I certainly can't speak for the EFF, and for this issue I don't think any individual at the EFF could speak for it either: In the interview Brad states that board members have divergent views on this issue.
That said, the statement 'Copyright infringement is wrong.' is an very complicated set of concepts and assumptions boxed up in a seemingly simple set of 4 words. I think the EFF should and does focus on better statements like "Protecting free speech is right" and "Protecting technological innovation is right" and "Collateral damage from new laws is wrong."
A nowhere near good enough analogy is asking the AAA (American auto association) to state "Speeding is Wrong." Is it? Speeding as defined by who? Morally, legally or ethically wrong? How about when there are speed-traps? How about if the Congress made going 1 mile over the speed limit a felony offense? It is too complicated a set of issues to try to wrap up in a simple statement. The AAA is better off focusing on "Safe traffic speeds are right" and "well-designed highways are right."
The EFF doesn't find cute baby harp seal cases
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EFF Chairman Interviewed
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· Score: 3, Insightful
As a side note, the EFF as a non-profit has strict rules about what it can do politically. Non-profits cannot support or fight against particular candidates, so another organization needs to do this. At the same time you still need the EFF's work to prevent the "Because the internet scares me I'll weaken it" attempts by politicians and the law in the first place.
The EFF's major 'problem' is that they attempt to work on major issues long before most people would recognize that the issue exists. Back in 1989, how many people would know what a BBS is, let along why it isn't constitutional to seize an entire email server to check out one person's email? The EFF is fighting the equivalent of Physical and Link layer issues, while most people can only really get worked up about Application layer issues. The EFF's fights are the "why we need to protect plankton and krill" issues of the online world- critically important but doesn't have big-eyed sympathetic megafauna that photographs well symbols.
Nor does the EFF get to choose sympathetic posterboy cases. Much as the EFF would love to take on a "RIAA threatens to eat babies at the widows and orphans facility" case, the XXAA is never going to give them one. They get 2600, not the NYTimes. They get Hamadi, not the girl scouts.
But by fighting the one case early on, however obscure or unsympathetic, the EFF is preventing a whole timeline of worse court cases later on. So donate! with this quote from the interview in mind:
"...if you agree with us 75% of the time you should donate some money. If you agree with us 50% of the time you should be on the board.
The issues the EFF deals with are novel and contentious, and we are rarely all of one view..."
With this thread, and the previous ADD thread, many useful posts are being done anonymously. I assume this is because posters might not want to go on the record as having ADD or similar diagnoses. While most of the time mod-reading at 0 = boring comments, with these threads reading at 0 = insightful comments. In the ADD thread I could have used 20 mod points for useful AC comments.
Watch out for this trick of using a phrase like "pirated software, movies, music and games" where 'pirated...music' includes fileshared songs. This phrase tries to make all of these items equivalent to each other: they aren't. It implies "we can't talk about software piracy without also talking about music downloading." No, we can and we ought to talk about these separately. Yes, technically these are all 'unauthorized copies' but that verbal common denominator isn't sufficient to treat them identically.
It is analogous to law-makers announcing that they've doubled the enforcement and punishment for "carjackers, grand theft auto, speeders and drunk driving." Yes, technically all involve broken laws and cars but that doesn't mean that they naturally group together. The police aren't going to get- and shouldn't get- the same kudos for stopping a ring of speeders compared to stopping a ring of car thieves, for example. Continuing the analogy, imagine if the police started using the phrase "ring of speeders" all the time, as if there was a hidden speeder mafia, making speeding out to be an organized crime. At some point you'd have to say "Stop talking like that- mixing the two together! Speeding isn't burglary!"
So, DoJ, I know you guys are working hard and all that but... "Stop talking like that. Unauthorized MP3 sharing isn't the same as factories stamping out bootleg DVDs. Catching sharers at a dorm isn't the same as catching the mafia who filled a shipping container with bootleg CAD software CDs. Not the same, so stop talking about them in the same sentence as if they should get the same sentence."
And an observation about those fines, comparing software copies to song copies. Software companies generally don't authorize anyone else to copy and send their commercial software out. But right now anyone can legally make thousands of digital copies of songs to send out- so long as they are temporary. How does the RIAA value one person listening to that copy of one song? Somewhere between $0.0007 and $0.0014, based on webcasting rates. I know, Napster wasn't the same as webcasting. But then Napster wasn't the same as a factory pressing out DVDs in Malaysia either.
Or in other numbers...
$150,000 fine for each unauthorized copy of a $1,000 software program = 150:1 ratio of punishment to value of item
$150,000 fine for each unauthorized copy of a $1.00 song = a 150,000:1 ratio
$150,000 fine for a $0.0014 song = a 107,142,857:1 (100 million to 1).
Again, not that sharing is identical to webcasting (although the behavior and motivation seemed to be close) but it isn't identical to those $10 copies of OfficeXP in Shenzhen either, even if they all involve copyright. (And once more for the analogy) Just like speeding isn't the same as letting the meter expire, but it also isn't the same as carjacking, even if they all involve illegal uses of cars.
I really liked the BMG show, but Burning Man is so much larger. Not as expensive for individual productions, sure, but the creativity at BM is wonderful.
I'm not kidding about being the BMG: there are camps that'll airbrush you blue, or any other color you want. There are percussive sculpture for you to play. You can animate yourself with el-wire (what they used for that animated desert). You can dance under strobelights.
But beyond that you can be the "Blue Women with Flamethrowers" group. You can be "the entirely blue Tiki bar towed by a lobster" group. Like another poster said, Burning Man is whatever you want it to be. Sure, you can be boring and do the drugs and drunk thing, but I think this is less common that others have said- you'd miss out on so much.
Given this fee structure, could most actually innocent people fight this when DirectTV is wrong? No. You'll fight a traffic ticket because you can afford to take a day off and/or afford to lose. But what if the original ticket fine was $1,000 (but they kindly reduce it to $200 if you act now) and if you lost you lose 5 days in court, 5 days of your car, and $5,000? Unless you are rich, no matter how innocent you are you cannot risk losing.
Their behavior is similar to the BSA's (Business Software Alliance not Boy Scouts). Threaten with a big number, entice to immediate settlement with a smaller number, and always have the threat in the background of being able to ruin the person's business. With the BSA their "we can ruin you" threat is the full business audit: they can take your computer equipment- all of your computers- down for days or weeks. No business can afford that, so you'll 'voluntarily' take the 'negotiated' settlement. With DirectTV their "ruin you" threat is the big lawsuit: you'd be spending $10k+ in lawyers, you'll lose weeks of time, you'll lose a month off of your future life because of the stress, and if you lose you'll have to pay for their 20 $300/hr lawyers.
"...The problem is that there is no adequate system in place that allows music lovers access to their favorite music while compensating artists and copyright holders. It's time to start addressing this problem head on. In the past, we've used a system called "compulsory licensing" to reconcile copyright law with the benefits of new technologies like cable television and webcasting. This approach has drawbacks, but it's certainly better than the direction that the recording industry is taking us today.
Many innovative payment models have been proposed (with or without a compulsory license), and we have highlighted some of them here,..." (emphasis added)
Fred's April article (which according to the EFF "explores a possible alternative": this doesn't read like strong support by the EFF to me) is talking about how to compensate artists. Fred writes that there are many ways to compensate them, of which one could be compulsory licensing, and that one way to do c.l. is ISP fees. Again, this doesn't read like a policy endorsement but instead an exploration of alternatives: ISP fees/modem taxes are a subset of a subset of ways to compensate artists. And talking about it != endorsing it.
If you read the EFF's File-Sharing campaign site you'll see that they list and link to multiple ways that could be used to pay artists. Of these, only one is written by an EFF-related person, although Brad Templeton is not a staff member. His proposal- microrefunds- doesn't require DRM.
Other EFF board members include John Perry Barlow [also associated w/the Grateful Dead] and John Gilmore, neither of whom would endorse systems that require DRM. Beyond that, the EFF's general vibe of promoting online privacy and the right to anonymity would make the EFF incompatible with DRM systems.
I think that this bad meme (that the EFF wants C.L.) got into Slashdot a few months ago when an article covered the talk an EFF staff member gave on compulsory licencing. Talking about it or listing it as one method of compensating artists != endorsing it, but that confusion was made.
Especially as movies are 30 years behind...
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Science Faction
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· Score: 5, Interesting
the literature, at least. And the author appears to be entirely unaware of this, because the people she interviewed- the movie experts- also don't know this. Saying that technology is catching up with "the benchmarks set by sci-fi writers and filmmakers" is like saying that a new computer is catching up with "the benchmarks set by PDP-11's and Cray X1's."One is mightily easier to catch up with than the other.
Comparing authors and the literature with directors and the SF movies...
Authors
Know about the history of SF literature, including what has become stale or cliched.
Must be aware of scientific developments of the past 40 years, especially if the author specializes in "Hard SF"
Get help or critiques from other writers / scientists: many of the best SF writers are both (i.e. Benford, Vinge)
Go to SF conventions where topics include recent discoveries in science, technology and medicine; bleeding edge new writers and concepts; and which new novels or short stories should get recognized via awards like the Hugo.
Directors and others involved in SF movies...
Get away with plots and backstory that were already old 30 years ago in the SF literature
Don't seem to want to admit their relationship with / dependancy on the SF literature, so don't read or seek criticism from SF writers. (Anecdotal evidence- they rarely participate in regular SF conventions (instead going to Media Cons) and even more rarely hang out in the audience, listening and learning.)
Don't know the state of the art in scientifically consistent (even if not plausible) technobabble. Apparently not aware of the evil overlord's rules and other long-known lists of cliches to avoid.
Don't have any idea about recent SF writers. Nor do their critics, so as in this case the movie/TV show will always be compared to one of "Wells, Verne, Bradbury, Star Trek, Star Wars, Bladerunner (or rarely PKDick) and The Matrix," all nice but they could use some higher standards. Leads to critics calling movies like Harris's Fatherland ("ohhhh, what if Hitler *won* WWII?") original, because they don't know that the SF subfield of alternate history is decades old.
If the technologists have caught up to the literature, let's all go off to play a game of quantum soccer with the other 10^16 posthumans in the multiverse (to give a nice 4 years old example from a state of the art author. I'd also recommend Dozois' "Year's Best Science Fiction" collections, Stross, McLeod, Vinge and most anything found in the best of the SF magazines.)
'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'
My internet is primarily electro-magnetic: mostly aligned magnetic bits- billions per square inch- on oxide or thin film discs (someday to be replaced with nanocrystal superlattice films) and electrons. And more recently it is CDMA2000 formatted radio waves. As I don't currently have either an ethernet adaptor or cellular receiving station in my brain I have to have my internet translated into a visual format so I can read it. But I could have it translated into sound if necessary- it just wouldn't be as fast for me.
Your "primarily visual" internet- it is composed of icons and mediaglyphics? Which only computers with optical sensors can process? It only covers topics like card tricks, miming, and optical illusions? Or do you mean "primarily visual" items like blinking text, Flash, and ads that bounce around the screen? I find that these inherently visual items get in the way of actual information, and I'd rather do without them.
With leaner, less profitable but better technological systems. It is like ISDN and Frame Relay: the California phone company resisted replacing them with DSL for years, because the former were so much more profitable. The consumers of California lost out, having to wait extra years for cheap DSL to be widely available.
A curious lack of flexibility in the US
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Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
They never want you to be more than 5 days away from them. You're right there for 50/52 weeks a year, and even those 2/52 weeks are split into little pieces. It is as if the US doesn't have a word for "Two week vacation." There is a whole category of vacation unavailable to people who aren't yet retired. (Unless, of course, you work in academia or other place where sabbaticals are in the vocabulary.)
It is odd that there is no flexibility on this. Even if you are willing to put in 10% extra hours and take unpaid time off, or are willing to take a 10% cut in pay and benefits, the option of taking a long vacation just isn't there. An employee can be just as productive- I'd say perhaps even more productive- during a year if they take a straight two weeks off along with shorter holidays. But the option isn't there. [As I commented in an earlier thread on temporary 80 hour workweeks, more stress = worse immune system =more time being fatigued from fighting off colds, etc. You're be stressed by not being able to spend a quantity of quality time with your partner, kids, or relatives. You're always in the work-lag (= to jet-lag) of having just left work or being about to go to work. You don't get the stress reduction of being able to think about something else entirely for a week or two.]
Imagine an alternate universe where everyone only gets a 5 minute lunch break: the option of a 1/2 or 1 hour lunch break is alien to them. "Companies can't afford to coddle employees with 1/2 hour lunch breaks: they're not paid to eat" or "If you take a 1 hour break in the middle of the day, you'll be a lot less productive, whether or not that hour is paid time off..." We'd find this alternate universe strange in its lack of flexibility. I find the current vacation time structure in the US equally as strange.
Qualitatively better vacations, but not in the US
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Working Hard?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I would gladly work more 10-11 hour days to get more than the standard 10 or 15 vacation days per year. There seems to be this idea in the US that you should wait until retirement to take a certain type of vacation- the long, perhaps educational trip where you have the time to explore your local area in detail. I think it is terrible you can't do this when you're younger, especially for people with children. I'd think being able to take kids on longer trips while they are still children is a good thing- it both makes the kids more cosmopolitan and makes for better family bonding.
Do the numbers. If you have 10 or 15 days, then
You keep 2 or 3 in reserve for illness or emergencies
You use up 3-4 for the obligatory visiting one set of relatives.
If your company is anal you use up 3-4 just to have some long weekends each year, or to stretch out time near holidays. (vs. some companies which let you work longer days for a few days to make up for it)
You have one trip to Hawaii or Disneyland...
That's it, you've used up your vacation time.
A proper exploration vacation, where you spend 2-3 weeks in one country or learning one new skill (cooking classes in Provence, learning Spanish by being in Spain, a 2 week Japan Rail Pass for exploring the top castles of Japan) is right out. Only semi-sarcastically would I say "Of cource Europeans know more about the US than Americans know about Europe: Europeans actually have time to visit the US."
Re:Curious... strikes me as being illegal
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Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
Vacation time is money in the bank- a benefit that accumulates to you- and so shouldn't be forfeited. At the most you should have 'lost' (used up) four days of vacation time, not ten.
I'd like to see a law applying the same rules to all congressional computers. Of course, as this is the same congress that exempts itself(*) from other regulations, it wouldn't happen.
The CCPA Law of 2003: As the US Congress is 100% federally funded, all congressional computers must have a protective filter installed. That filter shall be identical to the filters used on adults' computers at a randomly selected, federal-funds-receiving US library. All requests to lift the filter or unblock sites must be forwarded to a librarian at the selected library, and if delays occur because that librarian is already overworked due to budget cutbacks, Congress shall just have to wait. All requests to lift the filter or unblock sites shall be a matter of public record.
(Of course one could say that Congress is different because CIPA is all about protecting the children, but... 1. Shouldn't we care almost as much about Congress as we do about children? Now that we've got children protected, why not Congress next? 2. Doesn't Congress want to show that it won't force laws on other adults that it isn't willing to take for itself as well? 3. What about Take Your Child To Work Day? Do we want the innocent children of Congresspeople (or their staff) to be Harmed?
(*)Pre-recorded phone spam is bad except for political messages, OSHA rules apply to everyone but Congress, Labor rules apply...FOIA rules apply...
Perhaps you mean "People who lived near major research libraries got along better than most people did before the (widespread) internet"? Here are some people who weren't doing as well before the internet:
People with rare illnesses: pre-internet you'd be lucky if your doctor recognized the symptoms of the illness. You'd have to move from doctor to doctor, so that months or years went by before you'd find a doctor who recognized what you had. You'd almost never meet anyone else with the disease, so you'd have to recreate your 'library of information' yourself. Now you can quickly search for information centers and support groups, and you can narrow down possible causes of symptoms much faster than before.
People with illnesses in general: before, unless you were near a research library you'd not be able to find out much about your illness on your own. Now you can quickly get access to medical journals (Medline) or to other people with the same illness to get advice or support.
People who need to comparison shop: pre-internet, other than Consumers Report (and similar) you were on your own.
People who want to warn about a business or practice: pre-internet it was difficult to share warnings. Even if you told your local BBB, what happened if the problem business left town / state?
The reduced asymmetry of information brought about by the internet is a qualitative improvement to people's lives.
May 27 1669 This morning, before I went to the office, Nick the servant of Mr. Scobell came requesting that I correct what I said of him and link to his version of events. Staid past noon so to make this correction: "Mr. Scobell says that Parliament merely misunderstood how it was writ that Parliament was dissolved and that Mr. Scobell was not in danger of being arrested and you may find his version at Desk.Mr.Scobell.KingStreetByHayMarket.London." Thence to the office. Dined with my cosin which was very good; only the venison pasty was palpable beef. Then to home and to bed.
May 28 1669 To my office till noon. Intended to meet with Mr. Harper to drink and eat, for I had not eaten earlier. But hither my cosin comes to complain and ask that I write this correction "That I shall say that my cosin does buy his meat from fyne butchers and that he would not mix venisin with beef" and you may find his writings at Diary.ThomasPepys.LeftPocket-TheGreenCoat.London. Unable to meet Mr. Harper. Drank two cups of Metheglin instead. Then to bed.
May 29 1669 Up in the morning and I was to go to King's Crossing to collect my salary so I can pay my landlord before he gets apoplectic. But Mr. Cook came angrily to correct me about what I wrote of him so let me write "Mr. Cook did not 'Rail' or otherwise speak in any but a rational way when confronting Mr. Pepys about if Mr. Pepys was after my job." and you may find his statement at MrCook.DiaryLibrary.BehindTheSwan.CrookedLane.Lond on.
Again I was to leave and hither comes the servant of my Lord Chesterfield with a note that "Lord Chesterfield wishes to correct Mr. Pepys and requests him to link to Chesterfield's account of the duel. To whit: Chesterfield did not 'flee' but merely had an important meeting the next day in Holland." I then was to go to my brothers but in comes Mr. Cook to say "You must tell them I was not angry when I spake with you this morning." And you may find his words at MrCook.DiaryLibrary.EtcEtcEtc. And then to bed.
May 30 1669 I lay in bed intending to practice my lute, but then came three servants of three men each telling me to correct what I did write of their employers. I spent until 3 O'clock fixing my writings. Then to King's Crossing but just as I started Mrs. Jewel accosted me to say I wrote badly of her in that "She was not drunk and even if she did drink she still sings better than anyone else in the Tavern" and I should link to her diary which I do not know the location but you may search at DiariesOfDrunkenLadies I am sure. Drank three cups of Metheglin and then to bed.
May 31 1669 This morning comes a pounding on my door from both my landlord and John the Tavern owner ordering that I tell you their versions of what I had writ so "the landlord is not apoplectic" and "All singers at the tavern sing like the nightingale". Spent the afternoon hiding from Mrs. Jewel. And now I shall stop the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done so much corrections and additions every time I take a pen in my hand I do not have time for my own words. And so to bed.
Because you're going to need them. 12/7 for two weeks I could see, or 12/6 for 6 weeks... but 12/7 for 6 weeks is a good way to schedule a failure. The very act of assuming and requiring 100% uptime in the people just about guarantees that it can't happen. The problem is a combination of physiology and human factors analysis:
Physiology: increased stress = decreased function of your immune system. Insufficient sleep = increased stress.
Human factors: if you're on a team, you don't want to appear to be doing less work than the others.
and the numbers: 168 hours in a week. 84 for work, 56 for healthy sleep...28 for everything else
Assume all developers find a way to work 12/7: they cancel all vacations, classes, conferences, workshops, ceremonies, weddings and funerals; they telnet into religous services (and never mind all the caselaw protecting rights of religious expression when, for example, it includes having a day of rest); they suspend all taking care of children or parents (nevermind the family medical leave act)...
So what happens the first time one developer gets exposed to a cold or the flu? Under regular 9/5 circumstances you might just say "Look, I'm coming down with something. I'll head out early today to sleep it off": you make up the time later, and everyone appreciates that you didn't expose them to the bug. Instead, under the 12/7 situation you're going to try to tough it out. You won't get the extra sleep you need, so the illness just gets worse. Because everyone else is sleep deprived, more people are likely to catch the cold from you. Because there is no room for errors / illness / humanity in the schedule, anyone who falls behind will be aware of how they're holding everything up. This causes stress. Stress causes illnesses to last a lot longer. Interesting negative feedback loops ensue.
And this is assuming everyone is gung-ho for the 12/7 plan. What happens when one developer gets creeped out over having to skip a funeral and decides the only choice is to quit? There won't be time to train a replacement: those 84 hours'll have to be absorbed by everyone else.
And that's just the people: that 12/7 schedule doesn't have wiggle room for all the standard crashes, viruses, connectivity failures, power outages, traffic jams, major news events, and other standard slowdowns in modern office life. Someone in management there needs to buy a spine and give the client an honest timeline.
A hoax was listed in textbooks until after science proved that it was a hoax. It is a good case study of why scientists should make sure they apply the best testing methods to new discoveries, which they didn't do for Piltdown. What, though, is the impact that you talk about?
There are multiple FAQs/reviews on Bones of Contention. "The major argument of Marvin Lubenow's book Bones of Contention (1992) is that the various species of hominid cannot form an evolutionary sequence because they overlap one another in time... Once it is realized that this argument is based on a misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, Lubenow's book loses much of its force."
Do you think Java man is a human or ape? Looking at all the species of hominids we know about, can you draw a line to separate human from ape? Why can't Gish, Lubenow and others agree on which are apes? As one Lubenow FAQ asks: ""If two eminent authorities cannot agree whether these skulls are human or ape, does this not imply that they are, um, intermediate?"
Interesting point on Scopes. Another FAQ on Nebraska Man (including the Scopes trial) talks about this "...Osborn apparently began to have doubts about his identification of the tooth shortly before the Scopes "monkey trial" in July 1925, and he stopped mentioning it in his publications. It seems likely that the crumbling of the Fundamentalist assault on evolution in the years following the Scopes trial prevented the Hesperopithecus affair from becoming a serious embarrassment to evolutionists. Although Nebraska Man did not survive long enough to become widely accepted by the scientific community and was quickly forgotten when its true identity was recognized, Hesperopithecus is again being trotted out in the current recrudescence of creationist attacks on evolution. The creationists who belittle mistakes by scientists cannot admit that science advances, in part, by correcting error. "
The new findings show that modern looking Homo sapiens existed 160,000 years ago. Petralona is one of many skulls that show that earlier Homo sapiens didn't look like modern humans, i.e. none of these earlier skulls could be confused with a modern human. These earlier fossils range from not-quite modern to not-quite Homo erectus.
How come it takes so long for refuted stories to stop showing up in creationists' arguments? In general, even when a major creationist group itself says not to use certain arguments, you'll still find them used. Sometimes creationists will ignore data that is directly presented to them. For example, Gish kept on telling the story of the supposedly hidden skills of Java man 15 years after being shown he was wrong.
But specifically, in reference to your listing of Piltdown, Nebraska man, and Java man, read the extensive talk.origins FAQs on these very items: (emphasis added by me)
Nebraska man: "as creationists tell the story, evolutionists used one tooth to build an entire species of primitive man... before further excavations revealed the tooth to belong to a peccary... The true story is much more complex... The imaginative drawing of Nebraska Man to which creationists invariably refer... was done for a British popular magazine......Most other scientists were skeptical even of the modest claim that the Hesperopithecus tooth belonged to a primate... It is simply not true that Nebraska Man was widely accepted as an ape-man, or even as an ape, by scientists, and its effect upon the scientific thinking of the time was negligible."
Java man: "Many creationists have claimed that Java Man, discovered by Eugene Dubois in 1893, was "bad science". Gish (1985) says that Dubois found two human skulls at nearby Wadjak at the same level and had kept them secret; that Dubois later decided Java Man was a giant gibbon; and that the bones do not come from the same individual. Most people would find Gish's meaning of "nearby" surprising: the Wadjak skulls were found 65 miles (104 km) of mountainous countryside away from Java Man. Similarly for "at the same level": the Wadjak skulls were found in cave deposits in the mountains, while Java Man was found in river deposits in a flood plain (Fezer 1993).
Nor is it true, as is often claimed, that Dubois kept the existence of the Wadjak skulls secret because knowledge of them would have discredited Java Man. Dubois briefly reported the Wadjak skulls in three separate publications in 1890 and 1892. Despite being corrected on this in a debate in 1982 and in print (Brace 1986), Gish has continued to make this claim, even stating, despite not having apparently read Dubois' reports, that they did not mention the Wadjak skulls (Fezer 1993)."
Piltdown: It took *less* than 50 years and suspicions that they were a hoax existed by 1914. Even so, Piltdown represents a bad episode in science: "...the hoax points to common and dangerous faults. The hoax succeeded in large part because of the slipshod nature of the testing applied to it; careful examination using the methods available at the time would have immediately revealed the hoax."
In the 90 years since then have we developed better and more rigorous testing methods? Yes. But even during those 40 years it took for the full hoax to be revealed, faults with Piltdown were found, long before testing showed that they were recent skulls: "...It should be remembered that, at the time of Piltdown finds, there were very few early hominid fossils; Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens were clearly fairly late. It was expected that there was a "missing link" between ape and man... Piltdown man had the expected mix of features, which lent it plausibility as a human precursor.
This plausibility did not hold up. During the next two decades there were a number of finds of ancient hominids and near hominids, e.g. Dart's discovery of Australopith
Not junking the infrastructure: throttling
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I, Spammer
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· Score: 1
emails get through regardless of domain, unlike blacklisting or whitelisting
The protocol stays the same
anonymity exists
common carriers exist
The executive summary:
"The plan is to divide the network into two camps, those who can be held accountable for spam, and those whose status is unknown. Mail would flow unimpeded for those on the accountable list, since by definition, we would have other ways to deter or deal with spam from such networks.
For the rest, mail would be redirected through special relay servers whose job it is to "throttle" or rate-limit the amount of mail any party can send. As such, single person to person mail would normally be unimpeded, but mass mailing (regardless of content) from untrusted addresses would be impossible. In effect, mass mailing becomes a slightly privileged operation open to those who can be held accountable if they abuse it by sending such mailings to people who don't know the sender.
Medium volume mailing (small lists, sudden bursts) would be slowed rather than blocked, mainly to detect if the volume is getting to spam levels. Small mailings would still be delivered at a slower rate, but injurious spam campaigns would not work.
In effect the only limitation put on E-mail is that those who wish to host mailing lists must get on the list of those who will be accountable for the abuse of lists. It's even possible to run open relays again. All other mail is delivered. "
Not only !=, Spam is the opposite of bulk mailing
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I, Spammer
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· Score: 2, Informative
Starting with a definition: Spam is "bulk email from a stranger." Content (commercial, religious, political) doesn't matter: that is is both bulk and from a stranger is what causes the damage. (And you don't want to define Spam by content, because courts will be less likely to uphold laws based on that.) I'm using a definition written about in Brad Templeton's essays.
Significant differences separate spam from bulk mail, making them opposites, not just non-equals. In short, bulk mail is a negotiated part of a public good, spam is an unnegotiated public bad that interferes with (or can ruin) a public good. Differences include:
Negotiations and trade:
With bulk mail every step of the process involves trade and negotiations. This includes the last step- you receiving mail- because bulk mail subsidizes first class mail. Granted, this last step was negotiated as a group (all people in the US using the US postal service).
Spammers don't negotiate and don't trade with the people affected by their actions- one doesn't hear of them sitting down to say "I'm going to use this stolen credit card to buy an account for $30 and then send out 5,000,000 spams that'll cost you 3 days of sysadmin time and a crashed hard drive. Deal?" or "I'm going to use your return address so that your email box fills every 2 hours with bounces, and you lose important emails from a prospective employer, in return for me not getting antispam complaints. Deal?"
Predictable prices and costs:
Bulk mail is used by the USPS to have smoothed out, predictable costs and income- again, subsidizing first class mail. From the USPS's point of view, everything is known and predictable *within the system* with standardized costs i.e. "this week in this area we'll be paid $.15 per mail for an average of 200,000 deliveries of ads. If someone wants to send 2x the ads they'll pay 2x the old total. We'll also be paid $.37 for about 20,000 first class mailings. Each postal worker will carry about 20 lbs of mail, except at holidays where it is 30 lbs..." Same from the user's p.o.v. "6 days a week a postal worker'll come by the mailbox. It'll take about 4 days for a letter to arrive, 7 during holidays, and about 1/100,000 will go astray (or whatever the error rate is).
Because spam isn't negotiated and because of the fake return addresses, etc, you have unpredictable and unknown costs, i.e. "every day I'll send an average of 5 mails, receive 10 mails from non-strangers (including annoying ones, but I voluntarily gave my cousin or Microsoft my address), and at random times get horrible pictures, be flooded by bounces or have my ISP crash or be blacklisted." Those costs are externalities- costs (or benefits) that accrue to entities outside of the negotiation process.
I've seen arguments that say that because of peering agreements, ISPs or users should think of a flood of spam bouces the way an 'All-You-Can-Eat' restaurant thinks of Sumo wrestlers: an expensive but expected cost. No, because the wrestler still fits on the bell curve the restaurant uses to predict eating habits, and what the wrestler does is legal. No human can fill their stomach with more than about a gallon of food, and the contract with the restaurant is that it is "All YOU can eat HERE", you don't get to feed two people on one ticket or bring food home using rubber pockets. Spammers cheat- its like one person paying and letting 10 people sneak in the back door. And they break the contract- those peering agreements / contracts usually say no spamming.
Unrecoverable costs and opportunity costs:
spammers cause damage far in excess of the money they put into the system. Its like the flu, a computer virus, forest fire or a traffic accident- the money paid into recovering from it is nowhere near the total damage it caused- you get a net loss to society because it happened. Spam also causes opportunity costs- all that time and money spent recovering from spam could have been spent in more productive ways. Money spent merely to restore you to where you were before is money wasted compared to being able to invest in the future.
What evidence is there that some force (other than pure physiological impossibility) will keep any breed of male dog from covering a bitch in heat? One visit to the pound should get rid of that notion.
What type of dog self-segregates? Out in the countryside where dogs can spend time in packs I've seen packs where the largest dog is 10x the weight of the smallest, all hanging out together. If that pack was allowed to breed together for several generations you'd end up with a pack of medium-sized brown dogs: they revert back to the mean fairly quickly. Look up 'pariah dogs' for pictures.
As for humans- we have very little diversity. Sure, we have some variations in bone density, height, melatonin (you do know we all are exactly the same color? We just have different saturation, as an afternoon with Photoshop shows) and hair shape. But that's nothing more than adaptations to new climates occuring after the last population bottleneck 70,000 years ago. We wandered around too much to form sub-species, let alone a species.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, the statement 'Copyright infringement is wrong.' is an very complicated set of concepts and assumptions boxed up in a seemingly simple set of 4 words. I think the EFF should and does focus on better statements like "Protecting free speech is right" and "Protecting technological innovation is right" and "Collateral damage from new laws is wrong."
A nowhere near good enough analogy is asking the AAA (American auto association) to state "Speeding is Wrong." Is it? Speeding as defined by who? Morally, legally or ethically wrong? How about when there are speed-traps? How about if the Congress made going 1 mile over the speed limit a felony offense? It is too complicated a set of issues to try to wrap up in a simple statement. The AAA is better off focusing on "Safe traffic speeds are right" and "well-designed highways are right."
The EFF's major 'problem' is that they attempt to work on major issues long before most people would recognize that the issue exists. Back in 1989, how many people would know what a BBS is, let along why it isn't constitutional to seize an entire email server to check out one person's email? The EFF is fighting the equivalent of Physical and Link layer issues, while most people can only really get worked up about Application layer issues. The EFF's fights are the "why we need to protect plankton and krill" issues of the online world- critically important but doesn't have big-eyed sympathetic megafauna that photographs well symbols.
Nor does the EFF get to choose sympathetic posterboy cases. Much as the EFF would love to take on a "RIAA threatens to eat babies at the widows and orphans facility" case, the XXAA is never going to give them one. They get 2600, not the NYTimes. They get Hamadi, not the girl scouts.
But by fighting the one case early on, however obscure or unsympathetic, the EFF is preventing a whole timeline of worse court cases later on. So donate! with this quote from the interview in mind:
With this thread, and the previous ADD thread, many useful posts are being done anonymously. I assume this is because posters might not want to go on the record as having ADD or similar diagnoses. While most of the time mod-reading at 0 = boring comments, with these threads reading at 0 = insightful comments. In the ADD thread I could have used 20 mod points for useful AC comments.
It is analogous to law-makers announcing that they've doubled the enforcement and punishment for "carjackers, grand theft auto, speeders and drunk driving." Yes, technically all involve broken laws and cars but that doesn't mean that they naturally group together. The police aren't going to get- and shouldn't get- the same kudos for stopping a ring of speeders compared to stopping a ring of car thieves, for example. Continuing the analogy, imagine if the police started using the phrase "ring of speeders" all the time, as if there was a hidden speeder mafia, making speeding out to be an organized crime. At some point you'd have to say "Stop talking like that- mixing the two together! Speeding isn't burglary!"
So, DoJ, I know you guys are working hard and all that but... "Stop talking like that. Unauthorized MP3 sharing isn't the same as factories stamping out bootleg DVDs. Catching sharers at a dorm isn't the same as catching the mafia who filled a shipping container with bootleg CAD software CDs. Not the same, so stop talking about them in the same sentence as if they should get the same sentence."
And an observation about those fines, comparing software copies to song copies. Software companies generally don't authorize anyone else to copy and send their commercial software out. But right now anyone can legally make thousands of digital copies of songs to send out- so long as they are temporary. How does the RIAA value one person listening to that copy of one song? Somewhere between $0.0007 and $0.0014, based on webcasting rates. I know, Napster wasn't the same as webcasting. But then Napster wasn't the same as a factory pressing out DVDs in Malaysia either.
Or in other numbers...
- $150,000 fine for each unauthorized copy of a $1,000 software program = 150:1 ratio of punishment to value of item
- $150,000 fine for each unauthorized copy of a $1.00 song = a 150,000:1 ratio
- $150,000 fine for a $0.0014 song = a 107,142,857:1 (100 million to 1).
Again, not that sharing is identical to webcasting (although the behavior and motivation seemed to be close) but it isn't identical to those $10 copies of OfficeXP in Shenzhen either, even if they all involve copyright. (And once more for the analogy) Just like speeding isn't the same as letting the meter expire, but it also isn't the same as carjacking, even if they all involve illegal uses of cars.I'm not kidding about being the BMG: there are camps that'll airbrush you blue, or any other color you want. There are percussive sculpture for you to play. You can animate yourself with el-wire (what they used for that animated desert). You can dance under strobelights.
But beyond that you can be the "Blue Women with Flamethrowers" group. You can be "the entirely blue Tiki bar towed by a lobster" group. Like another poster said, Burning Man is whatever you want it to be. Sure, you can be boring and do the drugs and drunk thing, but I think this is less common that others have said- you'd miss out on so much.
Their behavior is similar to the BSA's (Business Software Alliance not Boy Scouts). Threaten with a big number, entice to immediate settlement with a smaller number, and always have the threat in the background of being able to ruin the person's business. With the BSA their "we can ruin you" threat is the full business audit: they can take your computer equipment- all of your computers- down for days or weeks. No business can afford that, so you'll 'voluntarily' take the 'negotiated' settlement. With DirectTV their "ruin you" threat is the big lawsuit: you'd be spending $10k+ in lawyers, you'll lose weeks of time, you'll lose a month off of your future life because of the stress, and if you lose you'll have to pay for their 20 $300/hr lawyers.
"...The problem is that there is no adequate system in place that allows music lovers access to their favorite music while compensating artists and copyright holders. It's time to start addressing this problem head on. In the past, we've used a system called "compulsory licensing" to reconcile copyright law with the benefits of new technologies like cable television and webcasting. This approach has drawbacks, but it's certainly better than the direction that the recording industry is taking us today.
Many innovative payment models have been proposed (with or without a compulsory license), and we have highlighted some of them here,..." (emphasis added)
Fred's April article (which according to the EFF "explores a possible alternative": this doesn't read like strong support by the EFF to me) is talking about how to compensate artists. Fred writes that there are many ways to compensate them, of which one could be compulsory licensing, and that one way to do c.l. is ISP fees. Again, this doesn't read like a policy endorsement but instead an exploration of alternatives: ISP fees/modem taxes are a subset of a subset of ways to compensate artists. And talking about it != endorsing it.
Other EFF board members include John Perry Barlow [also associated w/the Grateful Dead] and John Gilmore, neither of whom would endorse systems that require DRM. Beyond that, the EFF's general vibe of promoting online privacy and the right to anonymity would make the EFF incompatible with DRM systems.
I think that this bad meme (that the EFF wants C.L.) got into Slashdot a few months ago when an article covered the talk an EFF staff member gave on compulsory licencing. Talking about it or listing it as one method of compensating artists != endorsing it, but that confusion was made.
Comparing authors and the literature with directors and the SF movies...
Authors
- Know about the history of SF literature, including what has become stale or cliched.
- Must be aware of scientific developments of the past 40 years, especially if the author specializes in "Hard SF"
- Get help or critiques from other writers / scientists: many of the best SF writers are both (i.e. Benford, Vinge)
- Go to SF conventions where topics include recent discoveries in science, technology and medicine; bleeding edge new writers and concepts; and which new novels or short stories should get recognized via awards like the Hugo.
Directors and others involved in SF movies...- Get away with plots and backstory that were already old 30 years ago in the SF literature
- Don't seem to want to admit their relationship with / dependancy on the SF literature, so don't read or seek criticism from SF writers. (Anecdotal evidence- they rarely participate in regular SF conventions (instead going to Media Cons) and even more rarely hang out in the audience, listening and learning.)
- Don't know the state of the art in scientifically consistent (even if not plausible) technobabble. Apparently not aware of the evil overlord's rules and other long-known lists of cliches to avoid.
- Don't have any idea about recent SF writers. Nor do their critics, so as in this case the movie/TV show will always be compared to one of "Wells, Verne, Bradbury, Star Trek, Star Wars, Bladerunner (or rarely PKDick) and The Matrix," all nice but they could use some higher standards. Leads to critics calling movies like Harris's Fatherland ("ohhhh, what if Hitler *won* WWII?") original, because they don't know that the SF subfield of alternate history is decades old.
If the technologists have caught up to the literature, let's all go off to play a game of quantum soccer with the other 10^16 posthumans in the multiverse (to give a nice 4 years old example from a state of the art author. I'd also recommend Dozois' "Year's Best Science Fiction" collections, Stross, McLeod, Vinge and most anything found in the best of the SF magazines.)'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'
My internet is primarily electro-magnetic: mostly aligned magnetic bits- billions per square inch- on oxide or thin film discs (someday to be replaced with nanocrystal superlattice films) and electrons. And more recently it is CDMA2000 formatted radio waves. As I don't currently have either an ethernet adaptor or cellular receiving station in my brain I have to have my internet translated into a visual format so I can read it. But I could have it translated into sound if necessary- it just wouldn't be as fast for me.
Your "primarily visual" internet- it is composed of icons and mediaglyphics? Which only computers with optical sensors can process? It only covers topics like card tricks, miming, and optical illusions? Or do you mean "primarily visual" items like blinking text, Flash, and ads that bounce around the screen? I find that these inherently visual items get in the way of actual information, and I'd rather do without them.
With leaner, less profitable but better technological systems. It is like ISDN and Frame Relay: the California phone company resisted replacing them with DSL for years, because the former were so much more profitable. The consumers of California lost out, having to wait extra years for cheap DSL to be widely available.
It is odd that there is no flexibility on this. Even if you are willing to put in 10% extra hours and take unpaid time off, or are willing to take a 10% cut in pay and benefits, the option of taking a long vacation just isn't there. An employee can be just as productive- I'd say perhaps even more productive- during a year if they take a straight two weeks off along with shorter holidays. But the option isn't there. [As I commented in an earlier thread on temporary 80 hour workweeks, more stress = worse immune system =more time being fatigued from fighting off colds, etc. You're be stressed by not being able to spend a quantity of quality time with your partner, kids, or relatives. You're always in the work-lag (= to jet-lag) of having just left work or being about to go to work. You don't get the stress reduction of being able to think about something else entirely for a week or two.]
Imagine an alternate universe where everyone only gets a 5 minute lunch break: the option of a 1/2 or 1 hour lunch break is alien to them. "Companies can't afford to coddle employees with 1/2 hour lunch breaks: they're not paid to eat" or "If you take a 1 hour break in the middle of the day, you'll be a lot less productive, whether or not that hour is paid time off..." We'd find this alternate universe strange in its lack of flexibility. I find the current vacation time structure in the US equally as strange.
Do the numbers. If you have 10 or 15 days, then
- You keep 2 or 3 in reserve for illness or emergencies
- You use up 3-4 for the obligatory visiting one set of relatives.
- If your company is anal you use up 3-4 just to have some long weekends each year, or to stretch out time near holidays. (vs. some companies which let you work longer days for a few days to make up for it)
- You have one trip to Hawaii or Disneyland...
- That's it, you've used up your vacation time.
A proper exploration vacation, where you spend 2-3 weeks in one country or learning one new skill (cooking classes in Provence, learning Spanish by being in Spain, a 2 week Japan Rail Pass for exploring the top castles of Japan) is right out. Only semi-sarcastically would I say "Of cource Europeans know more about the US than Americans know about Europe: Europeans actually have time to visit the US."Vacation time is money in the bank- a benefit that accumulates to you- and so shouldn't be forfeited. At the most you should have 'lost' (used up) four days of vacation time, not ten.
The CCPA Law of 2003: As the US Congress is 100% federally funded, all congressional computers must have a protective filter installed. That filter shall be identical to the filters used on adults' computers at a randomly selected, federal-funds-receiving US library. All requests to lift the filter or unblock sites must be forwarded to a librarian at the selected library, and if delays occur because that librarian is already overworked due to budget cutbacks, Congress shall just have to wait. All requests to lift the filter or unblock sites shall be a matter of public record.
(Of course one could say that Congress is different because CIPA is all about protecting the children, but... 1. Shouldn't we care almost as much about Congress as we do about children? Now that we've got children protected, why not Congress next? 2. Doesn't Congress want to show that it won't force laws on other adults that it isn't willing to take for itself as well? 3. What about Take Your Child To Work Day? Do we want the innocent children of Congresspeople (or their staff) to be Harmed?
(*)Pre-recorded phone spam is bad except for political messages, OSHA rules apply to everyone but Congress, Labor rules apply...FOIA rules apply...
- People with rare illnesses: pre-internet you'd be lucky if your doctor recognized the symptoms of the illness. You'd have to move from doctor to doctor, so that months or years went by before you'd find a doctor who recognized what you had. You'd almost never meet anyone else with the disease, so you'd have to recreate your 'library of information' yourself. Now you can quickly search for information centers and support groups, and you can narrow down possible causes of symptoms much faster than before.
- People with illnesses in general: before, unless you were near a research library you'd not be able to find out much about your illness on your own. Now you can quickly get access to medical journals (Medline) or to other people with the same illness to get advice or support.
- People who need to comparison shop: pre-internet, other than Consumers Report (and similar) you were on your own.
- People who want to warn about a business or practice: pre-internet it was difficult to share warnings. Even if you told your local BBB, what happened if the problem business left town / state?
The reduced asymmetry of information brought about by the internet is a qualitative improvement to people's lives.May 27 1669 This morning, before I went to the office, Nick the servant of Mr. Scobell came requesting that I correct what I said of him and link to his version of events. Staid past noon so to make this correction: "Mr. Scobell says that Parliament merely misunderstood how it was writ that Parliament was dissolved and that Mr. Scobell was not in danger of being arrested and you may find his version at Desk.Mr.Scobell.KingStreetByHayMarket.London." Thence to the office. Dined with my cosin which was very good; only the venison pasty was palpable beef. Then to home and to bed.
May 28 1669 To my office till noon. Intended to meet with Mr. Harper to drink and eat, for I had not eaten earlier. But hither my cosin comes to complain and ask that I write this correction "That I shall say that my cosin does buy his meat from fyne butchers and that he would not mix venisin with beef" and you may find his writings at Diary.ThomasPepys.LeftPocket-TheGreenCoat.London. Unable to meet Mr. Harper. Drank two cups of Metheglin instead. Then to bed.
May 29 1669 Up in the morning and I was to go to King's Crossing to collect my salary so I can pay my landlord before he gets apoplectic. But Mr. Cook came angrily to correct me about what I wrote of him so let me write "Mr. Cook did not 'Rail' or otherwise speak in any but a rational way when confronting Mr. Pepys about if Mr. Pepys was after my job." and you may find his statement at MrCook.DiaryLibrary.BehindTheSwan.CrookedLane.Lond on.
Again I was to leave and hither comes the servant of my Lord Chesterfield with a note that "Lord Chesterfield wishes to correct Mr. Pepys and requests him to link to Chesterfield's account of the duel. To whit: Chesterfield did not 'flee' but merely had an important meeting the next day in Holland." I then was to go to my brothers but in comes Mr. Cook to say "You must tell them I was not angry when I spake with you this morning." And you may find his words at MrCook.DiaryLibrary.EtcEtcEtc. And then to bed.
May 30 1669 I lay in bed intending to practice my lute, but then came three servants of three men each telling me to correct what I did write of their employers. I spent until 3 O'clock fixing my writings. Then to King's Crossing but just as I started Mrs. Jewel accosted me to say I wrote badly of her in that "She was not drunk and even if she did drink she still sings better than anyone else in the Tavern" and I should link to her diary which I do not know the location but you may search at DiariesOfDrunkenLadies I am sure. Drank three cups of Metheglin and then to bed.
May 31 1669 This morning comes a pounding on my door from both my landlord and John the Tavern owner ordering that I tell you their versions of what I had writ so "the landlord is not apoplectic" and "All singers at the tavern sing like the nightingale". Spent the afternoon hiding from Mrs. Jewel. And now I shall stop the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done so much corrections and additions every time I take a pen in my hand I do not have time for my own words. And so to bed.
- Physiology: increased stress = decreased function of your immune system. Insufficient sleep = increased stress.
- Human factors: if you're on a team, you don't want to appear to be doing less work than the others.
- and the numbers: 168 hours in a week. 84 for work, 56 for healthy sleep...28 for everything else
Assume all developers find a way to work 12/7: they cancel all vacations, classes, conferences, workshops, ceremonies, weddings and funerals; they telnet into religous services (and never mind all the caselaw protecting rights of religious expression when, for example, it includes having a day of rest); they suspend all taking care of children or parents (nevermind the family medical leave act)...So what happens the first time one developer gets exposed to a cold or the flu? Under regular 9/5 circumstances you might just say "Look, I'm coming down with something. I'll head out early today to sleep it off": you make up the time later, and everyone appreciates that you didn't expose them to the bug. Instead, under the 12/7 situation you're going to try to tough it out. You won't get the extra sleep you need, so the illness just gets worse. Because everyone else is sleep deprived, more people are likely to catch the cold from you. Because there is no room for errors / illness / humanity in the schedule, anyone who falls behind will be aware of how they're holding everything up. This causes stress. Stress causes illnesses to last a lot longer. Interesting negative feedback loops ensue.
And this is assuming everyone is gung-ho for the 12/7 plan. What happens when one developer gets creeped out over having to skip a funeral and decides the only choice is to quit? There won't be time to train a replacement: those 84 hours'll have to be absorbed by everyone else.
And that's just the people: that 12/7 schedule doesn't have wiggle room for all the standard crashes, viruses, connectivity failures, power outages, traffic jams, major news events, and other standard slowdowns in modern office life. Someone in management there needs to buy a spine and give the client an honest timeline.
There are multiple FAQs/reviews on Bones of Contention. "The major argument of Marvin Lubenow's book Bones of Contention (1992) is that the various species of hominid cannot form an evolutionary sequence because they overlap one another in time... Once it is realized that this argument is based on a misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, Lubenow's book loses much of its force."
Do you think Java man is a human or ape? Looking at all the species of hominids we know about, can you draw a line to separate human from ape? Why can't Gish, Lubenow and others agree on which are apes? As one Lubenow FAQ asks: ""If two eminent authorities cannot agree whether these skulls are human or ape, does this not imply that they are, um, intermediate?"
Interesting point on Scopes. Another FAQ on Nebraska Man (including the Scopes trial) talks about this "...Osborn apparently began to have doubts about his identification of the tooth shortly before the Scopes "monkey trial" in July 1925, and he stopped mentioning it in his publications. It seems likely that the crumbling of the Fundamentalist assault on evolution in the years following the Scopes trial prevented the Hesperopithecus affair from becoming a serious embarrassment to evolutionists. Although Nebraska Man did not survive long enough to become widely accepted by the scientific community and was quickly forgotten when its true identity was recognized, Hesperopithecus is again being trotted out in the current recrudescence of creationist attacks on evolution. The creationists who belittle mistakes by scientists cannot admit that science advances, in part, by correcting error. "
The new findings show that modern looking Homo sapiens existed 160,000 years ago. Petralona is one of many skulls that show that earlier Homo sapiens didn't look like modern humans, i.e. none of these earlier skulls could be confused with a modern human. These earlier fossils range from not-quite modern to not-quite Homo erectus.
But specifically, in reference to your listing of Piltdown, Nebraska man, and Java man, read the extensive talk.origins FAQs on these very items: (emphasis added by me)
Nor is it true, as is often claimed, that Dubois kept the existence of the Wadjak skulls secret because knowledge of them would have discredited Java Man. Dubois briefly reported the Wadjak skulls in three separate publications in 1890 and 1892. Despite being corrected on this in a debate in 1982 and in print (Brace 1986), Gish has continued to make this claim, even stating, despite not having apparently read Dubois' reports, that they did not mention the Wadjak skulls (Fezer 1993)."
In the 90 years since then have we developed better and more rigorous testing methods? Yes. But even during those 40 years it took for the full hoax to be revealed, faults with Piltdown were found, long before testing showed that they were recent skulls: "...It should be remembered that, at the time of Piltdown finds, there were very few early hominid fossils; Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens were clearly fairly late. It was expected that there was a "missing link" between ape and man ... Piltdown man had the expected mix of features, which lent it plausibility as a human precursor.
This plausibility did not hold up. During the next two decades there were a number of finds of ancient hominids and near hominids, e.g. Dart's discovery of Australopith
The executive summary:
Significant differences separate spam from bulk mail, making them opposites, not just non-equals. In short, bulk mail is a negotiated part of a public good, spam is an unnegotiated public bad that interferes with (or can ruin) a public good. Differences include:
With bulk mail every step of the process involves trade and negotiations. This includes the last step- you receiving mail- because bulk mail subsidizes first class mail. Granted, this last step was negotiated as a group (all people in the US using the US postal service).
Spammers don't negotiate and don't trade with the people affected by their actions- one doesn't hear of them sitting down to say "I'm going to use this stolen credit card to buy an account for $30 and then send out 5,000,000 spams that'll cost you 3 days of sysadmin time and a crashed hard drive. Deal?" or "I'm going to use your return address so that your email box fills every 2 hours with bounces, and you lose important emails from a prospective employer, in return for me not getting antispam complaints. Deal?"
Bulk mail is used by the USPS to have smoothed out, predictable costs and income- again, subsidizing first class mail. From the USPS's point of view, everything is known and predictable *within the system* with standardized costs i.e. "this week in this area we'll be paid $.15 per mail for an average of 200,000 deliveries of ads. If someone wants to send 2x the ads they'll pay 2x the old total. We'll also be paid $.37 for about 20,000 first class mailings. Each postal worker will carry about 20 lbs of mail, except at holidays where it is 30 lbs..." Same from the user's p.o.v. "6 days a week a postal worker'll come by the mailbox. It'll take about 4 days for a letter to arrive, 7 during holidays, and about 1/100,000 will go astray (or whatever the error rate is).
Because spam isn't negotiated and because of the fake return addresses, etc, you have unpredictable and unknown costs, i.e. "every day I'll send an average of 5 mails, receive 10 mails from non-strangers (including annoying ones, but I voluntarily gave my cousin or Microsoft my address), and at random times get horrible pictures, be flooded by bounces or have my ISP crash or be blacklisted." Those costs are externalities- costs (or benefits) that accrue to entities outside of the negotiation process.
I've seen arguments that say that because of peering agreements, ISPs or users should think of a flood of spam bouces the way an 'All-You-Can-Eat' restaurant thinks of Sumo wrestlers: an expensive but expected cost. No, because the wrestler still fits on the bell curve the restaurant uses to predict eating habits, and what the wrestler does is legal. No human can fill their stomach with more than about a gallon of food, and the contract with the restaurant is that it is "All YOU can eat HERE", you don't get to feed two people on one ticket or bring food home using rubber pockets. Spammers cheat- its like one person paying and letting 10 people sneak in the back door. And they break the contract- those peering agreements / contracts usually say no spamming.
spammers cause damage far in excess of the money they put into the system. Its like the flu, a computer virus, forest fire or a traffic accident- the money paid into recovering from it is nowhere near the total damage it caused- you get a net loss to society because it happened. Spam also causes opportunity costs- all that time and money spent recovering from spam could have been spent in more productive ways. Money spent merely to restore you to where you were before is money wasted compared to being able to invest in the future.
What type of dog self-segregates? Out in the countryside where dogs can spend time in packs I've seen packs where the largest dog is 10x the weight of the smallest, all hanging out together. If that pack was allowed to breed together for several generations you'd end up with a pack of medium-sized brown dogs: they revert back to the mean fairly quickly. Look up 'pariah dogs' for pictures.
As for humans- we have very little diversity. Sure, we have some variations in bone density, height, melatonin (you do know we all are exactly the same color? We just have different saturation, as an afternoon with Photoshop shows) and hair shape. But that's nothing more than adaptations to new climates occuring after the last population bottleneck 70,000 years ago. We wandered around too much to form sub-species, let alone a species.