Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela, or perhaps Cuba. That's not an unfair question; it's current news, that's made it to the front page of the NYT (so it's not really obscure), that goes to the question of the US's treatment of former CIA assets who also happen to be terrorists and whether or not the US is willing to sacrifice a former asset and anti-Castro partisan to the notional War on Terrorism. If you're asking somebody who's not, say, a Cuban exile, it wouldn't surprise me if the response was confusion.
Even more simply, most people aren't very interested in following the economic ramifications of, say, agricultural subsidies and won't have such theories to fall back on if you ask them to decide.
On the other hand, legislators get placed on committees and have staffs so in theory they can and should dedicate nontrivial attention to following such issues and making informed decisions. Of course, sometimes they're irresponsible bastards. It's the citizens' responsibility to toss them out, then.
But the Feds can't mandate that a state use IRV -- at least, not directly.
What they can do, however, is force a state to comply with equal-protection in both policy and deed. A state can't legally declare that minority votes count as 3/5th that of a white male, or set up one understaffed polling place with few provisional ballots per minority-dominated county and multiple well-staffed and well-run polling places per white-dominated precinct.
Using an international intermediary / proxy, however, might make it harder to identify them. A John Doe lawsuit isn't very interesting if you never find out who John Doe is.
And spammers probably aren't very likely to be extradited unless they've pissed off their hosts, since it's such a minor offense... even if such laws exist. You don't see China bothering very much to enforce its IP laws, for instance, to the point where its police tolerate the extremely open sales of counterfeit goods and infringing DVDs in shopping centers. The likelihood that they'd bother to cooperate with an investigation of a spammer isn't very much unless, say, he's spamming in favor of Falun Gong, in which case perhaps they'd rather send him to a re-education camp instead of extradite.
Granted, you'd have to anonymize not only the spam, but also any transactions. But it'd still help.
This would let somebody sabotage somebody else's market for a copyrighted work by selling at cost. You might see a publishing house retalliating against another publisher's star author (which refused a deal with the first one) by simply distributing that star's works online for no cost. Want to hurt Adobe? Put every version of Photoshop online for free. You'd force the entire creative market to shift to service contracts -- and in some cases, such as just about anything creative except software, this just doesn't make much sense.
(1) Right to make an archival backup for personal use, including the ability to keep the original as the archival backup and to use the duplicate instead.
(2) Right to time-shift and space-shift for strictly personal use. 'Personal use' does not automatically include friends and family with the exception of broadcast media, or in other cases when involved friends/family are otherwise entitled to watch/partake prior to said shifting; it would be odd to prohibit recording a broadcast television program unless it were to be watched solo particularly when everyone involved had the right to watch it at the original time.
Explicitly permit technological subversion of protection schemes as necessary for such, so long as such subversion does not involve unauthorized access to anything not owned by subverter. Breaking into the licensing server is/not/ okay. Space-shifting onto a random stranger's P2P client is/not/ okay.
(3) Full disclosure of protection schemes. If a program uses copy protection schemes, this information must be made readily available prior to transaction -- e.g. clearly described on packaging, not buried inside shrinkwrap.
(4) Full disclosure of licensing terms. For both this and the above, failure to do so in any meaningful regard entitles the purchaser to return all purchased items for a full refund plus any necessary shipping/handling costs during a short period after purchase, regardless of broken shrink wrap or other EULA terms.
(5) With regards to protection schemes, such a scheme may *not* interfere with other media or possessions. It may *not* deliberately require that other software be uninstalled, or actively disable them for full functionality to be enabled. If the protected program is uninstalled, any related protection mechanisms must also be completely uninstalled if the user so chooses.
Ultimately, a consumer should be assured that his transaction will not be rendered meaningless by deliberate and undisclosed protection methods. And if a software product's license requires a license per CPU core, it should be fully disclosed prior to purchase. And so forth.
(6) Continued limited rights regarding educational and editorial purposes. Quoting excerpts for the purposes of review is fine; quoting the entire book for a short "review" is not. Distributing unlicensed copies of Doom III to your 200 students ostensibly for teaching them about human-computer interaction is right out.
Why do so many people correlate being an environmentalist with being left-wing?
Simple. It's usually not those focused purely on conservation that get the press; it's the frothing anti-nuclear, anti-globalization, anti-GM, anti-capitalist, anti-war, anti-meat, anti-fur screaming protesters who hold rallies, vandalize McDonalds, try to disrupt nuclear protests, call Bush a Nazi, and refer to Amerikkka who do.
Traditional conservationists who aren't, say, radical leftists, seem to not use publicity-hound tactics, whereas radicals have developed a knack for conflating multiple causes into marches and rallies, any one of which risks losing support from moderates but the combination of which allows them to be painted as, well, radical loons. Greenpeace and Earth First! get more press than the Nature Conservancy because they're more willing to engage in in-your-face actions, and it doesn't help that Green parties commonly embrace left-wing agendas such as strictly capping maximum to minimum incomes and emphasizing intensely progressive taxation.
A separate team of climate scientists, which was regularly used by Science and the journal Nature to review papers on the progress of global warming, said it was dropped after attempting to publish its own research which raised doubts over the issue.... As with Dr Peiser's study, Science refused to publish his rebuttal. Prof Bray told The Telegraph: "They said it didn't fit with what they were intending to publish."
Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: "It's pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It's the news value that is most important."
He said that after his own team produced research casting doubt on man-made global warming, they were no longer sent papers by Nature and Science for review - despite being acknowledged as world leaders in the field.
If they were regularly being consulted for reviewing publications submitted to the very same journal, that suggests that the journal editorial staff considered them reasonably competent -- that is, until they decided to disagree.
There are situations in which multiple users expect physical access to the machine including the ability to log on, and this sort of flaw -- if it really means that any local user can overwrite arbitrary files -- would be problematic in such situations.
Consider universities with their shared computer clusters, for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, we're also offering to sell them jet fighters. Presumably, at least part of the US government is convinced that the Indians can be trusted with them if such an offer has been made...
How much money have you spent on entertainment? Eating out when you could have cooked for yourself? Buying books? Buying hardware? Paying for DSL? Travelling? Are you sure that you couldn't afford it if you saved for it?
Not really.
For one bit, there's inertia. It costs time and effort to switch, and this will only increase if you're needing to share files with other people who haven't switched. If you're in a field where everybody else -- say, designers and their clients -- are freely tossing multi-layer PSD files, you'd better be able to handle them well, for instance. If you need to hire more people and you need to retrain *them* because you're not using the utterly dominant app, this increases your business costs and perhaps lowers your appeal to potential employees. And so forth.
Likewise, given the choice between two "free" items -- but one of which normally costs several hundred dollars and is a polished, professional product which is dominant in the industry and the other a considerably more obscure product with a vastly different interface -- many will choose the former due to the perception (regardless of its accuracy) that the former is superior.
Furthermore, I might note that there are already budget versions -- see Photoshop Elements, and the competing Paint Shop Pro, for instance. And for light photo editing, there are others such as Picture Window Pro or so forth. Your average digital snapshooter doesn't need the full functionality of Photoshop CS2, nor even the Gimp, but that probably won't stop him from downloading Photoshop.
No. People have stolen just about anything, no matter how cheap, so long as they think that they won't get caught. They will continue to do so no matter how cheap something is, because there will always be an element which cares about getting something at the minimum possible cost ignoring all other considerations.
It would not surprise me if Yahoo! paid the RIAA more than the charged the users, in aggregate. It'd still make business sense if this cost allowed them to charge more for advertising (more eyeballs, perhaps more click-through) and the increase in ad revenue more than offset the deficit in undercharging users.
In most cases, the results would be obvious: either it's a case of mistaken identity (either of the operator of the machine, or of the nature of the files being offered) or an open-and-shut case, since generally speaking the laws and precedents are very clear that putting things online for the whole world to download is not fair use.
The ambiguities might only arise if the machine appears to have been compromised to the degree that the machine's owner can plausibly argue that he was unaware of what was going on, or similar unusual circumstances. If you put Brittany Spears' latest piece on KaZaA without prior authorization, you're probably going down no matter how good your lawyer is. He might argue about the punishment not fitting the crime, but your guilt is going to be pretty clear according to the law -- it's contributory copyright infringement.
Bear in mind that Yahoo! intends to get far more than $5 per user. You can't really infer that because Yahoo! only charges that amount, that the RIAA must be getting at most that.
Fundamentally, their customers are advertisers, not their users. It wouldn't surprise me if they were willing to offer a downloading service even *at a loss* in terms of user fees versus licensing fees, if they profit more by having a larger membership base and (they might hope) more people following their ads. It's the same reason why they and Google each provide free e-mail accounts, which clearly must be below their cost; they make money by selling your eyeballs to advertisers, and they can still profit based on ad revenue.
Bad analogy, since your system is configured to do one thing and one thing only: make copies. Not lend; make copies.
Unless your P2P system obliterates all other copies in any form that are in your possession upon a single download, it's not a loan; it's a duplication service. As such, you also don't deserve any presumption that "well, I didn't mean for them to copy it" because it's not just a significant use, but the only one.
Dead wrong. Criminal prosecutions involve fines.
Civil suits involve damages, both compensatory and punitive.
Google the Ford Pinto cases, for instance. A jury once awarded $125M to a single plaintiff (Richard Grimshaw) in a civil suit against Ford, although the ward was later reduced to $3.5M by the judge.
There's compensatory damages, and punitive damages.
Punitive damages can be significantly more than actual losses. That's deliberate.
Uh-oh. Finster must be going crazy again. Somebody call the Rangers before it's too late. /geek
Growing trend, so there's probably more post-mortem analyses available from other nations' experiences.
0 9-7337_3-5387540.html
http://news.com.com/Global+lessons+in+e-voting/20
Of some tangential relevance, the Carter Center's report on the Venezuelan recall vote, which involved e-voting machines that produced paper receipts for verification:
http://cartercenter.org/doc1801.htm
Your post was quite clear; arguing that representatives should essentially collate the votes of their voters and follow them. The technical means for doing so isn't particularly interesting if one doesn't like the intent.
I'm arguing that this is exactly counter to the purpose of having a representative republic in the first place, and that there are quite reasonable grounds for not having representatives do this.
It works -- somewhat -- for publicly-owned corporations. But not terribly well; you still see overly cozy relationships between board members and executives, for instance, and it's very rare for a shareholder revolt to actually succeed. Hence boards, though nominally reflective of their shareholders, not infrequently act against shareholder interest in such things as approving excessive compensation for CEOs and similar positions. It can take a heavyweight owner such as a government pension plan, dissident board member, executive or mutual fund manager to beat the general pro-board, pro-executive inertia.
They're bound by the 14th and 15th Amendments. The former covers equal protection and due process of law, the latter explicitly mentions race, color and previous condition of servitude.
/were/ prohibited from voting in a number of jurisdictions (even when they were counted as 3/5 people for electoral-college purposes), you can't anymore -- at any level, local, state or Federal. For the same reason, you can't effectively disenfranchise a race by race-based gerrymandering, but you ARE permitted to to partisan-based gerrymandering.
Thus, while at one time blacks
Theoretically, stripping felons of their right to vote isn't a violation of equal protection so long as it's not only policy but law and not applied ex-post-facto. Objections to it might come from either the angle that it's cruel or unusual, or that the specification of felonies is discriminatory (if, for instance, 80% of criminal incidents classified as felonies just happened to be committed by a specific minority group forming 15% of the population that might be more than slightly suspicious -- race-based disenfranchisement).
The nation's rather evenly split, so you wouldn't have to have a nationwide conspiracy to affect a nationwide election. Pennsylvania, for instance, is close enough that if the Democratic machines that have run Pittsburgh and Philadelphia for decades were utterly corrupt, they might swing Pennsylvania. And Pennsylvania is a winner-take-all state which also gets a decent number of electoral votes, so that'd have a significant impact when the margins would ordinarily be tight. You'd just need to target some swing states, and possibly major metro areas in those swing states depending on population distribution.
Yippee. There's a reason why we have a representative republic and not a phone-a-vote democracy.
/not/ need the direct supervision of a UN supremo in the former Yugoslav republic, and see if you find people who even remember who Mladic and Karazdic are.
It'd be rather unlikely to get a remotely reasonable foreign policy from the masses, for instance, considering how improbable it would be that they'd be informed about the topics at hand. Go ask random people walking on the street about what the US or NATO should be doing about the continued failure to apprehend General Mladic or to form governments that do
For that matter, go ask people about whether we should be extraditing Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela, or perhaps Cuba. That's not an unfair question; it's current news, that's made it to the front page of the NYT (so it's not really obscure), that goes to the question of the US's treatment of former CIA assets who also happen to be terrorists and whether or not the US is willing to sacrifice a former asset and anti-Castro partisan to the notional War on Terrorism. If you're asking somebody who's not, say, a Cuban exile, it wouldn't surprise me if the response was confusion.
Even more simply, most people aren't very interested in following the economic ramifications of, say, agricultural subsidies and won't have such theories to fall back on if you ask them to decide.
On the other hand, legislators get placed on committees and have staffs so in theory they can and should dedicate nontrivial attention to following such issues and making informed decisions. Of course, sometimes they're irresponsible bastards. It's the citizens' responsibility to toss them out, then.
It wouldn't surprise me if the elderly, the poorly educated, and women were all a bit more leery of technology than younger, well-educated males.
a tes/US/P/00/epolls.0.html
But a better predictor would be income. It's not inconceivable that the poor would have less experience with and less liking for computers, and the poor swing heavily Democratic.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/st
But the Feds can't mandate that a state use IRV -- at least, not directly.
What they can do, however, is force a state to comply with equal-protection in both policy and deed. A state can't legally declare that minority votes count as 3/5th that of a white male, or set up one understaffed polling place with few provisional ballots per minority-dominated county and multiple well-staffed and well-run polling places per white-dominated precinct.
Using an international intermediary / proxy, however, might make it harder to identify them. A John Doe lawsuit isn't very interesting if you never find out who John Doe is.
And spammers probably aren't very likely to be extradited unless they've pissed off their hosts, since it's such a minor offense... even if such laws exist. You don't see China bothering very much to enforce its IP laws, for instance, to the point where its police tolerate the extremely open sales of counterfeit goods and infringing DVDs in shopping centers. The likelihood that they'd bother to cooperate with an investigation of a spammer isn't very much unless, say, he's spamming in favor of Falun Gong, in which case perhaps they'd rather send him to a re-education camp instead of extradite.
Granted, you'd have to anonymize not only the spam, but also any transactions. But it'd still help.
Bad for photographers who shoot a lot of images... unless you can somehow classify a whole group as a single work.
$10/picture/year for somebody who shoots a lot of stock photography could be rather significant in the scheme of things.
Not really.
This would let somebody sabotage somebody else's market for a copyrighted work by selling at cost. You might see a publishing house retalliating against another publisher's star author (which refused a deal with the first one) by simply distributing that star's works online for no cost. Want to hurt Adobe? Put every version of Photoshop online for free. You'd force the entire creative market to shift to service contracts -- and in some cases, such as just about anything creative except software, this just doesn't make much sense.
(1) Right to make an archival backup for personal use, including the ability to keep the original as the archival backup and to use the duplicate instead.
/not/ okay. Space-shifting onto a random stranger's P2P client is /not/ okay.
(2) Right to time-shift and space-shift for strictly personal use. 'Personal use' does not automatically include friends and family with the exception of broadcast media, or in other cases when involved friends/family are otherwise entitled to watch/partake prior to said shifting; it would be odd to prohibit recording a broadcast television program unless it were to be watched solo particularly when everyone involved had the right to watch it at the original time.
Explicitly permit technological subversion of protection schemes as necessary for such, so long as such subversion does not involve unauthorized access to anything not owned by subverter. Breaking into the licensing server is
(3) Full disclosure of protection schemes. If a program uses copy protection schemes, this information must be made readily available prior to transaction -- e.g. clearly described on packaging, not buried inside shrinkwrap.
(4) Full disclosure of licensing terms. For both this and the above, failure to do so in any meaningful regard entitles the purchaser to return all purchased items for a full refund plus any necessary shipping/handling costs during a short period after purchase, regardless of broken shrink wrap or other EULA terms.
(5) With regards to protection schemes, such a scheme may *not* interfere with other media or possessions. It may *not* deliberately require that other software be uninstalled, or actively disable them for full functionality to be enabled. If the protected program is uninstalled, any related protection mechanisms must also be completely uninstalled if the user so chooses.
Ultimately, a consumer should be assured that his transaction will not be rendered meaningless by deliberate and undisclosed protection methods. And if a software product's license requires a license per CPU core, it should be fully disclosed prior to purchase. And so forth.
(6) Continued limited rights regarding educational and editorial purposes. Quoting excerpts for the purposes of review is fine; quoting the entire book for a short "review" is not. Distributing unlicensed copies of Doom III to your 200 students ostensibly for teaching them about human-computer interaction is right out.
Why do so many people correlate being an environmentalist with being left-wing?
Simple. It's usually not those focused purely on conservation that get the press; it's the frothing anti-nuclear, anti-globalization, anti-GM, anti-capitalist, anti-war, anti-meat, anti-fur screaming protesters who hold rallies, vandalize McDonalds, try to disrupt nuclear protests, call Bush a Nazi, and refer to Amerikkka who do.
Traditional conservationists who aren't, say, radical leftists, seem to not use publicity-hound tactics, whereas radicals have developed a knack for conflating multiple causes into marches and rallies, any one of which risks losing support from moderates but the combination of which allows them to be painted as, well, radical loons. Greenpeace and Earth First! get more press than the Nature Conservancy because they're more willing to engage in in-your-face actions, and it doesn't help that Green parties commonly embrace left-wing agendas such as strictly capping maximum to minimum incomes and emphasizing intensely progressive taxation.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/01/ ixworld.html
...
A separate team of climate scientists, which was regularly used by Science and the journal Nature to review papers on the progress of global warming, said it was dropped after attempting to publish its own research which raised doubts over the issue.
As with Dr Peiser's study, Science refused to publish his rebuttal. Prof Bray told The Telegraph: "They said it didn't fit with what they were intending to publish."
Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: "It's pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It's the news value that is most important."
He said that after his own team produced research casting doubt on man-made global warming, they were no longer sent papers by Nature and Science for review - despite being acknowledged as world leaders in the field.
If they were regularly being consulted for reviewing publications submitted to the very same journal, that suggests that the journal editorial staff considered them reasonably competent -- that is, until they decided to disagree.
There are situations in which multiple users expect physical access to the machine including the ability to log on, and this sort of flaw -- if it really means that any local user can overwrite arbitrary files -- would be problematic in such situations.
Consider universities with their shared computer clusters, for instance.