Assange is being accused of "sex by surprise", which is a Swedish law that states that you need explicit permission to engage in consensual relations each time it happens, no matter what happens before or after. In his case, the woman he "attacked" made him breakfast after her "rape", and they continued their relationship for weeks, until she met a different woman who had also slept with him (after acting like a virtual stalker towards him).
It was only after they compared notes, that they approached Assange and asked him to get a STD test. He refused, and they spoke to the police.
Initially prosecutors declined to take this case, but then the whole Wikileaks scandal broke, and a different prosecutor (from a different area of the country) was assigned to the case, and tried to peruse it.
Assange repeatedly tried to speak to this prosecutor, but she apparently did not want to speak to him. Eventually, he was told he was free to leave the country, which he did.
Now we learn that at least one of the women supposedly who accused him of this is not cooperating with the prosecutors.
I'm not sure what to call any of this, and I'm completely torn about whether Wikileaks is good or bad, but this sure as hell isn't any normal kind of rape accusation to me. The whole thing stinks to high heaven.
You are completely wrong. It's pretty unfortunate for this comment to have been modded up to +5 based on that.
Unlike tort law, the lack of a severability clause does not doom an entire piece of legislation. Courts give far more deference to statutory law than they do contracts. The normal rule is that partial invalidation is the required course.
In other words, even if this opinion is upheld on appeal (which I would guess to be about a 40% chance), it is up to the courts to decide whether other pieces of the law are affected or not. And any attempt to invalidate the remaining parts of the legislation would be on increasingly shaky ground, themselves subject to even more-likely-to-succeed appeals.
The team has so far used a proof-of-concept device to power a clock. The sunlight-to-electricity efficiency of the device is only 0.1 per cent at present, compared with between 10 and 15 per cent for existing dye-sensitised solar cells, however. Screening different algae species to find the most productive electron donor might be one way to produce more juice.
Eventually, algal cells could float out at sea, generating electricity from sunlight and seawater. "We might end up with less efficiency than [conventional] photovoltaics, but we think we can win on cost, and we don't require space where people want to live," says Bombelli.
Of course, making electricity at sea isn't so nearly hard to do as it is to get the electricity to a place where it can be used.
The only politician who ever focused on paying down the debt, President Clinton, received absolutely no credit for it when he did so. When the debt was dropping dramatically, Republican voters actually believed it was going up.
And when Bush was elected despite the overwhelming competence in running the nation and the economy the administration did, Cheney father famously stated "Reagan taught us that deficits don't matter".
In a Democracy, the government reflects the general attitudes of the electorate. So since Americans like to hock themselves out the wazoo, why would anyone ever expect the government to act differently?
Um, guy, you do know that Income Tax is not the only tax that has ever been levied in the history of the world, right?
*sigh* Maybe not. Neither you nor the people who moderated you up.
Okay, here's the deal. Before we had income taxes, we had massive property taxes and sales taxes. We also had a lot less financial oversight, which meant regularly scheduled banking panics in which people lost their life's savings due to the shenanigans of bankers who gambled with other people's money.
Now I understand you think this is all fine and dandy, largely because you were never exposed to it. But I strongly suggest you actually crack open a history book before making more of a fool of yourself. In case you don't like dry tomes, here's a nice readable one, illustrated with period drawings: The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!
The Doctrine of Fair Use states that very small excerpts of a copyrighted work may be used for academic teaching, political commentary, and indexing.
Competition with the actual author of the work with a verbatim copy, as in the Psystar case, is clearly not fair use.
This ruling, upholding the French version of the DMCA (except far more draconian), essentially says that you can sue a Phone Book company for putting the copyrighted name of your business in their phone book. It also makes programming open/free software into a "suicide mission". France is going to suffer decreased competition from these laws, and likely stunt their intellectual services economy as a result.
Maybe it's not the same degree of mistake as Vietnam and Iraq that the French warned Americans against, but it will hurt them economically in the long run quite badly.
Perhaps. Or at least, it's one thing they may attempt to do. But not all saboteurs terrorize.
In fact, the word "sabotage" comes from French, detailing the practice of throwing "Sabots" (hard wooden shoes) into the gears of machines that were throwing thousands of people out of jobs, during bitter labor protests of that era.
Now you may think, as I do, that that is counterproductive, and disagree politically with those 19th century protesters, but it's hardly the same thing as a suicide bombing.
Ditto, by the way, for eco-saboteurs who try to damage large scale logging equipment.
I am not an lawyer either, but the concept between a "matter of law" and a "matter of fact" is pretty basic.
Matters of fact: "I didn't do it." "Yes you did."
Matters of law: "Of course I did it; it ain't against the law, bub!" "Yes it is".
In this case, the fact that internet radio stations were broadcasting copyrighted material (for which they had the proper licenses) was not in doubt. The question was one of law: is that an "interactive service" or not, which has additional restrictions on it?
Novell sued SCO for the money SCO got in licensing their own products Novell won Novell wants their money before SCO tries to "sell" their assets to a buyer that is nothing but a sham front company for SCO.
According to groklaw, this is exactly what is going on right now.
The thing about the law is that it is supposed to operate equally for everybody. And it actually does - when all the parties are rich. For whatever else you want to believe, the PirateBay is not poor.
Just like the bottom of a swimming pool, the uneven pattern should change over time as the termination shock fluctuates.
Re:All Hail Michael Toy (Netscape fame) and others
on
A History of Rogue
·
· Score: 1
I have to say it's pretty surreal reading his thread. I was there in the Crown College Stat-Lab of UC Santa Cruz in 1980 when Glenn Wichman came up with the idea of an auto-generated adventure game and Michael Toy had the talent to use the curses library to write the program up.
My sole contribution was acting as a sounding board to help Michael fix a bug.
Prior to that, games were Adventure based, everything had to be programmed in, and so didn't have much replay value.
It's pretty amazing how much game time you could get out of those old glass-ttys. Michael once said that if he had a penny for every time rogue was played, he'd be a multimillionaire. Too bad the company they started to sell the game went out of business because of all the pirating.
...all claiming that String theory is not testable.
To these people, I'd like to point out that: 1] Not being testable with current technology is not the same as not making any testable predictions. Technology advances, after all, and there are predictions that were made by Einstein that are still being tested today.
2] It's flat out wrong to say there is no work being done to test String theory. The LHC will begin to unlock a number of answers in this regard.
It sounds like a good idea, but because of precession of the Earth orbital axis, a sundial becomes inaccurate over the course of even a couple hundred years. Everything from Mayan ruins (which were originally lined up with the sun), to astrological signs (which originally stood for the period of time when a certain constellation was covered by the sun) have been made inaccurate by this effect.
1] Given the way records in private medical databases are protected (or rather, not protected), this system will at least have the sunshine of many eyes making sure its security, data loss prevention, and procedures to correct misinformation, is all up to date.
2] Invasion of medical privacy is only a major concern in the US because of the presently legal practice of insurance companies cherry-picking only the healthiest of people to insure. If the US had a national health care system like every other major first world nation, there would be little or no economic incentive to go sneaking peeks at people's medical records. So fix that instead.
3] This will both increase the quality and decrease the price of medical care. It is a step up.
4] Back to my point #2. This is one of the many kinds of efficiencies that are not dangerous only when you have a national medical plan. So long as we have economic incentives for doing bad things, those things will happen. Oh, but public-schools=socialism! libraries=socialism! public-health-care=socialism! It seems like the only thing that isn't socialism is covering the bad bets of right wing gamblers on Wall Street. All trillion dollars of it.
That seems reasonable enough. If your daughter isn't actually going looking for porn.
If she is, you need to have a talk. Not porn=bad because that won't work. Rather: porn=unrealistic. And that she needs to understand that much of what she will see is the result of payment to foolish and desperate people.
Oh, and build up her self-esteem. That is the critical factor in teen girls getting into situations they're not ready for.
You know, I'm pretty sure if those wacky religious leaders weren't breaking the law, they'd be left alone. It's not as if we have any lack of wacky religions in this country, and until recently most of their leaders weren't merely being left alone - they were mostly running it. So don't go blaming the ATF for the suicidal things nutballs do when the cops come to say no you can't have dozens of 12 year old "wives".
Because if you think we should just let people willing to kill themselves be a law unto themselves, pretty soon you'll have a society where it's perfectly acceptable to fly airplanes into buildings. And I kind of have a problem with that.
Definitely no. But Greed and Ambition have nothing to do with it.
As a customer, I want a game that just works. Not a game with five dozen incompatible interfaces, two half broken configuration interfaces, inscrutable documentation written by an engineer who never took a writing class in his entire six years in college, untalented artwork, and random crashes justified by the credo "if you don't like it, dig through 100,000 lines of poorly commented code to fix it yourself".
For the non open-source "free" games, I want a game I can play, not one that's a one screen flash-animation that's really just an add for whatever is the latest kid-fluff being pushed on Nickelodeon.
As a customer, I want my GTA, Oblivion, Project Gotham, and a dozen other high quality games that could only be developed by paying real programmers, artists, and writers real money to work on them. So I am perfectly willing to shell out real money to pay for them to do so.
In fact, given the price of a couple of movie tickets and a family night out, I figure video games are still the best dollar per hour entertainment value out there.
The overhead of private health insurers averages 35%. The overhead of Medicare is 3%.
The median tuition for their member private day schools in 2005-2006 in the United States was close to $14,000 for grades 1 to 3, $15,000 for grades 6 to 8 and $16,600 for grades 9 to 12. Public schools average cost per student is $13340, and they take everyone, including the very expensive special-needs kids.
The problem with government run programs is not that they're inefficient. They're nearly always more efficient, because they don't have to make profit, and culturally it's unacceptable for the chief officers to self-deal like US CEOs do.
The real problem with government programs is that they're inflexible and rarely innovative. Which means they should only be used for industries for which there is a known, steady, need: Libraries, Schools, Roads, Bridges, Power, Healthcare, a bare-minimum forced retirement savings program (Social Security). Everything else should be done privately.
Oh, I know. Taco did his snark, and you were modded +5 Insightful, because of the Republican/Libertarian cult of the CEO. But just remember that if you're ideology actually worked, Obama wouldn't have to be working so hard to bail us out of the economic mess you got us into.
While Barack Obama is currently called "President Elect", technically he really isn't yet. All that has happened so far is that he has won the majority of Presidential Electors pledged to him. According to US Code at 3, USC 7, the date that the Electoral College meets to actually vote for the next President of the United States is the first Monday following the second Wednesday in December. In 2008, this will be on December 15.
What happens if a "President-Elect" dies before being elected by the college? Answer: the electors pledged to that candidate get to vote for whomever they want. If half the Democratic electors voted for Hillary and the other half voted for Biden, then John McCain could theoretically become President in 2008.
(After the electoral college election, the standard rules of succession hold. So if Obama died on Christmas, Biden would be our next President.)
Again, none of this is likely. But it could happen. Let's be all very nice to Renegade's nervous looking Secret Service detail.
Groklaw is a wonderful resource. That said, PJ is trolling here. She she herself has rather authoritatively explained, there is no legal basis for SCO to attack the clear meaning of the original Agreement (contract) with hearsay evidence - especially from second and third hand sources. This is an insurmountable legal obstacle, unless the 10th Court of Appeals wants to make new case law. (From looking at their record, it looks like they don't).
But hell, if we're thinking implausible nightmare scenarios, Barack Obama could have a heart attack right now, Biden and Hillary could split, the Republicans could win on that basis, McCain could have a heart attack in a couple of months, and we could be all saying "President Palin" a year from now.
We had bubbles and depressions before FDR, but the government had very little power to interfere in the recovery process, and they were typically over in two years or less.
Your assertions don't square against known history. The panic of 1857 was interrupted only by the civil war. The panic of 1873 lasted five years. The panic of 1893 lasted nearly four.
And in all of them, the American governments of the day did indeed try to take various measures to stop them, although they weren't always very effective.
And these panics were far more serious. For people who lost their life savings in a supposedly guaranteed savings account, they could be literally deadly, given that retirees did not have Social Security to fall back on. If you didn't have an extended family who could provide food, you could (and would) starve to death.
Insofar as your attack on FDR and farm price supports, you are clearly not aware that some goods and services (most notably rail transportation) did not substantially fall during that period. The result: it cost more to transport goods to market than you could get by selling them. So your idea that there would be food for all, if only bad old FDR hadn't stopped the market from working, is, to put it mildly, completely unsupported by fact.
I would go on, but given the tenor of your original post, I'm pretty sure any additional logic or fast would be wasted on you. There's a rule about arguing on the internet, and believe me, I'm not retarded.
A snippet (only 3 paragraphs to fall within fair use):
I used to live next door to a Russian emigre. One day he asked me to explain something that puzzled him about his new country. "This place seems very rich," he said, "but I never see anyone making anything. How does the country earn its money?"
...
In other words, a fuller answer to my former neighbor would be that these days, Americans make a living selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese. Somehow, that doesn't seem like a sustainable lifestyle.
How solid, then, is America's economic recovery? The British have a phrase that applies: "safe as houses." Our economy is as safe as houses. Unfortunately, given current prices and our dependence on foreign lenders, houses aren't safe at all.
Whine all you want about the Nobel Committee having a political agenda. Right is right. And Krugman was right.
Andy Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and at his award-winning humor site, BorowitzReport.com.
Not quite. It's even more restrictive than that. Perjury is lying under oath about things that is material (i.e. important) to the case.
The reason for this is simple. If there wasn't a rule like this, every court case about a fender-bender auto accident would begin with: "have you ever cheated on your spouse?". With wide-eyed hubby/wifey in the front row, the inclination to lie would be overwhelming, and court cases would be lost in the weeds over long ago affairs.
Insofar as the perjury charge here, however, a spammer testifying under oath that they don't even know how to spam clearly meets the test set out by law. However, State Rules of Evidence almost never allow introducing anything that was obtained illegally under state law, even if it would be legal under another State's statutes. So the recording cannot be used to impeach (authoritatively disprove) the spammer's testimony in a criminal case.
Slashdot Mirror
Assange is being accused of "sex by surprise", which is a Swedish law that states that you need explicit permission to engage in consensual relations each time it happens, no matter what happens before or after. In his case, the woman he "attacked" made him breakfast after her "rape", and they continued their relationship for weeks, until she met a different woman who had also slept with him (after acting like a virtual stalker towards him).
It was only after they compared notes, that they approached Assange and asked him to get a STD test. He refused, and they spoke to the police.
Initially prosecutors declined to take this case, but then the whole Wikileaks scandal broke, and a different prosecutor (from a different area of the country) was assigned to the case, and tried to peruse it.
Assange repeatedly tried to speak to this prosecutor, but she apparently did not want to speak to him. Eventually, he was told he was free to leave the country, which he did.
Now we learn that at least one of the women supposedly who accused him of this is not cooperating with the prosecutors.
I'm not sure what to call any of this, and I'm completely torn about whether Wikileaks is good or bad, but this sure as hell isn't any normal kind of rape accusation to me. The whole thing stinks to high heaven.
You are completely wrong. It's pretty unfortunate for this comment to have been modded up to +5 based on that.
Unlike tort law, the lack of a severability clause does not doom an entire piece of legislation. Courts give far more deference to statutory law than they do contracts. The normal rule is that partial invalidation is the required course.
In other words, even if this opinion is upheld on appeal (which I would guess to be about a 40% chance), it is up to the courts to decide whether other pieces of the law are affected or not. And any attempt to invalidate the remaining parts of the legislation would be on increasingly shaky ground, themselves subject to even more-likely-to-succeed appeals.
If you'd RTFA, you would have seen this snippet:
Of course, making electricity at sea isn't so nearly hard to do as it is to get the electricity to a place where it can be used.
The only politician who ever focused on paying down the debt, President Clinton, received absolutely no credit for it when he did so. When the debt was dropping dramatically, Republican voters actually believed it was going up.
And when Bush was elected despite the overwhelming competence in running the nation and the economy the administration did, Cheney father famously stated "Reagan taught us that deficits don't matter".
In a Democracy, the government reflects the general attitudes of the electorate. So since Americans like to hock themselves out the wazoo, why would anyone ever expect the government to act differently?
Um, guy, you do know that Income Tax is not the only tax that has ever been levied in the history of the world, right?
*sigh* Maybe not. Neither you nor the people who moderated you up.
Okay, here's the deal. Before we had income taxes, we had massive property taxes and sales taxes. We also had a lot less financial oversight, which meant regularly scheduled banking panics in which people lost their life's savings due to the shenanigans of bankers who gambled with other people's money.
Now I understand you think this is all fine and dandy, largely because you were never exposed to it. But I strongly suggest you actually crack open a history book before making more of a fool of yourself. In case you don't like dry tomes, here's a nice readable one, illustrated with period drawings: The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!
The difference is "Fair Use".
The Doctrine of Fair Use states that very small excerpts of a copyrighted work may be used for academic teaching, political commentary, and indexing.
Competition with the actual author of the work with a verbatim copy, as in the Psystar case, is clearly not fair use.
This ruling, upholding the French version of the DMCA (except far more draconian), essentially says that you can sue a Phone Book company for putting the copyrighted name of your business in their phone book. It also makes programming open/free software into a "suicide mission". France is going to suffer decreased competition from these laws, and likely stunt their intellectual services economy as a result.
Maybe it's not the same degree of mistake as Vietnam and Iraq that the French warned Americans against, but it will hurt them economically in the long run quite badly.
Aren't all terrorists out to sabotage?
Perhaps. Or at least, it's one thing they may attempt to do. But not all saboteurs terrorize.
In fact, the word "sabotage" comes from French, detailing the practice of throwing "Sabots" (hard wooden shoes) into the gears of machines that were throwing thousands of people out of jobs, during bitter labor protests of that era.
Now you may think, as I do, that that is counterproductive, and disagree politically with those 19th century protesters, but it's hardly the same thing as a suicide bombing.
Ditto, by the way, for eco-saboteurs who try to damage large scale logging equipment.
I am not an lawyer either, but the concept between a "matter of law" and a "matter of fact" is pretty basic.
Matters of fact: "I didn't do it." "Yes you did."
Matters of law: "Of course I did it; it ain't against the law, bub!" "Yes it is".
In this case, the fact that internet radio stations were broadcasting copyrighted material (for which they had the proper licenses) was not in doubt. The question was one of law: is that an "interactive service" or not, which has additional restrictions on it?
Novell sued SCO for the money SCO got in licensing their own products
Novell won
Novell wants their money before SCO tries to "sell" their assets to a buyer that is nothing but a sham front company for SCO.
According to groklaw, this is exactly what is going on right now.
The thing about the law is that it is supposed to operate equally for everybody. And it actually does - when all the parties are rich. For whatever else you want to believe, the PirateBay is not poor.
Just like the bottom of a swimming pool, the uneven pattern should change over time as the termination shock fluctuates.
I have to say it's pretty surreal reading his thread. I was there in the Crown College Stat-Lab of UC Santa Cruz in 1980 when Glenn Wichman came up with the idea of an auto-generated adventure game and Michael Toy had the talent to use the curses library to write the program up.
My sole contribution was acting as a sounding board to help Michael fix a bug.
Prior to that, games were Adventure based, everything had to be programmed in, and so didn't have much replay value.
It's pretty amazing how much game time you could get out of those old glass-ttys. Michael once said that if he had a penny for every time rogue was played, he'd be a multimillionaire. Too bad the company they started to sell the game went out of business because of all the pirating.
...all claiming that String theory is not testable.
To these people, I'd like to point out that:
1] Not being testable with current technology is not the same as not making any testable predictions. Technology advances, after all, and there are predictions that were made by Einstein that are still being tested today.
2] It's flat out wrong to say there is no work being done to test String theory. The LHC will begin to unlock a number of answers in this regard.
It sounds like a good idea, but because of precession of the Earth orbital axis, a sundial becomes inaccurate over the course of even a couple hundred years. Everything from Mayan ruins (which were originally lined up with the sun), to astrological signs (which originally stood for the period of time when a certain constellation was covered by the sun) have been made inaccurate by this effect.
A few comments on this:
1] Given the way records in private medical databases are protected (or rather, not protected), this system will at least have the sunshine of many eyes making sure its security, data loss prevention, and procedures to correct misinformation, is all up to date.
2] Invasion of medical privacy is only a major concern in the US because of the presently legal practice of insurance companies cherry-picking only the healthiest of people to insure. If the US had a national health care system like every other major first world nation, there would be little or no economic incentive to go sneaking peeks at people's medical records. So fix that instead.
3] This will both increase the quality and decrease the price of medical care. It is a step up.
4] Back to my point #2. This is one of the many kinds of efficiencies that are not dangerous only when you have a national medical plan. So long as we have economic incentives for doing bad things, those things will happen. Oh, but public-schools=socialism! libraries=socialism! public-health-care=socialism! It seems like the only thing that isn't socialism is covering the bad bets of right wing gamblers on Wall Street. All trillion dollars of it.
That seems reasonable enough. If your daughter isn't actually going looking for porn.
If she is, you need to have a talk. Not porn=bad because that won't work. Rather: porn=unrealistic. And that she needs to understand that much of what she will see is the result of payment to foolish and desperate people.
Oh, and build up her self-esteem. That is the critical factor in teen girls getting into situations they're not ready for.
You know, I'm pretty sure if those wacky religious leaders weren't breaking the law, they'd be left alone. It's not as if we have any lack of wacky religions in this country, and until recently most of their leaders weren't merely being left alone - they were mostly running it. So don't go blaming the ATF for the suicidal things nutballs do when the cops come to say no you can't have dozens of 12 year old "wives".
Because if you think we should just let people willing to kill themselves be a law unto themselves, pretty soon you'll have a society where it's perfectly acceptable to fly airplanes into buildings. And I kind of have a problem with that.
Definitely no. But Greed and Ambition have nothing to do with it.
As a customer, I want a game that just works. Not a game with five dozen incompatible interfaces, two half broken configuration interfaces, inscrutable documentation written by an engineer who never took a writing class in his entire six years in college, untalented artwork, and random crashes justified by the credo "if you don't like it, dig through 100,000 lines of poorly commented code to fix it yourself".
For the non open-source "free" games, I want a game I can play, not one that's a one screen flash-animation that's really just an add for whatever is the latest kid-fluff being pushed on Nickelodeon.
As a customer, I want my GTA, Oblivion, Project Gotham, and a dozen other high quality games that could only be developed by paying real programmers, artists, and writers real money to work on them. So I am perfectly willing to shell out real money to pay for them to do so.
In fact, given the price of a couple of movie tickets and a family night out, I figure video games are still the best dollar per hour entertainment value out there.
I'm not holding my breath until they do, but if you don't, you're a hypocrite for exhaling (dumping) your CO2 into the atmosphere.
I've heard this argument made before. It's pretty funny.
Everything we eat and breathe out as CO2 was formed from very recently grown plant material. Plants, as we all know, consume CO2.
So excepting anyone drinking fossil fuels straight from the tap, human body processes, including breathing, are inherently carbon-neutral.
This being the case, your charge of hypocrisy doesn't fly (except, of course, in whatever nutcase right-wing blog you got it from).
The overhead of private health insurers averages 35%. The overhead of Medicare is 3%.
The median tuition for their member private day schools in 2005-2006 in the United States was close to $14,000 for grades 1 to 3, $15,000 for grades 6 to 8 and $16,600 for grades 9 to 12. Public schools average cost per student is $13340, and they take everyone, including the very expensive special-needs kids.
The problem with government run programs is not that they're inefficient. They're nearly always more efficient, because they don't have to make profit, and culturally it's unacceptable for the chief officers to self-deal like US CEOs do.
The real problem with government programs is that they're inflexible and rarely innovative. Which means they should only be used for industries for which there is a known, steady, need: Libraries, Schools, Roads, Bridges, Power, Healthcare, a bare-minimum forced retirement savings program (Social Security). Everything else should be done privately.
Oh, I know. Taco did his snark, and you were modded +5 Insightful, because of the Republican/Libertarian cult of the CEO. But just remember that if you're ideology actually worked, Obama wouldn't have to be working so hard to bail us out of the economic mess you got us into.
While Barack Obama is currently called "President Elect", technically he really isn't yet. All that has happened so far is that he has won the majority of Presidential Electors pledged to him. According to US Code at 3, USC 7, the date that the Electoral College meets to actually vote for the next President of the United States is the first Monday following the second Wednesday in December. In 2008, this will be on December 15.
What happens if a "President-Elect" dies before being elected by the college? Answer: the electors pledged to that candidate get to vote for whomever they want. If half the Democratic electors voted for Hillary and the other half voted for Biden, then John McCain could theoretically become President in 2008.
(After the electoral college election, the standard rules of succession hold. So if Obama died on Christmas, Biden would be our next President.)
Again, none of this is likely. But it could happen. Let's be all very nice to Renegade's nervous looking Secret Service detail.
Groklaw is a wonderful resource. That said, PJ is trolling here. She she herself has rather authoritatively explained, there is no legal basis for SCO to attack the clear meaning of the original Agreement (contract) with hearsay evidence - especially from second and third hand sources. This is an insurmountable legal obstacle, unless the 10th Court of Appeals wants to make new case law. (From looking at their record, it looks like they don't).
But hell, if we're thinking implausible nightmare scenarios, Barack Obama could have a heart attack right now, Biden and Hillary could split, the Republicans could win on that basis, McCain could have a heart attack in a couple of months, and we could be all saying "President Palin" a year from now.
Hey, could happen. Right?
We had bubbles and depressions before FDR, but the government had very little power to interfere in the recovery process, and they were typically over in two years or less.
Your assertions don't square against known history. The panic of 1857 was interrupted only by the civil war. The panic of 1873 lasted five years. The panic of 1893 lasted nearly four.
And in all of them, the American governments of the day did indeed try to take various measures to stop them, although they weren't always very effective.
And these panics were far more serious. For people who lost their life savings in a supposedly guaranteed savings account, they could be literally deadly, given that retirees did not have Social Security to fall back on. If you didn't have an extended family who could provide food, you could (and would) starve to death.
Insofar as your attack on FDR and farm price supports, you are clearly not aware that some goods and services (most notably rail transportation) did not substantially fall during that period. The result: it cost more to transport goods to market than you could get by selling them. So your idea that there would be food for all, if only bad old FDR hadn't stopped the market from working, is, to put it mildly, completely unsupported by fact.
I would go on, but given the tenor of your original post, I'm pretty sure any additional logic or fast would be wasted on you. There's a rule about arguing on the internet, and believe me, I'm not retarded.
Safe as Houses
A snippet (only 3 paragraphs to fall within fair use):
Whine all you want about the Nobel Committee having a political agenda. Right is right. And Krugman was right.
The author of the article was joking.
Andy Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and at his award-winning humor site, BorowitzReport.com.
Not quite. It's even more restrictive than that.
Perjury is lying under oath about things that is material (i.e. important) to the case.
The reason for this is simple. If there wasn't a rule like this, every court case about a fender-bender auto accident would begin with: "have you ever cheated on your spouse?". With wide-eyed hubby/wifey in the front row, the inclination to lie would be overwhelming, and court cases would be lost in the weeds over long ago affairs.
Insofar as the perjury charge here, however, a spammer testifying under oath that they don't even know how to spam clearly meets the test set out by law. However, State Rules of Evidence almost never allow introducing anything that was obtained illegally under state law, even if it would be legal under another State's statutes. So the recording cannot be used to impeach (authoritatively disprove) the spammer's testimony in a criminal case.