Why wouldn't PETA do that? Maybe PETA couldn't find a home for those seals, despite, you know, not trying, or maybe they were living off humanities' effort, like cows, and thus PETA, instead of setting them 'free' to die, decided to humanely bash their heads in instead of them starving to death?
They think that we shouldn't be using any animals in any way, so obviously their success is automatically going to result in hundreds of millions of dead animals that can't live on their own. Every cow will die, every dog (Because they'd go feral and we'd have to shoot them), almost every cat, almost every horse will die if they do what they want to do. (Hence they see nothing wrong with killing almost every single animal their shelter collects, when they have way more than enough money to keep every stray in this country.)
And once you've justified the death of hundreds of millions of animals, a few more can't hurt anything. Of course, if you consider animals equivalent to people, than killing a few people is probably okay, also.
Almost no actions of PETA would surprise me. They could be discovered to running a goat prostitution ring with the goats trained to bite off the heads of their customers and steal their wallets, and I'd just blink and keep going.
Almost every single objection to OSS: lack of warranty, inability to distribute without following the license, left in the cold if the publisher goes belly-up, and others are exactly the same when applied to closed source, or worse.
It's just completely surreal that anyone listens to these people.
There are commericial code libraries out there. They always have clauses about distribution.
Some you can get for free, code to for free, and have to buy when reselling stuff using them.
Some you have to pay for a single copy, can copy internally as much as you want, and may have to pay again to redistrubute.
Some you have to pay for every copy insternally, and may have to pay again to redistrubute.
When you pay to redistibute, you may have to pay X amount for each copy you send out, you may have level of 1-100, 101-1000, etc, you may have to pay to start and pay a percentage of the price, etc, etc, etc.
So there's all this craziness about commercial libraries...and yet somehow open source ones are the danger? If you use third-party libraries in your code, you're already aware of the hurdles you have to jump through, and that you have to check every single damn license.
The theory here is that people might see source code and decide to use it in their product without knowing the legal ramifications is just completely idiotic. Open source at least has the advantage that legal can say 'We have approved all LGPL libraries, please notify your manager if you need one. We have unapproved all GPL ones, do not use them.', etc, and keep from having to review them individually before the programmers can use them.
No, not if you remain on exactly the same hardware. And exactly the same software.
Of course, if you don't upgrade anything, every piece of old software will keep working, but have fun expanding in any way, have fun when a piece of hardware dies, and have lots of fun trying to get support on the old software you have where the makers still are in business. (This software requires DOS 3.3, but I can't seem to get MS to listen to me...)
Whereas not only does most open source have an upgrade path, even if created by non-original programmers, but often someone creates an open source upgrade path for closed source programs, e.g., MSDOS and FreeDOS.
You can argue there's no reason for this, and logically there isn't much of one beyond 'With open source I don't have to start over, so I'll write myself an upgrade path and publish it', but there being no good reason for something doesn't make it not true. There are very few dead-ends of seriously-used OSS, which demonstrates you need do your research and not use some fancy new web server that two people are writing and fifty using, but Apache instead, and so on.
Whereas there are lots of dead-ends of seriously used close technology. Visual Basic, anyone? Visual J++? Those are just two I thought of while typing.
so the only option is to hire a team of engineers to fix/upgrade it anyway
See, I love that. It's exactly akin to 'If you want to include GPL code in your product, you have to make it GPL', and that's presented as some sort of advantage over closed code. Both of those statements are literally true, but not an advantage.
It's the difference between jumping out of an airplane clutching a parachute, and jumping out without one. Yes, if you did have one in your hands, you must go through the long and complicated process of putting it on while falling, whereas, if you didn't bring one at all, you don't have to bother with all that nonsense, or even bother with the ripcode or trying to land safely.
Good point there, talking about how 'hard' it is to do something with OSS, when it is literally impossible, both legally without the copyright and technologically without the original source, to do it with closed programs.
Incidentally, you don't have to do it. Someone has to do it. That's only sometimes just 'you'. Often it is other people who use the program. (Which is, as I said, a reason you need to pick popular OSS programs if you're putting anything critical on them, not obscure ones.)
For all those people who don't know anything about spammers, the theft is not of the person who got the spam, or their bandwidth or anything. You can argue all you want if that's really theft, but that's moot, as it isn't what anyone was charged with.
The theft is the illegal hijacking of unsuspecting third-parties with trojans that send the spam. This is how almost all spammers operate nowdays, since all open relays have been shut down.
Which is why CAN SPAM was a spectaularly misinformed piece of legislation. The constant blocking and filtering of spammer resources (and, sadly, legitimately open resources) made them, as of about five years ago, start illegally using other poeple's resources if they want anything to get through, so we could have just been arresting them for that this entire time. We don't need any laws about 'spam' at all to stop 99.99% of the spammers out there....enforcement of laws against computer theft and the filtering of spammer-owned resources works fine.
HBHG didn't invent 'The Priory'. It 'actually' existed, or was invented about 100 years ago by the non-fictional priest who 'discovered' all this.
If this is a fictional story, it's not one by the writers of HBHG. It's one at least 100 years old, planted by a hoaxer in France.
Interestingly, I don't think there are any copyright protections for 'hoaxes'. If I, in real life, make up a pretend government agency, and a mission from it, and claim to be part of it, I'm not entirely sure I could sue someone who heard me and actually used that agency in a book, especially if I had never admitted it was a hoax.
But, regardless, the idea was never copyrighted, not even in France. Back then, you had to publish with a copyright notice, and it wouldn't automatically transfer to the US, and would have expired anyway.
Plantard invented the grail thing, the idea that Jesus was not crucified, married Mary Magdalen and went to live in France.
No he didn't. That had been around before. The middle two had been common 'heresies' forever, and the latter, linking Jesus to the Merovingians, was not new either, at least not in France.
Even if it is fiction, 99% of it is fiction that's been around at least 100 years, and hence is completely out of copyright.
It's like the Bible. If it is fiction, the story could be copyrighted, if it is fact it cannot...except that it's way too old, so it's rather a moot point.
I can't say I have seen this sort of work anywhere else.
Then you haven't looked. At most of the story had been around a very long time.
The somewhat inexplicable war between the Templars/Freemasons and the Catholic Church is fairly well known, and inspired quite a lot of conspiracy theories over the years, most of them centered around the idea that the Templars knew something really big about Christianity.(1)
And the idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and sired the Merovingians has been around forever, too. (Along with the other theory that an alien sired the Merovingians.)
And, yes, they've been combined before, with that being the Templar's secret.
This appears, incidentally, is one of the reasons why the Catholic Church insists on confusing Mary Magdalene with a prostitute, despite nothing in the Bible even slightly implying that those were the same people. The other reason is that she, quite likely, was an actual 'apostle', which the Church really didn't like. Hence the 'trash Mary Magdalene' effort by making her into a 'prostitute who saw the light', instead of just this woman who hung around with Jesus.
Anyway, combining the largest mystery in Christian history, the Templars, with the most glamourous mystery in European history, the Merovingians, and the second(1) largest 'heresy' in Christianity, that Jesus didn't die on the cross but married and fled to Gaul, is not exactly rocket science.
HBHG just pulled in the whole idea that some French guy discovered all this 100 years ago and linked it with the Priory of Sion.
1) Hilariously, the largest 'heresy' in Christianity is the other thing often attributed to the Templars: Gnosism.
Those guys really got around. They were actually charged with yet a third heresy, worshipping an idol.
If someone says 'X is what really happened', and I write a fiction book where X is true, that is completely fine, because you can't copyright facts. If that's what happened, anyone can use it.
This whole lawsuit makes no fucking sense. If HBHG is true, which it claims to be, it is not a plot, it does not have characters, it is facts. Anyone can recount them, or incorporate them in any fictional plot. (And they're old enough facts that you don't even need a disclaimer on them, because none of those people can sue.)
If it's a scholarly work, there might be obvious plagerism, but fictional books do not have to cite sources for things they present as facts, or any sources at all.
However, as others have pointed out, Holy Blood, Holy Grail is mentioned within The Da Vinci Code. So it is, indeed, 'cited'.
Incidently, Holy Blood, Holy Grail didn't discover most of these 'facts' either. They are old legends and stories and occult secrets. The writer just put them together and documented some evidence of them being true. So even if they are fiction, they are public domain fiction.
I think you can eventually get a jury trial, if you keep demanding it.
Speeding tickets, and other moving vilations, are weird crimes, in that intent doesn't matter. The mere fact you were physically doing something is illegal. Hence all they have to prove is that you were doing something, and you're guilty. Hence the lack of a need for a jury to figure that out.
However, I'm fairly certain you can end up in front of a jury, no matter what. Just keep pleading innocent, or 'guilty with migrating circumstances'. If you don't want to say the latter, just plead innnocent even if you are technically guilty...a mere plea cannot be counted as perjury.
I do, however, know that in some states you can't do the same thing for a parking violation. Some parking violations are not 'crimes' in any meaningful sense, because no one is charged with them. They are, in a sense, usage fees on your car.
Which is why 'I didn't park the car there' doesn't work as an excuse for them, whereas 'I wasn't driving' does work for moving violations, like red-light cameras catching you. The former asserts that a car was positioned illegally, and thus money must be paid to continue to operate said car on the roads, not that anyone has committed any crime. The latter asserts you committed a crime via your operation of a vehicle, and hence you can get a trial.
Technically, the Constition does apply. There's nothing in there about the boundaries of the US.
The constitution really only has three limits:
1) Citizens, which is only specificed with regard to voting and being electioned.
2) 'The Government', and what it cannot do. Sometimes called 'Congress' WRT to lawmaking, but the courtsa ren't stupid here and have realized this applies to the entire thing.
3) People. Just...people. The courts like to pretend some of these instances of 'people' mean 'US people', some mean 'all people' and some means 'US citizens'.
The courts are full of shit. Looking at the specific wording, these things apply to all people who have ever existed and will exist in any circumstances whatsoever.
I quote the Amendment XIV 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.'
Persons. Citizens. Different things. There are clearly people not born in the US. Any constitutional clause that references 'people' clearly includes those people.
Although there are obvious juridictional and causality problems with the US government enforcing 'The right of the people to be secure in their persons...' in China or in 304 BC. However, this fits perfectly with the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that people had rights, period. Not that the government 'should' grant them, or 'must' grant that, but that said rights existed in some real sense.
Think of it as the US's version of the 'Divine Right of Kings'. A philosophical point that is utterly unprovable, but that is, according to the US, true. Human rights exist, period. They don't exist because we say they exist, they don't exist because we choose not to infringe them, they exist because people were created with those rights and no one can take them away.
As philosophical premises for governments, it's one of the better ones. Instead of starting out with a moral reason for the government to do things, it starts out with a reason for the government not to do things. And only then does it say 'In order to secure these rights, we need a government to keep others from infringing them'.
Trying to make out these rights to be only for US citizens, on 'official' US soil, isn't just trashing the actual text of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence, it's trashing the whole philosophical underpinning of the nation, that people 'have' rights, and that is that.
Why it is that every time I quote the Declaration of Independence, I feel like I'm stirring sedition?
The memos appear to show that not only was the firm aware of the illegality of Diebold's actions, but was actively providing their client advice on how to evade detection, making them party to their illegal activities.
That is the one circumstance where violating client-attorney priviledge is allowed. Saying 'Here is how to break the law' is just flatly illegal for an attorney. It is entering into a conspiracy. The government can, indeed, listen in on such converstations. Although if they are wrong, they've not only got a lot of explaining to do, but have probably blow the original case also.
However, all this is moot, as he wasn't the damn government, or anyone lawyer. If I run across notes written by a lawyer to a client, I am not bound by anything. Client-attorney priviledge is a red herring.
They can't 'ignore' the law. They can, however, decide the punishment for breaking that particular law is out of the bounds of what punishment should be applied(1), and refuse to find the defendent not guilty.
And, no, that's not a mistrial. It's called jury nullification. It's the origin of freedom of speech and religion in this country, for one thing, because people refused to find others guilty of critizing the king and their religion.
In the longest sense, it's the reason we have trial-by-jury, it's the reason the Magna Carta exists. It's not to get a 'fair' trial, you can have fairness without having a jury of your peers. (Why peers instead of impartial legal experts?) It's so when there's a law that the population does not agree with, they can decide not to convict anyone of it. Or when the circumstances warrant it. (Speeding your pregnant wife to the hospital? Okay, speeding ticket dismissed.)
It's why the Declaration of Independence has a line in there about 'mock' trials and transporting accused criminals back to England to face a jury there. They were English, they knew their rights, they kept failing to convict other Englishmen of breaking the stupid laws people thousands of miles away kept passing, as was laid out in the Magna Carta. Ergo, the English government had to start doing that to find anyone guilty of anything.
And the idea that 'You can commit a crime to prevent a worse one' comes from there. If you break into someone's house to keep from being murdered, that's technically illegal. However, you won't get arrested for it, because common law says, traditionally, that you can do that, thanks to centuries of juries finding such people, who factually committed a crime, innocent. (No, it's not legally self-defense, that only applies to you using force against someone attacking you, not breaking into an unrelated person's house. Self-defense also started that way, although that is now codified into law.)
That's why the concept that the defense attorney cannot introduce this information, or facts about, say, medicinal use of pot (to pick an example) is the most dangerous precedent this country has ever had pre-Bush. Defense attornies should be able to produce anything they can prove. I'm not saying if they can't prove it, they shouldn't be able to introduce it, I'm just saying if they can, it should be forever out-of-bounds to restrict in any way.
Right now it's claimed it's 'not relevant', because the law doesn't make a distinction. But the circumstances and reason for a crime are always relevant. And, I have to point out, this only matters in cases where the defendant admits guilt, but shows up in court anyway instead of cutting a deal, which is like.1% of the time. We won't hear sob stories about how someone robbed that gas station and killed some people because he needed money to buy his kid medicine, because he'd have to admit he was guilty.
Incidently, if the phrase 'throw yourself on the mercy of the court' is going through your mind, that is, indeed, exactly where that phrase is coming from.
1) Often, they think this punishment should be 'none'.
However, whistleblower protection is only when you do something you can be punished for to expose a larger crime. I.e., violate a NDA or take documents home with you that you are not allowed to. And it's usually about punishment from the people you're blowing the whistle on...they don't get to fire you because you 'violated your NDA' because you went to the police.
About the only way it would apply to cops is if you break out of a corrupt jail, I guess.
Nuclear power is the usage of nuclear processes to generate usable power, just like solar power is the usage of solar energy to generate usable power.
Where power is usually defined as 'electricity', although it can be merely heat if you just need heat. The key concept here is using a process to generate and store energy for later. Growing a plant is not solar power, and blowing something up is not nuclear power.
I'm sorry if you've somehow mistaken 'nuclear processes' with 'nuclear power', or even 'nuclear weapons' with 'nuclear power', and hope I have been informative.
Nuclear processes have been heating the earth, both as the sun and as radioactive decay within the earth, since the formation of the earth, and nuclear fisson has been happened here in a few spots naturally. Nuclear weapons were invented in the mid-1940s and used at the end of WWII on Japan by the US, having been tested very shortly before that.
However, electricity was first generated off a nuclear reaction in 1951, and the first commerical nuclear power came online in 1954 in the USSR. The industry itself could be said to have come into being between then and 1957, when both the International Atomic Energy Agency and the European Atomic Energy Community showed up on the scene. That is nuclear power.
And nuclear processes were discovered. Nuclear power, the specific application of said processes to generate electricity, was invented. And while people thought of it way back in the 1930s, things aren't invented until they actually work.
The French are the only people who ever managed to build a nuclear reactor damaged by, and I quote, 'heavy snowfall'.
The shutting down of Superphenix, however, was really political, not engineering.
However, the engineering of breeder reactors is, right now, where nuclear power was in the 1970s, and have the same craptacular 'Let's generate thousands of tons of radioactive coolent that we then have to deal with' design.
We need to build pebble bed reactors now and work on coming up with a good, failsafe, non-over-engineered, non-waste producing breeder reactor design to use their waste.
Luckily, even if the US ignores all this, China is going to start building PBR and a South Africa wants to build and export them.
It's not like you wouldn't notice you were getting cooked if it suddenly decided to do so, anyway. We are not frogs, and we will will, indeed, go 'Damn, why am I getting so hot standing here? It's like 120 degrees in here!'.
Of course, microwave ovens were invented by guys standing too close to a microwave radar system and cooking things in their pockets, and they didn't notice anything or even get hot, so maybe not. It's plausibly we can only sense heat on the outside of our body, which is also why we can get cooked by UV while swimming and not notice.
OTOH, those guys didn't suffer any ill effects, although it probably killed a lot of cells in their legs, at least. Microwaves aren't some magical evil ray, at full force, they just heat you up until they kill you.
Subthermal levels of radiation can still affect the biological function of polar molecules, which can in turn can cause carcinogenic compounds to end up where they don't belong.
See, that's just dumb. 'carcinogenic compounds to end up where they don't belong'. You mean...microwave radiation can put 'carcinogenic compounds' in my body?
Because, you see, that is where they don't belong. If they're already there, and a few molecules moving around can move them to where they can cause cancer, I was pretty much fucked to start with. Anything that can cause cancer within my cells is...um...bad. And microwaves can't move things in and out of my cells, if that's what you mean by 'where they don't belong'. They could, in theory, hit something exactly right to cause it to ram the cell, thus...killing it. Which is fine, cells die all the time.
And you have absolutely no evidence that said hypothetical movement isn't moving more 'carcinogenic compounds' away from 'where they don't belong' than towards, pretending your claim makes any sense at all.
To be absolutely clear about this: Cancer has nothing to do with 'frequency', at least, not in absolute terms. What causes cancer is a wavelength of radiation that goes far enough through the dead skin on your body (can't cause cancer in dead skin) and screws up your DNA once it does so.
If it does not do that, it cannot cause cancer. If it does do that, it might cause cancer.
The wavelength of radio stations and TV stations go through you. However, they are much much too large to have an effect on a cell...they are in the meter range. They can't cause cancer anymore than getting hit by a car can.
In fact, anything much larger than the visible spectrum isn't going to be small enough to cause cancer. Although note that, not only are you transmitting on the wavelength you want, you are often transmitting on half that wavelength and double that wavelength, thanks to some reason I don't fully understand.
Getting back to wifi, microwaves, and other gigahertz wavelength, which are smaller than visible light, go through your cells very poorly, tending to get stopped by water and the cell barrier. And, in effect, transmitting their motion to the water, heating it up, although you'd never notice unless you were standing inside a microwave oven, as most signalling methods in that wavelength are in or below the watt range.
This is, contrary to what people think, proof that it is not harming us, because our skin can take a hell of a lot of heating before anything bad happens, and heat cannot cause cancer. (By the time you apply enough heat to screw up DNA, you've already killed the cell. Which is good, because otherwise people would get cancer from burns.) Moving water is much better than continuing forward and moving DNA.
The current 'theory' about how cell phones mess you up has nothing to do with any of this, it's that EM fields somehow mess with chemical reactions in your body, reactions that are unrelated to DNA. That's magnetic fields, not radiation. When things move through a magnetic field, they generate electricity. (Erm, in essence, although that's a bit simple.) The theory is that cell phones generate a strong enough field that your head moving right there can generate enough power to mess up your head.
Of course, this is completely idiotic, but whatever. It's basically the exact same claim as the one made living near power lines, which also has no evidence for it. The only place our body uses electricity is our nervous system, and if the minute amounts of electricity generated within us could screw that up, we'd have people having seizures every time they walked under a power-line transformer and stuff like that. There's no logical reason that long term exposure to minute internally-generated electrical current would have an effect, but short, extremely powerful bursts like walking through a power plant wouldn't.
Although I did find it funny when I ran into someone who insisted cell phones were bad for you...and walked around with magnets in their shoe.
No. Your cell phone produces much lower average than that, mainly because you aren't using it 95% of the time. In fact, to be fair, we should average in all those trashed cell phones that are off all the time.
A stream of bullets has a pretty low average momentum whern you factor in the air inbetween the bullets, too. I don't know why people are worried about being sprayed with one.
By including in the 'average' the amount of time the phone isn't transmitting, you're assumeing any problems have anything to do with an 'average' radiation output. However, we pretty much know the radiation is safe...the question is, do EMI fields interfer with chemical reactions in your body? If so, alternating spikes of low and high fields could logically do as much, or more, damage as merely leaving it on high all the time.
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They think that we shouldn't be using any animals in any way, so obviously their success is automatically going to result in hundreds of millions of dead animals that can't live on their own. Every cow will die, every dog (Because they'd go feral and we'd have to shoot them), almost every cat, almost every horse will die if they do what they want to do. (Hence they see nothing wrong with killing almost every single animal their shelter collects, when they have way more than enough money to keep every stray in this country.)
And once you've justified the death of hundreds of millions of animals, a few more can't hurt anything. Of course, if you consider animals equivalent to people, than killing a few people is probably okay, also.
Almost no actions of PETA would surprise me. They could be discovered to running a goat prostitution ring with the goats trained to bite off the heads of their customers and steal their wallets, and I'd just blink and keep going.
Almost every single objection to OSS: lack of warranty, inability to distribute without following the license, left in the cold if the publisher goes belly-up, and others are exactly the same when applied to closed source, or worse.
It's just completely surreal that anyone listens to these people.
There are commericial code libraries out there. They always have clauses about distribution.
Some you can get for free, code to for free, and have to buy when reselling stuff using them.
Some you have to pay for a single copy, can copy internally as much as you want, and may have to pay again to redistrubute.
Some you have to pay for every copy insternally, and may have to pay again to redistrubute.
When you pay to redistibute, you may have to pay X amount for each copy you send out, you may have level of 1-100, 101-1000, etc, you may have to pay to start and pay a percentage of the price, etc, etc, etc.
So there's all this craziness about commercial libraries...and yet somehow open source ones are the danger? If you use third-party libraries in your code, you're already aware of the hurdles you have to jump through, and that you have to check every single damn license.
The theory here is that people might see source code and decide to use it in their product without knowing the legal ramifications is just completely idiotic. Open source at least has the advantage that legal can say 'We have approved all LGPL libraries, please notify your manager if you need one. We have unapproved all GPL ones, do not use them.', etc, and keep from having to review them individually before the programmers can use them.
Of course, if you don't upgrade anything, every piece of old software will keep working, but have fun expanding in any way, have fun when a piece of hardware dies, and have lots of fun trying to get support on the old software you have where the makers still are in business. (This software requires DOS 3.3, but I can't seem to get MS to listen to me...)
Whereas not only does most open source have an upgrade path, even if created by non-original programmers, but often someone creates an open source upgrade path for closed source programs, e.g., MSDOS and FreeDOS.
You can argue there's no reason for this, and logically there isn't much of one beyond 'With open source I don't have to start over, so I'll write myself an upgrade path and publish it', but there being no good reason for something doesn't make it not true. There are very few dead-ends of seriously-used OSS, which demonstrates you need do your research and not use some fancy new web server that two people are writing and fifty using, but Apache instead, and so on.
Whereas there are lots of dead-ends of seriously used close technology. Visual Basic, anyone? Visual J++? Those are just two I thought of while typing.
so the only option is to hire a team of engineers to fix/upgrade it anyway
See, I love that. It's exactly akin to 'If you want to include GPL code in your product, you have to make it GPL', and that's presented as some sort of advantage over closed code. Both of those statements are literally true, but not an advantage.
It's the difference between jumping out of an airplane clutching a parachute, and jumping out without one. Yes, if you did have one in your hands, you must go through the long and complicated process of putting it on while falling, whereas, if you didn't bring one at all, you don't have to bother with all that nonsense, or even bother with the ripcode or trying to land safely.
Good point there, talking about how 'hard' it is to do something with OSS, when it is literally impossible, both legally without the copyright and technologically without the original source, to do it with closed programs.
Incidentally, you don't have to do it. Someone has to do it. That's only sometimes just 'you'. Often it is other people who use the program. (Which is, as I said, a reason you need to pick popular OSS programs if you're putting anything critical on them, not obscure ones.)
Whereas, of course, you can legally use closed source a part of your own products all you want.
The theft is the illegal hijacking of unsuspecting third-parties with trojans that send the spam. This is how almost all spammers operate nowdays, since all open relays have been shut down.
Which is why CAN SPAM was a spectaularly misinformed piece of legislation. The constant blocking and filtering of spammer resources (and, sadly, legitimately open resources) made them, as of about five years ago, start illegally using other poeple's resources if they want anything to get through, so we could have just been arresting them for that this entire time. We don't need any laws about 'spam' at all to stop 99.99% of the spammers out there....enforcement of laws against computer theft and the filtering of spammer-owned resources works fine.
If this is a fictional story, it's not one by the writers of HBHG. It's one at least 100 years old, planted by a hoaxer in France.
Interestingly, I don't think there are any copyright protections for 'hoaxes'. If I, in real life, make up a pretend government agency, and a mission from it, and claim to be part of it, I'm not entirely sure I could sue someone who heard me and actually used that agency in a book, especially if I had never admitted it was a hoax.
But, regardless, the idea was never copyrighted, not even in France. Back then, you had to publish with a copyright notice, and it wouldn't automatically transfer to the US, and would have expired anyway.
No he didn't. That had been around before. The middle two had been common 'heresies' forever, and the latter, linking Jesus to the Merovingians, was not new either, at least not in France.
It's like the Bible. If it is fiction, the story could be copyrighted, if it is fact it cannot...except that it's way too old, so it's rather a moot point.
Then you haven't looked. At most of the story had been around a very long time.
The somewhat inexplicable war between the Templars/Freemasons and the Catholic Church is fairly well known, and inspired quite a lot of conspiracy theories over the years, most of them centered around the idea that the Templars knew something really big about Christianity.(1)
And the idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and sired the Merovingians has been around forever, too. (Along with the other theory that an alien sired the Merovingians.)
And, yes, they've been combined before, with that being the Templar's secret.
This appears, incidentally, is one of the reasons why the Catholic Church insists on confusing Mary Magdalene with a prostitute, despite nothing in the Bible even slightly implying that those were the same people. The other reason is that she, quite likely, was an actual 'apostle', which the Church really didn't like. Hence the 'trash Mary Magdalene' effort by making her into a 'prostitute who saw the light', instead of just this woman who hung around with Jesus.
Anyway, combining the largest mystery in Christian history, the Templars, with the most glamourous mystery in European history, the Merovingians, and the second(1) largest 'heresy' in Christianity, that Jesus didn't die on the cross but married and fled to Gaul, is not exactly rocket science.
HBHG just pulled in the whole idea that some French guy discovered all this 100 years ago and linked it with the Priory of Sion.
1) Hilariously, the largest 'heresy' in Christianity is the other thing often attributed to the Templars: Gnosism.
Those guys really got around. They were actually charged with yet a third heresy, worshipping an idol.
This whole lawsuit makes no fucking sense. If HBHG is true, which it claims to be, it is not a plot, it does not have characters, it is facts. Anyone can recount them, or incorporate them in any fictional plot. (And they're old enough facts that you don't even need a disclaimer on them, because none of those people can sue.)
If it's a scholarly work, there might be obvious plagerism, but fictional books do not have to cite sources for things they present as facts, or any sources at all.
However, as others have pointed out, Holy Blood, Holy Grail is mentioned within The Da Vinci Code. So it is, indeed, 'cited'.
Incidently, Holy Blood, Holy Grail didn't discover most of these 'facts' either. They are old legends and stories and occult secrets. The writer just put them together and documented some evidence of them being true. So even if they are fiction, they are public domain fiction.
Speeding tickets, and other moving vilations, are weird crimes, in that intent doesn't matter. The mere fact you were physically doing something is illegal. Hence all they have to prove is that you were doing something, and you're guilty. Hence the lack of a need for a jury to figure that out.
However, I'm fairly certain you can end up in front of a jury, no matter what. Just keep pleading innocent, or 'guilty with migrating circumstances'. If you don't want to say the latter, just plead innnocent even if you are technically guilty...a mere plea cannot be counted as perjury.
I do, however, know that in some states you can't do the same thing for a parking violation. Some parking violations are not 'crimes' in any meaningful sense, because no one is charged with them. They are, in a sense, usage fees on your car.
Which is why 'I didn't park the car there' doesn't work as an excuse for them, whereas 'I wasn't driving' does work for moving violations, like red-light cameras catching you. The former asserts that a car was positioned illegally, and thus money must be paid to continue to operate said car on the roads, not that anyone has committed any crime. The latter asserts you committed a crime via your operation of a vehicle, and hence you can get a trial.
Wouldn't that be, you know, social? ;)
The constitution really only has three limits:
1) Citizens, which is only specificed with regard to voting and being electioned.
2) 'The Government', and what it cannot do. Sometimes called 'Congress' WRT to lawmaking, but the courtsa ren't stupid here and have realized this applies to the entire thing.
3) People. Just...people. The courts like to pretend some of these instances of 'people' mean 'US people', some mean 'all people' and some means 'US citizens'.
The courts are full of shit. Looking at the specific wording, these things apply to all people who have ever existed and will exist in any circumstances whatsoever.
I quote the Amendment XIV 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.'
Persons. Citizens. Different things. There are clearly people not born in the US. Any constitutional clause that references 'people' clearly includes those people.
Although there are obvious juridictional and causality problems with the US government enforcing 'The right of the people to be secure in their persons...' in China or in 304 BC. However, this fits perfectly with the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that people had rights, period. Not that the government 'should' grant them, or 'must' grant that, but that said rights existed in some real sense.
Think of it as the US's version of the 'Divine Right of Kings'. A philosophical point that is utterly unprovable, but that is, according to the US, true. Human rights exist, period. They don't exist because we say they exist, they don't exist because we choose not to infringe them, they exist because people were created with those rights and no one can take them away.
As philosophical premises for governments, it's one of the better ones. Instead of starting out with a moral reason for the government to do things, it starts out with a reason for the government not to do things. And only then does it say 'In order to secure these rights, we need a government to keep others from infringing them'.
Trying to make out these rights to be only for US citizens, on 'official' US soil, isn't just trashing the actual text of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence, it's trashing the whole philosophical underpinning of the nation, that people 'have' rights, and that is that.
Why it is that every time I quote the Declaration of Independence, I feel like I'm stirring sedition?
That is the one circumstance where violating client-attorney priviledge is allowed. Saying 'Here is how to break the law' is just flatly illegal for an attorney. It is entering into a conspiracy. The government can, indeed, listen in on such converstations. Although if they are wrong, they've not only got a lot of explaining to do, but have probably blow the original case also.
However, all this is moot, as he wasn't the damn government, or anyone lawyer. If I run across notes written by a lawyer to a client, I am not bound by anything. Client-attorney priviledge is a red herring.
And, no, that's not a mistrial. It's called jury nullification. It's the origin of freedom of speech and religion in this country, for one thing, because people refused to find others guilty of critizing the king and their religion.
In the longest sense, it's the reason we have trial-by-jury, it's the reason the Magna Carta exists. It's not to get a 'fair' trial, you can have fairness without having a jury of your peers. (Why peers instead of impartial legal experts?) It's so when there's a law that the population does not agree with, they can decide not to convict anyone of it. Or when the circumstances warrant it. (Speeding your pregnant wife to the hospital? Okay, speeding ticket dismissed.)
It's why the Declaration of Independence has a line in there about 'mock' trials and transporting accused criminals back to England to face a jury there. They were English, they knew their rights, they kept failing to convict other Englishmen of breaking the stupid laws people thousands of miles away kept passing, as was laid out in the Magna Carta. Ergo, the English government had to start doing that to find anyone guilty of anything.
And the idea that 'You can commit a crime to prevent a worse one' comes from there. If you break into someone's house to keep from being murdered, that's technically illegal. However, you won't get arrested for it, because common law says, traditionally, that you can do that, thanks to centuries of juries finding such people, who factually committed a crime, innocent. (No, it's not legally self-defense, that only applies to you using force against someone attacking you, not breaking into an unrelated person's house. Self-defense also started that way, although that is now codified into law.)
That's why the concept that the defense attorney cannot introduce this information, or facts about, say, medicinal use of pot (to pick an example) is the most dangerous precedent this country has ever had pre-Bush. Defense attornies should be able to produce anything they can prove. I'm not saying if they can't prove it, they shouldn't be able to introduce it, I'm just saying if they can, it should be forever out-of-bounds to restrict in any way.
Right now it's claimed it's 'not relevant', because the law doesn't make a distinction. But the circumstances and reason for a crime are always relevant. And, I have to point out, this only matters in cases where the defendant admits guilt, but shows up in court anyway instead of cutting a deal, which is like .1% of the time. We won't hear sob stories about how someone robbed that gas station and killed some people because he needed money to buy his kid medicine, because he'd have to admit he was guilty.
Incidently, if the phrase 'throw yourself on the mercy of the court' is going through your mind, that is, indeed, exactly where that phrase is coming from.
1) Often, they think this punishment should be 'none'.
However, whistleblower protection is only when you do something you can be punished for to expose a larger crime. I.e., violate a NDA or take documents home with you that you are not allowed to. And it's usually about punishment from the people you're blowing the whistle on...they don't get to fire you because you 'violated your NDA' because you went to the police.
About the only way it would apply to cops is if you break out of a corrupt jail, I guess.
Where power is usually defined as 'electricity', although it can be merely heat if you just need heat. The key concept here is using a process to generate and store energy for later. Growing a plant is not solar power, and blowing something up is not nuclear power.
I'm sorry if you've somehow mistaken 'nuclear processes' with 'nuclear power', or even 'nuclear weapons' with 'nuclear power', and hope I have been informative.
Nuclear processes have been heating the earth, both as the sun and as radioactive decay within the earth, since the formation of the earth, and nuclear fisson has been happened here in a few spots naturally. Nuclear weapons were invented in the mid-1940s and used at the end of WWII on Japan by the US, having been tested very shortly before that.
However, electricity was first generated off a nuclear reaction in 1951, and the first commerical nuclear power came online in 1954 in the USSR. The industry itself could be said to have come into being between then and 1957, when both the International Atomic Energy Agency and the European Atomic Energy Community showed up on the scene. That is nuclear power.
And nuclear processes were discovered. Nuclear power, the specific application of said processes to generate electricity, was invented. And while people thought of it way back in the 1930s, things aren't invented until they actually work.
The shutting down of Superphenix, however, was really political, not engineering.
However, the engineering of breeder reactors is, right now, where nuclear power was in the 1970s, and have the same craptacular 'Let's generate thousands of tons of radioactive coolent that we then have to deal with' design.
We need to build pebble bed reactors now and work on coming up with a good, failsafe, non-over-engineered, non-waste producing breeder reactor design to use their waste.
Luckily, even if the US ignores all this, China is going to start building PBR and a South Africa wants to build and export them.
THEY GLOW IN THE DARK!
And he's worried about idiotic wifi, while he's spewing enough radiation out of every ceiling at burn them if they touched the source.
And that frequency radiation has almost been known to blind people with not much more power than light bulbs produce.
Of course, microwave ovens were invented by guys standing too close to a microwave radar system and cooking things in their pockets, and they didn't notice anything or even get hot, so maybe not. It's plausibly we can only sense heat on the outside of our body, which is also why we can get cooked by UV while swimming and not notice.
OTOH, those guys didn't suffer any ill effects, although it probably killed a lot of cells in their legs, at least. Microwaves aren't some magical evil ray, at full force, they just heat you up until they kill you.
See, that's just dumb. 'carcinogenic compounds to end up where they don't belong'. You mean...microwave radiation can put 'carcinogenic compounds' in my body?
Because, you see, that is where they don't belong. If they're already there, and a few molecules moving around can move them to where they can cause cancer, I was pretty much fucked to start with. Anything that can cause cancer within my cells is...um...bad. And microwaves can't move things in and out of my cells, if that's what you mean by 'where they don't belong'. They could, in theory, hit something exactly right to cause it to ram the cell, thus...killing it. Which is fine, cells die all the time.
And you have absolutely no evidence that said hypothetical movement isn't moving more 'carcinogenic compounds' away from 'where they don't belong' than towards, pretending your claim makes any sense at all.
WTF? How the hell would you apply a broadcast limit to reception in the first place?
If it does not do that, it cannot cause cancer. If it does do that, it might cause cancer.
The wavelength of radio stations and TV stations go through you. However, they are much much too large to have an effect on a cell...they are in the meter range. They can't cause cancer anymore than getting hit by a car can.
In fact, anything much larger than the visible spectrum isn't going to be small enough to cause cancer. Although note that, not only are you transmitting on the wavelength you want, you are often transmitting on half that wavelength and double that wavelength, thanks to some reason I don't fully understand.
Getting back to wifi, microwaves, and other gigahertz wavelength, which are smaller than visible light, go through your cells very poorly, tending to get stopped by water and the cell barrier. And, in effect, transmitting their motion to the water, heating it up, although you'd never notice unless you were standing inside a microwave oven, as most signalling methods in that wavelength are in or below the watt range.
This is, contrary to what people think, proof that it is not harming us, because our skin can take a hell of a lot of heating before anything bad happens, and heat cannot cause cancer. (By the time you apply enough heat to screw up DNA, you've already killed the cell. Which is good, because otherwise people would get cancer from burns.) Moving water is much better than continuing forward and moving DNA.
The current 'theory' about how cell phones mess you up has nothing to do with any of this, it's that EM fields somehow mess with chemical reactions in your body, reactions that are unrelated to DNA. That's magnetic fields, not radiation. When things move through a magnetic field, they generate electricity. (Erm, in essence, although that's a bit simple.) The theory is that cell phones generate a strong enough field that your head moving right there can generate enough power to mess up your head.
Of course, this is completely idiotic, but whatever. It's basically the exact same claim as the one made living near power lines, which also has no evidence for it. The only place our body uses electricity is our nervous system, and if the minute amounts of electricity generated within us could screw that up, we'd have people having seizures every time they walked under a power-line transformer and stuff like that. There's no logical reason that long term exposure to minute internally-generated electrical current would have an effect, but short, extremely powerful bursts like walking through a power plant wouldn't.
Although I did find it funny when I ran into someone who insisted cell phones were bad for you...and walked around with magnets in their shoe.
A stream of bullets has a pretty low average momentum whern you factor in the air inbetween the bullets, too. I don't know why people are worried about being sprayed with one.
By including in the 'average' the amount of time the phone isn't transmitting, you're assumeing any problems have anything to do with an 'average' radiation output. However, we pretty much know the radiation is safe...the question is, do EMI fields interfer with chemical reactions in your body? If so, alternating spikes of low and high fields could logically do as much, or more, damage as merely leaving it on high all the time.