They even have tree rings dating back more than 10k years.

AdBlock exists for Chrome.

And it usually downloads the adverts before deciding to hide them

Korean law states that (in non legal terms): You may do what you want with what you bought.

Can you cite this? (I don't doubt it but I'm looking for a reference for an article I'm writing)

Because the hypertext transfer protocol was designed to transfer hypertext documents. It was not designed to be a remote application protocol.

Irrelevant. If it can be evolved to work well enough for people then it is suitable. The Type-III Secretory Gland evolved into the Bacterium Flagellum without any design, but it happened to work well enough to survive and so it did.

Design helps cause effects but it doesn't prevent useful side-effects.

I see it as all fitting together, really quite neatly, something that the suposed randomness of evolution doesnt really explain

Evolution isn't (just) random, it's also natural selection. It's a myth that Evolution is random. This means that when there's a niche (Eg, a food that no one else is eating) then a creature whose DNA/RNA mutates and is able to use that niche will thrive and have more children than one that doesn't. Evolution is perfectly compatible with everything fitting together.

Doesn't mean much when your choices are the local cable monopoly or the local telco monopoly. It just makes three strikes into six.

Incorrect. As far as I know the proposed law doesn't say that you can't sign up at the same ISP again. Effectively internet termination is more akin to the fine where you'd inconvenienced by the reconnection cost and the time without internet.

What does NZ produce to make any of this worth while?

Well we did most of the graphics for Avatar and all of the graphics for the Lord of the Rings movies. The copyright for those is, as I understand it, partly owned by New Zealanders.

We don't tend to have many successful international music artists though (Crowded House, The Datsuns etc. were a while ago now).

Oh yeah and the Flight of the Conchords doing computer songs.

Could I just make bogus claims that somebody had pirated something of mine and have them banned?

No, you'd have to prove it in the tribunal or in a court.

What are the consiquences of a neighbour downloading something off your wireless AP?

It's unclear what happens to open wireless points under the new law. I suspect that people won't be responsible if they didn't authorise the infringement because there have been defenses like that before (not just the recent Australian iiNet case, but NZ cases too).

What about business connections where a potentialy large group is sharing a single connection?

A good way of thinking about this is to consider the business to be an ISP itself that connects to an ISP. Basically the ISPs pass the buck down the chain until it reaches a customer, so the business would be expected to identify the individual who did it.

This does mean that there may be significant business compliance costs involved in recording who used a public IP address at a particular time. We've asked the government for estimates, and we're working with several groups to get independent estimates for this.

And who exactly was behind this sudden interest in protecting what really is a majority of overseas owned copywrite?

To a large degree it was probably the US and Japan via ACTA.

And lets not forget the ISPs. They now have a huge task to monitor and store large volumes of data for no benefit to them or their customers.

Just to be clear, under this New Zealand bill ISPs are not asked to monitor traffic. They are expected to record which one of their customers was using a public IP address at a particular time. This is to that they can facilitate the communication between the alleged copyright holder and the alleged infringer.

In other words ISPs are simple middlemen and they take no active role other than to pass messages along. This is how it should be.

(sorry, here's a formatted version. I should have used preview!)

The NZ Herald article is really confused about the law and it talks about a protest on Monday but I'm from the Creative Freedom Foundation (quoted in the NZ Herald article linked in the story) and as there is no protest planned.

The original law that this replaced was a Guilt Upon Accusation-style law where unproven allegations of infringement could see people cut off the internet. We at the Creative Freedom Foundation (20,000 New Zealanders including 10,000 artists) protested against it.

This new proposal is nothing like the original. It's a tribunal system where copyright law experts (such as people who helped set up Creative Commons NZ, and technology lawyers who are involved in DNS) will judge infringement. So people are innocent until proven guilty, and there are independent experts involved.

The new extensions to New Zealand's Copyright Tribunal can only award fines, it can't kick people off the internet (that facility has been added to the courts, but court cases about copyright are rare in New Zealand). Personally I think the internet is an essential service that's only going to become more important in the coming years. We don't cut off people's power for copyright infringement, and we don't cut off phone lines or road access so the internet shouldn't be tampered with. It is however much better that it's in the courts and not in the tribunal because, in practice, it will be used rarely.

The new branch of the Copyright Tribunal can award fines and the maximum they can award in the most extreme cases is $15k (US $10k) which is equal to that of New Zealand's Disputes Tribunal. Remember, this is a large scary figure for the infringement but this is the maximum and it's much less than the existing Copyright Act that New Zealand has. In practice it's still unclear how much the fine for infringement of a movie or a song will be.

The new proposal doesn't seem to deal with open wireless access points that are provided as a public service in thousands of places in New Zealand (airports, municipal WiFi, libraries, etc.).

It also isn't clear whether hacked computers are liable. I suspect not because there have been defenses where people who didn't authorise any infringement aren't liable (not just the recent Australian iiNet case, but NZ cases too).

For the politicians involved doing nothing wasn't politically tenable and, so far, we generally support the new law's approach which is basically this new law is like a specialised court for copyright. Court cases can be flawed and certainly evidence can be maliciously faked, but that's the same of any court case.

It does need more work around the areas I've mentioned above though and we'll be lobbying hard for that. If anyone has any suggestions let me know, cheers.

The NZ Herald article is really confused about the law and it talks about a protest on Monday but I'm from the Creative Freedom Foundation (quoted in the NZ Herald article linked in the story) and as there is no protest planned. The original law that this replaced was a Guilt Upon Accusation-style law where unproven allegations of infringement could see people cut off the internet. We at the Creative Freedom Foundation (20,000 New Zealanders including 10,000 artists) protested against it. This new proposal is nothing like the original. It's a tribunal system where copyright law experts (such as people who helped set up Creative Commons NZ, and technology lawyers who are involved in DNS) will judge infringement. So people are innocent until proven guilty, and there are independent experts involved. The new extensions to New Zealand's Copyright Tribunal can only award fines, it can't kick people off the internet (that facility has been added to the courts, but court cases about copyright are rare in New Zealand). Personally I think the internet is an essential service that's only going to become more important in the coming years. We don't cut off people's power for copyright infringement, and we don't cut off phone lines or road access so the internet shouldn't be tampered with. It is however much better that it's in the courts and not in the tribunal because, in practice, it will be used rarely. The new branch of the Copyright Tribunal can award fines and the maximum they can award in the most extreme cases is $15k (US $10k) which is equal to that of New Zealand's Disputes Tribunal. Remember, this is a large scary figure for the infringement but this is the maximum and it's much less than the existing Copyright Act that New Zealand has. In practice it's still unclear how much the fine for infringement of a movie or a song will be. The new proposal doesn't seem to deal with open wireless access points that are provided as a public service in thousands of places in New Zealand (airports, municipal WiFi, libraries, etc.). It also isn't clear whether hacked computers are liable. I suspect not because there have been defenses where people who didn't authorise any infringement aren't liable (not just the recent Australian iiNet case, but NZ cases too). For the politicians involved doing nothing wasn't politically tenable and, so far, we generally support the new law's approach which is basically this new law is like a specialised court for copyright. Court cases can be flawed and certainly evidence can be maliciously faked, but that's the same of any court case. It does need more work around the areas I've mentioned above though and we'll be lobbying hard for that.

A fuller explanation of the "information" term (which is primarily used by creationists) can be found in this response by Richard Dawkins. His conclusion is as follows

The "information challenge" turns out to be none other than our old friend: "How could something as complex as an eye evolve?" It is just dressed up in fancy mathematical language - perhaps in an attempt to bamboozle. Or perhaps those who ask it have already bamboozled themselves, and don't realise that it is the same old - and thoroughly answered - question.

"Every step"? I think most of them are still waiting to hear about one significant step that has been demonstrated to be through non-artificially-induced genetic error.

How about Nylon eating bacteria? Nylon didn't exist until the 20th century and yet bacteria evolved to eat the waste that was left outside industrial sites. This was a significant benefit caused by evolution.

That said I wonder if this will be considered "significant" to you, because the way you talk makes you sound like you don't understand evolution and you act as if creationists would change their mind when presented with evidence.

DNA isn't really a blueprint (it's not like a diagram of what is to be built) it's more like a recipe of how to build, and DNA defines every part of trees and animals. For example, human babies are composed of 50% of their parents DNA along with 100-200 mutations.

Whether mutations are artificial or natural doesn't affect whether they result in different creatures. We understand how nature can cause errors in copying, and we understand how do to the same artificially.

So the same DNA results in the same creatures, and different DNA can result in different creatures.

Actually in law infringement is defined as 'making unauthorised copies' which is why it's usually only uploading that counts.

You're talking about New Zealand law?

Also is it about uploading or downloading?

It's about copyright infringement on an internet connection, so to answer your question: both. The process is based on taking someone to tribunal for what their internet connection was used for. It's a basic court-like system, where if you're accused of infringement you defend yourself with whatever evidence you have that what you did was acceptable or that. In that respect it's like most trial systems that have a presumption of innocence but an obligation to defend yourself. As for your specific example of the difficulty of telling whether the content you're getting is legal I agree that's a problem. I don't really see a way around that though. Proprietary licenses are notoriously difficult to understand in comparison to Creative Common's use of icons. The only thing I can say is that this new proposal is a judgment interpreted by people who you can reason with and explain that it wasn't intentional. Just so you know, the ISPs aren't inspecting traffic.