However, the private insurers have no say in what treatment is given that is and should be the decision of the treating doctor.
This approach is not without costs, though.
First, it seems as though your doctors have a small conflict of interest. If they are the ones deciding who gets treated, and how much, they have an economic incentive to test more and treat more, because they get paid for that, right?
Doctors should be concerned exclusively with the health of the individual. But someone has to decide how much of the country's resources should be put toward the goal of saving someone's life. The doctor can, the government can, an insurance company can, or if the patient has a lot of cash, the patient can.
Every system has its benefits and weaknesses. People claiming their system is the best, and has no flaws, should under no circumstances be listened to.
I want a Cessna Citation and can't get one. Is that because there is a Citation shortage? No, it's because I have a money shortage;).
It's the same thing, really. When you say "shortage" you really mean "lack of supply". If there were enough Citations produced ("competing" for the demand), the price would fall. Prices and sales are nothing more than signals (incentives) to increase or decrease production.
If you fix prices, you eliminate those signals and the market's ability to correct for supply/demand changes. At the same time, if you massively increase demand (suddenly those people uninsured today will be insured tomorrow), you guarantee serious shortages.
IMO, we don't have this "fixed price" problem today, because insurance companies negotiate individually with doctors. A doctor can elect to accept whatever insurance plans he or she wants. This provides some pressure for insurance companies to keep reimbursement rates reasonable (doctors wouldn't be in business otherwise, but yes, the insurance companies have the upper hand). This isn't likely to be the case with a "universal" health care plan.
The judge is part of the Judiciary, that slowly made litigation a very expensive option
The judiciary didn't do this. The legislators created the ground rules, the judiciary resolved the ambiguities, and the lawyers seek to exploit every possible angle. It's this last part that's expensive. If you want simpler ground rules, talk to the legislature.
consider awarding legal expenses to the winners, whoever they are, by default
I believe the chief reason this isn't common in the US is because it discourages people without a lot of money from bringing suit, or defending against one. The other side can hire expensive lawyers, and rack up quite a lot of "reasonable" legal fees, and even if you're pretty sure you would win, but aren't absolutely certain, "loser pays" creates an incentive for you to cut your losses and walk away. So while you think you're doing this to help the little guy, in practice, it doesn't, and encourages bullying by individuals/companies with lots of lawyers.
I think awarding legal fees only upon a reasonable, special request, is probably better.
The odds of you encountering a physical issue increases as capacity increases
I think perhaps you misunderstand what the article is trying to say. Consider that not all "physical issues" results in an immediately detectable error on the drive. If these occur at rates proportional to capacity, what happens when a RAID array suffers a drive failure, and the data on the remaining (large) drives must be read, in its entirety, to rebuild a replacement drive?
Statistically speaking, there is a point where if errors accumulate at a rate proportional to capacity, the odds of a cascade of failures being detected during a rebuild make RAID 5 and 6 far less useful.
An obvious solution, though, is to do regular scans of the data on your drives, to try and pick out and work around errors as they accumulate, instead of noticing the data is MIA when you need it for a rebuild.
This seems risky, actually. By publishing the matter even further, won't this invite droves of Anonymous? In order to make the publicity useful, you're going to have to make it easy for people to know what phone number you're talking about.
Even if it has a firewall, it's probably third-party software, and as such, doesn't start until after the network interface is up and running, leaving a huge (by computer standards) window of opportunity for the box to get pw0ned. And, of course, the same is true for any anti-virus running.
First, XP has a firewall built in. It's not likely to be "third-party software". Second, firewalls and virus scanners use the same Windows Filtering Platform to do their work. This platform installs boot-time filters that are in effect until the user-mode software is finally up, at which point there's an atomic hand-off. At no time is the system open to any sort of "window of opportunity" like you describe.
Computer fans and the like will probably be unsalvageable, but the rest should be OK after some cleaning. I'd disassemble everything, as much as I was comfortable putting back, and use some distilled water and a toothbrush to clean it. If there's evidence of corrosion on the boards, you can try cleaning/scraping it away, but your odds of a successful recovery start to go down. Follow up with some rubbing alcohol to displace the water and let things dry for a day or two before reassembly.
If you value your data, I would put the hard drive in a known-good system first, to get all of the data off of it, before trying it in a recovered system. And if the system fails to boot up, that doesn't mean that all of the components are dead. You might be able to consolidate memory, hard drives, etc., and avoid spending too much.
Use caution when disassembling and cleaning power supplies, since they can still kill you. That's actually the one part that I would just throw away rather than attempt to fix.
Just playing the devil's advocate, I don't think it's likely to see wholesale copy-and-paste from clearly proprietary code. I suspect the disagreement would be about whether a piece of code is proprietary or not. You might find something published online, and the developer thinks it's appropriate to copy-and-paste, but the original author discovers it and asserts copyright.
Alternatively, this could be a patent instead. It might be harder to see those coming, and those lawsuits could easily target the users of the software rather than the authors or copyright holders of the code.
I think these cases would be extremely unlikely, though.
but in that case at least it'll be that vendor's neck on the block, not ours.
I'm curious: What exactly are the benefits you see here? If the vendor fails catastrophically to fix the problem, you're left with software you flat out cannot use. Suing them does nothing if they're bankrupt. Now you have to go through an expensive process getting an entirely new system in place, with your work stopped in the mean time. With an OSS product, you could simply fix the problem yourself. If you're just being paranoid about being named in a lawsuit, I submit that you're letting your lawyers dictate policy, rather than advise you of the risks and the costs. It should be a manager that looks at the costs on both sides and makes a decision. Even if you're more likely to be sued (has this ever happened as you describe?), the costs may still turn out to be far less than going with a vendor you can point fingers at.
Now part of the trouble with free, open source software is that it comes poorly documented and supported
Popular OSS projects (Linux, Apache) have plenty of commercial support options from a variety of vendors. You don't need to "own" the software to provide support for it. Documentation is similar. Find a vendor that supports it and tell them you're willing to pay for better documentation.
If it's bug fixes and features you want, make it clear you're willing to pay for those too. Alternatively, hire your own small staff of programmers to do this yourself. You don't have to open source your features/bug fixes unless you choose to redistribute the resulting software. Sound expensive? Compare these total costs with the total costs for other software you're considering.
Another important fact is that some OSS is crap, and there's no easy way to distinguish between the good and bad
Yes there is. When any corporation is looking at software to meet some need, if you're doing your job right, this will involve getting demos of the software, and if possible, installing a test version and trying to get it working with your environment. For a large enterprise, you're an idiot if you buy software based on the glossy brochure without actually trying to use it first. Since this is easy to do with OSS, there's no excuse for not being aware of the product's deficiencies before you commit to it.
In this case, the proper thing to look at is what the media company would charge someone if they wanted the purchase the rights to distribute the song, which is obviously going to much higher than the cost of purchasing a single download of the song.
So if I had my own record label and did my own distribution, I could offer to sell redistribution rights for $1M per song and sue everyone sharing my song for that amount?
The purpose of a civil suit is compensation, not forced licensing. That compensation should be based on the damages caused. How much money did the copyright holder lose because of this person's actions? They would not have signed up for a redistribution license, so it's ridiculous to say that this is what they lost. What they lost is potential sales. Every person that downloaded a song might have paid someone else for that same song had it not been available for download. This means the record label was "harmed" by the wholesale price of the song multiplied by the probability that the downloader would have purchased it at market price.
You cannot violate your own copyright, it just can't happen. So then agent's empowered by the RIAA making downloads off file sharing networks are in fact authorized to do so, so the copies they obtain are legal. The copyright owner told them to go get them. Investigators downloading mp3's doesn't get you anywhere and 'making available' isn't a crime, the distribution is.
I think you've answered your own question. When Bob downloads a copyrighted song from Alice, two acts of infringement occur: Alice redistributed the work, and Bob made a copy and stored it on his hard drive. The RIAA doesn't go after Bob, they go after Alice. If it turns out Bob works for the copyright holder, his act of infringement isn't really infringement, as you say. But Alice's still is. Entrapment only applies to law enforcement.
The problem with XXX domains or "adult" labels is that communities can't agree on what it means to be "XXX" or "adult", and the Internet is limited to no one community. One community might find another's clothing ads obscene. Another might find a site about breast cancer "harmful to minors". How do you establish definitions that can apply everywhere the Internet is used?
That being said, PICS allowed for all kinds of useful self-labeling, had a facility for 3rd-party ratings bureaus, and browsers even supported it for a time. Maybe start there?
Because this works SO well for SSL certificates. Users will see the certificate warning and dismiss it, just like they do every other dialog that gets in the way of them doing what they want to do.
An obvious technical solution is to define a set of variants that must be searched for e-mail addresses. If someone registering owns a whole domain, they should be required to register the domain. If someone signs up as "joe+one@example.com", the social networking site could then be obligated to check for:
High humidity begets condensation. You don't need to be at 100% humidity to see condensation, you just need a surface temperature lower than the temperature of the water vapor (dew point). Low humidity is bad because it doesn't carry heat away very well.
IPv6 will last until nanotech becomes widespread and you want to have networks of nanoscopic devices online - and possibly even then since it would make sense to treat personal area networks as a single public device.
So your solution to running out of IPv6 addresses is.. NAT?
If you knew that you would die (unless you got a certain medical procedure), but that the procedure that could save your life was not covered by your insurance, and to pay out of pocket would be so expensive as to bankrupt your family, what would you do?
This actually happens all the time. People that can't afford insurance are the same people that can't afford medical procedures. These people wait until their condition constitutes a near-emergency and go to the ER, where the EMTALA requires that they be treated, and get the procedure done. The hospital may be perfectly aware that they won't get reimbursed, so they'll try to get some of the money, but generally will write it off. (EMTALA doesn't allow ERs to get reimbursed through taxes, so this is essentially mandatory charity care.)
Yes, they will "owe", and if the hospital were aggressive about pursuing the bills, bankruptcy would be the reasonable outcome, but I don't think it usually gets that far.
Don't feel you have to be a slave to the standard bureaucratic resume template here. Personal projects are just as good to see on a resume as "work experience". Start playing with some big open source project and contribute some features, or start your own project that showcases your hobbies and interests. Some software companies (like the one I work for) actually prefer seeing things like this, because it shows them that you're passionate about software, and you're not just there to work your 8 hours churning out code that merely meets expectations.
``Why should the content provider pay to respond?``
Because they're the one doing the sending... it's really not that hard to grok.
Please don't talk to me like I'm an idiot. You presume that we agree that the person doing the sending should be responsible for paying for the message. If I agreed with that, then obviously it makes sense that the content provider should pay. It's not hard to "grok" that line of reasoning. But I don't agree with the premise, so your train of logic doesn't apply.
``Making them pay means many of them will simply go away, which I think would be a shame.``
Too bad, so sad.
I think this is where our disagreement is. I pay a flat rate each month for n SMS messages. I take advantage of some "free" SMS services, where I send a request and get back an SMS response. I don't pay any incremental cost to get these. The providers don't pay any significant incremental cost to send them.
If the content providers were required to pay, I would not likely see any benefit of that. I doubt my SMS plan would get any cheaper. But since it becomes more costly for these services to exist, they would either have to work out some kind of subscription or advertising plan, which would be annoying for me and cause me to use their service less, or they'd just close up shop. "Too bad, so sad." Yes, exactly. Your plan would negatively affect me, and these services. Who benefits? Why is this better than the way it is now?
For unsolicited messages, I agree. But what if you're trying to take advantage of a "free" SMS service (like Google)? You're soliciting that SMS response. Why should the content provider pay to respond? They may not be making any money off of that. Making them pay means many of them will simply go away, which I think would be a shame.
But for all of those "sign up to receive SMS spam from us" services, I agree that there ought to be a way to shift some of those costs onto them.
1. A dual-stack system allows IPv4 and IPv6 to exist on the same physical network at the same time. I read the parent post as wondering how the two would work together.
2. A dual-stack system is necessary to tunnel IPv4 over IPv6, or vice-versa. You could run an IPv4-only network at home, and an IPv6 gateway machine on your ISP's side could then wrap that in an IPv6 packet. My PCs at home, being dual stack, could also do this automatically for me.
There is a thing called "dual stack", and methods of moving IPv4 packets over IPv6 and vice-versa, so it is completely possible (and likely) that the two will co-exist for many years before the transition will be complete (my PC here is dual-stack, and has a public IPv6 address, but I'm communicating perfectly well with Slashdot on IPv4). While consumer routers usually don't support IPv6 (except with custom firmware), Mac, Windows and Linux do, right out of the box. You probably have everything you need for an IPv6 home network already available. But you're right: until DSL routers/modems support it, and ISPs support it, you're going to have to set up your own tunneling over IPv4 if you want IPv6 Internet.
But intelligence isn't, otherwise we'd be able to produce environments that turned every child into a genius (note here that I'm referring to true geniuses such as Newton and Einstein, not those who fall into an arbitrary statistical IQ region).
I think your other comments are spot on, but I'm not sure I agree with this one. Obviously, genetics is the largest factor in intelligence. Otherwise, you'd be able to craft an environment that can turn a rock into a genius. But given that the brain is so malleable at birth, it seems perfectly reasonable that the environment can influence one's ability to learn and reason, without being the most significant factor (as you imply).
So perhaps it's time for geneticists to consider human technology as being a part of evolution just like our genes are
Agreed. My personal opinion is that we continue to evolve, incorporating technology into our evolution, but natural selection is becoming the less dominant process responsible for it. By treating those with genetic defects that "should" have been selected out of our gene pool, the next generation requires more treatment on average than the previous. If we're removing natural selection from our evolution, we have to assume that responsibility for ourselves.
None of the examples you provided are clear, provable examples of perjury. A recording obviously isn't testimony. Maybe he lied to you when you were recording him? He wasn't under oath then. Maybe the guy saying he didn't even sell merchant accounts, didn't sell them at the time, but now he does? If you can think of a plausible scenario where what he said could technically be looked upon as true (even if you and I "know" he's lying), that's a far cry from being able to prove that he perjured himself. Even the case where the guy said the wrong e-mail address isn't quite open-and-shut. Is there really enough evidence to prosecute him? A civil trial has a lower burden of proof than a criminal one. Just because a judge awards you judgment(believing the defendant was lying) doesn't mean there's enough evidence to convict him of perjury.
Slashdot Mirror
This approach is not without costs, though.
First, it seems as though your doctors have a small conflict of interest. If they are the ones deciding who gets treated, and how much, they have an economic incentive to test more and treat more, because they get paid for that, right?
Doctors should be concerned exclusively with the health of the individual. But someone has to decide how much of the country's resources should be put toward the goal of saving someone's life. The doctor can, the government can, an insurance company can, or if the patient has a lot of cash, the patient can.
Every system has its benefits and weaknesses. People claiming their system is the best, and has no flaws, should under no circumstances be listened to.
It's the same thing, really. When you say "shortage" you really mean "lack of supply". If there were enough Citations produced ("competing" for the demand), the price would fall. Prices and sales are nothing more than signals (incentives) to increase or decrease production.
If you fix prices, you eliminate those signals and the market's ability to correct for supply/demand changes. At the same time, if you massively increase demand (suddenly those people uninsured today will be insured tomorrow), you guarantee serious shortages.
IMO, we don't have this "fixed price" problem today, because insurance companies negotiate individually with doctors. A doctor can elect to accept whatever insurance plans he or she wants. This provides some pressure for insurance companies to keep reimbursement rates reasonable (doctors wouldn't be in business otherwise, but yes, the insurance companies have the upper hand). This isn't likely to be the case with a "universal" health care plan.
The judiciary didn't do this. The legislators created the ground rules, the judiciary resolved the ambiguities, and the lawyers seek to exploit every possible angle. It's this last part that's expensive. If you want simpler ground rules, talk to the legislature.
I believe the chief reason this isn't common in the US is because it discourages people without a lot of money from bringing suit, or defending against one. The other side can hire expensive lawyers, and rack up quite a lot of "reasonable" legal fees, and even if you're pretty sure you would win, but aren't absolutely certain, "loser pays" creates an incentive for you to cut your losses and walk away. So while you think you're doing this to help the little guy, in practice, it doesn't, and encourages bullying by individuals/companies with lots of lawyers.
I think awarding legal fees only upon a reasonable, special request, is probably better.
I think perhaps you misunderstand what the article is trying to say. Consider that not all "physical issues" results in an immediately detectable error on the drive. If these occur at rates proportional to capacity, what happens when a RAID array suffers a drive failure, and the data on the remaining (large) drives must be read, in its entirety, to rebuild a replacement drive?
Statistically speaking, there is a point where if errors accumulate at a rate proportional to capacity, the odds of a cascade of failures being detected during a rebuild make RAID 5 and 6 far less useful.
An obvious solution, though, is to do regular scans of the data on your drives, to try and pick out and work around errors as they accumulate, instead of noticing the data is MIA when you need it for a rebuild.
This seems risky, actually. By publishing the matter even further, won't this invite droves of Anonymous? In order to make the publicity useful, you're going to have to make it easy for people to know what phone number you're talking about.
First, XP has a firewall built in. It's not likely to be "third-party software". Second, firewalls and virus scanners use the same Windows Filtering Platform to do their work. This platform installs boot-time filters that are in effect until the user-mode software is finally up, at which point there's an atomic hand-off. At no time is the system open to any sort of "window of opportunity" like you describe.
Computer fans and the like will probably be unsalvageable, but the rest should be OK after some cleaning. I'd disassemble everything, as much as I was comfortable putting back, and use some distilled water and a toothbrush to clean it. If there's evidence of corrosion on the boards, you can try cleaning/scraping it away, but your odds of a successful recovery start to go down. Follow up with some rubbing alcohol to displace the water and let things dry for a day or two before reassembly.
If you value your data, I would put the hard drive in a known-good system first, to get all of the data off of it, before trying it in a recovered system. And if the system fails to boot up, that doesn't mean that all of the components are dead. You might be able to consolidate memory, hard drives, etc., and avoid spending too much.
Use caution when disassembling and cleaning power supplies, since they can still kill you. That's actually the one part that I would just throw away rather than attempt to fix.
Just playing the devil's advocate, I don't think it's likely to see wholesale copy-and-paste from clearly proprietary code. I suspect the disagreement would be about whether a piece of code is proprietary or not. You might find something published online, and the developer thinks it's appropriate to copy-and-paste, but the original author discovers it and asserts copyright.
Alternatively, this could be a patent instead. It might be harder to see those coming, and those lawsuits could easily target the users of the software rather than the authors or copyright holders of the code.
I think these cases would be extremely unlikely, though.
I'm curious: What exactly are the benefits you see here? If the vendor fails catastrophically to fix the problem, you're left with software you flat out cannot use. Suing them does nothing if they're bankrupt. Now you have to go through an expensive process getting an entirely new system in place, with your work stopped in the mean time. With an OSS product, you could simply fix the problem yourself. If you're just being paranoid about being named in a lawsuit, I submit that you're letting your lawyers dictate policy, rather than advise you of the risks and the costs. It should be a manager that looks at the costs on both sides and makes a decision. Even if you're more likely to be sued (has this ever happened as you describe?), the costs may still turn out to be far less than going with a vendor you can point fingers at.
Popular OSS projects (Linux, Apache) have plenty of commercial support options from a variety of vendors. You don't need to "own" the software to provide support for it. Documentation is similar. Find a vendor that supports it and tell them you're willing to pay for better documentation.
If it's bug fixes and features you want, make it clear you're willing to pay for those too. Alternatively, hire your own small staff of programmers to do this yourself. You don't have to open source your features/bug fixes unless you choose to redistribute the resulting software. Sound expensive? Compare these total costs with the total costs for other software you're considering.
Yes there is. When any corporation is looking at software to meet some need, if you're doing your job right, this will involve getting demos of the software, and if possible, installing a test version and trying to get it working with your environment. For a large enterprise, you're an idiot if you buy software based on the glossy brochure without actually trying to use it first. Since this is easy to do with OSS, there's no excuse for not being aware of the product's deficiencies before you commit to it.
So if I had my own record label and did my own distribution, I could offer to sell redistribution rights for $1M per song and sue everyone sharing my song for that amount?
The purpose of a civil suit is compensation, not forced licensing. That compensation should be based on the damages caused. How much money did the copyright holder lose because of this person's actions? They would not have signed up for a redistribution license, so it's ridiculous to say that this is what they lost. What they lost is potential sales. Every person that downloaded a song might have paid someone else for that same song had it not been available for download. This means the record label was "harmed" by the wholesale price of the song multiplied by the probability that the downloader would have purchased it at market price.
I think you've answered your own question. When Bob downloads a copyrighted song from Alice, two acts of infringement occur: Alice redistributed the work, and Bob made a copy and stored it on his hard drive. The RIAA doesn't go after Bob, they go after Alice. If it turns out Bob works for the copyright holder, his act of infringement isn't really infringement, as you say. But Alice's still is. Entrapment only applies to law enforcement.
At least that's the way I see it.
The problem with XXX domains or "adult" labels is that communities can't agree on what it means to be "XXX" or "adult", and the Internet is limited to no one community. One community might find another's clothing ads obscene. Another might find a site about breast cancer "harmful to minors". How do you establish definitions that can apply everywhere the Internet is used?
That being said, PICS allowed for all kinds of useful self-labeling, had a facility for 3rd-party ratings bureaus, and browsers even supported it for a time. Maybe start there?
Because this works SO well for SSL certificates. Users will see the certificate warning and dismiss it, just like they do every other dialog that gets in the way of them doing what they want to do.
An obvious technical solution is to define a set of variants that must be searched for e-mail addresses. If someone registering owns a whole domain, they should be required to register the domain. If someone signs up as "joe+one@example.com", the social networking site could then be obligated to check for:
joe+one@example.com
joe@example.com
example.com
Problem "solved".
High humidity begets condensation. You don't need to be at 100% humidity to see condensation, you just need a surface temperature lower than the temperature of the water vapor (dew point). Low humidity is bad because it doesn't carry heat away very well.
So your solution to running out of IPv6 addresses is.. NAT?
This actually happens all the time. People that can't afford insurance are the same people that can't afford medical procedures. These people wait until their condition constitutes a near-emergency and go to the ER, where the EMTALA requires that they be treated, and get the procedure done. The hospital may be perfectly aware that they won't get reimbursed, so they'll try to get some of the money, but generally will write it off. (EMTALA doesn't allow ERs to get reimbursed through taxes, so this is essentially mandatory charity care.)
Yes, they will "owe", and if the hospital were aggressive about pursuing the bills, bankruptcy would be the reasonable outcome, but I don't think it usually gets that far.
Don't feel you have to be a slave to the standard bureaucratic resume template here. Personal projects are just as good to see on a resume as "work experience". Start playing with some big open source project and contribute some features, or start your own project that showcases your hobbies and interests. Some software companies (like the one I work for) actually prefer seeing things like this, because it shows them that you're passionate about software, and you're not just there to work your 8 hours churning out code that merely meets expectations.
Please don't talk to me like I'm an idiot. You presume that we agree that the person doing the sending should be responsible for paying for the message. If I agreed with that, then obviously it makes sense that the content provider should pay. It's not hard to "grok" that line of reasoning. But I don't agree with the premise, so your train of logic doesn't apply.
I think this is where our disagreement is. I pay a flat rate each month for n SMS messages. I take advantage of some "free" SMS services, where I send a request and get back an SMS response. I don't pay any incremental cost to get these. The providers don't pay any significant incremental cost to send them.
If the content providers were required to pay, I would not likely see any benefit of that. I doubt my SMS plan would get any cheaper. But since it becomes more costly for these services to exist, they would either have to work out some kind of subscription or advertising plan, which would be annoying for me and cause me to use their service less, or they'd just close up shop. "Too bad, so sad." Yes, exactly. Your plan would negatively affect me, and these services. Who benefits? Why is this better than the way it is now?
For unsolicited messages, I agree. But what if you're trying to take advantage of a "free" SMS service (like Google)? You're soliciting that SMS response. Why should the content provider pay to respond? They may not be making any money off of that. Making them pay means many of them will simply go away, which I think would be a shame.
But for all of those "sign up to receive SMS spam from us" services, I agree that there ought to be a way to shift some of those costs onto them.
I was trying to make two points:
1. A dual-stack system allows IPv4 and IPv6 to exist on the same physical network at the same time. I read the parent post as wondering how the two would work together.
2. A dual-stack system is necessary to tunnel IPv4 over IPv6, or vice-versa. You could run an IPv4-only network at home, and an IPv6 gateway machine on your ISP's side could then wrap that in an IPv6 packet. My PCs at home, being dual stack, could also do this automatically for me.
There is a thing called "dual stack", and methods of moving IPv4 packets over IPv6 and vice-versa, so it is completely possible (and likely) that the two will co-exist for many years before the transition will be complete (my PC here is dual-stack, and has a public IPv6 address, but I'm communicating perfectly well with Slashdot on IPv4). While consumer routers usually don't support IPv6 (except with custom firmware), Mac, Windows and Linux do, right out of the box. You probably have everything you need for an IPv6 home network already available. But you're right: until DSL routers/modems support it, and ISPs support it, you're going to have to set up your own tunneling over IPv4 if you want IPv6 Internet.
I think your other comments are spot on, but I'm not sure I agree with this one. Obviously, genetics is the largest factor in intelligence. Otherwise, you'd be able to craft an environment that can turn a rock into a genius. But given that the brain is so malleable at birth, it seems perfectly reasonable that the environment can influence one's ability to learn and reason, without being the most significant factor (as you imply).
Agreed. My personal opinion is that we continue to evolve, incorporating technology into our evolution, but natural selection is becoming the less dominant process responsible for it. By treating those with genetic defects that "should" have been selected out of our gene pool, the next generation requires more treatment on average than the previous. If we're removing natural selection from our evolution, we have to assume that responsibility for ourselves.
None of the examples you provided are clear, provable examples of perjury. A recording obviously isn't testimony. Maybe he lied to you when you were recording him? He wasn't under oath then. Maybe the guy saying he didn't even sell merchant accounts, didn't sell them at the time, but now he does? If you can think of a plausible scenario where what he said could technically be looked upon as true (even if you and I "know" he's lying), that's a far cry from being able to prove that he perjured himself. Even the case where the guy said the wrong e-mail address isn't quite open-and-shut. Is there really enough evidence to prosecute him? A civil trial has a lower burden of proof than a criminal one. Just because a judge awards you judgment(believing the defendant was lying) doesn't mean there's enough evidence to convict him of perjury.