Comment Re:Weather is NOT climate (Score 0) 567
But apparently you assholes don't care about what you are going to eat while your permafrost thaws.
Swedish Farmers Have Doubts About Climatologists and Climate Change 567
cold fjord (826450) writes with this excerpt from ScienceNordic: Researchers the world over almost unanimously agree that our climate is changing ... But many farmers – at least Swedish ones – have experienced mild winters and shifting weather before and are hesitant about trusting the scientists. The researcher who discovered the degree of scepticism among farmers was surprised by her findings. Therese Asplund ... was initially looking into how agricultural magazines covered climate change. Asplund found after studying ten years of issues of the two agricultural sector periodicals ATL and Land Lantbruk that they present climate change as scientifically confirmed, a real problem. But her research took an unexpected direction when she started interviewing farmers in focus groups about climate issues. Asplund had prepared a long list of questions about how the farmers live with the threat of climate change and what they plan to do to cope with the subsequent climate challenges. The conversations took a different course: "They explained that they didn't quite believe in climate changes," she says. "Or at least that these are not triggered by human activities."
(Original paper here.)
Comment Re:And another on the ban pile (Score 1) 289
I know where you are coming from. I have an old Linksys PCMCIA wifi card that had 7 different hardware revisions & almost as many drivers.
Comment Cut them off. (Score 1) 248
I think it's time Google started cutting countries off when they pull stupid shit like this. Canada isn't even 40 million people.
Comment Bananaman! (Score 1) 396
Looks like it's time for a gritty Bananaman reboot!
Comment Re:Key Point Missing (Score 2) 34
The summary misses a key point. Yes they scan and store the entire book, but they are _NOT_ making the entire book available to everyone. For the most part they are just making it searchable.
Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."
So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.
Submission + - Appeals Court finds scanning to be fair use in Authors Guild v Hathitrust
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: In Authors Guild v Hathitrust, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has found that scanning whole books and making them searchable for research use is a fair use. In reaching its conclusion, the 3-judge panel reasoned, in its 34-page opinion (PDF), that the creation of a searchable, full text database is a "quintessentially transformative use", that it was "reasonably necessary" to make use of the entire works, that maintaining maintain 4 copies of the database was reasonably necessary as well, and that the research library did not impair the market for the originals. Needless to say, this ruling augurs well for Google in Authors Guild v. Google, which likewise involves full text scanning of whole books for research.
Comment Re:yes please (Score 1) 253
Jody *Williams* has to be a fairly common name & as a bonus, it's unisex.
Comment Good Reason (Score 1) 398
The signatures on the letter reads like a who's who of ISP industry presidents and CEOs, including AT&T's Randall Stephenson, Cox Communications' Patrick Esser, NCTA president (and former FCC commissioner) Michael Powell, Verizon's Lowell McAdam, and Comcast's Brian Roberts.
Case closed, we all know they know what's best for us, right?
Comment Cook has it backwards. (Score 1) 711
Looks like the Reality Distortion Field has rubbed off on Mr. Cook. It's become a game with me to tease my fiance about the things my cheap-ass Nexus can do that her 64GB iPad can't.
Submission + - Councilman/Open Source Developer submits Open Source bill (gothamgazette.com)
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: New York City Council Member Ben Kallos (KallosEsq), who also happens to be a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developer, just introduced legislation to mandate a government preference for FOSS and creating a Civic Commons website to facilitate collaborative purchasing of software. He argues that NYC could save millions of dollars with the Free and Open Source Software Preferences Act 2014, pointing out that the city currently has a $67 million Microsoft ELA. Kallos said: "It is time for government to modernize and start appreciating the same cost savings as everyone else."
Comment Re:Apply to Hollywood? Please? (Score 1) 136
Can this be used as precedent to dismiss all the pending RIAA and MPAA lawsuits? What about reversing past suits whose victims are already in the body count?
Don't I wish.
Comment A little late, but welcome (Score 1) 136
A cynic might argue that the key difference in this case was that, for a change, the ISP's, and not merely defendants, were challenging the subpoenas; but of course we all know that justice is 'blind'.
An ingrate might bemoan the Court's failure to address the key underlying fallacy in the "John Doe" cases, that because someone pays the bill for an internet account that automatically makes them a copyright infringer; but who's complaining over that slight omission?
A malcontent like myself might be a little unhappy that it took the courts ten (10) years to finally come to grips with the personal jurisdiction issue, which would have been obvious to 9 out of 10 second year law students from the get go, and I personally have been pointing it out and writing about it since 2005; but at least they finally did get there.
And a philosopher might wonder how much suffering might have been spared had the courts followed the law back in 2004 when the John Doe madness started; but of course I'm a lawyer, not a philosopher. :)
Bottom line, though: this is a good thing, a very good thing. Ten (10) years late in coming, but good nonetheless. - R.B. )
An ingrate might bemoan the Court's failure to address the key underlying fallacy in the "John Doe" cases, that because someone pays the bill for an internet account that automatically makes them a copyright infringer; but who's complaining over that slight omission?
A malcontent like myself might be a little unhappy that it took the courts ten (10) years to finally come to grips with the personal jurisdiction issue, which would have been obvious to 9 out of 10 second year law students from the get go, and I personally have been pointing it out and writing about it since 2005; but at least they finally did get there.
And a philosopher might wonder how much suffering might have been spared had the courts followed the law back in 2004 when the John Doe madness started; but of course I'm a lawyer, not a philosopher.
Bottom line, though: this is a good thing, a very good thing. Ten (10) years late in coming, but good nonetheless. - R.B. )
Comment Re:The FCC has no right to dictate terms (Score 1) 208
As someone who, over the past 20 years, has designed outside plant for literally every single major ISP in the country, his ideas are hilarious. It's like a plumber watching House M.D. & then telling a neurosurgeon that he could do it better. "They can just upgrade the poles!" "They can just bury everything they can't put on a pole!" "Who care about that gas line & power cable!"
Video Don't Be a Server Hugger! (Video) 409
