Posts by Matthew Poole
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He is not alleging a prior conspiracy -- but an orchestrated litany of lies afterwards, to cover up incompetence and official fecklesness. He's been publicly backed by at least two members of the commission -- one of them, the chair, Thomas Kean, was the Republican governor of New Jersey.
I just don't get why this isn't the year's biggest story in America.
Possibly because it exposes an inconvenient truth: that the government bears only culpability, but not guilt, for the events of the day. It's one thing to allege a grand conspiracy centred on the Oval Office, and have people accept it, but quite another to state as a fairly bald fact that the Alphabet Soup, objects of fear, admiration, loathing and intrigue, were so thoroughly incompetent pre fact that it was necessary to lie comprehensively post fact to ensure the continuation of their elevated reputations.
I can actually understand why people wouldn't want to hear it. Evil from the top down is much easier to stomach than incompetent from top to bottom and side to side, since the former is transient while the latter is embedded and systemic. -
The explosion of the burning aviation fuel-air mixture will strip the fire-protective coatings off the steel truss structure of the towers
Especially if, as was explained by three FDNY officers who I saw speak, the coating started off as of far lesser thickness than required. I saw photographs of the trusses where one could make out cross braces at joints, in a couple of cases even make out bolts, beneath sprayed-on fire-protective coating that should've been so heavily applied as to render all joints and detail nothing more than amorphous blobs.
Buildings are complex structures and I can easily imagine the shock of the impacts of collapsing floors at upper levels propagating through the structure to find points of concentration below, causing sudden catastrophic buckling, producing lateral bursts of dust and debris.
Or even driving air down the elevator shafts, blowing open whatever lift lobby doors were still intact. If the central core was good enough for a waterfall of flaming jet fuel to reach ground level, it's certainly good enough for air that's been compressed by a collapsing structure.
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The hardest thing in the world to prove is that we went to the moon, innit?
Not really. Someone had to place the laser reflectors there, unless we're now turning it into a debate about extraterrestrial lifeforms capable of taking part in earth-based conspiracy theories.
And don't forget the USSR. Does anyone really think they wouldn't have blown it all wide open if the Americans didn't actually get to the moon? The technology of the day was more than adequate for tracking the lunar lander, and there was not a word from the Soviets to suggest that the Americans hadn't made it.
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Gio, to be fair to you, the "the ISPs are raking it in courtesy of all this downloading activity" argument is almost an article of faith with major media. I've seen it trotted out before, to justify the suggestion that the costs of a monitoring solution should be borne by ISPs not by the media industry.
The lesson here is that you should be very, very sceptical about anything major media claims unless it's backed up by hard numbers from outside sources. They're very good at coming up with theories that sound good, even plausible, and then announcing them as fact.
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To throw out some of those dirty numbers of which I am so fond, Telecom's 2009 annual report says that they earned revenue from "Broadband and internet" of NZD582m. If one follows the line across, we see that since 2005 revenue from this activity has only increased by 55%. Given how much uptake of broadband has increased in that time (considerably more than 55% growth), it is a fair assumption that broadband actually earns ISPs less than dialup does.
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Gio, still not buying it, sorry. To get back on my tired old hobby horse, got any evidence? You know, numbers. Preferably something unambiguous.
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Gio, already shouted that one down here. Just because you say it doesn't make it so, sorry. Nobody in the ISP industry makes money from high-volume users. That's why there are fair-use policies and all the rest.
Also, there's this concept of common carrier. Ordering ISPs to monitor and enforce copyright law with traffic on their network is, as per Cameron's analogy, like requiring councils to ensure that no vehicles on their roads are carrying copyrighted material. Infeasible, expensive, grossly disruptive, and using another agency's resources to solve something that is your problem.
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The constitutional court ruled that the new body could only have the power to issue warnings and that any disconnections could only be ordered by a judge after two written warnings from the new authority.
The sanctions imposed by a judge could also include fines of up to 30,000 euros ($44,420).
Fine with the former, totally not fine (thank you, I'll be here all week. Please, no hard-boiled eggs) with the latter. Not in any way, shape or form. People who are recreational consumers of illicit downloads should never be potentially bankrupted as a consequence, ever. That is a penalty far, far in excess of anything that is reasonable in the circumstances.
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I guess the film industry will expect ISPs to invest in monitoring filesharing, torrents, etc.
There, fixed that for you :P
That's another big concern of mine. There seems very little political willingness to engage with the serious concerns that ISPs have over the costs of monitoring (as Peter has noticed), and who will bear the burden. As a very vague indication of the money involved, in the consultation phase of the Telecommunications (Interception Capability) Bill, the select committee accepted that "compliance costs to be borne by the telecommunications companies were estimated to be $12 million". This is just to provide the facility to intercept and store (not screen in real time) the communications of a particular customer, primarily aimed at tapping voice service. That is a very, very basic system that just diverts a particular customer's traffic through a storage device for later analysis (something that is very, very easy to do, and demanding only inasmuch as it requires storage capacity). There is no comparison of the traffic with anything, never mind attempts to store, reassemble, then calculate and compare a hash value for multi-GB files at something approximating real-time speeds. This is incredibly demanding computationally. As an example, it takes my Core2 Duo workstation, doing not very much else, about eight seconds to calculate the hash on a 4GB .iso file once it's completed downloading off bittorrent. Multiply that by hundreds, or thousands, and then by dozens of ISPs, and you start to get a vague idea of the demands. That's not getting into the complexity of trying to capture and assemble streams of traffic, doing matching of traffic types because you can disguise bittorrent to look at a casual glance like other types of traffic, and then the maintenance of a database of hashes of infringing files.
Don't discount, too, that such legislation would result in thousands of malicious torrents being created with suspicious names but innocuous (or nonsense) content, just to keep the filtering authorities busy. There would be active measures to disrupt the system through spurious results, never mind the legally-dubious means that would likely be utilised. I would estimate feasibility of a monitoring solution, on a scale of 0-1, as 0.0, rounded from about 20 decimal places. Yes, it really is that difficult, and that's in a world where you don't have outraged citizens engaging in disruptive-but-completely-legally-and-ethically-acceptable as well as outright-illegal-and-ethically-dubious acts of rebellion. -
So, Sacha, now that you're caught up, care to join in?