This is for cub scouts. Ages are around 7-11ish. They aren't likely to have parents who both put them in scouting and allow them to play DOABV (and quite frankly, most adults wouldn't bother to play it either, especially those who play a lot of video games).
There is already a reading belt loop, this one is to encourage interaction and utility with video games (specific amounts of play, teaching others what you have learned, etc).
If you don't have a driver's license, I can't see any reason not to carry a passport - an official government identification device that is relatively simple to keep on your person
A passport is far from "relatively simple to keep on your person", though. Unless you carry a purse. Do you carry a purse?
A passport is a document for foreign travel. Its primary role is not to prove your citizenship to a police officer.
You have offered a very simple way to carry a passport for roughly half of the human population. Being not a woman, I tend to wear pants. My passport fits in the pockets of my pants with no problems. You could keep it in the glove box of your car (they tend to have locks on them), or your briefcase, or in your laptop bag, or between your head and your hat, or any number of other relatively simple methods to keep a passport on your person.
As for your second statement, don't be absurd. The purpose of a passport is personal identification. Its primary purpose is to prove your citizenship. The fact that it is commonly used as proof of citizenship for the purpose of foreign travel does not mean that it cannot or should not be used for other things. In fact, when you travel to foreign countries and show your passport to customs, you are showing it to a police officer to prove your citizenship (as opposed to a VISA, which proves that the country you are traveling to has approved of your travel as a citizen of your home country).
Actually, if you present your driver's license, the officer could simply call it in to verify if you are a US citizen (when you took the driver's license test, you had to bring your birth certificate or your green card and you checked a box clarifying citizenship status). Or the officer could call your employer, who presumably has run a background check on you and can confirm whether or not you are a citizen (yes, your employer could lie, but they would be subject to liability in the event that they claim you are a citizen when you are not or if they claim you are not a citizen when you are). A birth certificate would definitely prove citizenship (if you were born in the US). Naturalization, by definition, would confer the rights of citizenship upon a foreign born person, and thus would be usable as proof of citizenship (one of the benefits of citizenship is in fact citizenship).
As for pointing out documentation that doesn't prove citizenship, I don't see the point. One could carry a library card or a utility bill or a college student ID or a receipt for your latest rent/mortgage check or a health insurance card or a AAA membership card or a BSA eagle scout recognition card or a B&N readers advantage card or a Kroger plus card or a...well, you get the idea. Just because you carry something that identifies you doesn't mean its intention is to prove your citizenship. Meanwhile, if you have a driver's license and aren't leaving the country, you wouldn't need a passport. If you don't have a driver's license, I can't see any reason not to carry a passport - an official government identification device that is relatively simple to keep on your person so that you can use a credit card (yes, many stores that take credit cards do in fact still check ID, specifically because a credit card identifies a credit line on your behalf, rather than identifying the card holder), visit a bank in person, and of course prove your citizenship in Arizona.
BadAnalogyGuy, you normally post things that are either funny or at least analogies, but this time, you were just stupid (for those who would reply without recognizing that some commonly used words have many definitions, I mean that the OP was lacking in ordinary quickness and keenness of mind and marked by a lack of intelligence or care).
IANAL, but I understand contract law as a PA (soon to be CPA).
Your act of selling a used watch does not make you a merchant. Selling it on ebay may mean otherwise. You would have no problem selling it on craigslist, representing yourself as an individual (until craigslist changes its policies, which if you are selling something on craigslist, you as an individual are required to keep yourself up to date). Trying to sell it on ebay as an individual would also carry minimal to excruciatingly large issues (for example,you may need the original packaging or some such to prove it is an Omega watch, or you may need to get the watch insured and the insurance notarized; I am not familiar with Omega watches or ebay's policies regarding their sale). Selling it as a merchant on ebay has massive legal repercussions that hoist the flag of common sense (that would be expected of a merchant, not a layperson).
You are a consumer, and your used watch is sold 'as-is,' so if breaks, you don't have warranty costs (although on ebay you may still be liable; ebay is a service and as such retains the right to make you jump through any hoops it pleases...if you don't like them, find a different service or create you own; after all, here in the US you can pretty much start any business you want; while your legal issues may vary). If your watch is actually an Omuga watch, and not an Omega watch, you are not liable to replace the product with an actual one, but you can't call it an Omega watch, no matter who you are.
A reseller, on the other hand, isn't selling used watches that they were using, and have to be held to standards of contract law in the US (and if importing them, also of the country of origin, depending on the country). They are importing watches and reselling them (hence why they are called resellers) and held to the same standards as if they were the manufacturer (sometimes modified, depending on the creator, who holds the manufacturer liable for who they sell to). If you are selling Omuga watches (not Omega), then yes, Omega can sue you for slapping an Omega label on them, even if you bought them from overseas once. Meanwhile, if you sell Omega watches, you don't get the right to change the prices as a reseller, if Omega requires a price floor in order to be a reseller in your region (among many, many other control methods that you may be subject to, even as a consumer...again, right of first sale may apply, but not to resellers). You can look up case law on your own time.
To recap, as an individual, copyright does in fact cover imports; its how you imported in the first place. As a merchant, keep a lawyer on retainer to advise you as to your rights (online or off). If you don't understand the difference, I would speak to a lawyer, in person, before trying to sell watches as a merchant, and if selling as an individual, make absolutely certain that your purchaser understands that you are not a merchant.
IMO the law the states should pass isn't one banning the sale of those games to minors (which isn't happening), it's one mandating 1-year prison sentences for any adult who gives such a game to a minor (which is what's happening). But I doubt that'll ever happen.
I doubt it too, because that would be insane. You would be proposing the same punishment for purchasing a video game and allowing a minor to play it as for having a real, loaded, unregistered semi-automatic weapon (mandatory 1 year in jail). Do you really not understand why these things are somewhat different in severity? You aren't asking that parents who allow their kids to view R rated movies be placed in jail, or that parents that let their kids try a cigarette or a beer go to jail. You are asking that video games rated M (the reason for the rating being independent of parental moral worldviews, which vary quite widely) be restricted beyond point of sale, punishable by automatic jail time.
If a parent is buying their child heroin, I can see that as endangering a child's life and reason to put the bastard in prison (the parent, not the kid). I don't see the parallel to putting parents in prison because they let their kids shoot zombies (left4dead) or prostitutes (GTA series). Hell, kids can go online and shoot nazis for free (racistgames, newgrounds, countless others), so choosing the media that your children consume should be called parenting, not criminal activity. I promise you, as a parent (which I am not), if I was living in a state where I could go to prison because I bought a video game for my kid, I would most certainly move out of California (because no other state would possibly even consider passing such a ridiculous law). If I have friends over for a bbq, and they bring their 14 year old, you want me to have to lock up my video game systems in the safe with my guns?
Its more likely that in order to be legal, these would have to be US based gambling sites. You would receive tax documentation showing losses and gains on an individual basis. You might even have to prove your identity (scan your driver's license/passport) just to be allowed to gamble.
From a gambler's perspective, most money lines are already in favor of the house. An even money bet (like the point spread bet or the under/over )might get you -103 to -112, depending on the place. While the payouts are even money, the odds of winning are not, and the house makes a profit by trying to get roughly equal amounts of betting on each possible outcome (adjusting the line as necessary). Professional gamblers are able to tell when the line is favorable to a specific bet. Adding a (6% state + 2% federal) tax on wagers (even though winnings would also be taxed as income whether you remove the winnings from your account or not) means that if you bet $110 on an even money proposition and are in the 25% tax bracket, your after tax winnings are only $69. In order to break even this way, you would have to win these propositions 61.5% of the time. The best gamblers win about that much, because the line is distinguished by people who bet on who they want to win, not on who is likely to win. Gambling sites are fantastic at finding where to draw the line to get the most action, but professional gamblers are not going to play just to break even.
As the summary notes, it would end up being a source of money, just not for those participating.
It's sad that people are being prosecuted for being dicks rather than for breaking actual laws. Mob justice acts with an arbitrary and inconsistent hand, and has no place under the rule of law.
He pretended to be a female nurse in order to instruct others on how to commit suicide.
To clarify, the issue is not that he pretended to be female, but rather that he pretended to be a nurse (although if anyone relied on him being a female for the purpose of committing suicide, it in fact could be an issue).
I'm fairly certain that fraud, especially in the context of pretending to have medical training, is in fact a crime based on actual laws.
Meanwhile, he has been charged with two counts of assisting suicide, not convicted by mob justice (for example, being hanged in a tree without a court hearing). He has a chance to prove that he did nothing wrong, or to be convicted of a crime that has been committed, specifically because of rule of law. Your implication that charging someone with a crime based on valid allegations (in this case, based on the fact that the accused admits to having helped people commit suicide) should be seen as mob justice is patently absurd.
Let's be honest, 90% of guns are used to kill people. Let's abolish the 2nd amendment!
There are an estimated 200-250 million guns in the US. In 2009, there were less than 20k gun related deaths, the majority of them suicides. The vast, vast majority of guns are never even fired, but your 90% statistic is off by a factor of approximately 900000 (which also assumes incorrectly that every gun related death is committed by a different gun).
Am I the only one that sees irony in the fact Sid Meier, a guy who takes 3 years to make games that take 30 hours to play being mentioned in the same sentence as 48 hour game making session...?
Yes, because that isn't irony. Also, his son is hosting the contest, the article is about a documentary about Sid Meier.
I find you to be particularly lazy to not read 2 sentences with enough reading comprehension to get the point.
Meanwhile, in the US, you would ordinarily sue the manufacturer, retailer, and wholesaler for any legal complaint against manufactured items.
The question of who is ultimately liable is left up to court system (generally a judge or judge panel, not a jury, unless your damages go beyond the scope of the written or implied contract).
Twitter cannot own a patent on sending messages to a group of subscribers through a automated medium. Prior art exists well before email, but even with email the concept of a listserv is not owned by twitter simply because they employ the concept through sms (although if they did, you could get around it by simply sending email messages by using an excel spreadsheet of email addresses and importing the list into an automated emailer by running a script on your blog that sends the list and the message everytime you update. Twitter is uninvolved and owns no patent and due to common use of spreadsheet for performing spreadsheet functions, no one has the ability to patent such).
I believe Ashton Kutcher has never said anything of any importance to 4 million people at once. It's simply a marketing device that allows people to sign up to receive messages. This could very easily be done by having a sign up list on any website to include your phone number and an agreement box to accept sms messages at personal cost. The only impact on the phone company is minor research for actuarial calculations about how users are taking advantage of unlimited use service contracts (they don't give a rat's ass about you using twitter, they care about whether you are sending/receiving 1000 messages a month - (17 mb), or 10M messages a month (167 GB); so long as the price paid for sending all of these messages is less than the price charged for unlimited messaging). This information is available to phone companies because they are the dumb pipe in this equation; twitter is uninvolved. While phone companies (or data transmission groups) do not have the right to control whether or not people choose to tweet, they are not going to pay twitter for the ability to provide the service. Much more imporantly, twitter sure as hell can't stop phone companies from providing sms, phone, or email service to its paying customers, so even if twitter decides to hide behind a paywall (which it has every right to do), it will in no way affect the phone service for which customers pay.
While you could make the argument that the use of twitter has gotten a lot of stupid people to upgrade cell phone service to include sms, it wasn't done with any contracts, and thus not one of them (phone company) will pay for it unless they can get exclusive twitter rights (ie a buy-out of twitter). Since, as I previously mentioned, twitter doesn't have the ability to obtain the patent to prevent competition (by preventing anyone else from creating lists to which things can be sent over sms), which every phone company has a back up method to (immediately) create, this seems like an unreasonable possibility.
AT&T has a P/E of 12+ and stock price is in the mid 20's. They have not made billions this year. EPS is scheduled around 2.20 per share and they have 30 M shares outstanding. Furthermore, RE shows that AT&T made 2.8B between Q4 08 and Q4 09. Meanwhile, one certainly does not attribute its growth entirely (or even materially) to twitter. If it were (which it isn't), then twitter would be responsible for AT&T's general recommendation being a weak buy/hold. Not exactly the exploding growth you seem to think the company is having.
If you were the CEO of twitter, you would probably know a little more about the company, specifically that the its success is almost entirely because it is free, and that trying to blackmail companies that have little to nothing to gain from your existence is a surefire way to be certain that you never go public.
Statistically, the probability of life in the universe is exactly 100%. I leave it to you to figure out why that is the case (hint: we are talking to each other).
Not quite.
The statistical point would be that given an infinite number of equivalent universes, the probability of life is not 100%, simply because in this universe, we in fact have life. Given the conditions that have arisen in our universe, the likelihood of life existing is close to 1, but the likelihood of that life understanding its own existence is not as high.
You should instead say that probabilistically, the statistic of the existence of life in this universe is 1.
I would rather Twitter went into the offices of the CEOs of Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon, and says "we want a third of your SMS-fee revenues; and don't raise prices. Otherwise, we'll turn off Twitter."
Those guys would shit their pants and break a nail grabbing for the checkbook.
At which point, all of the Ceos will have the exact same reaction:
'How did you get into my office? You want what??!! HAHAHAHAHAHA...no.'
You know why? Because Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon can all use their prebudgeted ad time to point out that users will still have access to SMS in order to send pointless messages about the most mundane points of their lives and the ability to blog and send automatic short messages to user groups via SMS every time their blog gets updated, all doable from their phone, without twitter. Im sure the marketing department will come up with a way to sell cell phone specific sets of this, which will add the ability to add users from other cell networks within 6 months, for only (30-20-10-5) dollars per month on top of your bill; all the while acting like this is a favor due to market wishes, and not something any of them could already implement at the drop of a hat. They might even be able to hide the fact that they in fact want twitter to try and fail to monetize because they in fact are already good to go.
'a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement or for that of spectators'
According to the dictionary, that's a game, not a sport.
'diversion; recreation; pleasant pastime'
That's a sport.
Clearly computer trouble shooting falls under sport, not game.
I'm gonna stick with my previous post, which unfortunately has been modded funny instead of informative.
This is like Nintendo suing Sony because I can't play The Legend of Zelda on a PS3.
No it isn't.
Sony may choose to license TLoZ if they wish, at terms amenable to Nintendo. Nintendo wouldn't be able to sue over the lack of TLoZ on PS3 because Nintendo controls those rights.
This is more like Seagate suing Microsoft because users can't install install their own hard drives (without buying xbox specific hard drives). Its a product (hard drives) in widespread use that is explicitly excluded from a seperate vendor, despite the fact that the majority of its consumers want it.
I am tired of pet causes like this that demonize slightly risky behavior like driving buzzed and bringing a knife to school, you know, behaviors that make life exciting and worth living. So you might get killed by some dumbass on his phone, if you were a decent driver you should be able to avoid it. I know I avoid getting killed by some prick in an SUV at least twice a week.
So...
You think avoiding drunk SUV drivers is the meaning of life. Haven't you ever had sex or gone fishing or eaten a great meal at a fine restaurant or gone to see a live broadway production or entered a live televised poker tournament in vegas or read a really good book or sat in front of fireplace on a cold winter's night with someone you love and just talked or gone to the beach and made a new friend? There are so many, many things to do that make life worth living that either don't involve huge amounts of (slightly) risky behaviour or much importantly don't create that risk for others. This is the issue and why drunk driving is demonized (if a police officer can tell that you are buzzed driving, its drunk driving. No two ways about it, you should go to jail for it). The point of school isn't to get a bunch of youngerish people in one place so someone can bring a gun or a knife and maybe hurt or kill a bunch of people. It sure as hell isn't why I went to school, and if I thought for a second it was a remote possibility I would have left (which I eventually did, and not because of graduation).
1 in 20 crashes involves a cell phone, 41000 people died in car crashes last year, so maybe 2050 deaths a year are caused by cell phones.
Logical failure; in order to assume that death rate in car crashes where cell phone use is involved is approximately equal to the death rate in the population of all car crashes would in fact have to assume that cell phones do not cause crashes and that cell phone use is not related to the severity of those crashes. The number of crashes due to cell phone use is not related to the number of deaths involved in those crashes. That 41k deaths is within 30 days, by the way (and is for 2007, not last year). Meanwhile, there were over 10 million vehicle accidents. Each year, how many people on cell phones are hitting parked cars and driving off, not even recognizing they have hit someone? I bet its more than 41000. Each year, how many people on their cell phones are sitting at green lights for 5, 10, 20 seconds, until the light turns yellow again because they aren't paying attention? I bet its more than 10 million. Meanwhile, what about the 15-16-17 year old learning how to drive on their learner's permit? The British expat learning to drive on the right (correct) side of the road? Should they die because some dumbass is talking on their cellphone? Should they get rear ended while stopped at a red light by some dumbass on their cell phone? Should they have to swerve to avoid some dumbass on their cell phone? As a good driver, I shouldn't have to, but I do, all the damn time.
Somehow I'm allowed to eat, talk to people in my car, smoke cigarettes, change clothes, change the song on my iPod, etc.
None of these are true. You can be pulled over for distracted driving for any of these items (smoking cigarettes might be tough; you might have to be lighting matches to make that one work).
Shitty drivers will stay shitty, and they will stay on the roads. OTOH, when I pull up to a red light I have to worry about getting a ticket for quickly using my phone while I am stopped OR while I am driving down a highway with little traffic.
You shouldn't make a call at a red light or while driving on the highway, even if there is no traffic. If you use your phone at a red light, you are a shitty driver, because you are the jackass that sits there for 10 seconds after the light turns green in a left turn lane when the signal only lasts for 12 seconds. Worse, you don't even realize that you are a shitty driver. Buy a fucking bluetooth headset so that you have both hands to control your vehicle. There really is not a time where you have a phone call that you have to take while you are driving. Stop at the next exit and call them back. If it is an emergency, pull over to the shoulder of the road, turn on your warning lights, and call them back when you are not traveling in a multi-thousand pound machine at high rates of speed.
I don't see why...airplane mode doesn't cost me anything, and kicks in for automatically when I get to the airport.
The iphone might charge for it, but android market already has similar ideas (teen driving mode alerts to let you know when the vehicle speeds or reaches destinations) for free.
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This is for cub scouts. Ages are around 7-11ish. They aren't likely to have parents who both put them in scouting and allow them to play DOABV (and quite frankly, most adults wouldn't bother to play it either, especially those who play a lot of video games).
There is already a reading belt loop, this one is to encourage interaction and utility with video games (specific amounts of play, teaching others what you have learned, etc).
If you don't have a driver's license, I can't see any reason not to carry a passport - an official government identification device that is relatively simple to keep on your person
A passport is far from "relatively simple to keep on your person", though. Unless you carry a purse. Do you carry a purse?
A passport is a document for foreign travel. Its primary role is not to prove your citizenship to a police officer.
You have offered a very simple way to carry a passport for roughly half of the human population. Being not a woman, I tend to wear pants. My passport fits in the pockets of my pants with no problems. You could keep it in the glove box of your car (they tend to have locks on them), or your briefcase, or in your laptop bag, or between your head and your hat, or any number of other relatively simple methods to keep a passport on your person.
As for your second statement, don't be absurd. The purpose of a passport is personal identification. Its primary purpose is to prove your citizenship. The fact that it is commonly used as proof of citizenship for the purpose of foreign travel does not mean that it cannot or should not be used for other things. In fact, when you travel to foreign countries and show your passport to customs, you are showing it to a police officer to prove your citizenship (as opposed to a VISA, which proves that the country you are traveling to has approved of your travel as a citizen of your home country).
Actually, if you present your driver's license, the officer could simply call it in to verify if you are a US citizen (when you took the driver's license test, you had to bring your birth certificate or your green card and you checked a box clarifying citizenship status). Or the officer could call your employer, who presumably has run a background check on you and can confirm whether or not you are a citizen (yes, your employer could lie, but they would be subject to liability in the event that they claim you are a citizen when you are not or if they claim you are not a citizen when you are). A birth certificate would definitely prove citizenship (if you were born in the US). Naturalization, by definition, would confer the rights of citizenship upon a foreign born person, and thus would be usable as proof of citizenship (one of the benefits of citizenship is in fact citizenship).
As for pointing out documentation that doesn't prove citizenship, I don't see the point. One could carry a library card or a utility bill or a college student ID or a receipt for your latest rent/mortgage check or a health insurance card or a AAA membership card or a BSA eagle scout recognition card or a B&N readers advantage card or a Kroger plus card or a...well, you get the idea. Just because you carry something that identifies you doesn't mean its intention is to prove your citizenship. Meanwhile, if you have a driver's license and aren't leaving the country, you wouldn't need a passport. If you don't have a driver's license, I can't see any reason not to carry a passport - an official government identification device that is relatively simple to keep on your person so that you can use a credit card (yes, many stores that take credit cards do in fact still check ID, specifically because a credit card identifies a credit line on your behalf, rather than identifying the card holder), visit a bank in person, and of course prove your citizenship in Arizona.
BadAnalogyGuy, you normally post things that are either funny or at least analogies, but this time, you were just stupid (for those who would reply without recognizing that some commonly used words have many definitions, I mean that the OP was lacking in ordinary quickness and keenness of mind and marked by a lack of intelligence or care).
If its called puff, puff, pass, its not a fellatio game, its a marijuana game.
Let me guess, you had a private school education?
IANAL, but I understand contract law as a PA (soon to be CPA).
Your act of selling a used watch does not make you a merchant. Selling it on ebay may mean otherwise. You would have no problem selling it on craigslist, representing yourself as an individual (until craigslist changes its policies, which if you are selling something on craigslist, you as an individual are required to keep yourself up to date). Trying to sell it on ebay as an individual would also carry minimal to excruciatingly large issues (for example,you may need the original packaging or some such to prove it is an Omega watch, or you may need to get the watch insured and the insurance notarized; I am not familiar with Omega watches or ebay's policies regarding their sale). Selling it as a merchant on ebay has massive legal repercussions that hoist the flag of common sense (that would be expected of a merchant, not a layperson).
You are a consumer, and your used watch is sold 'as-is,' so if breaks, you don't have warranty costs (although on ebay you may still be liable; ebay is a service and as such retains the right to make you jump through any hoops it pleases...if you don't like them, find a different service or create you own; after all, here in the US you can pretty much start any business you want; while your legal issues may vary). If your watch is actually an Omuga watch, and not an Omega watch, you are not liable to replace the product with an actual one, but you can't call it an Omega watch, no matter who you are.
A reseller, on the other hand, isn't selling used watches that they were using, and have to be held to standards of contract law in the US (and if importing them, also of the country of origin, depending on the country). They are importing watches and reselling them (hence why they are called resellers) and held to the same standards as if they were the manufacturer (sometimes modified, depending on the creator, who holds the manufacturer liable for who they sell to). If you are selling Omuga watches (not Omega), then yes, Omega can sue you for slapping an Omega label on them, even if you bought them from overseas once. Meanwhile, if you sell Omega watches, you don't get the right to change the prices as a reseller, if Omega requires a price floor in order to be a reseller in your region (among many, many other control methods that you may be subject to, even as a consumer...again, right of first sale may apply, but not to resellers). You can look up case law on your own time.
To recap, as an individual, copyright does in fact cover imports; its how you imported in the first place. As a merchant, keep a lawyer on retainer to advise you as to your rights (online or off). If you don't understand the difference, I would speak to a lawyer, in person, before trying to sell watches as a merchant, and if selling as an individual, make absolutely certain that your purchaser understands that you are not a merchant.
IMO the law the states should pass isn't one banning the sale of those games to minors (which isn't happening), it's one mandating 1-year prison sentences for any adult who gives such a game to a minor (which is what's happening). But I doubt that'll ever happen.
I doubt it too, because that would be insane. You would be proposing the same punishment for purchasing a video game and allowing a minor to play it as for having a real, loaded, unregistered semi-automatic weapon (mandatory 1 year in jail). Do you really not understand why these things are somewhat different in severity? You aren't asking that parents who allow their kids to view R rated movies be placed in jail, or that parents that let their kids try a cigarette or a beer go to jail. You are asking that video games rated M (the reason for the rating being independent of parental moral worldviews, which vary quite widely) be restricted beyond point of sale, punishable by automatic jail time.
If a parent is buying their child heroin, I can see that as endangering a child's life and reason to put the bastard in prison (the parent, not the kid). I don't see the parallel to putting parents in prison because they let their kids shoot zombies (left4dead) or prostitutes (GTA series). Hell, kids can go online and shoot nazis for free (racistgames, newgrounds, countless others), so choosing the media that your children consume should be called parenting, not criminal activity. I promise you, as a parent (which I am not), if I was living in a state where I could go to prison because I bought a video game for my kid, I would most certainly move out of California (because no other state would possibly even consider passing such a ridiculous law). If I have friends over for a bbq, and they bring their 14 year old, you want me to have to lock up my video game systems in the safe with my guns?
How did your post get modded to -1 already?
Meanwhile, $11 CPM is fairly standard for higher traffic (1M + daily) sites. If it wasn't presold, it might have gone for $20 CPM.
at $11 per 1000 ad views, thats 88k in ad revenue. Nevermind that they probably would have gotten at least a quarter of that without the apple story.
I'm almost certain that a lawsuit defense against apple will cost much than that.
Its more likely that in order to be legal, these would have to be US based gambling sites. You would receive tax documentation showing losses and gains on an individual basis. You might even have to prove your identity (scan your driver's license/passport) just to be allowed to gamble.
From a gambler's perspective, most money lines are already in favor of the house. An even money bet (like the point spread bet or the under/over )might get you -103 to -112, depending on the place. While the payouts are even money, the odds of winning are not, and the house makes a profit by trying to get roughly equal amounts of betting on each possible outcome (adjusting the line as necessary). Professional gamblers are able to tell when the line is favorable to a specific bet. Adding a (6% state + 2% federal) tax on wagers (even though winnings would also be taxed as income whether you remove the winnings from your account or not) means that if you bet $110 on an even money proposition and are in the 25% tax bracket, your after tax winnings are only $69. In order to break even this way, you would have to win these propositions 61.5% of the time. The best gamblers win about that much, because the line is distinguished by people who bet on who they want to win, not on who is likely to win. Gambling sites are fantastic at finding where to draw the line to get the most action, but professional gamblers are not going to play just to break even.
As the summary notes, it would end up being a source of money, just not for those participating.
It's sad that people are being prosecuted for being dicks rather than for breaking actual laws. Mob justice acts with an arbitrary and inconsistent hand, and has no place under the rule of law.
He pretended to be a female nurse in order to instruct others on how to commit suicide.
To clarify, the issue is not that he pretended to be female, but rather that he pretended to be a nurse (although if anyone relied on him being a female for the purpose of committing suicide, it in fact could be an issue).
I'm fairly certain that fraud, especially in the context of pretending to have medical training, is in fact a crime based on actual laws.
Meanwhile, he has been charged with two counts of assisting suicide, not convicted by mob justice (for example, being hanged in a tree without a court hearing). He has a chance to prove that he did nothing wrong, or to be convicted of a crime that has been committed, specifically because of rule of law. Your implication that charging someone with a crime based on valid allegations (in this case, based on the fact that the accused admits to having helped people commit suicide) should be seen as mob justice is patently absurd.
Let's be honest, 90% of guns are used to kill people. Let's abolish the 2nd amendment!
There are an estimated 200-250 million guns in the US. In 2009, there were less than 20k gun related deaths, the majority of them suicides. The vast, vast majority of guns are never even fired, but your 90% statistic is off by a factor of approximately 900000 (which also assumes incorrectly that every gun related death is committed by a different gun).
Am I the only one that sees irony in the fact Sid Meier, a guy who takes 3 years to make games that take 30 hours to play being mentioned in the same sentence as 48 hour game making session...?
Yes, because that isn't irony. Also, his son is hosting the contest, the article is about a documentary about Sid Meier.
I find you to be particularly lazy to not read 2 sentences with enough reading comprehension to get the point.
Meanwhile, in the US, you would ordinarily sue the manufacturer, retailer, and wholesaler for any legal complaint against manufactured items.
The question of who is ultimately liable is left up to court system (generally a judge or judge panel, not a jury, unless your damages go beyond the scope of the written or implied contract).
Twitter cannot own a patent on sending messages to a group of subscribers through a automated medium. Prior art exists well before email, but even with email the concept of a listserv is not owned by twitter simply because they employ the concept through sms (although if they did, you could get around it by simply sending email messages by using an excel spreadsheet of email addresses and importing the list into an automated emailer by running a script on your blog that sends the list and the message everytime you update. Twitter is uninvolved and owns no patent and due to common use of spreadsheet for performing spreadsheet functions, no one has the ability to patent such).
I believe Ashton Kutcher has never said anything of any importance to 4 million people at once. It's simply a marketing device that allows people to sign up to receive messages. This could very easily be done by having a sign up list on any website to include your phone number and an agreement box to accept sms messages at personal cost. The only impact on the phone company is minor research for actuarial calculations about how users are taking advantage of unlimited use service contracts (they don't give a rat's ass about you using twitter, they care about whether you are sending/receiving 1000 messages a month - (17 mb), or 10M messages a month (167 GB); so long as the price paid for sending all of these messages is less than the price charged for unlimited messaging). This information is available to phone companies because they are the dumb pipe in this equation; twitter is uninvolved. While phone companies (or data transmission groups) do not have the right to control whether or not people choose to tweet, they are not going to pay twitter for the ability to provide the service. Much more imporantly, twitter sure as hell can't stop phone companies from providing sms, phone, or email service to its paying customers, so even if twitter decides to hide behind a paywall (which it has every right to do), it will in no way affect the phone service for which customers pay.
While you could make the argument that the use of twitter has gotten a lot of stupid people to upgrade cell phone service to include sms, it wasn't done with any contracts, and thus not one of them (phone company) will pay for it unless they can get exclusive twitter rights (ie a buy-out of twitter). Since, as I previously mentioned, twitter doesn't have the ability to obtain the patent to prevent competition (by preventing anyone else from creating lists to which things can be sent over sms), which every phone company has a back up method to (immediately) create, this seems like an unreasonable possibility.
AT&T has a P/E of 12+ and stock price is in the mid 20's. They have not made billions this year. EPS is scheduled around 2.20 per share and they have 30 M shares outstanding. Furthermore, RE shows that AT&T made 2.8B between Q4 08 and Q4 09. Meanwhile, one certainly does not attribute its growth entirely (or even materially) to twitter. If it were (which it isn't), then twitter would be responsible for AT&T's general recommendation being a weak buy/hold. Not exactly the exploding growth you seem to think the company is having.
If you were the CEO of twitter, you would probably know a little more about the company, specifically that the its success is almost entirely because it is free, and that trying to blackmail companies that have little to nothing to gain from your existence is a surefire way to be certain that you never go public.
Statistically, the probability of life in the universe is exactly 100%. I leave it to you to figure out why that is the case (hint: we are talking to each other).
Not quite.
The statistical point would be that given an infinite number of equivalent universes, the probability of life is not 100%, simply because in this universe, we in fact have life. Given the conditions that have arisen in our universe, the likelihood of life existing is close to 1, but the likelihood of that life understanding its own existence is not as high.
You should instead say that probabilistically, the statistic of the existence of life in this universe is 1.
I would rather Twitter went into the offices of the CEOs of Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon, and says "we want a third of your SMS-fee revenues; and don't raise prices. Otherwise, we'll turn off Twitter."
Those guys would shit their pants and break a nail grabbing for the checkbook.
At which point, all of the Ceos will have the exact same reaction:
'How did you get into my office? You want what??!! HAHAHAHAHAHA...no.'
You know why? Because Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon can all use their prebudgeted ad time to point out that users will still have access to SMS in order to send pointless messages about the most mundane points of their lives and the ability to blog and send automatic short messages to user groups via SMS every time their blog gets updated, all doable from their phone, without twitter. Im sure the marketing department will come up with a way to sell cell phone specific sets of this, which will add the ability to add users from other cell networks within 6 months, for only (30-20-10-5) dollars per month on top of your bill; all the while acting like this is a favor due to market wishes, and not something any of them could already implement at the drop of a hat. They might even be able to hide the fact that they in fact want twitter to try and fail to monetize because they in fact are already good to go.
Its fairly obvious why you aren't a CEO...
This is amusing...my OP has gone from interesting to informative to troll...
No, I'm quite certain I'm correct on this one.
'a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement or for that of spectators'
According to the dictionary, that's a game, not a sport.
'diversion; recreation; pleasant pastime'
That's a sport.
Clearly computer trouble shooting falls under sport, not game.
I'm gonna stick with my previous post, which unfortunately has been modded funny instead of informative.
This is like Nintendo suing Sony because I can't play The Legend of Zelda on a PS3.
No it isn't.
Sony may choose to license TLoZ if they wish, at terms amenable to Nintendo. Nintendo wouldn't be able to sue over the lack of TLoZ on PS3 because Nintendo controls those rights.
This is more like Seagate suing Microsoft because users can't install install their own hard drives (without buying xbox specific hard drives). Its a product (hard drives) in widespread use that is explicitly excluded from a seperate vendor, despite the fact that the majority of its consumers want it.
It's a sport when you talk about, it's a game when you play it.
Also you are very old.
There is no Zaphod the 42nd agrees with the post moderation.
I am tired of pet causes like this that demonize slightly risky behavior like driving buzzed and bringing a knife to school, you know, behaviors that make life exciting and worth living. So you might get killed by some dumbass on his phone, if you were a decent driver you should be able to avoid it. I know I avoid getting killed by some prick in an SUV at least twice a week.
So...
You think avoiding drunk SUV drivers is the meaning of life. Haven't you ever had sex or gone fishing or eaten a great meal at a fine restaurant or gone to see a live broadway production or entered a live televised poker tournament in vegas or read a really good book or sat in front of fireplace on a cold winter's night with someone you love and just talked or gone to the beach and made a new friend? There are so many, many things to do that make life worth living that either don't involve huge amounts of (slightly) risky behaviour or much importantly don't create that risk for others. This is the issue and why drunk driving is demonized (if a police officer can tell that you are buzzed driving, its drunk driving. No two ways about it, you should go to jail for it). The point of school isn't to get a bunch of youngerish people in one place so someone can bring a gun or a knife and maybe hurt or kill a bunch of people. It sure as hell isn't why I went to school, and if I thought for a second it was a remote possibility I would have left (which I eventually did, and not because of graduation).
1 in 20 crashes involves a cell phone, 41000 people died in car crashes last year, so maybe 2050 deaths a year are caused by cell phones.
Logical failure; in order to assume that death rate in car crashes where cell phone use is involved is approximately equal to the death rate in the population of all car crashes would in fact have to assume that cell phones do not cause crashes and that cell phone use is not related to the severity of those crashes. The number of crashes due to cell phone use is not related to the number of deaths involved in those crashes. That 41k deaths is within 30 days, by the way (and is for 2007, not last year). Meanwhile, there were over 10 million vehicle accidents. Each year, how many people on cell phones are hitting parked cars and driving off, not even recognizing they have hit someone? I bet its more than 41000. Each year, how many people on their cell phones are sitting at green lights for 5, 10, 20 seconds, until the light turns yellow again because they aren't paying attention? I bet its more than 10 million. Meanwhile, what about the 15-16-17 year old learning how to drive on their learner's permit? The British expat learning to drive on the right (correct) side of the road? Should they die because some dumbass is talking on their cellphone? Should they get rear ended while stopped at a red light by some dumbass on their cell phone? Should they have to swerve to avoid some dumbass on their cell phone? As a good driver, I shouldn't have to, but I do, all the damn time.
Somehow I'm allowed to eat, talk to people in my car, smoke cigarettes, change clothes, change the song on my iPod, etc.
None of these are true. You can be pulled over for distracted driving for any of these items (smoking cigarettes might be tough; you might have to be lighting matches to make that one work).
Shitty drivers will stay shitty, and they will stay on the roads. OTOH, when I pull up to a red light I have to worry about getting a ticket for quickly using my phone while I am stopped OR while I am driving down a highway with little traffic.
You shouldn't make a call at a red light or while driving on the highway, even if there is no traffic. If you use your phone at a red light, you are a shitty driver, because you are the jackass that sits there for 10 seconds after the light turns green in a left turn lane when the signal only lasts for 12 seconds. Worse, you don't even realize that you are a shitty driver. Buy a fucking bluetooth headset so that you have both hands to control your vehicle. There really is not a time where you have a phone call that you have to take while you are driving. Stop at the next exit and call them back. If it is an emergency, pull over to the shoulder of the road, turn on your warning lights, and call them back when you are not traveling in a multi-thousand pound machine at high rates of speed.
I don't see why...airplane mode doesn't cost me anything, and kicks in for automatically when I get to the airport.
The iphone might charge for it, but android market already has similar ideas (teen driving mode alerts to let you know when the vehicle speeds or reaches destinations) for free.
Who cares about the VCR's. People still watch television without downloading it?
Well yes they do. Live sports and news channels don't really make sense to watch weeks or days or even hours after the fact.