Okay, I'm going to have to explain to people who might be confused by your stupidity.
The original question was 'How many people in the US can't change jobs because of losing health insurance if they do?'.
You don't seem to grasp what is immediately obvious to everyone one, that the original poster was talking about wanting to change to a job without health insurance, as obviously people wouldn't 'lose' health insurance if they had it at their new job.
In other words, many people are unable to switch from jobs with insurance to jobs without insurance, as they'd then, DUH, lose their insurance. This is insanely obvious to every single person except you, who apparently think it makes sense to talk about people 'losing their insurance' when changing between two jobs with insurance.
COBRA, is indeed slightly relevant here, in that CORBA is designed to cover people through transitions. If they switch jobs and their new insurance doesn't cover preexisting conditions, they can use COBRA and keep their old insurance for, indeed, 18 months, not any longer, which is hopefully long enough for it to kick in. So it's slightly useful in job changing if you're going to one insured position to another.
However, that still wouldn't help if they were 'changing to a job where they would lose health insurance'. If they change to a job without health insurance, CORBA will 'help' in that they will remain covered longer, but ultimately they will be uninsured. (Except in your crazy world, where people who need health insurance can purchase it on the street.)
Proposing CORBA as insurance is akin to proposing unemployment as a job. It's just stupid. CORBA is just 'If you find yourself without a job, you can continue your job's insurance for a set amount of time'.
And incidentally many people in the US cannot get insurance without a job
The question was: How many people in the US can't change jobs because of losing health insurance if they do?
If they'd lose health insurance if they change jobs, it's because their new job wouldn't have health insurance. Um, duh. Most people do not change jobs and then immediately look for a new job. And CORBA lasts 18 months when changing jobs.
And incidentally many people in the US cannot get insurance without a job, so cannot 'look for' insurance independent of looking for a job.
'This military structure provided for significant US leverage over the secret stay-behind networks in Western Europe as the SACEUR, throughout NATO's history, has traditionally been a US General who reports to the Pentagon in Washington and is based in NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, Belgium. The ACC's duties included elaborating on the directives of the network, developing its clandestine capability, and organizing bases in Britain and the United States.'
Yeah, it was nominally a NATO network. A NATO network that almost none of the other people in NATO appeared to know about. (Except France and England.) One operated by a 'Allied Clandestine Committee' that does not actually exist in NATO's structure. One reporting to the SACEUR, which is a four-star Pentagon general.
This is because, and if you've been asleep 50 years you might not know this, NATO is operated almost entirely by the US. Decisions are made by the member countries, but the actual operation and funding is entirely controlled by the US, so it was rather trivial for the US to stick a secret organization inside it, one that, in essence, 'stole' existing secret intelligence services after the war (During which they had been working with NATO) from their own countries' leadership.
It would take a lot more to institute a coup d'etat in France than in Venezuela, and IMHO that is purely the reason the US has never tried it.
One word: Gladio
It was a secret network operated by the CIA in, basically, all of Europe. Its many parts:
Lochoi Oreinn Katadromn - Helped overthrow Greece government in 1967 in miltary coup
Aginter Press - assassinated many leftist Portugal politicans
Counter-Guerrilla - Killed about 5000 Turks via domestic terror.
Gladio - Blew up, shot, and killed half of Italy. Way too much to list. Also linked to the very odd 'Propaganda Due' conspiracy.
Exactly. Cuba is just the last punchline, and not actually that important considering their medical technology somewhat sucks. Free 1960 medical care is not exactly something to get worked up over. The actual countries to pay attention to in Sicko are England, France, and Canada.
Just the other day I was talking to an English friend online who'd taken issue to some American saying that new mothers should stay in the hospital for longer periods of time. We talked past each other for a bit until I realized she was saying that hospitals make new mothers stay too long, which in her book was 'two weeks', and that they should let them go after a day or three and just send people out to check on new mothers and babies, whereas in my experience hospitals were throwing mothers out four hours after giving birth because that was all insurance allowed.
It was truly a surreal moment for me. Hospitals...having people stay too long? Nurses...making house calls?
And then it really hit me this was all for free and I almost punched a hole in the wall.
And while some of Moore's other documentaries play loose with some of the facts, Sicko doesn't. The only outright lie in it is that prisoners at Gitmo get nice medical care, when in fact they don't, but that's a government lie (Remember when they swore up and down they weren't hurting people there?), not Moore's.
Right now, the socialist ideals of Cuba are facing the harsh realities of the global mass media, and hopefully they will begin to embrace it. As more and more tourists head for Cuba, the government, and state-run outlets, has to know that people are going to start figuring out that there's some freedoms they still aren't enjoying to the fullest extent.
Which, incidentally, is why the embargo is the stupidest fucking thing ever.
because, as the 92% figure proves beyond any doubt, the experiments performed on animals in no way predict the human outcomes of those drugs or procedures
It proves nothing of the sort. It merely proves that animal testing results in false positives.
For it to predict it 'in no way', you'd have to demonstrate that there were false negatives, too. That things that failed on animals would have worked on humans.
Otherwise, animal testing is still performing a valuable service of filtering out things. Oh, and a lot of testing isn't for workability, it's for safety.
E.g., if I you've got 1000 different things that could cure cancer, and you test each one on an animal, and 200 animals die, hey, you just saved 200 people in the clinical trial. And if 600 of the rest have no effect, well, you've saved a lot of time. It doesn't matter that, of the 200 remaining things that you go on to test on people, that 184 of them don't work and you only have a 8% success rate. Without animal testing you'd have a 2% success rate and a 20% mortality rate.
Model Ts only came off the assembly line in black.
Before the assembly line was developed for them, people often got them in different colors. When the assembly line showed up, black was the only option. (Possibly you could also get them unpainted, and paint them yourself, I don't know.)
There's a myth that black paint dried faster, but it's not true. The paint on Model Ts was many different types in different places, and the color of a paint has little to do with the drying time. Black paint, however, is somewhat cheaper, especially if you've got a dozen different kinds and are trying to match colors between them.
More to the point about this conspiracy crap, it's been asserted that oil companies (and car companies, for some reason), have been buying patents for decades.
So the real problem there is that patents last 20 years. If the 'car that ran on water' story that started in the seventies was true, duh, all the patents have expired. So where are the cars?
Of course, that's like the tenth level of stupidity in that story, considering that a) patents are public anyway, and yet no one has ever managed to point at these patents (And ones they have pointed at have expired), and b) car companies have no damn reason to produce less efficient cars, they don't make money from gas.
Especially as car companies are getting their asses kicked by the Japanese there. If they could produce an cheap SUV that got 50 mpg, they'd be doing coke in the boardrooms like they were 80s stockbrokers. If they could could produce one that got 300 mpg, they'd be have orgies in the streets.
Any conspiracy about super-cars that involves car manufacturers is automatically stupid. The only reason American car manufacturers are fighting fuel-efficiency standards is they're a lot worse at making efficient cars than Japan and Europe, and are making their money from giant tankcars, trucks, and SUVs. If they could magically add 100 mpg to their cars, they'd change their position so fast we'd get whiplash, demanding that cars average 120 MPG a gallon, forcing the Japanese out of the market. (This is assuming that, somehow, other countries don't have access to this amazing technology, but that's inherent in the idea that American car companies are somehow covering it up.)
It's astonishing how many conspiracy theories make no damn sense, motivewise. Not even talking about plausibility or ability, it's amazing how many of them just have people behaving in totally nonsensical ways that do not benefit them in the least. It's like the 9/11 truthers who think the government switched planes and flew a explosive drone into the WTC or whatever. If the government wanted to crash a plane into a building, wouldn't it be a bit easier to crash the actual plane into the building, you lunatics?
No shit. It's this sort of stuff that makes it obvious the entire copyright system is broken.
Let's look at the facts:
1a) The courts said the fair market value of the photo was about $5000. That is not unreasonable for commercial use of a photograph.
1b) A song on itunes is 99 cents. A song on an album is roughly the same price. Let's use the crazy highest cost and give it a value of $5. That is not unreasonable for personal ownership and use of a song.
2a) He gets the value of the photo plus $10,000. This photo was distributed tens of thousands of times. (It was printed in the frickin phone book.) Let's call that a dollar per infringement.
2b) The RIAA sues people for $150,000, or $149,995 plus fair market cost. Even pretending the penalties for commercial and non-commercial use should be the same at one dollar (And they shouldn't.), the sued person would have had to distribute the song 149,995 times, which is obviously absurd.
I don't quite understand what's going on, but when you throw in the fact the company in this case lied to the court and forged documents, whereas in the RIAA's case there's usually not even enough evidence to find someone guilty at all, the RIAA just strongarms them into plea agreements before court...well, anyone who thinks it's hypocritical to support this guy and fight the RIAA needs to pay a bit more attention.
I would not be the least bit opposed to the RIAA showing up, with proper evidence that would stand up in court, and saying: Hey, filesharing software at your house distributed songs represented by us approximately 200 times. ('Approximately' as you distributed parts of songs instead of whole songs, but here is our math, and it adds up to 200 'songs'.) You own us $1000 for the songs themselves and another $5000 for the penalties.
That is not what they are doing. They're showing up with no evidence, waving huge numbers around, and getting people to sign documents without lawyers to settle cases that are, as everyone predicted, being thrown out of court when they actually make it in front of a judge.
Exactly. What might be good is 7 years plus another 7 years renewal, or maybe 14 + 10, but with the renewal requiring you hand over copies of all source material and those get public-domained at the end also, and making the renewal fee a rather large amount that you actually have to pay. (Unlike the original copyright, which you don't actually need to register unless there's a lawsuit.) This fee would be used to support the system.
Oh, and at the renewal point, the copyright holder would have first dibs on that obviously, but if they passed on renewing, the original copyright holder or artist could come in and take it. In case someone sold the copyright, or it was a work-for-hire, or whatever.
The blood splatters sound impressive in a newspaper report -- and the cops did their best to milk it for all it's worth, didn't they? One wonders what that was about -- but it doesn't take a lot of thought to realize that they just don't mean anything. Human beings -- particularly women -- leak blood now and then. Wouldn't you expect to find a couple of blood stains of indeterminate age around a place where someone has been living for years?
Reading more about that, it appears that they don't even have any evidence that it's her blood. Not to mention, to get blood 'spatters', she would actually would have to be stabbed there, and there's not actually any reason for her to have been in his front seat at all.
People aren't realizing how much legal liability there is here. (And, luckily, the president cannot wave his pardon-wand at legal liability of lawsuits that haven't happened yet.)
There's enough that, when the Democrats get into office, they can destroy the telecoms industry. Totally, utterly, completely destroy the entire thing, simply by informing every American that was spied on that they were spied on, and making the telecoms liable for trillions of dollars. The largest class-action lawsuit in history would instantly spring up.
I guess it goes to show: If you don't want to go bankrupt, don't repeatedly commit millions of felonies, especially not ones with fines that are per-day and per-person.
And after those lawsuits, expect a bunch of follow-up shareholder lawsuits for destroying the companies, which, because the officers of the company committed crimes, can pierce the corporate veil and target the actual executive's bank accounts.
Oh, and instead of the assets being sold for pennies on the dollar, what should actually happen is that the Democrats pass legislation to deal with this beforehand, and end up nationalizing the telecoms existing infrastructure, and run it for free (In lieu of paying people the fines individually.) and then slowly sell it off as to the highest bidder piecemeal.
I'm sure some people will talk about how this is unfair. It is. There should be a lot more prison time then there's going to be. That would be the best deterrent. We'll just have to settle for grinding the companies into the dirt and the officers who made the decisions into bankrupcy.
I believe Hans actually purchased those books after the police started questioning him about his ex-wife's disappearance. In other words, if he's innocent, he was either a) trying to figure out what happened to her, or b) trying to figure out why the police thought he did it. (If he's guilty, he's trying to figure out if he missed anything.)
Looking up how a murder investigation works, once you become a suspect in it, is exactly the sort of behavior you'd expect from a geek. It would be my first impulse, too, except I wouldn't be stupid enough to purchase books and leave them laying around. He purchased them 'surreptitiously', whatever that means, I'd actually go past that and not purchase them at all, just reading them in the library and bookstore.
As for removing parts of a car: My car has all its seats, although I have ripped out the center console and rigged up an electrical switching system in the glove compartment running to the rear of the car. Geeks do weird things with cars, maybe he's just absurdly gas-conscious. (Someone above asked why he didn't rip out the backseat too...he has two kids, he needs a backseat.) I once considered using the fold-down backseats in my car to make a bed extending into the truck. I have at least two 'secret' compartments in my car that are simply parts of the interior not attached firmly that I can pull off and get into easily. I sometimes remove the inside of the gearshift so people can't steal my car, at least not until they figure out why the hell they can't shift into drive and find something to push the thing down.
Geeks do weird things to other stuff too, I used a TV for six years that wouldn't turn off, I had to flip a power strip. I've ripped out tape-deck guts from a boom box because they didn't work and it was lighter without them. Once I was in someone's house when they made a casual remark about wishing their fridge door opened the other way, and I pointed out that the door actually could come off and be reattached to the other side with a little bit of work, although they'd have to patch holes where sheet metal had been punched. It had never occurred to them to even look, whereas I already knew that factories weren't going to make two sets of parts so it was likely that everything was the same and it was just put together different. I then realized to most people, a fridge, and everything else you buy, are a single entity that just exists...you don't try to change it unless it's obviously designed for changing. You can change the faceplate of your cellphone, but you don't peel the CPU stickers off your laptop, or put tape over the idiotic bright blue lights, and you certainly don't open it up and remove them.
Now, I haven't done anything that I would consider suspicious, but there are certain things about what I do and have that I would have a hard time explaining to to the courts if it turned out one of them were suspicious. Us geeks and nerds are much more likely to actually understand how things work, and are willing to change them if that would suit us better, things that normal human beings would not consider changing. Or perhaps a better term to refer to us is 'hackers'.
Incidentally, killing someone in your car, or killing them somewhere and transporting them in such a way that they bleed on your car's front seat, is incredibly stupid and and incredibly easy to avoid. Hans actually sounds like a smart guy, so I'm having trouble connecting 'Oh, I'll carry this bloody corpse in my car's front seat' with him.
OTOH, the fact there were blood spatters doesn't look good for them, as does the fact he can't produce the seat. (Whereas I can, even now, produce the center console of my car complete with broken tape deck.)
They wouldn't need to do it over another channel, the TCP connection is encrypted anyway. If they could convince the other end to only drop the connection if they said so, instead of if they got a RST packet, it would work fine. They just say 'And I'm done' at the end of the connection, and then send the TCP/IP packets to break down the connection.
The problem with ignoring RST is that if the other end actually did disappear from the internet, and the router correctly tries to send RST packets, it won't be believed. But dangling open connections aren't really a problem in modern OSes, and if the application knows what's going on it can have a fairly short timeout for closing them, and in reality people no longer disappear from the internet quite as often as they used to anyway. Not cable modem/DSL users.
But, they can implement this per-connection anyway. When a client starts, it can assume its connections are not messed with. If it gets a RST packet, it can try calling the people up again and saying 'Hey, did you mean to do that? If not, ignore RST sent 'from me' as someone is forging packets.'. If they get no response, it probably was valid and that computer just left the internet.
When that happens a dozen times, the client should start assuming someone forging packets on all their connections and start saying that to start with. Remember, forged packets could be forged by either person's ISP, and what we want is all people on the ISPs that do that to send a signal to not believe RST on their connections, and to also not believe any RSTs they get, and no one else so the rest of the internet can at least work right.
It'd probably end up being some sort of 'on/off/autodetect' switch, where people who know what's going on can set it, but everyone else has some autodetect threshold where the client starts assuming it's their ISP. (And everyone follows it for a connection where the other end said it.)
I always thought that a useful way to restructure the law would be to apply filters at each level.
It is nearly impossible to actually find all the parts of the law that could apply to what you are doing, so I propose a system where at each level, the law becomes more and more specific, and everything under that level can only apply to situations where it matches the filter.
This would remove a lot of the ambiguity, at least where laws are stretched to cover things they weren't supposed to cover.
You know three people who were first for refusing the DOCTYPE correctly at the top of the document?
...well, yeah, I'd probably fire them too if they were deliberately writing code in quirks mode, but that's a web browser issue, not the fault of the w3c.
Because they didn't post the user-agents that are doing this, we've got a lot of goobers here who think they know what's doing it. As someone who's actually watched web pages load at the network level, let me assure everyone that neither IE, Firefox, or Opera have ever made a request to the w3c for a DTD. And it's not just caching...you can make up a URL and standard name and use that in the doctype and they don't go get it. It's not end-user web browsers doing it, mainly because the doctype is used in web browsers solely as a trigger string...they don't actually have the DTD and use it to actually parse the document.
What I suspect it is, but have no evidence for, are validation and parsing libraries. Not applications, libraries. Libraries that expect a DTD, and someone who wrote the application just handed it the URL, or told it to get the URL itself, instead of implementing a local copy or cache. Java's already been mentioned above by someone else, but I don't know if they have any evidence of this or are just making it up.
Actually, considering that large buildings are designed to sway, it would indeed be possible to generate power at the top by putting a heavy weight there and generating power as it moved with respect to the building.
Of course, the problem is that a weight that could generate a meaningful amount of power would unbalance the building as it slide from side to side.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I'm going to have to explain to people who might be confused by your stupidity.
The original question was 'How many people in the US can't change jobs because of losing health insurance if they do?'.
You don't seem to grasp what is immediately obvious to everyone one, that the original poster was talking about wanting to change to a job without health insurance, as obviously people wouldn't 'lose' health insurance if they had it at their new job.
In other words, many people are unable to switch from jobs with insurance to jobs without insurance, as they'd then, DUH, lose their insurance. This is insanely obvious to every single person except you, who apparently think it makes sense to talk about people 'losing their insurance' when changing between two jobs with insurance.
COBRA, is indeed slightly relevant here, in that CORBA is designed to cover people through transitions. If they switch jobs and their new insurance doesn't cover preexisting conditions, they can use COBRA and keep their old insurance for, indeed, 18 months, not any longer, which is hopefully long enough for it to kick in. So it's slightly useful in job changing if you're going to one insured position to another.
However, that still wouldn't help if they were 'changing to a job where they would lose health insurance'. If they change to a job without health insurance, CORBA will 'help' in that they will remain covered longer, but ultimately they will be uninsured. (Except in your crazy world, where people who need health insurance can purchase it on the street.)
Proposing CORBA as insurance is akin to proposing unemployment as a job. It's just stupid. CORBA is just 'If you find yourself without a job, you can continue your job's insurance for a set amount of time'.
And incidentally many people in the US cannot get insurance without a job
Another lie.
I can't get insurance without a job, you idiot.
And then I learned exactly how much they had paid, which was a good deal less than any US health insurance, and I almost punched a hole in you.
Did you actually read what you responded to?
The question was: How many people in the US can't change jobs because of losing health insurance if they do?
If they'd lose health insurance if they change jobs, it's because their new job wouldn't have health insurance. Um, duh. Most people do not change jobs and then immediately look for a new job. And CORBA lasts 18 months when changing jobs.
And incidentally many people in the US cannot get insurance without a job, so cannot 'look for' insurance independent of looking for a job.
Try actually reading what you link to.
'This military structure provided for significant US leverage over the secret stay-behind networks in Western Europe as the SACEUR, throughout NATO's history, has traditionally been a US General who reports to the Pentagon in Washington and is based in NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, Belgium. The ACC's duties included elaborating on the directives of the network, developing its clandestine capability, and organizing bases in Britain and the United States.'
Yeah, it was nominally a NATO network. A NATO network that almost none of the other people in NATO appeared to know about. (Except France and England.) One operated by a 'Allied Clandestine Committee' that does not actually exist in NATO's structure. One reporting to the SACEUR, which is a four-star Pentagon general.
This is because, and if you've been asleep 50 years you might not know this, NATO is operated almost entirely by the US. Decisions are made by the member countries, but the actual operation and funding is entirely controlled by the US, so it was rather trivial for the US to stick a secret organization inside it, one that, in essence, 'stole' existing secret intelligence services after the war (During which they had been working with NATO) from their own countries' leadership.
It would take a lot more to institute a coup d'etat in France than in Venezuela, and IMHO that is purely the reason the US has never tried it.
One word: Gladio
It was a secret network operated by the CIA in, basically, all of Europe. Its many parts:
Lochoi Oreinn Katadromn - Helped overthrow Greece government in 1967 in miltary coup
Aginter Press - assassinated many leftist Portugal politicans
Counter-Guerrilla - Killed about 5000 Turks via domestic terror.
Gladio - Blew up, shot, and killed half of Italy. Way too much to list. Also linked to the very odd 'Propaganda Due' conspiracy.
Exactly. Cuba is just the last punchline, and not actually that important considering their medical technology somewhat sucks. Free 1960 medical care is not exactly something to get worked up over. The actual countries to pay attention to in Sicko are England, France, and Canada.
Just the other day I was talking to an English friend online who'd taken issue to some American saying that new mothers should stay in the hospital for longer periods of time. We talked past each other for a bit until I realized she was saying that hospitals make new mothers stay too long, which in her book was 'two weeks', and that they should let them go after a day or three and just send people out to check on new mothers and babies, whereas in my experience hospitals were throwing mothers out four hours after giving birth because that was all insurance allowed.
It was truly a surreal moment for me. Hospitals...having people stay too long? Nurses...making house calls?
And then it really hit me this was all for free and I almost punched a hole in the wall.
And while some of Moore's other documentaries play loose with some of the facts, Sicko doesn't. The only outright lie in it is that prisoners at Gitmo get nice medical care, when in fact they don't, but that's a government lie (Remember when they swore up and down they weren't hurting people there?), not Moore's.
COBRA only last 18 months, fucktard.
Right now, the socialist ideals of Cuba are facing the harsh realities of the global mass media, and hopefully they will begin to embrace it. As more and more tourists head for Cuba, the government, and state-run outlets, has to know that people are going to start figuring out that there's some freedoms they still aren't enjoying to the fullest extent.
Which, incidentally, is why the embargo is the stupidest fucking thing ever.
because, as the 92% figure proves beyond any doubt, the experiments performed on animals in no way predict the human outcomes of those drugs or procedures
It proves nothing of the sort. It merely proves that animal testing results in false positives.
For it to predict it 'in no way', you'd have to demonstrate that there were false negatives, too. That things that failed on animals would have worked on humans.
Otherwise, animal testing is still performing a valuable service of filtering out things. Oh, and a lot of testing isn't for workability, it's for safety.
E.g., if I you've got 1000 different things that could cure cancer, and you test each one on an animal, and 200 animals die, hey, you just saved 200 people in the clinical trial. And if 600 of the rest have no effect, well, you've saved a lot of time. It doesn't matter that, of the 200 remaining things that you go on to test on people, that 184 of them don't work and you only have a 8% success rate. Without animal testing you'd have a 2% success rate and a 20% mortality rate.
Model Ts only came off the assembly line in black.
Before the assembly line was developed for them, people often got them in different colors. When the assembly line showed up, black was the only option. (Possibly you could also get them unpainted, and paint them yourself, I don't know.)
There's a myth that black paint dried faster, but it's not true. The paint on Model Ts was many different types in different places, and the color of a paint has little to do with the drying time. Black paint, however, is somewhat cheaper, especially if you've got a dozen different kinds and are trying to match colors between them.
We've gone and created Vietnam 2.0.
Oh, no, it's a much greater advancement then that.
It's like Vietnam 3000 Pro.
More to the point about this conspiracy crap, it's been asserted that oil companies (and car companies, for some reason), have been buying patents for decades.
So the real problem there is that patents last 20 years. If the 'car that ran on water' story that started in the seventies was true, duh, all the patents have expired. So where are the cars?
Of course, that's like the tenth level of stupidity in that story, considering that a) patents are public anyway, and yet no one has ever managed to point at these patents (And ones they have pointed at have expired), and b) car companies have no damn reason to produce less efficient cars, they don't make money from gas.
Especially as car companies are getting their asses kicked by the Japanese there. If they could produce an cheap SUV that got 50 mpg, they'd be doing coke in the boardrooms like they were 80s stockbrokers. If they could could produce one that got 300 mpg, they'd be have orgies in the streets.
Any conspiracy about super-cars that involves car manufacturers is automatically stupid. The only reason American car manufacturers are fighting fuel-efficiency standards is they're a lot worse at making efficient cars than Japan and Europe, and are making their money from giant tankcars, trucks, and SUVs. If they could magically add 100 mpg to their cars, they'd change their position so fast we'd get whiplash, demanding that cars average 120 MPG a gallon, forcing the Japanese out of the market. (This is assuming that, somehow, other countries don't have access to this amazing technology, but that's inherent in the idea that American car companies are somehow covering it up.)
It's astonishing how many conspiracy theories make no damn sense, motivewise. Not even talking about plausibility or ability, it's amazing how many of them just have people behaving in totally nonsensical ways that do not benefit them in the least. It's like the 9/11 truthers who think the government switched planes and flew a explosive drone into the WTC or whatever. If the government wanted to crash a plane into a building, wouldn't it be a bit easier to crash the actual plane into the building, you lunatics?
No shit. It's this sort of stuff that makes it obvious the entire copyright system is broken.
Let's look at the facts:
1a) The courts said the fair market value of the photo was about $5000. That is not unreasonable for commercial use of a photograph.
1b) A song on itunes is 99 cents. A song on an album is roughly the same price. Let's use the crazy highest cost and give it a value of $5. That is not unreasonable for personal ownership and use of a song.
2a) He gets the value of the photo plus $10,000. This photo was distributed tens of thousands of times. (It was printed in the frickin phone book.) Let's call that a dollar per infringement.
2b) The RIAA sues people for $150,000, or $149,995 plus fair market cost. Even pretending the penalties for commercial and non-commercial use should be the same at one dollar (And they shouldn't.), the sued person would have had to distribute the song 149,995 times, which is obviously absurd.
I don't quite understand what's going on, but when you throw in the fact the company in this case lied to the court and forged documents, whereas in the RIAA's case there's usually not even enough evidence to find someone guilty at all, the RIAA just strongarms them into plea agreements before court...well, anyone who thinks it's hypocritical to support this guy and fight the RIAA needs to pay a bit more attention.
I would not be the least bit opposed to the RIAA showing up, with proper evidence that would stand up in court, and saying: Hey, filesharing software at your house distributed songs represented by us approximately 200 times. ('Approximately' as you distributed parts of songs instead of whole songs, but here is our math, and it adds up to 200 'songs'.) You own us $1000 for the songs themselves and another $5000 for the penalties.
That is not what they are doing. They're showing up with no evidence, waving huge numbers around, and getting people to sign documents without lawyers to settle cases that are, as everyone predicted, being thrown out of court when they actually make it in front of a judge.
Exactly. What might be good is 7 years plus another 7 years renewal, or maybe 14 + 10, but with the renewal requiring you hand over copies of all source material and those get public-domained at the end also, and making the renewal fee a rather large amount that you actually have to pay. (Unlike the original copyright, which you don't actually need to register unless there's a lawsuit.) This fee would be used to support the system.
Oh, and at the renewal point, the copyright holder would have first dibs on that obviously, but if they passed on renewing, the original copyright holder or artist could come in and take it. In case someone sold the copyright, or it was a work-for-hire, or whatever.
Killing someone's family is not theft either, dumbass.
What are you talking about? Pakistan is apparently one of the good guys!
The blood splatters sound impressive in a newspaper report -- and the cops did their best to milk it for all it's worth, didn't they? One wonders what that was about -- but it doesn't take a lot of thought to realize that they just don't mean anything. Human beings -- particularly women -- leak blood now and then. Wouldn't you expect to find a couple of blood stains of indeterminate age around a place where someone has been living for years?
Reading more about that, it appears that they don't even have any evidence that it's her blood. Not to mention, to get blood 'spatters', she would actually would have to be stabbed there, and there's not actually any reason for her to have been in his front seat at all.
Indeed.
People aren't realizing how much legal liability there is here. (And, luckily, the president cannot wave his pardon-wand at legal liability of lawsuits that haven't happened yet.)
There's enough that, when the Democrats get into office, they can destroy the telecoms industry. Totally, utterly, completely destroy the entire thing, simply by informing every American that was spied on that they were spied on, and making the telecoms liable for trillions of dollars. The largest class-action lawsuit in history would instantly spring up.
I guess it goes to show: If you don't want to go bankrupt, don't repeatedly commit millions of felonies, especially not ones with fines that are per-day and per-person.
And after those lawsuits, expect a bunch of follow-up shareholder lawsuits for destroying the companies, which, because the officers of the company committed crimes, can pierce the corporate veil and target the actual executive's bank accounts.
Oh, and instead of the assets being sold for pennies on the dollar, what should actually happen is that the Democrats pass legislation to deal with this beforehand, and end up nationalizing the telecoms existing infrastructure, and run it for free (In lieu of paying people the fines individually.) and then slowly sell it off as to the highest bidder piecemeal.
I'm sure some people will talk about how this is unfair. It is. There should be a lot more prison time then there's going to be. That would be the best deterrent. We'll just have to settle for grinding the companies into the dirt and the officers who made the decisions into bankrupcy.
I believe Hans actually purchased those books after the police started questioning him about his ex-wife's disappearance. In other words, if he's innocent, he was either a) trying to figure out what happened to her, or b) trying to figure out why the police thought he did it. (If he's guilty, he's trying to figure out if he missed anything.)
Looking up how a murder investigation works, once you become a suspect in it, is exactly the sort of behavior you'd expect from a geek. It would be my first impulse, too, except I wouldn't be stupid enough to purchase books and leave them laying around. He purchased them 'surreptitiously', whatever that means, I'd actually go past that and not purchase them at all, just reading them in the library and bookstore.
As for removing parts of a car: My car has all its seats, although I have ripped out the center console and rigged up an electrical switching system in the glove compartment running to the rear of the car. Geeks do weird things with cars, maybe he's just absurdly gas-conscious. (Someone above asked why he didn't rip out the backseat too...he has two kids, he needs a backseat.) I once considered using the fold-down backseats in my car to make a bed extending into the truck. I have at least two 'secret' compartments in my car that are simply parts of the interior not attached firmly that I can pull off and get into easily. I sometimes remove the inside of the gearshift so people can't steal my car, at least not until they figure out why the hell they can't shift into drive and find something to push the thing down.
Geeks do weird things to other stuff too, I used a TV for six years that wouldn't turn off, I had to flip a power strip. I've ripped out tape-deck guts from a boom box because they didn't work and it was lighter without them. Once I was in someone's house when they made a casual remark about wishing their fridge door opened the other way, and I pointed out that the door actually could come off and be reattached to the other side with a little bit of work, although they'd have to patch holes where sheet metal had been punched. It had never occurred to them to even look, whereas I already knew that factories weren't going to make two sets of parts so it was likely that everything was the same and it was just put together different. I then realized to most people, a fridge, and everything else you buy, are a single entity that just exists...you don't try to change it unless it's obviously designed for changing. You can change the faceplate of your cellphone, but you don't peel the CPU stickers off your laptop, or put tape over the idiotic bright blue lights, and you certainly don't open it up and remove them.
Now, I haven't done anything that I would consider suspicious, but there are certain things about what I do and have that I would have a hard time explaining to to the courts if it turned out one of them were suspicious. Us geeks and nerds are much more likely to actually understand how things work, and are willing to change them if that would suit us better, things that normal human beings would not consider changing. Or perhaps a better term to refer to us is 'hackers'.
Incidentally, killing someone in your car, or killing them somewhere and transporting them in such a way that they bleed on your car's front seat, is incredibly stupid and and incredibly easy to avoid. Hans actually sounds like a smart guy, so I'm having trouble connecting 'Oh, I'll carry this bloody corpse in my car's front seat' with him.
OTOH, the fact there were blood spatters doesn't look good for them, as does the fact he can't produce the seat. (Whereas I can, even now, produce the center console of my car complete with broken tape deck.)
They wouldn't need to do it over another channel, the TCP connection is encrypted anyway. If they could convince the other end to only drop the connection if they said so, instead of if they got a RST packet, it would work fine. They just say 'And I'm done' at the end of the connection, and then send the TCP/IP packets to break down the connection.
The problem with ignoring RST is that if the other end actually did disappear from the internet, and the router correctly tries to send RST packets, it won't be believed. But dangling open connections aren't really a problem in modern OSes, and if the application knows what's going on it can have a fairly short timeout for closing them, and in reality people no longer disappear from the internet quite as often as they used to anyway. Not cable modem/DSL users.
But, they can implement this per-connection anyway. When a client starts, it can assume its connections are not messed with. If it gets a RST packet, it can try calling the people up again and saying 'Hey, did you mean to do that? If not, ignore RST sent 'from me' as someone is forging packets.'. If they get no response, it probably was valid and that computer just left the internet.
When that happens a dozen times, the client should start assuming someone forging packets on all their connections and start saying that to start with. Remember, forged packets could be forged by either person's ISP, and what we want is all people on the ISPs that do that to send a signal to not believe RST on their connections, and to also not believe any RSTs they get, and no one else so the rest of the internet can at least work right.
It'd probably end up being some sort of 'on/off/autodetect' switch, where people who know what's going on can set it, but everyone else has some autodetect threshold where the client starts assuming it's their ISP. (And everyone follows it for a connection where the other end said it.)
I always thought that a useful way to restructure the law would be to apply filters at each level.
It is nearly impossible to actually find all the parts of the law that could apply to what you are doing, so I propose a system where at each level, the law becomes more and more specific, and everything under that level can only apply to situations where it matches the filter.
This would remove a lot of the ambiguity, at least where laws are stretched to cover things they weren't supposed to cover.
You know three people who were first for refusing the DOCTYPE correctly at the top of the document?
Because they didn't post the user-agents that are doing this, we've got a lot of goobers here who think they know what's doing it. As someone who's actually watched web pages load at the network level, let me assure everyone that neither IE, Firefox, or Opera have ever made a request to the w3c for a DTD. And it's not just caching...you can make up a URL and standard name and use that in the doctype and they don't go get it. It's not end-user web browsers doing it, mainly because the doctype is used in web browsers solely as a trigger string...they don't actually have the DTD and use it to actually parse the document.
What I suspect it is, but have no evidence for, are validation and parsing libraries. Not applications, libraries. Libraries that expect a DTD, and someone who wrote the application just handed it the URL, or told it to get the URL itself, instead of implementing a local copy or cache. Java's already been mentioned above by someone else, but I don't know if they have any evidence of this or are just making it up.
Actually, considering that large buildings are designed to sway, it would indeed be possible to generate power at the top by putting a heavy weight there and generating power as it moved with respect to the building.
Of course, the problem is that a weight that could generate a meaningful amount of power would unbalance the building as it slide from side to side.
That's almost enough energy to hoist it up there in the first place!