Discovery News - Top Stories
Information communications and technologies, such as the internet, account for approximately as much carbon dioxide emissions as the aviation industry.
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Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Report: Crashes at red-light camera intersections are down
MiamiHerald.com: Florida
Safety stats may have a say in whether the cameras are here to stay.
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Cliff deal includes at least $67.9B for special interests
As part of a last-second deal to slam the brakes on an economy racing toward the so-called fiscal cliff, Congress gave the green light this week to extending dozens of business and industry tax breaks.
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Requests for gun permits spikes in Florida
MiamiHerald.com: Florida
Numbers surge after President Obama's re-election and the Sandy Hook mass shootings.
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Florida outsources inmate medical care
MiamiHerald.com: Florida
Four of the major prisons where health care is being privatized are in Miami-Dade.
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Heroin deaths creep up statewide as other opiates become too expensive
MiamiHerald.com: Florida
Every time her son, Tod, relapsed, Maureen Barrett sat with him all day at a rehab facility, hoping she could save him.
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Beware Spice Abuse
Discovery News - Top Stories
Cinnamon and nutmeg can pose risks to kids seeking a quick thrill.
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UN says Syria death toll has passed 60,000
AL JAZEERA ENGLISH (AJE)
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says number of deaths since conflict began in March 2011 "is truly shocking".
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1913 vs. 2013: Where Were We Then, Where Are We Now?
The Rundown News Blog
Our world has changed a lot in 100 years. On this first day of 2013, we compare the world in 1913 and today.
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No Regulation? No Problem
In the short time since President Obama was re-elected, government has issued hundreds of new regulations. The bureaucrats never stop. There are now more than 170,000 pages of federal regulations.
President Obama wants still more rules. Cheering on increased financial regulation, he said, "We've got to keep moving forward." To the president, and probably most Americans, "forward" means passing more laws.
It is scary to think about a world without regulation. Intuition leads us to think that without government we'd be victims of fraud, as I explain in my latest book, "No, They Can't!" But our intuition is wrong.
Consider this: An entire sector of the economy operates almost entirely without government controls. Complete strangers exchange big money there every day.
It's the Internet. It does have regulation, just not government regulation.
On my next TV show, titled "Freedom 2.0" (which the Fox Business Network airs this Thursday at 9 p.m. EST), economics professor Ed Stringham explains that Paypal.com, which transfers billions of dollars for people, at first assumed they needed government help to prevent fraud.
"They faced fraudsters from all over the world. They turned to the FBI," says Stringham. "But the FBI had no idea who these people were."
So PayPal invented a new form of regulation. "They developed a private fraud detection system, where they used computers to say, 'This might be fraudulent,' and then it would send it to a human to investigate that." That dramatically reduced fraud, and PayPal thrived.
EBay's business model is also threatened by fraud. How can a buyer trust that, say, a seller will actually deliver a $25 pack of baseball cards and that the cards will be what he claims they are? In theory, you could sue; but in practice, our legal system is too slow and costly for that.
So eBay came up with self-regulation: The buyers rate the sellers.
"EBay and other groups developed private reputation mechanisms," says Stringham. "When you go onto eBay, you know there's a 99 percent chance that you're going to get the goods delivered."
Private companies found they could "crowd-source" enforcement against fraud and low-quality products, in much the same way that Wikipedia discovered an encyclopedia could be created without a central organizer. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales tells me that method "works far better than the top-down system that it replaced."
We almost always assume that top-down government regulation is necessary, even though history says otherwise. Did you know that stock markets began without government regulation?
Stringham researched how the first stock exchanges developed in London in the 1700s: "Government refused to enforce all but the most simple contracts. Nevertheless, brokers figured out how to do short sales, futures contracts, options contracts—even though none was enforceable by law."
They came up with private enforcement.
"They traded in coffeehouses. And after a while, they decided: 'Let's enforce rules within this coffeehouse. If you default, you're going to get kicked out of the coffeehouse, and we're going to call you a lame duck.'" (Because you had to waddle out of the coffeehouse. That's actually where the phrase "lame duck" originated.)
Years of consumer reporting have taught me that such private regulation is better for consumers than the piles of rules produced by our bloated government.
Worse, government's micromanagement stifles innovation. Companies now invest in lawyers and "compliance officers," rather than engineers and creators.
Those that don't may get shut down.
Intrade is an innovative "prediction market" website where people bet about future events—who will win the Oscars, elections, etc. The betting odds are great indicators of what will happen in the future because people think carefully before putting their money on the line.
But a government agency called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission determined that Intrade's bets are "commodity options" and Intrade does not have the right license to trade those options. The agency sued, and Intrade decided it had to close its site to Americans. The result: We lose knowledge—and opportunity.
President Obama is wrong. We don't need new rules. Government should stop adding regulations—or try following the Stossel Law: For every new rule, repeal two old ones.
President Obama wants still more rules. Cheering on increased financial regulation, he said, "We've got to keep moving forward." To the president, and probably most Americans, "forward" means passing more laws.
It is scary to think about a world without regulation. Intuition leads us to think that without government we'd be victims of fraud, as I explain in my latest book, "No, They Can't!" But our intuition is wrong.
Consider this: An entire sector of the economy operates almost entirely without government controls. Complete strangers exchange big money there every day.
It's the Internet. It does have regulation, just not government regulation.
On my next TV show, titled "Freedom 2.0" (which the Fox Business Network airs this Thursday at 9 p.m. EST), economics professor Ed Stringham explains that Paypal.com, which transfers billions of dollars for people, at first assumed they needed government help to prevent fraud.
"They faced fraudsters from all over the world. They turned to the FBI," says Stringham. "But the FBI had no idea who these people were."
So PayPal invented a new form of regulation. "They developed a private fraud detection system, where they used computers to say, 'This might be fraudulent,' and then it would send it to a human to investigate that." That dramatically reduced fraud, and PayPal thrived.
EBay's business model is also threatened by fraud. How can a buyer trust that, say, a seller will actually deliver a $25 pack of baseball cards and that the cards will be what he claims they are? In theory, you could sue; but in practice, our legal system is too slow and costly for that.
So eBay came up with self-regulation: The buyers rate the sellers.
"EBay and other groups developed private reputation mechanisms," says Stringham. "When you go onto eBay, you know there's a 99 percent chance that you're going to get the goods delivered."
Private companies found they could "crowd-source" enforcement against fraud and low-quality products, in much the same way that Wikipedia discovered an encyclopedia could be created without a central organizer. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales tells me that method "works far better than the top-down system that it replaced."
We almost always assume that top-down government regulation is necessary, even though history says otherwise. Did you know that stock markets began without government regulation?
Stringham researched how the first stock exchanges developed in London in the 1700s: "Government refused to enforce all but the most simple contracts. Nevertheless, brokers figured out how to do short sales, futures contracts, options contracts—even though none was enforceable by law."
They came up with private enforcement.
"They traded in coffeehouses. And after a while, they decided: 'Let's enforce rules within this coffeehouse. If you default, you're going to get kicked out of the coffeehouse, and we're going to call you a lame duck.'" (Because you had to waddle out of the coffeehouse. That's actually where the phrase "lame duck" originated.)
Years of consumer reporting have taught me that such private regulation is better for consumers than the piles of rules produced by our bloated government.
Worse, government's micromanagement stifles innovation. Companies now invest in lawyers and "compliance officers," rather than engineers and creators.
Those that don't may get shut down.
Intrade is an innovative "prediction market" website where people bet about future events—who will win the Oscars, elections, etc. The betting odds are great indicators of what will happen in the future because people think carefully before putting their money on the line.
But a government agency called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission determined that Intrade's bets are "commodity options" and Intrade does not have the right license to trade those options. The agency sued, and Intrade decided it had to close its site to Americans. The result: We lose knowledge—and opportunity.
President Obama is wrong. We don't need new rules. Government should stop adding regulations—or try following the Stossel Law: For every new rule, repeal two old ones.
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Fla. workers' comp insurance market remains strong
MiamiHerald.com: Florida
An annual report says Florida's workers' compensation insurance market remains strong and competitive.
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A New Year means new laws for Florida drivers
Firstcoastnews.com Local News
JACKSONVILLE, Fla.- It is a new year in the Sunshine State and on Florida's roadways there are some new laws in effect.
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Obama enacts anti-Iran bill for the Americas
AL JAZEERA ENGLISH (AJE)
President Obama signs into law bill passed by Congress requiring State Department to employ new strategy against Tehran.
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Police deaths down 23 percent this year in US
The number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty fell sharply in 2012, the first full year that two Obama administration police safety programs were in effect.
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Mayor Brown Unveils Retirement Reform Initiative For Fire Employees
City of Jacksonville - News RSS
Mayor Alvin Brown promised earlier this year that he would unveil a retirement reform initiative no later than the end of 2012. In October and November, the City of Jacksonville negotiating team unveiled his reform proposal for police employees in the Police and Fire Pension Fund (PFPF) and for non-public safety employees in the General Employees Retirement Plan (GERP).
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Florida Department of Juvenile Justice calls executive’s pay ‘excessive’
MiamiHerald.com: Florida
The state says the hefty paydays need to stop, and the money should instead go to helping kids.
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Half the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong
Dinosaurs were cold-blooded. Increased K-12 spending and lower pupil/teacher ratios boost public school student outcomes. Most of the DNA in the human genome is junk. Saccharin causes cancer and a high fiber diet prevents it. Stars cannot be bigger than 150 solar masses.
In the past half-century, all of the foregoing facts have turned out to be wrong. In the modern world facts change all of the time, according to Samuel Arbesman, author of the new book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date (Current).
Fact-making is speeding up, writes Arbesman, a senior scholar at the Kaufmann Foundation and an expert in scientometrics, the science of measuring and analyzing science. As facts are made and remade with increasing speed, Arbesman is worried that most of us don't keep up to date. That means we're basing decisions on facts dimly remembered from school and university classes—facts that often turn out to be wrong.
In 1947, the mathematician Derek J. de Solla Price was asked to store a complete set of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society temporarily in his house. Price stacked them in chronological order by decade, and he noticed that the number of volumes doubled about every 15 years, i.e., scientific knowledge was apparently growing at an exponential rate. Thus the field of scientometrics was born.
Price started to analyze all sorts of other kinds of scientific data, and concluded in 1960 that scientific knowledge had been growing steadily at a rate of 4.7 percent annually for the last three centuries. In 1965, he exuberantly observed, "All crude measures, however arrived at, show to a first approximation that science increases exponentially, at a compound interest of about 7 percent per annum, thus doubling in size every 10–15 years, growing by a factor of 10 every half century, and by something like a factor of a million in the 300 years which separate us from the seventeenth-century invention of the scientific paper when the process began."
A 2010 study in the journal Scientometrics, looking at data between 1907 and 2007, concurred: The "overall growth rate for science still has been at least 4.7 percent per year."
Since knowledge is still growing at an impressively rapid pace, it should not be surprising that many facts people learned in school have been overturned and are now out of date. But at what rate do former facts disappear? Arbesman applies to the dissolution of facts the concept of half-life—the time required for half the atoms of a given amount of a radioactive substance to disintegrate. For example, the half-life of the radioactive isotope strontium-90 is just over 29 years. Applying the concept of half-life to facts, Arbesman cites research that looked into the decay in the truth of clinical knowledge about cirrhosis and hepatitis. "The half-life of truth was 45 years," he found.
In other words, half of what physicians thought they knew about liver diseases was wrong or obsolete 45 years later. Similarly, ordinary people's brains are cluttered with outdated lists of things, such as the 10 biggest cities in the United States.
Facts are being manufactured all of the time, and, as Arbesman shows, many of them turn out to be wrong. Checking each one is how the scientific process is supposed to work; experimental results need to be replicated by other researchers. So how many of the findings in 845,175 articles published in 2009 and recorded in PubMed, the free online medical database, were actually replicated? Not all that many. In 2011, a disquieting study in Nature reported that a team of researchers over 10 years was able to reproduce the results of only six out of 53 landmark papers in preclinical cancer research.
In 2005, the physician and statistician John Ioannides published "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" in the journal PLoS Medicine. Ioannides cataloged the flaws of much biomedical research, pointing out that reported studies are less likely to be true when they are small, the postulated effect is likely to be weak, research designs and endpoints are flexible, financial and nonfinancial conflicts of interest are common, and competition in the field is fierce. Ioannides concluded that "for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias." Still, knowledge marches on, spawning new facts and changing old ones.
Another reason that personal knowledge decays is that people cling to selected "facts" as a way to justify their beliefs about how the world works. Arbesman notes, "We persist in only adding facts to our personal store of knowledge that jibe with what we already know, rather than assimilate new facts irrespective of how they fit into our worldview." All too true; confirmation bias is everywhere.
So is there anything we can do to keep up to date with the changing truth? Arbesman suggests that simply knowing that our factual knowledge bases have a half-life should keep us humble and ready to seek new information. Well, hope springs eternal.
More daringly, Arbesman suggests, "Stop memorizing things and just give up. Our individual memories can be outsourced to the cloud." Through the Internet, we can "search for any fact we need any time." Really? The Web is great for finding an up-to-date list of the 10 biggest cities in the United States, but if the scientific literature is littered with wrong facts, then cyberspace is an enticing quagmire of falsehoods, propaganda, and just plain bunkum. There simply is no substitute for skepticism.
Toward the end of his book, Arbesman suggests that "exponential knowledge growth cannot continue forever." Among the reasons he gives for the slowdown is that current growth rates imply that everyone on the planet would one day be a scientist. The 2010 Scientometrics study also mused about the growth rate in the number of scientists and offered a conjecture "that the borderline between science and other endeavors in the modern, global society will become more and more blurred." Most may be scientists after all. Arbesman notes that "the number of neurons that can be recorded simultaneously has been growing exponentially, with a doubling time of about seven and a half years." This suggests that brain/computer linkages will one day be possible.
I, for one, am looking forward to updating my factual knowledge daily through a direct telecommunications link from my brain to digitized contents of the Library of Congress.
In the past half-century, all of the foregoing facts have turned out to be wrong. In the modern world facts change all of the time, according to Samuel Arbesman, author of the new book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date (Current).
Fact-making is speeding up, writes Arbesman, a senior scholar at the Kaufmann Foundation and an expert in scientometrics, the science of measuring and analyzing science. As facts are made and remade with increasing speed, Arbesman is worried that most of us don't keep up to date. That means we're basing decisions on facts dimly remembered from school and university classes—facts that often turn out to be wrong.
In 1947, the mathematician Derek J. de Solla Price was asked to store a complete set of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society temporarily in his house. Price stacked them in chronological order by decade, and he noticed that the number of volumes doubled about every 15 years, i.e., scientific knowledge was apparently growing at an exponential rate. Thus the field of scientometrics was born.
Price started to analyze all sorts of other kinds of scientific data, and concluded in 1960 that scientific knowledge had been growing steadily at a rate of 4.7 percent annually for the last three centuries. In 1965, he exuberantly observed, "All crude measures, however arrived at, show to a first approximation that science increases exponentially, at a compound interest of about 7 percent per annum, thus doubling in size every 10–15 years, growing by a factor of 10 every half century, and by something like a factor of a million in the 300 years which separate us from the seventeenth-century invention of the scientific paper when the process began."
A 2010 study in the journal Scientometrics, looking at data between 1907 and 2007, concurred: The "overall growth rate for science still has been at least 4.7 percent per year."
Since knowledge is still growing at an impressively rapid pace, it should not be surprising that many facts people learned in school have been overturned and are now out of date. But at what rate do former facts disappear? Arbesman applies to the dissolution of facts the concept of half-life—the time required for half the atoms of a given amount of a radioactive substance to disintegrate. For example, the half-life of the radioactive isotope strontium-90 is just over 29 years. Applying the concept of half-life to facts, Arbesman cites research that looked into the decay in the truth of clinical knowledge about cirrhosis and hepatitis. "The half-life of truth was 45 years," he found.
In other words, half of what physicians thought they knew about liver diseases was wrong or obsolete 45 years later. Similarly, ordinary people's brains are cluttered with outdated lists of things, such as the 10 biggest cities in the United States.
Facts are being manufactured all of the time, and, as Arbesman shows, many of them turn out to be wrong. Checking each one is how the scientific process is supposed to work; experimental results need to be replicated by other researchers. So how many of the findings in 845,175 articles published in 2009 and recorded in PubMed, the free online medical database, were actually replicated? Not all that many. In 2011, a disquieting study in Nature reported that a team of researchers over 10 years was able to reproduce the results of only six out of 53 landmark papers in preclinical cancer research.
In 2005, the physician and statistician John Ioannides published "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" in the journal PLoS Medicine. Ioannides cataloged the flaws of much biomedical research, pointing out that reported studies are less likely to be true when they are small, the postulated effect is likely to be weak, research designs and endpoints are flexible, financial and nonfinancial conflicts of interest are common, and competition in the field is fierce. Ioannides concluded that "for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias." Still, knowledge marches on, spawning new facts and changing old ones.
Another reason that personal knowledge decays is that people cling to selected "facts" as a way to justify their beliefs about how the world works. Arbesman notes, "We persist in only adding facts to our personal store of knowledge that jibe with what we already know, rather than assimilate new facts irrespective of how they fit into our worldview." All too true; confirmation bias is everywhere.
So is there anything we can do to keep up to date with the changing truth? Arbesman suggests that simply knowing that our factual knowledge bases have a half-life should keep us humble and ready to seek new information. Well, hope springs eternal.
More daringly, Arbesman suggests, "Stop memorizing things and just give up. Our individual memories can be outsourced to the cloud." Through the Internet, we can "search for any fact we need any time." Really? The Web is great for finding an up-to-date list of the 10 biggest cities in the United States, but if the scientific literature is littered with wrong facts, then cyberspace is an enticing quagmire of falsehoods, propaganda, and just plain bunkum. There simply is no substitute for skepticism.
Toward the end of his book, Arbesman suggests that "exponential knowledge growth cannot continue forever." Among the reasons he gives for the slowdown is that current growth rates imply that everyone on the planet would one day be a scientist. The 2010 Scientometrics study also mused about the growth rate in the number of scientists and offered a conjecture "that the borderline between science and other endeavors in the modern, global society will become more and more blurred." Most may be scientists after all. Arbesman notes that "the number of neurons that can be recorded simultaneously has been growing exponentially, with a doubling time of about seven and a half years." This suggests that brain/computer linkages will one day be possible.
I, for one, am looking forward to updating my factual knowledge daily through a direct telecommunications link from my brain to digitized contents of the Library of Congress.
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Florida forgave $124.2 million in taxes and fines
MiamiHerald.com: Florida
For the third year in a row, Florida is giving up on collecting more than $100 million in taxes, fees and fines owed the state.
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Florida governor asks Obama to block possible ports strike
MIAMI (Reuters) - Florida's Republican governor wants President Barack Obama to invoke federal law and order a cooling-off period if nearly 15,000 longshoremen walk off the job in a looming strike that would be a big blow to the state's economy, according to a letter he sent the president this week.
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SMG keeps contract to operate EverBank Field, other city facilities
Jacksonville Local News – Jacksonville.com and The Florida Times-Union
SMG, the company that has managed EverBank Field for the past 20 years, will keep its contract to run city facilities after slashing its fee from almost $1 million to $100,000.The company signed a three-year agreement with the city, Mayor Alvin Brown announced Saturday, and will be able to earn an additional $100,000 in incentives on top of its base fee.
In return, the Philadelphia-based company will give the city an open-ended $1 million grant and establish a $500,000 fund to attract and promote events at city facilities.
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What’s Wrong With a Copyright Alert System?
In January, Internet service providers will begin sending notices to subscribers suspected of illegally downloading music or movies using peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. After five increasingly sternly worded warnings, subscribers' Internet access will be slowed down or partially blocked. This new "Copyright Alert System" is bound to raise the hackles of digital rights activists—but should it?
The system is the result of a private agreement between ISPs and the recording and movie industries. The agreement is nominally voluntary, although former New York Attorney General (now Governor) Andrew Cuomo strongly suggested to ISPs that they cooperate, and the Obama Administration's IP czar Victoria Espinel helped broker the deal.
Under the new system, copyright holders monitor P2P networks and note the IP addresses of users they believe are engaging in piracy. The suspect IP addresses are passed along to the ISPs, which match them to individual subscribers, and then send the copyright nastrygrams. The ISPs never reveal to copyright holders the identities of subscribers.
The first two messages are "educational" warnings that merely let subscribers know that illegal downloading has been detected on their accounts. These will have an effect, for example, by alerting parents who are unaware that their kids are file-sharing. The next two warnings are more strongly worded and must be acknowledged by clicking on a pop-up before subscribers can continue to use their Internet connections. Users will never be cut off from the Internet completely.
With the fifth and sixth warnings, ISPs will implement a "mitigation measure" of their choosing, which might be slowing down access speeds, or blocking access altogether until the subscriber contacts the ISP. Before such a punishment goes into effect, subscribers will have an opportunity to appeal to a private third-party arbitrator by paying a refundable $35 filing fee and explaining why they think they are not liable.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, among many other copyright skeptics, does not like the new program.
"Big media companies are launching a massive peer-to-peer surveillance scheme to snoop on subscribers," a recent EFF blog post reads. "Based on the results of that snooping, ISPs will be serving as Hollywood's private enforcement arm, without the checks and balances public enforcement requires. Once a subscriber is accused, she must prove her innocence, without many of the legal defenses she'd have in a courtroom."
I don't take a back seat to anyone in criticizing our out-of-control copyright system. Copyrights are too long and too strong, penalties for infringement are disproportionate, and federal enforcement has gotten out of hand. Yet those of us who seek to reform copyright should keep in mind that piracy is real, and copyright holders have a legitimate interest in enforcing their rights.
The EFF and others talk about surveillance and snooping, but in fact the monitoring in question takes place over publicly accessible networks. And while it's true that the Copyright Alert System's private arbitration flips the burden of proof, it's not clear "public enforcement" is really such a great alternative.
One form of public enforcement is the kind of mass litigation the recording industry engaged in until recently, suing tens of thousands of Internet users in civil court. They sometimes unmasked the subscribers behind suspected IP addresses using subpoenas, and they made defendants an offer they couldn't refuse: Accept a multi-thousand-dollar settlement or fight an expensive court battle that could potentially end in liability for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The other type of public enforcement is federal criminal prosecution, with disproportionate penalties and its own due process problems.
While the Copyright Alert System is far from perfect, it succeeds in treating illegal file-sharing as an infraction more akin to speeding, and less like grand larceny the way courts and prosecutors do. And the private system has its own set of checks and balances absent from public enforcement: ISPs have a strong incentive to ensure that their customers are not harassed by false positives or overzealous enforcement. (Indeed, the agreement limits the number of notices copyright holders may send in a month.) This is why the temptation to codify such a "six-strike" system in law the way France and other countries have should be resisted.
In the long run, the new system is likely to be ineffective at stopping piracy. Determined pirates will be able to detect and evade monitoring, spoof their IP addresses, or simply switch to other methods of file-sharing not covered by the agreement, like streaming or using locker sites or Usenet. In the short run, however, copyright alerts will attempt to nudge public norms that have increasingly moved toward widespread acceptance of file-sharing. Evidence suggests, though, that it's probably too late for that too.
Rather than dismiss the new system out of hand, those of us seeking a saner copyright regime should welcome this experiment while keeping a close eye on it. If nothing else, it's preferable to have content owners make constructive use of their private rights rather than rely on the power of the state.
The system is the result of a private agreement between ISPs and the recording and movie industries. The agreement is nominally voluntary, although former New York Attorney General (now Governor) Andrew Cuomo strongly suggested to ISPs that they cooperate, and the Obama Administration's IP czar Victoria Espinel helped broker the deal.
Under the new system, copyright holders monitor P2P networks and note the IP addresses of users they believe are engaging in piracy. The suspect IP addresses are passed along to the ISPs, which match them to individual subscribers, and then send the copyright nastrygrams. The ISPs never reveal to copyright holders the identities of subscribers.
The first two messages are "educational" warnings that merely let subscribers know that illegal downloading has been detected on their accounts. These will have an effect, for example, by alerting parents who are unaware that their kids are file-sharing. The next two warnings are more strongly worded and must be acknowledged by clicking on a pop-up before subscribers can continue to use their Internet connections. Users will never be cut off from the Internet completely.
With the fifth and sixth warnings, ISPs will implement a "mitigation measure" of their choosing, which might be slowing down access speeds, or blocking access altogether until the subscriber contacts the ISP. Before such a punishment goes into effect, subscribers will have an opportunity to appeal to a private third-party arbitrator by paying a refundable $35 filing fee and explaining why they think they are not liable.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, among many other copyright skeptics, does not like the new program.
"Big media companies are launching a massive peer-to-peer surveillance scheme to snoop on subscribers," a recent EFF blog post reads. "Based on the results of that snooping, ISPs will be serving as Hollywood's private enforcement arm, without the checks and balances public enforcement requires. Once a subscriber is accused, she must prove her innocence, without many of the legal defenses she'd have in a courtroom."
I don't take a back seat to anyone in criticizing our out-of-control copyright system. Copyrights are too long and too strong, penalties for infringement are disproportionate, and federal enforcement has gotten out of hand. Yet those of us who seek to reform copyright should keep in mind that piracy is real, and copyright holders have a legitimate interest in enforcing their rights.
The EFF and others talk about surveillance and snooping, but in fact the monitoring in question takes place over publicly accessible networks. And while it's true that the Copyright Alert System's private arbitration flips the burden of proof, it's not clear "public enforcement" is really such a great alternative.
One form of public enforcement is the kind of mass litigation the recording industry engaged in until recently, suing tens of thousands of Internet users in civil court. They sometimes unmasked the subscribers behind suspected IP addresses using subpoenas, and they made defendants an offer they couldn't refuse: Accept a multi-thousand-dollar settlement or fight an expensive court battle that could potentially end in liability for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The other type of public enforcement is federal criminal prosecution, with disproportionate penalties and its own due process problems.
While the Copyright Alert System is far from perfect, it succeeds in treating illegal file-sharing as an infraction more akin to speeding, and less like grand larceny the way courts and prosecutors do. And the private system has its own set of checks and balances absent from public enforcement: ISPs have a strong incentive to ensure that their customers are not harassed by false positives or overzealous enforcement. (Indeed, the agreement limits the number of notices copyright holders may send in a month.) This is why the temptation to codify such a "six-strike" system in law the way France and other countries have should be resisted.
In the long run, the new system is likely to be ineffective at stopping piracy. Determined pirates will be able to detect and evade monitoring, spoof their IP addresses, or simply switch to other methods of file-sharing not covered by the agreement, like streaming or using locker sites or Usenet. In the short run, however, copyright alerts will attempt to nudge public norms that have increasingly moved toward widespread acceptance of file-sharing. Evidence suggests, though, that it's probably too late for that too.
Rather than dismiss the new system out of hand, those of us seeking a saner copyright regime should welcome this experiment while keeping a close eye on it. If nothing else, it's preferable to have content owners make constructive use of their private rights rather than rely on the power of the state.
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Congress votes to expand borrowing authority for Sandy flood claims
Responding to the insurance claims of property owners hit by last October's super-storm Sandy, the House and Senate on Friday approved $9.7 billion in additional borrowing authority for the National Flood Insurance Program which covers property owners in flood-prone areas.
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US troops on Turkey border to man missile batteries
The first American military forces have "put boots on the ground" in Turkey to man Patriot missile batteries along the border with war-wracked Syria, defense officials told NBC News on Friday.
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Obama signs bill for Sandy flood insurance claims
Jacksonville Local News – Jacksonville.com and The Florida Times-Union
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has signed into law a $9.7 billion bill to pay flood insurance claims from Superstorm Sandy.The law increases the borrowing authority of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA had warned that it was set to run out of money without additional dollars from Congress.
The White House said more than 100,000 flood claim payments from Sandy would be delayed without the additional money.
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Homicides increase in 2012, but numbers lower than historic highs
Jacksonville Local News – Jacksonville.com and The Florida Times-Union
A four-year decline in the number of Jacksonville homicides ended in 2012 with a jump to 108 from 86 in 2011, according to preliminary counts of killings.Of the 2012 homicides, 93 were ruled murder, up from 72 in 2011.
There are important distinctions between homicide and murder. While all murders are homicides, not all homicides are murder. A homicide is one person killing another person, no matter the reason, and would include justifiable, excusable or accidental killings at the hands of another person.
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BofA in $10 billion settlement with Fannie Mae
Bank of America said Monday it reached a $10 billion settlement with Fannie Mae to resolve claims related to the sale and delivery of residential mortgage loans. The bank will pay Fannie Mae $3.6 billion, and buy back $6.8 billion in loans to settle mortgage claims.
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Oil sands' toxins end up in lakes
BBC News - US & Canada
Toxic pollutants released by oil sands mining operations are accumulating in freshwater ecosystems, a study by Canadian researchers suggests.
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UN: One million Syrians going hungry amid war
About 1 million Syrians are going short of food, most of them in conflict zones, due to government restrictions on aid distribution, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
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