By putting 'constitutional law' in there, you're arguing in circles. Banning obscenity is constitional. Saying 'They can't ban that as obscene, that would be unconstitional' is logical gibberish. You have to say 'They can't ban that as obscene because it's not obscene under the Supreme Court's test'.
And the fact that a law has to define it as a sexual act does not, in fact, mean anything. All the town has to do is define what they are talking about as sex in the law they pass. Watch:
The prongs are:
a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest
b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and
c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
The only prong that exist independent of the local community is c). They don't get to define what 'lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value'. So, throw away c), they couldn't screw with that. The news would pass no matter what. It would, however, still be trivial to find things that wouldn't, like photos on driver's licenses, which do not serve any literary, artistic, political, or scientific value at all. (Of course, a state can violate community laws and distribute obscene IDs all it wants.;)
b) says state law, but that's a lie. Normally that's a state law, and it was for the example case. But barring a state law or state constitional clause to the contrary, nothing stops local communities from passing stricter laws. Including such absurdities as defining sex as taking off your hat, or shaking hands. All that says is to claim something is obscene, it has to be something the law also defines as 'sex'.
And note it says defined as sex in the applicable law, so that it would be trivial to do 'for the purposes of this act, sex is defined as...'. It doesn't have to be the general legal defination of sex.(1)
And a) I already covered.
So a) and b) are dependant entirely on local law and local standards. a) and b) could be rigged by any 'community' that felt like it in such a way as to outlaw any images. At all. It doesn't even require it be of people. (Hey, that grass is naked! And pollenizing itself!)
1) And I didn't just make that up, because it already happens. States that pass obscenity laws do specifically define sex in them, independent of elsewhere in the law. They do that because sometimes they don't define 'sex' anywhere else. They may define certain activities as unlawful sex, but they often fail to specifically mention that consensual intercourse between people over the age of consent is, in fact, sex. Why would they, they don't regulate it? Or they regulated it with anti-fornication laws that were struck down, and they possibly removed from the law, without realizing they removed their defination of 'sex' also.
Even if they didn't, that still introduces the hilarious idea of porn created by married people being legal...because legally that's not regulated as 'sex'. Heh.
And they almost always fail to include masturbation in any other defination of sex, whereas there are quite a few things a person can do by themselves that would be regarded as 'obscene' in places, and they would like to regulate.
No. England is the opposite of a theocracy, which happens to look identical to one if you aren't paying attention.
In a theocracy, the church runs the government. In England, the government runs the church. As these both have the same entity running both the church and the government, it is easy to confuse them.
With England, however, the government runs the church because the church that used to claim authority (The Catholic Church) was asserting too much authority, so they got rid of it. And then, because it was expected at the time, they made their own church, which they have then continued to basically ignore.
The other guy mentioned this, but an important fact here is that all states in the US will transfer you for any reason if you end up in their custody. The laws do not have to be the same. If you, for example, get charged with gambling in Georgia, and get captured in Nevada, they will send you to Georgia. (Yes, yes, not all gambling is legal in Nevada, but even if it was, they'd still do that.)
The rules about extradition only work between different countries. They might call transfering people from state to state 'extradition', but it doesn't follow the same rules. (You also can't appeal it.)
However, some states won't bother to track down and arrest you for different levels of crime committed in other states, because they are lazy and don't really care. (This is what they whole 'escaping across state lines' is.) They are not 'legally obliged' to track you down, as the GP claimed. (Hell, the original police aren't obliged to do that. The police are not required to enforce any laws at all.)
However, if you end up in jail somehow, and they don't actually want you anymore, and they notice that some other state wants you, they'll call that state up and invite them to come get you.
Yes, in theory, that means you can be charged with a crime in a juridiction and never arrested. You will, however, eventually be tried in absentee, sentence to jail, and then a few years later you get pulled off the street as a witness in a car accident and they notice that some other state wants you and off they ship you. Or you end up in the papers and they come and pick you up for some quick PR. Or they're just bored one day and run the 'outstanding warrants' though the phone book. Risking your freedom on the placidity of the local phone force is not really a good plan.
I think is a way for the other state to force them to arrest you, actually. They can show up at your door and do a 'citizen's arrest'(1), and call the local police, who have been notified in advance that you are wanted in another state. At that point the local police have no choice but to keep you.
1) Citizen's arrests are restricted in many states to requiring someone to witness the arrested person actually committing a crime. However...failing to show up in court after being summoned is a crime, so the bailiff can do a citizen's arrest for that. He witnessed your lack of being in court, ergo he can legally detain you.
I think people should be able to bring hypothetical cases to court as long as they are willing to pay for them themselves, or show they are likely to run afoul of the law.
In a hypotherical case, the facts would be stipulated in advance, everyone would 'admit' to the supposed actions, so it would only be a question of law. Aka, 'If I did this, and you could prove I did it, what would be the legal consequences?'.
Maybe the whole thing is just a complete cluster fuck, and should be scrapped in its entirety.
It is, because of one thing. Sort of akin to what the British called 'rotten boroughs'. That is basically an election district with, say, ten people in it. Or even one. (They get that because their election districts are decided by specific laws instead of census. Towns die, areas even slide entirely into the sea, and they still get a member of Parliment.)
In the US, there are, indeed, towns, with the legal ability to pass laws, with less than 50 people in them. Let's assume there are, oh, 30 adults, and they want to have a little fun. They merely need to get about 16 of them to decide that community standards say that exposed foreheads are a violation of community standards, and be willing to testify under oath that this is so. (Hey, if they've all agreed that it is so, it is the standard, so it's not even a lie.)
They can destroy basically the entire media in one go by passing a law against it and arresting anyone. Case goes to trial, the prosecution merely brings in more than half the adult population to testify as to 'community standards'. It works even better if you make them even more extreme than the law. Pass a law against photographs despicting the forehead, but agree that the 'community standards' require everyone to hide their entire face. So even if a few people do not play along, you can take an 'average'.
The whole concept is fucking absurd. The person who caused the images to pass over the border should be arrested, not the person who responded to that request. The latter not only requires everyone to know everyone's law, which would be bad enough, it requires everyone to know every community in the US so well that it would know what that community considers obscene, which is flatly impossible.
Hell, I don't even know what my own community would consider obscene, because at most town social occasions we rarely pull out porn and invite others in the community to view it. (Barring, of course, Porntoberfest.)
Which raises an interesting question: How the hell is there a 'community standard' for obscene, considering that 'the community' rarely looks at 'almost obscene' material together, and, hence, there is no way at all for anyone to know how anyone else thinks about certain things?
People decide the 'community standards' solely from feedback from other members of the community, right? People don't walk around saying 'Well, I was watching Porn Video #24524 last night, and I think it was a bit over the line.', 'Well, I disagree, it was acceptable. You want something completely unacceptable, look at #9472, about twenty minutes in.' 'Damn straight! That's simply not show around here! They should be more like Porn Video #912. Ah, that was a classic.' 'Oh, yes, good ole #912. They don't make porn like that anymore.'. (Numbers because I'm too lazy to make up porn names.)
Specifically, Southern Democrats evolved into the Dixiecrats....who don't exist anymore. They didn't just slowly vanish, they actually split off in 1948 when the Democrats decided to adopt the position of anti-segregation. The Dixiecrats ran a candidate on a platform of 'Segregation Forever!'.
The original Democrats managed to win that election anyway, which is a pretty neat trick after a 'party split' like that. The Dixiecrats then dissolved and the members were absorbed into both the Republican and the Democratic parties.
In essense, the Southern Democrats held an election in 1948. No one came. They either changed their minds, shut their racist trap, or joined the Republicans. (Where they had to shut their racist trap in 1975 or so instead.)
And most of them are dead. The most obvious one that's not is Strom Thurmond who was, indeed, the candidate they ran. (And is a Republican now.)
Who here finds it more worrying that you were wandering around inside a chemical plant apparently unsupervised than what OS the computers were running?
And it's entirely possible those computers are just to monitor things, not actually do anything. Most chemical plants, last I looked into it, did everything manually, as in, someone stands there and pushes buttons on the tank to make it do things. Yes, it might suck if the inventory system goes down and you have no idea how much of Chemical X you have, but it's hardly going to kill anyone.
I'm sure a large fraction of people are 'music pirates' in some sense, and hence a large precentage of murdered people have, logically, been killed by 'music pirates'.
I find the comparison of the RIAA to people who shoot other people, gore them, and then kill their children with a firebomb uncalled for.
I can think of a few circumstances where that behavior would be acceptable. For example, maybe the child was infected with some sort of human-race-destroying plague and the parent was attempting to run off with her?
The WTO specifically is to stop countries from regulating international commerce in certain ways. One of these ways is that countries can't regulate economic behavior of its own citizens in other countries. (Which has been a tradition of international law, anyway.)
However, no one's sure if this falls under what the WTO prohibits, or not. I don't know how much they have to do with banking regulations.
And, yes, the WTO can't enforce anything at all. It doesn't have to. The WTO has the ability to ask other countries to impose penalties on goods exported from countries that break the rules, and the other countries that signed the WTO already agreed to automatically follow whatever the WTO said.
It's all well and good to say 'The US is sovereign', but have fun explaining that to US companies that suddenly find themselves getting hit with a 10% tarrif to ship their goods to the UK or Japan. Yes, technically, the UK and Japan could simply decide not do this...and they would get blacklisted and hit with penalties by the WTO.
Alternately, we could simply leave it, but then we'd stop getting all the benefits, and countries would be free to impose whatever tarrifs they want on us, and avoiding that is the entire point of the WTO in the first place.
Don't make the mistake of thinking the WTO doesn't have any teeth.
It is because there are so few "professional" athletes, but the reason for that is that there is an artifical monopoly on the number of positions, via a monopoly on the number of teams.
Completely untrue, adn this is well documented. First, Americans won't take those low level jobs. See, we've gotten our economy to the point where we generate more work than there are people to do it. We take the good jobs, but somebody has to do the crap we don't want to do.
It's well documented, eh? Where? I think it's rather absurd for me to say 'We have no evidence for X', and you to say 'Nuh-uh!' and not provide it.
And Americans will take any job if you pay them enough. The question is, would this payment be so large in relation to the current pay that it would mess things up, and would it be permanent, or something that would just cause some market flux and then settle back down?
Dunno if you've noticed, but the de facto minimum wage right now is around $8 an hour. Here in the DC area, fast food restaurants are starting people with no experience near $10.
The DC area is not representative of any part of the US. Here, very few businesses pay the $5.15/hr min wage...they instead pay $6.25/hr. However, raising the min pushes the businesses that do pay that up, and that pushes up the ones slightly higher to attract the same people.
And the minimum wage was never meant to be "lived on," as if you've been working more than a year and you're making minimum...there's something wrong with you.
That's a bit revisionist, isn't it? The minimum wage was designed as the mimimum amount you could live on. There's not a lot of point of requiring businesses pay a wage people can't live on. The fact it hasn't kept up with the price of living doesn't change the point of it.
And don't forget, raising wages through artificial labor restrictions raises costs.
Well, duh. Raising wages raises costs, period.
Also, if we keep workers out and there aren't enough people to fill the jobs, businesses leave.
Businesses already are leaving if they can, and they're leaving when the cost of their employees are way above min wage. The only way to fix that is tariffs and taxes on imported goods.
However, if that's really a major objection, I'm fine with a split minimum wage, one for manufacturing, and a higher one for service/food.
Liberals want a bigger government? What crack are you smoking? Do you have the slightest idea how large the government has grown under Bush?
Incidentally, we do have socialized education in this country.
As for fighting terrorism...how about not outing CIA agents? How about not appointting political hacks to important positions? How about not invading people we don't need to, so we have enough military to respond to actual threats? How about law enforcement actually fighting it in a serious manner behind the scenes, like the fucking government has been doing for several decades, instead of a bunch of political theatre about security while not actually doing anything, or making things worse?
I do like the fact you're recognized that Bush has raised the debt outragiously, sadly, it didn't seem to occur to you that he spent it on the government, making it larger. And the liberals would reduced the debt by cutting the budget and raising taxes, exactly how Clinton did it. Um, duh. It's not hard. More money coming in and less money going on means the government paying off loans. (And before you freak about paying more taxes...this would be undoing the tax cuts Bush gave to the rich.)
Oh, and also, we could, you know, stop losing money in Iraq. I don't mean spending money, although that would be a good idea, I mean literally losing money...we've had several billion dollars just walk off in Iraq.
I love it when Bush support argue the stereotype conservatives against the stereotype liberals. Hey, here's a free clue: Bush is not, and has never, acted in a conservative manner. The neocon agenda isn't 'conservative' at all.
Giving large handouts to business isn't conservative, it's fairly socialist, although it's socialist in a fairly stupid direction. At least free handouts to human beings makes sense. It doesn't work that well, but it makes sense. Free handouts to business is nonsensical.
Invading other countries isn't conservative, and invading them to give them their freedom is, in fact, a liberal concept, although liberals wouldn't do it in such a fucking stupid manner. Check out the military actions under Clinton for how this is supposed to work.
Hell, even anti-abortion isn't 'conservative'.
And I say this as someone agreeing with about 60% of the traditional conservative agenda, and about 25% of the liberal one. I'm anti-death penalty, and pro-some-sort-of-socialized health care(1).
1) We are, at this point, managing to spend something liek three times as much on health care as other countries...and not providing any better care. Why? Health insurance. Stop whining about the government paperwork and look at the private system we've manage to build without anyone noticing...and we just ported it over to Medicare!
As for Iran, no one knows what the fuck to do about Iran, and a large part of it is this fucking mess we're in in Iraq.
The 'Republicans', as in, the voters, aren't. Neither are the neocons. Neither are the theocons.
However, the 'pro-business' Republicans are, and it is, indeed, for cheaper labor.
And it's not worry that any specific person can do the job any better. People coming to this country for work are often taken advantage of, being paid less that min wage, or, for visas, trapped in contracts they cannot get out of without being expelled. And there's the fact they often support families in cheaper countries, whereas Americans tend to support families in America.
For Americans to compete they have to accept similiar paychecks. Which they can't live on, and certainly can't support a family on.
And, more to the point, there's not any evidence we have enough low-level jobs to go around. Ergo, everyone who comes to this country to take a job is, indeed, taking away it away from an American. If there was truly some sort of labor shortage, it would be one thing, but there's not, all we've done is introduced more people to compete with us.
Of course, we can solve this problem in a better way than shooting at honest, hardworking people leaping the border and making a run for more money. We could, instead, come down hard on business that hire people undocumented, and even let everyone enter documented...and raise the minimum wage to the point that Americans can live on it.
And as for the work visas, we should just ditch them.
Why the hell would anyone buy a webserver restricted to five users?
Especially considering that some browsers will open two connections to load a page, and most will keep the connection open for a second or so just in case it needs to make more requests. If there are dialup users where each page load takes five seconds, and opens two connections, and users click about once every twenty seconds...you need ten people to render the website unusable, on average. (It can handle less dialup people than normal people, to show how silly this is.)
Does anyone recall when the supposed 'advantage' (The only advantage) of Unix over Linux was that Unix scaled better? Does SCO releasing extremely crippled versions of Unix really help this concept?
And, yes, it appears they are licensing the stack in addition to the OS, which makes no sense, because if you purchase their Unix, you can frickin go and download MySQL, Apache, and PHP/Perl/Python/whatever yourself.
Posner then states that the provision did not intend for him to erase files that they either needed for business and had no copies of or needed as evidence against him. This leads me to believe that the nature of the files were either work product or trade secrets that they intended to keep as evidence in case he was stealing clients or using the company's IP to drive his competative business.
Well, that's all well and good they may have intended that, but it's almost certainly not illegal for him to stop them from doing that.;)
Having 'no copies of', however, is another thing, but I rather seriously doubt that's true. That would be a pretty inane way to run a business.
Again, without the facts from the lower case, I am not positive about this and it seems mostly speculation. However, I don't think that those people who feel that this is a big issue understand the exact scope of this opinion.
Yeah. I don't think we really understand what's going on here, and he's certainly not getting in trouble for 'deleting files', as the rather misleading headline held. This is about whether or not someone had the legal right to destroy something to keep from incriminating himself, and, even with that legal right, whether the fact that he did so can itself be used in court.
For an example of this: If you are a computer cracker, and the police break through your door as you're standing there degaussing your hard drive with an industrial magnet, having clearly seen them drive up, you are, legally, fine. They can't charge you with anything for that, it's your hard drive, you can do what you want until the second they arrest you or tell you to stop.
However, when in court, they can bring up the fact that while you do not possess the specific tools they accuse you of using, you did wipe out a hard drive as they drove up, and they presume that those tools were on that.
OTOH, that laptop supposedly contained trade secrets, so there were perfectly valid reasons for him to wipe parts of it. He could have been helping the company instead of hurting it.
You could even frame it in such a way it would be hard to object.
How about requiring all real estate transactions to happen on said real estate? This not only demonstates that the buyer knows exactly what property he's buying, but helps show that the seller has the legal right to sell the property. (Hopefully, if he didn't, someone would show up and ask what the hell is going on.)
This would also stop whiney fools who view the 'model home' in a subdivision, and then buy a property, sight unseen, for a house to be built on, and then complain that they're backed up against a shopping mall or highway or something.
As an added bonus, it would automatically stop those idiots selling property rights on the moon.
If having the actual transaction happen on the property is unfeasable, you could be allowed to head there in advance and sign a statement saying you are currently on the property, but intend to do the transaction elsewhere. As long as both the buyer and seller, or an agent of the buyer and seller, sign something while standing together on the property.
That 'buy houses and fix them to make money' concept is completely idiotic. There are companies that make money that way, but they own construction workers and actually know when 'fixer uppers' can be fixed up. (And they've already bought the good ones.) And if you have a lot of money, buying real estate as an investment makes sense, especially if you pay attention to where cities are expanding and buy from landowners who are not. Own it for five years, and then sell it, you can sometimes double your money. And if you do that, while you own the house, you might as well fix it up. But you should only invest in those with actual value to start with. (And while you're at it, rent it.)
However, thinking you can improve the price of a house by more than the cost of overhead and repairs is a risk. Sure, it might work, but it might not. It is, like you said, exactly akin to day trading. Buying stock as investment makes sense. Buying and selling stock constantly is a good way to lose all your money to overhead.
People don't realize there's a reason that 'slightly-broken' houses are cheaper than the cost to fix them up: 95% of people do not want to live in such houses. Unless you fix them up perfectly, they will continue to be slightly-broken houses and hence almost valueless thanks to supply and demand. Unless you are a construction worker skilled in every area of construction, you cannot fix them up perfectly.
At least with stock, you can't buy it with a loan, you don't have property taxes, you don't have to hire contractors, and you don't have to try six months to sell it. Just stick with day trading, at least there you can only lose money you have, you put in 2000 dollars and end up with 0. With houses, you can end up having a mortgage and property taxes, every month, until you manage to offload the house at less than you paid for it, and then you have to finishing paying off the mortgage excess!
I like how you actually include the part in the first quote, but fail to hilight it. 'Neural pressure' is all the standard zone implants can do. They can change emotion, even things not normally called emotions, like willingness to obey someone's orders. (And they could induce some other mental states, like sleep and unconciousness.)
And the book can call whatever is Angus 'zone implants' all they want. The point is he had a computer inside him. Not just a zone implant. This computer knew what he was doing, and could cause him, via his zone implants, to stop, and could even turn on 'complusion' mode and give him an order and he'd basically have to do it.
Normal zone implants installations don't have anything like that. They are merely small devices inserted in the head. Agnus was taken apart and put back together.
Slashdot Mirror
And the fact that a law has to define it as a sexual act does not, in fact, mean anything. All the town has to do is define what they are talking about as sex in the law they pass. Watch:
The prongs are:
a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest
b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and
c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
The only prong that exist independent of the local community is c). They don't get to define what 'lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value'. So, throw away c), they couldn't screw with that. The news would pass no matter what. It would, however, still be trivial to find things that wouldn't, like photos on driver's licenses, which do not serve any literary, artistic, political, or scientific value at all. (Of course, a state can violate community laws and distribute obscene IDs all it wants.;)
b) says state law, but that's a lie. Normally that's a state law, and it was for the example case. But barring a state law or state constitional clause to the contrary, nothing stops local communities from passing stricter laws. Including such absurdities as defining sex as taking off your hat, or shaking hands. All that says is to claim something is obscene, it has to be something the law also defines as 'sex'.
And note it says defined as sex in the applicable law, so that it would be trivial to do 'for the purposes of this act, sex is defined as...'. It doesn't have to be the general legal defination of sex.(1)
And a) I already covered.
So a) and b) are dependant entirely on local law and local standards. a) and b) could be rigged by any 'community' that felt like it in such a way as to outlaw any images. At all. It doesn't even require it be of people. (Hey, that grass is naked! And pollenizing itself!)
1) And I didn't just make that up, because it already happens. States that pass obscenity laws do specifically define sex in them, independent of elsewhere in the law. They do that because sometimes they don't define 'sex' anywhere else. They may define certain activities as unlawful sex, but they often fail to specifically mention that consensual intercourse between people over the age of consent is, in fact, sex. Why would they, they don't regulate it? Or they regulated it with anti-fornication laws that were struck down, and they possibly removed from the law, without realizing they removed their defination of 'sex' also.
Even if they didn't, that still introduces the hilarious idea of porn created by married people being legal...because legally that's not regulated as 'sex'. Heh.
And they almost always fail to include masturbation in any other defination of sex, whereas there are quite a few things a person can do by themselves that would be regarded as 'obscene' in places, and they would like to regulate.
In a theocracy, the church runs the government. In England, the government runs the church. As these both have the same entity running both the church and the government, it is easy to confuse them.
With England, however, the government runs the church because the church that used to claim authority (The Catholic Church) was asserting too much authority, so they got rid of it. And then, because it was expected at the time, they made their own church, which they have then continued to basically ignore.
The rules about extradition only work between different countries. They might call transfering people from state to state 'extradition', but it doesn't follow the same rules. (You also can't appeal it.)
However, some states won't bother to track down and arrest you for different levels of crime committed in other states, because they are lazy and don't really care. (This is what they whole 'escaping across state lines' is.) They are not 'legally obliged' to track you down, as the GP claimed. (Hell, the original police aren't obliged to do that. The police are not required to enforce any laws at all.)
However, if you end up in jail somehow, and they don't actually want you anymore, and they notice that some other state wants you, they'll call that state up and invite them to come get you.
Yes, in theory, that means you can be charged with a crime in a juridiction and never arrested. You will, however, eventually be tried in absentee, sentence to jail, and then a few years later you get pulled off the street as a witness in a car accident and they notice that some other state wants you and off they ship you. Or you end up in the papers and they come and pick you up for some quick PR. Or they're just bored one day and run the 'outstanding warrants' though the phone book. Risking your freedom on the placidity of the local phone force is not really a good plan.
I think is a way for the other state to force them to arrest you, actually. They can show up at your door and do a 'citizen's arrest'(1), and call the local police, who have been notified in advance that you are wanted in another state. At that point the local police have no choice but to keep you.
1) Citizen's arrests are restricted in many states to requiring someone to witness the arrested person actually committing a crime. However...failing to show up in court after being summoned is a crime, so the bailiff can do a citizen's arrest for that. He witnessed your lack of being in court, ergo he can legally detain you.
In a hypotherical case, the facts would be stipulated in advance, everyone would 'admit' to the supposed actions, so it would only be a question of law. Aka, 'If I did this, and you could prove I did it, what would be the legal consequences?'.
It is, because of one thing. Sort of akin to what the British called 'rotten boroughs'. That is basically an election district with, say, ten people in it. Or even one. (They get that because their election districts are decided by specific laws instead of census. Towns die, areas even slide entirely into the sea, and they still get a member of Parliment.)
In the US, there are, indeed, towns, with the legal ability to pass laws, with less than 50 people in them. Let's assume there are, oh, 30 adults, and they want to have a little fun. They merely need to get about 16 of them to decide that community standards say that exposed foreheads are a violation of community standards, and be willing to testify under oath that this is so. (Hey, if they've all agreed that it is so, it is the standard, so it's not even a lie.)
They can destroy basically the entire media in one go by passing a law against it and arresting anyone. Case goes to trial, the prosecution merely brings in more than half the adult population to testify as to 'community standards'. It works even better if you make them even more extreme than the law. Pass a law against photographs despicting the forehead, but agree that the 'community standards' require everyone to hide their entire face. So even if a few people do not play along, you can take an 'average'.
The whole concept is fucking absurd. The person who caused the images to pass over the border should be arrested, not the person who responded to that request. The latter not only requires everyone to know everyone's law, which would be bad enough, it requires everyone to know every community in the US so well that it would know what that community considers obscene, which is flatly impossible.
Hell, I don't even know what my own community would consider obscene, because at most town social occasions we rarely pull out porn and invite others in the community to view it. (Barring, of course, Porntoberfest.)
Which raises an interesting question: How the hell is there a 'community standard' for obscene, considering that 'the community' rarely looks at 'almost obscene' material together, and, hence, there is no way at all for anyone to know how anyone else thinks about certain things?
People decide the 'community standards' solely from feedback from other members of the community, right? People don't walk around saying 'Well, I was watching Porn Video #24524 last night, and I think it was a bit over the line.', 'Well, I disagree, it was acceptable. You want something completely unacceptable, look at #9472, about twenty minutes in.' 'Damn straight! That's simply not show around here! They should be more like Porn Video #912. Ah, that was a classic.' 'Oh, yes, good ole #912. They don't make porn like that anymore.'. (Numbers because I'm too lazy to make up porn names.)
The original Democrats managed to win that election anyway, which is a pretty neat trick after a 'party split' like that. The Dixiecrats then dissolved and the members were absorbed into both the Republican and the Democratic parties.
In essense, the Southern Democrats held an election in 1948. No one came. They either changed their minds, shut their racist trap, or joined the Republicans. (Where they had to shut their racist trap in 1975 or so instead.)
And most of them are dead. The most obvious one that's not is Strom Thurmond who was, indeed, the candidate they ran. (And is a Republican now.)
Who here finds it more worrying that you were wandering around inside a chemical plant apparently unsupervised than what OS the computers were running?
And it's entirely possible those computers are just to monitor things, not actually do anything. Most chemical plants, last I looked into it, did everything manually, as in, someone stands there and pushes buttons on the tank to make it do things. Yes, it might suck if the inventory system goes down and you have no idea how much of Chemical X you have, but it's hardly going to kill anyone.
I'm sure a large fraction of people are 'music pirates' in some sense, and hence a large precentage of murdered people have, logically, been killed by 'music pirates'.
I can think of a few circumstances where that behavior would be acceptable. For example, maybe the child was infected with some sort of human-race-destroying plague and the parent was attempting to run off with her?
The WTO specifically is to stop countries from regulating international commerce in certain ways. One of these ways is that countries can't regulate economic behavior of its own citizens in other countries. (Which has been a tradition of international law, anyway.)
However, no one's sure if this falls under what the WTO prohibits, or not. I don't know how much they have to do with banking regulations.
And, yes, the WTO can't enforce anything at all. It doesn't have to. The WTO has the ability to ask other countries to impose penalties on goods exported from countries that break the rules, and the other countries that signed the WTO already agreed to automatically follow whatever the WTO said.
It's all well and good to say 'The US is sovereign', but have fun explaining that to US companies that suddenly find themselves getting hit with a 10% tarrif to ship their goods to the UK or Japan. Yes, technically, the UK and Japan could simply decide not do this...and they would get blacklisted and hit with penalties by the WTO.
Alternately, we could simply leave it, but then we'd stop getting all the benefits, and countries would be free to impose whatever tarrifs they want on us, and avoiding that is the entire point of the WTO in the first place.
Don't make the mistake of thinking the WTO doesn't have any teeth.
It is because there are so few "professional" athletes, but the reason for that is that there is an artifical monopoly on the number of positions, via a monopoly on the number of teams.
It's well documented, eh? Where? I think it's rather absurd for me to say 'We have no evidence for X', and you to say 'Nuh-uh!' and not provide it.
And Americans will take any job if you pay them enough. The question is, would this payment be so large in relation to the current pay that it would mess things up, and would it be permanent, or something that would just cause some market flux and then settle back down?
Dunno if you've noticed, but the de facto minimum wage right now is around $8 an hour. Here in the DC area, fast food restaurants are starting people with no experience near $10.
The DC area is not representative of any part of the US. Here, very few businesses pay the $5.15/hr min wage...they instead pay $6.25/hr. However, raising the min pushes the businesses that do pay that up, and that pushes up the ones slightly higher to attract the same people.
And the minimum wage was never meant to be "lived on," as if you've been working more than a year and you're making minimum...there's something wrong with you.
That's a bit revisionist, isn't it? The minimum wage was designed as the mimimum amount you could live on. There's not a lot of point of requiring businesses pay a wage people can't live on. The fact it hasn't kept up with the price of living doesn't change the point of it.
And don't forget, raising wages through artificial labor restrictions raises costs.
Well, duh. Raising wages raises costs, period.
Also, if we keep workers out and there aren't enough people to fill the jobs, businesses leave.
Businesses already are leaving if they can, and they're leaving when the cost of their employees are way above min wage. The only way to fix that is tariffs and taxes on imported goods.
However, if that's really a major objection, I'm fine with a split minimum wage, one for manufacturing, and a higher one for service/food.
Incidentally, we do have socialized education in this country.
As for fighting terrorism...how about not outing CIA agents? How about not appointting political hacks to important positions? How about not invading people we don't need to, so we have enough military to respond to actual threats? How about law enforcement actually fighting it in a serious manner behind the scenes, like the fucking government has been doing for several decades, instead of a bunch of political theatre about security while not actually doing anything, or making things worse?
I do like the fact you're recognized that Bush has raised the debt outragiously, sadly, it didn't seem to occur to you that he spent it on the government, making it larger. And the liberals would reduced the debt by cutting the budget and raising taxes, exactly how Clinton did it. Um, duh. It's not hard. More money coming in and less money going on means the government paying off loans. (And before you freak about paying more taxes...this would be undoing the tax cuts Bush gave to the rich.)
Oh, and also, we could, you know, stop losing money in Iraq. I don't mean spending money, although that would be a good idea, I mean literally losing money...we've had several billion dollars just walk off in Iraq.
I love it when Bush support argue the stereotype conservatives against the stereotype liberals. Hey, here's a free clue: Bush is not, and has never, acted in a conservative manner. The neocon agenda isn't 'conservative' at all.
Giving large handouts to business isn't conservative, it's fairly socialist, although it's socialist in a fairly stupid direction. At least free handouts to human beings makes sense. It doesn't work that well, but it makes sense. Free handouts to business is nonsensical.
Invading other countries isn't conservative, and invading them to give them their freedom is, in fact, a liberal concept, although liberals wouldn't do it in such a fucking stupid manner. Check out the military actions under Clinton for how this is supposed to work.
Hell, even anti-abortion isn't 'conservative'.
And I say this as someone agreeing with about 60% of the traditional conservative agenda, and about 25% of the liberal one. I'm anti-death penalty, and pro-some-sort-of-socialized health care(1).
1) We are, at this point, managing to spend something liek three times as much on health care as other countries...and not providing any better care. Why? Health insurance. Stop whining about the government paperwork and look at the private system we've manage to build without anyone noticing...and we just ported it over to Medicare!
As for Iran, no one knows what the fuck to do about Iran, and a large part of it is this fucking mess we're in in Iraq.
However, the 'pro-business' Republicans are, and it is, indeed, for cheaper labor.
And it's not worry that any specific person can do the job any better. People coming to this country for work are often taken advantage of, being paid less that min wage, or, for visas, trapped in contracts they cannot get out of without being expelled. And there's the fact they often support families in cheaper countries, whereas Americans tend to support families in America.
For Americans to compete they have to accept similiar paychecks. Which they can't live on, and certainly can't support a family on.
And, more to the point, there's not any evidence we have enough low-level jobs to go around. Ergo, everyone who comes to this country to take a job is, indeed, taking away it away from an American. If there was truly some sort of labor shortage, it would be one thing, but there's not, all we've done is introduced more people to compete with us.
Of course, we can solve this problem in a better way than shooting at honest, hardworking people leaping the border and making a run for more money. We could, instead, come down hard on business that hire people undocumented, and even let everyone enter documented...and raise the minimum wage to the point that Americans can live on it.
And as for the work visas, we should just ditch them.
Especially considering that some browsers will open two connections to load a page, and most will keep the connection open for a second or so just in case it needs to make more requests. If there are dialup users where each page load takes five seconds, and opens two connections, and users click about once every twenty seconds...you need ten people to render the website unusable, on average. (It can handle less dialup people than normal people, to show how silly this is.)
Does anyone recall when the supposed 'advantage' (The only advantage) of Unix over Linux was that Unix scaled better? Does SCO releasing extremely crippled versions of Unix really help this concept?
And, yes, it appears they are licensing the stack in addition to the OS, which makes no sense, because if you purchase their Unix, you can frickin go and download MySQL, Apache, and PHP/Perl/Python/whatever yourself.
Well, that's all well and good they may have intended that, but it's almost certainly not illegal for him to stop them from doing that. ;)
Having 'no copies of', however, is another thing, but I rather seriously doubt that's true. That would be a pretty inane way to run a business.
Again, without the facts from the lower case, I am not positive about this and it seems mostly speculation. However, I don't think that those people who feel that this is a big issue understand the exact scope of this opinion.
Yeah. I don't think we really understand what's going on here, and he's certainly not getting in trouble for 'deleting files', as the rather misleading headline held. This is about whether or not someone had the legal right to destroy something to keep from incriminating himself, and, even with that legal right, whether the fact that he did so can itself be used in court.
For an example of this: If you are a computer cracker, and the police break through your door as you're standing there degaussing your hard drive with an industrial magnet, having clearly seen them drive up, you are, legally, fine. They can't charge you with anything for that, it's your hard drive, you can do what you want until the second they arrest you or tell you to stop.
However, when in court, they can bring up the fact that while you do not possess the specific tools they accuse you of using, you did wipe out a hard drive as they drove up, and they presume that those tools were on that.
OTOH, that laptop supposedly contained trade secrets, so there were perfectly valid reasons for him to wipe parts of it. He could have been helping the company instead of hurting it.
Are you guys sure you're not Americans?
Buildings never are, unless you're going to tear them down.
Use your inspectors and your lawyers to research it before buying it.
The 'renovation costs' would be things like: climate control, electricity, water, doors, windows, and walls.
How about requiring all real estate transactions to happen on said real estate? This not only demonstates that the buyer knows exactly what property he's buying, but helps show that the seller has the legal right to sell the property. (Hopefully, if he didn't, someone would show up and ask what the hell is going on.)
This would also stop whiney fools who view the 'model home' in a subdivision, and then buy a property, sight unseen, for a house to be built on, and then complain that they're backed up against a shopping mall or highway or something.
As an added bonus, it would automatically stop those idiots selling property rights on the moon.
If having the actual transaction happen on the property is unfeasable, you could be allowed to head there in advance and sign a statement saying you are currently on the property, but intend to do the transaction elsewhere. As long as both the buyer and seller, or an agent of the buyer and seller, sign something while standing together on the property.
Or does eBay let you say 'I'm not happy with what I purchased' and not pay the seller? If so, remind me never to use escrow.
However, thinking you can improve the price of a house by more than the cost of overhead and repairs is a risk. Sure, it might work, but it might not. It is, like you said, exactly akin to day trading. Buying stock as investment makes sense. Buying and selling stock constantly is a good way to lose all your money to overhead.
People don't realize there's a reason that 'slightly-broken' houses are cheaper than the cost to fix them up: 95% of people do not want to live in such houses. Unless you fix them up perfectly, they will continue to be slightly-broken houses and hence almost valueless thanks to supply and demand. Unless you are a construction worker skilled in every area of construction, you cannot fix them up perfectly.
At least with stock, you can't buy it with a loan, you don't have property taxes, you don't have to hire contractors, and you don't have to try six months to sell it. Just stick with day trading, at least there you can only lose money you have, you put in 2000 dollars and end up with 0. With houses, you can end up having a mortgage and property taxes, every month, until you manage to offload the house at less than you paid for it, and then you have to finishing paying off the mortgage excess!
Neither Enron or Parmalot ripped customers off with shoddy products. (In fact, Enron didn't even sell products.)
And the book can call whatever is Angus 'zone implants' all they want. The point is he had a computer inside him. Not just a zone implant. This computer knew what he was doing, and could cause him, via his zone implants, to stop, and could even turn on 'complusion' mode and give him an order and he'd basically have to do it.
Normal zone implants installations don't have anything like that. They are merely small devices inserted in the head. Agnus was taken apart and put back together.