If your arguments are true, then if your car is caught on photo-radar speeding, can you use the "maybe someone borrowed my car, but I'm not quite sure who it might be" defense to avoid paying the traffic fine?
Would this mean, then, that fines would be applied against the homeowner or internet-service owner? Afterall, when they catch you speeding with photo-radar, they don't apply traffic tickets against the driver (they don't know for sure who the driver might be), but you still have to pay a fine and it's sent to the owner of the vehicle - something you can't get out of by simply going "Gee, I don't know who that driver might be, I guess I don't need to pay the ticket!"
Okay, but wouldn't "can't identify a person" still apply in both cases? Afterall, if you're going to go to jail for making a bomb threat (or child porn, etc), then it's even more important to disregard IP-address based evidence in criminal cases.
Al Gore got people cheering one side of this issue but being Al Gore managed to alienate and effectively create an opposing side
An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006. I remember being a kid back in the early 1990s and hearing Rush Limbaugh complain about how Global Warming was all wrong and false and volcanoes put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than human beings (which is false, BTW).
"claimed that weather stations exaggerated the warming trend. This was disproven by satellite data"
Cause I recall satellite data being reported as showing more of a cooling trend.
It turns out that the satellite orbit had decayed and it was reading temperatures at a different time of day.
"solar activity was blamed for much of the warming. This looked like a promising theory until the '80s"
Wait, I remember the 80's, I was in elementary school and being taught that we were headed toward a potential ice age.
The "ice age" idea got some popular press, but very little support among scientists. Based on historical trends (the pattern over the past million years) the earth was unusually warm during the past 10,000 years, so it wouldn't have been a terrible prediction (if you ignore human contributions to climate change) to say that the pattern would continue and we'd enter another ice age in another few thousand or a few tens of thousands of years. A video to watch on this subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU_AtHkB4Ms
"climate contrarians are convinced that changes in cloud cover will largely mitigate the warming caused by increased CO2"
Well, hadn't heard that one. Did hear the one about how CO2 is nothing compared to H2O in regards to greenhouse affect.
Clouds during the day mostly reflect solar energy (because they're white and reflect it back into space), and cloud cover at night retain solar energy (like a blanket). The levels of H20 in the atmosphere are also dependent on how warm the atmosphere is. If you heat the earth with CO2 and CH4, then you get more H2O, which, in turn, creates an additional amount of heating. It's wrong to see H2O levels as independent from CO2 and CH4.
I don't disagree with the possibility that big energy and big auto would want to put out propaganda, but in this case, it is not in their interest to do so. Anything that reduces demand for fossil energy and cars increases the demand for alternatives. Which they also produce.
Yeah, but what are the profit margins? If I remember right, oil in Saudi Arabia costs about a few dollars per barrel to drill out of the ground, but it sells for over $100 a barrel on the open market. It's almost like free money.
"When in December 2008, 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi how much it cost Saudi Arabia to produce one barrel of oil, he didn't blink: "Probably less than $2 to produce a barrel." If it costs only $2 to produce a barrel of oil, then why do we pay over $105 a barrel?" http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/04/02/149684373/the-real-reason-gas-costs-4-a-gallon
If you're holding the rights to drill for oil in some location, that's valuable. If oil gets replaced by something else that valuable piece of paper becomes a lot less valuable.
So, no, it's often very much in the oil companies interests to keep everyone on oil.
There is significant evidence that the earth's climate changed dramatically in the past, without any human intervention. So there is all kinds of historic evidence for climate change. The issue is how significant human activities are for climate change.
Well, ignoring the fact that we know how much carbon dioxide has increased and we have a good idea how much we've been putting up there from human activities (i.e. most of it). Whenever, I hear someone say that carbon dioxide had changed in the past without human involvement, I can't help but imagine a man standing in a hospital with his beaten-up girlfriend explaining that sometimes, in the past, long before he was around, she got injured by falling down stairs, or falling off her bike, or hitting her eye on a door handle. The fact that she's injured and it has the hallmarks of domestic violence doesn't prove he did it (even though it's obvious he did).
> "Ripping a DVD is a $20k fine and 5 years in prison."
"(Jul. 26, 2010) The U.S. Copyright Office published six new exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) anti-circumvention clause today which should make it far easier for online filmmakers to legally use commercial DVDs. Up until now, filmmakers were actually breaking the law when ripping DVDs to get footage because the act of ripping entails circumventing copy-protection measures."
...
The new exemptions come only days after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a ruling questioning whether the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions can be used at all to restrict use cases that would otherwise be perfectly legal. In its ruling, the court wrote:
“Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision. The DMCA prohibits only forms of access that would violate or impinge on the protections that the Copyright Act otherwise affords copyright owners.”
> "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
Imaginary? Seriously? I guess there are two extreme wings for every opinion. You could probably argue reasonably well that the threats are "overblown" or "exaggerated". You'd have a hard time arguing that it's not important to secure our computer infrastructure. And you'd have an even worse time arguing that computer threats won't increase during the next major war. But, to call them "imaginary" instead of "exaggerated" seems like you're intentionally trying to say something provocative (and wrong).
I think Microsoft created a project which would put ads in games (on billboards in racing games, for example), and I remember them predicting lots of growth in subsequent years. I think they went out of business or maybe Microsoft tried to sell-off the division a few years back. I don't think the ad revenue ever amounted to much, plus it was probably pretty hard to track the ad results (unlike, say, when google ads are placed on a website and google can count exactly how many clicks the ad gets).
> "Not only would this provide a revenue stream with which games can be developed, it would also assist in the immersive quality of the games."
Depends on the game. I don't know what kinds of ads could be used in a game based in the Star Wars Universe (any ads for earth-based products immediately seem out of place) or for medieval/fantasy games - what are you going to advertize in Skyrim or Lord of the Rings games that doesn't seem out of place? Your example of GTA works well because it's placed in a contemporary, urban environment where you'd expect to see ads for real-world products.
> "Heck, enough sponsorship and a developer could practically give the game away."
I have some friends who have earned money by creating free, ad-supported apps for smart phones. I wonder if it's all that profitable for anything other than low-development-cost mobile apps.
There's also a related area of game branding. I've seen a few places where companies can buy a webgame, pay the developer to customize it with their logo, and then display it on their website. As far as I can tell, it's a pretty nitch market. It seems to be okay revenue for very small game companies (like one person, maybe more).
> "If Obama wanted to send me to a Siberian salt mine, what legal obstacles would he face?"
I think he'd face a few. For one thing, you're an American (I assume) on American soil. If your story got press, it would raise some resistance. It also depends on how often it happened. One person wrongfully imprisoned might not make the news (but, of course, there's always Mumia Abu-Jamal among others - to be clear, I don't actually believe he's innocent, but he gets press). A few hundred people would make news and cause trouble. Doing this to a few thousand people would cause a lot of trouble. (Think Montana Freemen on a much larger scale.)
> "There are men imprisoned today who will be imprisoned for the rest of their lives without ever receiving due process."
Yes, men accused of terrorist ties in countries that are known hotbeds of terrorism. Obviously, if everyone in Gitmo was merely accused of ties to terrorism, there would be a *ton* more people there. (For the record, there are only 171 people in Gitmo right now.) I'd agree that there are probably some innocent people there who, perhaps on the false testimony of neighbors, ended up in Gitmo. Just as there are real nasty people there without a good paper-trail that would actually convict them in a court.
* "Since January 2002, 779 men have been brought to Guantanamo.[23] Eight men died in the prison camp and 600 have been released.[24] Most of them have been released without charge or transferred to facilities in their home countries."
> "If it can happen to them, why can't it happen to me?"
Because you're in a different situation. If you want to be wrongfully convicted, I suggest you go run around Afghanistan with an automatic weapon and generally try to look suspicious, like you're an American Jihadi who wants to destroy the great Satan. Then, you can complain about how you never got due process and you didn't actually do anything wrong. If you're in the US or some Western country and you're not walking around with guns or bombs, you're about a thousand more times more likely to get struck by lightning than actually end up arrested and put into a prison without due process.
> "Is there anything stopping it besides Obama's good will?"
Yeah, the situation, whether you are a citizen of a Western country, and how suspicious you seem to be.
> "How long will that last?"
About 10 more seconds. You sound like you got here from prisonplanet.com.
What should the ratio of software architects to software developers be? I have a feeling there aren't nearly enough architect jobs to go around, which means most developers would need to transition to something else.
> "has a few choice words to say about having his business trashed this way, with 220 jobs lost"
While the legality of the move raises questions, I have to admit, there seems something poetic about someone who earned a fortune on ill-gotten, pirated material complaining about having his business trashed and jobs lost.
I actually couldn't help but wonder what the commissioner would think about convicted hackers being forced off the internet (like Kevin Mitnick) based on the fear that they could wreak havoc. Similarly, Kevin Trudeau was blocked from promoting certain products on TV (which could be considered a part of one's fundamental freedom of speech) because of his numerous false claims about products he was selling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Trudeau). While I agree with internet freedom and I oppose kicking off large swaths of the population in order to (attempt to) shut-down uprisings and riots, I did have to wonder if there's really anything wrong with banning people or, preferably, forcing them onto a slow-speed internet, if they commit crimes on the internet (though such bans should be short-lived, since I don't think anyone should have a lifetime ban). Similarly, we deny the second amendment (the right to bear arms, which is a "fundamental freedom") to convicted felons, as well. The idea that cutting off whole sections society from parts of the internet (which we all agree is bad) is similar to kicking off individual people for repeated infractions of the law seems like a very questionable leap in my mind.
I realize, of course, that pirates won't like my comment because they'd like to ensure that no penalty against them is ever permitted.
I use LibreOffice on my computer. While I don't use it much, I haven't used MS Word in years. I generally find LibreOffice to be harder to use and less professional-looking than MS Office. How do I know? A few months ago, we were putting together some documents for work. Other people in the office were using MS Office and I was using LibreOffice. Sending documents back and forth between us mostly worked, although there were sometimes things that didn't appear in the LibreOffice version of the document (if I remember right, it was some image data in the headers and footers and sometimes signatures wouldn't show up in LibreOffice). I was sometimes surprised when I looked at a document in MS Office because I'd suddenly discover that something important wasn't showing up at all in LibreOffice and there was no indication that something was supposed to be there. Also, formatting had a tendency to get messed up. Don't get me started on getting charts to format correctly on LibreOffice. When I'd go over to my coworkers computers and look at/adjust the document in MS Office, it was generally a better experience (even though I haven't used MS Office in years). My conclusion was that MS Office was just plain a better program and LibreOffice has some usability issues and looked like it was a number of years behind MS.
I use LibreOffice because it's free - that's the only reason. If both were free, I'd use MS Office. But, for someone who wouldn't spend a lot of time using LibreOffice/MSOffice, it's just not worth my money to buy a copy of MS Office.
> "He got a million in 12 days, how is is not gaining money?"
Just so you know, bringing in $1 million revenue does not automatically mean you're "making money". Making money means paying all your expenses and then having a profit. Louis C.K. says he, "$250,000 will go to pay off expenses related to the website. Another $250,000 is going to his staff and the people who helped work on the show.". Louis C.K. did make money from the show, but that's because of the other $500,000 ($280,000 of which he gave to charity).
Also, I tried to lookup the quote by following links from the Techdirt article. God, I hate techdirt - not just because Masnik and Techdirt loves to spin anything related to copyright (Masnik believes filesharing should be fully legal and has a hand-waving explanation as to how to make money on digital content, his Techdirt sidekick, Nina Paley, argues copyright shouldn't exist in any form and anyone should be able to sell anyone else's copyrighted material), but also because all the links lead right back to Techdirt and you can't verify the quotes or find the context. Here's a link to the quote (thanks to Google, http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/infolaw/2012/04/10/hollywood-comes-to-brooklyn/ ) if you want to verify it like I did. The link is to a story where someone summarized Al Perry's speech (it's not a direct quote) - ugh, I hope he summarized it fairly otherwise were on a crappy witchhunt. For all I know, Perry might've said that Louis C.K. didn't monetize well (e.g. charge more and do more advertising or something).
They are blocking free speech by users. Surely there must be some "twinge" in their brains that says, "This is wrong to take down people's posts."
I'm sure that the Chinese leaders and censors are doing this stuff because they believe it's for the betterment of Chinese society and China as a nation. In their view, they're removing lies that get people all stirred up, they're silencing the rebel-rousers inciting people to do something bad, the no-good / ill-informed "rebels" are harming the stability and legitimacy of the Chinese government (whom they most likely believe are doing a good job compared to all the alternatives), the "rebels" are dangerous to China's continued economic growth (which would help Chinese people in general and China's position internationally), the censors are maintaining stability and the status-quo in society and preventing an unknown and destructive anarchy. I'm betting those are the beliefs in their heads, and it would mean that they don't feel guilty about what they're doing. It doesn't actually require that Chinese censors are motivated by an evil self-interest.
To be fair, when it comes to distorting and spinning the news, FOX News and Talk Radio are the most obvious examples. A few months back, I heard one right-wing talk radio host go on for quite a while about how there will be no 2012 election because Obama is going to declare himself dictator over the United States and rule for the next forty years. (No, I'm seriously not making that up. And people think right-wing distortions of reality are no worse what happens on the left.) True, the MSNBC tape was edited and the producer was fired. The most unfortunate thing about that incident is that now the right-wing media gets to pretend that they're no worse than anyone else and that they don't distort the news worse than anyone else. Heck, even Newt Gingritch and Rick Santorum have said that FOX News has a bias (http://reallyfoxnews.tumblr.com/post/20975850816/i-assume-its-because-rupert-murdoch-at-some):
"In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than Fox this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of Fox, and we’re more likely to get distortion out of Fox. That’s just a fact." - Newt Gingritch
It seems to me that Rupert Murdoch longs for the days when News Agencies can throw around their weight as kingmakers in political races.
Software under copyright doesn't force anything on anyone because everyone is still *free* not to use it. Similarly, if I give you a ride in my car, don't complain about how I'm "restricting your freedom" because me giving you a ride is contingent on you not yelling obscenities out of the window.
I guess I don't think that clicking a "Like" button is that big of an infraction, and wouldn't compare it to astroturfing. When I'm looking at buying a product, the number of "Likes" I see is meaningless because all likes tells me is percentage of people who like a product times the number of people who have seen a product. If a product has only been seen 100 times but 100% of them truely like it, then it has 100 likes, but if a product has been seen a million times and only 10% of them truely like it, then it has 100,000 likes. The number of likes is meaningless because there's no "downvote" and no "rate 1 to 5" option.
The situation where astroturfing gets on my nerves is when it's manipulating the information I'm using to decide whether or not to buy a product -- fake reviews, or fake Amazon ratings (which ranges from 1 to 5, not a single "upvote" button with no way to downvote it) get on my nerves because I use it to help me make an informed decision. I think you need to chill out if you think clicking "Like" is a serious astroturfing problem.
I want to vote you up just so I can put you on display for everyone on Slashdot. This is what we have to look forward to as creationism is taught in schools, everyone.
> And, whatever else, I believe that it's important, especially in a science class, to teach students to be skeptical. You shouldn't just accept what someone in authority tells you as true beyond question. You should be in the habit of questioning and investigating everything that you learn, especially in science.
If you knew that a bunch of teachers believed in the ancient Greek four-elements theory of matter (fire, earth, air, and water) and you had scientists saying that all matter is made up of the elements as described in the periodic table of elements, should we allow both to be taught under the claim that "you shouldn't just accept what someone in authority tells you"? Obviously, there's established science that needs to be taught as "the facts". Saying that kids need to question and investigate this stuff gives bunk theories too much of a foot in the door. Evolution is also a pretty complicated science, and I don't believe that kids can get into it deeply enough to make an informed decision about it unless they're very intelligent kids and they're going to spend years and years learning about it. This means the majority of kids can easily get their opinions derailed into believing pseudoscience.
> "I'm curious why the law in this article is taken as an imposition of Christian doctrine on teachers."
It's not taken as "an imposition of Christian doctrine on teachers". What people are complaining about is the fact that there are a lot of teachers who really want to teach creationism to kids and dis evolution in their classrooms. This gives them license to do so.
> "Every organized religion, be it Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, believes that there is a higher power that created the universe, as opposed to the atheist position that the universe just...is...because...it is."
Ok, but evolution is not the "atheist position" and creationism is not the "theist position". Rather, it's a question of science. Similarly, if a religion taught that all diseases are caused by demons (as St.Augustine taught), but those darn atheists taught it was germs -- it's not a question of teaching the "atheist" position of germ-theory vs the "theist" position of demon-caused-diseases. It's a question of teaching the established science.
> "Why is a teacher forced by this law to proclaim that the world was created in six days, and on the seventh, God rested"
They're not forced to teach that, but it's fairly easy for a teacher to stand up in class and talk about evolution as some fairy tale make-up by atheists and how life was obviously designed by a creator and, without getting too much into it, he can effectively paint the situation as "evolution = lies, creationism = truth, I'm not going to tell you which God did it, but we're all from the Bible-belt so we all know who we're talking about here." Wink. Wink.
> a) making it generic enough to avoid biases towards one religion or another or b) briefly exploring the Cliff's notes version of every major religious faith?
Yeah, like that will happen in a heavily Christianized state. I'm sure teachers will give a nice, balanced presentation for all the religions they don't believe in.
Slashdot Mirror
If your arguments are true, then if your car is caught on photo-radar speeding, can you use the "maybe someone borrowed my car, but I'm not quite sure who it might be" defense to avoid paying the traffic fine?
Would this mean, then, that fines would be applied against the homeowner or internet-service owner? Afterall, when they catch you speeding with photo-radar, they don't apply traffic tickets against the driver (they don't know for sure who the driver might be), but you still have to pay a fine and it's sent to the owner of the vehicle - something you can't get out of by simply going "Gee, I don't know who that driver might be, I guess I don't need to pay the ticket!"
Okay, but wouldn't "can't identify a person" still apply in both cases? Afterall, if you're going to go to jail for making a bomb threat (or child porn, etc), then it's even more important to disregard IP-address based evidence in criminal cases.
An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006. I remember being a kid back in the early 1990s and hearing Rush Limbaugh complain about how Global Warming was all wrong and false and volcanoes put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than human beings (which is false, BTW).
It turns out that the satellite orbit had decayed and it was reading temperatures at a different time of day.
The "ice age" idea got some popular press, but very little support among scientists. Based on historical trends (the pattern over the past million years) the earth was unusually warm during the past 10,000 years, so it wouldn't have been a terrible prediction (if you ignore human contributions to climate change) to say that the pattern would continue and we'd enter another ice age in another few thousand or a few tens of thousands of years. A video to watch on this subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU_AtHkB4Ms
Clouds during the day mostly reflect solar energy (because they're white and reflect it back into space), and cloud cover at night retain solar energy (like a blanket). The levels of H20 in the atmosphere are also dependent on how warm the atmosphere is. If you heat the earth with CO2 and CH4, then you get more H2O, which, in turn, creates an additional amount of heating. It's wrong to see H2O levels as independent from CO2 and CH4.
As usual, I'll recommend this video series on Global Warming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52KLGqDSAjo&list=PLA4F0994AFB057BB8&index=2&feature=plpp_video
Yeah, but what are the profit margins? If I remember right, oil in Saudi Arabia costs about a few dollars per barrel to drill out of the ground, but it sells for over $100 a barrel on the open market. It's almost like free money.
"When in December 2008, 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi how much it cost Saudi Arabia to produce one barrel of oil, he didn't blink: "Probably less than $2 to produce a barrel." If it costs only $2 to produce a barrel of oil, then why do we pay over $105 a barrel?"
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/04/02/149684373/the-real-reason-gas-costs-4-a-gallon
If you're holding the rights to drill for oil in some location, that's valuable. If oil gets replaced by something else that valuable piece of paper becomes a lot less valuable.
So, no, it's often very much in the oil companies interests to keep everyone on oil.
Well, ignoring the fact that we know how much carbon dioxide has increased and we have a good idea how much we've been putting up there from human activities (i.e. most of it). Whenever, I hear someone say that carbon dioxide had changed in the past without human involvement, I can't help but imagine a man standing in a hospital with his beaten-up girlfriend explaining that sometimes, in the past, long before he was around, she got injured by falling down stairs, or falling off her bike, or hitting her eye on a door handle. The fact that she's injured and it has the hallmarks of domestic violence doesn't prove he did it (even though it's obvious he did).
Of course, there were people within the past few centuries arguing for a flat-earth: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3665172/Flat-out-unbelievable.html
> "Ripping a DVD is a $20k fine and 5 years in prison."
"(Jul. 26, 2010) The U.S. Copyright Office published six new exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) anti-circumvention clause today which should make it far easier for online filmmakers to legally use commercial DVDs. Up until now, filmmakers were actually breaking the law when ripping DVDs to get footage because the act of ripping entails circumventing copy-protection measures."
...
The new exemptions come only days after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a ruling questioning whether the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions can be used at all to restrict use cases that would otherwise be perfectly legal. In its ruling, the court wrote:
“Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision. The DMCA prohibits only forms of access that would violate or impinge on the protections that the Copyright Act otherwise affords copyright owners.”
In other words: Ripping a DVD to make a backup copy is perfectly legal, ripping it to sell copies is not — at least based on this decision. Maybe the DMCA is finally catching up with reality, after all.
http://gigaom.com/video/new-dmca-exemptions-ripping-dvds-for-online-video-now-legal/
> "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
Imaginary? Seriously? I guess there are two extreme wings for every opinion. You could probably argue reasonably well that the threats are "overblown" or "exaggerated". You'd have a hard time arguing that it's not important to secure our computer infrastructure. And you'd have an even worse time arguing that computer threats won't increase during the next major war. But, to call them "imaginary" instead of "exaggerated" seems like you're intentionally trying to say something provocative (and wrong).
I think Microsoft created a project which would put ads in games (on billboards in racing games, for example), and I remember them predicting lots of growth in subsequent years. I think they went out of business or maybe Microsoft tried to sell-off the division a few years back. I don't think the ad revenue ever amounted to much, plus it was probably pretty hard to track the ad results (unlike, say, when google ads are placed on a website and google can count exactly how many clicks the ad gets).
These articles paint a more positive picture than I would expect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-game_advertising
http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/12/global-ad-spending-in-video-games-to-top-7-2b-in-2016/
> "Not only would this provide a revenue stream with which games can be developed, it would also assist in the immersive quality of the games."
Depends on the game. I don't know what kinds of ads could be used in a game based in the Star Wars Universe (any ads for earth-based products immediately seem out of place) or for medieval/fantasy games - what are you going to advertize in Skyrim or Lord of the Rings games that doesn't seem out of place? Your example of GTA works well because it's placed in a contemporary, urban environment where you'd expect to see ads for real-world products.
> "Heck, enough sponsorship and a developer could practically give the game away."
I have some friends who have earned money by creating free, ad-supported apps for smart phones. I wonder if it's all that profitable for anything other than low-development-cost mobile apps.
There's also a related area of game branding. I've seen a few places where companies can buy a webgame, pay the developer to customize it with their logo, and then display it on their website. As far as I can tell, it's a pretty nitch market. It seems to be okay revenue for very small game companies (like one person, maybe more).
> "If Obama wanted to send me to a Siberian salt mine, what legal obstacles would he face?"
I think he'd face a few. For one thing, you're an American (I assume) on American soil. If your story got press, it would raise some resistance. It also depends on how often it happened. One person wrongfully imprisoned might not make the news (but, of course, there's always Mumia Abu-Jamal among others - to be clear, I don't actually believe he's innocent, but he gets press). A few hundred people would make news and cause trouble. Doing this to a few thousand people would cause a lot of trouble. (Think Montana Freemen on a much larger scale.)
> "There are men imprisoned today who will be imprisoned for the rest of their lives without ever receiving due process."
Yes, men accused of terrorist ties in countries that are known hotbeds of terrorism. Obviously, if everyone in Gitmo was merely accused of ties to terrorism, there would be a *ton* more people there. (For the record, there are only 171 people in Gitmo right now.) I'd agree that there are probably some innocent people there who, perhaps on the false testimony of neighbors, ended up in Gitmo. Just as there are real nasty people there without a good paper-trail that would actually convict them in a court.
* "Since January 2002, 779 men have been brought to Guantanamo.[23] Eight men died in the prison camp and 600 have been released.[24] Most of them have been released without charge or transferred to facilities in their home countries."
> "If it can happen to them, why can't it happen to me?"
Because you're in a different situation. If you want to be wrongfully convicted, I suggest you go run around Afghanistan with an automatic weapon and generally try to look suspicious, like you're an American Jihadi who wants to destroy the great Satan. Then, you can complain about how you never got due process and you didn't actually do anything wrong. If you're in the US or some Western country and you're not walking around with guns or bombs, you're about a thousand more times more likely to get struck by lightning than actually end up arrested and put into a prison without due process.
> "Is there anything stopping it besides Obama's good will?"
Yeah, the situation, whether you are a citizen of a Western country, and how suspicious you seem to be.
> "How long will that last?"
About 10 more seconds. You sound like you got here from prisonplanet.com.
What should the ratio of software architects to software developers be? I have a feeling there aren't nearly enough architect jobs to go around, which means most developers would need to transition to something else.
> "has a few choice words to say about having his business trashed this way, with 220 jobs lost"
While the legality of the move raises questions, I have to admit, there seems something poetic about someone who earned a fortune on ill-gotten, pirated material complaining about having his business trashed and jobs lost.
I actually couldn't help but wonder what the commissioner would think about convicted hackers being forced off the internet (like Kevin Mitnick) based on the fear that they could wreak havoc. Similarly, Kevin Trudeau was blocked from promoting certain products on TV (which could be considered a part of one's fundamental freedom of speech) because of his numerous false claims about products he was selling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Trudeau). While I agree with internet freedom and I oppose kicking off large swaths of the population in order to (attempt to) shut-down uprisings and riots, I did have to wonder if there's really anything wrong with banning people or, preferably, forcing them onto a slow-speed internet, if they commit crimes on the internet (though such bans should be short-lived, since I don't think anyone should have a lifetime ban). Similarly, we deny the second amendment (the right to bear arms, which is a "fundamental freedom") to convicted felons, as well. The idea that cutting off whole sections society from parts of the internet (which we all agree is bad) is similar to kicking off individual people for repeated infractions of the law seems like a very questionable leap in my mind.
I realize, of course, that pirates won't like my comment because they'd like to ensure that no penalty against them is ever permitted.
I use LibreOffice on my computer. While I don't use it much, I haven't used MS Word in years. I generally find LibreOffice to be harder to use and less professional-looking than MS Office. How do I know? A few months ago, we were putting together some documents for work. Other people in the office were using MS Office and I was using LibreOffice. Sending documents back and forth between us mostly worked, although there were sometimes things that didn't appear in the LibreOffice version of the document (if I remember right, it was some image data in the headers and footers and sometimes signatures wouldn't show up in LibreOffice). I was sometimes surprised when I looked at a document in MS Office because I'd suddenly discover that something important wasn't showing up at all in LibreOffice and there was no indication that something was supposed to be there. Also, formatting had a tendency to get messed up. Don't get me started on getting charts to format correctly on LibreOffice. When I'd go over to my coworkers computers and look at/adjust the document in MS Office, it was generally a better experience (even though I haven't used MS Office in years). My conclusion was that MS Office was just plain a better program and LibreOffice has some usability issues and looked like it was a number of years behind MS.
I use LibreOffice because it's free - that's the only reason. If both were free, I'd use MS Office. But, for someone who wouldn't spend a lot of time using LibreOffice/MSOffice, it's just not worth my money to buy a copy of MS Office.
> "He got a million in 12 days, how is is not gaining money?"
Just so you know, bringing in $1 million revenue does not automatically mean you're "making money". Making money means paying all your expenses and then having a profit. Louis C.K. says he, "$250,000 will go to pay off expenses related to the website. Another $250,000 is going to his staff and the people who helped work on the show.". Louis C.K. did make money from the show, but that's because of the other $500,000 ($280,000 of which he gave to charity).
Also, I tried to lookup the quote by following links from the Techdirt article. God, I hate techdirt - not just because Masnik and Techdirt loves to spin anything related to copyright (Masnik believes filesharing should be fully legal and has a hand-waving explanation as to how to make money on digital content, his Techdirt sidekick, Nina Paley, argues copyright shouldn't exist in any form and anyone should be able to sell anyone else's copyrighted material), but also because all the links lead right back to Techdirt and you can't verify the quotes or find the context. Here's a link to the quote (thanks to Google, http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/infolaw/2012/04/10/hollywood-comes-to-brooklyn/ ) if you want to verify it like I did. The link is to a story where someone summarized Al Perry's speech (it's not a direct quote) - ugh, I hope he summarized it fairly otherwise were on a crappy witchhunt. For all I know, Perry might've said that Louis C.K. didn't monetize well (e.g. charge more and do more advertising or something).
They are blocking free speech by users. Surely there must be some "twinge" in their brains that says, "This is wrong to take down people's posts."
I'm sure that the Chinese leaders and censors are doing this stuff because they believe it's for the betterment of Chinese society and China as a nation. In their view, they're removing lies that get people all stirred up, they're silencing the rebel-rousers inciting people to do something bad, the no-good / ill-informed "rebels" are harming the stability and legitimacy of the Chinese government (whom they most likely believe are doing a good job compared to all the alternatives), the "rebels" are dangerous to China's continued economic growth (which would help Chinese people in general and China's position internationally), the censors are maintaining stability and the status-quo in society and preventing an unknown and destructive anarchy. I'm betting those are the beliefs in their heads, and it would mean that they don't feel guilty about what they're doing. It doesn't actually require that Chinese censors are motivated by an evil self-interest.
It seems to me that Rupert Murdoch longs for the days when News Agencies can throw around their weight as kingmakers in political races.
Software under copyright doesn't force anything on anyone because everyone is still *free* not to use it. Similarly, if I give you a ride in my car, don't complain about how I'm "restricting your freedom" because me giving you a ride is contingent on you not yelling obscenities out of the window.
I guess I don't think that clicking a "Like" button is that big of an infraction, and wouldn't compare it to astroturfing. When I'm looking at buying a product, the number of "Likes" I see is meaningless because all likes tells me is percentage of people who like a product times the number of people who have seen a product. If a product has only been seen 100 times but 100% of them truely like it, then it has 100 likes, but if a product has been seen a million times and only 10% of them truely like it, then it has 100,000 likes. The number of likes is meaningless because there's no "downvote" and no "rate 1 to 5" option.
The situation where astroturfing gets on my nerves is when it's manipulating the information I'm using to decide whether or not to buy a product -- fake reviews, or fake Amazon ratings (which ranges from 1 to 5, not a single "upvote" button with no way to downvote it) get on my nerves because I use it to help me make an informed decision. I think you need to chill out if you think clicking "Like" is a serious astroturfing problem.
I want to vote you up just so I can put you on display for everyone on Slashdot. This is what we have to look forward to as creationism is taught in schools, everyone.
> And, whatever else, I believe that it's important, especially in a science class, to teach students to be skeptical. You shouldn't just accept what someone in authority tells you as true beyond question. You should be in the habit of questioning and investigating everything that you learn, especially in science.
If you knew that a bunch of teachers believed in the ancient Greek four-elements theory of matter (fire, earth, air, and water) and you had scientists saying that all matter is made up of the elements as described in the periodic table of elements, should we allow both to be taught under the claim that "you shouldn't just accept what someone in authority tells you"? Obviously, there's established science that needs to be taught as "the facts". Saying that kids need to question and investigate this stuff gives bunk theories too much of a foot in the door. Evolution is also a pretty complicated science, and I don't believe that kids can get into it deeply enough to make an informed decision about it unless they're very intelligent kids and they're going to spend years and years learning about it. This means the majority of kids can easily get their opinions derailed into believing pseudoscience.
> "I'm curious why the law in this article is taken as an imposition of Christian doctrine on teachers."
It's not taken as "an imposition of Christian doctrine on teachers". What people are complaining about is the fact that there are a lot of teachers who really want to teach creationism to kids and dis evolution in their classrooms. This gives them license to do so.
> "Every organized religion, be it Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, believes that there is a higher power that created the universe, as opposed to the atheist position that the universe just...is...because...it is."
Ok, but evolution is not the "atheist position" and creationism is not the "theist position". Rather, it's a question of science. Similarly, if a religion taught that all diseases are caused by demons (as St.Augustine taught), but those darn atheists taught it was germs -- it's not a question of teaching the "atheist" position of germ-theory vs the "theist" position of demon-caused-diseases. It's a question of teaching the established science.
> "Why is a teacher forced by this law to proclaim that the world was created in six days, and on the seventh, God rested"
They're not forced to teach that, but it's fairly easy for a teacher to stand up in class and talk about evolution as some fairy tale make-up by atheists and how life was obviously designed by a creator and, without getting too much into it, he can effectively paint the situation as "evolution = lies, creationism = truth, I'm not going to tell you which God did it, but we're all from the Bible-belt so we all know who we're talking about here." Wink. Wink.
> a) making it generic enough to avoid biases towards one religion or another or b) briefly exploring the Cliff's notes version of every major religious faith?
Yeah, like that will happen in a heavily Christianized state. I'm sure teachers will give a nice, balanced presentation for all the religions they don't believe in.
Doesn't $33 per user seem a bit excessive to you?