No it doesn't. The first treatise on English law was the Tractatus of Glanvill in 1188 (law predating that is legally defined as "time immemorial"). England was subject to Norman Law since 1066, but Normandy was a Duchy of Viking invaders and settlers, and the Kind of France didn't conquer it and unify it into France until 1204. The common law of England is geographically distinct - the rest of Western Europe uses civil law.
those "slaves" are slaves for a seven-year term, after which they're free. Second they get paid, and there's even a minimum wage...
Only true for Jewish slaves, who were more like servants. The majority of slaves were non-Jewish, and could be worked without pay until death.
with raping female slaves, which is islamic in origin.
Judaic law gives slave masters the right to rape the wife of any of their slaves if the slave was sold into slavery by a court of law.
killing slaves and raping slaves and torture only ever was allowed under islamic law
Actually it was allowed in many places: "A major touchstone of the nature of a slave society was whether or not the owner had the right to kill his slave. In most Neolithic and Bronze Age societies slaves had no such right, for slaves from ancient Egypt and the Eurasian steppes were buried alive or killed to accompany their deceased owners into the next world. Among the Northwest Coast Tlingit, slave owners killed their slaves in potlatches to demonstrate their contempt for property and wealth; they also killed old or unwanted slaves and threw their bodies into the Pacific Ocean. An owner could kill his slave with impunity in Homeric Greece, ancient India, the Roman Republic, Islamic countries, Anglo-Saxon England, medieval Russia, and many parts of the American South before 1830." - Encyclopedia Britannica
The Holocaust was legalised under German law that gave Hitler's orders legal power. The establishment of slavery in the colonies, concentration camps, hunting Aborigines for sport, these all occurred under Western legal systems. Islamic law does not have a monopoly on abuse.
Even in the old-testament, while gays are convicted, it's not quite as black and white as is often put.
"If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."
I googled for that text, it's obviously not from the new testament.
Insurance companies and their clients also have an adversarial relationship. The company can directly decrease costs by working against the interests of the client, by denying coverage and rejecting claims. The insurance company has the problem of asymmetric information - the client knows more about their own health than the insurance company does, thus in any market based system, people who have poor health will take advantage of their knowledge, which increases costs for everyone else, to the point where the people in good health feel refuse to overpay and stop buying the insurance, which in turn increases costs for everyone else. Akerlof showed that this kind of asymmetric information problem will eventually cause the market itself to fail. We can already see the start of this - insurance companies denying preexisting conditions, government regulating that they must accept, and insurance costs rising.
The per capita admin cost of the U.S. health care system alone exceeds the entire per capita expenditure of the Singapore health care system, despite both having similar healthcare outcomes.
"The reason why Singapore's success is uncommon is probably that policy debates get stuck with one side claiming that we should rely on the market and the other side asserting that the government would do a better job. So, government or market? We've learned that the question doesn't make any sense in isolation. To answer it we need to understand why markets might work, and how and why they fail." - The Undercover Economist
you cannot tell who will need expensive health care
We obviously can't predict accidents, but we do know that, for the average person, the bulk of their health care costs will be in old age, and those costs will increase as they get closer to the point of death. 27 percent of Medicare spending covers care for people in the very final year of life (source). If we were more accepting of death, then we would probably not bother to squander so much money when the end comes. From a financial perspective, it would make more sense to develop a matrix of cost/benefit, and to offer patients either the treatment or some fraction of the equivalent cash to give to their families. Or to develop a statistical model, and only provide baseline medical service when the probability of death in the next 12 months exceeds 95% or so. Rational, but perhaps not politically/socially viable.
it's not quite as black and white as is often put.
"If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."
A lot of Christians also believe in the Old Testament.
the basis of our law system is ~90% Judaic law
No... The basis of U.S. law is English common law, which followed rulings made by the King's judges based English tradition and legal precedent. There was influence from some other legal systems, including the Roman one where Christianity was the state religion (as it was in England), but no direct link to Judaic law. Some laws developed that were heavily influenced by religious views - the death sentence for blasphemy and homosexuality being two obvious ones (see Thomas Aikenhead, John William Gott). Both of those were argued from Christian religious perspectives, primarily based on passages in the Bible.
Judaic law is far better than islamic law in that it's not racist
There are plenty of others, for example, there are explicit passages that mandate setting a Hebrew slave free after 7 years, whilst Canaanite slaves must work forever.
And more recent racist religous law:
Say no to rabbis’ racism: Back in 2010, some 50 of Israel’s most prominent rabbis issued a religious edict against Jews renting property to gentiles, "Leasing land to non-Jews blasphemous, anyone violating ban may be ostracized, rabbis say" Thirty-nine of those rabbis are on the government’s payroll, although their opinions vary drastically from the State of Israel’s official laws and ethos. After this incident, no rabbi was fired or brought to court for incitement.
Killing Non-Jewish Infants is Permitted: "There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”In a chapter entitled “Deliberate harm to innocents,” the book explains that war is directled mainly against the pursuers, but those who belong to the enemy nation are also considered the enemy because they are assisting murderers."
King's Torah splits Israel's religious and secular Jews: "Rabbis Dov Lior and Yacob Yousef had endorsed a highly controversial book, the King's Torah - written by two lesser-known settler rabbis. It attempts to justify killing non-Jews, including those not involved in violence, under certain circumstances."
does not have slavery
It does, it is even explicitly permitted for a father to sell his pre-pubescent daughters into slavery as a "last resort" to get money. Judaism and slavery: "Judaism's religious texts contain numerous laws governing the ownership and treatment of slaves."
I of course, sadly, know the justification given in islamic text. Because he won military battles and his tactics will supposedly give his followers military domination over everyone else.
As opposed to the religious law that you apparently support, where the complete genocide of every living thing in a city is ok when "ordered by God"? Where followers are instructed to Wipe out the descendants of another tribe, To burn a city that has turned to idol worship, To destroy idols and their accessories (y
Caspian Sea oil and gas unrecovered reserves are enormous, valued at over $10 trillion. Iran is currently a transit country for this, but the aim is to use Afghanistan instead. The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is a big part of this. Plans for an Afghan pipeline have been in the making for a long time, U.S. Congress testimony in 1998:
Mr. MARESCA. It's not going to be built until there is a single Afghan Government. That's the simple answer. We would not want to be in the situation where we became the target of the other faction. In any case, because of the financing situation, credits are not going to be available until there is a recognized government of Afghanistan.
Mr. BEREUTER. So you are not making any suggestions about the prospects of that or timing of that. It's just you are not going to move or it's not going to be moved from another source until that happens. That would be your judgment?
Mr. MARESCA. That's my judgment. We do of course follow very closely the negotiations which have been going on. We are hopeful that they will lead somewhere. All wars end. I think that's a universal rule. So one of these days this war too will end. Then I believe the pipeline will be secure.
That war (officially) ended thanks to the U.S. military, Afghanistan was (officially) unified under the Karzai government, and in 2002 Karzai signed the TAPI pipeline deal. Very fast given the complexity of such a deal. The U.S. has invested $0.5 trillion in the Afghan War so far, that's quite a lot just to bring bin Laden to justice. That $0.5 trillion didn't magically disappear - it was given to corporations which have profited handsomely from this war. Some stand to profit even more in the future from the ability to export Caspian Sea oil and gas through Afghanistan. And it also isolates Iran further.
Is it all a coincidence? It does seem awfully convenient...
It is not helped by the fact that Swedes are notoriously uncommitted in their relationships, resulting in one of the highest, if not the highest percentage of 1-person households and single-parent families on the planet.
The rate may be high but it isn't exceptional - it's about the same in the UK, plus the UK divorce rate is higher - 19% versus Sweden's 14%.
Stockholm is littered with foreigners who married Swedes, moved here, then got dumped a few years later
Anecdotes about the difficulties of foreign immigrants aren't representative of the Swedish population as a whole, as immigrants make up only 14% of the population.
Is the Linux Desktop actually growing? quotes a market share figure from Net Applications of 1.4%, up from 0.97% the previous July. Other estimates have put the figure at 1.67%. Some analysts are predicting the figure could hit 2% to 3% before the end of 2012.
The author states that 12% of visitors to his tech related web sites run Linux. If that is any indication, then the figure of technologically minded people using Linux desktops already exceeds 10%.
Keep in mind that Apple's global desktop market share is in single figures: Linux desktop market share doesn't have to exceed that of Windows to be considered important.
The vegan has the smallest footprint: 3 kWh per day of energy from the plants he eats. A typical dairy diet adds 1.5 kWh/d to that. Meat adds 8 kWh/d. Include eggs 1 kWh/d. The total comes to 12 kWh per day, so the typical person chooses a diet that requires four times more energy to produce than the typical vegan diet.
Since vegans aren't all dead, I'm going to assume that a vegan diet would be survivable for most people.
Yesterday, thanks to PriorSmart‘s Daily Litigation Alerts, I noticed Dell, HP and Lenovo all targeted in the same Delaware patent lawsuit by Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc. The titles of the two patents at issue were both “Display system having floating point rasterization and floating point framebuffering” (6,650,327 and 7,518,615). It sounded a bit familiar, so after a little searching, I found out that, sure enough, just a few days before the same company filed suit on the same 2 patents against Apple, Nintendo, Sony, Toshiba and Acer in the Southern District of New York. That said, I still wasn’t satisfied that I had correctly identified the source of my recollection. (You don’t often forget a term like “rasterization.”)
After a little more searching, I came across an older case, Silicon Graphics v. ATI Technologies, which had gone to trial in Madison, Wisconsin in 2008. The case was a close to a total loss for SGI, with Judge Barbara Crabb ruling that co-defendants ATI and AMD did not infringe the ’327 Patent, and that both defendants were authorized for certain uses under a license to Microsoft. So why are these new lawsuits being filed, and who is Graphics Properties Holdings? Graphics Properties is essentially what’s left of SGI after filing bankruptcy last year. (That’s right, again.) As for why these former SGI patents are now being asserted again, a court of appeals decision from earlier this year may help explain. Chief Judge Rader, in a unanimous opinion, undid just about everything that Judge Crabb had done.
Because the district court erroneously construed two of the three contested limitations in the ’327 patent this court vacates the summary judgment on claims with those terms. This court also determines that the district court erred with respect to the effect of the Microsoft license on direct infringement.
* * *
[As a result,]this court vacates the district court’s non-infringement ruling and remands for consideration in light of the correct construction.
In other words, because Judge Crabb misinterpreted the meaning of critical terms in the patent, the ultimate conclusion of non-infringement was incorrect. Specifically, the phrase “a rasterization process which operates on a floating point format” was interpreted by Judge Crabb as requiring that the process “as a whole” needs to operate on a floating point format. It was undisputed that the accused products performed some rasterization processes on a floating point format, but others using fixed point values. Based on this construction, Judge Crabb (correctly) concluded that the accused products did not exactly match the claimed invention.
However, on appeal, Judge Rader noted that the specification recites a number of different rasterization processes, and that the patent claim uses the indefinite article a when describing rasterization on a floating point format. The correct construction, according to Judge Rader, is that “one or more of the rasterization processes (e.g., scan conversion, color, texture, fog, shading) operate on a floating point format.” Because it was also admitted that some of the rasterization process did use a floating point format, a judge simply can’t deny the patent holder its opportunity to prove infringement of the patent to the jury.
The contrast between these two constructions is dramatic, as potential design around opportunities for Judge Crabb’s narrower interpretation are significantly easier than for Judge Rader’s broader construction. Having emerged from this first battle with a broader interpretation of the patent claims, Graphics Properties has apparently decided to turn up the heat and pursue an even broader class of targets, including PC and game console manufacturers, and to do it on multiple fronts.
How are you going to get your standpoint implemented when you aren't allowed to talk about them in a campaign?
If your argument is that not being able to talk about commiting racist genocide during your campaign makes it difficult to implement, then surely that is a good thing? If Hitler had been prevented from spending years railing against ethnic minorities in Germany, and had subsequently found that he couldn't implement the Nuremberg Laws, thus preventing the Holocaust, that would have been a worthwhile limitation on his right to free speech.
If you shout fire, and someone believes you and tramples another person, then you are responsible?
Saying something racially insensitive can....make someone(s) sad.
If you tell a Nazi that you overheard a Jew planning to kill him, and he believes you and tramples the Jew, then you are not responsible?
In both cases you have lied to another person or people, with the knowledge that they are likely to react in a certain way that results in injury to a third party. Are these two cases really so different?
I mean, if you kill someone...they are dead. Does it matter really the reason you did it?
Most people think so, otherwise a premeditated murder would be treated the same as self defense or having a passenger die in a car crash. Applying the same logic to terrorism would lead to the conclusion that terrorism itself shouldn't be a crime - the crime should just be "killing" - and yet the legal system of every nation in the world treats terrorism as a crime, so obviously the legal world see some good reasons to treat motivation as part of the crime. People have actually written published papers on this exact topic: Is Terrorism a Crime or an Aggravating Factor in Sentencing?
There are some important differences - the foreigners held by the UK during the Gulf War were allowed to leave the country if they wished (a few chose to do so). In the U.S., interned foreigners are not given that choice.
The other difference is that the British courts already ruled in 2004 that internment of foreigners was incompatible with human rights laws, so the kind of internment that you are referring to is no longer possible. The U.S. courts have not made any similar rulings. Wikipedia:
"A series of legal challenges were made in respect of the powers and processes established under the ATCSA and on December 16 2004, the Law Lords ruled that the powers of detention conferred by Part 4 of ATCSA were incompatible with the UK's obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court ruled by a majority of 8–1 that the purported derogation was not authorised by Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights since the measures taken could not rationally be held to be "strictly required by the exigencies of the situation", and were also discriminatory contrary to Article 14 of the Convention.
The ruling could be summed up as follows:
No detention pending deportation had lasted for more than seven days, let alone three years.
The law was unjustifiably discriminatory. What if a British citizen was also suspected of terrorism which required that they be detained indefinitely without trial? There was no way to do it.
There was no observable state of emergency threatening the life of the nation. No other European country which had experience far more severe crises had declared such a state of emergency over such a long time period, and certainly without anyone noticing."
Maybe he actually did whatever it is that Google suggests his name is associated with? I have an acquaintance who got busted for dealing cocaine a while back. Now, Google's auto-complete suggests his name if you type in only the first three letters of his first name and surname - and if you complete the name, then it suggests two searches ("John Doe Town" and "John Doe Drugs") - both searches lead to pages of news sites about the drugs bust and his prosecution. Clearly, this is going to make it difficult for him to find employment in the future...
You mean that out of the 7 billion people on this planet, there might be one with the same name?
There are plenty of real world names which are unique enough that, when combined with location and date information, they identify an individual with enough accuracy to make a potential employer suspicious. I'm not suggesting that Google should be forced to remove the auto-complete searches, but I would also not suggest that this man's employment problem is fictitious, or even that employers are necessarily acting unreasonably.
The real question is whether or not Huawei equipment has backdoors that allow spying, and also whether equipment from other vendors has such backdoors. A vendor should not be disqualified based on vague speculation about what might be possible. There were allegations years ago that the U.S. had used backdoored Cisco equipment to spy on the European Union parliament internal network - should the E.U. have banned Cisco from competitive tenders based on these allegations alone? Should we trust, say, Ericsson switches, even though we know that they come preloaded with "lawful intercept" capability that has been abused in the past?
One could argue that the phone company technically "owns" more of the phone than you do because of subsidies.
One could try to argue that, but if you tried it in a court of law you would fail. The contract states that the physical phone belongs to you, and that you are still liable for the monthly rental fees on your contract even if your phone is lost or stolen. The "subsidy" is tied to the contract.
If your *smartphone* (not feature phone) is stolen, in particular if it's Android or iOS, there are a number of solutions , other than retrieving it.
And most of those solutions can be easily worked around by a knowledgeable person, at the simplest level by just reflashing the firmware. This is not just theoretical - IMEI reprogramming used to be common place for stolen mobile phones, and there was a whole cottage industry based around cracking IMEIs so that stolen phones could be reenabled (to be fair, there were a few legitimate uses, but the illegal usage far outnumbered that). Now that the manufacturers made it harder to reprogram the IMEI, stolen phones that are blocked by the networks are only useful for export to countries that have the same network technology. So there is still a route to profit, but it requires more organisation than just being able to list the phone on ebay or sell it down the pub, which is what used to happen in the old days.
one could use without having to resort to calling police to "brick" your phone
The police have nothing to do with IMEI blocking, the network operator does the blocking, and will do so when you report the stolen phone to them, which you obviously need anyway to do as you are liable for all phone calls until the theft is reported.
More stolen phones means more phones being replaced, also if you are on contract you can be liable for a huge bill. The UK government had to actually bring in a law requiring carriers to block stolen phones (or threaten to legislate, I can't remember whether the carriers caved before the law was due to introduced).
Slashdot Mirror
English law descends from French law
No it doesn't. The first treatise on English law was the Tractatus of Glanvill in 1188 (law predating that is legally defined as "time immemorial"). England was subject to Norman Law since 1066, but Normandy was a Duchy of Viking invaders and settlers, and the Kind of France didn't conquer it and unify it into France until 1204. The common law of England is geographically distinct - the rest of Western Europe uses civil law.
those "slaves" are slaves for a seven-year term, after which they're free. Second they get paid, and there's even a minimum wage...
Only true for Jewish slaves, who were more like servants. The majority of slaves were non-Jewish, and could be worked without pay until death.
with raping female slaves, which is islamic in origin.
Judaic law gives slave masters the right to rape the wife of any of their slaves if the slave was sold into slavery by a court of law.
killing slaves and raping slaves and torture only ever was allowed under islamic law
Actually it was allowed in many places: "A major touchstone of the nature of a slave society was whether or not the owner had the right to kill his slave. In most Neolithic and Bronze Age societies slaves had no such right, for slaves from ancient Egypt and the Eurasian steppes were buried alive or killed to accompany their deceased owners into the next world. Among the Northwest Coast Tlingit, slave owners killed their slaves in potlatches to demonstrate their contempt for property and wealth; they also killed old or unwanted slaves and threw their bodies into the Pacific Ocean. An owner could kill his slave with impunity in Homeric Greece, ancient India, the Roman Republic, Islamic countries, Anglo-Saxon England, medieval Russia, and many parts of the American South before 1830." - Encyclopedia Britannica
The Holocaust was legalised under German law that gave Hitler's orders legal power. The establishment of slavery in the colonies, concentration camps, hunting Aborigines for sport, these all occurred under Western legal systems. Islamic law does not have a monopoly on abuse.
Even in the old-testament, while gays are convicted, it's not quite as black and white as is often put.
"If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."
I googled for that text, it's obviously not from the new testament.
Reading skills are useful.
Insurance companies and their clients also have an adversarial relationship. The company can directly decrease costs by working against the interests of the client, by denying coverage and rejecting claims. The insurance company has the problem of asymmetric information - the client knows more about their own health than the insurance company does, thus in any market based system, people who have poor health will take advantage of their knowledge, which increases costs for everyone else, to the point where the people in good health feel refuse to overpay and stop buying the insurance, which in turn increases costs for everyone else. Akerlof showed that this kind of asymmetric information problem will eventually cause the market itself to fail. We can already see the start of this - insurance companies denying preexisting conditions, government regulating that they must accept, and insurance costs rising.
The per capita admin cost of the U.S. health care system alone exceeds the entire per capita expenditure of the Singapore health care system, despite both having similar healthcare outcomes.
"The reason why Singapore's success is uncommon is probably that policy debates get stuck with one side claiming that we should rely on the market and the other side asserting that the government would do a better job. So, government or market? We've learned that the question doesn't make any sense in isolation. To answer it we need to understand why markets might work, and how and why they fail." - The Undercover Economist
you cannot tell who will need expensive health care
We obviously can't predict accidents, but we do know that, for the average person, the bulk of their health care costs will be in old age, and those costs will increase as they get closer to the point of death. 27 percent of Medicare spending covers care for people in the very final year of life (source). If we were more accepting of death, then we would probably not bother to squander so much money when the end comes. From a financial perspective, it would make more sense to develop a matrix of cost/benefit, and to offer patients either the treatment or some fraction of the equivalent cash to give to their families. Or to develop a statistical model, and only provide baseline medical service when the probability of death in the next 12 months exceeds 95% or so. Rational, but perhaps not politically/socially viable.
10% Mac
Citation? All of the recent sources say 5%.
it's not quite as black and white as is often put.
"If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."
This isn't black and white enough for you?
Christians believe first in the New Testament.
A lot of Christians also believe in the Old Testament.
the basis of our law system is ~90% Judaic law
No... The basis of U.S. law is English common law, which followed rulings made by the King's judges based English tradition and legal precedent. There was influence from some other legal systems, including the Roman one where Christianity was the state religion (as it was in England), but no direct link to Judaic law. Some laws developed that were heavily influenced by religious views - the death sentence for blasphemy and homosexuality being two obvious ones (see Thomas Aikenhead, John William Gott). Both of those were argued from Christian religious perspectives, primarily based on passages in the Bible.
Judaic law is far better than islamic law in that it's not racist
613 mitzvot: Wipe out the descendants of Amalek (every man, woman and child). Genocide of another ethnic group is inherently racist.
There are plenty of others, for example, there are explicit passages that mandate setting a Hebrew slave free after 7 years, whilst Canaanite slaves must work forever.
And more recent racist religous law:
Say no to rabbis’ racism: Back in 2010, some 50 of Israel’s most prominent rabbis issued a religious edict against Jews renting property to gentiles, "Leasing land to non-Jews blasphemous, anyone violating ban may be ostracized, rabbis say" Thirty-nine of those rabbis are on the government’s payroll, although their opinions vary drastically from the State of Israel’s official laws and ethos. After this incident, no rabbi was fired or brought to court for incitement.
Killing Non-Jewish Infants is Permitted: "There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”In a chapter entitled “Deliberate harm to innocents,” the book explains that war is directled mainly against the pursuers, but those who belong to the enemy nation are also considered the enemy because they are assisting murderers."
King's Torah splits Israel's religious and secular Jews: "Rabbis Dov Lior and Yacob Yousef had endorsed a highly controversial book, the King's Torah - written by two lesser-known settler rabbis. It attempts to justify killing non-Jews, including those not involved in violence, under certain circumstances."
does not have slavery
It does, it is even explicitly permitted for a father to sell his pre-pubescent daughters into slavery as a "last resort" to get money. Judaism and slavery: "Judaism's religious texts contain numerous laws governing the ownership and treatment of slaves."
I of course, sadly, know the justification given in islamic text. Because he won military battles and his tactics will supposedly give his followers military domination over everyone else.
As opposed to the religious law that you apparently support, where the complete genocide of every living thing in a city is ok when "ordered by God"? Where followers are instructed to Wipe out the descendants of another tribe, To burn a city that has turned to idol worship, To destroy idols and their accessories (y
When a U.S. soldiers goes on a rampage shooting civilians, he is labelled as an unwitting victim of psychotropic drugs.
When a Norwegian militant goes on a rampage shooting civilians, he is labelled as an unwitting victim of mental illness.
What do you think would happen if either of these men were Muslim? These defenses would never be accepted.
Different rules for different folk...
Caspian Sea oil and gas unrecovered reserves are enormous, valued at over $10 trillion. Iran is currently a transit country for this, but the aim is to use Afghanistan instead. The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is a big part of this. Plans for an Afghan pipeline have been in the making for a long time, U.S. Congress testimony in 1998:
Mr. MARESCA. It's not going to be built until there is a single Afghan Government. That's the simple answer. We would not want to be in the situation where we became the target of the other faction. In any case, because of the financing situation, credits are not going to be available until there is a recognized government of Afghanistan.
Mr. BEREUTER. So you are not making any suggestions about the prospects of that or timing of that. It's just you are not going to move or it's not going to be moved from another source until that happens. That would be your judgment?
Mr. MARESCA. That's my judgment. We do of course follow very closely the negotiations which have been going on. We are hopeful that they will lead somewhere. All wars end. I think that's a universal rule. So one of these days this war too will end. Then I believe the pipeline will be secure.
That war (officially) ended thanks to the U.S. military, Afghanistan was (officially) unified under the Karzai government, and in 2002 Karzai signed the TAPI pipeline deal. Very fast given the complexity of such a deal. The U.S. has invested $0.5 trillion in the Afghan War so far, that's quite a lot just to bring bin Laden to justice. That $0.5 trillion didn't magically disappear - it was given to corporations which have profited handsomely from this war. Some stand to profit even more in the future from the ability to export Caspian Sea oil and gas through Afghanistan. And it also isolates Iran further.
Is it all a coincidence? It does seem awfully convenient...
It is not helped by the fact that Swedes are notoriously uncommitted in their relationships, resulting in one of the highest, if not the highest percentage of 1-person households and single-parent families on the planet.
The rate may be high but it isn't exceptional - it's about the same in the UK, plus the UK divorce rate is higher - 19% versus Sweden's 14%.
Stockholm is littered with foreigners who married Swedes, moved here, then got dumped a few years later
Anecdotes about the difficulties of foreign immigrants aren't representative of the Swedish population as a whole, as immigrants make up only 14% of the population.
Is the Linux Desktop actually growing? quotes a market share figure from Net Applications of 1.4%, up from 0.97% the previous July. Other estimates have put the figure at 1.67%. Some analysts are predicting the figure could hit 2% to 3% before the end of 2012.
The author states that 12% of visitors to his tech related web sites run Linux. If that is any indication, then the figure of technologically minded people using Linux desktops already exceeds 10%.
Keep in mind that Apple's global desktop market share is in single figures: Linux desktop market share doesn't have to exceed that of Windows to be considered important.
Sustainable Energy - without the hot air , Chapter 13 Food and farming, David JC MacKay
The vegan has the smallest footprint: 3 kWh per day of energy from the plants he eats. A typical dairy diet adds 1.5 kWh/d to that. Meat adds 8 kWh/d. Include eggs 1 kWh/d. The total comes to 12 kWh per day, so the typical person chooses a diet that requires four times more energy to produce than the typical vegan diet.
Since vegans aren't all dead, I'm going to assume that a vegan diet would be survivable for most people.
Here's an interesting article from Nov 2010 Embattled Silicon Graphics Portfolio Now On The Warpath
Yesterday, thanks to PriorSmart‘s Daily Litigation Alerts, I noticed Dell, HP and Lenovo all targeted in the same Delaware patent lawsuit by Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc. The titles of the two patents at issue were both “Display system having floating point rasterization and floating point framebuffering” (6,650,327 and 7,518,615). It sounded a bit familiar, so after a little searching, I found out that, sure enough, just a few days before the same company filed suit on the same 2 patents against Apple, Nintendo, Sony, Toshiba and Acer in the Southern District of New York. That said, I still wasn’t satisfied that I had correctly identified the source of my recollection. (You don’t often forget a term like “rasterization.”)
After a little more searching, I came across an older case, Silicon Graphics v. ATI Technologies, which had gone to trial in Madison, Wisconsin in 2008. The case was a close to a total loss for SGI, with Judge Barbara Crabb ruling that co-defendants ATI and AMD did not infringe the ’327 Patent, and that both defendants were authorized for certain uses under a license to Microsoft. So why are these new lawsuits being filed, and who is Graphics Properties Holdings? Graphics Properties is essentially what’s left of SGI after filing bankruptcy last year. (That’s right, again.) As for why these former SGI patents are now being asserted again, a court of appeals decision from earlier this year may help explain. Chief Judge Rader, in a unanimous opinion, undid just about everything that Judge Crabb had done.
Because the district court erroneously construed two of the three contested limitations in the ’327 patent this court vacates the summary judgment on claims with those terms. This court also determines that the district court erred with respect to the effect of the Microsoft license on direct infringement. * * *
[As a result,]this court vacates the district court’s non-infringement ruling and remands for consideration in light of the correct construction.
In other words, because Judge Crabb misinterpreted the meaning of critical terms in the patent, the ultimate conclusion of non-infringement was incorrect. Specifically, the phrase “a rasterization process which operates on a floating point format” was interpreted by Judge Crabb as requiring that the process “as a whole” needs to operate on a floating point format. It was undisputed that the accused products performed some rasterization processes on a floating point format, but others using fixed point values. Based on this construction, Judge Crabb (correctly) concluded that the accused products did not exactly match the claimed invention.
However, on appeal, Judge Rader noted that the specification recites a number of different rasterization processes, and that the patent claim uses the indefinite article a when describing rasterization on a floating point format. The correct construction, according to Judge Rader, is that “one or more of the rasterization processes (e.g., scan conversion, color, texture, fog, shading) operate on a floating point format.” Because it was also admitted that some of the rasterization process did use a floating point format, a judge simply can’t deny the patent holder its opportunity to prove infringement of the patent to the jury.
The contrast between these two constructions is dramatic, as potential design around opportunities for Judge Crabb’s narrower interpretation are significantly easier than for Judge Rader’s broader construction. Having emerged from this first battle with a broader interpretation of the patent claims, Graphics Properties has apparently decided to turn up the heat and pursue an even broader class of targets, including PC and game console manufacturers, and to do it on multiple fronts.
This isn't the first time SGI has sued over these type of patents, see Slashdot 2006, and the 2010 ruling in SILICON GRAPHICS V ATI TECHNOLOGIES
How are you going to get your standpoint implemented when you aren't allowed to talk about them in a campaign?
If your argument is that not being able to talk about commiting racist genocide during your campaign makes it difficult to implement, then surely that is a good thing? If Hitler had been prevented from spending years railing against ethnic minorities in Germany, and had subsequently found that he couldn't implement the Nuremberg Laws, thus preventing the Holocaust, that would have been a worthwhile limitation on his right to free speech.
Shouting fire can get people trampled and killed.
If you shout fire, and someone believes you and tramples another person, then you are responsible?
Saying something racially insensitive can....make someone(s) sad.
If you tell a Nazi that you overheard a Jew planning to kill him, and he believes you and tramples the Jew, then you are not responsible?
In both cases you have lied to another person or people, with the knowledge that they are likely to react in a certain way that results in injury to a third party. Are these two cases really so different?
You can be prosecuted for indirect incitements to violence, like the abortion "hit lists" - it is up to a jury of your peers to decide if you are trying to use your "free speech" to encourage violence. http://news.cnet.com/Abortion-hit-list-slammed-in-court/2100-1023_3-221054.html
I mean, if you kill someone...they are dead. Does it matter really the reason you did it?
Most people think so, otherwise a premeditated murder would be treated the same as self defense or having a passenger die in a car crash. Applying the same logic to terrorism would lead to the conclusion that terrorism itself shouldn't be a crime - the crime should just be "killing" - and yet the legal system of every nation in the world treats terrorism as a crime, so obviously the legal world see some good reasons to treat motivation as part of the crime. People have actually written published papers on this exact topic: Is Terrorism a Crime or an Aggravating Factor in Sentencing?
There are some important differences - the foreigners held by the UK during the Gulf War were allowed to leave the country if they wished (a few chose to do so). In the U.S., interned foreigners are not given that choice.
The other difference is that the British courts already ruled in 2004 that internment of foreigners was incompatible with human rights laws, so the kind of internment that you are referring to is no longer possible. The U.S. courts have not made any similar rulings. Wikipedia:
"A series of legal challenges were made in respect of the powers and processes established under the ATCSA and on December 16 2004, the Law Lords ruled that the powers of detention conferred by Part 4 of ATCSA were incompatible with the UK's obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court ruled by a majority of 8–1 that the purported derogation was not authorised by Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights since the measures taken could not rationally be held to be "strictly required by the exigencies of the situation", and were also discriminatory contrary to Article 14 of the Convention.
The ruling could be summed up as follows:
No detention pending deportation had lasted for more than seven days, let alone three years.
The law was unjustifiably discriminatory. What if a British citizen was also suspected of terrorism which required that they be detained indefinitely without trial? There was no way to do it.
There was no observable state of emergency threatening the life of the nation. No other European country which had experience far more severe crises had declared such a state of emergency over such a long time period, and certainly without anyone noticing."
Maybe he actually did whatever it is that Google suggests his name is associated with? I have an acquaintance who got busted for dealing cocaine a while back. Now, Google's auto-complete suggests his name if you type in only the first three letters of his first name and surname - and if you complete the name, then it suggests two searches ("John Doe Town" and "John Doe Drugs") - both searches lead to pages of news sites about the drugs bust and his prosecution. Clearly, this is going to make it difficult for him to find employment in the future...
You mean that out of the 7 billion people on this planet, there might be one with the same name?
There are plenty of real world names which are unique enough that, when combined with location and date information, they identify an individual with enough accuracy to make a potential employer suspicious. I'm not suggesting that Google should be forced to remove the auto-complete searches, but I would also not suggest that this man's employment problem is fictitious, or even that employers are necessarily acting unreasonably.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/11/04/1626247/iranian-police-tracking-dissidents-using-tech-from-western-companies Western companies have also sold domestic surveillance tech to Iran.
To some extent, every large telecomms provider is an arm of its national government... e.g. AT&T was part of the U.S. government's warrantless wiretapping program. and in return for cosying up to the government, AT&T gets billions a year in tax breaks.
The real question is whether or not Huawei equipment has backdoors that allow spying, and also whether equipment from other vendors has such backdoors. A vendor should not be disqualified based on vague speculation about what might be possible. There were allegations years ago that the U.S. had used backdoored Cisco equipment to spy on the European Union parliament internal network - should the E.U. have banned Cisco from competitive tenders based on these allegations alone? Should we trust, say, Ericsson switches, even though we know that they come preloaded with "lawful intercept" capability that has been abused in the past?
One could argue that the phone company technically "owns" more of the phone than you do because of subsidies.
One could try to argue that, but if you tried it in a court of law you would fail. The contract states that the physical phone belongs to you, and that you are still liable for the monthly rental fees on your contract even if your phone is lost or stolen. The "subsidy" is tied to the contract.
If your *smartphone* (not feature phone) is stolen, in particular if it's Android or iOS, there are a number of solutions , other than retrieving it.
And most of those solutions can be easily worked around by a knowledgeable person, at the simplest level by just reflashing the firmware. This is not just theoretical - IMEI reprogramming used to be common place for stolen mobile phones, and there was a whole cottage industry based around cracking IMEIs so that stolen phones could be reenabled (to be fair, there were a few legitimate uses, but the illegal usage far outnumbered that). Now that the manufacturers made it harder to reprogram the IMEI, stolen phones that are blocked by the networks are only useful for export to countries that have the same network technology. So there is still a route to profit, but it requires more organisation than just being able to list the phone on ebay or sell it down the pub, which is what used to happen in the old days.
one could use without having to resort to calling police to "brick" your phone
The police have nothing to do with IMEI blocking, the network operator does the blocking, and will do so when you report the stolen phone to them, which you obviously need anyway to do as you are liable for all phone calls until the theft is reported.
More stolen phones means more phones being replaced, also if you are on contract you can be liable for a huge bill. The UK government had to actually bring in a law requiring carriers to block stolen phones (or threaten to legislate, I can't remember whether the carriers caved before the law was due to introduced).