Rather late in the campaign Obama stated that it would be difficult to build a coal-fired plant in the US were he president. He would tax them at such a rate as to make it unfeasible to build such a plant. This has
It is good to know that some people get it. The only way to have true "sustainable" energy use s to decrease energy use to the point where natual processes will recycle everything. This wasn't happening after around 1850 or so and maybe not after 1750.
Figure with some improvements in technology the maximum carrying capacity of the planet is around 200 million people or so.
To be able to treat the Earth as a closed system and "sustainable" we need to get back to those 200 million people as quickly as possible. Can we start herding people into gas chambers next week? Better not wait until the week after because there will just be more of them.
If we killed 1 million people a day it would take more than 20 years to reach a sustainable level.
Good to know which side of this decision you are on.
It would take 10 years to build a plant, pretty much anywhere today. It would require years of environmental impact studies and would likely fail to pass in the end.
California will likely be out of electricity long before 2016 anyway, so this is somewhat pointless. Unless they can get the capacity up to the point to equal increasing demand, people are just going to have to learn to do without.
Without 100% reliable electric power - where it gets turned off periodically - all sorts of things change. Kiss your home server goodbye. If they turn it off long enough, plan on buying food differently because refrigerators aren't going to stay cold. Freezers would be OK still, but it will change how people buy food. Think back to air conditioning in the 1950's where you had it in movie theaters and some other places but not at home. This will change all sorts of things in people's lives.
Even if they build up the capacity again a few years later the changes will have taken place. People will never trust electric power again to just be there. This is how it is in all over the planet today, just not in the US and Western Europe. I suspect California will be first to go down this road, but it will be nationwide - we haven't kept up with electric demand and it is starting to show.
Nobody likes advertising. The world would be a better place with out it, completely. No more billboards cluttering up highways and ghetto streets. No more web banners for porn on children's sites.
Is there anyone that doesn't agree? OK, except people getting paid for advertising.
So it's settled then. No more advertising and we'll all be happy.
Since a great deal of US law is prohibitions on what law enforcement cannot do, there is currently a large amount that is open to private citizens that simply doesn't come up very often. For civil cases there are rules about obtaining evidence, but most of these rules relate to things like stolen work product from attorneys and things like grand theft.
The problem here may quite likely be that the person "stealing" the email did nothing that is directly illegal. It might not have been very nice, but in terms of a law being violated there just might not be anything. Even ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act) is going to be a bit of a stretch here.
If the email in question was accessible to the person "stealing" it in his job, then I suspect about all you could try for is some kind of theft of proprietary information, i.e., trade secrets. This would apply to stealing a customer list but email? Might be tough.
Of course, he can be sued for his actions, but trying to categorize the lawsuit on the basis of wiretap? I think you would have to sue under the same grounds as you would for stealing a customer list, that techically there isn't much in the way of law against it.
Remember, I can sue you for spitting on your sidewalk if I want. There is no reason I cannot other than common sense. So suing someone for trading supposedly secret emails can certainly be done. Just don't try to characterize your suit as being on criminal grounds.
The problem with ISPs is they would like to do as little work as possible. Contacting the customer can involve either management or legal - neither one is going to be happy about getting involved with a "trivial" problem.
They also want to be "customer friendly" and that means not shutting people off for possible TOS violations. Sure, it may be in their TOS "thou shall not break into systems", but that is mostly there for liability protection. In my experience, ISPs do not respond to information that their customers are attempting to break into systems.
Yet another facet of this is there is no law against attempting to break into a system. It is only (possibly) illegal to actually break in. So until you have a break in, the ISP customer has done nothing wrong, legally. Further, until you have $25,000 worth of damages (provable), no law enforcement agency in the US will touch it. And even at that level, most are reluctant.
The end result is this is a free ride for people and nobody is ever going to do something about it.
The experience I have had with reporting such attacks has been "F... off!!!" or nothing. Especially from anything.nl - it is evidently the enshrined right of all ISP customers there to break into servers worldwide. Even in the US, ISPs have generally not responded or responded with questioning the log timestamps or suggesting getting a court order.
The result is that I just don't see the point. The idea seems to be to allow "minor" offenses to build up and up until the perpetrator believes they are untouchable. Then, maybe, they do something so incredibly high profile that it no longer can be ignored.
However, I still believe that nothing is ever going to happen to people that break into systems like this. It's the Internet and that sort of behavior is expected. If you put your computer on the Internet, you better expect to have break in attempts. And if any succeed, it was your own fault.
Everyone knows that if you get arrested then you must have done something wrong. Well, maybe not everyone, but everyone that watches American Idol. Or maybe Survivor. And certainly Survivor-watchers want to see the perp-walk so they know if they ever see someone that looks like that in the grocery store they can avoid them. And keep their kids away.
Come on, it is just like reviewing the sex offender registry and making sure that people that looks like sex offenders are treated like criminals. Or lepers. So what does a sex offender look like? Obviously just like the pictures online of sex offenders.
Unfortunately the real problem is VC and other investor money that comes with strings attached. Such as, requring the companies they are funding to be in control of their destiny. This is in many ways even a higher priority than simply making money, because if you aren't in control of your destiny your source of revenue can be removed at any time. Even if you aren't making money yet, just being in control can keep you in the game because nobody can take your marbles away.
Yup. Except since 1976 real losses have nothing whatsoever to do with copyright infringement.
Yes, you might be able to strengthen your case with stories of real losses but the law does not require this, not even for punitive damages.
Since 1976 copyright has very little to do with money and a lot to do with rights and control. You violate the rights and take away the control and you are now subject to statutory and punitive damages.
Who is going to pay for it? Nobody. Free is in, pay is out.
The Western Hemisphere has pretty much grown up an entire generation guided by the idea that if it is on the Internet, it is (or should be) free. Music is now (for all but the terminally stupid or guilt-ridden) free. Movies aren't far behind. Books, software, and anything else in digitial form is going to be right there with it.
The answer I keep hearing is there will be no shortage of content because people will create it for free, for the joy of creating. I suspect that most people that believe this need to spend 30 minutes with YouTube. Pay attention to things like Magibon and the ShayTards. Yup, there will be no shortage of content, that's for sure.
On the Internet two things seem apparent. The first is that a low price trumps all other considerations. The second is that quantity overwhelms quality every time.
You wouldn't be getting a license from the publisher - they are giving up their licensing rights. You would need a license from Google's agent. In reality, you would need to get a license from Google to compete with Google.
Good luck with that. While they are passing out books for $1 the license fee to include the book in a different library is $5. Or $50. It doesn't matter. With a construct like this it is impossible to create a "competitor".
Yes, but... Google will have negotiated a position as the sole rights holder for those books in digital form. Sure, the original books will exist. And you will have the ultimate choice in deciding between travelling to where the book is or doing whatever Google wants you to do.
So, no, you cannot create your own repository. Google will own the rights. There will be the existing books and the digital copy and only the original book will escape Google's reach.
If they were to do this without being the exclusive rightsholder, then maybe this idea has a chance. But giving up access to all books currently under copyright to Google and Google's agency seems like a pretty big step.
It might be that you are confused about what Valerie Plame's status really was.
She had nothing to do with NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES and hadn't for some time. It was well known in Washington DC social circles that she was with the CIA and was, at one time, under cover.
Most of the left-wing idiot blogs still run garbage about how her life and other agents lives were put in danger because of retalitory action by the Bush administration. Everyone else noticed that even after all the hearings and nonsense that nobody was ever even indicted.
But your political bias is always refreshingly humourous on Slashdot.
One of the signficant problems with DOS and Windows 3 was what appeared to be a policy from Microsoft. They refused, for hardware compatibility reasons I am sure, to make use of DMA with floppy drives. Similarly, until Windows 95 there was no use of DMA except by third-party drivers at all.
The result of this was that any Microsoft backup utility ran at half (or less) the speed3 of any DMA-using backup utility. Also, if you didn't have a third-party DMA driver, hard disk access was considerably slower.
Windows 3.11 finally included what was apparently a licensed DMA driver for 32-bit hard disk access. It did not appear to have too many compatibility problems, but there were some. If anything, I would see this as reinforcing the idea of continuing to use BIOS access for the floppy drive and BIOS access only.
There was some relaxation of this with Windows 95, but by no means was it complete. DMA continued to be under-utilized for I/O, partly because of kernel design and partly because of hardware compatibility issues. With more rigorous standards from Microsoft about how stuff is required to work, somewhere around 1999 we started getting more "standardized" hardware for the Windows world.
Anyone comparing this to Apple doesn't understand the problem. With Apple there was one hardware standard and only one, since 1984.
The problem is the way they are being published. If I take pictures of the front of your hose for my own use, no problem. If I wait around until you come out of your house and take pictures, I will be arrested for stalking. If I take lots of pictures of your neighborhood and put them on a very popular Internet site... well, that is what the commotion is all about.
It is going to take a long time to sort this out. And because of the visibility of these photographs it is not clear at all what the right resolution should be.
If the government is paying retail prices for licensing 50,000 computers they are complete idiots and deserve to be flogged and burned at the stake for utter waste.
I do not know what the bulk licensing price would be to an organization with 50,000 computers but I suspect it would be less than $5 each for Vista. Add on Microsoft Office 2007 and I suspect you might be talking about $50 per machine. Yes, that would be $2,500,000 dollars. But nowhere near $200 per machine.
The problem is the sort of new creative works being produced. Take a gander at YouTube. There is a whole new set of really interesting videos popping up which consist of a young girl looking at a webcam and blinking, smiling, making faces, making the peace sign, etc. For about two minutes.
I bet I can find 100 different videos like that on YouTube alone right now. Don't ever think that the lack of compensation will cause things like this to dry up. Nobody is paying these girls for their videos today.
Of course, what people may not expect is instead of a new season of ER they may just get an hour-long montage of these young girl videos on TV. It would be much, much cheaper to produce.
Can't say there will ever be a lack of new stuff like that. Quality? Now that might be affected somewhat, but quantity will never be.
The problem is that you either are forced to place your average blogger on an equal footing with someone being paid by a newspaper as a jouralist or are going to have to acknowledge that if nobody pays the journalist is going to go away.
When the paid staff disappears the aggregators have nothing more to aggregate. Except recycled junk from opinionated and ill-informed bloggers.
It certainly seems to me that little or no value is placed on the paid staff these days, so we are going to have to actually experience all the "news" content coming from unpaid ego-driven bloggers.
Do you believe that the contributors to Free Republic and Daily Kos are doing so because they seek exposure for their paid-for newsletters and speaking engagements? No, they are there because of personal aggrandizement and ego. Today, does Google aggregate "news" from Free Republic and Daily Kos? Why not? Aren't the people contributing there just as valuable in their opinions as any other journalist? Could someone actually be making a decision that these folks aren't as valuable?
Well, if you get rid of the paid staff, all we are going to be left with to aggregate will be the folks that frequent sites like Free Republic and Daily Kos. There will be no shortage of content, I assure you. And it will be as valuable as anything else you can find on the Internet - after the paid staff is gone.
Amazon has quite a lot of free books - as in zero cost - available on their site for the Kindle. They are taking up space on their system and being managed identically to revenue-producing books. This means you can delete it from the device and it is considered "archived".
Amazon is also making quite a few recent books available at zero cost as well. Most of this is a marketing technique but the result is free content.
The Kindle isn't anywhere near as locked-down as you seem to think. You can go to many web sites and download books directly on the Kindle using the free wireless cellular modem in the device. You do not have to use a separate computer to do this.
There are some problems with the Kindle 2, probably the first and foremost is the lack of a bright full-color screen with a resolution sufficient to read maps with. Something around 4096x4096 would be nice. Of course, the battery life might suffer with that... But without a much larger color display and a much faster processor it isn't really possible to display generic PDF documents very well. It all comes down to the device being designed for something different.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather late in the campaign Obama stated that it would be difficult to build a coal-fired plant in the US were he president. He would tax them at such a rate as to make it unfeasible to build such a plant. This has
Appears to have been carried by lots of newspapers, such as http://www.heraldstaronline.com/page/content.detail/id/511265.html
I'm not sure I believe this is a retraction of this position.
It is good to know that some people get it. The only way to have true "sustainable" energy use s to decrease energy use to the point where natual processes will recycle everything. This wasn't happening after around 1850 or so and maybe not after 1750.
Figure with some improvements in technology the maximum carrying capacity of the planet is around 200 million people or so.
To be able to treat the Earth as a closed system and "sustainable" we need to get back to those 200 million people as quickly as possible. Can we start herding people into gas chambers next week? Better not wait until the week after because there will just be more of them.
If we killed 1 million people a day it would take more than 20 years to reach a sustainable level.
Good to know which side of this decision you are on.
Nuclear? In California? Forget it.
It would take 10 years to build a plant, pretty much anywhere today. It would require years of environmental impact studies and would likely fail to pass in the end.
California will likely be out of electricity long before 2016 anyway, so this is somewhat pointless. Unless they can get the capacity up to the point to equal increasing demand, people are just going to have to learn to do without.
Without 100% reliable electric power - where it gets turned off periodically - all sorts of things change. Kiss your home server goodbye. If they turn it off long enough, plan on buying food differently because refrigerators aren't going to stay cold. Freezers would be OK still, but it will change how people buy food. Think back to air conditioning in the 1950's where you had it in movie theaters and some other places but not at home. This will change all sorts of things in people's lives.
Even if they build up the capacity again a few years later the changes will have taken place. People will never trust electric power again to just be there. This is how it is in all over the planet today, just not in the US and Western Europe. I suspect California will be first to go down this road, but it will be nationwide - we haven't kept up with electric demand and it is starting to show.
Nobody likes advertising. The world would be a better place with out it, completely. No more billboards cluttering up highways and ghetto streets. No more web banners for porn on children's sites.
Is there anyone that doesn't agree? OK, except people getting paid for advertising.
So it's settled then. No more advertising and we'll all be happy.
Since a great deal of US law is prohibitions on what law enforcement cannot do, there is currently a large amount that is open to private citizens that simply doesn't come up very often. For civil cases there are rules about obtaining evidence, but most of these rules relate to things like stolen work product from attorneys and things like grand theft.
The problem here may quite likely be that the person "stealing" the email did nothing that is directly illegal. It might not have been very nice, but in terms of a law being violated there just might not be anything. Even ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act) is going to be a bit of a stretch here.
If the email in question was accessible to the person "stealing" it in his job, then I suspect about all you could try for is some kind of theft of proprietary information, i.e., trade secrets. This would apply to stealing a customer list but email? Might be tough.
Of course, he can be sued for his actions, but trying to categorize the lawsuit on the basis of wiretap? I think you would have to sue under the same grounds as you would for stealing a customer list, that techically there isn't much in the way of law against it.
Remember, I can sue you for spitting on your sidewalk if I want. There is no reason I cannot other than common sense. So suing someone for trading supposedly secret emails can certainly be done. Just don't try to characterize your suit as being on criminal grounds.
It certainly is not illegal.
It could quite likely be actionable and subject to a civil lawsuit.
The problem with ISPs is they would like to do as little work as possible. Contacting the customer can involve either management or legal - neither one is going to be happy about getting involved with a "trivial" problem.
They also want to be "customer friendly" and that means not shutting people off for possible TOS violations. Sure, it may be in their TOS "thou shall not break into systems", but that is mostly there for liability protection. In my experience, ISPs do not respond to information that their customers are attempting to break into systems.
Yet another facet of this is there is no law against attempting to break into a system. It is only (possibly) illegal to actually break in. So until you have a break in, the ISP customer has done nothing wrong, legally. Further, until you have $25,000 worth of damages (provable), no law enforcement agency in the US will touch it. And even at that level, most are reluctant.
The end result is this is a free ride for people and nobody is ever going to do something about it.
The experience I have had with reporting such attacks has been "F... off!!!" or nothing. Especially from anything .nl - it is evidently the enshrined right of all ISP customers there to break into servers worldwide. Even in the US, ISPs have generally not responded or responded with questioning the log timestamps or suggesting getting a court order.
The result is that I just don't see the point. The idea seems to be to allow "minor" offenses to build up and up until the perpetrator believes they are untouchable. Then, maybe, they do something so incredibly high profile that it no longer can be ignored.
However, I still believe that nothing is ever going to happen to people that break into systems like this. It's the Internet and that sort of behavior is expected. If you put your computer on the Internet, you better expect to have break in attempts. And if any succeed, it was your own fault.
1. Low price trumps everything else. Customer service, convenience, product quality, whatever.
2. Quantity beats Quality every time.
So Amazon having 10x more books than the local bookstore at lower prices means the local bookstore gets driven out of business.
Everyone knows that if you get arrested then you must have done something wrong. Well, maybe not everyone, but everyone that watches American Idol. Or maybe Survivor. And certainly Survivor-watchers want to see the perp-walk so they know if they ever see someone that looks like that in the grocery store they can avoid them. And keep their kids away.
Come on, it is just like reviewing the sex offender registry and making sure that people that looks like sex offenders are treated like criminals. Or lepers. So what does a sex offender look like? Obviously just like the pictures online of sex offenders.
Unfortunately the real problem is VC and other investor money that comes with strings attached. Such as, requring the companies they are funding to be in control of their destiny. This is in many ways even a higher priority than simply making money, because if you aren't in control of your destiny your source of revenue can be removed at any time. Even if you aren't making money yet, just being in control can keep you in the game because nobody can take your marbles away.
Yup. Except since 1976 real losses have nothing whatsoever to do with copyright infringement.
Yes, you might be able to strengthen your case with stories of real losses but the law does not require this, not even for punitive damages.
Since 1976 copyright has very little to do with money and a lot to do with rights and control. You violate the rights and take away the control and you are now subject to statutory and punitive damages.
Who is going to pay for it? Nobody. Free is in, pay is out.
The Western Hemisphere has pretty much grown up an entire generation guided by the idea that if it is on the Internet, it is (or should be) free. Music is now (for all but the terminally stupid or guilt-ridden) free. Movies aren't far behind. Books, software, and anything else in digitial form is going to be right there with it.
The answer I keep hearing is there will be no shortage of content because people will create it for free, for the joy of creating. I suspect that most people that believe this need to spend 30 minutes with YouTube. Pay attention to things like Magibon and the ShayTards. Yup, there will be no shortage of content, that's for sure.
On the Internet two things seem apparent. The first is that a low price trumps all other considerations. The second is that quantity overwhelms quality every time.
You wouldn't be getting a license from the publisher - they are giving up their licensing rights. You would need a license from Google's agent. In reality, you would need to get a license from Google to compete with Google.
Good luck with that. While they are passing out books for $1 the license fee to include the book in a different library is $5. Or $50. It doesn't matter. With a construct like this it is impossible to create a "competitor".
That is the settlement. Google, or rather Google's agent, will own the digital rights to all of these works. Period, end of story.
This means you can't just scan it yourself and post it on your web page. You would need to license the right to do so from Google's agent.
Yes, but the settlement with Google gives them the digital rights, not the publisher.
I suppose they could license the works from Google.
Yes, but... Google will have negotiated a position as the sole rights holder for those books in digital form. Sure, the original books will exist. And you will have the ultimate choice in deciding between travelling to where the book is or doing whatever Google wants you to do.
So, no, you cannot create your own repository. Google will own the rights. There will be the existing books and the digital copy and only the original book will escape Google's reach.
If they were to do this without being the exclusive rightsholder, then maybe this idea has a chance. But giving up access to all books currently under copyright to Google and Google's agency seems like a pretty big step.
There are two ways to "solve" any possible global warming problem.
1. Decrease energy usage, drastically.
2. Decrease the number of humans on the planet, drastically
Choose one. All other "solutions" aren't.
It might be that you are confused about what Valerie Plame's status really was.
She had nothing to do with NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES and hadn't for some time. It was well known in Washington DC social circles that she was with the CIA and was, at one time, under cover.
Most of the left-wing idiot blogs still run garbage about how her life and other agents lives were put in danger because of retalitory action by the Bush administration. Everyone else noticed that even after all the hearings and nonsense that nobody was ever even indicted.
But your political bias is always refreshingly humourous on Slashdot.
One of the signficant problems with DOS and Windows 3 was what appeared to be a policy from Microsoft. They refused, for hardware compatibility reasons I am sure, to make use of DMA with floppy drives. Similarly, until Windows 95 there was no use of DMA except by third-party drivers at all.
The result of this was that any Microsoft backup utility ran at half (or less) the speed3 of any DMA-using backup utility. Also, if you didn't have a third-party DMA driver, hard disk access was considerably slower.
Windows 3.11 finally included what was apparently a licensed DMA driver for 32-bit hard disk access. It did not appear to have too many compatibility problems, but there were some. If anything, I would see this as reinforcing the idea of continuing to use BIOS access for the floppy drive and BIOS access only.
There was some relaxation of this with Windows 95, but by no means was it complete. DMA continued to be under-utilized for I/O, partly because of kernel design and partly because of hardware compatibility issues. With more rigorous standards from Microsoft about how stuff is required to work, somewhere around 1999 we started getting more "standardized" hardware for the Windows world.
Anyone comparing this to Apple doesn't understand the problem. With Apple there was one hardware standard and only one, since 1984.
Yes, but what can you do with those photographs?
The problem is the way they are being published. If I take pictures of the front of your hose for my own use, no problem. If I wait around until you come out of your house and take pictures, I will be arrested for stalking. If I take lots of pictures of your neighborhood and put them on a very popular Internet site... well, that is what the commotion is all about.
It is going to take a long time to sort this out. And because of the visibility of these photographs it is not clear at all what the right resolution should be.
If the government is paying retail prices for licensing 50,000 computers they are complete idiots and deserve to be flogged and burned at the stake for utter waste.
I do not know what the bulk licensing price would be to an organization with 50,000 computers but I suspect it would be less than $5 each for Vista. Add on Microsoft Office 2007 and I suspect you might be talking about $50 per machine. Yes, that would be $2,500,000 dollars. But nowhere near $200 per machine.
Trickle? Hardly.
The problem is the sort of new creative works being produced. Take a gander at YouTube. There is a whole new set of really interesting videos popping up which consist of a young girl looking at a webcam and blinking, smiling, making faces, making the peace sign, etc. For about two minutes.
I bet I can find 100 different videos like that on YouTube alone right now. Don't ever think that the lack of compensation will cause things like this to dry up. Nobody is paying these girls for their videos today.
Of course, what people may not expect is instead of a new season of ER they may just get an hour-long montage of these young girl videos on TV. It would be much, much cheaper to produce.
Can't say there will ever be a lack of new stuff like that. Quality? Now that might be affected somewhat, but quantity will never be.
The problem is that you either are forced to place your average blogger on an equal footing with someone being paid by a newspaper as a jouralist or are going to have to acknowledge that if nobody pays the journalist is going to go away.
When the paid staff disappears the aggregators have nothing more to aggregate. Except recycled junk from opinionated and ill-informed bloggers.
It certainly seems to me that little or no value is placed on the paid staff these days, so we are going to have to actually experience all the "news" content coming from unpaid ego-driven bloggers.
Do you believe that the contributors to Free Republic and Daily Kos are doing so because they seek exposure for their paid-for newsletters and speaking engagements? No, they are there because of personal aggrandizement and ego. Today, does Google aggregate "news" from Free Republic and Daily Kos? Why not? Aren't the people contributing there just as valuable in their opinions as any other journalist? Could someone actually be making a decision that these folks aren't as valuable?
Well, if you get rid of the paid staff, all we are going to be left with to aggregate will be the folks that frequent sites like Free Republic and Daily Kos. There will be no shortage of content, I assure you. And it will be as valuable as anything else you can find on the Internet - after the paid staff is gone.
Amazon has quite a lot of free books - as in zero cost - available on their site for the Kindle. They are taking up space on their system and being managed identically to revenue-producing books. This means you can delete it from the device and it is considered "archived".
Amazon is also making quite a few recent books available at zero cost as well. Most of this is a marketing technique but the result is free content.
The Kindle isn't anywhere near as locked-down as you seem to think. You can go to many web sites and download books directly on the Kindle using the free wireless cellular modem in the device. You do not have to use a separate computer to do this.
There are some problems with the Kindle 2, probably the first and foremost is the lack of a bright full-color screen with a resolution sufficient to read maps with. Something around 4096x4096 would be nice. Of course, the battery life might suffer with that... But without a much larger color display and a much faster processor it isn't really possible to display generic PDF documents very well. It all comes down to the device being designed for something different.