You can't discharge judgments based upon willful copyright infringement or any intentional tort in bankruptcy. He might be able to get rid of some credit card debt in bankruptcy, but any taxes, student loans, and this $675K judgment will all stick around. Plus his attorney's fees, trustees' fees, and court costs for the bankruptcy. Of course maybe he can get Nesson to represent him in bankruptcy too, he did a bang-up job with this case.
I never said the idea or the researcher was either stupid or useless, on the contrary the research is probably brilliant. It is this site's analysis of research that is consistently worthless. The article and all of its commenters are raving about urea, and specifically urine, as an energy SOURCE and SOLUTION. It's never going to be.
Not only do you have no concept of energy scale whatsoever (you couldn't boil down the ocean if you busted every subatomic bond in the fecal rumblings of your post)--but you are also wrong about where the urea in your piss comes from.
We don't go around eating urea-laden food and passing it into our piss (most of us, anyway, maybe you're a piss-guzzler). Ammonia is a toxic by-product of metabolism that makes your blood too alkaline. The body expends extra energy from the metabolism to synthesize urea from this waste ammonia, just as synthetic urea is made from ammonia found in coal or such, in order to put nitrogen in neutral, less toxic form that can be removed by the kidneys.
Urea will never be a significant energy source. Think about it, cars use far more energy than the total caloric intake of an animal (human or otherwise) per day. Yet WASTE product is supposed to supply all the energy needs of our vehicles?
Secondly, this would directly compete with our food sources even more so than biodiesel already does. Urea is a nitrogen fertilizer source that is in short supply. We already manufacture most of the world's urea supply from atmospheric nitrogen using up energy (mostly natural gas) in the process.
So in short, while this research may be of practical and academic interest, it is not going to usher in a new era of piss-powered cars.
Free speech doesn't give unlimited protection to libel.
Ars Technica (TFA) claims that the judge's order ignores previous rulings, yet the ones it cites are not on point. They involve politicians and business executives.
These involve purported libel of private figures acquitted of a crime.
Each entry in Amtrak's "Picture our Train" photo contest must be an 8x10 color photo of an Amtrak train displaying the current Amtrak logo. No digital images will be accepted.
It also specifically reminds participants not to trespass:
Remember, SAFETY FIRST! Amtrak reminds the public and especially those who may photograph a train to stay out of danger. It is very important to stay away from tracks, moving trains, yards, railroad structures (such as bridges, trestles, towers and wires) and the railroad right-of-way. Photographers must not trespass on railroad property or on private property adjacent to the railroad.
Allowing representatives to use third-party services for official purposes, rather than government-run official IT infrastructure, enables them to hide their operations in plain sight. This is much like gov.palin@hotmail.com and Bush using RNC services while in office.
With these new rules in place, official goverment records that should be open to scrutiny will be spread across thousands of privately-controlled servers. Oversight will be impossible.
I never liked Myspace much and only joined to monitor what certain people were posting. I replaced my profile with an anti-Fox message and logged off permanently when Murdoch bought it up, so it makes me happy to see this site wither. It was always ugly and poorly designed anyway.
Of course then Microsoft bought 15% of Facebook so I've eliminated most of my usage of that as well. Bit of a loss, but these things are big time-wasters anyway.
1. Yes, Slashdot is getting a "great deal" here,--almost insulting to the web designers who participate. Having Slashdot in your portfolio is probably worth as much as the prize, a laptop "valued up to $4500," meaning it will likely not cost Slashdot nearly that much. It probably cost Slashdot more to have their lawyer review the contest and come up with the rules than they are offering for the runner-up prize.
2. Slashdot's lawyers would be committing malpractice if they did not put such a clause conveying the entrants' IP to the sponsor. If Slashdot doesn't own their own design and logos, they are just asking to be hit up for royalties or even penalties later on.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(x) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems (x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck (x) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (x) Sending email should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Have you been to China? There are plenty of well-lit, well-staffed, and cleanly retail shops selling CDs for RMB7, complete with jewel cases and professionally printed liner notes. You can bet these do not have the RIAA stamp of approval.
Sure you can buy CDs out of cardboard boxes or back-alley shacks if you want to, (just as you can in NYC's Chinatown), and you might even save a few cents. But your explanation is BS.
That begs the question. I agree that this study is a stupid waste of $2.8 million. But it does scientifically test a hypothesis, and did come up with a result, namely that "no health benefit was measured when a group of believers was randomly assigned to pray for particular persons' conditions." This does not mean that prayer can't help in other situations outside the context of this circumstance, it doesn't mean that there wasn't some actual subtle benefit that the study was not sensitive enough to measure. It certainly doesn't prove that prayer doesn't work or that there isn't a god. It proves very little. But it does contradict earlier shoddy studies arranged similarly to this one which supposedly *did* find some small benefit from this kind of "assigned intercessory prayer," as a previous poster noted. And it certainly shows that sincere prayer doesn't always work "magic," for those who believe it does. So the study is not completely worthless. There have been previously published articles of questionable quality making assertions of this kind, and this appears to be a large-scale, carefully controlled study that finds no such effect. That and $0.50 will get you a $0.50 cup of coffee.
No. Even 50 or 60 can easily yield statistically significant results. It all depends on the sensitivity you need in the study. More than 300 is rarely needed for truly randomized experimental studies--diminishing returns and all that—usually at some point procedural limitations will obviate any increased sensitivity from large samples. Very large samples are usually used in surveys and epidemiological studies which are observational or use novel sampling techniques.
No, they don't have the faintest idea how much prayer the control group got.
Like I said, they do know how much more prayer the experimental group got.
This is like doing a drug evaluation experiment, where they ask some people to take the drug, but the drug is available over the counter and they don't actually control either group's access to it, so they end up without the faintest idea what either group actually got.
No, this is like doing a toxicology experiment, where they ask some people to take the substance, but the substance is present in the environment in unknown quantities, but since the control group and the experimental group are randomized they know how much more of the substance the experimental group is getting.
Sheesh, you smug bastards should really go over some elementary statistics before piping up.
Take a class in statistics. This is what randomization is for. The prayed-for people in this study have no idea if they are being prayed for or not. Individually, we know exactly how much more prayer they are getting than they would otherwise. As a group, randomization ensures that the control group and the prayer group are getting the same amount of prayer outside of the study.
No, you don't. That's what randomization is for. The Prayer group is getting a defined amount of more prayer than the Control group.
Of course, what this doesn't take into account is that the Flying Spaghetti Monster will shuffle around the random number generator and skew the results, making it appear that prayer doesn't have an effect, when He rigged the whole thing!
Not exactly. They didn't just give these downloads away, costing them nothing more than bandwidth. Apple and/or the various giveaway sponsors paid full royalties on these songs. Which is close to a dollar each. Apple doesn't make much if anything on downloads, they make money on hardware.
was convicted for assaulting a former tenant of his while performing a "citizen's arrest" for failure to pay rent. He appealed the case pro se, and unsurprisingly lost on his irrelevent legal arguments. The man seems to be a bit nutty, if not dangerous.
Such legislation would be completely redundant. It is already and always has been the case that illegal contracts are unenforceable. Nor will courts grant restitution for money paid on an illegal contract. So if you owe money on an illegal gambling debt (which all online gambling debts are), you don't have to pay it. And if the person you owe is dumb enough to take you to court, they will always be thrown out. On the same token, if you've already paid, then you can't sue to get your money back (although courts have sometimes allowed this, it is contrary to the doctrine of illegality and so will ordinarily fail).
Credit card debt is just debt, so if you funded your online gambling account with your credit card (and haven't paid it off), then you can contact your card company, tell them it's payment for illegal online gambling and ask for a charge-back. If they hassle you, you can take them to court (subject to your contract, which may require arbitration). Of course you would be confessing to criminal conduct yourself which could be used to convict you of illegal gambling, but this is unlikely to happen. This is a more complicated situation than dealing directly with the site operator though. If the credit card company itself lost money due to your transaction they might be entitled to it, and there could be other stuff in your contract regarding customer's illegal use of the card, so if you're in a situation like this you should talk to a lawyer.
No, no, no. It won't stop Timbuktu companies from accepting U.S. credit cards payments for online wagers. But it will stop U.S. credit card companies from approving payments for online wagers. So your the transaction will be declined regardless. Likewise for U.S. credit card processors, even if you have a foreign credit card. If you use a foreign card with a foreign company, then it won't apply.
filler: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
Thanks for the kind thoughts. Unfortunately for your babbling, neither is legal now. I'm not a fan of the war on drugs, and I think that possession and use of marijuana should probably be decriminalized at least. But the fact is these laws are on the books. The DoJ should not be throwing the book at people like Marc Emery and looking the other way when another American runs a multi-billion dollar corporation out of Gibraltar that violates the law just as flagrantly on a much larger scale. It is hypocrisy and it is immensely unfair to American citizens who work hard to make a living while abiding by the law.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't discharge judgments based upon willful copyright infringement or any intentional tort in bankruptcy. He might be able to get rid of some credit card debt in bankruptcy, but any taxes, student loans, and this $675K judgment will all stick around. Plus his attorney's fees, trustees' fees, and court costs for the bankruptcy. Of course maybe he can get Nesson to represent him in bankruptcy too, he did a bang-up job with this case.
I never said the idea or the researcher was either stupid or useless, on the contrary the research is probably brilliant. It is this site's analysis of research that is consistently worthless. The article and all of its commenters are raving about urea, and specifically urine, as an energy SOURCE and SOLUTION. It's never going to be.
Not only do you have no concept of energy scale whatsoever (you couldn't boil down the ocean if you busted every subatomic bond in the fecal rumblings of your post)--but you are also wrong about where the urea in your piss comes from.
We don't go around eating urea-laden food and passing it into our piss (most of us, anyway, maybe you're a piss-guzzler). Ammonia is a toxic by-product of metabolism that makes your blood too alkaline. The body expends extra energy from the metabolism to synthesize urea from this waste ammonia, just as synthetic urea is made from ammonia found in coal or such, in order to put nitrogen in neutral, less toxic form that can be removed by the kidneys.
You fail. Fail, fail, fail.
Urea will never be a significant energy source. Think about it, cars use far more energy than the total caloric intake of an animal (human or otherwise) per day. Yet WASTE product is supposed to supply all the energy needs of our vehicles?
Secondly, this would directly compete with our food sources even more so than biodiesel already does. Urea is a nitrogen fertilizer source that is in short supply. We already manufacture most of the world's urea supply from atmospheric nitrogen using up energy (mostly natural gas) in the process.
So in short, while this research may be of practical and academic interest, it is not going to usher in a new era of piss-powered cars.
Free speech doesn't give unlimited protection to libel.
Ars Technica (TFA) claims that the judge's order ignores previous rulings, yet the ones it cites are not on point. They involve politicians and business executives.
These involve purported libel of private figures acquitted of a crime.
The contest rules on the front page say:
It also specifically reminds participants not to trespass:
Allowing representatives to use third-party services for official purposes, rather than government-run official IT infrastructure, enables them to hide their operations in plain sight. This is much like gov.palin@hotmail.com and Bush using RNC services while in office.
With these new rules in place, official goverment records that should be open to scrutiny will be spread across thousands of privately-controlled servers. Oversight will be impossible.
Never read a 404 before.
I never liked Myspace much and only joined to monitor what certain people were posting. I replaced my profile with an anti-Fox message and logged off permanently when Murdoch bought it up, so it makes me happy to see this site wither. It was always ugly and poorly designed anyway.
Of course then Microsoft bought 15% of Facebook so I've eliminated most of my usage of that as well. Bit of a loss, but these things are big time-wasters anyway.
What about games such as The Dark Eye? There's quite a bit in that genre.
1. Yes, Slashdot is getting a "great deal" here,--almost insulting to the web designers who participate. Having Slashdot in your portfolio is probably worth as much as the prize, a laptop "valued up to $4500," meaning it will likely not cost Slashdot nearly that much. It probably cost Slashdot more to have their lawyer review the contest and come up with the rules than they are offering for the runner-up prize.
2. Slashdot's lawyers would be committing malpractice if they did not put such a clause conveying the entrants' IP to the sponsor. If Slashdot doesn't own their own design and logos, they are just asking to be hit up for royalties or even penalties later on.
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(x) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Have you been to China? There are plenty of well-lit, well-staffed, and cleanly retail shops selling CDs for RMB7, complete with jewel cases and professionally printed liner notes. You can bet these do not have the RIAA stamp of approval.
Sure you can buy CDs out of cardboard boxes or back-alley shacks if you want to, (just as you can in NYC's Chinatown), and you might even save a few cents. But your explanation is BS.
That begs the question. I agree that this study is a stupid waste of $2.8 million. But it does scientifically test a hypothesis, and did come up with a result, namely that "no health benefit was measured when a group of believers was randomly assigned to pray for particular persons' conditions." This does not mean that prayer can't help in other situations outside the context of this circumstance, it doesn't mean that there wasn't some actual subtle benefit that the study was not sensitive enough to measure. It certainly doesn't prove that prayer doesn't work or that there isn't a god. It proves very little. But it does contradict earlier shoddy studies arranged similarly to this one which supposedly *did* find some small benefit from this kind of "assigned intercessory prayer," as a previous poster noted. And it certainly shows that sincere prayer doesn't always work "magic," for those who believe it does. So the study is not completely worthless. There have been previously published articles of questionable quality making assertions of this kind, and this appears to be a large-scale, carefully controlled study that finds no such effect. That and $0.50 will get you a $0.50 cup of coffee.
No. Even 50 or 60 can easily yield statistically significant results. It all depends on the sensitivity you need in the study. More than 300 is rarely needed for truly randomized experimental studies--diminishing returns and all that—usually at some point procedural limitations will obviate any increased sensitivity from large samples. Very large samples are usually used in surveys and epidemiological studies which are observational or use novel sampling techniques.
No, they don't have the faintest idea how much prayer the control group got.
Like I said, they do know how much more prayer the experimental group got.
This is like doing a drug evaluation experiment, where they ask some people to take the drug, but the drug is available over the counter and they don't actually control either group's access to it, so they end up without the faintest idea what either group actually got.
No, this is like doing a toxicology experiment, where they ask some people to take the substance, but the substance is present in the environment in unknown quantities, but since the control group and the experimental group are randomized they know how much more of the substance the experimental group is getting.
Sheesh, you smug bastards should really go over some elementary statistics before piping up.
Take a class in statistics. This is what randomization is for. The prayed-for people in this study have no idea if they are being prayed for or not. Individually, we know exactly how much more prayer they are getting than they would otherwise. As a group, randomization ensures that the control group and the prayer group are getting the same amount of prayer outside of the study.
No, you don't. That's what randomization is for. The Prayer group is getting a defined amount of more prayer than the Control group.
Of course, what this doesn't take into account is that the Flying Spaghetti Monster will shuffle around the random number generator and skew the results, making it appear that prayer doesn't have an effect, when He rigged the whole thing!
Not exactly. They didn't just give these downloads away, costing them nothing more than bandwidth. Apple and/or the various giveaway sponsors paid full royalties on these songs. Which is close to a dollar each. Apple doesn't make much if anything on downloads, they make money on hardware.
was convicted for assaulting a former tenant of his while performing a "citizen's arrest" for failure to pay rent. He appealed the case pro se, and unsurprisingly lost on his irrelevent legal arguments. The man seems to be a bit nutty, if not dangerous.
Such legislation would be completely redundant. It is already and always has been the case that illegal contracts are unenforceable. Nor will courts grant restitution for money paid on an illegal contract. So if you owe money on an illegal gambling debt (which all online gambling debts are), you don't have to pay it. And if the person you owe is dumb enough to take you to court, they will always be thrown out. On the same token, if you've already paid, then you can't sue to get your money back (although courts have sometimes allowed this, it is contrary to the doctrine of illegality and so will ordinarily fail).
Credit card debt is just debt, so if you funded your online gambling account with your credit card (and haven't paid it off), then you can contact your card company, tell them it's payment for illegal online gambling and ask for a charge-back. If they hassle you, you can take them to court (subject to your contract, which may require arbitration). Of course you would be confessing to criminal conduct yourself which could be used to convict you of illegal gambling, but this is unlikely to happen. This is a more complicated situation than dealing directly with the site operator though. If the credit card company itself lost money due to your transaction they might be entitled to it, and there could be other stuff in your contract regarding customer's illegal use of the card, so if you're in a situation like this you should talk to a lawyer.
No, no, no. It won't stop Timbuktu companies from accepting U.S. credit cards payments for online wagers. But it will stop U.S. credit card companies from approving payments for online wagers. So your the transaction will be declined regardless. Likewise for U.S. credit card processors, even if you have a foreign credit card. If you use a foreign card with a foreign company, then it won't apply.
filler:
Please try to keep posts on topic.
Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads.
Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
Thanks for the kind thoughts. Unfortunately for your babbling, neither is legal now. I'm not a fan of the war on drugs, and I think that possession and use of marijuana should probably be decriminalized at least. But the fact is these laws are on the books. The DoJ should not be throwing the book at people like Marc Emery and looking the other way when another American runs a multi-billion dollar corporation out of Gibraltar that violates the law just as flagrantly on a much larger scale. It is hypocrisy and it is immensely unfair to American citizens who work hard to make a living while abiding by the law.
Yes, and he was arrested more than half a year ago, and the U.S. is trying to arrest him.