There are two cases which are in contradiction on this point. The first is Vernor vs Autocad, where it was found that when you buy a copy, you do indeed become the owner of that copy in one particular sense which is relevant to installation of software (as we will see). The second case is Blizzard, in which it was found that you do not become the owner, but are only the licensee.
The sense in which you need to be the owner is that of Title 17 Section 117. If you are the owner of a copy in that sense, you have the right to both make any copies or adaptations essential to use with a machine, and you also have the right to authorize others to do so on your behalf.
Blizzard found you are not the owner in the sense needed. The implication of only being the licensee and not the owner of a copy is that you need some permissions from the owner of the copyright in order to make copies. It is established law since MAI that when you load software into memory to run it, you are making a copy in the sense of the copyright legislation in the US. It is not so clear that this is true outside the US, which may be important.
The permissions given, according to Blizzard, are given in the EULA. It follows that if you break any EULA condition, you no longer have permission to copy, and so your next use will be in breach of copyright. This means that not only can you be sued by the owner for breaching a civil contract with him, which you entered into by click through. You will also be subject to prosecution for breach of copyright, which is a criminal offense.
It follows that breaching the EULA in ways that have intrinsically nothing to do with the act of copying can put you in breach of copyright on subsequent use. If, for instance, the EULA says that you will not have on your computer or install in future a copy of mdbtools, whether this is relevant or not to the software you are installing, then if you do, you are in breach of copyright. Even if what you are installing is, for instance, a calculator program, or a photo retouching program, or a calendar, or whatever. If the EULA says you must wear a particular uniform, be under a certain weight, be of a certain racial or ethnic or religious background, if you use it not being or doing any of those things, you are in breach of copyright.
The Church of Scientology could, for instance, put in the EULA that a freely sold copy of some software was only to be used by paid up members of the Church, and anyone who used it would then be in breach of copyright if he either was not in or had left the Church. Political parties could license material to their members and ban non-members from looking at it.
Remember, its the act of loading into memory that is copyright violating now, not the act of duplicating and distributing. This is because if Blizzard is the binding precedent, the protections of Section 117 no longer cover use of software by a buyer of a retail copy.
On the other hand, if Vernor is the binding precedent, then you are the owner of the copy, and you have S117 rights to do any adaptations necessary to use it with a machine. A machine. This means, if its OSX, the machine of your choice. You will then be liable to civil suit by Apple for breaching the civil contract of the EULA, but you won't be in breach of copyright.
All this has no bearing whatever on the GPL. If you are the owner of a copy, you are only exempted in terms of further copying and the making of derivative works by S117, and this only covers use with a machine. A machine. Not machines, not any particular brand of machine. A machine. One machine of your choice, unless given other permissions.
This means that the GPL sections which regulate what you may do in the way of copying, making new works with, distributing, remain valid. It is a common piece of Cupertino FUD to say that if Apple loses the power to restrain installation of OSX to its own brand of computers, the GPL falls. It does not.
Its excellent value, its a national treasure, everyone loves it.
So why exactly does it have to be legally compulsory to subscribe to it if you want to watch any TV? Why is this the only subscription TV that you are obliged to subscribe to? Why, if we really want to make it compulsory to subscribe to some TV, do we not allow you to pick the provider of your choice? Why is it, that if you want to watch the English cricket team go down in flames yet again, you are obliged to subscribe to two TV broadcast services, only one of which provides cricket coverage?
Try writing to the BBC and telling them you want to cancel your subscription, because you are choosing to use Sky as your premium content provider. Or you don't want any premium content, you are happy to watch only ad funded TV.
Why exactly can you not do that? What would be so terrible if you could?
The BBC desperately needs competition, and that does not mean other channels that you are permitted to subscribe to in addition to it. It needs competition on equal terms, where you can subscribe to the BBC, to Channel X, neither, or both, as the mood strikes you.
The various cases on this matter make it clear that there are three different things involved. Read Title 17 Section 117.
You may own copyright in the software. This gives you the right to control what copies are made, with one exception. This, copyright ownership, is what people usually mean when they talk about owning the software. It is the same as a publisher owning copyright to a book. He may print and sell as many copies as he wants.
You may also own a retail copy. This is what Vernor finds, and what Softman found before that. It has been repeatedly argued by software suppliers that you do not own the copy, that you only own a license to use. It has now been found for the second time that you own it, and the criterion used is whether the supplier has any right to repossess. If not, the copy is yours.
We next come to copies made in way of use. If the software is not supplied 'live', ie running off the installation media, it must be installed. Installation constitutes copying. It would be illegal under copyright law without some explicit permission. In fact the sort of copying which also occurs during use when the software is read into memory was found illegal in the well known MAI case, until Title 17 S 1117 was revised as a result of this case.
The revisions provided that copies and modifications made or authorized by the owner which were essential to use with a machine (notice the article, "a" machine) are permitted. But 117 also provides that if you resell the copy you own, you may only sell with it the copies you have made in way of being essential to use, with the consent of the copyright holder.
So, to summarize the situation, when you buy a retail copy of software, you own that copy. You do not become the copyright holder, your right to make copies is limited by Title 17. You may make copies (or modifications) that are essential to use with "a" machine - by implication, the machine of your choice, not of the copyright holder's choice. But your rights over resale of those copies is limited.
Two things are sometimes argued about this.
(1) It is sometimes argued that you may only use a machine which is essential. For instance, you may not install OSX on a Dell, because a Dell is not an essential machine, you could equally well use a Mac. Wrong. The machine does not have to be essential, and the article is indefinite, "a" machine. What has to be essential is the copying.
(2) It is also sometimes argued that because you have no rights of resale of the copies made in way of being essential to use, the copyright holder owns them, and you do not. There is no ground for this view. The test of repossession does not suggest this. The copyright holder has no right of repossession of those copies, and you have a right to them in perpetuity with no further payments. The situation is, you own them but you have restricted rights of resale.
So where does this leave Psystar and OSX? In a very simple situation. If they installed without having transferred the ownership of the retail copy of OSX to the customer, they were in violation of copyright. If they were made when ownership of machine and copy had been transferred, they were permitted by 117 as having been authorized by the owner, and were not then resold, so no permission for transfer was required, as they were never transferred.
This means that there need not have been any violation of copyright, but there was of course a breach of the Apple EULA. Whether the term of that EULA which obliges you to buy your hardware from Apple is enforceable is a quite different matter. But as far as copyright goes, you are the owner of any retail copy of OSX, or MS Office, that you have lawfully acquired. There is nothing in copyright law to stop you installing it wherever you want, as long as you do not make more than one copy. It says "a" machine, remember.
I've put in three kyoceras, one printer, one MFP, one copier with an add-on print card. Mechanically perfect, very cheap to run because the drum lasts forever. More expensive, yes, but worth it. They have all been in without problem for several years, fairly heavy usage, and I expect them to continue indefinitely.
The question is, over what time period are we seeing rises and falls in coverage? We have no proper data before the satellite age. So all we know is that there has been recent shrinkage. We have however no idea what the standard deviation is of gains and shrinkages over a period of centuries or millenia, so we have no idea whether we are looking at an event close to the mean or one that is several standard deviations away from it.
At this point people usually ridicule one for not being prepared to take action until there is proof, which is usually projected as being some natural disaster like New Orleans.
The argument is mistaken. It is quite reasonable to wait for proof, because 'doing things' in the absence of proof is a risky and expensive business. It could have quite dramatic and unexpected side effects depending on what the situation really is.
It would enormously help us figure this thing out if all the climate scientists would just publish their raw data and algorithms. That way we could at least verify their work so far. The ones that need to publish? Well, just about all of them. They supposedly have evidence that the present warming is a very rare event, but they decline to publish it. They just publish studies based on it, summaries of it, processed forms of it. We need this data, and we need the code that was applied to it.
Without that, its not science, its arm waving. There is probably nothing more important than to establish the climatic history of the last 2,000 years, and if we could establish ice coverage and density in some way, that too. Without the scientists publishing, I do not see how we take this debate any further. It is, to say the least, curious that the main workers in the field, the ones who find the present trend most alarming, are the ones who refuse to reveal the data that would prove them right.
Where, for instance, is Mann's algorithm, the one he refused to supply to the Wegman Committee? Where is the data underlying the HADCRU series? Where is Thompson's ice core data?
If we cannot see it, how do we even know it exists?
And we look forward to more occasions when some kinds of food will be illegal to sell or serve outside of their native location.
For example, we cannot wait for the time when Yorkshire Pudding will vanish from all menus not in Yorkshire. When the Melton Mowbray pie will cease to exist except in the town of that name. When Brie will be confined to the town of Brie, and not Brie sur Seine either. When the Frankfurter will be unobtainable except by travelling to Frankfurt.
When the London Irish rugby club will only be able to have players who are both Irish and Londoners, and the Royal Irish Guards will consist only of men who are both Royal and Irish. A rare and distinctive combination.
What we need is truth in advertising and respect for local traditions. Cheshire cheese for instance, why should we have any uncertainty about where that was made. Or the even more disgracefully abused Cheddar. The fine Cheddar Gorge is the only place on the planet which should be permitted to make or serve it. Go through your supermarket shelves, you North Americans, and remove all that orange goop you have there. There is only one true Cheddar, and we Cheddarians have it.
And the Norwalk Island Sharpie shall never sail outside the sacred waters of Norwalk, nor shall the Cornish Shrimper ever fish in the waters off Devon. Yessir, the world is going to be a different and better place from here on in.
Thank goodness, we will no longer be obliged to see the New York Times on sale wherever we travel in the US, and the International Herald Tribune will only be available internationally.
There are legitimate reasons to be unconvinced, no matter what the affiliations of the people offering them may be.
We have an hypothesis about the reaction of the earth's climate to CO2 emissions. The hypothesis is first, that the additional CO2 warms by absorbing IR radiation. That this will occur is not subject to dispute, its basic physics, and has been known for around 100 years. It was only partially known to Aarhenius, who seems to have got the effect right but to have overestimated its magnitude, but the effect itself has been known. This is a relatively minor component of the hypothesis. If this effect were all there was, doubling of CO2 levels from around 300ppm to around 600ppm would raise the average temperature of the planet in the lower troposphere by roughly 1 degree centigrade. This would not be terribly serious - in fact, it might even improve life, and its of the same order as natural variations anyway.
The second hypothesized effect is that when the climate warms by any amount, from any cause, there is positive feedback. This feedback amplifies the effect. So the warming of 1 degree caused by CO2 rises is hypothesized to lead to further warming of a further few degrees. The amounts are uncertain. The total warming effect could be anything from 2-5 degrees C. Even at the lower levels, this would lead to significant problems, and at the higher levels, particularly over 5 degrees, we would be looking at climate disaster.
However, its a question whether the climate reacts to warming by positive feedback, and if so how strongly, or by negative feedback. To have concerns about feedback is not denialism or flat-earth -ism. Its quite reasonable.
This is where we come into the evidence issue. The decisive evidence for feedback would be if the climate were now genuinely warming faster than or differently from ever before. And this is where the question of the refusal of the climate science community to reveal their data becomes important. We have Jacoby, d'Arrigo, Mann, Thompson, Jones and others refusing to reveal the data which would allow replication and verification of their results. Their defenders meanwhile abuse everyone who does not simply believe, without proof, that the results are as represented.
As long as the data and algorithms are not placed in the public domain for inspection and validation, it is going to be reasonable to be skeptical. All that the authors have to do to eliminate this skepticism is to publish. Until they do, it is going to remain an open question whether there is anything very special going on with climate in terms of the last 2,000 years, and so it will remain an open question whether feedback works the way that the IPCC hypothesizes.
And so, it will remain an open question whether the reaction of the climate machine to an initial warming of 1 degree will be an ultimate stable state of no change, +1, +2 or +5.
In the same way as when I drink a cup of coffee, you cannot predict my future temperature solely by reference to the heat content of the coffee, nor can you make any assumptions without examining the way my body reacts about whether the feedback will be positive or negative, so you need evidence in the form of the behavior of the climate to tell what sort of feedback mechanisms occur. It is very, very odd, inexplicable in fact, that the climate science community seems to see it as positively wrong to ask for the data on what is allegedly going on with the climate to be released. Free the data, free the code, and lets see if the studies prove what they purport to.
Its a bet the company strategy, in a context in which its not clear that they need to bet the company. The bet is that they can tie together a monolithic offering, where people will buy into the whole thing because of the excellence of the individual bits. So you buy into iTunes, iPod, the store, the PC software, then that gets tied into the iPhone via the app store...and so on. They have been trying to do this for many years, e-world, running only on Macs, was an early example.
This is one part of it, but it also has a flip side: the need to exclude apps. The problem is that you are trying to tie apps to hardware to services, to construct a closed little world that your customers never leave. But if they do leave? Then you lose the service revenue, or the app revenue, or the hardware revenue. So you end up with coercion in one way or another, and the immortal line, which probably really reflects what Cupertino has brainwashed itself into, the view that being able to run Google Voice on your iPhone - being able to, notice - detracts from the user experience. They probably really believe this stuff by now, they say it to each other every day, and they get their shills to post it all over the net.
You see tje risk of course. If it comes about that there is a must have service (like maybe Google Voice, or something in the cloud) or a must have bit of hardware or a must have non-Apple peripheral, all of a sudden they are in the position of having the model break, or else being feature deficient. This is basically what happened to the other monoliths of the 80s and 90s of the last century.
The puzzling thing is that the vast investments required to keep this thing going, whether in legal fees, in huge data centers, in new product and market entries, are very risky. You cannot afford to have one big loss. But one big loss is inevitable sooner or later. Meanwhile, there is an alternative almost totally risk free strategy, sit on your laurels and pay dividends, and gradually open up all the platforms, and try to maximize returns from each one individually.
The difficulty is that there is a real tension here. The OS would sell far more free from the tie to the hardware. But the hardware would also sell far more freed from the tie to the OS. The same will happen with the app store as mobile apps develop. You'd have a more viable store if it sold apps for more phones, and you'd sell more iPhones if it would run more apps. Not yet, but that day will come. The same thing will happen with services. The only way, for instance, to make a success out of e-world was to have it run on any OS at all. The only way to make the Mac a success online was to have it support the ISP and online service of your choice.
So this is what they are targeting, and what they are running headlong into. And it will end in tears. In a few years, but it will end in tears. As it did last time. Learning and repeating history.
You can go overnight from 'I have to have a Mac so I can manage my iTunes' to 'I can't have a Mac because it won't run Google Voice. That is, an exclusive feature becomes a feature exclusion, and you move from being cool and integrated to being feature deficient. Overnight.
Could be. So why will they not produce the data and the code that would prove it decisively to all the skeptics? You could be right, but what needs explanation is why is it in their interests to conceal what would convince everyone of what they say?
The thing I cannot understand is this. We have a bunch of scientists, lots of them. Starting with Michael Mann in front of Wegman, but including Jones, Thompson, lots of really well known and respected people. They have all done work which supposedly proves that the human race on Earth is facing catastrophe. They supposedly have decisive evidence for this, in the form of data and code.
We then have a lot of sceptics who allege that the data does not exist, is not as described, and the code used to process it does not do what it is said to do, and that there is no such threat as described, or at leas that there is no evidence for one.
You would expect the scientists to immediately produce their evidence and their code and to silence debate once and for all. It would be so simple, it would just be end of story, and now lets focus on what to do about it all. But they do not. Instead they refuse to reveal anything. Jones, for instance, refused to even reveal the names of the stations in China on which his study was based. Mann would not reveal the algorithm which generated the hockey stick to a Congressional Committee. Thompson is silent. Yet supposedly this secret evidence proves decisively, contrary to the claims of sceptics, that the future of the human race is under severe and imminent threat?
It makes absolutely no sense. They never give any reasons for refusing that make any sense either. Sometimes it is commercial considerations. What commercial considerations can there be that outweigh the possible extinction of humanity? Sometimes it is, as Jones once is reported to have said, that they do not want people trying to poke holes in it. WTF??? Sometimes, as with Thompson's ice core data, there is just silence.
It is very hard to believe that this wonderful evidence really exists, and really is as represented. Or maybe it is, and they really do not want to convince everyone of the threat? I don't know, but the story as told makes absolutely no sense. Something is not right here.
"Apple with it's BSD-based kernel and more open culture than Microsoft..."
This is the image it has among some, but the reality is that it is far more closed and restrictive and controlling in its culture than Microsoft ever was. Its really mysterious where it gets this impression of openness from. The only analogy I can think of is that among the liberal establishment, Soviet Russia and Communism generally was somehow seen as more humane and decent than Fascism, while indulging in repeated genoicides several times as large. The then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, for example, made some remark in his last year in office about the deaths caused by capitalism, as if the Ukraine and Chinese famines had never happened. One does not know whether the blindness is due to willful ignorance, or lack of thought. But its wrong.
Apple is not the company you and others think it is, or would like it to be, painful as it is to accept that.
The really deep problem they have is with those sections of the Bible and the Koran which do not simply denigrate, but actively promote violence against, non believers. What are they to do with them?
Blasphemy laws can only work if the protection of the law is confined to one religion, or if there are no religions that condemn other ones. Alas, there are very few indeed of the latter.
which dates from a bit after the legislation was introduced in the late nineties, and says that it has achieved the desired effects - reducing the demand for liver transplants. At the end of the piece it is stated that attempted suicides with it were mainly done by young women, particularly young Asian women, in the UK. Young men are apparently more dramatic and violent in their choice of method. There are quite a few clinicians and clinical institutions quoted. I really don't think its an urban myth. Elsewhere in this thread people cite data on liver damage in the US, where Acetaminophen is stated to be the main cause (well, there is alcohol abuse too, of course).
I really doubt, if it were discovered today and went through approval procedures, that any manufacturer would accept the liability involved in introducing a drug with these characteristics, and it must be even more doubtful that it would get approval today in any OECD country.
A problem in the UK, or used to be, or at least, was believed and claimed to be. This is why you can only buy a small quantity at once. The rationale was, kid gets depressed, takes overdose, wakes up in morning, life isn't so bad, goes about business, three days or so later is in liver failure, dies slowly. This at least was the reason given for why only such small amounts can be bought at one time. No, I do not have stats.
The problem is, the lethal dose is very close to the effective dose. In addition, the effect of an overdose is not getting sick, its death. It is not a drug that should be sold over the counter. It is simply not safe.
To compound that, it is being misused. It is being mixed with opiates to prevent people overdosing for kicks on the opiates, by mixing the opiates with a substance which is lethal if too much is taken. This is a misuse of Acetaminophen, it is not being compounded with the opiates for the therapeutic effect, but for social purposes to do with our attitudes to opiate abuse.
Something similar happened in the UK with cough mixture. Everyone, pharmacists and doctors, knows that the only effective cough suppressant is codeine. However, in the mania about stopping abuse of codeine based cough syrups, it is sold either mixed with other positively harmful ingredients or not at all. In Gee's Linctus, for example, an optium extract is sold mixed with Quill, which is a truly noxious substance and one of the worst things to give to an invalid.
We need to do a few things. One is to focus more on getting the opiates to people who are sick, stop worrying about people who are sick and need them abusing them. They will not. This implies that if people need opiates, prescribe the things to them, not mixed with crap they do not need. The second thing is we do have to have a rational drug policy which prevents the crime and disease associated with opiate abuse - but what we do not need is to screw up sick people's access to drugs they need in the name of doing this. Not that it does it, anyway.
The third is we need to take Acetaminophen off the over the counter list altogether.
If a doctor wishes to prescribe a mixture of opiates and Acetaminophen, that's a professional decision. There is no reason why Acetaminophen despite its dangers should not be available on a prescription basis, it may have unique applications. But there is every reason why a drug with those characteristics, and to which there are perfectly good over the counter alternatives, should not be sold over the counter, let alone mixed in half the over the counter pain relief and cold remedies.
We should not be telling people to read the ingredients and not take two over the counter pain or cold remedies at the same time under danger of dying. That is just a totally ridiculous, even criminal policy. We should be making sure that any painkiller ingredient where taking two medicines with it in at once will kill you, is not freely available over the counter.
I left hospital recently with a huge stock of this crap - opiate pain relief mixed with Acetaminophen, with the recommended daily dose right at the limit of how much Acetaminophen you can safely take. I got myself off the stuff as fast as possible at the price of feeling some pain. It was a choice I should not have had to make.
The blogger in question left enough clues around in his postings that he could be easily identified. Like he for instance referred to his position in the Force, and then referred to his membership in an athletic club. There only was one office of that rank in that club's membership. He then described cases he had been involved in, without adequately disguising the details, so it was clear that it could only have been that case that the blog referred to as having been one the blogger had been involved in.
He then sought to prevent the Times from publishing his name.
Well, surely, if you want anonymity, make at least some effort to stop people finding out who you are? It does not seem very rational to leave around all the clues anyone needs to identify you, but to focus your efforts on making it legally impossible for them to publish it, once they have made the fairly small effort required to find out.
A case which really touched on the anonymity of bloggers would be one in which it was undiscoverable by ordinary means such as the above, but the courts ordered the ISP or provider to disclose the identity. Now that would be a different and much more serious issue.
We have a Department of Culture, Media and Sport. What the hell is that? Now we turn out to have a Technology Strategy Board (TSB), whatever that is.
Not only that, we seem to have these things called "executive non-departmental public bod[ies] (NDPB)", which this Board is an example of. What the hell are they? And also we now have a Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS). When did that spring into being, and what the hell does it do on Tuesdays?
We also have numerous 'Partnerships", which are not elected, but have some role in local government, with boundaries that do not coincide with any other local government agencies or elected bodies. We have County Councils. Then we have District Councils under them. Then we have Town, City or Borough or Parish councils. We spend a fortune on coordinating all their activities, or more usually on failing to coordinate them. They all raise taxes of course. We have Regional Development Agencies, which then give some of the taxes back in response to applications for grants which usually run to 40-50 pages submitted in ten copies.
What we have here is the view that the state should have a role in everything that anyone does. And so we construct these government agencies, or government funded agencies, which have a nominal remit to make everyone follow a party line. And we also have the view that if you cannot change what a department does, fine, change its name. Then no-one will have a clue what it is supposed to be doing.
For example, do you have any idea at all what exactly "English Heritage" is? What "Natural England" is?
No, thought not. Neither does anyone else. But you are paying for them. This is called 'investing in our great public services'. Orwell would be proud of his foresight.
Meanwhile, what we are not spending our money on. If you think your child will have Downs syndrome, you may decide to have amniocentesis. This has an associated death rate. So, in the national health service, which we have no choice about being in, they give a test for Downs with a high false positive rate, rather than multiple tests with low false positive rates. This results in excessive numbers of amniocentesis tests, which in turn results in miscarriages. Because 'investing in our great public services' rises to all these departments and executive non-departmental public bodies, it will not rise to doing reliable tests for Downs. And so we have lots of miserable ladies all going through totally unecessary miscarriages in order to fund these quasi or real governmental bodies, and their pensions, to fall all over each other and get in each others, and our, way.
Their problem is, they think the Internet is about something they call'content'. They really do not get it. What the Internet did was to abolish the relevance of the concept of content. Ask yourself, is Twitter 'content'? Or ask Sony, more like.
Something similar is happening with open source software. As in the famous cases of school teachers confiscating copies of Linux. Its hard during revolutions.
England is a very curious case. In law its in a situation in which any authoritarian government, having got itself elected, would never need to call another election. There are a host of measures which have been passed in the last ten years which would permit the suspension of Parliament and rule by decree. The terrorism legislation would allow such a government to imprison anyone it liked for any or no reason. Then there is the surveillance, which is on a scale only previously found in science fiction. All travel, all communication (including this post) are logged. Henry Porter's articles in the Guardian and Vanity Fair detail the whole thing. Recently an opposition Member of Parliament was arrested, on Parliament premises, on suspicion of 'conspiring to encourage misconduct in public office'. Well.
Yet, it is obvious that England is a far pleasanter and freer place to live than the countries it is being compared to. Its also obviously, if you look at the recent deep embarrassment of its politicians over expenses, ruled by people who feel accountable to public opinion in a way that none of the true authoritarian states do. You will still find vigorous debate in the media. Only today, for example, Polly Toynbee in the Guardian runs up one side of the Prime Minister and down the other, and calls on the Party to get rid of him in the next three weeks. There will shortly be elections, relatively properly run, and the goverment will take a huge hit, and will accept it.
What has happened is that a genuinely democratic party, elected admittedly on a flawed and not particularly representative electoral system with a minority of the vote, one which consists of pleasant and well meaning people, has gradually without realizing what it is doing, passed legislation which would enable the British National Party, should it ever take power, to be as unrestrained by legislative limits on its powers as the Nazi Party in Germany 1933.
At the moment what stands between the English and either left or right authoritarianism is tradition, an independent judiciary, and the goodwill of the ruling party. We are effectively Weimar, with all the legal framework any future government will need to turn us at will either into Nazi Germany or the GDR.
We just have to hope that the wrong people don't get elected. If they do, its all over.
"simple answers, like the one you just gave, never work on complex problems, like the one being discussed."
I know its a complex social and political issue. My point is, it is not due to Global Warming. And it will not be solved by building a sandstone wall either. Getting sustainable farming however, though complex and difficult, will work if it can be done. I don't think, either, that getting sustainable farming going is a simple answer to a complex problem. I'd be more inclined to call it a complicated answer to a simple problem. The problem of land turning to desert because of mismanagement.
The underlying problem is, these state broadcasters are offering services which lots of people would not subscribe to if they had a choice. Lots of people do not think they are worth having at all, lots do not think they are value.
In the UK, for instance, lots of people would rather do without the BBC than pay £130 a year for it. But they have no choice. Its a criminal offense to watch any TV at all without subscribing to the BBC.
The difficult intellectual question is, what justifies this compulsion? It is not compulsory to subscribe to any other broadcaster. Why is the BBC not just another subscription TV company? Why do we insist people subscribe to it, whether they want to watch it or not?
It is exactly not like Road Tax, where we pay an annual fee for the privilege of driving a car, which at least nominally goes to pay for the roads. Don't have a car, don't pay. We do not, with Road Tax, pay a fee to one particular car manufacturer every time we buy a car from the competition.
The BBC is nominally independent, but in practice is simply the State TV company. The real reason why we insist everyone subscribes to it is that we want there to be a state broadcaster. We therefore want people to have an incentive to watch it, and making it compulsory to subscribe means that it has a competitive advantage. It is incrementally free. In economic terms it is cheaper than ad funded TV, because it does not have ads. We want this because we are afraid of what a genuinely free broadcasting media could be like.
People argue all the time that this model is justified because they like what the BBC puts out. This is not the point. The fact that I like it, is not a reason why people who neither like nor want it should be forced to buy it. This is the real point of the argument about funding the state channels by compulsory fees on all TV ownership.
What is the evidence that there is any desertification? Where that is defined as deserts which are advancing, and whose advance is not containable by substitution of sustainable farming practices for unsustainable ones, such as over grazing by goats rather than mixed arable farming. That is, mixed crops and animal husbandry with attention to composting, manure and crop rotation.
There is no such evidence. All that is needed is sensible traditional mixed farming. And a lot less journalistic blather about desertification that is not happening, global warming that is not happening, and how the one imaginary event is a consequence of the other imaginary event. And for well meaning idiots to stop subsidizing goats.
And no, its not happening in the Sahel either. But if we buy them enough goats, we could probably make it happen!
Slashdot Mirror
There are two cases which are in contradiction on this point. The first is Vernor vs Autocad, where it was found that when you buy a copy, you do indeed become the owner of that copy in one particular sense which is relevant to installation of software (as we will see). The second case is Blizzard, in which it was found that you do not become the owner, but are only the licensee.
The sense in which you need to be the owner is that of Title 17 Section 117. If you are the owner of a copy in that sense, you have the right to both make any copies or adaptations essential to use with a machine, and you also have the right to authorize others to do so on your behalf.
Blizzard found you are not the owner in the sense needed. The implication of only being the licensee and not the owner of a copy is that you need some permissions from the owner of the copyright in order to make copies. It is established law since MAI that when you load software into memory to run it, you are making a copy in the sense of the copyright legislation in the US. It is not so clear that this is true outside the US, which may be important.
The permissions given, according to Blizzard, are given in the EULA. It follows that if you break any EULA condition, you no longer have permission to copy, and so your next use will be in breach of copyright. This means that not only can you be sued by the owner for breaching a civil contract with him, which you entered into by click through. You will also be subject to prosecution for breach of copyright, which is a criminal offense.
It follows that breaching the EULA in ways that have intrinsically nothing to do with the act of copying can put you in breach of copyright on subsequent use. If, for instance, the EULA says that you will not have on your computer or install in future a copy of mdbtools, whether this is relevant or not to the software you are installing, then if you do, you are in breach of copyright. Even if what you are installing is, for instance, a calculator program, or a photo retouching program, or a calendar, or whatever. If the EULA says you must wear a particular uniform, be under a certain weight, be of a certain racial or ethnic or religious background, if you use it not being or doing any of those things, you are in breach of copyright.
The Church of Scientology could, for instance, put in the EULA that a freely sold copy of some software was only to be used by paid up members of the Church, and anyone who used it would then be in breach of copyright if he either was not in or had left the Church. Political parties could license material to their members and ban non-members from looking at it.
Remember, its the act of loading into memory that is copyright violating now, not the act of duplicating and distributing. This is because if Blizzard is the binding precedent, the protections of Section 117 no longer cover use of software by a buyer of a retail copy.
On the other hand, if Vernor is the binding precedent, then you are the owner of the copy, and you have S117 rights to do any adaptations necessary to use it with a machine. A machine. This means, if its OSX, the machine of your choice. You will then be liable to civil suit by Apple for breaching the civil contract of the EULA, but you won't be in breach of copyright.
All this has no bearing whatever on the GPL. If you are the owner of a copy, you are only exempted in terms of further copying and the making of derivative works by S117, and this only covers use with a machine. A machine. Not machines, not any particular brand of machine. A machine. One machine of your choice, unless given other permissions.
This means that the GPL sections which regulate what you may do in the way of copying, making new works with, distributing, remain valid. It is a common piece of Cupertino FUD to say that if Apple loses the power to restrain installation of OSX to its own brand of computers, the GPL falls. It does not.
All that falls is Apple's power to sell at retail
Its excellent value, its a national treasure, everyone loves it.
So why exactly does it have to be legally compulsory to subscribe to it if you want to watch any TV? Why is this the only subscription TV that you are obliged to subscribe to? Why, if we really want to make it compulsory to subscribe to some TV, do we not allow you to pick the provider of your choice? Why is it, that if you want to watch the English cricket team go down in flames yet again, you are obliged to subscribe to two TV broadcast services, only one of which provides cricket coverage?
Try writing to the BBC and telling them you want to cancel your subscription, because you are choosing to use Sky as your premium content provider. Or you don't want any premium content, you are happy to watch only ad funded TV.
Why exactly can you not do that? What would be so terrible if you could?
The BBC desperately needs competition, and that does not mean other channels that you are permitted to subscribe to in addition to it. It needs competition on equal terms, where you can subscribe to the BBC, to Channel X, neither, or both, as the mood strikes you.
The various cases on this matter make it clear that there are three different things involved. Read Title 17 Section 117.
You may own copyright in the software. This gives you the right to control what copies are made, with one exception. This, copyright ownership, is what people usually mean when they talk about owning the software. It is the same as a publisher owning copyright to a book. He may print and sell as many copies as he wants.
You may also own a retail copy. This is what Vernor finds, and what Softman found before that. It has been repeatedly argued by software suppliers that you do not own the copy, that you only own a license to use. It has now been found for the second time that you own it, and the criterion used is whether the supplier has any right to repossess. If not, the copy is yours.
We next come to copies made in way of use. If the software is not supplied 'live', ie running off the installation media, it must be installed. Installation constitutes copying. It would be illegal under copyright law without some explicit permission. In fact the sort of copying which also occurs during use when the software is read into memory was found illegal in the well known MAI case, until Title 17 S 1117 was revised as a result of this case.
The revisions provided that copies and modifications made or authorized by the owner which were essential to use with a machine (notice the article, "a" machine) are permitted. But 117 also provides that if you resell the copy you own, you may only sell with it the copies you have made in way of being essential to use, with the consent of the copyright holder.
So, to summarize the situation, when you buy a retail copy of software, you own that copy. You do not become the copyright holder, your right to make copies is limited by Title 17. You may make copies (or modifications) that are essential to use with "a" machine - by implication, the machine of your choice, not of the copyright holder's choice. But your rights over resale of those copies is limited.
Two things are sometimes argued about this.
(1) It is sometimes argued that you may only use a machine which is essential. For instance, you may not install OSX on a Dell, because a Dell is not an essential machine, you could equally well use a Mac. Wrong. The machine does not have to be essential, and the article is indefinite, "a" machine. What has to be essential is the copying.
(2) It is also sometimes argued that because you have no rights of resale of the copies made in way of being essential to use, the copyright holder owns them, and you do not. There is no ground for this view. The test of repossession does not suggest this. The copyright holder has no right of repossession of those copies, and you have a right to them in perpetuity with no further payments. The situation is, you own them but you have restricted rights of resale.
So where does this leave Psystar and OSX? In a very simple situation. If they installed without having transferred the ownership of the retail copy of OSX to the customer, they were in violation of copyright. If they were made when ownership of machine and copy had been transferred, they were permitted by 117 as having been authorized by the owner, and were not then resold, so no permission for transfer was required, as they were never transferred.
This means that there need not have been any violation of copyright, but there was of course a breach of the Apple EULA. Whether the term of that EULA which obliges you to buy your hardware from Apple is enforceable is a quite different matter. But as far as copyright goes, you are the owner of any retail copy of OSX, or MS Office, that you have lawfully acquired. There is nothing in copyright law to stop you installing it wherever you want, as long as you do not make more than one copy. It says "a" machine, remember.
I've put in three kyoceras, one printer, one MFP, one copier with an add-on print card. Mechanically perfect, very cheap to run because the drum lasts forever. More expensive, yes, but worth it. They have all been in without problem for several years, fairly heavy usage, and I expect them to continue indefinitely.
Imperial gallons vs US gallons. They are different.
The question is, over what time period are we seeing rises and falls in coverage? We have no proper data before the satellite age. So all we know is that there has been recent shrinkage. We have however no idea what the standard deviation is of gains and shrinkages over a period of centuries or millenia, so we have no idea whether we are looking at an event close to the mean or one that is several standard deviations away from it.
At this point people usually ridicule one for not being prepared to take action until there is proof, which is usually projected as being some natural disaster like New Orleans.
The argument is mistaken. It is quite reasonable to wait for proof, because 'doing things' in the absence of proof is a risky and expensive business. It could have quite dramatic and unexpected side effects depending on what the situation really is.
It would enormously help us figure this thing out if all the climate scientists would just publish their raw data and algorithms. That way we could at least verify their work so far. The ones that need to publish? Well, just about all of them. They supposedly have evidence that the present warming is a very rare event, but they decline to publish it. They just publish studies based on it, summaries of it, processed forms of it. We need this data, and we need the code that was applied to it.
Without that, its not science, its arm waving. There is probably nothing more important than to establish the climatic history of the last 2,000 years, and if we could establish ice coverage and density in some way, that too. Without the scientists publishing, I do not see how we take this debate any further. It is, to say the least, curious that the main workers in the field, the ones who find the present trend most alarming, are the ones who refuse to reveal the data that would prove them right.
Where, for instance, is Mann's algorithm, the one he refused to supply to the Wegman Committee? Where is the data underlying the HADCRU series? Where is Thompson's ice core data?
If we cannot see it, how do we even know it exists?
And we look forward to more occasions when some kinds of food will be illegal to sell or serve outside of their native location.
For example, we cannot wait for the time when Yorkshire Pudding will vanish from all menus not in Yorkshire. When the Melton Mowbray pie will cease to exist except in the town of that name. When Brie will be confined to the town of Brie, and not Brie sur Seine either. When the Frankfurter will be unobtainable except by travelling to Frankfurt.
When the London Irish rugby club will only be able to have players who are both Irish and Londoners, and the Royal Irish Guards will consist only of men who are both Royal and Irish. A rare and distinctive combination.
What we need is truth in advertising and respect for local traditions. Cheshire cheese for instance, why should we have any uncertainty about where that was made. Or the even more disgracefully abused Cheddar. The fine Cheddar Gorge is the only place on the planet which should be permitted to make or serve it. Go through your supermarket shelves, you North Americans, and remove all that orange goop you have there. There is only one true Cheddar, and we Cheddarians have it.
And the Norwalk Island Sharpie shall never sail outside the sacred waters of Norwalk, nor shall the Cornish Shrimper ever fish in the waters off Devon. Yessir, the world is going to be a different and better place from here on in.
Thank goodness, we will no longer be obliged to see the New York Times on sale wherever we travel in the US, and the International Herald Tribune will only be available internationally.
Some of us cannot wait!
There are legitimate reasons to be unconvinced, no matter what the affiliations of the people offering them may be.
We have an hypothesis about the reaction of the earth's climate to CO2 emissions. The hypothesis is first, that the additional CO2 warms by absorbing IR radiation. That this will occur is not subject to dispute, its basic physics, and has been known for around 100 years. It was only partially known to Aarhenius, who seems to have got the effect right but to have overestimated its magnitude, but the effect itself has been known. This is a relatively minor component of the hypothesis. If this effect were all there was, doubling of CO2 levels from around 300ppm to around 600ppm would raise the average temperature of the planet in the lower troposphere by roughly 1 degree centigrade. This would not be terribly serious - in fact, it might even improve life, and its of the same order as natural variations anyway.
The second hypothesized effect is that when the climate warms by any amount, from any cause, there is positive feedback. This feedback amplifies the effect. So the warming of 1 degree caused by CO2 rises is hypothesized to lead to further warming of a further few degrees. The amounts are uncertain. The total warming effect could be anything from 2-5 degrees C. Even at the lower levels, this would lead to significant problems, and at the higher levels, particularly over 5 degrees, we would be looking at climate disaster.
However, its a question whether the climate reacts to warming by positive feedback, and if so how strongly, or by negative feedback. To have concerns about feedback is not denialism or flat-earth -ism. Its quite reasonable.
This is where we come into the evidence issue. The decisive evidence for feedback would be if the climate were now genuinely warming faster than or differently from ever before. And this is where the question of the refusal of the climate science community to reveal their data becomes important. We have Jacoby, d'Arrigo, Mann, Thompson, Jones and others refusing to reveal the data which would allow replication and verification of their results. Their defenders meanwhile abuse everyone who does not simply believe, without proof, that the results are as represented.
As long as the data and algorithms are not placed in the public domain for inspection and validation, it is going to be reasonable to be skeptical. All that the authors have to do to eliminate this skepticism is to publish. Until they do, it is going to remain an open question whether there is anything very special going on with climate in terms of the last 2,000 years, and so it will remain an open question whether feedback works the way that the IPCC hypothesizes.
And so, it will remain an open question whether the reaction of the climate machine to an initial warming of 1 degree will be an ultimate stable state of no change, +1, +2 or +5.
In the same way as when I drink a cup of coffee, you cannot predict my future temperature solely by reference to the heat content of the coffee, nor can you make any assumptions without examining the way my body reacts about whether the feedback will be positive or negative, so you need evidence in the form of the behavior of the climate to tell what sort of feedback mechanisms occur. It is very, very odd, inexplicable in fact, that the climate science community seems to see it as positively wrong to ask for the data on what is allegedly going on with the climate to be released. Free the data, free the code, and lets see if the studies prove what they purport to.
Its a bet the company strategy, in a context in which its not clear that they need to bet the company. The bet is that they can tie together a monolithic offering, where people will buy into the whole thing because of the excellence of the individual bits. So you buy into iTunes, iPod, the store, the PC software, then that gets tied into the iPhone via the app store...and so on. They have been trying to do this for many years, e-world, running only on Macs, was an early example.
This is one part of it, but it also has a flip side: the need to exclude apps. The problem is that you are trying to tie apps to hardware to services, to construct a closed little world that your customers never leave. But if they do leave? Then you lose the service revenue, or the app revenue, or the hardware revenue. So you end up with coercion in one way or another, and the immortal line, which probably really reflects what Cupertino has brainwashed itself into, the view that being able to run Google Voice on your iPhone - being able to, notice - detracts from the user experience. They probably really believe this stuff by now, they say it to each other every day, and they get their shills to post it all over the net.
You see tje risk of course. If it comes about that there is a must have service (like maybe Google Voice, or something in the cloud) or a must have bit of hardware or a must have non-Apple peripheral, all of a sudden they are in the position of having the model break, or else being feature deficient. This is basically what happened to the other monoliths of the 80s and 90s of the last century.
The puzzling thing is that the vast investments required to keep this thing going, whether in legal fees, in huge data centers, in new product and market entries, are very risky. You cannot afford to have one big loss. But one big loss is inevitable sooner or later. Meanwhile, there is an alternative almost totally risk free strategy, sit on your laurels and pay dividends, and gradually open up all the platforms, and try to maximize returns from each one individually.
The difficulty is that there is a real tension here. The OS would sell far more free from the tie to the hardware. But the hardware would also sell far more freed from the tie to the OS. The same will happen with the app store as mobile apps develop. You'd have a more viable store if it sold apps for more phones, and you'd sell more iPhones if it would run more apps. Not yet, but that day will come. The same thing will happen with services. The only way, for instance, to make a success out of e-world was to have it run on any OS at all. The only way to make the Mac a success online was to have it support the ISP and online service of your choice.
So this is what they are targeting, and what they are running headlong into. And it will end in tears. In a few years, but it will end in tears. As it did last time. Learning and repeating history.
You can go overnight from 'I have to have a Mac so I can manage my iTunes' to 'I can't have a Mac because it won't run Google Voice. That is, an exclusive feature becomes a feature exclusion, and you move from being cool and integrated to being feature deficient. Overnight.
Could be. So why will they not produce the data and the code that would prove it decisively to all the skeptics? You could be right, but what needs explanation is why is it in their interests to conceal what would convince everyone of what they say?
The thing I cannot understand is this. We have a bunch of scientists, lots of them. Starting with Michael Mann in front of Wegman, but including Jones, Thompson, lots of really well known and respected people. They have all done work which supposedly proves that the human race on Earth is facing catastrophe. They supposedly have decisive evidence for this, in the form of data and code.
We then have a lot of sceptics who allege that the data does not exist, is not as described, and the code used to process it does not do what it is said to do, and that there is no such threat as described, or at leas that there is no evidence for one.
You would expect the scientists to immediately produce their evidence and their code and to silence debate once and for all. It would be so simple, it would just be end of story, and now lets focus on what to do about it all. But they do not. Instead they refuse to reveal anything. Jones, for instance, refused to even reveal the names of the stations in China on which his study was based. Mann would not reveal the algorithm which generated the hockey stick to a Congressional Committee. Thompson is silent. Yet supposedly this secret evidence proves decisively, contrary to the claims of sceptics, that the future of the human race is under severe and imminent threat?
It makes absolutely no sense. They never give any reasons for refusing that make any sense either. Sometimes it is commercial considerations. What commercial considerations can there be that outweigh the possible extinction of humanity? Sometimes it is, as Jones once is reported to have said, that they do not want people trying to poke holes in it. WTF??? Sometimes, as with Thompson's ice core data, there is just silence.
It is very hard to believe that this wonderful evidence really exists, and really is as represented. Or maybe it is, and they really do not want to convince everyone of the threat? I don't know, but the story as told makes absolutely no sense. Something is not right here.
"Apple with it's BSD-based kernel and more open culture than Microsoft..."
This is the image it has among some, but the reality is that it is far more closed and restrictive and controlling in its culture than Microsoft ever was. Its really mysterious where it gets this impression of openness from. The only analogy I can think of is that among the liberal establishment, Soviet Russia and Communism generally was somehow seen as more humane and decent than Fascism, while indulging in repeated genoicides several times as large. The then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, for example, made some remark in his last year in office about the deaths caused by capitalism, as if the Ukraine and Chinese famines had never happened. One does not know whether the blindness is due to willful ignorance, or lack of thought. But its wrong.
Apple is not the company you and others think it is, or would like it to be, painful as it is to accept that.
The really deep problem they have is with those sections of the Bible and the Koran which do not simply denigrate, but actively promote violence against, non believers. What are they to do with them?
Blasphemy laws can only work if the protection of the law is confined to one religion, or if there are no religions that condemn other ones. Alas, there are very few indeed of the latter.
I think it is true. Have a look at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/783080.stm
which dates from a bit after the legislation was introduced in the late nineties, and says that it has achieved the desired effects - reducing the demand for liver transplants. At the end of the piece it is stated that attempted suicides with it were mainly done by young women, particularly young Asian women, in the UK. Young men are apparently more dramatic and violent in their choice of method. There are quite a few clinicians and clinical institutions quoted. I really don't think its an urban myth. Elsewhere in this thread people cite data on liver damage in the US, where Acetaminophen is stated to be the main cause (well, there is alcohol abuse too, of course).
I really doubt, if it were discovered today and went through approval procedures, that any manufacturer would accept the liability involved in introducing a drug with these characteristics, and it must be even more doubtful that it would get approval today in any OECD country.
A problem in the UK, or used to be, or at least, was believed and claimed to be. This is why you can only buy a small quantity at once. The rationale was, kid gets depressed, takes overdose, wakes up in morning, life isn't so bad, goes about business, three days or so later is in liver failure, dies slowly. This at least was the reason given for why only such small amounts can be bought at one time. No, I do not have stats.
The problem is, the lethal dose is very close to the effective dose. In addition, the effect of an overdose is not getting sick, its death. It is not a drug that should be sold over the counter. It is simply not safe.
To compound that, it is being misused. It is being mixed with opiates to prevent people overdosing for kicks on the opiates, by mixing the opiates with a substance which is lethal if too much is taken. This is a misuse of Acetaminophen, it is not being compounded with the opiates for the therapeutic effect, but for social purposes to do with our attitudes to opiate abuse.
Something similar happened in the UK with cough mixture. Everyone, pharmacists and doctors, knows that the only effective cough suppressant is codeine. However, in the mania about stopping abuse of codeine based cough syrups, it is sold either mixed with other positively harmful ingredients or not at all. In Gee's Linctus, for example, an optium extract is sold mixed with Quill, which is a truly noxious substance and one of the worst things to give to an invalid.
We need to do a few things. One is to focus more on getting the opiates to people who are sick, stop worrying about people who are sick and need them abusing them. They will not. This implies that if people need opiates, prescribe the things to them, not mixed with crap they do not need. The second thing is we do have to have a rational drug policy which prevents the crime and disease associated with opiate abuse - but what we do not need is to screw up sick people's access to drugs they need in the name of doing this. Not that it does it, anyway.
The third is we need to take Acetaminophen off the over the counter list altogether.
If a doctor wishes to prescribe a mixture of opiates and Acetaminophen, that's a professional decision. There is no reason why Acetaminophen despite its dangers should not be available on a prescription basis, it may have unique applications. But there is every reason why a drug with those characteristics, and to which there are perfectly good over the counter alternatives, should not be sold over the counter, let alone mixed in half the over the counter pain relief and cold remedies.
We should not be telling people to read the ingredients and not take two over the counter pain or cold remedies at the same time under danger of dying. That is just a totally ridiculous, even criminal policy. We should be making sure that any painkiller ingredient where taking two medicines with it in at once will kill you, is not freely available over the counter.
I left hospital recently with a huge stock of this crap - opiate pain relief mixed with Acetaminophen, with the recommended daily dose right at the limit of how much Acetaminophen you can safely take. I got myself off the stuff as fast as possible at the price of feeling some pain. It was a choice I should not have had to make.
The blogger in question left enough clues around in his postings that he could be easily identified. Like he for instance referred to his position in the Force, and then referred to his membership in an athletic club. There only was one office of that rank in that club's membership. He then described cases he had been involved in, without adequately disguising the details, so it was clear that it could only have been that case that the blog referred to as having been one the blogger had been involved in.
He then sought to prevent the Times from publishing his name.
Well, surely, if you want anonymity, make at least some effort to stop people finding out who you are? It does not seem very rational to leave around all the clues anyone needs to identify you, but to focus your efforts on making it legally impossible for them to publish it, once they have made the fairly small effort required to find out.
A case which really touched on the anonymity of bloggers would be one in which it was undiscoverable by ordinary means such as the above, but the courts ordered the ISP or provider to disclose the identity. Now that would be a different and much more serious issue.
Its Orwellian, isn't it?
We have a Department of Culture, Media and Sport. What the hell is that? Now we turn out to have a Technology Strategy Board (TSB), whatever that is.
Not only that, we seem to have these things called "executive non-departmental public bod[ies] (NDPB)", which this Board is an example of. What the hell are they? And also we now have a Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS). When did that spring into being, and what the hell does it do on Tuesdays?
We also have numerous 'Partnerships", which are not elected, but have some role in local government, with boundaries that do not coincide with any other local government agencies or elected bodies. We have County Councils. Then we have District Councils under them. Then we have Town, City or Borough or Parish councils. We spend a fortune on coordinating all their activities, or more usually on failing to coordinate them. They all raise taxes of course. We have Regional Development Agencies, which then give some of the taxes back in response to applications for grants which usually run to 40-50 pages submitted in ten copies.
What we have here is the view that the state should have a role in everything that anyone does. And so we construct these government agencies, or government funded agencies, which have a nominal remit to make everyone follow a party line. And we also have the view that if you cannot change what a department does, fine, change its name. Then no-one will have a clue what it is supposed to be doing.
For example, do you have any idea at all what exactly "English Heritage" is? What "Natural England" is?
No, thought not. Neither does anyone else. But you are paying for them. This is called 'investing in our great public services'. Orwell would be proud of his foresight.
Meanwhile, what we are not spending our money on. If you think your child will have Downs syndrome, you may decide to have amniocentesis. This has an associated death rate. So, in the national health service, which we have no choice about being in, they give a test for Downs with a high false positive rate, rather than multiple tests with low false positive rates. This results in excessive numbers of amniocentesis tests, which in turn results in miscarriages. Because 'investing in our great public services' rises to all these departments and executive non-departmental public bodies, it will not rise to doing reliable tests for Downs. And so we have lots of miserable ladies all going through totally unecessary miscarriages in order to fund these quasi or real governmental bodies, and their pensions, to fall all over each other and get in each others, and our, way.
Its a sick country.
Their problem is, they think the Internet is about something they call'content'. They really do not get it. What the Internet did was to abolish the relevance of the concept of content. Ask yourself, is Twitter 'content'? Or ask Sony, more like.
Something similar is happening with open source software. As in the famous cases of school teachers confiscating copies of Linux. Its hard during revolutions.
England is a very curious case. In law its in a situation in which any authoritarian government, having got itself elected, would never need to call another election. There are a host of measures which have been passed in the last ten years which would permit the suspension of Parliament and rule by decree. The terrorism legislation would allow such a government to imprison anyone it liked for any or no reason. Then there is the surveillance, which is on a scale only previously found in science fiction. All travel, all communication (including this post) are logged. Henry Porter's articles in the Guardian and Vanity Fair detail the whole thing. Recently an opposition Member of Parliament was arrested, on Parliament premises, on suspicion of 'conspiring to encourage misconduct in public office'. Well.
Yet, it is obvious that England is a far pleasanter and freer place to live than the countries it is being compared to. Its also obviously, if you look at the recent deep embarrassment of its politicians over expenses, ruled by people who feel accountable to public opinion in a way that none of the true authoritarian states do. You will still find vigorous debate in the media. Only today, for example, Polly Toynbee in the Guardian runs up one side of the Prime Minister and down the other, and calls on the Party to get rid of him in the next three weeks. There will shortly be elections, relatively properly run, and the goverment will take a huge hit, and will accept it.
What has happened is that a genuinely democratic party, elected admittedly on a flawed and not particularly representative electoral system with a minority of the vote, one which consists of pleasant and well meaning people, has gradually without realizing what it is doing, passed legislation which would enable the British National Party, should it ever take power, to be as unrestrained by legislative limits on its powers as the Nazi Party in Germany 1933.
At the moment what stands between the English and either left or right authoritarianism is tradition, an independent judiciary, and the goodwill of the ruling party. We are effectively Weimar, with all the legal framework any future government will need to turn us at will either into Nazi Germany or the GDR.
We just have to hope that the wrong people don't get elected. If they do, its all over.
If you don't like the way Apple runs its store, don't buy from it.
If you don't like gay marriage, don't do it.
If you don't like murder, don't commit it.
If you don't like France, don't go there.
If you don't like math, don't learn it.
If you don't care for Enron, don't buy the stock.
If you don't like subprime, don't take one out.
-- And in any case, don't talk any more about it.
Why am I starting to wonder if there might not be something a little bit wrong with this form of argument?
"simple answers, like the one you just gave, never work on complex problems, like the one being discussed." I know its a complex social and political issue. My point is, it is not due to Global Warming. And it will not be solved by building a sandstone wall either. Getting sustainable farming however, though complex and difficult, will work if it can be done. I don't think, either, that getting sustainable farming going is a simple answer to a complex problem. I'd be more inclined to call it a complicated answer to a simple problem. The problem of land turning to desert because of mismanagement.
The underlying problem is, these state broadcasters are offering services which lots of people would not subscribe to if they had a choice. Lots of people do not think they are worth having at all, lots do not think they are value.
In the UK, for instance, lots of people would rather do without the BBC than pay £130 a year for it. But they have no choice. Its a criminal offense to watch any TV at all without subscribing to the BBC.
The difficult intellectual question is, what justifies this compulsion? It is not compulsory to subscribe to any other broadcaster. Why is the BBC not just another subscription TV company? Why do we insist people subscribe to it, whether they want to watch it or not?
It is exactly not like Road Tax, where we pay an annual fee for the privilege of driving a car, which at least nominally goes to pay for the roads. Don't have a car, don't pay. We do not, with Road Tax, pay a fee to one particular car manufacturer every time we buy a car from the competition.
The BBC is nominally independent, but in practice is simply the State TV company. The real reason why we insist everyone subscribes to it is that we want there to be a state broadcaster. We therefore want people to have an incentive to watch it, and making it compulsory to subscribe means that it has a competitive advantage. It is incrementally free. In economic terms it is cheaper than ad funded TV, because it does not have ads. We want this because we are afraid of what a genuinely free broadcasting media could be like.
People argue all the time that this model is justified because they like what the BBC puts out. This is not the point. The fact that I like it, is not a reason why people who neither like nor want it should be forced to buy it. This is the real point of the argument about funding the state channels by compulsory fees on all TV ownership.
There is no justification.
What is the evidence that there is any desertification? Where that is defined as deserts which are advancing, and whose advance is not containable by substitution of sustainable farming practices for unsustainable ones, such as over grazing by goats rather than mixed arable farming. That is, mixed crops and animal husbandry with attention to composting, manure and crop rotation.
There is no such evidence. All that is needed is sensible traditional mixed farming. And a lot less journalistic blather about desertification that is not happening, global warming that is not happening, and how the one imaginary event is a consequence of the other imaginary event. And for well meaning idiots to stop subsidizing goats.
And no, its not happening in the Sahel either. But if we buy them enough goats, we could probably make it happen!