The whole thing crashing down, and them getting their hands slapped, also came about from them lending out too much to too many. So I can kind of understand why they'd be a little loan-shy. That said, legislature should have anticipated the ever-present human behavior of over-reacting and put those strings there and at least try to stop the pendulum in the middle. Instead we went from (irrationally) too risky to (irrationally) too risk averse.
And, of course, any of this is easy to bypass for someone who's up to no good.
Or just incompetent. When I bought my house the inspector was good enough to check the GFCI in the basement that the previous owner finished himself. Everything went thru a GFCI outlet right above the wetbar. Only he had gotten 'line' and 'load' backwards. The one outlet that needed it most was on the wrong side of the interrupt.
Also had the doorbell transformer exposed. Silly mechanical engineers thinking they are electricians. My deck is built probably 2x over code, though. Inspector was impressed with that.
Exactly. This was one of the most compelling complaints against DMCA when Congress passed it:
In the name of copyright protection it allows the content creators to build a fence. This 'golden' fence gets a special status under the law and is protected by the DMCA and people who breach it are considered law breakers. But the gross injustice is that along with legitimate copyrightable works, the content creators can put whatever else they want behind the fence. Want to deny a fair use? Integrate such use tightly with the enforced-by-law copyright protection mechanism. Activities that others would legitimately be able to do with the content that aren't infringing become untouchable, because to do so they must cross that golden fence.
In my opinion, if content creators overreach and try to prevent fair-use activities by fencing things off within their copyright protection/access control mechanisms (such as this case) then the access control technology should lose its special status as legally protected under 1201(a)(2).
You are a content provider who wants the protection of the law/legal-threat for your access mechanism? Don't want 'violators' to get a free pass? Tough. Only protect things that you had the right to protect in the first place.
You keep diluting any Phosphorus from the first sample over and over as you move to the arsenic substrates. Perhaps then the bacteria practice Homeopathy.
Yeah, if a deal even has a whiff of to-good-to-be-true or I've never heard or dealt with the company I will usually do a search for (company name fraud) or (company name scam) in the Google. You have to take the results with a grain of salt and use some judgment: there are some loud, unreasonable customers out there. But typically a company trend is fairly evident.
Yes, and it's actually a major motivator that drives the plot, even if the argument itself only gets a bit of ink. It's the whole reason Waterhouse is called back from the colonies to England.
Bureaucracy can't feel anger. Some paper pusher will be angry at FutureTap for forcing him to deny that patent, hurting his 'approved' quota. And then the other 99 out of 100 rip-offs that were submitted will get approved by someone down the all.
FutureTap can't sue either, because their business model involves selling apps for a product whose maker has Monopolistic control over the distributed apps. If they sue, Apple could just refuse to sell all of their apps for the duration of the lawsuit.
You obviously didn't pay enough attention to what the OP was saying in the third paragraph and made his argument for him. Perhaps you need Taxes 202, too.
So do the best of both... Institute a flat tax while allowing a cost of living deduction, say $30,000 just to throw a number out there, on the income. Earn anywhere up to $30,000? Pay nothing. Earn $90,000, pay tax on $60,000. Earn $1,000,000, pay tax on $970,000. The simplicity of a flat tax with the humanity of a progressive tax.
Congratulations, you just reinvented the progressive tax: 10% of 60K is 6.67% of 90K, but 10% of 970K is %9.7 of 1M. I.e. your tax rate starts at 0% below 30K and asymptotically approaches 10%. A very simple progressive tax, a very appealing progressive tax, but a progressive tax.
Agreed. $30 for a a phone and a $25 in minutes. Buy the $100 minutes to become Gold so you have to get more minutes 1/yr instead of every 90 days. Now I only have to put the minimum $10 a year on the phone (or whatever I use above that, because even I use >100minutes a year) upkeep.
It's great, no hassle, cheap, and they have the best customer service. The first year I forgot the renewal date (I was off by a day) but the rep told me I was within the (one time) 48hr grace period so they restored the ~100 bucks that should have expired. They got a life customer for that class act.
Actually they didn't get that guarantee till third season. Apparently that's why the show starts to drag in season 2-3 till it picks up again, they didn't know how much they'd need to stretch it. So they still had 3 years to pace themselves and failed. I saw the whole thing in order (including seasons 1-3 in a DVD bender, where it didn't drag nearly as much.) The ending was still a huge donkey-testicle sucking cop-out.
As I see it, there are three kinds of mysteries that the show has:
1. Simple continuity goofs and other mistakes. (Forgivable in seasons 2-3, less so in 4-6 if that's what they are.) Shows lack of planning and foresight that the writers claimed to have.
2. Mysteries that have plausible explanations. Things that, given the rules, mythology and events we've been shown by the writers, can be explained somehow, perhaps with several possibilities. I'm fine leaving these as mysteries for fans to ponder and debate. I think some of the "nitpickers" get hung up on these which the fanbois pounce on.
3. Mysteries that are unexplainable* and/or contradictory to the rules, mythology and events witnessed so far. These are the kinds of things that are obviously missing a critical component, with the implicit (or sometimes explicit, in this case) contract between writer and audience of a payoff. There are two options: that the writer has either planned ahead, in a masterstroke of genius, for a "reveal" that adds that last little bit and completely alters the viewers perspective; or the writer has no clue and is just adding mystery for its own sake (or to cynically keep eyeballs on ads) and has no concept of internally consistent story telling. Lacking any attempt at briliant "aha!" reveals, I have to conclude bad writers got themselves in a hole with no way (or desire) to get out of it.
If you can't do it, don't make empty promises on mysteries like #3. Throwing a few bones by answering some #2s, or a few cliche feel-good moments under the excuse of "it's a character study" doesn't make up for the betrayal to the audience's trust.
*Without becoming a fan-fic writer yourself and inventing new cannon out of whole cloth.
So anyone can get to purgatory, all it takes is a friend or loved one with suicidal access to a thermonuclear device near a mystical, magical, electromagnetic anomaly? All the rest of us shmoes get to just die with no afterlife?
I want to know why a 1970s computer (or a dippy bird) couldn't automatically push the button every 108 minutes? Even Homer figured that one out.
It's still the software's fault then. It should take these failure modes into account and react in a safe manner when people's lives are on the line. (Granted you can always come up with some wacky way everything could go wrong simultaneously, but a safe design will make that immensely improbable.)
...else con men could get away with all sorts of mail or wire fraud schemes.
That is why wire and mail fraud across state lines are subject to federal law.
...Or what if I stand on the Maryland side of the Mason-Dixon line and throw trash into Pennsylvania?
That's just vigilante justice. Pennsylvania farmers (and other states in the watershed*) let all their nasties (nitrates, etc.) run off into our Bay, and don't want be forced to stop nor to pay to help clean it up. Probably going to require the big-bad federal EPA to force everyone to be nice.
*and yes, MD's own chicken farmers are a royal pain about this too.
It's a whole liability issue. They're not supposed to enter when they are unsupervised with a minor. It's just a bad idea all around. When I was 16 an appliance repair guy got about two rooms into the house before he remembered to ask how old I was (I'm tall and looked older.) He skedadled real quick and waited on the porch for my parents to get home.
Slashdot Mirror
From the same director that brought you the minesweeper movie? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHY8NKj3RKs
The whole thing crashing down, and them getting their hands slapped, also came about from them lending out too much to too many. So I can kind of understand why they'd be a little loan-shy. That said, legislature should have anticipated the ever-present human behavior of over-reacting and put those strings there and at least try to stop the pendulum in the middle. Instead we went from (irrationally) too risky to (irrationally) too risk averse.
And, of course, any of this is easy to bypass for someone who's up to no good.
Or just incompetent. When I bought my house the inspector was good enough to check the GFCI in the basement that the previous owner finished himself. Everything went thru a GFCI outlet right above the wetbar. Only he had gotten 'line' and 'load' backwards. The one outlet that needed it most was on the wrong side of the interrupt.
Also had the doorbell transformer exposed. Silly mechanical engineers thinking they are electricians. My deck is built probably 2x over code, though. Inspector was impressed with that.
Exactly. This was one of the most compelling complaints against DMCA when Congress passed it:
In the name of copyright protection it allows the content creators to build a fence. This 'golden' fence gets a special status under the law and is protected by the DMCA and people who breach it are considered law breakers. But the gross injustice is that along with legitimate copyrightable works, the content creators can put whatever else they want behind the fence. Want to deny a fair use? Integrate such use tightly with the enforced-by-law copyright protection mechanism. Activities that others would legitimately be able to do with the content that aren't infringing become untouchable, because to do so they must cross that golden fence.
In my opinion, if content creators overreach and try to prevent fair-use activities by fencing things off within their copyright protection/access control mechanisms (such as this case) then the access control technology should lose its special status as legally protected under 1201(a)(2).
You are a content provider who wants the protection of the law/legal-threat for your access mechanism? Don't want 'violators' to get a free pass? Tough. Only protect things that you had the right to protect in the first place.
Treme is pretty interesting when its on.
You underestimate the addictiveness of that game to some people.
with technologies from HSPA+ to LTE improving available bandwidth per MHz exponentially
Not to get all nitpicky, but I think there is this guy Shannon who would disagree with you. (Also this has a more concise formula.)
You keep diluting any Phosphorus from the first sample over and over as you move to the arsenic substrates. Perhaps then the bacteria practice Homeopathy.
Yeah, if a deal even has a whiff of to-good-to-be-true or I've never heard or dealt with the company I will usually do a search for (company name fraud) or (company name scam) in the Google. You have to take the results with a grain of salt and use some judgment: there are some loud, unreasonable customers out there. But typically a company trend is fairly evident.
Yes, and it's actually a major motivator that drives the plot, even if the argument itself only gets a bit of ink. It's the whole reason Waterhouse is called back from the colonies to England.
Bureaucracy can't feel anger. Some paper pusher will be angry at FutureTap for forcing him to deny that patent, hurting his 'approved' quota. And then the other 99 out of 100 rip-offs that were submitted will get approved by someone down the all.
FutureTap can't sue either, because their business model involves selling apps for a product whose maker has Monopolistic control over the distributed apps. If they sue, Apple could just refuse to sell all of their apps for the duration of the lawsuit.
You obviously didn't pay enough attention to what the OP was saying in the third paragraph and made his argument for him. Perhaps you need Taxes 202, too.
So do the best of both... Institute a flat tax while allowing a cost of living deduction, say $30,000 just to throw a number out there, on the income. Earn anywhere up to $30,000? Pay nothing. Earn $90,000, pay tax on $60,000. Earn $1,000,000, pay tax on $970,000. The simplicity of a flat tax with the humanity of a progressive tax.
Congratulations, you just reinvented the progressive tax: 10% of 60K is 6.67% of 90K, but 10% of 970K is %9.7 of 1M. I.e. your tax rate starts at 0% below 30K and asymptotically approaches 10%. A very simple progressive tax, a very appealing progressive tax, but a progressive tax.
Agreed. $30 for a a phone and a $25 in minutes. Buy the $100 minutes to become Gold so you have to get more minutes 1/yr instead of every 90 days. Now I only have to put the minimum $10 a year on the phone (or whatever I use above that, because even I use >100minutes a year) upkeep.
It's great, no hassle, cheap, and they have the best customer service. The first year I forgot the renewal date (I was off by a day) but the rep told me I was within the (one time) 48hr grace period so they restored the ~100 bucks that should have expired. They got a life customer for that class act.
As I see it, there are three kinds of mysteries that the show has:
1. Simple continuity goofs and other mistakes. (Forgivable in seasons 2-3, less so in 4-6 if that's what they are.) Shows lack of planning and foresight that the writers claimed to have.
2. Mysteries that have plausible explanations. Things that, given the rules, mythology and events we've been shown by the writers, can be explained somehow, perhaps with several possibilities. I'm fine leaving these as mysteries for fans to ponder and debate. I think some of the "nitpickers" get hung up on these which the fanbois pounce on.
3. Mysteries that are unexplainable* and/or contradictory to the rules, mythology and events witnessed so far. These are the kinds of things that are obviously missing a critical component, with the implicit (or sometimes explicit, in this case) contract between writer and audience of a payoff. There are two options: that the writer has either planned ahead, in a masterstroke of genius, for a "reveal" that adds that last little bit and completely alters the viewers perspective; or the writer has no clue and is just adding mystery for its own sake (or to cynically keep eyeballs on ads) and has no concept of internally consistent story telling. Lacking any attempt at briliant "aha!" reveals, I have to conclude bad writers got themselves in a hole with no way (or desire) to get out of it.
If you can't do it, don't make empty promises on mysteries like #3. Throwing a few bones by answering some #2s, or a few cliche feel-good moments under the excuse of "it's a character study" doesn't make up for the betrayal to the audience's trust.
*Without becoming a fan-fic writer yourself and inventing new cannon out of whole cloth.
So anyone can get to purgatory, all it takes is a friend or loved one with suicidal access to a thermonuclear device near a mystical, magical, electromagnetic anomaly? All the rest of us shmoes get to just die with no afterlife?
I want to know why a 1970s computer (or a dippy bird) couldn't automatically push the button every 108 minutes? Even Homer figured that one out.
To quote khasim from above http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1645610&cid=32139876 The command you want is "service unsupported-transceiver".
But they all agreed on Purple Monkey Dishwasher.
It's still the software's fault then. It should take these failure modes into account and react in a safe manner when people's lives are on the line. (Granted you can always come up with some wacky way everything could go wrong simultaneously, but a safe design will make that immensely improbable.)
Perhaps anytime it was driven more than 70 MPH with the headlights on and the seat warmer set to low?
...else con men could get away with all sorts of mail or wire fraud schemes.
...Or what if I stand on the Maryland side of the Mason-Dixon line and throw trash into Pennsylvania?
That is why wire and mail fraud across state lines are subject to federal law.
That's just vigilante justice. Pennsylvania farmers (and other states in the watershed*) let all their nasties (nitrates, etc.) run off into our Bay, and don't want be forced to stop nor to pay to help clean it up. Probably going to require the big-bad federal EPA to force everyone to be nice.
*and yes, MD's own chicken farmers are a royal pain about this too.
And here I was thinking it was Dances-With-Wolves-With-Blue-People http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099348/ . From two years prior to Fern Gully.
It's a whole liability issue. They're not supposed to enter when they are unsupervised with a minor. It's just a bad idea all around. When I was 16 an appliance repair guy got about two rooms into the house before he remembered to ask how old I was (I'm tall and looked older.) He skedadled real quick and waited on the porch for my parents to get home.
Lunchtime doubly so.
You could just hook a Kill-O-Watt to them for a few days and take the average consumption.
Couldn't have been that reckless. They seem to be making student loans to folks that pay them off early.