Oh please, please someone post a release date for Duke Nukem Forever!
Thing is, no one would believe that. Though a lot of people might well believe the story about a Duke Nukem trilogy for NDS and PSP being released. It may even be true...
(the different moderation selections have essentially devolved into up and down...)
I see that as a result of the broken metamoderation system. I for one used to metamoderate fairly regularly, but have now completely stopped because there's just no point. I agree with the GP: if I'm metamoderating a post that is purely "interesting" but has been modded "informative", I want to be able to mark it as mismodded. As things stand, there is simply no correct metamoderation for a post like that. So I've given up.
Digg-like moderation is something that ought to be avoided, not emulated.
Its pretty easy for the RIAA to cycle adsl lines, oe heck even dialup accounts, on a monthly basis, even to the extent of renting an apartment with 5 phone lines and rotating the ISPs every other month - are PeerGuardian fast enough to catch those IP addresses before they are actively used by the RIAA?
Sure it's possible for the RIAA to catch people who are using PeerGuardian, but if your aim is to make it impossible for them to catch you, the only sane tactic is not to play. The point of PeerGuardian is more like the case of the story about the two wildlife cameramen filming a lion, of whom one is wearing running shoes -- not to outrun the lion, as he explains, but to outrun the other cameraman.
Not pretty, I know, but there just isn't any such thing as perfect security. An illegal downloader trying to evade the RIAA is like someone trying to come up with DRM so effective that no one can get round it. It's never going to happen. The aim is instead to make sure that you're not one of the easier targets.
I haven't met a single person in the whole world that has ever demanded a "made in China" product. Ever.
How many products are there where any customer will ever demand a "made in [COUNTRY X]" product as opposed to "made in [COUNTRY Y]"? I can think of only a few. Coffee-making equipment made in Italy, maybe; kitchen utensils made in France; certain types of farming equipment made in the US; cars not made in the US; but precious little else.
In general, pretty much the only reason for anyone ever to insist on a "made in [COUNTRY X]" product is if they're loyal to [COUNTRY X] and/or living there. If that is true, which I believe to be the case, then the only information that your post contains is that you have never been to China.... Ever.
That gives us a conversion rate of one Library of Congress to about 332 libraries of Alexandria.
On reflection, I'm not happy with my earlier estimate, for two reasons:
I neglected the fact that the figure of 1,589,248 bytes was actually for all of Homer, not just the Iliad;
The estimate for the size of the LoC is vastly overestimated. The 20 TB figure is based on an estimate of 1 MB per book, which is way too high for unformatted text, and if we're comparing like to like, unformatted text is what we should be looking at.
On the latter point, I'll take The Count of Monte Cristo as a sample. It may be over 2.5 MB unformatted, but that's much longer than the mean book. A typical book length would be 50,000-100,000 words. Let's take 65,000 as a conservative mean. If I take the first 100,000 characters of the Project Gutenberg edition of Monte Cristo, I find that comes to 18,083 words; extrapolating from that, 65,000 words ought to be only about 351 kB, not 1 MB. If the LoC has 20 million books, then, that comes to only about 6.6 TB (almost exactly 6700 GB). I therefore take this as a revised estimate for 1 LoC.
For a revised LoA, I take the following texts.
Homer -- 48 books at 33016 bytes per book
Euripides -- 19 plays at 79764 bytes per play
Pausanias -- 10 books at 174,490 [sic] bytes per book
Apollonios -- 4 books at 81,920 bytes per book
Galen -- 227 books at 88,055 bytes per book
I'm not sure whether to give an even weighting to the books or to the authors. If an even weighting is given to each book, the above gives a mean of 81,693 bytes per book. If an even weighting is given to each author, that gives a mean of 91,449 bytes per book. Since the two figures are fairly close, I suggest splitting the difference and taking an average ancient Greek book as occupying 86,571 bytes. For a 500,000-book library of Alexandria, this gives 1 LoA = 40.3 GB.
Can anyone tell me what the conversion factor is from Libraries of Congress to Libraries of Alexandria?
Yes.
Let the Iliad represent a typical ancient Greek text, occupying 24 scrolls. In a modern edition it occupies 1,589,248 bytes in Beta Code (= ASCII transliteration of ancient Greek), or 66,219 bytes per "book" (scroll).
Ptolemy II set a goal of half a million scrolls for the library. This is probably a pretty conservative estimate of the library's size at its height. However, let us work with conservative estimates. This gives us a ballpark figure of 33.1 billion bytes, or 30.8 gigabytes, for the Library of Alexandria.
For the Library of Congress, Wikipedia quotes figures of 20 TB and 10 TB. We take the more conservative estimate. That gives us a conversion rate of one Library of Congress to about 332 libraries of Alexandria.
And yet if you look at other cultures you will discover that there is a prevalence of a "flood myth" that would tend to indicate that a very large catestrophe happened a long time ago. When? Nobody really knows, but it is nearly a dead certanity that there was a big disaster that wiped out a lot of the planet a long time ago.
Hundreds of widely-dispersed cultures also have stories about monsters living in a cave from which the hero manages to escape by blinding the monster. Does that make it a "dead certainty" that there used to be one-eyed giants roaming all over Europe, Africa, Asia, and Polynesia?
That said, these actions can have consequences and, these days, they could turn into long term/permanent consequences. I'd draw a comparison to getting a tattoo on an exposed body part (face, hand, etc.).
What long term/permanent consequences could possibly be worse than the teen being put on a sex offender registry for the rest of his/her life?
It is possible that there is something shady going on, but I wouldn't underestimate Judith Tizard's monumental idiocy.
Bear in mind: (1) the RIANZ isn't nearly as powerful as the RIAA is in the US; the ISPs are much more significant by comparison, as they haven't been able to parcel the country into small monopolies quite to the same extent that they've done in the US (except Telecom, but Telecom is a weird case in several ways). (2) Judith Tizard hasn't retired; she just was too low down the list to get back into parliament. She's continued to be vocal in the last couple of months, issuing a stream of press releases that no one has bothered reporting outside the Business pages; that tends to suggest that she was acting under her own steam all along -- it's not that she was bribed, it's that she actually genuinely does care more about the income of multi-national corporations more than she does about the freedom of NZ citizens.
Now, that's not to say that there won't be another similar law on its way. The PM has already made clear that he fully intends to sell out on this issue. But who knows? The ISPs may end up shouting louder.
I was wondering how long it would take for other businesses to start putting up some resistance to the recording industry. I really hope this signals the start of a new trend.
I don't. I for one do not welcome our new corporate overlords. It's very sad to see that we have to rely on corporations like TelstraClear and Google to protect us from other corporations' re-writing the law, while the government stands off to one side drooling.
It's not precisely the government's job to protect our freedom; but it certainly is the government's responsibility to prevent itself from being manipulated the way it has been.
Maybe, but also maybe not. Ultimately the RIANZ just isn't a very important force -- or let's say, nowhere near as influential as the RIAA in the US. The record industry is just rather sickly here. ISPs, by contrast, are important businesses that the government needs to avoid offending. The main motivation for section 92A all along was not local interests at all, but the government of the day seeking a Free Trade Agreement with the US. Now that the US has become involved in talks aimed at a multilateral trade agreement with several countries in the South Pacific, the pressure for a section 92A may drop a bit.
So it's hard to predict. Only one thing is certain: in this matter the will of the people of New Zealand will count for exactly nothing.
We're facing an uphill battle. The evil forces of Sarkozy-Universal are occupying the territory; they will probably be stopped by the European Parliament, but there will be much blood.
Fortunately, France is the second-closest country to New Zealand -- closer than the Australian mainland, in fact -- so our peace-loving democratic ideals should spread to you folks reasonably promptly:-)
This (and other crazy laws which have been repealed) was passed by the left-wing Labour Party government, which got voted out in a landslide in December.
Regardless of your political leanings -- and thanks for introducing them by the way, we're all really interested -- 58 seats to 43 is not a landslide.
Seems like every other day now a new crazy law is put in place, just to be repealed a week later. What is this, a circus?
In this case, there was a change of government. That wasn't enough by itself, mind; the new government was willing to sit back and watch what happened when the new law came into effect.
In this case what really lead to the repeal was the actions of a company that was too big to be ignored -- TelstraClear refusing to have anything to do with writing a code of practice to mitigate the effects of the law. Suddenly I'm glad I'm with them, and I've already written to compliment them on their actions.
I'm also rather tickled to note that my MP -- Peter Dunne -- took a key role in calling for the repeal. That was after he had been part of the government that passed the law in the first place, mind you... (yes there was a change of government, but he's been in both governing coalitions.)
If I don't vote (and I didn't, which in Australia is actually punishable, but so be it - I didn't see a candidate I could conscionably vote for)
You should always vote. If you can't vote for any of the candidates in good conscience, do a write-in. If you can't do a write-in, vote no confidence. If you can't vote no confidence, spoil the ballot paper.
An election where 30-40% of all ballot papers came back spoilt would send a political message, however small or insignificant. Not voting sends a message that you don't care.
(Unfortunately, of course, this isn't possible with an electronic voting system.)
... but NZ politicians would still dearly love to get a FTA with the US. And the National government has already made clear that they would be willing to create new copyright laws specifically to get such a FTA -- just as Australia did.
It's probably got something to do with the fact that, despite all reasons to run screaming from the US, the US is still our number 2 trading partner. (Unless you count the EU as a single nation, of course.)
As sibling posts have noted, it's traditional to make a direct mapping between the English "dictionary" form, which is the infinitive, and the Latin "dictionary" form, which is the first person singular.
More puzzling to me is where they got the idea that it means "fall in love with". It means "love earnestly"; that's a perfectly acceptable meaning, so why not quote that one?
Also I wonder where the submitter got the idea that the pronunciation ought to be "a-dahm-o". That may be how Dell are pronouncing it, but in Latin the ictus is on the first syllable: "a-dah-mo". Both the first two syllables are short, guys.
Just for the sake of completeness, here's the entry on adamo in the best (not most recent; best) Latin-English dictionary.
If you look in the original Whirlpool thread where someone posted their submitted complaint about Wikileaks site (As a test to see if they would block it) the response they posted is an automated reply to all online ACMA complaints.
If you go on to read the second reply you will see that that is not automated -- or at least I sure hope that every submission doesn't automatically get this response:
Following investigation of your complaint, ACMA is satisfied that the internet content specified in your complaint is hosted outside Australia, and that the content is prohibited content or potential prohibited content... On this occasion ACMA has also referred the matter to the appropriate law enforcement agency...
Not even slightly FUD. This is to my mind sufficient cause for rebellion.
I'd be more interested in hearing about whether you think it was the right thing to do or not, instead of shouting "You broke the rules!" like a child in a schoolyard. If they didn't do any harm it isn't very important that they broke the law. Follow the spirit, not the letter.
Now, you know it's not as simple as that, I'm sure. Surely you can see that the resentment springing up here -- and, no doubt, in at least some of the British media in the coming days -- is resentment over the fact that if a private citizen had done exactly the same things, with exactly the same intent, with exactly the same precautions, they would be looking at decades in prison and perhaps extradition to a country that practises torture. While if the BBC does it, they get off scot-free.
I'm personally undecided as to whether they were doing the right thing. It's certainly arguable that a body that can do a public service like this and get off scot-free should be permitted to do so. But at the same time the resentment is wholly justified, and it's important enough to feel a lot of resentment over. I think you shouldn't dismiss it out of hand either.
You've got some interesting points, but I suspect that if de Gaulle were around today he'd be thoroughly in favour of keeping the UK in the EU. It really specifically was the Commonwealth that he was concerned about, and the UK has wholeheartedly and thoroughly done its best to bring the Commonwealth to an end.
Today the major powers in the EU -- France and Germany, and to a lesser extent Benelux -- very much want to keep the UK in the EU, and I suspect that's precisely because of the UK's trans-Atlantic links. The UK may have always been ambivalent about the EU -- it so happens that the yea-sayers have been winning so far -- but since the Commonwealth became moribund, the EU has been working remarkably hard to appease the UK and keep them in. Perhaps the UK's importance in the field of banking is another reason to keep the UK. If not for those two things, I would imagine that France in particular would have given up on UK-appeasing long ago.
Hopefully this will clear up some questions and suppositions about what is actually changing.
- Kiwi
Alas, it doesn't clear up all that much. The Act states that ISPs must have a reasonable policy in place for dealing with takedown notices. It lays down only very loose guidelines for what form those takedown notices should take, and gives absolutely no guidance on
what counts as a "reasonable" policy
what counts as adequate evidence (assuming the policy even considers evidence; the law itself does not require evidence)
who gets to write the policy (the ISPs produce a draft, but since then have simply been letting record publishers veto anything they want)
who has to enforce the policy (neither the ISPs nor the record publishers want to pay for enforcement; AFAIK this is still stalemated)
provision for reconnection at a later date
arbitration in disputed cases (assuming the policy allows for disputing takedown notices; the law itself does not require this); this should be almost all cases
He's playing word-games (that's a nice euphemism for "lying through his teeth") when he says he thinks an independent adjudicator would be a good idea. The classic example of an independent adjudicator is a court; but no way in hell does he want courts deciding this kind of thing.
Why, I wonder? After all, it's not as though courts are supposed to be independent, or have any experience in the whole adjudication business...
The declaration you quote simply doesn't hang together. He says he wants independent adjudication, but it is manifestly obvious that he actually wants anything but independent adjudication. In fact I'd go so far as to conclude that what he really means is "independent of the judicial system".
Let's take a look at another couple of his statements, all from the page you quote from:
There are no human rights issue involved.
Internet access is an aspect of freedom of speech.
No provision is made either in law or in any code of practice that I've seen for re-connection. Ever. You get accused (and found guilty by an "independent adjudicator") one too many times, you're exiled from the internet for life.
The process as a whole is clearly not designed for the benefit of artists, as only publishing corporations are capable of developing the infrastructure to use the process.
"No human rights issue" my shiny metal arse.
Preventing copyright infringement is something that ISPs already set out in their terms and conditions.
So why push for duplication of the regulations?
Section 92A will be great news for consumers
OK, this one is just so manifestly the exact opposite of the truth that it gets beyond stupid and into the realm of insanity. Come on, after reading that, you can't really seriously be imagining that this is a man whose words are to be taken at face value -- can you? -- when he says things like "independent adjudicator".
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please, please someone post a release date for Duke Nukem Forever!
Thing is, no one would believe that. Though a lot of people might well believe the story about a Duke Nukem trilogy for NDS and PSP being released. It may even be true ...
(the different moderation selections have essentially devolved into up and down...)
I see that as a result of the broken metamoderation system. I for one used to metamoderate fairly regularly, but have now completely stopped because there's just no point. I agree with the GP: if I'm metamoderating a post that is purely "interesting" but has been modded "informative", I want to be able to mark it as mismodded. As things stand, there is simply no correct metamoderation for a post like that. So I've given up.
Digg-like moderation is something that ought to be avoided, not emulated.
Its pretty easy for the RIAA to cycle adsl lines, oe heck even dialup accounts, on a monthly basis, even to the extent of renting an apartment with 5 phone lines and rotating the ISPs every other month - are PeerGuardian fast enough to catch those IP addresses before they are actively used by the RIAA?
Sure it's possible for the RIAA to catch people who are using PeerGuardian, but if your aim is to make it impossible for them to catch you, the only sane tactic is not to play. The point of PeerGuardian is more like the case of the story about the two wildlife cameramen filming a lion, of whom one is wearing running shoes -- not to outrun the lion, as he explains, but to outrun the other cameraman.
Not pretty, I know, but there just isn't any such thing as perfect security. An illegal downloader trying to evade the RIAA is like someone trying to come up with DRM so effective that no one can get round it. It's never going to happen. The aim is instead to make sure that you're not one of the easier targets.
I haven't met a single person in the whole world that has ever demanded a "made in China" product. Ever.
How many products are there where any customer will ever demand a "made in [COUNTRY X]" product as opposed to "made in [COUNTRY Y]"? I can think of only a few. Coffee-making equipment made in Italy, maybe; kitchen utensils made in France; certain types of farming equipment made in the US; cars not made in the US; but precious little else.
In general, pretty much the only reason for anyone ever to insist on a "made in [COUNTRY X]" product is if they're loyal to [COUNTRY X] and/or living there. If that is true, which I believe to be the case, then the only information that your post contains is that you have never been to China. ... Ever.
That gives us a conversion rate of one Library of Congress to about 332 libraries of Alexandria.
On reflection, I'm not happy with my earlier estimate, for two reasons:
On the latter point, I'll take The Count of Monte Cristo as a sample. It may be over 2.5 MB unformatted, but that's much longer than the mean book. A typical book length would be 50,000-100,000 words. Let's take 65,000 as a conservative mean. If I take the first 100,000 characters of the Project Gutenberg edition of Monte Cristo, I find that comes to 18,083 words; extrapolating from that, 65,000 words ought to be only about 351 kB, not 1 MB. If the LoC has 20 million books, then, that comes to only about 6.6 TB (almost exactly 6700 GB). I therefore take this as a revised estimate for 1 LoC.
For a revised LoA, I take the following texts.
I'm not sure whether to give an even weighting to the books or to the authors. If an even weighting is given to each book, the above gives a mean of 81,693 bytes per book. If an even weighting is given to each author, that gives a mean of 91,449 bytes per book. Since the two figures are fairly close, I suggest splitting the difference and taking an average ancient Greek book as occupying 86,571 bytes. For a 500,000-book library of Alexandria, this gives 1 LoA = 40.3 GB.
Based on these estimates, 1 LoC = 166 LoA.
Can anyone tell me what the conversion factor is from Libraries of Congress to Libraries of Alexandria?
Yes.
Let the Iliad represent a typical ancient Greek text, occupying 24 scrolls. In a modern edition it occupies 1,589,248 bytes in Beta Code (= ASCII transliteration of ancient Greek), or 66,219 bytes per "book" (scroll).
Ptolemy II set a goal of half a million scrolls for the library. This is probably a pretty conservative estimate of the library's size at its height. However, let us work with conservative estimates. This gives us a ballpark figure of 33.1 billion bytes, or 30.8 gigabytes, for the Library of Alexandria.
For the Library of Congress, Wikipedia quotes figures of 20 TB and 10 TB. We take the more conservative estimate. That gives us a conversion rate of one Library of Congress to about 332 libraries of Alexandria.
And yet if you look at other cultures you will discover that there is a prevalence of a "flood myth" that would tend to indicate that a very large catestrophe happened a long time ago. When? Nobody really knows, but it is nearly a dead certanity that there was a big disaster that wiped out a lot of the planet a long time ago.
Hundreds of widely-dispersed cultures also have stories about monsters living in a cave from which the hero manages to escape by blinding the monster. Does that make it a "dead certainty" that there used to be one-eyed giants roaming all over Europe, Africa, Asia, and Polynesia?
That said, these actions can have consequences and, these days, they could turn into long term/permanent consequences. I'd draw a comparison to getting a tattoo on an exposed body part (face, hand, etc.).
What long term/permanent consequences could possibly be worse than the teen being put on a sex offender registry for the rest of his/her life?
It is possible that there is something shady going on, but I wouldn't underestimate Judith Tizard's monumental idiocy.
Bear in mind: (1) the RIANZ isn't nearly as powerful as the RIAA is in the US; the ISPs are much more significant by comparison, as they haven't been able to parcel the country into small monopolies quite to the same extent that they've done in the US (except Telecom, but Telecom is a weird case in several ways). (2) Judith Tizard hasn't retired; she just was too low down the list to get back into parliament. She's continued to be vocal in the last couple of months, issuing a stream of press releases that no one has bothered reporting outside the Business pages; that tends to suggest that she was acting under her own steam all along -- it's not that she was bribed, it's that she actually genuinely does care more about the income of multi-national corporations more than she does about the freedom of NZ citizens.
Now, that's not to say that there won't be another similar law on its way. The PM has already made clear that he fully intends to sell out on this issue. But who knows? The ISPs may end up shouting louder.
I was wondering how long it would take for other businesses to start putting up some resistance to the recording industry. I really hope this signals the start of a new trend.
I don't. I for one do not welcome our new corporate overlords. It's very sad to see that we have to rely on corporations like TelstraClear and Google to protect us from other corporations' re-writing the law, while the government stands off to one side drooling.
It's not precisely the government's job to protect our freedom; but it certainly is the government's responsibility to prevent itself from being manipulated the way it has been.
They'll just backdoor it later.
Maybe, but also maybe not. Ultimately the RIANZ just isn't a very important force -- or let's say, nowhere near as influential as the RIAA in the US. The record industry is just rather sickly here. ISPs, by contrast, are important businesses that the government needs to avoid offending. The main motivation for section 92A all along was not local interests at all, but the government of the day seeking a Free Trade Agreement with the US. Now that the US has become involved in talks aimed at a multilateral trade agreement with several countries in the South Pacific, the pressure for a section 92A may drop a bit.
So it's hard to predict. Only one thing is certain: in this matter the will of the people of New Zealand will count for exactly nothing.
We're facing an uphill battle. The evil forces of Sarkozy-Universal are occupying the territory; they will probably be stopped by the European Parliament, but there will be much blood.
Fortunately, France is the second-closest country to New Zealand -- closer than the Australian mainland, in fact -- so our peace-loving democratic ideals should spread to you folks reasonably promptly :-)
But why would the New Zealanders care what you do to West Island?
You're just showing your foreignness, you know. The islands are always prefixed with "the" -- as, the West Island.
This (and other crazy laws which have been repealed) was passed by the left-wing Labour Party government, which got voted out in a landslide in December.
Regardless of your political leanings -- and thanks for introducing them by the way, we're all really interested -- 58 seats to 43 is not a landslide.
Seems like every other day now a new crazy law is put in place, just to be repealed a week later. What is this, a circus?
In this case, there was a change of government. That wasn't enough by itself, mind; the new government was willing to sit back and watch what happened when the new law came into effect.
In this case what really lead to the repeal was the actions of a company that was too big to be ignored -- TelstraClear refusing to have anything to do with writing a code of practice to mitigate the effects of the law. Suddenly I'm glad I'm with them, and I've already written to compliment them on their actions.
I'm also rather tickled to note that my MP -- Peter Dunne -- took a key role in calling for the repeal. That was after he had been part of the government that passed the law in the first place, mind you ... (yes there was a change of government, but he's been in both governing coalitions.)
If I don't vote (and I didn't, which in Australia is actually punishable, but so be it - I didn't see a candidate I could conscionably vote for)
You should always vote. If you can't vote for any of the candidates in good conscience, do a write-in. If you can't do a write-in, vote no confidence. If you can't vote no confidence, spoil the ballot paper.
An election where 30-40% of all ballot papers came back spoilt would send a political message, however small or insignificant. Not voting sends a message that you don't care.
(Unfortunately, of course, this isn't possible with an electronic voting system.)
... but NZ politicians would still dearly love to get a FTA with the US. And the National government has already made clear that they would be willing to create new copyright laws specifically to get such a FTA -- just as Australia did.
It's probably got something to do with the fact that, despite all reasons to run screaming from the US, the US is still our number 2 trading partner. (Unless you count the EU as a single nation, of course.)
that sentence makes no sense.
I think this headline illustrates nicely why Capitalising Every Word In The Headline is not a great idea.
I mean, if I write
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
you all know what I mean, right? But if I write
Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo.
then that's just incomprehensible.
As sibling posts have noted, it's traditional to make a direct mapping between the English "dictionary" form, which is the infinitive, and the Latin "dictionary" form, which is the first person singular.
More puzzling to me is where they got the idea that it means "fall in love with". It means "love earnestly"; that's a perfectly acceptable meaning, so why not quote that one?
Also I wonder where the submitter got the idea that the pronunciation ought to be "a-dahm-o". That may be how Dell are pronouncing it, but in Latin the ictus is on the first syllable: "a-dah-mo". Both the first two syllables are short, guys.
Just for the sake of completeness, here's the entry on adamo in the best (not most recent; best) Latin-English dictionary.
If you look in the original Whirlpool thread where someone posted their submitted complaint about Wikileaks site (As a test to see if they would block it) the response they posted is an automated reply to all online ACMA complaints.
If you go on to read the second reply you will see that that is not automated -- or at least I sure hope that every submission doesn't automatically get this response:
Following investigation of your complaint, ACMA is satisfied that the internet content specified in your complaint is hosted outside Australia, and that the content is prohibited content or potential prohibited content ... On this occasion ACMA has also referred the matter to the appropriate law enforcement agency ...
Not even slightly FUD. This is to my mind sufficient cause for rebellion.
I'd be more interested in hearing about whether you think it was the right thing to do or not, instead of shouting "You broke the rules!" like a child in a schoolyard. If they didn't do any harm it isn't very important that they broke the law. Follow the spirit, not the letter.
Now, you know it's not as simple as that, I'm sure. Surely you can see that the resentment springing up here -- and, no doubt, in at least some of the British media in the coming days -- is resentment over the fact that if a private citizen had done exactly the same things, with exactly the same intent, with exactly the same precautions, they would be looking at decades in prison and perhaps extradition to a country that practises torture. While if the BBC does it, they get off scot-free.
I'm personally undecided as to whether they were doing the right thing. It's certainly arguable that a body that can do a public service like this and get off scot-free should be permitted to do so. But at the same time the resentment is wholly justified, and it's important enough to feel a lot of resentment over. I think you shouldn't dismiss it out of hand either.
n/t
You've got some interesting points, but I suspect that if de Gaulle were around today he'd be thoroughly in favour of keeping the UK in the EU. It really specifically was the Commonwealth that he was concerned about, and the UK has wholeheartedly and thoroughly done its best to bring the Commonwealth to an end.
Today the major powers in the EU -- France and Germany, and to a lesser extent Benelux -- very much want to keep the UK in the EU, and I suspect that's precisely because of the UK's trans-Atlantic links. The UK may have always been ambivalent about the EU -- it so happens that the yea-sayers have been winning so far -- but since the Commonwealth became moribund, the EU has been working remarkably hard to appease the UK and keep them in. Perhaps the UK's importance in the field of banking is another reason to keep the UK. If not for those two things, I would imagine that France in particular would have given up on UK-appeasing long ago.
You can view it here.
Hopefully this will clear up some questions and suppositions about what is actually changing.
- Kiwi
Alas, it doesn't clear up all that much. The Act states that ISPs must have a reasonable policy in place for dealing with takedown notices. It lays down only very loose guidelines for what form those takedown notices should take, and gives absolutely no guidance on
It's just a really, really badly thought out law.
- also kiwi
Mmm hmm. "users should be able to flag to an independent adjudicator anything they regard as mistaken evidence"
He's playing word-games (that's a nice euphemism for "lying through his teeth") when he says he thinks an independent adjudicator would be a good idea. The classic example of an independent adjudicator is a court; but no way in hell does he want courts deciding this kind of thing.
Why, I wonder? After all, it's not as though courts are supposed to be independent, or have any experience in the whole adjudication business ...
The declaration you quote simply doesn't hang together. He says he wants independent adjudication, but it is manifestly obvious that he actually wants anything but independent adjudication. In fact I'd go so far as to conclude that what he really means is "independent of the judicial system".
Let's take a look at another couple of his statements, all from the page you quote from:
There are no human rights issue involved.
"No human rights issue" my shiny metal arse.
Preventing copyright infringement is something that ISPs already set out in their terms and conditions.
So why push for duplication of the regulations?
Section 92A will be great news for consumers
OK, this one is just so manifestly the exact opposite of the truth that it gets beyond stupid and into the realm of insanity. Come on, after reading that, you can't really seriously be imagining that this is a man whose words are to be taken at face value -- can you? -- when he says things like "independent adjudicator".