I can't remember where I heard it, so I have no proof, but the story I heard goes like this:
They tried, years ago in a trial run somewhere. Customers hated it. Why? A few reasons: One, marking down the price sends the message "this movie sucks!" whether it's true or not, and nobody will go to see it. Two, people will feel like you're extorting them by charging more for the good movies (just like Coca-Cola found out when they decided they could add thermometers to Coke machines and charge more when it was really hot out).
Three, people LIKE it being predictable that a movie always costs X; it turns out in fact people don't like having to do complicated 'well would movie A be worth $10, or should I see movie B instead for $%' calculations. This makes the decision-making much more complicated than "which of these movies do I want to see".
A great many media have discovered more or less the same thing. DVDs, books, audio CDs, movies, video games... they tend to have standardized prices. Such a practice would not be so common if there weren't very compelling reasons.
The only reason you've given that they're too high is the impact it has on you - this is only half the question. Nobody likes paying taxes. The other half of the question is, how much money does the government need?
If you eat at an expensive restaraunt, you can't complain you shouldn't have to pay for dessert because you already paid $100 for the entree and drinks, and you "thought you paid enough thank you very much".
Clearly, the government does not have enough money to pay its bills. Clearly, borrowing at the rate we have been is at best a stopgap solution. Somewhat less clearly, but still pretty obvious, the gap is too big to close by reducing spending; the deep cuts required would cut into the government's ability to pay for things almost everyone agrees are required.
The obvious conclusion is that taxes are not too high. They're too low.
This does not necessarily mean your taxes specifically are too low. But given the size of this pit, asking only some of us to fill it in doesn't seem right. Taxes need to be raised, and before you ask - yes, I am calling for my own taxes to be raised.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Except that the federal law in question provides that no website is considered either an 'author' or a 'publisher' of any 'information [the post] provided by another information content provider [the user]'. It then goes on to explicitly overrule any state/local laws that conflict with this.
Short version is, this law was intended to shield Internet companies for being passive conduits. It would be a terrible idea if, anytime anyone sent defamatory content through the mail, the victim could sue the Post Office, right?
The problem is, the wording was very broad. So now this company is covered by the liability shield (which provides more or less complete immunity from defamation laws of any kind) because it's user-generated content. But they're NOT a passive conduit, their business is apparently set up to actively solicit this type of arguably-libelous content.
So yeah, your suggestion is a good idea - it might be a good idea to tweak the CDA to strip the liability shield if the user wants something removed and the company refuses. But as written, that's not currently how the law works. Which is unfortunate.
He completely flew off the handle when the customer complained about being treated badly (Reacts to criticism with anger, shame, or humiliation), doesn't seem to care about or even really understand why the customer is pissed off (Obsessed with oneself and Lacks empathy and disregards the feelings of others)... And finally, unrealistic fantasies of... power speaks for itself, as does [exaggerates] own importance, achievements, and talents .
"People who are overly narcissistic commonly feel rejected, humiliated and threatened when criticised. To protect themselves from these dangers, they often react with disdain, rage, and/or defiance to any slight criticism, real or imagined... In cases where [the afflicted] feels a lack of admiration, adulation, attention and affirmation, he/she may also manifest a desire to be feared and to be notorious (narcissistic supply).
Although individuals with NPD are often ambitious and capable, the inability to tolerate setbacks, disagreements or criticism, along with lack of empathy, make it difficult for such individuals to work cooperatively with others or to maintain long-term professional achievements. With narcissistic personality disorder, the individual's self-perceived fantastic grandiosity, often coupled with a hypomanic mood, is typically not commensurate with his or her real accomplishments.
The entire thing describes him almost to the letter.
A four billion dollar non-refundable breakup fee? Why would you want to pay such an enormous fee to abandon your buyout attempt... and then close the buy out anyway?
The deal is dead, dead, dead as a doornail, done. AT&T would not be paying four billion dollars to one of its biggest competitors if it thought there was a snowball's chance in hell it could avoid doing so.
Republican... Democrat... Does it really matter? Neither party's mainstream will support this. I mean, you couldn't ask for a better example of a death panel, unless they were to actually rename this Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee to "death panel". As it is, "Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee" is already Orwellian enough.
Jury nullification is also a great way to enact tyranny of the majority. How many white people went to jail for lynching black people in the thirties? And then there's this case where it's kind of hard to avoid the implication that the jury thought it was okay to kill gays.
Jury nullification yes, can be used to fight oppression by the system, like the Fugitive Slave Law. But it's also great for trial-by-popularity-contest. The entire point of jury nullification is "screw the rules, I'm going to do what's 'right'". Sometimes that works, but jury nullification makes no distinction between good parts of the system, and bad parts.
Many parts of the system are there to protect the fair interests of justice. Juries can nullify them too. The rules over what evidence is admissible, for example - most juries aren't physically sequestered in a room with no phone and no internet the entire duration of the trial. They can easily search the internet for all kinds of half-baked "evidence". The judge is supposed to keep all that out of court, because it's unverified, or scientifically dubious, etc.
Jury nullification is an incredibly dangerous thing. It is not justice at all, because it is fundamentally capricious in nature. Justice is supposed to be the same for everybody.
WTF, slashdot? I never asked you - not once - to change the moderation system to moderate with one click. Now I can't mod this person up, and instead have to post this silly statement that they are, in fact, not Offtopic at all.
Standing is a very important issue. You need to have some kind of rules governing who's allowed to sue over what sorts of incidents. Basically, there should only ever be at most a single lawsuit covering any given topic. If there are ever two lawsuits in different courts over the exact same issue, and they issue conflicting rulings, what happens? The answer is "that must not ever happen".
Even small kids are good at causing trouble when this rule isn't in place - "well, Dad said no... so I'm gonna go ask Mom".
In this case, Righthaven didn't actually control the copyrights; all they had was a 'right to sue'. So if that gives Righthaven standing, and the original copyright holder still has standing (because they still have these rights)... then both companies could sue someone, over the same incident, in different courtrooms. And you are not allowed to do that.
"No imaginable military target", huh? Just because you say it doesn't make it true. A nuke would do a pretty severe amount of damage to just about any military installation. Anywhere a lot of military facilities were built close together is a good military target for a nuke. So is anywhere a large number of troops are massed.
It so happens that the last few war the US has been involved in have been against asymmetric guerilla opponents. Nukes are largely useless against relatively small groups of people hiding in plain sight. But that doesn't mean there's no military application for nukes. To the contrary - if it ever had come to nuclear war against the Russians, the Pentagon would have been one of the first places they blew up. That's a classic military target. For an enormous list of other military targets, see this list of US military bases.
They said as much in one of their blog posts where they tried (poorly) to explain why this was necessary. It's really quite simple: They don't want to be the next AOL.
Remember when AOL bought Time Warner? Yeah, that was craaazy, wasn't it? And where are they now? Plummeting like a rock from those amazing heights. They've been basically irrelevant for years now. So what happened?
They were a market leader, in a market being disrupted by new technology (broadband). They looked at the new technology, then looked at the river of gold they already had, and said "Hmm. If we switch to the new tech, our costs soar, and we cannibalize our existing money press." So they fell victim to one of the classic blunders: they played for short-term gain at the cost of long-term ruin.
AOL was one of the few ISPs large enough to take advantage of an opportunity that existed then. Before the business model solidified for cable and DSL, there was an opening for an ISP to partner with the cableco and telcos. Broadband would have been AOL and the infrastructure companies.
Instead, they went it alone. AOL's opportunity evaporated. They tried offering AOL-branded broadband far too late, and abandoned the experiment shortly. This doomed them to oblivion as an ISP.
Netflix really really wants to avoid repeating this mistake. As they noted in their blog post - companies make this mistake all too often. DVD by mail is doomed, and it has precisely the same weakness as DVD by rental store (which Netflix just chewed up and spit out): It will be out-competed by more efficient, superior technology. Streaming is going to destroy DVD by mail. It's cheaper and more convenient.
The entire Qwikster thing only makes sense if you assume Netflix planned to jettison Qwikster. It's easier to jettison a division if you've already separated out the dependencies. Why else would they have contemplated such a silly move?
As for why Netflix would want out of DVD-by-mail sooner rather than later -- They can get a lot of money for selling the business while it's still got a huge install base. If they wait until years after the erosion starts after they've already lost a third of the users, it will sell for a lot less.
This is an odd case that demonstrates why words in legal senses have complex convoluted meanings. To "pay" someone is not necessarily to give them money. To "pay" is to give another entity a thing of value in exchange for services or goods they have rendered you.
In this case, you pay the school cash money and in exchange they allow you to attend classes and receive credit and so on. But they also are giving you things that are valuable: Course credit. Course credit, and degrees, are essentially the university using their reputation to enhance yours. Anyone can learn the content that is covered by a course; people pay a University so they will run you through a process designed to officially recognize that you have learned the content.
So you do some work for the University, and in exchange, they give you course credit - a thing of value. Thus they are saying it is a work for hire, that they 'paid' you for your work... just not in cash.
Replying to undo incorrect moderation. Screw you, new mod system! I used to have to click "OK" to confirm, and I liked it that way. It wasn't broken, why'd they break it?
Not a valid argument for or against patents? A special case all unto itself? Hardly. It is the perfect example of what patent protection is all about. Here we have innovation that would stand no chance of ever recouping the staggering initial investment costs, but for the protection granted by patents. All that other stuff you were talking about? That is the ancilliary crap that sprung up around it.
Sorry, but your argument is essentially "If you ignore all the reasons patents are a good idea, then you clearly see that patents suck!"
I feel compelled to make one slight correction to your post: Theldala Magee is not a rapist. She is an alleged rapist.
I read the article, and I couldn't find out whether Theldala denies the substance of the allegations - or merely disputes the terminology used to describe it. But essentially, what we have here appears to be a (s)he-said she-said. Amy Aklon claims certain things about the incident. If, in fact, it did happen the way that was described, then Theldala Magee is a rapist. If, however, it did not... then it's possible that Amy is the one guilty of a crime: Defaming the character of the TSA agent in question.
Without knowing more details, it's impossible to say for sure. And honestly, since it is a my-word-against-yours situation... Absent a confession from either party that "yeah, I did it" or "yeah, I made the whole thing up", it's quite likely no one will ever be able to say 100% for sure what happened.
Personally, in my opinion probably the story happened the way the blogger says. But we don't know that, as far as I see. Rushing to judgement can be very dangerous. Just ask the Duke Lacrosse Team.
The drug induces apoptosis in cells that are infected. In other words, if the cell has been infected, this drug tells it to commit suicide. All the virus has to do to circumvent this is change the cell so it ignores these commands.
The usual name for cells that ignore the safeguards that tell them to stop reproducing is cancer. We've already seen some viruses getting blamed for causing cancer - that's why the HPV vaccine is such a big deal. And unless I'm missing something here, this new therapy encourages viruses (known for extremely rapid evolution) to find ways to turn cells cancerous.
Not to say it isn't a great drug. Given a choice between curing (say) Ebola, at a risk of encouraging carcinogenic mutations... and doing nothing... the rational choice is probably curing Ebola. But I find it unsettling.
The war in Afghanistan is hadly "completely fucking useless". Osama Bin Laden killed thousands of civilian US citizens. The Taleban were being financially propped up by OBL, and they had given him free rein to do as he wished. Then when we sent our diplomats to talk to the Taleban about this, they stonewalled us and gave him shelter.
By almost any standard I have ever heard of, this is an act of war (on the part of the Afghan government). It's so clearly an act of war that if you were to take a course in the causes of war, 9/11 would be in the textbook.
I'm not at all saying that there weren't problems with that war. There were. It's going badly for us now because of these problems. But it furthered the national security interests of the United States to defeat the Taleban and get Bin Laden, dead or alive.
A sad fact of international politics is that you can't seem to be weak. If other nations think you're an easy mark, they'll try to get in on the action. Ask China how that worked out for them a hundred years ago, when every major European power repeatedly embarrassed them and demanded all kinds of humiliating special treatment afterwards. The US absolutely cannot be seen to do nothing in the face of something like 9/11.
Furthermore, your post implies a choice between invading Afghanistan, and investing in nuclear. But the US government is more than willing to spend money it doesn't have. There is no real either-or choice here. If the government were united behind alternative power, then it would happen, budget be damned. They simply aren't.
I'm not a lawyer, so I have no idea why the judge would say that. I also have no idea what the particulars of your case were, so even if I were a lawyer, I wouldn't be able to answer that. But if you have proof that they lied in court to this judge, and you really want to punish them, find a lawyer. Even though you lost your case, they lied, and it damaged you. That may be actionable libel or defamation or some othey type of slander.
If the lawyer doesn't want to take the case because it's not enough money, that means that the amount of money you would get charged in order for the lawyer to work for you is less than you could get out of the other guy. Rather than giving you sub-standard representation (which I believe is against their ethical code), you are being turned away. If you then say you are prepared to pay what it costs, and you know that you are going to lose money - but you're more interested in making the other party suffer the consequences of their misdeeds... you can probably find someone willing to represent you. Just don't expect it to be cheap.
This is not quite true. The system does have lots of serious problems. But many of the arcane crazy rules you're complaining about serve essentially the same function as security patches: closing a loophole that any jackass can use to totally screw over people who actually try to use the system as intended. The thing with the law is that every part of it it is roughly analogous to the most hostile kind of IT security environment: a public internet facing server. Absolutely anyone who wants to can, will, and often already has messed with it to see what they can pull.
Remember the 54 Million Dollar Pants lawsuit? The "logic" behind that absurd amount: He claimed the 'Satisaction Guaranteed' sign meant they had to give him literally anything he wanted. Failing to do so was a violation of the Consumer Protection and Procedures Act at $1K per violation. And since the law was nebulous about how a "violation" extends over time, he claimed that each day was a new violation. (There were other tricks involved.) That works out to millions of dollars because the store didn't live up to its "promise" to guarantee satisfaction no matter what.
Similarly, there are all kinds of arcane legal restrictions on when you're allowed to make various types of arguments. If you have even a 100% valid claim... but you don't assert it at the proper time? Too bad, you waived your right to assert it. This seems really unfair at first. But it is designed to prevent a specific type of gamesmanship, that would otherwise be trivially easy: Stalling.
Consider how many different ways there are to express even a very simple idea: the number 4. 4, 2+2, 2*2, the square root of 16, the list continues. To infinity; there are an unlimited number of ways to say "four". Many of which are complicated to parse out and determine that, in fact, it means four.
If you were allowed to revise your assertions into a law case at any time, you could stall any case, at any time, indefinitely by playing the same game, except with words. Each time you revise your filing, the judge and the other side have to review it, which necessarily introduces a delay. By doing this continually, you bury your opponent in paperwork so long as you can pay your lawyers.
This would turn any lawsuit into death by attrition: whoever has more money spends their opponent into the ground with stalling tactics. No one thinks the rules should permit this, and so the law has introduced mechanisms to prevent this sort of gamesmanship.
Which is an interesting point: One of the big criticisms of our legal system is how unbalanced it is, and how being on the less-well-funded side of a lawsuit is a terrible disadvantage. And that's with rules in place designed to thwart it. Imagine how well the system would work without these safeguards.
Most of the seemingly-illogical arcane details of the law are this sort of safeguard. The problem is, people who don't know the law are helpless. They've never heard of these rules, and even if they try to look it up, they won't navigate them as well as someone who knows what they're doing.
This is why you need to talk to a lawyer whenever you have any non-trivial interaction with the legal system. At all. Non-lawyers don't know how the system works, any more than non-programmers can debug a kernel panic.
Besides which, you can defeat an ideology. It happens all the time. How many people still worship Zeus? What happened to old Zeus? He wasn't defeated by war; when the Romans conquered Greece, they simply merged Zeus with their own King of the Gods, Jupiter.
What did defeat Zeus? Christianity, a new ideology. When it became the state religion of the Roman empire, it displaced the traditional Roman state religion; which still included Zeus.
So yes, it is very hard to defeat an ideology with bullets. But that doesn't mean you can't defeat an ideology. You defeat an ideology by convincing people that it's not a good ideology. Why do people become terrorists? Well, there's a lot of complex religious legal theory involved... but most of that takes a back seat to what REALLY drives most terrorists: Anger, hatred, desperation.
Terrorists hate their enemies. They hate them so much that massacring busloads of schoolchildren seems like a good idea. That is a very severe sort of loathing. Terrorists also generally come from disadvantaged backgrounds; there are exceptions to this (Bin Laden was from a wealthy family; most US-citizen terrorists had relatively normal lives before radicalizing).
How do you defeat terrorism? You attack the current membership, while also addressing these two points. Why do so many people in the Middle East hate us? Can we do something to make ourselves less unpopular? And is it possible to get people out of poverty in those regions? These are the things that will cut down on Al Qaeda's ability to recruit new members.
You need a license to drive a car but any moron can raise a Dahmer or even a Hitler in their own home.
Well, yes. Consider the alternatives. Do you really think it would be a good idea to live in a world where the government gets to decide who is / is not allowed to have kids? It's a terrifying thought.
Remember the shenanigans that got pulled in Ohio by the state government to try to rig the election? (Deliberately understaffing and undersupplying voting precincts in Democratic areas was the least of it.) Now imagine that some partisan asshole is in charge of the Department of Reproductive Licensing. Since most kids tend to follow political leanings of their parents, you can rig elections basically through eugenics.
Licensing requirements for having children will never fly, at least not in the USA. They're almost guaranteed to be unconstitutional.
Bullshit. Gasoline accounted for 45% of US oil usage in 2004. See the referred-to graph for details. Most electricity is not generated by oil in the USA, and more than twice as much oil was used for gas than for industrial applications (e.g. plastic).
As for tankers, there are an estimated 250 million cars on the road, and that's just in the United States. The number of tankers is about four orders of magnitude lower. Given the vastly different population sizes, there are simply too many cars for tankers to dwarf them.
No criminal law should ever be passed that is unrelated to morality. The problem is that "morality" has had its meaning twisted, so that when the legal system refers to laws about "morality" they mean laws enforcing lifestyle choices that society would like to make mandatory.
This is ass-backwards to me. All laws fundamentally derive their authority from either the societal need for order, or from morality. What are laws banning murder, but a moral judgement that murder is wrong? What is the Thirteenth Amendment, if not a statement that enslaving others is immoral?
What are commonly called morality-based laws are really laws lacking any connection to morality. Laws telling consenting adults what sex acts they aren't allowed to perform in private have no possible moral justification (other than unconstitutionally religious-based ones); no immoral act has been commited and nobody has been harmed.
To me, the state can make something a crime only because the act unrightfully has a detrimental effect on another entity. This seems to be to be equivalent to giving the state the power to criminalize immorality. (Just not the sort most people think of when they hear the word.)
That's all very well and true, but it has nothing to do with the OP's point. There exist adult pedophiles who engage in the type of behavior described by the parent. They not only enjoy personally engaging in the behavior, but swapping stories and media (in the same way jocks in locker rooms trade stories about cheerleaders).
The ones that aren't engaging in the sort of sophisticated countersurveillance described are being picked off by law enforcement. This leaves the ones who are, and this is a big problem because they are usually not just collectors, but producers - that is to say, serial rapists.
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I can't remember where I heard it, so I have no proof, but the story I heard goes like this:
... they tend to have standardized prices. Such a practice would not be so common if there weren't very compelling reasons.
They tried, years ago in a trial run somewhere. Customers hated it. Why? A few reasons: One, marking down the price sends the message "this movie sucks!" whether it's true or not, and nobody will go to see it. Two, people will feel like you're extorting them by charging more for the good movies (just like Coca-Cola found out when they decided they could add thermometers to Coke machines and charge more when it was really hot out).
Three, people LIKE it being predictable that a movie always costs X; it turns out in fact people don't like having to do complicated 'well would movie A be worth $10, or should I see movie B instead for $%' calculations. This makes the decision-making much more complicated than "which of these movies do I want to see".
A great many media have discovered more or less the same thing. DVDs, books, audio CDs, movies, video games
If you eat at an expensive restaraunt, you can't complain you shouldn't have to pay for dessert because you already paid $100 for the entree and drinks, and you "thought you paid enough thank you very much".
Clearly, the government does not have enough money to pay its bills. Clearly, borrowing at the rate we have been is at best a stopgap solution. Somewhat less clearly, but still pretty obvious, the gap is too big to close by reducing spending; the deep cuts required would cut into the government's ability to pay for things almost everyone agrees are required.
The obvious conclusion is that taxes are not too high. They're too low.
This does not necessarily mean your taxes specifically are too low. But given the size of this pit, asking only some of us to fill it in doesn't seem right. Taxes need to be raised, and before you ask - yes, I am calling for my own taxes to be raised.
Except that the federal law in question provides that no website is considered either an 'author' or a 'publisher' of any 'information [the post] provided by another information content provider [the user]'. It then goes on to explicitly overrule any state/local laws that conflict with this.
Short version is, this law was intended to shield Internet companies for being passive conduits. It would be a terrible idea if, anytime anyone sent defamatory content through the mail, the victim could sue the Post Office, right?
The problem is, the wording was very broad. So now this company is covered by the liability shield (which provides more or less complete immunity from defamation laws of any kind) because it's user-generated content. But they're NOT a passive conduit, their business is apparently set up to actively solicit this type of arguably-libelous content.
So yeah, your suggestion is a good idea - it might be a good idea to tweak the CDA to strip the liability shield if the user wants something removed and the company refuses. But as written, that's not currently how the law works. Which is unfortunate.
He completely flew off the handle when the customer complained about being treated badly (Reacts to criticism with anger, shame, or humiliation), doesn't seem to care about or even really understand why the customer is pissed off (Obsessed with oneself and Lacks empathy and disregards the feelings of others)
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The entire thing describes him almost to the letter.
A four billion dollar non-refundable breakup fee? Why would you want to pay such an enormous fee to abandon your buyout attempt ... and then close the buy out anyway?
The deal is dead, dead, dead as a doornail, done. AT&T would not be paying four billion dollars to one of its biggest competitors if it thought there was a snowball's chance in hell it could avoid doing so.
Republican ... Democrat ... Does it really matter? Neither party's mainstream will support this. I mean, you couldn't ask for a better example of a death panel, unless they were to actually rename this Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee to "death panel". As it is, "Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee" is already Orwellian enough.
Jury nullification is also a great way to enact tyranny of the majority. How many white people went to jail for lynching black people in the thirties? And then there's this case where it's kind of hard to avoid the implication that the jury thought it was okay to kill gays.
Jury nullification yes, can be used to fight oppression by the system, like the Fugitive Slave Law. But it's also great for trial-by-popularity-contest. The entire point of jury nullification is "screw the rules, I'm going to do what's 'right'". Sometimes that works, but jury nullification makes no distinction between good parts of the system, and bad parts.
Many parts of the system are there to protect the fair interests of justice. Juries can nullify them too. The rules over what evidence is admissible, for example - most juries aren't physically sequestered in a room with no phone and no internet the entire duration of the trial. They can easily search the internet for all kinds of half-baked "evidence". The judge is supposed to keep all that out of court, because it's unverified, or scientifically dubious, etc.
Jury nullification is an incredibly dangerous thing. It is not justice at all, because it is fundamentally capricious in nature. Justice is supposed to be the same for everybody.
WTF, slashdot? I never asked you - not once - to change the moderation system to moderate with one click. Now I can't mod this person up, and instead have to post this silly statement that they are, in fact, not Offtopic at all.
Standing is a very important issue. You need to have some kind of rules governing who's allowed to sue over what sorts of incidents. Basically, there should only ever be at most a single lawsuit covering any given topic. If there are ever two lawsuits in different courts over the exact same issue, and they issue conflicting rulings, what happens? The answer is "that must not ever happen".
... so I'm gonna go ask Mom".
... then both companies could sue someone, over the same incident, in different courtrooms. And you are not allowed to do that.
Even small kids are good at causing trouble when this rule isn't in place - "well, Dad said no
In this case, Righthaven didn't actually control the copyrights; all they had was a 'right to sue'. So if that gives Righthaven standing, and the original copyright holder still has standing (because they still have these rights)
"No imaginable military target", huh? Just because you say it doesn't make it true. A nuke would do a pretty severe amount of damage to just about any military installation. Anywhere a lot of military facilities were built close together is a good military target for a nuke. So is anywhere a large number of troops are massed.
It so happens that the last few war the US has been involved in have been against asymmetric guerilla opponents. Nukes are largely useless against relatively small groups of people hiding in plain sight. But that doesn't mean there's no military application for nukes. To the contrary - if it ever had come to nuclear war against the Russians, the Pentagon would have been one of the first places they blew up. That's a classic military target. For an enormous list of other military targets, see this list of US military bases.
They said as much in one of their blog posts where they tried (poorly) to explain why this was necessary. It's really quite simple: They don't want to be the next AOL.
Remember when AOL bought Time Warner? Yeah, that was craaazy, wasn't it? And where are they now? Plummeting like a rock from those amazing heights. They've been basically irrelevant for years now. So what happened?
They were a market leader, in a market being disrupted by new technology (broadband). They looked at the new technology, then looked at the river of gold they already had, and said "Hmm. If we switch to the new tech, our costs soar, and we cannibalize our existing money press." So they fell victim to one of the classic blunders: they played for short-term gain at the cost of long-term ruin.
AOL was one of the few ISPs large enough to take advantage of an opportunity that existed then. Before the business model solidified for cable and DSL, there was an opening for an ISP to partner with the cableco and telcos. Broadband would have been AOL and the infrastructure companies.
Instead, they went it alone. AOL's opportunity evaporated. They tried offering AOL-branded broadband far too late, and abandoned the experiment shortly. This doomed them to oblivion as an ISP.
Netflix really really wants to avoid repeating this mistake. As they noted in their blog post - companies make this mistake all too often. DVD by mail is doomed, and it has precisely the same weakness as DVD by rental store (which Netflix just chewed up and spit out): It will be out-competed by more efficient, superior technology. Streaming is going to destroy DVD by mail. It's cheaper and more convenient.
The entire Qwikster thing only makes sense if you assume Netflix planned to jettison Qwikster. It's easier to jettison a division if you've already separated out the dependencies. Why else would they have contemplated such a silly move?
As for why Netflix would want out of DVD-by-mail sooner rather than later -- They can get a lot of money for selling the business while it's still got a huge install base. If they wait until years after the erosion starts after they've already lost a third of the users, it will sell for a lot less.
This is an odd case that demonstrates why words in legal senses have complex convoluted meanings. To "pay" someone is not necessarily to give them money. To "pay" is to give another entity a thing of value in exchange for services or goods they have rendered you.
... just not in cash.
In this case, you pay the school cash money and in exchange they allow you to attend classes and receive credit and so on. But they also are giving you things that are valuable: Course credit. Course credit, and degrees, are essentially the university using their reputation to enhance yours. Anyone can learn the content that is covered by a course; people pay a University so they will run you through a process designed to officially recognize that you have learned the content.
So you do some work for the University, and in exchange, they give you course credit - a thing of value. Thus they are saying it is a work for hire, that they 'paid' you for your work
Replying to undo incorrect moderation. Screw you, new mod system! I used to have to click "OK" to confirm, and I liked it that way. It wasn't broken, why'd they break it?
Not a valid argument for or against patents? A special case all unto itself? Hardly. It is the perfect example of what patent protection is all about. Here we have innovation that would stand no chance of ever recouping the staggering initial investment costs, but for the protection granted by patents. All that other stuff you were talking about? That is the ancilliary crap that sprung up around it.
Sorry, but your argument is essentially "If you ignore all the reasons patents are a good idea, then you clearly see that patents suck!"
I feel compelled to make one slight correction to your post: Theldala Magee is not a rapist. She is an alleged rapist.
... then it's possible that Amy is the one guilty of a crime: Defaming the character of the TSA agent in question.
... Absent a confession from either party that "yeah, I did it" or "yeah, I made the whole thing up", it's quite likely no one will ever be able to say 100% for sure what happened.
I read the article, and I couldn't find out whether Theldala denies the substance of the allegations - or merely disputes the terminology used to describe it. But essentially, what we have here appears to be a (s)he-said she-said. Amy Aklon claims certain things about the incident. If, in fact, it did happen the way that was described, then Theldala Magee is a rapist. If, however, it did not
Without knowing more details, it's impossible to say for sure. And honestly, since it is a my-word-against-yours situation
Personally, in my opinion probably the story happened the way the blogger says. But we don't know that, as far as I see. Rushing to judgement can be very dangerous. Just ask the Duke Lacrosse Team.
The drug induces apoptosis in cells that are infected. In other words, if the cell has been infected, this drug tells it to commit suicide. All the virus has to do to circumvent this is change the cell so it ignores these commands.
... and doing nothing ... the rational choice is probably curing Ebola. But I find it unsettling.
The usual name for cells that ignore the safeguards that tell them to stop reproducing is cancer. We've already seen some viruses getting blamed for causing cancer - that's why the HPV vaccine is such a big deal. And unless I'm missing something here, this new therapy encourages viruses (known for extremely rapid evolution) to find ways to turn cells cancerous.
Not to say it isn't a great drug. Given a choice between curing (say) Ebola, at a risk of encouraging carcinogenic mutations
The war in Afghanistan is hadly "completely fucking useless". Osama Bin Laden killed thousands of civilian US citizens. The Taleban were being financially propped up by OBL, and they had given him free rein to do as he wished. Then when we sent our diplomats to talk to the Taleban about this, they stonewalled us and gave him shelter.
By almost any standard I have ever heard of, this is an act of war (on the part of the Afghan government). It's so clearly an act of war that if you were to take a course in the causes of war, 9/11 would be in the textbook.
I'm not at all saying that there weren't problems with that war. There were. It's going badly for us now because of these problems. But it furthered the national security interests of the United States to defeat the Taleban and get Bin Laden, dead or alive.
A sad fact of international politics is that you can't seem to be weak. If other nations think you're an easy mark, they'll try to get in on the action. Ask China how that worked out for them a hundred years ago, when every major European power repeatedly embarrassed them and demanded all kinds of humiliating special treatment afterwards. The US absolutely cannot be seen to do nothing in the face of something like 9/11.
Furthermore, your post implies a choice between invading Afghanistan, and investing in nuclear. But the US government is more than willing to spend money it doesn't have. There is no real either-or choice here. If the government were united behind alternative power, then it would happen, budget be damned. They simply aren't.
And of course by "is less than you could get" I really meant "is more". The sad part is that I DID hit 'preview' ...
I'm not a lawyer, so I have no idea why the judge would say that. I also have no idea what the particulars of your case were, so even if I were a lawyer, I wouldn't be able to answer that. But if you have proof that they lied in court to this judge, and you really want to punish them, find a lawyer. Even though you lost your case, they lied, and it damaged you. That may be actionable libel or defamation or some othey type of slander.
... you can probably find someone willing to represent you. Just don't expect it to be cheap.
If the lawyer doesn't want to take the case because it's not enough money, that means that the amount of money you would get charged in order for the lawyer to work for you is less than you could get out of the other guy. Rather than giving you sub-standard representation (which I believe is against their ethical code), you are being turned away. If you then say you are prepared to pay what it costs, and you know that you are going to lose money - but you're more interested in making the other party suffer the consequences of their misdeeds
This is not quite true. The system does have lots of serious problems. But many of the arcane crazy rules you're complaining about serve essentially the same function as security patches: closing a loophole that any jackass can use to totally screw over people who actually try to use the system as intended. The thing with the law is that every part of it it is roughly analogous to the most hostile kind of IT security environment: a public internet facing server. Absolutely anyone who wants to can, will, and often already has messed with it to see what they can pull.
... but you don't assert it at the proper time? Too bad, you waived your right to assert it. This seems really unfair at first. But it is designed to prevent a specific type of gamesmanship, that would otherwise be trivially easy: Stalling.
Remember the 54 Million Dollar Pants lawsuit? The "logic" behind that absurd amount: He claimed the 'Satisaction Guaranteed' sign meant they had to give him literally anything he wanted. Failing to do so was a violation of the Consumer Protection and Procedures Act at $1K per violation. And since the law was nebulous about how a "violation" extends over time, he claimed that each day was a new violation. (There were other tricks involved.) That works out to millions of dollars because the store didn't live up to its "promise" to guarantee satisfaction no matter what.
Similarly, there are all kinds of arcane legal restrictions on when you're allowed to make various types of arguments. If you have even a 100% valid claim
Consider how many different ways there are to express even a very simple idea: the number 4. 4, 2+2, 2*2, the square root of 16, the list continues. To infinity; there are an unlimited number of ways to say "four". Many of which are complicated to parse out and determine that, in fact, it means four.
If you were allowed to revise your assertions into a law case at any time, you could stall any case, at any time, indefinitely by playing the same game, except with words. Each time you revise your filing, the judge and the other side have to review it, which necessarily introduces a delay. By doing this continually, you bury your opponent in paperwork so long as you can pay your lawyers.
This would turn any lawsuit into death by attrition: whoever has more money spends their opponent into the ground with stalling tactics. No one thinks the rules should permit this, and so the law has introduced mechanisms to prevent this sort of gamesmanship.
Which is an interesting point: One of the big criticisms of our legal system is how unbalanced it is, and how being on the less-well-funded side of a lawsuit is a terrible disadvantage. And that's with rules in place designed to thwart it. Imagine how well the system would work without these safeguards.
Most of the seemingly-illogical arcane details of the law are this sort of safeguard. The problem is, people who don't know the law are helpless. They've never heard of these rules, and even if they try to look it up, they won't navigate them as well as someone who knows what they're doing.
This is why you need to talk to a lawyer whenever you have any non-trivial interaction with the legal system. At all. Non-lawyers don't know how the system works, any more than non-programmers can debug a kernel panic.
Besides which, you can defeat an ideology. It happens all the time. How many people still worship Zeus? What happened to old Zeus? He wasn't defeated by war; when the Romans conquered Greece, they simply merged Zeus with their own King of the Gods, Jupiter.
... but most of that takes a back seat to what REALLY drives most terrorists: Anger, hatred, desperation.
What did defeat Zeus? Christianity, a new ideology. When it became the state religion of the Roman empire, it displaced the traditional Roman state religion; which still included Zeus.
So yes, it is very hard to defeat an ideology with bullets. But that doesn't mean you can't defeat an ideology. You defeat an ideology by convincing people that it's not a good ideology. Why do people become terrorists? Well, there's a lot of complex religious legal theory involved
Terrorists hate their enemies. They hate them so much that massacring busloads of schoolchildren seems like a good idea. That is a very severe sort of loathing. Terrorists also generally come from disadvantaged backgrounds; there are exceptions to this (Bin Laden was from a wealthy family; most US-citizen terrorists had relatively normal lives before radicalizing).
How do you defeat terrorism? You attack the current membership, while also addressing these two points. Why do so many people in the Middle East hate us? Can we do something to make ourselves less unpopular? And is it possible to get people out of poverty in those regions? These are the things that will cut down on Al Qaeda's ability to recruit new members.
You need a license to drive a car but any moron can raise a Dahmer or even a Hitler in their own home.
Well, yes. Consider the alternatives. Do you really think it would be a good idea to live in a world where the government gets to decide who is / is not allowed to have kids? It's a terrifying thought.
Remember the shenanigans that got pulled in Ohio by the state government to try to rig the election? (Deliberately understaffing and undersupplying voting precincts in Democratic areas was the least of it.) Now imagine that some partisan asshole is in charge of the Department of Reproductive Licensing. Since most kids tend to follow political leanings of their parents, you can rig elections basically through eugenics.
Licensing requirements for having children will never fly, at least not in the USA. They're almost guaranteed to be unconstitutional.
Bullshit. Gasoline accounted for 45% of US oil usage in 2004. See the referred-to graph for details. Most electricity is not generated by oil in the USA, and more than twice as much oil was used for gas than for industrial applications (e.g. plastic).
As for tankers, there are an estimated 250 million cars on the road, and that's just in the United States. The number of tankers is about four orders of magnitude lower. Given the vastly different population sizes, there are simply too many cars for tankers to dwarf them.
No criminal law should ever be passed that is unrelated to morality. The problem is that "morality" has had its meaning twisted, so that when the legal system refers to laws about "morality" they mean laws enforcing lifestyle choices that society would like to make mandatory.
This is ass-backwards to me. All laws fundamentally derive their authority from either the societal need for order, or from morality. What are laws banning murder, but a moral judgement that murder is wrong? What is the Thirteenth Amendment, if not a statement that enslaving others is immoral?
What are commonly called morality-based laws are really laws lacking any connection to morality. Laws telling consenting adults what sex acts they aren't allowed to perform in private have no possible moral justification (other than unconstitutionally religious-based ones); no immoral act has been commited and nobody has been harmed.
To me, the state can make something a crime only because the act unrightfully has a detrimental effect on another entity. This seems to be to be equivalent to giving the state the power to criminalize immorality. (Just not the sort most people think of when they hear the word.)
That's all very well and true, but it has nothing to do with the OP's point. There exist adult pedophiles who engage in the type of behavior described by the parent. They not only enjoy personally engaging in the behavior, but swapping stories and media (in the same way jocks in locker rooms trade stories about cheerleaders).
The ones that aren't engaging in the sort of sophisticated countersurveillance described are being picked off by law enforcement. This leaves the ones who are, and this is a big problem because they are usually not just collectors, but producers - that is to say, serial rapists.