(Warning: this post contains 3 puns in decreasing order of wit.)
>...we can never truly know that the actual experience of that colour is the same for another person. We just have to assume...
Different people claim to regard the same colour as pleasant or distasteful; why disbelieve them? Why assume Senator McCarthy had the same experience as Josef Stalin on seeing the colour red? Surely their experiences were coloured by their convictions. I expect McCarthy saw red when he saw red.
Do you have the same experience when you see a red tomato, a red banana, a red traffic light, a pool of blood? I don't. Even if a colour recurs in exactly the same context (say the dull blue-green of the default Windows desktop), you'll feel differently about it. However much you first liked or disliked that colour, after continued exposure you will begin to feel jaded.
In languages with only three colour words, these invariably denote what we call black, white and red. Differences arise when others are added, but people are perfectly aware these are only terminological. Someone who considers turquoise to be blue and jade to be green is well aware that they are very similar, much more similar than indigo and lime.
>The IOC had forecast that 35 million people, or what they call unique users, would use the official website during the games.
>But with one day to go, the latest estimate is 15 million.
If only someone were to post the link on Slashdot! Sadly the article is 2 months old, though, so the time limit has passed.
>The head of the marketing division and IOC vice president, Dick Pound...
I see the IOC was wise enough to choose a marketing VP with a safe, ordinary name wherein no-one could possibly find any innuendo. I wonder what his hobbies are?
>The IOC classifies it as a broadcasting medium...
Surely that's up to lawmakers. Or does the IOC now have global jurisdiction over copyright law?
>Part of the problem for the IOC is that the place of the internet has yet to be accurately defined.
No problem. The Committee can use its new-found legal powers to define the place of the Internet as 23 degrees 4 minutes south, 12 degrees 18 minutes east.
>There was also pressure for a ban on pictures on the internet from the American broadcaster, NBC...
Yes, I can see the world's governments banning Olympic coverage. Anything to please the all-important NBC.
>NBC's controversial decision to show no live pictures and delay its coverage by 18 hours has led to lower viewing figures than expected.
All-important and wise with it.
Seriously, it sounds like the IOC intends to suppress fair use of Olympic clips in reviews. They may have the right to exclude unauthorised cameras from their sites, but they can't rewrite the law. Or perhaps Harry Peart was glossing rather heavily over the legal situation.
Although the UK has a susbstantial body of consitutional law, it cannot reasonably be said to have and use a constitution. A constitution is a set of rules for the operation of government. While it is possible for such rules to be unwritten, it is not possible for them to be unknown. Many constitutional questions cannot be resolved because there are no known rules. For example, is it legal for a divorcee (like Prince Charles) to become king? Can the Five Year Act (mandating elections at least every 5 years) be replaced with a Six Year Act? Can a paliamentary ordinance (without royal assent) become law? Can the Church of England choose to be formally led by the Archbishop of Canterbury and not the reigning monarch?
1)For a Bill of Parliament to become Law, it has to be signed by the Queen. This means that in the event of some Adolf Hitler type being elected, the Queen has the capacity to frustrate his ambitions.
She also has the capacity to frustrate the ambitions of a popular democratic reformer. Or not, as the case may be: royal assent was easily bypassed during the English Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Protectorate by passing ordinances instead of acts.
Consider Edward VIII. Some people thought the king was not allowed to marry a divorcee (and an American to boot:-), while others thought he was. There was no constitution to answer the question, and in the end he abdicated. What if he had still been reigning in 1940? Would he have invited Winston Churchill to form a government without the clear support of parliament? Probably not, since Churchill wanted to continue the disastrous war with Germany, which did not enjoy strong public support, and Edward was a Nazi sympathiser. What would have happened if he had refused? What would have happened if Churchill had appointed a cabinet anyway and attempted to set up shop?
2)The Army, Air Force, Navy, Police Force etc etc all swear loyalty to the Queen, not to an elected official. This is extremely important and stabilising. In the event of instability in the country, an attempted coup or whatever, the Queen can call on the forces to obey her, and not some tyrant. In a day to day sense, it means that the forces can be more impartial...
This means any usurper who gets control of the royal family has a good chance of winning control of the armed forces. Hardly a good thing. It would be much better if they swore (note grammar) loyalty to the people and constitution. And requiring the armed forces to support one side in any consitutional dispute does not make them impartial. It makes them extremely partial.
3)The Queen is the fount of soveriegnty in Britain - all power flows from her and is exercised in her name.
It's exercised in her name, but it does not flow from her: it flows from populace to parliament to Prime Minister to judiciary.
An example of the usefulness and stabilising influence of a Monarchy can be found in Spain in 1974(?), when an attempted coup was foiled by the King...
Spain is a good example of a country where the monarchy was used by a dictator (Franco) to derive legitimacy. See also Italy, Portugal, Norway, Poland, Japan, Romania and China in the same period. And England from 1066 (at the latest) to 1645. And British rule in India, Ireland, America, etc.
Th US military, especially the National Guard, has frequently opened fire on US civilians. However, it has seldom fired on unarmed US civilians, who pose less of a threat and can usually be overcome without lethal force. (It has enthusiastically massacred unarmed foreign civilians, but that's another matter...)
>If government has no reason to fear the citizenry it has no reason to be honest.
In a democracy the government has every reason to fear the citizenry as a whole, who can vote it out of office. The additional fear of assassination by lone fanatics or terrorist militias is both unnecessary and undesirable.
Both the UK and the USA have enjoyed a relatively stable society over the past 200 years, and both have gradually changed from oligarchic to democratic government. From these examples, it follows that the right to bear arms is not necessary for democracy, neither does it preclude democracy. One difference is the number of elected leaders who were undemocratically removed by your 'ultimate check and balance': 1 over here, 4 over there.
>Violate any law, just or unjust, and government officials with guns will come and get you.
You seem to think that because guns are commonplace in America they are commonplace in Britain. They aren't. I've only seen armed police officers here in once or twice in my life.
Important parts of the DMCA can be found at SafeKey International, and Thomas has the full text (search for 'digital millennium').
>The DMCA defines "circumvention" as decrypting or otherwise gaining access to a copyrighted work without the authority of the copyright holder.
That's true for provision 1201 subsection (a), Violations Regarding Circumvention of Technological Protection Measures, if you interpret the commas in the most sensible way:
(3) As used in this subsection --
(A) to 'circumvent a technological protection measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological protection measure, without the authority of the copyright owner;
But not for subsection (b), Additional Violations, which also prohibits circumvention devices:
(2) As used in this subsection --
(A) to 'circumvent protection afforded by a technological protection measure' means avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or otherwise impairing a technological protection measure;
MacroHard quoted (a)(2) instead of (b)(1), which is identical save for the numbering. The drafters deliberately took the effort to create two different prohibitions against circumvention devices. Or they were stupid. Or both.
>You make it sound as though I will be violating the DMCA even if I create a device that does nothing at all...
That is correct. 1201(a)(2)(B) and (b)(1)(B) don't say the device must circumvent access controls, only that it must not do anything else that's commercially significant. If you create your useless device you will be violating the letter of the law. Note that a device includes a service, so if you perform a commercially insignificant service (e.g. casting a shadow), that's illegal too, in theory. Components of devices are included, although it's not clear whether the component must do the circumvention on its own, or whether it need only be part of a potential or actual device. If the latter, it's not clear whether components that are also used in legal devices are excluded.
Re: not a good idea yet
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Golden Rice
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You're thinking of the fungus Penicillum, not the extract penicillin.
Re:Damned if you do, Damned if you don't
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no research can be done on the long-term effects of eating this rice, other than by feeding it in large quantities to some poor, unsuspecting people
Lots of research can, and has been done: the nutritional qualities of rice, beta carotene and both together are well-researched. The crop has been extensively tested. And the people are hardly unsuspecting, unless they're already so vitamin A deficient they can't tell white from yellow. It's trivially true that we don't know the precise effects on people of eating golden rice for many years. But the same applies to any new strain of rice, and to vitamin A pills.
But I can make some predictions about the effects of distributing vitamin pills:
Some people will eat too many and be ill.
Some people will eat too few and be ill.
Some people will eat the wrong pills and be ill.
The pills will degrade in storage to varying degrees.
Rumours will spread that the pills contain pig or cow glycerine (which they probably do). This is not considered good in southern Asia.
In most countries distribution will be either through a network of merchants whose prices are too high for the poor, or through an inefficient public system which fails to reach large rural areas.
if(do) {damn();} else {damn();}
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Golden Rice
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They especially don't turn recessive traits dominant. In most cases, we can take comfort in the fact that if new strain is fertile and it crosses with 'wild' strains, the new traits will likely not be expressed. Furthermore, if the new trait turns out to be a problem for plant survival, it will be quickly removed from the genome by natural processes.
I don't think it's a 'comfort' to know that a recessive gene may or may not be hidden in the hybrids. A dominant trait will be selected out very fast, a recessive one will take many generations to dwindle. And whereas with genetic engineering you introduce a small number of well-known genes, crossbreeding adds a vast number of mystery genes.
Re:Multiple causes, multiple effects
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Golden Rice
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>Famines never occur in democracies
...
>Even China and India produce enough food to feed their entire populations - it's the way their system is structured that causes the problem.
I agree with your general thesis, but India is a democracy. So is Bangladesh, to choose a more relevant example.
Re:Crippled for a reason
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Golden Rice
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No, No, No... Modern crops are breed to not reprogduce in order to increase their yield. Energy a plant spends reproducing is energy not spent producing more edible portions.
Wonko's new improved-yield crops!
Seedless rice!
Seedless wheat!
Seedless corn!
Tuberless potatoes!
Fruitless, nutless trees!
The main motive for breeding hybrid crops has always been to prevent replanting. Pure-breeding strains are much easier and cheaper to develop, and don't seem to be significantly lower in quality.
rice takes over the world
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Golden Rice
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...if this little number of a genetically modified rice kernel is extremely harmful (similar things have happened before with frankenfoods) we may be unable to stop it from growing with disasterous(sic) consequences.
They could just stop planting it. Or, in an extreme emergency, drain the fields.
Are you talking about the aims of the Party leadership, the rank-and-file members, or voters and casual supporters (or all 3)? Nazism was not an attempt to make a better world in any reasonable sense of the word 'better'. It was overtly a German nationalist movement which advocated enriching Germany at the expense of other nations by building an exploitative empire. Of course, there was nothing remarkable about such an aim; the British, French, Portugese, Dutch and American empires were regarded by many as models of enlightened practice.
National Socialist German Workers Party voters may have expected Hitler to keep his promises and end exploitation of German workers, but his first actions as chancellor included the banning of trade unions and a system of work permits unfavourable to employees. Among many other notorious acts, the Nazi regime defrauded thousands of ordinary people by promising a Volkswagen if they paid a certain number of installments in advance, but no cars were ever delivered (the factories were busy making tanks).
It's quite true that American cinema often turns Nazis into dumb stereotypes, which makes them uninteresting both personally and historically. Bear in mind, though, that Hollywood also portrays almost every other group of people as dumb stereotypes. Your implicit claim that Hollywood is pro-Communist is laughable - Communism is the only ideology treated with even less comprehension than Nazism. The Communists I know really do want to make the world a better place (I think many of their reforms would have the opposite effect, but that's another story).
I accept some of your points: UCAVs may make conflicts less deadly, and I certainly wouldn't want to defend the actions of the Republican Guard or Serbian irregulars.
However I agree with Vergil that removing the USA's principal inhibition against warfare is in itself a bad thing. The latest 3 presidents have all played the swaggering bully on the world stage. Sometimes they have been justified, sometimes not, but either way it delights the voters back home and causes immense suffering abroad. This does not inspire international confidence.
As for your specific points, I concede that high casualty rates were sometimes unavoidable in WWII. True, in Southeast Asia it was hard to identify people, but the Pentagon saw that not as a problem, but an opportunity for more air raids. The USA waged the war much more ruthlessly than France had, but was defeated just as badly.
The first use doctrine was hardly the only possible deterrent to Soviet tank forces. A few thousand more NATO tanks deployed in Western Europe is an obvious possibility (and probably cheaper than the nukes). Or a conventional arms limitation treaty. Or at the worst, threatening to use nuclear weapons only if a NATO member was invaded by substantial Warsaw Pact forces.
You completely misunderstand the propaganda effect of bombing. Attacking Belgrade had exactly the same effect as every terror bombing campaign from Guy Fawkes onwards (nukes excepted, I admit). It did not 'sap their will', it strengthened it. Milosevich killed Kosovars faster than before, and being pro-American in Serbia is now as acceptable as being pro-Unabomber in the USA, pro-Russian in Chechnya or pro-Real IRA in Britain.
This is not to say bombing is always bad: the strictly military campaign against the Serbian army and special police in Kosovo was beneficial, although it hindered the slaughter less than the city bombings incited it. I can see that pilotless helicopter gunships might have been very useful in that situation (I wouldn't want to fly low and slow into forested mountains covered with well-armed, Cold War-trained soldiers, and clearly NATO didn't either).
I'm sure the USA will retain its technological lead over other nations for the next few decades, so the best hope for restraint would be for the USA to accept the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction. This would make war crimes as serious an offence as dallying with an intern. Of course, Congress submitting to an international body is about as likely as glaciers coming out of Hell.
I would trust the US far more than anyone else to wage war as humanely as possible, meaning trying to minimize casualties to our side as well as noncombatants.
Where have you been for the last 200 years? Have you forgotten the mass terrorism of the Revolution, Civil War and whatever the politically correct term is for the 'Indian Wars'? American forces in World War 2 suffered and inflicted immense casualties, because their commanders wanted them to. Patton frequently boasted of the number of Germans he'd killed, and MacArthur was equally a butcher. I know there were other ruthless commanders in WWII, but the Americans compare very unfavourably to, say Montgomery, Rommel, or De Gaulle. The fire bombing of Dresden (by US & British aircraft) was arguably the worst single atrocity of the war. The second would be Hiroshima. While I would agree it was overall a good act to drop the bomb on Japan, choosing a city as the target was an exercise in pure malevolence, with the sole aim of maximizing civilian casualties. And just in case anyone was in doubt, this was followed by the wanton slaughter at Nagasaki.
And American policy has not changed since. Besides supporting bloodthirsty warmongers like Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot, the USA has also acted brutally in almost every war they fought. (I'm not claiming that all, or most Americans were involved in atrocities, but successive governments have carried them out one way or another.)
I don't know much about how the Korean War was fought. In Vietnam there was a deliberate policy of targeting civilians, and reporting the casualties as enemy soldiers. And there was rarely any attempt to distinguish sympathisers for one side or the other. The bulk of the terrorism was carried out by the Air Force, which 'carpet-bombed' Vietnamese villages and neigbouring neutral countries such as Cambodia.
NATO in the 1980s had a policy of 'early first use' of nuclear weapons in the event of a conflict with the Warsaw Pact. If Tito had died and Yugoslavia disintegrated ten years earlier, a third World War would have been hard to prevent.
After the allied invasion, the Persian Gulf War soon degenerated into an American hunt for, and massacre of, fleeing Iraqi forces who posed no threat to anyone. And Clinton has shown no compunction over bombing Sudanese townspeople to distract the media from his tiresome affair with Monica Lewinsky. More recently he turned Belgrade into a modern Guernica by cluster-bombing the marketplace - probably he was aiming for a different part of the heavily-populated city, but demonstrating a casual contempt for human life. And finally the USA wiped its (metaphorical) ass on the Geneva and Hague conventions by deliberately slaughtering journalists in Belgrade's television studios and bragging about it to stunned reporters.
Terrorism is not only immoral and illegal, it is also counterproductive (unless your aim is to provoke attack). While a brutal terrorist campaign by troops on the ground can be effective at suppressing resistance, non-nuclear bombing has invariably had the opposite effect. Zepellin raids on London in the World War I intensified British hatred of Germany and helped make a political settlement impossible. The 'Blitz' in WWII had the same effect, but much more so, as did the retaliatory terror bombing of Germany. Similarly the bombing of SE Asia and various bombing campaigns over Northern Ireland. The air campaign in Serbia had no effect there beyond causing death and suffering and intensifying the butchery in Kosovo (a 'predictable' consequence according to NATO). Milosevich's response was to escalate, and he only withdrew when an invasion force was massing on the border.
So you could fire a machine gun into a melee and be sure of missing your own troops? Interesting idea. The 'cookie cutters' in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age were a completely different kind of weapon: a nanobot in the bloodstream programmed to explode at a given signal.
I remember all too well the misinformed outrage last month from readers of the highly inaccurate ZDNet article. The original draft treaty states very clearly that cracking tools are only illegal if you intend to use them for illegal purposes. Possibly even this is wrong, but many other parts of the treaty deserved more criticism (positive and negative).
The jurisdiction article worries me most (Article 19). A country has jurisdiction over a communication if it has jurisdiction over any communicating party. This includes routers, so any Internet communication will be subject to the laws of all countries it may pass through. This is bad enough within Europe. For example, it would be illegal for a Spanish person to read a Greek historical site if a Nuremburg rally photo passes through Germany. It becomes even worse if, as planned, comparatively censorious countries like the USA, Australia, Singapore and China sign the treaty.
Good news:
This places a huge administrative burden on public institutions, in NH at least, that monitor individuals' online activities. If they have any sense they'll stop snooping. This is much better than the records being available to the bureaucrats but not to anyone else.
Bad news:
It also places a huge administrative burden on any public institution keeping non-personal logs to manage and secure its network. Libraries etc. may be forced to hire private contractors (who presumably are not affected by this ruling) to run their networks.
Ugly news:
To redact names and other personal information submitted over the web, the staff will have to pore over records which would normally be private. And it's hard to decide whether a piece of information is personal or not: for example, the nickname someone uses on Slashdot may or may not also be their nickname at school. On the other hand, the article suggests that the district will be forced to hand over the entire logs, redacting only the internal usernames and passwords.
I suggest the solution is to rewrite the usage policy to say that communication may be monitored, but only to collect statistical information and to investigate known problems and abuse. That ought to give students the privacy they deserve, and free the district from its onerous obligations.
Protein folding isn't a computable problem, in the sense that some algorithm can tell you what shape a given polypeptide will adopt under given physical and chemical conditions. Many proteins have more than one stable tertiary structure. BSE is caused by a prion changing from one form to another, for example.
Of the two exemptions the Library did grant, one is laughably narrow: 'Compilations Consisting of Lists of Websites Blocked by Filtering
Software Applications'. So you're allowed to reproduce lists of blocked websites, but not lists of blocked email addresses, lists of banned words, or even compilations consisting of lists of websites plus a copyright notice. And you have to know the compilation doesn't contain anything apart from lists of websites before you're allowed to decrypt it.
The other is laughably broad: 'Literary Works, Including Computer Programs and Databases, Protected by Access Control Mechanisms That Fail to Permit Access Because of Malfunction, Damage or Obsoleteness'. Compiled programs are not a literary work, and this is basically a kludge to circumvent the DMCA. To its credit, the Library does admit that it's abusing the law, and points out how ill-conceived the DMCA is.
The copyright holder can just create a new, cheap work protected with the same access control. A device circumventing that control would be illegal under the DMCA.
Read the treaties (especially you, sdo1). Both are very short and clear in comparison with, say, the Library of Congress ruling.
Read them? Good. Now you know that neither of them says anything about a copyright holder having some right to prevent owners of copies from accessing them however they wish. Neither says anything about source code not being speech. Both allow sweeping fair use exceptions.
Of course, if congress votes to ratify a treaty that doesn't imply that all or many of the congressbeings have read it.
I agree that it's unfair, but it was hardly Zakalwe lying to the reader. All the way through I felt that the characters would make perfect sense if only... things were different. And in the event they were. You may well accuse IMB of lying to you in Use Of Weapons, but the characters are true to themselves. And there is a clue on the back cover (of the paperback at least).
Slashdot Mirror
(Warning: this post contains 3 puns in decreasing order of wit.)
>...we can never truly know that the actual experience of that colour is the same for another person. We just have to assume...
Different people claim to regard the same colour as pleasant or distasteful; why disbelieve them? Why assume Senator McCarthy had the same experience as Josef Stalin on seeing the colour red? Surely their experiences were coloured by their convictions. I expect McCarthy saw red when he saw red.
Do you have the same experience when you see a red tomato, a red banana, a red traffic light, a pool of blood? I don't. Even if a colour recurs in exactly the same context (say the dull blue-green of the default Windows desktop), you'll feel differently about it. However much you first liked or disliked that colour, after continued exposure you will begin to feel jaded.
In languages with only three colour words, these invariably denote what we call black, white and red. Differences arise when others are added, but people are perfectly aware these are only terminological. Someone who considers turquoise to be blue and jade to be green is well aware that they are very similar, much more similar than indigo and lime.
>But with one day to go, the latest estimate is 15 million.
If only someone were to post the link on Slashdot! Sadly the article is 2 months old, though, so the time limit has passed.
>The head of the marketing division and IOC vice president, Dick Pound...
I see the IOC was wise enough to choose a marketing VP with a safe, ordinary name wherein no-one could possibly find any innuendo. I wonder what his hobbies are?
>The IOC classifies it as a broadcasting medium...
Surely that's up to lawmakers. Or does the IOC now have global jurisdiction over copyright law?
>Part of the problem for the IOC is that the place of the internet has yet to be accurately defined.
No problem. The Committee can use its new-found legal powers to define the place of the Internet as 23 degrees 4 minutes south, 12 degrees 18 minutes east.
>There was also pressure for a ban on pictures on the internet from the American broadcaster, NBC...
Yes, I can see the world's governments banning Olympic coverage. Anything to please the all-important NBC.
>NBC's controversial decision to show no live pictures and delay its coverage by 18 hours has led to lower viewing figures than expected.
All-important and wise with it.
Seriously, it sounds like the IOC intends to suppress fair use of Olympic clips in reviews. They may have the right to exclude unauthorised cameras from their sites, but they can't rewrite the law. Or perhaps Harry Peart was glossing rather heavily over the legal situation.
She also has the capacity to frustrate the ambitions of a popular democratic reformer. Or not, as the case may be: royal assent was easily bypassed during the English Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Protectorate by passing ordinances instead of acts.
Consider Edward VIII. Some people thought the king was not allowed to marry a divorcee (and an American to boot
This means any usurper who gets control of the royal family has a good chance of winning control of the armed forces. Hardly a good thing. It would be much better if they swore (note grammar) loyalty to the people and constitution. And requiring the armed forces to support one side in any consitutional dispute does not make them impartial. It makes them extremely partial.
It's exercised in her name, but it does not flow from her: it flows from populace to parliament to Prime Minister to judiciary.
Spain is a good example of a country where the monarchy was used by a dictator (Franco) to derive legitimacy. See also Italy, Portugal, Norway, Poland, Japan, Romania and China in the same period. And England from 1066 (at the latest) to 1645. And British rule in India, Ireland, America, etc.
Th US military, especially the National Guard, has frequently opened fire on US civilians. However, it has seldom fired on unarmed US civilians, who pose less of a threat and can usually be overcome without lethal force. (It has enthusiastically massacred unarmed foreign civilians, but that's another matter...)
>If government has no reason to fear the citizenry it has no reason to be honest.
In a democracy the government has every reason to fear the citizenry as a whole, who can vote it out of office. The additional fear of assassination by lone fanatics or terrorist militias is both unnecessary and undesirable.
Both the UK and the USA have enjoyed a relatively stable society over the past 200 years, and both have gradually changed from oligarchic to democratic government. From these examples, it follows that the right to bear arms is not necessary for democracy, neither does it preclude democracy. One difference is the number of elected leaders who were undemocratically removed by your 'ultimate check and balance': 1 over here, 4 over there.
>Violate any law, just or unjust, and government officials with guns will come and get you.
You seem to think that because guns are commonplace in America they are commonplace in Britain. They aren't. I've only seen armed police officers here in once or twice in my life.
MiniTruth: upmod doubleplusfitful truthcommand!
>The DMCA defines "circumvention" as decrypting or otherwise gaining access to a copyrighted work without the authority of the copyright holder.
That's true for provision 1201 subsection (a), Violations Regarding Circumvention of Technological Protection Measures, if you interpret the commas in the most sensible way:
But not for subsection (b), Additional Violations, which also prohibits circumvention devices:
MacroHard quoted (a)(2) instead of (b)(1), which is identical save for the numbering. The drafters deliberately took the effort to create two different prohibitions against circumvention devices. Or they were stupid. Or both.
>You make it sound as though I will be violating the DMCA even if I create a device that does nothing at all...
That is correct. 1201(a)(2)(B) and (b)(1)(B) don't say the device must circumvent access controls, only that it must not do anything else that's commercially significant. If you create your useless device you will be violating the letter of the law. Note that a device includes a service, so if you perform a commercially insignificant service (e.g. casting a shadow), that's illegal too, in theory. Components of devices are included, although it's not clear whether the component must do the circumvention on its own, or whether it need only be part of a potential or actual device. If the latter, it's not clear whether components that are also used in legal devices are excluded.
You're thinking of the fungus Penicillum, not the extract penicillin.
Lots of research can, and has been done: the nutritional qualities of rice, beta carotene and both together are well-researched. The crop has been extensively tested. And the people are hardly unsuspecting, unless they're already so vitamin A deficient they can't tell white from yellow. It's trivially true that we don't know the precise effects on people of eating golden rice for many years. But the same applies to any new strain of rice, and to vitamin A pills.
But I can make some predictions about the effects of distributing vitamin pills:
>Famines never occur in democracies
...
>Even China and India produce enough food to feed their entire populations - it's the way their system is structured that causes the problem.
I agree with your general thesis, but India is a democracy. So is Bangladesh, to choose a more relevant example.
Wonko's new improved-yield crops!
- Seedless rice!
- Seedless wheat!
- Seedless corn!
- Tuberless potatoes!
- Fruitless, nutless trees!
The main motive for breeding hybrid crops has always been to prevent replanting. Pure-breeding strains are much easier and cheaper to develop, and don't seem to be significantly lower in quality.They could just stop planting it. Or, in an extreme emergency, drain the fields.
[Note to moderators: the parent is no troll.]
Are you talking about the aims of the Party leadership, the rank-and-file members, or voters and casual supporters (or all 3)? Nazism was not an attempt to make a better world in any reasonable sense of the word 'better'. It was overtly a German nationalist movement which advocated enriching Germany at the expense of other nations by building an exploitative empire. Of course, there was nothing remarkable about such an aim; the British, French, Portugese, Dutch and American empires were regarded by many as models of enlightened practice.
National Socialist German Workers Party voters may have expected Hitler to keep his promises and end exploitation of German workers, but his first actions as chancellor included the banning of trade unions and a system of work permits unfavourable to employees. Among many other notorious acts, the Nazi regime defrauded thousands of ordinary people by promising a Volkswagen if they paid a certain number of installments in advance, but no cars were ever delivered (the factories were busy making tanks).
It's quite true that American cinema often turns Nazis into dumb stereotypes, which makes them uninteresting both personally and historically. Bear in mind, though, that Hollywood also portrays almost every other group of people as dumb stereotypes. Your implicit claim that Hollywood is pro-Communist is laughable - Communism is the only ideology treated with even less comprehension than Nazism. The Communists I know really do want to make the world a better place (I think many of their reforms would have the opposite effect, but that's another story).
Past winners Larry Wall and David Korn spring to mind, but more for their achievements in other fields.
Superinconvenient?
No, Newspeak is doubleplusgood!
I accept some of your points: UCAVs may make conflicts less deadly, and I certainly wouldn't want to defend the actions of the Republican Guard or Serbian irregulars.
However I agree with Vergil that removing the USA's principal inhibition against warfare is in itself a bad thing. The latest 3 presidents have all played the swaggering bully on the world stage. Sometimes they have been justified, sometimes not, but either way it delights the voters back home and causes immense suffering abroad. This does not inspire international confidence.
As for your specific points, I concede that high casualty rates were sometimes unavoidable in WWII. True, in Southeast Asia it was hard to identify people, but the Pentagon saw that not as a problem, but an opportunity for more air raids. The USA waged the war much more ruthlessly than France had, but was defeated just as badly.
The first use doctrine was hardly the only possible deterrent to Soviet tank forces. A few thousand more NATO tanks deployed in Western Europe is an obvious possibility (and probably cheaper than the nukes). Or a conventional arms limitation treaty. Or at the worst, threatening to use nuclear weapons only if a NATO member was invaded by substantial Warsaw Pact forces.
You completely misunderstand the propaganda effect of bombing. Attacking Belgrade had exactly the same effect as every terror bombing campaign from Guy Fawkes onwards (nukes excepted, I admit). It did not 'sap their will', it strengthened it. Milosevich killed Kosovars faster than before, and being pro-American in Serbia is now as acceptable as being pro-Unabomber in the USA, pro-Russian in Chechnya or pro-Real IRA in Britain.
This is not to say bombing is always bad: the strictly military campaign against the Serbian army and special police in Kosovo was beneficial, although it hindered the slaughter less than the city bombings incited it. I can see that pilotless helicopter gunships might have been very useful in that situation (I wouldn't want to fly low and slow into forested mountains covered with well-armed, Cold War-trained soldiers, and clearly NATO didn't either).
I'm sure the USA will retain its technological lead over other nations for the next few decades, so the best hope for restraint would be for the USA to accept the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction. This would make war crimes as serious an offence as dallying with an intern. Of course, Congress submitting to an international body is about as likely as glaciers coming out of Hell.
And American policy has not changed since. Besides supporting bloodthirsty warmongers like Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot, the USA has also acted brutally in almost every war they fought. (I'm not claiming that all, or most Americans were involved in atrocities, but successive governments have carried them out one way or another.)
I don't know much about how the Korean War was fought. In Vietnam there was a deliberate policy of targeting civilians, and reporting the casualties as enemy soldiers. And there was rarely any attempt to distinguish sympathisers for one side or the other. The bulk of the terrorism was carried out by the Air Force, which 'carpet-bombed' Vietnamese villages and neigbouring neutral countries such as Cambodia.
NATO in the 1980s had a policy of 'early first use' of nuclear weapons in the event of a conflict with the Warsaw Pact. If Tito had died and Yugoslavia disintegrated ten years earlier, a third World War would have been hard to prevent.
After the allied invasion, the Persian Gulf War soon degenerated into an American hunt for, and massacre of, fleeing Iraqi forces who posed no threat to anyone. And Clinton has shown no compunction over bombing Sudanese townspeople to distract the media from his tiresome affair with Monica Lewinsky. More recently he turned Belgrade into a modern Guernica by cluster-bombing the marketplace - probably he was aiming for a different part of the heavily-populated city, but demonstrating a casual contempt for human life. And finally the USA wiped its (metaphorical) ass on the Geneva and Hague conventions by deliberately slaughtering journalists in Belgrade's television studios and bragging about it to stunned reporters.
Terrorism is not only immoral and illegal, it is also counterproductive (unless your aim is to provoke attack). While a brutal terrorist campaign by troops on the ground can be effective at suppressing resistance, non-nuclear bombing has invariably had the opposite effect. Zepellin raids on London in the World War I intensified British hatred of Germany and helped make a political settlement impossible. The 'Blitz' in WWII had the same effect, but much more so, as did the retaliatory terror bombing of Germany. Similarly the bombing of SE Asia and various bombing campaigns over Northern Ireland. The air campaign in Serbia had no effect there beyond causing death and suffering and intensifying the butchery in Kosovo (a 'predictable' consequence according to NATO). Milosevich's response was to escalate, and he only withdrew when an invasion force was massing on the border.
So you could fire a machine gun into a melee and be sure of missing your own troops? Interesting idea. The 'cookie cutters' in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age were a completely different kind of weapon: a nanobot in the bloodstream programmed to explode at a given signal.
The jurisdiction article worries me most (Article 19). A country has jurisdiction over a communication if it has jurisdiction over any communicating party. This includes routers, so any Internet communication will be subject to the laws of all countries it may pass through. This is bad enough within Europe. For example, it would be illegal for a Spanish person to read a Greek historical site if a Nuremburg rally photo passes through Germany. It becomes even worse if, as planned, comparatively censorious countries like the USA, Australia, Singapore and China sign the treaty.
Good news:
This places a huge administrative burden on public institutions, in NH at least, that monitor individuals' online activities. If they have any sense they'll stop snooping. This is much better than the records being available to the bureaucrats but not to anyone else.
Bad news:
It also places a huge administrative burden on any public institution keeping non-personal logs to manage and secure its network. Libraries etc. may be forced to hire private contractors (who presumably are not affected by this ruling) to run their networks.
Ugly news:
To redact names and other personal information submitted over the web, the staff will have to pore over records which would normally be private. And it's hard to decide whether a piece of information is personal or not: for example, the nickname someone uses on Slashdot may or may not also be their nickname at school. On the other hand, the article suggests that the district will be forced to hand over the entire logs, redacting only the internal usernames and passwords.
I suggest the solution is to rewrite the usage policy to say that communication may be monitored, but only to collect statistical information and to investigate known problems and abuse. That ought to give students the privacy they deserve, and free the district from its onerous obligations.
Protein folding isn't a computable problem, in the sense that some algorithm can tell you what shape a given polypeptide will adopt under given physical and chemical conditions. Many proteins have more than one stable tertiary structure. BSE is caused by a prion changing from one form to another, for example.
Of the two exemptions the Library did grant, one is laughably narrow: 'Compilations Consisting of Lists of Websites Blocked by Filtering
Software Applications'. So you're allowed to reproduce lists of blocked websites, but not lists of blocked email addresses, lists of banned words, or even compilations consisting of lists of websites plus a copyright notice. And you have to know the compilation doesn't contain anything apart from lists of websites before you're allowed to decrypt it.
The other is laughably broad: 'Literary Works, Including Computer Programs and Databases, Protected by Access Control Mechanisms That Fail to Permit Access Because of Malfunction, Damage or Obsoleteness'. Compiled programs are not a literary work, and this is basically a kludge to circumvent the DMCA. To its credit, the Library does admit that it's abusing the law, and points out how ill-conceived the DMCA is.
The copyright holder can just create a new, cheap work protected with the same access control. A device circumventing that control would be illegal under the DMCA.
Read the treaties (especially you, sdo1). Both are very short and clear in comparison with, say, the Library of Congress ruling.
Read them? Good. Now you know that neither of them says anything about a copyright holder having some right to prevent owners of copies from accessing them however they wish. Neither says anything about source code not being speech. Both allow sweeping fair use exceptions.
Of course, if congress votes to ratify a treaty that doesn't imply that all or many of the congressbeings have read it.
I agree that it's unfair, but it was hardly Zakalwe lying to the reader. All the way through I felt that the characters would make perfect sense if only ... things were different. And in the event they were. You may well accuse IMB of lying to you in Use Of Weapons, but the characters are true to themselves. And there is a clue on the back cover (of the paperback at least).