Posts by Matthew Poole
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ordered him to plant and maintain to maturity replacement pohutukawa
On the same site, that is. So he couldn't subdivide because the trees had to be planted in such a way that the site had to be kept intact.
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A bit like when developers pay a small fine for wrecking something valuable (e.g. an old tree or a protected building), but stand to make killing in the process. That kind of trade-off would largely disappear.
That's the Judiciary's fault, as much as anything. The law allows for very creative solutions that totally destroy the potential profit from such actions. Witness the developer (whose name I forget) who cut down protected pohutukawa on a site he wanted to subdivide in Royal Oak, even after being explicitly told that they were protected. The judge sentenced him to some moderate fine (I think it was in the vicinity of $20k, which was certainly far less than the upside potential of being able to subdivide the site), and also ordered him to plant and maintain to maturity replacement pohutukawa. So not only did he not get to sub the property, he also had to make good on his destructive actions. Yes the original trees were gone, but they were being replaced in a way that completely subverted the intent behind their destruction. We need more judicial behaviour in that vein, because if it became commonplace for developers to get absolutely nowhere with destructive behaviour they'd probably eventually get the message. Or they'd lobby for a law change, and hopefully the public outrage in the submissions on such a change would dissuade any government stupid enough to contemplate such a thing.
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I seem to recollect an acquaintance making laminated ID cards for an enterprise that featured a date of birth. IDing is clearly more vigorous, and to a better standard of ID than before the law change. Anyone remember the old paper driver's licence?
The presence of photo drivers' licences made the law change a lot easier to enforce. Once it was established that the only acceptable forms of ID must be Gazetted, and must carry a photo, rather than allowing anything that purported to carry the DoB of the holder, it became completely indefensible for establishments to accept low-grade fake ID. They couldn't claim that "I thought it was OK", because they had been told precisely what was allowable.
Personally I think the accepted forms are a little bit restrictive, and that firearms licences (no, I don't have one) should also be allowed. But I understand the logic behind having a very small number of permitted types of ID, agree with it in general. -
Try downloading part of a torrented file and using it, and tell me if it works.
depends if the file has been archived and split into partitions or not.
uh, what? The whole point of BT is that files are pulled together from multiple sources, as a bunch of small chunks. Those chunks, individually, are worthless. Even if you have the very first x bytes of a file, you need much more than a single BT chunk to get a usable file. Most movie formats simply won't work if the file isn't complete.
I'm just going to drop this. You're not convincing me that you actually have the slightest clue how BT works, and certainly doing a very poor job of indicating that you've got the vaguest grasp on the enormous technical hurdles of establishing what's being downloaded in thousands of simultaneous torrents.
Of course, if you also support the disconnection-on-accusation rules in the Copyright Amendment Act then you don't give a damn if it can be proven what someone was downloading. Because, in that case, the supposition and appearance of infringement is quite sufficient to justify disconnection.
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Cos my little pirating machine can identify bits of files it needs and start download them all with in a few seconds of opening the program. it knows who its talking to (ip address) which bit of the file it needs and where to find it and place it and it does it all without asking me to help it at all. ie its not very labour intensive on my part.
Yeah, but you can't do anything with just those little bits of files. Without the entire target file, you've got nothing. Try downloading part of a torrented file and using it, and tell me if it works.
Your machine can do this because it's got the torrent file. If the torrent file is requesting something named FreeBSD-7.1-RELEASE.dvd1.iso but it's actually the latest Batman movie, how is ISP filtering going to pick that up? You're requesting something with a legit name but infringing content. The only way filtering can catch that is to assemble the entire file and then compare it to known hashes.
What you can do with your machine, which has the torrent file and knows which chunks it has and which chunks it needs, is utterly irrelevant to an ISP filtering system that must establish, independently of the name of the requested file, what a user is actually downloading. Which means getting the entire destination file, completely, in order to compute the final hash.
Also, if a user only torrents part of a file and then cancels the download, have they actually downloading infringing material? What they've got is of no utility, and technically isn't a copy, only a partial one. What then?
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Just to shoot down this notion of a zero-government anarchist state that could stay involved with the rest of the world, how will this state get mail delivered? The treaty on postal services, whatever it's called, is signed and ratified by nations, not cooperatives. That's one of the things about treaties.
Also, telecommunications is handled by various trans-national NGOs, like the ITU, and guess what: they don't admit non-countries. So suddenly this anarchist state has no telephone service and no mail services. The other hitch is that telecommunications is heavily based on contracts, and the ability to enforce. Who's going to sign a contract with a cooperative that exists in a lawless state that has no processes or organisations for enforcement? You can have all the jurisdictional clauses you like in the contract, but part of the power of an international contract is that even the party in the non-jurisdictional country can be made to answer to organs of their home state. No state? No organs? No answerability? No contract!Anarchy is a great idea, until you want to interact with a world that's based around concepts of state-enforced law.
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Please do go into further detail on the costing of such an exercise.
I don't know exact numbers, because it's not a field in which I work. But determining what a torrent is retrieving requires capturing the entire download, reassembling, and then hashing it against known infringing materials. So you have to have the scratch storage for hundreds of gigabytes (if not terrabytes) of simultaneous downloads. You have to have a powerful server to do the hashing/comparing of all the files. Plus you have to have a database server that stores millions of hashes.
Even then you won't get everything, because changing the hash value of a file is trivial. A tiny change, even just to embedded naming information, will result in a new hash. So someone, somewhere, has to review every file with an unknown hash (obviously known-good hashes will be stored, too) to determine that it's not infringing.
Remember, BitTorrent is not even close to being solely a mechanism for distributing copyright-infringing material. Most of the open source operating systems distribute over torrents, in addition to things like FTP/HTTP, and that's entirely legit. It's a more-efficient use of bandwidth to do it that way, and there'll be a lot of very seriously pissed-off people if you try to outlaw BT. There are already a few ISPs that are no-go areas for people who use OSS, because they're known to heavily throttle torrent traffic. Some game manufacturers distribute their updates via BT, too, and that's a paid-for service.
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I honestly don't think that raising the age will do a thing. When it was lowered, we were promised strict enforcement, harsh penalties, and various measures to ensure that under-age drinkers weren't getting their hands on alcohol. Has it worked? Has it hell!
Rather than changing the law, use the provisions and use them hard. Revoke liquor licences permanently on a second offence. Suspend for a week on a first offence. Levy maximum fines on everyone who's found breaching the law. We were promised zero tolerance, but that's never actually happened.
If any changes are necessary, change the law so that off-licences have a one-strike-and-you're-out existence. Unless they can prove that an under-age person presented adequate false ID, a single bad sale will cost them their licence forever. It's not the on-licences that are the problem, it's the off-licences. And hit parents/friends/acquaintances with the $2k fines that the law provides for supply to minors. Because if the age goes up to 20, the supply to 14, 15, 16-year-old drinkers will continue to be through their family and friends. It'll just be from ones who're over 20, rather than over 18. -
They'll do it when the industry bodies globally are told to take a leap.
IOW, they won't show any kind of leadership on the issue. What a shock. Spineless and purchased. Great combination for elected representatives, to be sure, especially if you're one of the ones who's got them bent over your pork barrel.
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On Gaza, it's nice to know that National are being entirely true to their predicted form and toadying up to the US. I point to the wishy-washy, neutral position taken, with McCully justifying it on the grounds that "the UN haven't taken a stance." That'd be because the US, as per bloody usual, vetoed a Security Council resolution to call on Israel to seek a cease-fire. Most of the rest of the world are denouncing, at volumes that increase by the day, Israel's massive armoured invasion. Three months ago, we would've been amongst the chorus.