Not really - very very few people predicted Serbia to beat Germany, especially in Germany, so if someone was giving Paul cues, that someone could have made a fortune betting on the results rather than training an octopus to pick the right box. I'm guessing it's blind luck - there must be thousands of these types of predictions prior to games - some are bound to turn out correct.
Yes it does, and happens relatively regularly. Judges will sometimes direct the jury to find a certain way, but the jury are under no obligation to do so. When being sworn in, jurors swear to find by the facts presented, ie. they swear to uphold the law, but what happens in the jury room stays in there, so there can be no recriminations to someone not doing so.
They are repealing the games industry tax relief, it was announced in the budget.
Top of my list would be drug laws, mainly because they don't work, and end up criminalising a very large proportion of the populace. There are an estimated one million _regular_ cocaine users in the country. There are over 3 million regular cannabis users. I'd personally guess that over half the population have at some point tried something illegal. The most idiotic of recent laws is the one outlawing mephedrone (which despite the newspaper hysteria has not been verifiably linked to any deaths yet), because it also outlaws many other drugs that have not ever been used by anyone. Basically, what I do in my own free time, as long as I don't inconvenience anyone else, should be for me to decide. If I decide to take something that might kill me, that is my decision - I don't need the government nannying me. The government currently is outlawing drugs for people's protection supposedly, and then locking up those same people.... if the goal is to protect people from the harmful effects, the solution is not to lock them up at the taxpayer's expense. Up to 4 billion pounds could be raised in revenue if drugs that are currently being used were taxed.
In no particular order, some others may be :
DRM circumvention illegality, as mentioned elseware.
Public disorder offences - I'm not against them per se, but recent laws are incredibly vague and make loads of things illegal.
Drunk and disorderly - Either enforce it or get rid of it... there are millions of drunk disorderly people on the streets every weekend.
All laws allowing detention without charge... 28 days is too long, which brings me on to...
All anti-terror laws. They are all shit and worthless (as far as I was aware, blowing people up was arleady illegal prior to anti-terror legislation), and infringe upon everone's rights. Glorifying terrorism is now an offense, which we seem to have been for ages when the terrorists are on our side (ANC, French Resistance, etc).
Some child protection laws - Two policewomen were recently found to be breaking the law by looking after each other's children, without being registered.
Some "eco" laws such as the illegality of incandescent light bulbs
Laws censoring the internet (currently being overseen by a non-governmental unnaccountable body, the Internet Watch Foundation) - They don't work, get over it.
Laws requiring people to reveal passwords to encrypted devices, which criminalise people who have forgotten their password
Some sex offences which require people to be put on the sex offenders register and not be allowed to work with children for the rest of their lives, like peeing against a lamppost, or somone on their 16th birthday having sex with someone a day younger than them.
Distribution of child pornography laws that apply to yourself - a 17 year old girl who sends a picture of her tits to her boyfriend is guilty of this.
Incitement to racial/religious hatred laws. I'm an atheist who really hates some religions, and tries to convince others to hate them too, ergo I am a criminal.
What depresses me is that I could go on - these are just some of the more important ones IMO. The last Labour government introduced almost 5000 new laws, so I am not convinced knocking off one or two will actually make a difference. Fortunately for us they have outlawed setting off a nuclear device, so we can all rest easy now... or perhaps that may have been covered by existing laws. Better safe than sorry, I guess.
Control groups are basically impossible to find with clouds, as any meteoroligist will tell you. We still cannot absolutely predict which ones will dump rain on us, and which ones won't - often they behave in completely unexpected ways with no apparent reason why. There's no such thing as a control group with clouds, because one formation may have been going to dump a load of rain anyway, and another seemingly identical formation would not.
With a large enough control it may be possible - but getting a large control is basically nigh on impossible because of differing air temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, and a whole host of other variables. This is not something you can accurately simulate either.
I don't know what the expectations are out there, but my 5-year old Prius gives me 52 mpg highway and even more in the city.
It doesn't give you more in the city - it may give you more compared to other cars. The best mpg of _any_ car is when driving at about 50-55mph. Lower and higher speeds result in worse mpg. The Prius is crap compared to some old cars too - the citroen AX diesel could hit 100mpg... why can't we do at least similar now?
Tobacco causes cancer yet cigarette companies will still do whatever they can to flog their products to anyone who will buy them. It doesnt mean its right.
I enjoy tobacco and don't mind dying younger. They're not doing anything wrong by supplying what I ask of them. They might be abusing dimlows but that does not mean they're abusing me. What they are doing _is_ right. AV vendors on the other hand only have a business from abusing dimlows - anyone who knows anything about it will generally either use free AV or none at all.
It's not necessarily a situation to be concerned about. I've used Windows 2000 and Vista as my desktop for over 10 years, and have used antivirus only occasionally (to test it out for other people predominantly (MSE completely hosed my system last time I installed it). I've had _one_ successful virus - still not sure how it got there, back in the win2k days. I cleaned it out in a couple of hours.
As long as you're not stupid about running stuff, there aren't too many remote exploits to worry about, and most of those are specific application based. Basically my point is you can run a windows system easily with no AV - I've done it for over 10 years, with only one mishap. Another thing to remember is that AV will not protect against all threats - just because you install AV, doesn't mean you won't get a virus. I've cleaned computers "protected" by AV way more often than computers not protected.
On a completely unrelated note, I listened to a BBC radio 4 report this morning all about the "Goatse hackers". I was sniggering all throughout the report, wondering how many of the unitiated googled goatse. I'm suprised this story hasn't hit/. yet, to be honest.
Profiting off of someone else's work is a tiny percentage of copyright infringements that happen, and I agree it should be illegal. I'm not arguing about that. I was talking about copyright infringement in general, which is not a criminal offense. Bill_the_Engineer is also confusing plagiarism with copyright, which is a completely different issue... if I publish the complete works of Shakespeare, and claim I wrote them, that is plagiarism. They're not copyrighted. There aren't specific plagiarism laws AFAIK, but if done for commercial gain plagiarism can and does drop into fraud laws. Plagiarism of non-copyrighted works without profit is not illegal, AFAIK
As far as I understand, the situation is like this:
Standard copyright infringement - eg ripping a friend's CD. Not illegal, and consists of 99% of copyright infringement.
Copyright infringement for profit - selling copies of attributed works in copyright. Dodgy DVD sellers at flea markets, definitely illegal and liable to be sued.
Plagiarising uncopyrighted material without profit - Legal, as far as I can tell, definitely morally wrong IMO.
Plagiarising coprighted material without profit - Falls under copyright laws, not a criminal offense, can be sued.
Plagiarising uncopyrighted material with profit - criminal, falls under fraud laws...
Plagiarising copyrighted material with profit - criminal under both fraud and copyright laws
It's not _that_ tough to understand, I don't think.
Profiting off someone else's work while denying them income from it by not linking them IS a criminal offense
No it isn't, not in itself. If you quickly rewrite someone else's factual story (in which most of the work done was obtaining those facts), and blog it and get ad revenue, you are not breaking any laws. It may be morally dubious, and it may deprive the original author of revenue, but it's not illegal, and you can't be sued for it.
GGGP is wrong. Copyright infringement is not a criminal offense. The GGGP did not state that the copyright infringement is willful and for private gain, I think they are just confused about whether it is a criminal offense. It isn't, apart from in those specific circumstances, which GGGP did not seem to be talking about.
Personally I believe copyright infringement for personal gain should be a criminal offense - it's just using someone else's copyright to make a quick buck. However, I'd guess that at least 99% of copyright infringements are not in this category, so calling copyright infringement a criminal offense when that large a majority of infringements aren't is wrong.
That's like claiming that sex is a criminal offense, because some very specific instances of sex are criminal offenses. Copyright infringement is not a criminal offense, profiteering from copyright infringement is, just as sex is not a criminal offense, but rape is.
The fact that copyright infringement does not equate to what is traditionally thought of as theft does not make copyright infringement any less wrong or any less of a crime.
Ummm... I think you'll find it does. One necessarily deprives the owner of something, the other does not. One is a criminal offense, the other is not.
Ah - this story was reported by The Sun in the UK. As mentioned further down, the hospital has commented and said that The Sun made up this story - the hospital has never had this policy.
I'm not sure which Sun you're reading. The Sun is definitely _not_ Liberal. The Mirror, which is its closest rival, is probably more liberal than the Sun, and all of the broadsheets (well, what used to be broadsheets - some have downsized) are more liberal, excepting the Telegraph. It may be liberal from a US perspective, but it's definitely not from a UK perspective.
If you go on a round the world flight, west to east, and return to London, your clock will be slightly slower than the one that stayed in London because it has been moving spacially slightly quicker. If you go east to west, it'll be slightly quicker, since it's been spacially moving slower. Both clocks are "accurate" until you realise that the point of time is to have noon at midday (about, usually). If you define time as that, both of the moved clocks are wrong.
Perhaps in your and my opinion - however free speech is more closely intertwined with thought crime than crime that is based on actions, rather than words. Your examples are about physical things happening - that was my point.
I dare anyone to name something as emotionally satisfying as facing a seemingly insurmountable problem...and then finding a solution.
You know those seemingly insurmountable problems could have been hand me downs that others just couldn't be bothered to do because they were too trivial tasks? Yes, yes I am cynical.... the seemingly insurmountable toilet blockage is rarely left to those at the top of the chain, however excited by challenges they might be.
I just spent a few hours playing a video game and I'd find it hard to call it a passive experience - some people here seem to feel a similar way. There are entire categories of video games based upon making things yourself, some of which have been around for decades - you remember Simcity?
I think anyone who spends a lot of time on games past about 16 years needs some help growing up. The need to play so much indicates (to me) that they don't have enough interesting, more important things to think about.
You know what? Smug bastards who have perfect lives need some serious growing up time, because not only are they self-delusional, but they are also kiddy fiddlers at heart. Making assumptions about people who enjoy playing games is just as stupid as making assumptions about those self-righteous enough to claim they know what is best for others.
Anyway, back on topic - I may get shouted down here, but the way I began to enjoy learning basic programming was with PHP, and HTML. I wrote a message board, and then a fantasy football page for me and my friends... it was nothing fancy, but the latter didn't look hideous (the former did), and it was really useful - we didn't want to pay for entering an official league, and we just wanted it to be amongst ourselves. That was the first real thing that I found that I could do that was useful, by myself - I'd dabbled with other projects, but I was never interested in them if they looked really crap compared to professional stuff. This was a while ago though - I'm not sure if anyone would be that impressed nowadays with a bar graph showing everyone's weekly scores with your image being absurdly stretched when you do really well... it was cool at the time:P.
Smokers already do pay for it many times over through taxes.... they also die younger, costing less in pensions. If smokers were not around, you'd have to pay more tax.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really - very very few people predicted Serbia to beat Germany, especially in Germany, so if someone was giving Paul cues, that someone could have made a fortune betting on the results rather than training an octopus to pick the right box. I'm guessing it's blind luck - there must be thousands of these types of predictions prior to games - some are bound to turn out correct.
By the way, does the UK has jury nullification?
Yes it does, and happens relatively regularly. Judges will sometimes direct the jury to find a certain way, but the jury are under no obligation to do so. When being sworn in, jurors swear to find by the facts presented, ie. they swear to uphold the law, but what happens in the jury room stays in there, so there can be no recriminations to someone not doing so.
They are repealing the games industry tax relief, it was announced in the budget.
Top of my list would be drug laws, mainly because they don't work, and end up criminalising a very large proportion of the populace. There are an estimated one million _regular_ cocaine users in the country. There are over 3 million regular cannabis users. I'd personally guess that over half the population have at some point tried something illegal. The most idiotic of recent laws is the one outlawing mephedrone (which despite the newspaper hysteria has not been verifiably linked to any deaths yet), because it also outlaws many other drugs that have not ever been used by anyone. Basically, what I do in my own free time, as long as I don't inconvenience anyone else, should be for me to decide. If I decide to take something that might kill me, that is my decision - I don't need the government nannying me. The government currently is outlawing drugs for people's protection supposedly, and then locking up those same people.... if the goal is to protect people from the harmful effects, the solution is not to lock them up at the taxpayer's expense. Up to 4 billion pounds could be raised in revenue if drugs that are currently being used were taxed.
In no particular order, some others may be :
DRM circumvention illegality, as mentioned elseware.
Public disorder offences - I'm not against them per se, but recent laws are incredibly vague and make loads of things illegal.
Drunk and disorderly - Either enforce it or get rid of it... there are millions of drunk disorderly people on the streets every weekend.
All laws allowing detention without charge... 28 days is too long, which brings me on to...
All anti-terror laws. They are all shit and worthless (as far as I was aware, blowing people up was arleady illegal prior to anti-terror legislation), and infringe upon everone's rights. Glorifying terrorism is now an offense, which we seem to have been for ages when the terrorists are on our side (ANC, French Resistance, etc).
Some child protection laws - Two policewomen were recently found to be breaking the law by looking after each other's children, without being registered.
Some "eco" laws such as the illegality of incandescent light bulbs
Laws censoring the internet (currently being overseen by a non-governmental unnaccountable body, the Internet Watch Foundation) - They don't work, get over it.
Laws requiring people to reveal passwords to encrypted devices, which criminalise people who have forgotten their password
Some sex offences which require people to be put on the sex offenders register and not be allowed to work with children for the rest of their lives, like peeing against a lamppost, or somone on their 16th birthday having sex with someone a day younger than them.
Distribution of child pornography laws that apply to yourself - a 17 year old girl who sends a picture of her tits to her boyfriend is guilty of this.
Incitement to racial/religious hatred laws. I'm an atheist who really hates some religions, and tries to convince others to hate them too, ergo I am a criminal.
What depresses me is that I could go on - these are just some of the more important ones IMO. The last Labour government introduced almost 5000 new laws, so I am not convinced knocking off one or two will actually make a difference. Fortunately for us they have outlawed setting off a nuclear device, so we can all rest easy now... or perhaps that may have been covered by existing laws. Better safe than sorry, I guess.
Control groups are basically impossible to find with clouds, as any meteoroligist will tell you. We still cannot absolutely predict which ones will dump rain on us, and which ones won't - often they behave in completely unexpected ways with no apparent reason why. There's no such thing as a control group with clouds, because one formation may have been going to dump a load of rain anyway, and another seemingly identical formation would not.
With a large enough control it may be possible - but getting a large control is basically nigh on impossible because of differing air temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, and a whole host of other variables. This is not something you can accurately simulate either.
f you had stopped right there you would have been insightful.
If you had stopped there...
Instead, the majority of your post nothing more than inciteful and irrelevant.
Methinks that the majority of your post nothing more than coherent?
I don't know what the expectations are out there, but my 5-year old Prius gives me 52 mpg highway and even more in the city.
It doesn't give you more in the city - it may give you more compared to other cars. The best mpg of _any_ car is when driving at about 50-55mph. Lower and higher speeds result in worse mpg. The Prius is crap compared to some old cars too - the citroen AX diesel could hit 100mpg... why can't we do at least similar now?
AV does not protect against 0 day exploits
Tobacco causes cancer yet cigarette companies will still do whatever they can to flog their products to anyone who will buy them. It doesnt mean its right.
I enjoy tobacco and don't mind dying younger. They're not doing anything wrong by supplying what I ask of them. They might be abusing dimlows but that does not mean they're abusing me. What they are doing _is_ right. AV vendors on the other hand only have a business from abusing dimlows - anyone who knows anything about it will generally either use free AV or none at all.
It's not necessarily a situation to be concerned about. I've used Windows 2000 and Vista as my desktop for over 10 years, and have used antivirus only occasionally (to test it out for other people predominantly (MSE completely hosed my system last time I installed it). I've had _one_ successful virus - still not sure how it got there, back in the win2k days. I cleaned it out in a couple of hours.
As long as you're not stupid about running stuff, there aren't too many remote exploits to worry about, and most of those are specific application based. Basically my point is you can run a windows system easily with no AV - I've done it for over 10 years, with only one mishap. Another thing to remember is that AV will not protect against all threats - just because you install AV, doesn't mean you won't get a virus. I've cleaned computers "protected" by AV way more often than computers not protected.
This explains the Fermi Paradox relatively neatly - I just hope it's not true.
On a completely unrelated note, I listened to a BBC radio 4 report this morning all about the "Goatse hackers". I was sniggering all throughout the report, wondering how many of the unitiated googled goatse. I'm suprised this story hasn't hit /. yet, to be honest.
Profiting off of someone else's work is a tiny percentage of copyright infringements that happen, and I agree it should be illegal. I'm not arguing about that. I was talking about copyright infringement in general, which is not a criminal offense. Bill_the_Engineer is also confusing plagiarism with copyright, which is a completely different issue... if I publish the complete works of Shakespeare, and claim I wrote them, that is plagiarism. They're not copyrighted. There aren't specific plagiarism laws AFAIK, but if done for commercial gain plagiarism can and does drop into fraud laws. Plagiarism of non-copyrighted works without profit is not illegal, AFAIK
As far as I understand, the situation is like this :
Standard copyright infringement - eg ripping a friend's CD. Not illegal, and consists of 99% of copyright infringement.
Copyright infringement for profit - selling copies of attributed works in copyright. Dodgy DVD sellers at flea markets, definitely illegal and liable to be sued.
Plagiarising uncopyrighted material without profit - Legal, as far as I can tell, definitely morally wrong IMO.
Plagiarising coprighted material without profit - Falls under copyright laws, not a criminal offense, can be sued.
Plagiarising uncopyrighted material with profit - criminal, falls under fraud laws...
Plagiarising copyrighted material with profit - criminal under both fraud and copyright laws
It's not _that_ tough to understand, I don't think.
Profiting off someone else's work while denying them income from it by not linking them IS a criminal offense
No it isn't, not in itself. If you quickly rewrite someone else's factual story (in which most of the work done was obtaining those facts), and blog it and get ad revenue, you are not breaking any laws. It may be morally dubious, and it may deprive the original author of revenue, but it's not illegal, and you can't be sued for it.
GGGP is wrong. Copyright infringement is not a criminal offense. The GGGP did not state that the copyright infringement is willful and for private gain, I think they are just confused about whether it is a criminal offense. It isn't, apart from in those specific circumstances, which GGGP did not seem to be talking about.
Personally I believe copyright infringement for personal gain should be a criminal offense - it's just using someone else's copyright to make a quick buck. However, I'd guess that at least 99% of copyright infringements are not in this category, so calling copyright infringement a criminal offense when that large a majority of infringements aren't is wrong.
That's like claiming that sex is a criminal offense, because some very specific instances of sex are criminal offenses. Copyright infringement is not a criminal offense, profiteering from copyright infringement is, just as sex is not a criminal offense, but rape is.
The fact that copyright infringement does not equate to what is traditionally thought of as theft does not make copyright infringement any less wrong or any less of a crime.
Ummm... I think you'll find it does. One necessarily deprives the owner of something, the other does not. One is a criminal offense, the other is not.
Ah - this story was reported by The Sun in the UK. As mentioned further down, the hospital has commented and said that The Sun made up this story - the hospital has never had this policy.
I'm not sure which Sun you're reading. The Sun is definitely _not_ Liberal. The Mirror, which is its closest rival, is probably more liberal than the Sun, and all of the broadsheets (well, what used to be broadsheets - some have downsized) are more liberal, excepting the Telegraph. It may be liberal from a US perspective, but it's definitely not from a UK perspective.
If you go on a round the world flight, west to east, and return to London, your clock will be slightly slower than the one that stayed in London because it has been moving spacially slightly quicker. If you go east to west, it'll be slightly quicker, since it's been spacially moving slower. Both clocks are "accurate" until you realise that the point of time is to have noon at midday (about, usually). If you define time as that, both of the moved clocks are wrong.
Perhaps in your and my opinion - however free speech is more closely intertwined with thought crime than crime that is based on actions, rather than words. Your examples are about physical things happening - that was my point.
I dare anyone to name something as emotionally satisfying as facing a seemingly insurmountable problem...and then finding a solution.
You know those seemingly insurmountable problems could have been hand me downs that others just couldn't be bothered to do because they were too trivial tasks? Yes, yes I am cynical.... the seemingly insurmountable toilet blockage is rarely left to those at the top of the chain, however excited by challenges they might be.
I just spent a few hours playing a video game and I'd find it hard to call it a passive experience - some people here seem to feel a similar way. There are entire categories of video games based upon making things yourself, some of which have been around for decades - you remember Simcity?
I think anyone who spends a lot of time on games past about 16 years needs some help growing up. The need to play so much indicates (to me) that they don't have enough interesting, more important things to think about.
You know what? Smug bastards who have perfect lives need some serious growing up time, because not only are they self-delusional, but they are also kiddy fiddlers at heart. Making assumptions about people who enjoy playing games is just as stupid as making assumptions about those self-righteous enough to claim they know what is best for others.
Anyway, back on topic - I may get shouted down here, but the way I began to enjoy learning basic programming was with PHP, and HTML. I wrote a message board, and then a fantasy football page for me and my friends... it was nothing fancy, but the latter didn't look hideous (the former did), and it was really useful - we didn't want to pay for entering an official league, and we just wanted it to be amongst ourselves. That was the first real thing that I found that I could do that was useful, by myself - I'd dabbled with other projects, but I was never interested in them if they looked really crap compared to professional stuff. This was a while ago though - I'm not sure if anyone would be that impressed nowadays with a bar graph showing everyone's weekly scores with your image being absurdly stretched when you do really well... it was cool at the time :P.
As much as I am wary to disrupt this nice discussion you seem to be having with yourself, can I just ask : Who are you talking to?
Those two examples are absolutely nothing to do with thought crime, though personally I agree they probably should not be illegal.
Smokers already do pay for it many times over through taxes.... they also die younger, costing less in pensions. If smokers were not around, you'd have to pay more tax.