He seems a bit salty that people don't want to just agree this was aliens.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I think he is upset that his hypothesis isn't being given any credence, even at the level of hypothesis. Which, I think, might be fair.
It is also entirely reasonable that the scientific community is extremely reluctant to be seen giving the hypothesis any real credence. Unfortunately, UFO and panspermia crackpots have poisoned that well.
Since when were we equating someone's upholstry with diversity? The threat is that you are more likely to damage the vehicle you are going to be a passenger in. You are more likely to be pain in the ass in any number of ways as a drunk passenger.
If the technology can reliably pick out the drunk from the sober, with no false positives then I'm all for it. No false positives is a bit of a dream, though, and I worry about quite what will happen to the poor folks who hold their phone in a 'drunk' way.
I sure hope so; the system they had was insane. The US system is far from perfect, but I would far rather err on the side of allowing people to voice their opinions rather than giving scam artists and lunatics the ability to shut down reasonable criticism.
It's a lot better, certainly and seems to actually fit the UK legal system more closely than before the 2013/14 changes. It was a massive victory for the libel reform campaign and Simon Singh played a big part in pushing it forwards. There continues to be campaigning for still more reform (especially in Scotland and Northern Ireland where the changes haven't been applied in the same way).
The UK still has less of a legal emphasis on protecting free speech than the US does and that definitely tips things more in favour of the accuser than the accused (relative to the US) but the libel reform bill addressed that balance somewhat and brought libel cases into alignment with other UK law in forcing an innocent-until-proven-guilty assumption.
In short - things are pretty much closer to an even balance between accuser and accused now with more protections for uneven fights between individuals and corporate entities and special protections for scientific publications.
Sorry - I don't buy the evolution analogy. There's elements of it that match but here's the issue. In a free market, companies don't 'evolve' to innovate. Innovation isn't the end goal, surviving and profiting is. There's a hell of a lot of ways to profit other than innovation and innovation is always a risky strategy to reach that end. Often it's easier to make a measured approach and plan to drag down anyone else who innovates, especially once you're big enough.
A free market is about the profitability and survival being the end goal and whatever achieves that is what happens. This is why licensing is required, to ensure that people don't get trampled underfoot on the way to that profitability.
As Solandri stated, licensing applies to people who could endanger your wellbeing through incompetence or negligence and we all benefit from that. You _could_ argue that people can vote with their feet, avoid restaurants that develop a reputation for food poisoning etc. Noone wants to be one of the ones who dies on the way to building that reputation, though.
Their source dates back to 2010 but up-to-date and reliable studies are hard to come by and the stats are unlikely to have changed substantially. It is worth noting that the data covers homicide, suicide and accidental death and compares firearm and non-firearm rates (as a common misconception is that what you shave off one will appear on the other set of stats).
So much for the Internet 'interpreting censorship as damage and routing around it'..
If you read the article you will see that is just what has happened in this case. Cloudflare are pulling the plug and the owners of the site have said it will cause minimal disruption. I would say that probably qualifies...
This actually suggests a possible advantage to using a service like Cloudfare. It won't have been cost and effort free to obtain that court order and it turns out to be largely useless in actually causing any substantial disruption for the sites in question. Now ACS will need to go back to the drawing board and work out how to actually disrupt the sites or give up. Either way, the court order did them little practical good so far.
Um... maybe to ensure that your bank transactions are kept secure such that those potentially snooping upon them can't follow up your legitimate transactions with ones that, for instance, move all of the money from your account to their own accounts?
Ah yes. Sorry - I was kind of assuming the dominant position without stating it.
So let me elucidate a little further with that made (hopefully) clearer. Qualcomm was in a market-dominant position at the time and cut an exclusivity deal with Apple that pretty much guaranteed that they would remain in a fairly dominant position as a result. It's not a _complete_ monopoly unless they managed to get a similar deal with other manufacturers but certainly significant enough to make it far less likely that anyone else would be in a position to invest in research to be able to enter the marketplace. The position of dominance is being leveraged through the exclusivity clauses in the contract. Whether or not apple are damaged by that, it does damage the marketplace as a whole. It stifles investment in new technology because once a dominant company know that they can maintain that dominance through contractual elements, they no longer need to be technologically innovative.
Consumer choice is kind of meaningless in this context. I'm not sure anyone is picking a phone based upon the manufacturer of the baseband chip.
The key, I believe, is that there was an exclusivity clause in the contract. The EU are very wary of such things (with good reason if you believe that monopolizing practices are harmful).
Now - had the contract been that they would sell X number of chips for a given prices then I suspect that there wouldn't have been a case - whether that X amounted to 100%, 99% or 150% of what Apple used. The problem was that the agreement they reached excluded other manufacturers.
Exclusivity contracts are one of those things that fall into a bit of a market freedom paradox. In a truly free market then they should be possible (because you can sign a contract for anything, right?) but in being available they curtail market freedom once in place.
As a proponent of market freedom (or control) you can fall either side on whether they are a good or bad thing.
Nope.. I'm afraid that thinkwaitfast was correct. It's a republic (a representative one) rather than a democracy - at least in the technical sense. Two things keep it from being a democracy:
1. Not everyone has the right to vote. 2. There is a constitutional limit placed upon the majority will. As a result, the government representing the majority vote is unable to necessarily enact their will if doing so violates the constitution.
The differences are subtle, though, in modern democratic republics:
Whilst I believe that you are right in identifying an mechanical failsafe as an incorrect approach I don't think this should fall to the user to pick from two items next to each other on a drop-down. Intelligent, highly-skilled operators make mistakes in these sort of circumstances and a bit of decent UI design goes a long way in preventing such things (without the need for mechanical safeguards).
Something as simple as giving obvious visual clues between test and live messages (icons, colour, font weight etc), separating the items on the drop down into obvious lists for test and live messages etc.
Getting only a _little_ more complicated in UI, a subsequent message confirming a live message (possibly with an action that requires a user to type 'live' or something to ensure that the validation request has been received and understood) would almost certainly eliminate any chance a live message being sent in place of a test one.
Decent design does not rely on users doing the right thing any more than it has to.
PornHub has made it's money by being very lax about copyright enforcement, especially proactive enforcement when compared to services like YouTube. Is it really any surprise that people are using it to host copyright-infringing material that isn't pornographic?
I suspect that there will be a lack of will from studios like Disney to tackle the problem, as well. At least whilst they think that not doing so keeps their names more separate from 'PornHub' in online searches, the media etc.
Why should it be? The kids uploaded the videos by themselves of their own volition.
If youtube decided to censor these videos it would run up against free speech provisions of the US constitution.
OK.
Two flaws with that argument.
Firstly, the US constitution protects free speech from interference by the state (at least it does in the broadest reading). Google is not (yet) considered to be an arm of the state.
Secondly, the article is talking about UK law and jurisdiction, not US. It doesn't matter a jot where the company is registered, their operations are not protected by the US constitution outside of the US (no matter how much you might wish that to be the case).
Note necessarily direct, certainly. Any given cause could be rooted in biology but be a dozen or more steps from the outcome and all of them filtered through societal reaction to those. Simply put - correlation is just that, it never implies causation without a thorough understanding of the mechanisms and these studies don't offer that. They offer very good evidence for a causal link but how strong that link is and whether it actually exists in any way that is meaningfully separate from societal pressures is, at best, guesswork without decent scientific understandings of the mechanism.
Yes - it does seem to be a rather simple formula....
1. Check price direct from airline/rail company/hotel company 2. Check price on travel meta-search 3. Compare prices 4. Check that there are no significant differences in what you are getting 5. Pick lowest price.
A little more effort than use meta-search of your choice an ask no questions but not massively. And the meta-search does basically what its name suggests - takes a little leg work out of search through multiple sites whist claiming a percentage for doing so. More often then not using one throws me a bit of a saving and sometimes I go direct anyway just so I get to use my favoured brand. It depends on the extent of the saving.
To me it's not too far apart from checking Amazon's price before buying a book or DVD in a store. It gives me a bit of surety that I'm not paying over the odds for something. And If I am then I know I was almost prepared to pay over the odds so I probably _really_ want to buy the thing online:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes - we had two cats and one was smart and one was about as dumb as a rock (in cat terms, at least). Both were well aware of their own names, though.
He seems a bit salty that people don't want to just agree this was aliens.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I think he is upset that his hypothesis isn't being given any credence, even at the level of hypothesis. Which, I think, might be fair.
It is also entirely reasonable that the scientific community is extremely reluctant to be seen giving the hypothesis any real credence. Unfortunately, UFO and panspermia crackpots have poisoned that well.
Except that at the end of his sentence, they can ask for his password again and if he refuses he can be jailed again.
Troll or moron?
I can't tell.
Maybe both?
Trollon
Since when were we equating someone's upholstry with diversity? The threat is that you are more likely to damage the vehicle you are going to be a passenger in. You are more likely to be pain in the ass in any number of ways as a drunk passenger.
If the technology can reliably pick out the drunk from the sober, with no false positives then I'm all for it. No false positives is a bit of a dream, though, and I worry about quite what will happen to the poor folks who hold their phone in a 'drunk' way.
I sure hope so; the system they had was insane. The US system is far from perfect, but I would far rather err on the side of allowing people to voice their opinions rather than giving scam artists and lunatics the ability to shut down reasonable criticism.
It's a lot better, certainly and seems to actually fit the UK legal system more closely than before the 2013/14 changes. It was a massive victory for the libel reform campaign and Simon Singh played a big part in pushing it forwards. There continues to be campaigning for still more reform (especially in Scotland and Northern Ireland where the changes haven't been applied in the same way).
I think that you maybe missed the substantial reform of libel law that happened in the wake of the Simon Singh case (see http://www.libelreform.org/ and https://www.theguardian.com/la...).
The UK still has less of a legal emphasis on protecting free speech than the US does and that definitely tips things more in favour of the accuser than the accused (relative to the US) but the libel reform bill addressed that balance somewhat and brought libel cases into alignment with other UK law in forcing an innocent-until-proven-guilty assumption.
In short - things are pretty much closer to an even balance between accuser and accused now with more protections for uneven fights between individuals and corporate entities and special protections for scientific publications.
Er... so that would be a computer, then?
Sorry - I don't buy the evolution analogy. There's elements of it that match but here's the issue. In a free market, companies don't 'evolve' to innovate. Innovation isn't the end goal, surviving and profiting is. There's a hell of a lot of ways to profit other than innovation and innovation is always a risky strategy to reach that end. Often it's easier to make a measured approach and plan to drag down anyone else who innovates, especially once you're big enough.
A free market is about the profitability and survival being the end goal and whatever achieves that is what happens. This is why licensing is required, to ensure that people don't get trampled underfoot on the way to that profitability.
As Solandri stated, licensing applies to people who could endanger your wellbeing through incompetence or negligence and we all benefit from that. You _could_ argue that people can vote with their feet, avoid restaurants that develop a reputation for food poisoning etc. Noone wants to be one of the ones who dies on the way to building that reputation, though.
Not the source mentioned but this article has a table that shows relative rates between the US and other high-income countries:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/h...
Their source dates back to 2010 but up-to-date and reliable studies are hard to come by and the stats are unlikely to have changed substantially. It is worth noting that the data covers homicide, suicide and accidental death and compares firearm and non-firearm rates (as a common misconception is that what you shave off one will appear on the other set of stats).
So much for the Internet 'interpreting censorship as damage and routing around it'..
If you read the article you will see that is just what has happened in this case. Cloudflare are pulling the plug and the owners of the site have said it will cause minimal disruption. I would say that probably qualifies...
This actually suggests a possible advantage to using a service like Cloudfare. It won't have been cost and effort free to obtain that court order and it turns out to be largely useless in actually causing any substantial disruption for the sites in question. Now ACS will need to go back to the drawing board and work out how to actually disrupt the sites or give up. Either way, the court order did them little practical good so far.
With Paxman frowning "Come on, come on. It's not difficult. At least not unless you're a politician"
Yes - both parties have been pretty bad on the issue. Nice to see that _someone_ is taking it seriously and listening to the experts, though :)
Um... maybe to ensure that your bank transactions are kept secure such that those potentially snooping upon them can't follow up your legitimate transactions with ones that, for instance, move all of the money from your account to their own accounts?
I mean... just as a starter for 10...
Ah yes. Sorry - I was kind of assuming the dominant position without stating it.
So let me elucidate a little further with that made (hopefully) clearer. Qualcomm was in a market-dominant position at the time and cut an exclusivity deal with Apple that pretty much guaranteed that they would remain in a fairly dominant position as a result. It's not a _complete_ monopoly unless they managed to get a similar deal with other manufacturers but certainly significant enough to make it far less likely that anyone else would be in a position to invest in research to be able to enter the marketplace. The position of dominance is being leveraged through the exclusivity clauses in the contract. Whether or not apple are damaged by that, it does damage the marketplace as a whole. It stifles investment in new technology because once a dominant company know that they can maintain that dominance through contractual elements, they no longer need to be technologically innovative.
Consumer choice is kind of meaningless in this context. I'm not sure anyone is picking a phone based upon the manufacturer of the baseband chip.
The key, I believe, is that there was an exclusivity clause in the contract. The EU are very wary of such things (with good reason if you believe that monopolizing practices are harmful).
Now - had the contract been that they would sell X number of chips for a given prices then I suspect that there wouldn't have been a case - whether that X amounted to 100%, 99% or 150% of what Apple used. The problem was that the agreement they reached excluded other manufacturers.
Exclusivity contracts are one of those things that fall into a bit of a market freedom paradox. In a truly free market then they should be possible (because you can sign a contract for anything, right?) but in being available they curtail market freedom once in place.
As a proponent of market freedom (or control) you can fall either side on whether they are a good or bad thing.
Nope.. I'm afraid that thinkwaitfast was correct. It's a republic (a representative one) rather than a democracy - at least in the technical sense. Two things keep it from being a democracy:
1. Not everyone has the right to vote.
2. There is a constitutional limit placed upon the majority will. As a result, the government representing the majority vote is unable to necessarily enact their will if doing so violates the constitution.
The differences are subtle, though, in modern democratic republics:
https://www.diffen.com/differe...
https://keydifferences.com/dif...
Whilst I believe that you are right in identifying an mechanical failsafe as an incorrect approach I don't think this should fall to the user to pick from two items next to each other on a drop-down. Intelligent, highly-skilled operators make mistakes in these sort of circumstances and a bit of decent UI design goes a long way in preventing such things (without the need for mechanical safeguards).
Something as simple as giving obvious visual clues between test and live messages (icons, colour, font weight etc), separating the items on the drop down into obvious lists for test and live messages etc.
Getting only a _little_ more complicated in UI, a subsequent message confirming a live message (possibly with an action that requires a user to type 'live' or something to ensure that the validation request has been received and understood) would almost certainly eliminate any chance a live message being sent in place of a test one.
Decent design does not rely on users doing the right thing any more than it has to.
PornHub has made it's money by being very lax about copyright enforcement, especially proactive enforcement when compared to services like YouTube. Is it really any surprise that people are using it to host copyright-infringing material that isn't pornographic?
I suspect that there will be a lack of will from studios like Disney to tackle the problem, as well. At least whilst they think that not doing so keeps their names more separate from 'PornHub' in online searches, the media etc.
Why should it be? The kids uploaded the videos by themselves of their own volition.
If youtube decided to censor these videos it would run up against free speech provisions of the US constitution.
OK.
Two flaws with that argument.
Firstly, the US constitution protects free speech from interference by the state (at least it does in the broadest reading). Google is not (yet) considered to be an arm of the state.
Secondly, the article is talking about UK law and jurisdiction, not US. It doesn't matter a jot where the company is registered, their operations are not protected by the US constitution outside of the US (no matter how much you might wish that to be the case).
Note necessarily direct, certainly. Any given cause could be rooted in biology but be a dozen or more steps from the outcome and all of them filtered through societal reaction to those. Simply put - correlation is just that, it never implies causation without a thorough understanding of the mechanisms and these studies don't offer that. They offer very good evidence for a causal link but how strong that link is and whether it actually exists in any way that is meaningfully separate from societal pressures is, at best, guesswork without decent scientific understandings of the mechanism.
If you removes emotion and look at the issue from a reasonable and logical point of view
Removing emotion is neither reasonable nor logical
Life is a sacrifice. And I appreciate and celebrate women for that sacrifice.
But not enough to want them to be paid the same as a man?
At a guess?
The one backed by considerably more than 90% of the academic experts in the field.
But who knows. Maybe unqualified Anonymous Coward #7687123 is correct...
Yes - it does seem to be a rather simple formula....
1. Check price direct from airline/rail company/hotel company
2. Check price on travel meta-search
3. Compare prices
4. Check that there are no significant differences in what you are getting
5. Pick lowest price.
A little more effort than use meta-search of your choice an ask no questions but not massively. And the meta-search does basically what its name suggests - takes a little leg work out of search through multiple sites whist claiming a percentage for doing so. More often then not using one throws me a bit of a saving and sometimes I go direct anyway just so I get to use my favoured brand. It depends on the extent of the saving.
To me it's not too far apart from checking Amazon's price before buying a book or DVD in a store. It gives me a bit of surety that I'm not paying over the odds for something. And If I am then I know I was almost prepared to pay over the odds so I probably _really_ want to buy the thing online :)
Probably restore from last full backup. You do have backups, right?