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Ignorance of the law isn't a defense, but it should be. Our laws are so complex ...

"Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because `tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to confute him." - JOHN SELDEN, Table Talk

Which is your point. The law has become impossibly complex in some areas, so much so that ignorance has been successfully pleaded.

So we could have:

1. If I could not reasonably be expected to know a law exists, it does not apply to me.
2. If the law is so complex it requires a lawyer to explain, it is reasonable for me to disregard it, per (1).

MAZEL TOV!!!!!!!!

That works as long as the Peter Principle doesn't apply.

More than 0.3% negative feedback is a redflag; more than 1.0% is invariably a bad dealer or a con artist. Positive feedback numbers and content CAN be rigged via the "penny auctions" loophole, so in itself is fairly useless.

I sometimes deal with this ebay seller. She's as honest as they come -- she once sent me an unrequested refund because I overpaid her for shipping. She has ten thousand positive ratings. But she has 11 negative ratings. She does a lot of repeat business, so her positive count probably won't get much higher. But there are always bad buyers who think nothing's their fault. If she attracts 90 of those before she gets 1,000 new satisified customers, she meets your definition of "bad dealer or con artists." That's totally unfair.

And your notions of how sellers can inflate their ratings don't make any sense either. Hundreds of positive ratings from a single user would be a dead giveaway -- and wouldn't affect your rating. So you'd have to create hundreds of bogus users. I suppose that's doable with scripts. But if you're that good, you can conduct hundreds of auctions for nonexistent merchandise and sell it to yourself at inflated prices. That's not something you could detect by filtering out low bids.

But let's just say I'm wrong, and that you can fake a lot of positives. Then it makes no sense to use percentages at all! If you can always add more positives, then you can always bring your negative percentage down.

I don't think it makes sense to rely on statistics in any form. You have to get a sense of who you're dealing with. That's not something that shows up through numbers and rules-of-thumb.

And although outright fraud gets the headlines, the big hazard of buying on ebay is not crooks but flakes. And those are pretty easy to detect.

Yeah, Techno fetishists everywhere are already creaming their pants over the demonstration of the new "doctrine" of remote warfare displayed by the US in the Afghan War.

It's certainly good for initial deployment and aerial interdiction and control, but remains untested for endgame positional tactics using soft assets.

But this development is nothing that Our Prophet Philip Dick did not foresee in such stories as Second Variety .

It reminds me of how Twain saw the devastating and immobilizing affect on warfare of machine guns and trench technology in the closing chapters of his 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court .

Or HG Wells foreseeing aerial warfare and the bombardment of cities and civilian populations in The War in the Air .

But because war is politics by any means necessary, when one approach is blocked the street will find a way to express itself through another. If politicized groups and countries cannot hope to use conventional warfare, then they will move on to more promising avenues and asymmetrical opportunities. Things more horribly inventive than destroying buildings with sharp knives and opportunity.

And as so many here have pointed out, most of this is self-serving propgaanda. 30% of munitions dropped still fail to explode. And this article points out, the Rout of the Taliban was largely a social victory. Factions on the ground saw which way the wind was blowing, shaved their beards, and changed sides.

But most of the same local bosses are still running things... why else do you think so many high-profile "Taliban" are being let go. Why is it proving so difficult to arrest Omar, a practically dead, half-blind guy doing a Steve McQueen on a motorbike?



Meanwhile, Blair ran a victory lap in Kabul. Right.

Remember, the Russians also "took" Afghanistan with virtually no resistance within a few months. But their mistake was to stay longer, and eventually the factions started uniting against them. That KC-130 that crashed, they are flying bricks. One hasn't crashed in error since the start of the 1970s. Odds are it was brought down by a shoulder-launched SAM at extremely close range.

And now the Marines are exiting and being replaced by the 101st, who'll be digging fortifying those bases that annoy the Russians so much. They are there for the long haul? I hope they have better luck than Reagan's Marines in Lebanon.

And why are Katz's articles so goddamn difficult to read? Does he go through a rewrite phase where he trys to find longer latinate words whenever possible, replacing anything short and punchy with polysyllabic monstrosities? A dose of Strunk and Whyte would go a long way there.

horrah for satan.
full context

Absence makes the heart grow fonder:
Isle of Beauty, fare thee well!
Isle of Beauty. , Thomas Haynes Bayly. (1797-1839)

Also the first line in an anonymous poem in Davidson' Poetical Rhapsody (1602) but probably popularized by Bayly.

See also:

Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.

Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder

Maintenance makes the heart grow fonder

Obsolesence makes the heart grow fonder

Absynth Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

etc.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder:
Isle of Beauty, fare thee well!
Isle of Beauty. , Thomas Haynes Bayly. (1797-1839)

Also the first line in an anonymous poem in Davidson' Poetical Rhapsody (1602) but probably popularized by Bayly.

See also:

Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.

Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder

Maintenance makes the heart grow fonder

Obsolesence makes the heart grow fonder

Absynth Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

etc.

Bring in Whoopi again.


Again? There was a lot of sexual inuendo, but I can't recall ever seeing folks actually going at it. Steamy scenes would bring in a different element though...

P.S. For those that might not know, whoopee (pronounced the same as Whoopi) is slang for having sex. In other words, this post is a farce.

A great gift for youngsters and oldsters alike.

The Harvard Classics. You can find them on eBay every now and then.

Next year, you can give them the Shelf of Fiction (scroll to the bottom).

The huge variation in price depends on how you acquire the lot. You can buy book-by-book in flea markets (making a charming shelf of odd-sized and colored books), or all in a lot, if you by a collection (making an impressive shelf, appropriate for a lawyer's TV commercial).

This is also a good gift for those who don't get much out of school: if you read through the entire shelf, you've basically acquired a liberal-arts education.

A great gift for youngsters and oldsters alike.

The Harvard Classics. You can find them on eBay every now and then.

Next year, you can give them the Shelf of Fiction (scroll to the bottom).

The huge variation in price depends on how you acquire the lot. You can buy book-by-book in flea markets (making a charming shelf of odd-sized and colored books), or all in a lot, if you by a collection (making an impressive shelf, appropriate for a lawyer's TV commercial).

This is also a good gift for those who don't get much out of school: if you read through the entire shelf, you've basically acquired a liberal-arts education.

Here's a link to a required reading for anyone interested in this subject. Funny thing is, it was written over a century ago. But, of course, it's timeless.

On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill

i thought it was "revolution is the opiate of the masses"...

It's worth pointing out that some of the meaning of the original quote has been lost. In Marx's day, "opiate" didn't mean "addictive recreational drug"; it meant "powerful, potentially harmful painkiller".

Put another way, Marx saw capitalism as a disorder for which religion was a dangerous, limited remedy, and communist revolution the cure.

Yecchhh, I'm actually defending Marx. I'm going to go take a shower now...

Don't have the Chicago Manual handy ...

Well, you know what? College is exciting compared to most I/T jobs....I say *most* because of the old saying:

For your job, you are allowed to pick two of the following:

1) High Paying
2) Fun
3) Legal

Truthfully, I'm at the same crossroads, after 5 years at my job. The job is great when it comes to job security and location, but as far a challenging goes, heh! most of the stuff I do is pulling data from databases and displaying it in a GUI that the business folks can't decide on. That being said, I realize most of my complaints are sourcing out of the fact that my job is cushy, so its easy to complain. In other words, go work in a nursing home for a week or two and then maybe C.S. will become interesting.

Keep in mind that any C.S. career is going to require that you love to learn new stuff endlessly...you will get to the point where you won't want to hear about that new programming language or new standard. You might even get to the point where you care more about your life outside of work and don't mind doing the routine things to get your project done....

Yeah, its a little hard to take pleasure in routine work well done since we don't live in a egragrian society anymore....(i.e. The Village Blacksmith ) but in a world where you are only adding value to someones bottom line...and you might not even see the results of your work being used around you or helping your neighborhood, however your work ethic should be the same. Otherwise, I recommend transfering to a tech school and learning how to run electric or something.

cf. "a little luny" in Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street written by Herman Melville in 1853:

"I prefer not to," he replied in a flute-like tone. It seemed to me that while I had been addressing him, he carefully revolved every statement that I made; fully comprehended the meaning; could not gainsay the irresistible conclusion; but, at the same time, some paramount consideration prevailed with him to reply as he did.

"You are decided, then, not to comply with my request? a request made according to common usage and common sense?"

He briefly gave me to understand that on that point my judgment was sound. Yes: his decision was irreversible.

It is not seldom the case that when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side. Accordingly, if any disinterested persons are present, he turns to them for some reinforcement for his own faltering mind.

"Turkey," said I, "what do you think of this? Am I not right?"

"With submission, sir," said Turkey, with his blandest tone, "I think that you are."

"Nippers," said I, "what do you think of it?"

"I think I should kick him out of the office."

(The reader of nice perceptions will here perceive that, it being morning, Turkey's answer is couched in polite and tranquil terms, but Nippers replies in ill-tempered ones. Or, to repeat a previous sentence, Nippers's ugly mood was on duty, and Turkey's off.)

"Ginger Nut," said I, willing to enlist the smallest suffrage in my behalf, "what do you think of it?"

"I think, sir, he's a little luny," replied Ginger Nut, with a grin.

"You hear what they say," said I, turning towards the screen, "come forth and do your duty."

You laugh, but if they had the power to do so, they would, eventually, find that power irresistible.

WORD HISTORY: Many central and south Asian states and regions end with the element -stan, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Baluchistan, Kurdistan, and Turkistan. This -stan is formed from the Iranian root *st-, "to stand, stay," and means "place (where one stays), home, country." Iranian peoples have been the principal inhabitants of the geographical region occupied by these states for over a thousand years. The names are compounds of -stan and the name of the people living there [[[afgans, kurds, etc-- --ac]]. Pakistan is a bit of an exception; its name was coined in 1933 using the suffix -istan from Baluchistan preceded by the initial letters of Punjab, Afghanistan, and Kashmir. Interestingly, a word almost identical in form, etymology, and meaning to the Iranian suffix -stan is found in Polish, which has a word stan meaning "state" (in the senses of both polity and condition). It can be found in the Polish name for the "United States of America," Stany Zjednoczone Ameryki (literally "States United of America").

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, generally regarded as the definitive reference work on quotations, attributes it to Benjamin Franklin. Here is the citation from the 1919 edition.

Franklin never even stole it for Poor Richard's Almanac

Well, you got that part right, at least. Franklin used it as the motto of his Historical Review of Pennsylvania, published in 1759, and not in Poor Richard's Almanac.

The earliest reference to such a quote was from Ludwig Thoma.

I see. I suppose this would be the same Ludwig Thoma who was born over a century after the publication of the Historical Review of Pennsylvania?

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, generally regarded as the definitive reference work on quotations, attributes it to Benjamin Franklin. Here is the citation from the 1919 edition.

Franklin never even stole it for Poor Richard's Almanac

Well, you got that part right, at least. Franklin used it as the motto of his Historical Review of Pennsylvania, published in 1759, and not in Poor Richard's Almanac.

The earliest reference to such a quote was from Ludwig Thoma.

I see. I suppose this would be the same Ludwig Thoma who was born over a century after the publication of the Historical Review of Pennsylvania?

BadDoggie writes:

[] How many times do you have to point out that Franklin never said the quotation contstantly mangled here (the one about security and liberty)? Ludwig Thoma. Ludwig Thoma. Ludwig Thoma. []

According to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, that was indeed Franklin.

BadDoggie writes:

[] How many times do you have to point out that Franklin never said the quotation contstantly mangled here (the one about security and liberty)? Ludwig Thoma. Ludwig Thoma. Ludwig Thoma. []

According to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, that was indeed Franklin.

BadDoggie writes:

[] How many times do you have to point out that Franklin never said the quotation contstantly mangled here (the one about security and liberty)? Ludwig Thoma. Ludwig Thoma. Ludwig Thoma. []

According to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, that was indeed Franklin.

BadDoggie writes:

[] How many times do you have to point out that Franklin never said the quotation contstantly mangled here (the one about security and liberty)? Ludwig Thoma. Ludwig Thoma. Ludwig Thoma. []

According to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, that was indeed Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin.

Here is the quote, attributed to Franklin, in the 1919 edition of Familiar Quotations (commonly referred to as Bartlett's Familiar Quotations). The 1919 edition is the most recent available online, but I was able to check a 1980 print edition, which also attributes the quote to Franklin.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is generally considered the definitive work on quotations, so if you're going to challenge it, please provide more evidence than your own assertion.

Is Bartlett's perfect? No, no reference work is. But I'm willing to accept it until I see more definitive evidence.

Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

steal
TRANSITIVE VERB: 1. To take (the property of another) without right or permission.

Microsoft is the Way, the Truth, and the Light. No one comes to the Internet but by Passport.

Read St. John, Chapter 14.

If you've heard of lutefisk, you have to be suspicious any time a Scandanavian uses "fresh" and "fish" in the same sentence :-)

That version came from Bartlett's, as posted on Bartleby.

Specific quote ref is here.

That version came from Bartlett's, as posted on Bartleby.

Specific quote ref is here.

If the government were working so effectively to control communication between citizens, we'd be talking tyranny and armed revolution. When corporations do the heavy lifting on their behalf, we bitch and moan on Slashdot.

Yet any system that allows distribution of copyrighted materials despite the wishes of powerful interests is invaluable for a parallel purpose: trading ideas and information that the government would like to suppress.

For example, Daniel Ellsberg might well have distributed the Pentagon Papers via P2P. Secure P2P could have been used to distribute suppressed writings in the former USSR in place of laboriously mimeographed samizdat. Not long ago, Linda Tripp held tapes that could destroy the president of the United States-- a terrifying position. Nowadays, she might post them on Freenet.

The existence of a mechanism for ordinary people to trade information by a means uncontrolled by elites shifts the power balance in an important, positive way. But here's a chilling thought: almost the same words were spoken in the early days of radio. People celebrated it as a new, uncontrolled medium for public expression of ideas that would enhance democracy in America. Now major stations are controled by media megacorps and low-power radio is flat-out illegal. Is this the future of P2P?

With certainty, there will be further occasions when the public needs to communicate through channels outside government control. The moment some politically explosive document is released on Freenet, the Supreme Court is going to take a very different view of P2P. I hope Freenet lasts long enough for this to happen.

Perhaps one need not reinvent the wheel in figuring out how to oppose RIAA and MPAA. Many organizations have a long history of fighting powerful interests and well-established techniques. It's remarkable that a fringey, but dedicated outfit like Earthfirst! manages to be more active than the 50 million Napster users combined. That need not continue.

> "A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order
> will lose both, and deserve neither."

According to Bartletts, Ben Franklin said this, not Jefferson.

Virg

Actually, according to Bartleby, the quote is "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Mark Duell

At least the people in our prisons have generally broken some law, rather than, for example, saying something nasty about Saddam Hussein. And 'corrupt government' is practically a tautology everywhere.

Financial success and stability in the U.S., or a lower crime rate, better health care

Better health care?
Average life expectancy in the United States: 77.12 years
Average life expectancy in Iran: 69.66 years
(Source)

, and better education anywhere else

Better education... unless you're a woman, or follow another religion, or...

Yes, the bathroom-tile man-machine argument sounds pretty 'out there'; however, there is a long tradition of books attempting to connect-up seemingly dispirate myths, legends, stories and poems. Taken in abstract, Robert Graves's claim that the stories of Jesus and Hercules are different versions of the same myth, sounds mad. Perhaps it is, but Graves's justification takes a few hundred pages and is pretty convincing. By the time he goes into how theories of accretion can pollute oral narratives and the effect of the written-word in making particular versions of stories more canonical than others, he's made a point.

Fact is, Wheat wasn't the first nor will he be the last. Sir James Frazer's 'The Golden Bough', Joseph Campbell's 'The Hero With a Thousand Faces', etc, etc, etc, are all equally mad. But each of them is attempting to do something very human and touching: they are attempting to detect some order, sanity, ration and reason in an otherwise pretty random and chaotic world -- just as Kubrick was doing, just as Homer was doing...

Having trouble finding online dictionaries?
--
Patrick Doyle

definition of can't from www.dictionary.com:

"can't \Can't\ A colloquial contraction for can not."

Colloquial means that it is used in conversation, but is not valid English.

>I'm pretty sure you actally don't.

I'm pretty sure he does.

>Any plausible explanation is wellcome as a theory

There. You just confirmed it. You don't know what "theory" means. You just defined "hypothesis".

>Anyway, I don't think you actually test the theory

You do if you're interested in doing science.

>Ensteinian theory, as elegant as it might be is not tested

Nonsense. Not only is it tested, it's been confirmed. Over and over again. In fact, few scientific theories, other than the round-earth theory, are better confirmed than Special Relativity and General Relativity. If you even bothered to do a web search, you would pick up things like this.

> unless ... it will never prove your theory.

No theory is provable. By definition. (You do know the difference between "prove" and "confirm", don't you?)

The current Linux development model has some problems and Linus needs tools to help solve those problems. Without a decent distributed source management system, all of the merging and tracking work falls on Linus' shoulders and that is getting to be way too much for any one person, even someone like Linus. The goal of the Bitkeeper effort is to provide tools that help the Linux kernel effort, and more specifically, help Linus.

Unfortunately, it has sat in "ready Real Soon Now" status for a long time now. I'd hazard the guess that a bunch of developers are feeling rebellious about the fact that it is not free software.

By the way, the "let's set up a CVS repository" idea has the conspicuous demerit at "send the patch to Linus time" that it is still going to take a lot of effort to make sure that the patches that get sent on to Linus are reasonably perspicuous. You're still left with the dilemma that:

• If you send him each and every patch, that represents a huge number of patches to evaluate, and if they're tiny and keep changing all the time as developers experiment things, it is certainly not a perspicuous set of changes.
• If you send him patches periodically, they'll bulk up, hopefully meaning that some of the little changes that go back and forth as people experiment before resolving to Regis' "Final Answer" will fold together.

  But this will tend to "bulk up" into something that involves a horde of changes, which again will not be terribly perspicuous.

• If you wait longer between times that updates get released to Linus, the deltas will get bigger and bigger, and become just too big and unperspicuous to get applied to the "official" kernel.

This is certainly spelled "dilemma," as all the alternatives are pretty poor...

But at the same time, we insist that the government be involved in every other aspect of our lives, trusting them with far more potentially pernicious powers in those areas. I'm here referring to Hayek's Road to Serfdom. While this is a more libertarian forum than the population as a whole, I wonder why the solution to DCS1000 seems to be outrage that they are betraying the trust we gave them. If they can't be trusted with the power, why trust them with the prerogative to acquire the power? Why put them in a position to betray our trust if we don't trust them? Or if we do trust them with the prerogative to acquire the power, why not with the power itself? This doesn't seem like a coherent position, to both trust and withhold trust.

If we were really concerned with limiting the powers of government, on the idea that we can't trust its executors, we would paraphrase Madison, Hamilton, and Jay not Benjamin Franklin (the latter portion, about receiving neither, is apocryphal -- it was added by people disturbed by the suggestion that, even if we got security, we would not deserve it if we so abandoned our freedom. Not that I think Moonwick is such a one; the tenor of his comment suggests that he was merely paraphrasing the misquotation of another who could not accept the radicalism of Franklin's statement.)

P.S., So if I'm doing a doctoral dissertation on James Madison, does that make this post flame-bait, insightful, or a troll?

According to Bartleby, it's Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, though it was apparently a common saying at the time.

I hope they are going to do it with humans, since for some species, parthenogenesis is the normal way to reproduce.

But let's be honest. We always knew it: Sex is best.

The Elements of Style

But they aren't the only projects out there, so why not publicize the other hard-working e-text sites, like etext.org, textfiles.com, project goatenberg, and project bartleby? I urge you all to help these other great projects get the recognition they so deserve!

Peter Principle

Robin William's" - Williams'

On a proper name, you use the full "apostrophe S". So you would use "Robin Williams's".

--

For tax expense purposes, the IRS treats off-the-shelf commercial software as a depreciable intangible asset. When you buy, say, Office 97 for $600, the IRS makes you write it off in $200 chunks over 3 years.

So why can't software copyrights be the same way? 3 years is about the real practical shelf life limit for most software. Heck, most games end up in the remainder bin a lot sooner. 75 years is rediculous for something as ephemeral as software. By that time the aluminum substrate on the CD will have long since oxidized. There will be nothing for the future Bartlebys of the late 21st century to salvage.

I know this is way off topic, but, the title to this story should really be "What if there were no copyright law?" In English, you should use the subjunctive tense of the verb "be" when you make a statement that is contrary to fact. See The American Heritage Book of English Usage for an explanation.

According to a Merriam-Webster article on the subject, this usage dates back to the '50s. Here's another more concise description.

But thanks for the challenge, I'm bored too. Or more accurately, I'm avoiding doing some economically useful work because it is as boring as hell.