Wait a minute. How can they assert that I have failed to pay a debt to them if they're refusing my fucking mail, which for all they know could contain a check to them?
Seriously, no, collect agencies can't refuse certified mail like that. People do, indeed, send them checks that way, usually if they're paying a large amount and want to make sure the collection agencies admits it got there by a certain day.
Refusing to accept certified mail would result in people who have interest-bearing accounts having a field day in court:
'I suspected they were taking a few extra days to file my payment, making sure I got hit with more interest. Sometimes I suspect they'd pretend the mail server 'lost' my payment entirely, and destroyed my check, so they could charge me more as I rushed another check to them. So I sent one payment certified to see exactly when it arrived. They didn't even accept it, sending it back to me, making me pay even more interest to mail it back using standard mail. The post office states someone refused to sign for it. Ergo, I'd like the judge to dismiss all interest whatsoever on this, and to cut the debt in half because of their malicious failure to accept my payments.'
Likewise, collection agencies are, of course, often involved in legal proceedings to try to collect a debt. I can just see what happens when they refuse to accept certified mail from an opposing council. The judge will crucify them.
Seriously, your 'knowledge' that collection services don't accept certified mail is bogus. In fact, no business gets away with refusing to accept certified mail...that's something only individuals do.
I believe the study also included suicide, which is, by far, the largest cause of gun deaths by people who own the gun legally. (Not including people in the military who actually run around shooting people, obviously.)
So you are 'more likely' to kill yourself or someone else in your family with a gun than to kill an intruder.
Which is true, because people are more likely to kill themselves or someone in their family than kill an intruder. With or without a gun.
Of course, in the normal world, we don't include statistics about things you choose to do when calculating the risks of things. The fact someone might choose to kill someone in their family is not actually a risk of gun ownership. (Gun ownership does make it slightly more likely they'd succeed, though, so it is slightly riskier to own a gun in that someone else in your family might succeed at killing you with it.)
Someone who hits someone, anyone, with a baseball bat enough to injure them should, in fact, be arrested, which simply means 'detained by the police'. "Hey, you hit this guy with a baseball bat, feel free to wander off."
Strictly speaking, at a crime scene, everyone is usually under arrest until the police sort out what happened. Even then, you're a material witness and they can legally detain (aka, arrest) you until you give them the story of what happened.
This is because people do not understand what 'arrest' means. An arrest is the police's power to physical prevent people from leaving somewhere. That's it. It is not, in any way, asserting they have committed a crime, although that is often the reason for it.
People who hit trespassers with weapons should not, however, be charged with anything and should be quickly released. As they usually are.
And, it's especially fun to hear people talk about what people were 'sued' over, especially if they're in favor of some sort of tort reform. I have to point out that tort reform would not and could not keep anyone from suing anyone for any reason whatsoever. It is not legally possible, nor is it slightly a good idea, to keep people from filing lawsuits.
Your logic sounds absurd, but considering that most people 'caught' and sued for running file sharing did not know they were, in fact, running software that did that, you have a pretty good point.
If the RIAA wants to remove 'intent' from actions you are civilly liable for, then they should be prepared for the consequences.
Here is a tricky thing when sharing stuff over the internet. If only one person at a time is accessing that content licence, is it really an infringement. Digital data is digital data, whether from a player to a nearby amp to a speaker, or whether from a player to a very distant amp to a speaker. So creating a library, that only one person at a time can access, all with legal content is not different from lending someone your cd, they listen to it and then return it you and then you or some one else can listen to that one legally licensed copy.
You are attempting to use logic when talking about copyright law. The RIAA does not believe that logic. The RIAA does not even agree that creating a digital library is legal in and of itself, much less letting others listen to it.
Okay, we've got two people here promoting PDF, who are apparently very very crazy.
Why the fuck would you want ebooks in PDF format?
PDF is for printing and making documents look identical on different computers. It is to transport documents with fonts, which change on different ereaders, and with margins, which change on different ereaders, and page sizes, which change on different ereaders, and line spacing, which change on different ereaders, and well, everything users might change as they read.
PDF is literally the exact opposite of what a useful ebook format would look like. ebooks need a small amount of format markup, such as bold and underline and center, along with images, along with a very very small amount of semantic markup.
They don't need damn page layouts, that is exactly the wrong thing to do for an ebook. PDF is a fine last resort to read if you have a document in that format, but it's a really stupid thing to aim ebooks at.
If you want a standard format, just use a standardized subset of HTML with some special rules to define a tiny amount of semantic markup such to indicate chapters and authors, like <div id="author"> or something, compressed in a standard format like.zip with some images. And, as an added bonus, this HTML could also work in a normal web browser.
The RIAA, right now, claims that ripping it to one computer is a copyright violation. You do not need a second computer involved.
This despite the fact that some format shifting has been outright declared fair use.
Sadly, these cases tend to involve required format shifting to listen to the music, like records to cassette tapes to play in a car. As a computer with a CD player can actually play CDs, legally, it might not be legal to rip to listen to them on a computer.
Luckily, it is required to listen to them on MP3 player, so court decisions would seem to imply that's fair use. Although, at some point, the RIAA was even stating that they were illegal to use, and, IIRC, sued, or at least threatened to sue, one of the early one that came with software to rip CDs.
The RIAA does go against people who only vaguely profit from music illegally, aka, people who play unlicensed-for-public-performance music in businesses and whatnot, which is a closer equivalent to using copied software and almost exactly what that BSA normally does. No one really minds this behavior.
What people do mind is them going against random people who violate copyright for their own use and getting huge awards out of them, especially when practically every person in existence has violated the copyright on music at some point.
It doesn't help that the 'making available' concept is bullshit. Making copies without the copyright holder's permission is illegal...offering to make copies without the copyright holder's permission, under any sane justice system, is not.
Normal human beings can see this, and can see that, at most, damages should limited to the actual violations that occurred, as the law actually says.
I don't have a problem with a story about someone doing that.
I was just pointing out that, when people actually attempt complicated plans like that in real life, such plans almost always end up failing horribly, especially when you do something as silly as making the two possible suspects be 'yourself and some other guy', one of you who has to be the murderer.
The safest thing to do, what has always been the safest thing to do, is to simply fail to appear on the suspect list at all, or to be so far down it that your faked alibi isn't investigated too much.
Which, if you're willing to kill a random person to frame someone else, is absurdly easy to do. You find simply find someone the guy you're framing dislikes, and that you 'have never heard of'.
And then a tiny amount of framing works. You can even skip the complicated thing I suggested, which was probably me being too 'intelligent' and overcomplicated things. Wait until the fall guy is at work, take the person to their house, kill them there, clean up the mess as good as you can, and hide the body in the woods somewhere it will be discovered after enough time has elapsed that the time of death is vague enough he could have done it.
If you have to break into his house, be very clever and make it look like a struggle happened there, and make off with weird stuff like his DVD player but not his laptop, so later, it looks like he actually invented this break-in to cover up the fight he had murdering someone. If you're really lucky, they'll discover minute amounts of blood when he reports the break-in, heh. Or, hehe, leave their fingerprints on something.
When you hide the body, include out some tiny clue to aim them at your fall guy, whereupon they will get a search warrant for his house and find the blood traces you 'missed', both on the floor and on the weapon you carefully cleaned and put back.
If all this fails horribly and they discover some hole in the plotting, at least they aren't instantly looking at you. They'll, first and foremost, be looking for other enemies of the victims, because most people aren't sociopathic enough to kill some random innocent person to frame someone they hate. (They will, instead, simply kill the person they hate.)
Oh, and, of course, if you're planning on doing this, for the love of Pete, clean out your browser cache after you read this, and then wipe the free space on your hard drive.;)
The alternate is not free electricity, but it is, a lot of the time, spare electricity.
Cars have 'overpowered' alternators because no one would be happy if repeatedly driving a car 2 miles resulted in a dead battery. So instead they provide enough power to charge the battery fairly rapidly.
After the battery is charged, yes, the load on them decreases, and they use less power, but they still provide a lot more electrical power than the car needs. I.e., there is a baseline load on the alternator that can't be removed, where it sucks X amount of energy out of the system, and converts it to electricity regardless.
But, more to the point, electric fans were just a hypothetical. It might be more efficient to use vacuum pressure from the engine, or just build really big exhaust filters, or who knows what. No one's really tried. Car companies get to the point where emission control starts costing them MPGs, and then only go as far as emission law requires.
Whereas if emissions were, instead of MPG, averaged across the fleet, and then the average lowered every year, they'd have incentives to actually invent ways to keep lowering them. And they'd even lower them at the expense of MPGs, which would be a very good thing.
Gasoline is an entity we can easily regulate and tax, and customers will pick cars with lower gas mileage by themselves. Well, at least, they should. And gas taxes should be high enough people do, in fact, want such cars.
But you can't tax emissions. And you can't regulate emissions except with emissions checks, and you can't really set those so low that correctly tuned older cars will fail them. The only way to regulate emissions is to force auto companies to sell new cars with lower emissions, or at least least tax them more for higher ones.
LSD isn't easily detectable but even if it was, it would damage the cops credability. They aren't going to say "how was he tricked into taking it", they are going to say, he was out of his mind when he did it. Besides, you can substitute anything for the LSD, the point was to make him act differently in an obviously noticeable way. When the cops behavior changes, then other things that you would never expect from him become more believable.
For future reference, people on LSD do not act 'differently'. They act like loons who are obviously hallucinating. Someone who'd been dosed with LSD in a cafe would probably not even be able to make it out the door. The police would be called, he'd be determined to be drugged, and they'd drug test him, and the food he was served.
You want them to act weird, give them PCP or something. Hallucinating is not 'acting different', it is 'either drugged or has suddenly caught schizophrenia'. Stress and extreme guilt, outside of Poe stories, does not actually result in hallucinations. You might be able to convince people that hallucinating gunshots was brought on by stress, but not hallucinating dancing giraffes.
As for the alibi, well that sort of takes care of itself when you accuse the cop of taking the girl.
It's still not a very good plan. First of all, cop cars have cameras, and GPSs, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this was before that.
More important, cops often, well, do things. What if he gets called somewhere right after pulling you over, and clearly doesn't have anyone in the car? Yes, you can assert she was in the trunk, but they will actually test the trunk, and discover she was not. (Lack of DNA from someone in the cab is reasonable. Lack of DNS from someone tied in a trunk, not really.)
What you did is make it literally where either you or the cop did the crime, and that means if he has any sort of alibi, you're busted.
And I don't think you have a very good acoustic premise with your fake gunshots. First of all, if you're firing actual bullets, they will, indeed, be loud, even inside a box. Secondly, other people will hear them.
Third, to attempt to make sure they don't, you're going to have to rig a radio control, which means you actually have to be there, which means when someone else does hear the gunshots, and the police actually start investigating, someone will have noticed you, and hey, isn't that the guy who claims that cop took the girl?
Like I said, this is exactly the sort of 'clever' criminal action that always backfires. It is not a good idea to make the criminal be either you or someone else, even if you're attempting to frame the someone else.
Actual LSD is unlikely to even be obtainable in non-blotter-paper form. It'd be hard to buy it as a liquid from anywhere but the lab that made it. It might be possible to throw the blotter paper in his drink, if it's something like coffee, but I have no idea what would happen to the LSD then.
And I didn't say it was detectable, I said it was 'testable', by which I mean it is fairly obvious when someone is on a frickin LSD trip, (It's unlikely he'd even make it to his car to hear these gunshots.) and if people show up with those symptoms, they will get drug tested.
So what would actually happen is that the cop shows up, drinks his drink, goes wacko or at least stares at things, other police get called in, they quickly determine he's actually been drugged, they test both him and his food, and find traces of LSD.
Possibly he manages to make it to the street to hear the gunshots, but at that point he's not going to be in any shape to call the police, and if he is, he certainly couldn't give a coherent account of 'how many gunshots' he heard, and he'd still be drug tested and the LSD would be discovered.
Even if the LSD isn't discovered in the drug test, he still has obviously been drugged with some hallucinogen. It's not some 'Oh, he's acting crazy' theory. People on LSD do not act 'slight weird' like they're having some sort of guilty conscious, they act like flippin loons who are hallucinating colors and staring at walls and can barely speak. Two seconds of talking to them gives them away.
And thus, because of the 'cleverness' of drugging the guy, when they eventually track down the girl and tie him to her, they're now looking at a guy who was drugged, in public, with LSD, the very next day for no discernible reason, and the case is going to look a hell of a lot more suspicious.
I'm not sure what drugs would make someone act erratic and sound paranoid and/or stressed, but LSD is not them. Cocaine would eventually do that, but it would take a long time. On the plus side, being a cocaine addict would damage credibility to start with, and explain violence in someone not previously violent, as opposed to someone who obviously got drugged with LSD in public.
I want to see a car like the Volt with a replaceable/removable generator.
Where you have a 'docking station' for the car and if you're going over 40 miles, you can drop the gasoline engine in. Otherwise, you leave it out, and save the weight.
And, of course, you could replace it with diesel if you wanted.
As another person replied, a series hybrid will never be more efficient than a straight engine,
I have to dispute that.
Yes, in theory, the laws of thermodynamics would seem to suggest that converting from gas to electric to power is less efficient than leaving out the middle step.
And if the engine in a car were simply fixed in place, rotating an axis at a set speed and torque, yes, you could not get more efficiency by going through an electrical system...but they aren't doing that.
Gasoline engines in cars then have to go through transmissions, they have to operate at different speeds instead of being tuned for one, they require a lot more powerful engines to actually acceleration and whatnot, which means they weigh more, and require more cooling and more cylinders, etc, etc.
Series hybrids won't have a transmission, they'll have a tiny engine, they'll have a tiny cooling system or no cooling at all, so the weight of the entire thing could be 500 pounds less. Their gas engine might be 50% more efficient than a normal gas engine, tuned exactly for the speed it operates at, with two or three cylinders. They don't need an extra alternator to suck power from the engine to drive the spark plugs. (Or, rather they do, but that's all they need.)
Ergo, it is theoretically possible to have a series hybrid system that is more efficient at moving a specific automobile than a straight gasoline engine could, even without any source but the engine charging the batteries. It's not likely, but it is possible in theory if you consider the entirety of the 'car moving' issue instead of just the thermodynamic 'converting to electricity' issue.
Of course, regenerative braking makes the issue moot, they're obviously more efficient if they do that. But they might be more efficient even without doing that.
Bingo. Fuel efficiency is a red herring. Especially as fuel efficiency and emissions are sometimes at odds with each other. I.e., adding more exhaust controls to reduce emissions can lower MPGs.(1)
If they just kept reducing the emissions allowed, cars would almost automatically become more energy efficient, as the easiest way to make them emit 10% less is to have them use 10% less gas.
Of course, you have to figure out what emissions, or have some sort of 'unit' system, where, for example, X amount of CO2 equals Y amount of sulfer equals Z amount of unburned gas, and add them all up, and the total has to be under a certain amount.
1) Although a lot of this can be counteracted in other ways. For example, how come no one's ever come up with an exhaust system with electric pressurization help, or at least fans? Using all that spare electricity gasoline cars have flowing around in them from the alternator, instead of having the gasoline engine have to force the exhaust through the exhaust cleaning system? Because car companies never needed to, they can reduce MPGs just as easily by cutting back on those emission controls instead.
Okay, the gunshots and the LSD part of your story are idiotic.
In fact, most intelligent people try to overcomplicate crimes. Using LSD requires you to buy LSD, and LSD is easily testable. Gee, it sure is suspicious that someone is drugging a cop just as he kills someone.
Likewise the gunshots. You think the cops sent to investigate that wouldn't look at suspicious boxes? You think others would not hear the gunshots? I mean, if every day, at ten o'clock, everyone hears a gunshot in a certain area, the obvious reason isn't going to be 'The cop there is crazy'.
The easiest way to frame someone for murder is to a) pick someone with a motive for them to murder, and you don't b) have a good alibi faked up for yourself, and c) commit the murder almost in front of them and have them walk up not two minutes later, d) steal the murder weapon from them beforehand.
a) Is isn't that hard, especially as motives for murders are often sorta silly.
b) is hard, but do-able, especially with another person or two. With two people, you can have one person really be there, and the second person, who stays mostly in shadows, 'be' the murderer and pay for things with his credit card, responds to that person's name, and carries his cell, at some movie theatre or something. So the alibi is 'I was out with my friend all night, paid for stuff with my credit card, didn't see anyone I knew'.
c) is easy...use their house. The trick is to do it when they can't prove they weren't there, but won't be there. Or, alternately, tie the person up, have a damn good escape route, and murder them the second the fall-guy drives up. (And don't forget, people being tied up have marks, ergo, you'll need to leave them tied up long enough for the fall-guy to have tied them up early.)
d) as for d), A tire iron is a good weapon...people will not notice that gone, but it's handy enough that people could plausibly grab it. Of course, if you're murdering someone in their house, just use some handy item. And then wash it off and put it back, if you have time.
Funny, I don't recall having seen the "actual definition" of solitary confinement anywhere.
Perhaps you should look at the actual words then. Prisoners are already confined. Solitary confinement confines them alone.
Any confinement where they are not confined with other people is solitary. That's it. That's what the words mean. It doesn't require the 'box' that you seem to think it does, it doesn't require no interaction with the outside world, it doesn't requires no books or mattress or whatever the hell you think it requires.
It simply requires that they are not confined with other people. That they are confined solitarily. Solitary. Confinement.
The research on the subject indicates that it's not particularly any better than regular maximum security for safety, though it is certainly more expensive.
So you're asserting that prisoners somehow harm others while in solitary confinement? Or that other prisoners make up the slack? What exactly are you trying to say here?
If you're trying to say that at least some violent prisoners will never learn to stop assaulting others, no matter how much we put them in solitary, that is certainly a plausible claim.
However, I have this to say to them: Fuck you. Stay in solitary, then.
People who are causing the violence in prisons come in second priority, psychologically, to those who are being attacked. Who are living in an environment where they fear for their live, despite being under government control.
If prisoners can't learn not to attack others, then they should, indeed, end up in their own cell (which will of course be smaller, being individual), and not actually be able to interact with any other prisoners they could attack.
Um, I don't think I advocated locking anyone in solitary confinement up for years, or even weeks.
Nor would I advocate using the current concept of solitary confinement which, as I've said elsewhere, is an attempt to harm people, not to remove them from the population.
The actual definition of 'solitary confinement', however, is simply 'prisoners don't get to interact with other prisoners'. It doesn't require them to have no human contact, it doesn't require them to have nothing to do. It simply requires them not speaking to people they've demonstrated they threaten. (Aka, other prisoners. The guard can live with threats.)
And it should not be used as punishment for general stuff. It should be used simply when a person has demonstrated they cannot interact with other prisoners without threatening them.
But I love how you're worried abut the psychological impact that solitary confinement might have on people, but don't seem to be worried about the hundreds of other people in prison who currently go through it in fear of their lives from that person, often joining racist gangs and committing violence because of that fear.
I'm sorry, but you're apparently in 1882 or something.
We now have things called 'cameras' that can record the entire prison population, inside cells and outside, at very little cost.
And we have the ability to look at what they record if any prisoner gives the slightest complaint that they were assaulted.
See, the problem isn't that people attack other prisoners. That's probably not possible to stop.
The problem is that they repeatedly attack other prisoners. Over and over. They have large gangs that run around intimidating people.
We could certainly stop that if we wanted to, by taking people who commit assault and, like I said, removing them from the prison population.
In fact, we could probably figure out who's likely to be such people in the first place, based on their crime and how they pulled it off. But, generally, we could just wait until people start committing violent actions, and remove them when they do.
Right. The point of prison is to provide a living environment away from others, without any of the luxuries like TV or whatnot. Perhaps you should be able to earn the right to watch TV, and stuff like that.
We can argue exactly where the minimum required is, but it should essentially just be a very bland and boring camp. You can read, or you can learn useful skills for the outside, or you can just lay around in your cell staring at the ceiling.
What it shouldn't be is an attempt to harm you. Prisoners should be not allowed to threaten other prisoners. (Who the hell gave them that privilege?) Anyone who does behave like that should be immediately removed from the general population.
Medical treatment should be promptly given, period. People should not be sleeping outside in tents either. They should have moderately comfortable beds, and be given eight hours of sleep each night.
Moreover, I'm going to go past that and say that certain things, like the group showering, shouldn't be tolerated there either. Even ignoring the history of assaults that happen in showers, it is simply there to be demeaning. Demeaning people is a great way to make them feel powerless, and making people feel powerless is a great way to make them exert power over others, often in criminal ways. Way to shoot ourselves in the foot.
Seriously, people. We're not putting people in prison to torture them. We're putting them there to get them away from the society they hurt, give them a chance to think about their behavior, try to give them some other skill instead of crime. (You will notice that this makes imprisoning people for drug abuse fairly pointless. But, hey, I can't help where logical conclusions go.)
Yes, some people will assert we're trying to discourage other criminals, but, no, that really doesn't work...criminals almost never believe they'll be caught. And if we really don't think that five years of 'reasonable' prison is nice, and they need five years of 'torture' prison, why the hell don't we just raise the sentencing terms and give them ten years of reasonable prison?
The answer is: Some people are fucking sadists and have decided that prisoners are 'fair game'.
The idea we can't stop crime in prison is idiotic. If people are even intimidating other people in prison, said intimidates should have their ability to interact with other prisoners revoked until they've learned their damn lesson.(1)
Hey, assholes, we put you in prison because you can't follow the law, you think running around threatening people, aka, committing felony assault, is going to fly?
Apparently, the answer is yes, and we've decided the prisoners 'deserve' whatever happens to them, and for some reason have failed to grasp what that actually means is we are allowing violent convicted criminals to continue to have fun. Forget a damn TV, how about we deny them the pleasure of raping someone? We don't even let innocent people rape people!
1) And, for all this talk about 'prison overcrowding', I suspect prison populations would be a lot easier to maintain, even more of them, if we'd simply move the 10% that cause the problems to solitary confinement until they stop causing damn problems.
Didn't we just have some sort of security issue with pulseadio and a NULL pointer?
Seriously, how hard is it for the OS to just blow up whatever program is running if it tries to access the memory location NULL, period? That is not a valid memory location, you cannot put things there, if you access it in any way, you die, no exceptions.
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Wait a minute. How can they assert that I have failed to pay a debt to them if they're refusing my fucking mail, which for all they know could contain a check to them?
Seriously, no, collect agencies can't refuse certified mail like that. People do, indeed, send them checks that way, usually if they're paying a large amount and want to make sure the collection agencies admits it got there by a certain day.
Refusing to accept certified mail would result in people who have interest-bearing accounts having a field day in court: 'I suspected they were taking a few extra days to file my payment, making sure I got hit with more interest. Sometimes I suspect they'd pretend the mail server 'lost' my payment entirely, and destroyed my check, so they could charge me more as I rushed another check to them. So I sent one payment certified to see exactly when it arrived. They didn't even accept it, sending it back to me, making me pay even more interest to mail it back using standard mail. The post office states someone refused to sign for it. Ergo, I'd like the judge to dismiss all interest whatsoever on this, and to cut the debt in half because of their malicious failure to accept my payments.'
Likewise, collection agencies are, of course, often involved in legal proceedings to try to collect a debt. I can just see what happens when they refuse to accept certified mail from an opposing council. The judge will crucify them.
Seriously, your 'knowledge' that collection services don't accept certified mail is bogus. In fact, no business gets away with refusing to accept certified mail...that's something only individuals do.
Um, yes, they will. In fact, they are legally required to in the case of nuisance calls. (Which are any calls you claim are nuisance.)
I believe the study also included suicide, which is, by far, the largest cause of gun deaths by people who own the gun legally. (Not including people in the military who actually run around shooting people, obviously.)
So you are 'more likely' to kill yourself or someone else in your family with a gun than to kill an intruder.
Which is true, because people are more likely to kill themselves or someone in their family than kill an intruder. With or without a gun.
Of course, in the normal world, we don't include statistics about things you choose to do when calculating the risks of things. The fact someone might choose to kill someone in their family is not actually a risk of gun ownership. (Gun ownership does make it slightly more likely they'd succeed, though, so it is slightly riskier to own a gun in that someone else in your family might succeed at killing you with it.)
That's always what the crazy stories leave out.
Someone who hits someone, anyone, with a baseball bat enough to injure them should, in fact, be arrested, which simply means 'detained by the police'. "Hey, you hit this guy with a baseball bat, feel free to wander off."
Strictly speaking, at a crime scene, everyone is usually under arrest until the police sort out what happened. Even then, you're a material witness and they can legally detain (aka, arrest) you until you give them the story of what happened.
This is because people do not understand what 'arrest' means. An arrest is the police's power to physical prevent people from leaving somewhere. That's it. It is not, in any way, asserting they have committed a crime, although that is often the reason for it.
People who hit trespassers with weapons should not, however, be charged with anything and should be quickly released. As they usually are.
And, it's especially fun to hear people talk about what people were 'sued' over, especially if they're in favor of some sort of tort reform. I have to point out that tort reform would not and could not keep anyone from suing anyone for any reason whatsoever. It is not legally possible, nor is it slightly a good idea, to keep people from filing lawsuits.
Your logic sounds absurd, but considering that most people 'caught' and sued for running file sharing did not know they were, in fact, running software that did that, you have a pretty good point.
If the RIAA wants to remove 'intent' from actions you are civilly liable for, then they should be prepared for the consequences.
Here is a tricky thing when sharing stuff over the internet. If only one person at a time is accessing that content licence, is it really an infringement. Digital data is digital data, whether from a player to a nearby amp to a speaker, or whether from a player to a very distant amp to a speaker. So creating a library, that only one person at a time can access, all with legal content is not different from lending someone your cd, they listen to it and then return it you and then you or some one else can listen to that one legally licensed copy.
You are attempting to use logic when talking about copyright law. The RIAA does not believe that logic. The RIAA does not even agree that creating a digital library is legal in and of itself, much less letting others listen to it.
Okay, we've got two people here promoting PDF, who are apparently very very crazy.
Why the fuck would you want ebooks in PDF format?
PDF is for printing and making documents look identical on different computers. It is to transport documents with fonts, which change on different ereaders, and with margins, which change on different ereaders, and page sizes, which change on different ereaders, and line spacing, which change on different ereaders, and well, everything users might change as they read.
PDF is literally the exact opposite of what a useful ebook format would look like. ebooks need a small amount of format markup, such as bold and underline and center, along with images, along with a very very small amount of semantic markup.
They don't need damn page layouts, that is exactly the wrong thing to do for an ebook. PDF is a fine last resort to read if you have a document in that format, but it's a really stupid thing to aim ebooks at.
If you want a standard format, just use a standardized subset of HTML with some special rules to define a tiny amount of semantic markup such to indicate chapters and authors, like <div id="author"> or something, compressed in a standard format like .zip with some images. And, as an added bonus, this HTML could also work in a normal web browser.
The RIAA, right now, claims that ripping it to one computer is a copyright violation. You do not need a second computer involved.
This despite the fact that some format shifting has been outright declared fair use.
Sadly, these cases tend to involve required format shifting to listen to the music, like records to cassette tapes to play in a car. As a computer with a CD player can actually play CDs, legally, it might not be legal to rip to listen to them on a computer.
Luckily, it is required to listen to them on MP3 player, so court decisions would seem to imply that's fair use. Although, at some point, the RIAA was even stating that they were illegal to use, and, IIRC, sued, or at least threatened to sue, one of the early one that came with software to rip CDs.
That really is the difference.
The RIAA does go against people who only vaguely profit from music illegally, aka, people who play unlicensed-for-public-performance music in businesses and whatnot, which is a closer equivalent to using copied software and almost exactly what that BSA normally does. No one really minds this behavior.
What people do mind is them going against random people who violate copyright for their own use and getting huge awards out of them, especially when practically every person in existence has violated the copyright on music at some point.
It doesn't help that the 'making available' concept is bullshit. Making copies without the copyright holder's permission is illegal...offering to make copies without the copyright holder's permission, under any sane justice system, is not.
Normal human beings can see this, and can see that, at most, damages should limited to the actual violations that occurred, as the law actually says.
I don't have a problem with a story about someone doing that.
I was just pointing out that, when people actually attempt complicated plans like that in real life, such plans almost always end up failing horribly, especially when you do something as silly as making the two possible suspects be 'yourself and some other guy', one of you who has to be the murderer.
The safest thing to do, what has always been the safest thing to do, is to simply fail to appear on the suspect list at all, or to be so far down it that your faked alibi isn't investigated too much.
Which, if you're willing to kill a random person to frame someone else, is absurdly easy to do. You find simply find someone the guy you're framing dislikes, and that you 'have never heard of'.
And then a tiny amount of framing works. You can even skip the complicated thing I suggested, which was probably me being too 'intelligent' and overcomplicated things. Wait until the fall guy is at work, take the person to their house, kill them there, clean up the mess as good as you can, and hide the body in the woods somewhere it will be discovered after enough time has elapsed that the time of death is vague enough he could have done it.
If you have to break into his house, be very clever and make it look like a struggle happened there, and make off with weird stuff like his DVD player but not his laptop, so later, it looks like he actually invented this break-in to cover up the fight he had murdering someone. If you're really lucky, they'll discover minute amounts of blood when he reports the break-in, heh. Or, hehe, leave their fingerprints on something.
When you hide the body, include out some tiny clue to aim them at your fall guy, whereupon they will get a search warrant for his house and find the blood traces you 'missed', both on the floor and on the weapon you carefully cleaned and put back.
If all this fails horribly and they discover some hole in the plotting, at least they aren't instantly looking at you. They'll, first and foremost, be looking for other enemies of the victims, because most people aren't sociopathic enough to kill some random innocent person to frame someone they hate. (They will, instead, simply kill the person they hate.)
Oh, and, of course, if you're planning on doing this, for the love of Pete, clean out your browser cache after you read this, and then wipe the free space on your hard drive. ;)
The alternate is not free electricity, but it is, a lot of the time, spare electricity.
Cars have 'overpowered' alternators because no one would be happy if repeatedly driving a car 2 miles resulted in a dead battery. So instead they provide enough power to charge the battery fairly rapidly.
After the battery is charged, yes, the load on them decreases, and they use less power, but they still provide a lot more electrical power than the car needs. I.e., there is a baseline load on the alternator that can't be removed, where it sucks X amount of energy out of the system, and converts it to electricity regardless.
But, more to the point, electric fans were just a hypothetical. It might be more efficient to use vacuum pressure from the engine, or just build really big exhaust filters, or who knows what. No one's really tried. Car companies get to the point where emission control starts costing them MPGs, and then only go as far as emission law requires.
Whereas if emissions were, instead of MPG, averaged across the fleet, and then the average lowered every year, they'd have incentives to actually invent ways to keep lowering them. And they'd even lower them at the expense of MPGs, which would be a very good thing.
Gasoline is an entity we can easily regulate and tax, and customers will pick cars with lower gas mileage by themselves. Well, at least, they should. And gas taxes should be high enough people do, in fact, want such cars.
But you can't tax emissions. And you can't regulate emissions except with emissions checks, and you can't really set those so low that correctly tuned older cars will fail them. The only way to regulate emissions is to force auto companies to sell new cars with lower emissions, or at least least tax them more for higher ones.
LSD isn't easily detectable but even if it was, it would damage the cops credability. They aren't going to say "how was he tricked into taking it", they are going to say, he was out of his mind when he did it. Besides, you can substitute anything for the LSD, the point was to make him act differently in an obviously noticeable way. When the cops behavior changes, then other things that you would never expect from him become more believable.
For future reference, people on LSD do not act 'differently'. They act like loons who are obviously hallucinating. Someone who'd been dosed with LSD in a cafe would probably not even be able to make it out the door. The police would be called, he'd be determined to be drugged, and they'd drug test him, and the food he was served.
You want them to act weird, give them PCP or something. Hallucinating is not 'acting different', it is 'either drugged or has suddenly caught schizophrenia'. Stress and extreme guilt, outside of Poe stories, does not actually result in hallucinations. You might be able to convince people that hallucinating gunshots was brought on by stress, but not hallucinating dancing giraffes.
As for the alibi, well that sort of takes care of itself when you accuse the cop of taking the girl.
It's still not a very good plan. First of all, cop cars have cameras, and GPSs, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this was before that.
More important, cops often, well, do things. What if he gets called somewhere right after pulling you over, and clearly doesn't have anyone in the car? Yes, you can assert she was in the trunk, but they will actually test the trunk, and discover she was not. (Lack of DNA from someone in the cab is reasonable. Lack of DNS from someone tied in a trunk, not really.)
What you did is make it literally where either you or the cop did the crime, and that means if he has any sort of alibi, you're busted.
And I don't think you have a very good acoustic premise with your fake gunshots. First of all, if you're firing actual bullets, they will, indeed, be loud, even inside a box. Secondly, other people will hear them.
Third, to attempt to make sure they don't, you're going to have to rig a radio control, which means you actually have to be there, which means when someone else does hear the gunshots, and the police actually start investigating, someone will have noticed you, and hey, isn't that the guy who claims that cop took the girl?
Like I said, this is exactly the sort of 'clever' criminal action that always backfires. It is not a good idea to make the criminal be either you or someone else, even if you're attempting to frame the someone else.
Actual LSD is unlikely to even be obtainable in non-blotter-paper form. It'd be hard to buy it as a liquid from anywhere but the lab that made it. It might be possible to throw the blotter paper in his drink, if it's something like coffee, but I have no idea what would happen to the LSD then.
And I didn't say it was detectable, I said it was 'testable', by which I mean it is fairly obvious when someone is on a frickin LSD trip, (It's unlikely he'd even make it to his car to hear these gunshots.) and if people show up with those symptoms, they will get drug tested.
So what would actually happen is that the cop shows up, drinks his drink, goes wacko or at least stares at things, other police get called in, they quickly determine he's actually been drugged, they test both him and his food, and find traces of LSD.
Possibly he manages to make it to the street to hear the gunshots, but at that point he's not going to be in any shape to call the police, and if he is, he certainly couldn't give a coherent account of 'how many gunshots' he heard, and he'd still be drug tested and the LSD would be discovered.
Even if the LSD isn't discovered in the drug test, he still has obviously been drugged with some hallucinogen. It's not some 'Oh, he's acting crazy' theory. People on LSD do not act 'slight weird' like they're having some sort of guilty conscious, they act like flippin loons who are hallucinating colors and staring at walls and can barely speak. Two seconds of talking to them gives them away.
And thus, because of the 'cleverness' of drugging the guy, when they eventually track down the girl and tie him to her, they're now looking at a guy who was drugged, in public, with LSD, the very next day for no discernible reason, and the case is going to look a hell of a lot more suspicious.
I'm not sure what drugs would make someone act erratic and sound paranoid and/or stressed, but LSD is not them. Cocaine would eventually do that, but it would take a long time. On the plus side, being a cocaine addict would damage credibility to start with, and explain violence in someone not previously violent, as opposed to someone who obviously got drugged with LSD in public.
I want to see a car like the Volt with a replaceable/removable generator.
Where you have a 'docking station' for the car and if you're going over 40 miles, you can drop the gasoline engine in. Otherwise, you leave it out, and save the weight.
And, of course, you could replace it with diesel if you wanted.
As another person replied, a series hybrid will never be more efficient than a straight engine,
I have to dispute that.
Yes, in theory, the laws of thermodynamics would seem to suggest that converting from gas to electric to power is less efficient than leaving out the middle step.
And if the engine in a car were simply fixed in place, rotating an axis at a set speed and torque, yes, you could not get more efficiency by going through an electrical system...but they aren't doing that.
Gasoline engines in cars then have to go through transmissions, they have to operate at different speeds instead of being tuned for one, they require a lot more powerful engines to actually acceleration and whatnot, which means they weigh more, and require more cooling and more cylinders, etc, etc.
Series hybrids won't have a transmission, they'll have a tiny engine, they'll have a tiny cooling system or no cooling at all, so the weight of the entire thing could be 500 pounds less. Their gas engine might be 50% more efficient than a normal gas engine, tuned exactly for the speed it operates at, with two or three cylinders. They don't need an extra alternator to suck power from the engine to drive the spark plugs. (Or, rather they do, but that's all they need.)
Ergo, it is theoretically possible to have a series hybrid system that is more efficient at moving a specific automobile than a straight gasoline engine could, even without any source but the engine charging the batteries. It's not likely, but it is possible in theory if you consider the entirety of the 'car moving' issue instead of just the thermodynamic 'converting to electricity' issue.
Of course, regenerative braking makes the issue moot, they're obviously more efficient if they do that. But they might be more efficient even without doing that.
Bingo. Fuel efficiency is a red herring. Especially as fuel efficiency and emissions are sometimes at odds with each other. I.e., adding more exhaust controls to reduce emissions can lower MPGs.(1)
If they just kept reducing the emissions allowed, cars would almost automatically become more energy efficient, as the easiest way to make them emit 10% less is to have them use 10% less gas.
Of course, you have to figure out what emissions, or have some sort of 'unit' system, where, for example, X amount of CO2 equals Y amount of sulfer equals Z amount of unburned gas, and add them all up, and the total has to be under a certain amount.
1) Although a lot of this can be counteracted in other ways. For example, how come no one's ever come up with an exhaust system with electric pressurization help, or at least fans? Using all that spare electricity gasoline cars have flowing around in them from the alternator, instead of having the gasoline engine have to force the exhaust through the exhaust cleaning system? Because car companies never needed to, they can reduce MPGs just as easily by cutting back on those emission controls instead.
Okay, the gunshots and the LSD part of your story are idiotic.
In fact, most intelligent people try to overcomplicate crimes. Using LSD requires you to buy LSD, and LSD is easily testable. Gee, it sure is suspicious that someone is drugging a cop just as he kills someone.
Likewise the gunshots. You think the cops sent to investigate that wouldn't look at suspicious boxes? You think others would not hear the gunshots? I mean, if every day, at ten o'clock, everyone hears a gunshot in a certain area, the obvious reason isn't going to be 'The cop there is crazy'.
The easiest way to frame someone for murder is to a) pick someone with a motive for them to murder, and you don't b) have a good alibi faked up for yourself, and c) commit the murder almost in front of them and have them walk up not two minutes later, d) steal the murder weapon from them beforehand.
a) Is isn't that hard, especially as motives for murders are often sorta silly.
b) is hard, but do-able, especially with another person or two. With two people, you can have one person really be there, and the second person, who stays mostly in shadows, 'be' the murderer and pay for things with his credit card, responds to that person's name, and carries his cell, at some movie theatre or something. So the alibi is 'I was out with my friend all night, paid for stuff with my credit card, didn't see anyone I knew'.
c) is easy...use their house. The trick is to do it when they can't prove they weren't there, but won't be there. Or, alternately, tie the person up, have a damn good escape route, and murder them the second the fall-guy drives up. (And don't forget, people being tied up have marks, ergo, you'll need to leave them tied up long enough for the fall-guy to have tied them up early.)
d) as for d), A tire iron is a good weapon...people will not notice that gone, but it's handy enough that people could plausibly grab it. Of course, if you're murdering someone in their house, just use some handy item. And then wash it off and put it back, if you have time.
Funny, I don't recall having seen the "actual definition" of solitary confinement anywhere.
Perhaps you should look at the actual words then. Prisoners are already confined. Solitary confinement confines them alone.
Any confinement where they are not confined with other people is solitary. That's it. That's what the words mean. It doesn't require the 'box' that you seem to think it does, it doesn't require no interaction with the outside world, it doesn't requires no books or mattress or whatever the hell you think it requires.
It simply requires that they are not confined with other people. That they are confined solitarily. Solitary. Confinement.
The research on the subject indicates that it's not particularly any better than regular maximum security for safety, though it is certainly more expensive.
So you're asserting that prisoners somehow harm others while in solitary confinement? Or that other prisoners make up the slack? What exactly are you trying to say here?
If you're trying to say that at least some violent prisoners will never learn to stop assaulting others, no matter how much we put them in solitary, that is certainly a plausible claim.
However, I have this to say to them: Fuck you. Stay in solitary, then.
People who are causing the violence in prisons come in second priority, psychologically, to those who are being attacked. Who are living in an environment where they fear for their live, despite being under government control.
If prisoners can't learn not to attack others, then they should, indeed, end up in their own cell (which will of course be smaller, being individual), and not actually be able to interact with any other prisoners they could attack.
Um, I don't think I advocated locking anyone in solitary confinement up for years, or even weeks.
Nor would I advocate using the current concept of solitary confinement which, as I've said elsewhere, is an attempt to harm people, not to remove them from the population.
The actual definition of 'solitary confinement', however, is simply 'prisoners don't get to interact with other prisoners'. It doesn't require them to have no human contact, it doesn't require them to have nothing to do. It simply requires them not speaking to people they've demonstrated they threaten. (Aka, other prisoners. The guard can live with threats.)
And it should not be used as punishment for general stuff. It should be used simply when a person has demonstrated they cannot interact with other prisoners without threatening them.
But I love how you're worried abut the psychological impact that solitary confinement might have on people, but don't seem to be worried about the hundreds of other people in prison who currently go through it in fear of their lives from that person, often joining racist gangs and committing violence because of that fear.
I'm sorry, but you're apparently in 1882 or something.
We now have things called 'cameras' that can record the entire prison population, inside cells and outside, at very little cost.
And we have the ability to look at what they record if any prisoner gives the slightest complaint that they were assaulted.
See, the problem isn't that people attack other prisoners. That's probably not possible to stop.
The problem is that they repeatedly attack other prisoners. Over and over. They have large gangs that run around intimidating people.
We could certainly stop that if we wanted to, by taking people who commit assault and, like I said, removing them from the prison population.
In fact, we could probably figure out who's likely to be such people in the first place, based on their crime and how they pulled it off. But, generally, we could just wait until people start committing violent actions, and remove them when they do.
Stop making sense!
But, seriously, the only reason I didn't say that in my post is that certain people would go 'Oh, he's a drug legalizer guy, I will ignore him'.
Right. The point of prison is to provide a living environment away from others, without any of the luxuries like TV or whatnot. Perhaps you should be able to earn the right to watch TV, and stuff like that.
We can argue exactly where the minimum required is, but it should essentially just be a very bland and boring camp. You can read, or you can learn useful skills for the outside, or you can just lay around in your cell staring at the ceiling.
What it shouldn't be is an attempt to harm you. Prisoners should be not allowed to threaten other prisoners. (Who the hell gave them that privilege?) Anyone who does behave like that should be immediately removed from the general population.
Medical treatment should be promptly given, period. People should not be sleeping outside in tents either. They should have moderately comfortable beds, and be given eight hours of sleep each night.
Moreover, I'm going to go past that and say that certain things, like the group showering, shouldn't be tolerated there either. Even ignoring the history of assaults that happen in showers, it is simply there to be demeaning. Demeaning people is a great way to make them feel powerless, and making people feel powerless is a great way to make them exert power over others, often in criminal ways. Way to shoot ourselves in the foot.
Seriously, people. We're not putting people in prison to torture them. We're putting them there to get them away from the society they hurt, give them a chance to think about their behavior, try to give them some other skill instead of crime. (You will notice that this makes imprisoning people for drug abuse fairly pointless. But, hey, I can't help where logical conclusions go.)
Yes, some people will assert we're trying to discourage other criminals, but, no, that really doesn't work...criminals almost never believe they'll be caught. And if we really don't think that five years of 'reasonable' prison is nice, and they need five years of 'torture' prison, why the hell don't we just raise the sentencing terms and give them ten years of reasonable prison?
The answer is: Some people are fucking sadists and have decided that prisoners are 'fair game'.
Prison rape is an especially sickening concept.
The idea we can't stop crime in prison is idiotic. If people are even intimidating other people in prison, said intimidates should have their ability to interact with other prisoners revoked until they've learned their damn lesson.(1)
Hey, assholes, we put you in prison because you can't follow the law, you think running around threatening people, aka, committing felony assault, is going to fly?
Apparently, the answer is yes, and we've decided the prisoners 'deserve' whatever happens to them, and for some reason have failed to grasp what that actually means is we are allowing violent convicted criminals to continue to have fun. Forget a damn TV, how about we deny them the pleasure of raping someone? We don't even let innocent people rape people!
1) And, for all this talk about 'prison overcrowding', I suspect prison populations would be a lot easier to maintain, even more of them, if we'd simply move the 10% that cause the problems to solitary confinement until they stop causing damn problems.
Didn't we just have some sort of security issue with pulseadio and a NULL pointer?
Seriously, how hard is it for the OS to just blow up whatever program is running if it tries to access the memory location NULL, period? That is not a valid memory location, you cannot put things there, if you access it in any way, you die, no exceptions.
Yes, but generally exploits get discovered by others if they are used.
At some point, someone curious will get hacked, and wonder how the hell that happened, and track down the exploit.
And that's not even including discovery on the cracker's side. (People he works with, etc.)
The only way to keep an exploit a secret is to (almost) never use it. It's going to be made public within a few months of even low usage.