Microsoft screwed over a business partner by agreeing to do something and then backing out after the partner upheld their end of the deal? Wow, is it Sunday again already?
I have to admit to being curious why any company would get involved in a business deal with Microsoft. I can understand being their customer, but willingly partnering with a company that stabs partners in the back on a regular basis just seems crazy. "Yes, just step over those corpses on the way into the conference room -- pay no attention to the ghost of Stacker rattling those noisey chains, I assure you this is a win-win situation!"
GE used to be one of the largest nuclear weapon manufacturers on Earth (of course they were also one of the largest companies doing nuclear power in general).
this is just another result of American self importance and ignorance. The writers of the US constitution were English and the reason they recognised certain human rights is because they were already used to them under English law. Habeus Corpus for example goes all the way back to the Magna Carta.
Forgive my self-important ignorance, but I was under the impression the Enlightenment postdated the Magna Carta and Charter of Liberites by a few centuries. While Enlightenment thinking certainly was most heavily developed in England and France, the United States was the first nation to set forth Enlightenment principles as the founding authority for the government, stating unequivocally that the government exists to defend the natural rights that man has by virtue of being an intelligent being, and that neither Church nor King is required to grant, or may abridge, those rights.
The Magna Carta and Charter of Liberties both explicitly recognize the exact opposite -- that the crown, by authority of (Christian) God, grants some liberties to the people and choses to allow the people to hold the monarchy to account when it may fail to observe the liberties so graciously given.
It may not make much practical difference to the accused prisoner why habeas corpus is observed in the judicial system, but it makes a great deal of difference historically and politically.
Whilst the US constitution was probably an incremental improvement over other "constitutions" of the time it was neither groundbreaking nor significant, and it only has historical importance because of the current superpower status of the US
I'm sure that would be interesting news to the nations who modeled their own constitutions on the US Constitution well before the US achieved anything approaching "superpower" status. While many parliamentary systems have subesequently achieved many of the same practical results as the US's Constitutional system, don't kid yourself that the US Constitution was some minor variation on a theme when it was written..
it's very naive to think that America's history with respect to civil liberties is special in any way.
The United States has never claimed to have the most effective or practical or pragmatic system. That has never been our strength (indeed, most of our major errors were due to overzealous pragmatism). What we got right was saying that people, by virtue of existing, have civil liberties that are not at the pleasure of government or society at large, even if it the exercise of those rights is not in the best short-term interest of the community or government. That was groundbreaking and significant and historically important, no matter how frequently we forget those ideals, or how much more effectively other nations may be at upholding them on a daily basis.
Everyone should have a battery powered radio receiver. Hurricanes, Earthquakes, Flooding, Volcanos (like Mt. St. Helens) happen, and you need a way to receive emergency information about which way to run.
No, everyone should own a hand-crank radio receiver that does AM/FM/Shortwave for a situation like that. $40 and it will last you a lifetime and be ready for any emergency, even a nation-wide one where the only reliable broadcasts are from out of the country, the stores are out of batteries and the electric grid is down.
The detainees are unlawful combatants. We didn't offer habeus corpus to German POWs during WWII, either. They didn't get lawyers, they got tossed into a cage for the duration.
That's because they weren't accused of any crimes, they were simply POWs treated according to the Geneva Conventions until the war was over, at which point they would be sent home. Torturing them was not standard policy and they were allowed contact with neutral parties to verify their treatment, as well as allowed regular access to communications like postal mail.
Congress hasn't declared war on anybody, last time I checked. And the people being held in Gitmo are not being treated as either military prisoners (as the Germans were) or civilian prisoners. We're told they're guilty of some civil crimes, but nobody is allowed to see the evidence, or even the charges themselves. They aren't (weren't) allowed access to attorneys or any communication with the outside world to even verify they were alive. And there's no way to know when the war is over, since we're not fighting anyone in particular, so when they might get sent home is anyone's guess.
You need to take a serious dose of reality, the President just invented out of whole cloth a whole new category of people, who for some magic reason are completely outside any law on Earth. We managed to defeat Germany and the Soviet Union without inventing such a lame excuse for violating our founding principles.
I simply don't get why dell can't just produce machines with clean lines and subdued colors. Minimalism is the easiest school of art to imitate.
Minimalism is the hardest aesthetic to do well. Minimalism means every millimeter has to be exactly right. The corner radius has to be just right, every curve has to be smooth, every surface has to be flawless, every edge has to fit perfectly.
I know NASA has flown at least one married couple, as well as other couples who wound up marrying later. The Soviets also flew couples who married. I can think of a half-dozen Astronaut couples who are married, and I spoke to one of the female astronauts from a married couple on my last experiment (In the KC-135 "Vomit Comet", to keep on-topic), and she confirmed that at least one couple has had sex on the shuttle, though she wouldn't say who (not that I blame her!). It's pretty much the worst-kept "secret" at NASA, as several other sources who worked in the manned spaceflight groups had said as much during my years working there.
Notice how the economy is always ascribed to the president when in reality he has very little to do with it.
I don't disagree with the gist of your post, but I always have to correct people when they say the president has nothing to do with the economy. First of all, the President appoints the Chair of the Federal Reserve, who more than any other single person on Earth can directly manipulate the economy to achive specific goals.
He also acts as probably the most significant factor when it comes to affecting consumer confidence. Policy proposals that on paper would have a neutral economic effect can have a very benefical or negative effect depending on how well the President sells that policy to the public.
One of the criticisms levied against both Presidents Bush is that they were not effective at convincing the general public they were concerned about economic well-being or were working to improve things. Indeed, rather than doing so they both simply tried to explain that the President doesn't have much power over the economy. Contrast them with Reagan and Clinton, who both had very different outlooks and economic policies but through sheer force of charisma convinced mainstream America that the economy would improve (regardless of whether they were doing anything tangible to bring about such an improvement).
There is also the matter of budgetary power, which varies greatly depending on whether the President's party is in control of Congress. Yes, Congress officially is the one who controls the budget, but when both branches are controlled by the same party, the President is the one in the driver's seat, as his proposed budget is usually introduced by party loyalists with few changes. When the parties are in opposition, the President can only control a few major budget matters through the use of the bully pulpit and the veto, but the Congress will take more of the credit or blame for the overall budget during that time.
It is these times of opposition where you'll have the most disagreement over who deserves credit -- obviously by my example above (Reagan/Clinton), I tend to credit the President more than the Congress, since I think consumer confidence matters more to overall economic performance than any particular part of a reasonable federal budget.
but when it is a bipartisan effort that is a bad idea (No Child Left Behind), we dare not give anyone besides the president any blame.
Yeah, the critical difference here being that NCLB was the President's policy proposal, and he requested members of congress to introduce it for a vote. He championed the proposal and made support for it a fundamental requirement for party loyalty.
He had nothing whatsoever to do with the OBD.
So yes, if the president proposes something and it is a bad idea, he'll get blamed (and so should the congresspeople who voted for it). If he has no involvement with something that is a good idea, he doesn't get credit for just not vetoing it.
This is not very difficult to understand for anyone who can look past ideological blinders.
I don't think you've ever participated in medical research or spoken to a real doctor about it. All research goes through a review board, and the primary critereon is that the risks be as minimal as possible and that the subject volunteers be fully informed. No research would ever take place if your standards applied, and all medical progress would halt since even the most benign advances require study in human populations before they are accepted by the medical community.
fluids to contend with, such as stomach acid, anal leakage and urine.
LOL, I don't think this is the kind of flight you're thinking of:P
But seriously, this is not the first time any of these problems have been dealt with in microgravity. We've flown sutures and needles and liquids and all this other stuff before. The gound crew would not be taking these guys up if they couldn't explin what mechanisms were in place to prevent it all from getting out. I can't really tell from the stories circulating now, but I would imagine they'll be using mostly fixed instruments (as that's what we'd use for real surgery in space) and probably have a tent or container around the area to be worked on.
Who can do *anything* well in a Vomit Comet? This stunt has no value.
We have run many surgical simulation missions onboard the KC-135, and there's plenty of research value. What happens on the ISS is very conservative and small scale, because it's so darn expensive to fly a pound of material up there.
You just don't do anything during the 2g period (which only lasts about 45 seconds). You're right, it isn't exactly the same as space, but it's also not as dangerous or as expensive. We try things out first on the ground, then in the plane, and finally if everything goes right, in space.
If these guys really wanted to experiment (and it is an experiment) with low-gravity surgery they would be doing it on animals long before human trials.
It has been done on animals. I worked with a NASA surgical research group for years and one of the many projects we did was surgical simulation (both computer with haptic feedback and with traditional box simulators) in microgravity. Other groups did surgical procedures on animals in microgravity. We've flown every possible piece of the puzzle, many times. This is the logical next step, and yes it is experimental, but that's what researchers do.
There are many things that could go wrong, and no doubt they'll tell the pilot to level the plane if that happens. Being in control of the gravity makes it a lot safer than trying it for the first time in an emergency aboard the space station. Sooner or later this has to be done -- I admit when I first heard this story on the news, I was hoping it was my old group doing it.
And like a 5 year old I totally mixed up left and right. I spent most of my time in EAST Africa, not West. West Africa had too much kidnapping (obviously I steered clear of Somalia and some other areas in the East as well).
I can't read your mind, but it doesn't matter: you just naively support those that do believe those things, which is worse.
You're right, you can't read my mind, so why do you keep trying? I don't support people who believe those things (naively or otherwise).
Don't flatter yourself -- you didn't tell me anything I hadn't heard a hundred times from people equally as reluctant to think.
Ditto. I find many teenagers in America are enamored of Ayn Rand, but usually when they get jobs and see more of the world and the people who inhabit it, they understand that her particular ideology is as based in reality as that she was rebelling against. She escaped one of the worst tyrranies in modern history -- overreaction is perfectly understandable. But growing up in modern America in the greatest comfort the world has ever seen and then believing you created it single-handedly and don't need anyone else's help is merely a conceit of immaturity and ignorance.
Really? Where exactly did you work where doctors were not monopolized through licensure, which Ayn Rand makes quite explicit is a fundamental part of a free market in health care? In which of these places did insurers not have to give mandatory coverage to certain conditions, so that people could choose to only insure genuinely catastrophic events, which is much cheaper? Where was health insurance decoupled from the government and one's employer?
Most of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia/the Indian subcontinent. It's pretty much a free market fantasy in the majority of African nations and most areas outside of the major cities in the other areas (well, I can't speak of much of East Africa from firsthand experience though my colleagues have said it is similar, I spent most of my time in West Africa, the Middle East and Asia/india). You can buy anything you want, any insurance, you can be left to die on the doorstep of the hospital, nobody is required to treat you, nobody is required to do much of anything. If you show up at a hospital without cash in hand, you'll be turned away (well, if you're white they assume you're a rich foreigner and treat you, but God only knows whether their equipment will be sterile or if the blood is infected with Hep or HIV or any of a hundred other things -- wise visitors buy insurance that covers medevac to another country and refuse transfusions whenever possible!).
The public hospitals that do exist are mostly places people go to die, not to get better. The private hospitals in large cities are just as modern as any you'd see in the US or Europe or Japan, and just as expensive, so only 1% of the population ever gets treatment beyond the local pharmacist/herbalist/shaman/medicine man. It's very similar to what the US was like when the barber and the doctor were the same man.
It is a fantastic free market without any restrictions, no wasteful public spending on health care to drag the economy down (most of what is spent on public health is foreign money) and no minimum requirements for physicians, facilities, medicinal quality/contents, or insurance companies. They are great places to take medical students, since they can see diseases that haven't existed in the US for a century, and they can see what the end stages of easily treatable problems look like. I don't think most people can appreciate how difficult it is these days to find a good patient dying of syphilis or tetanus. And seriosuly, we get so used to the antiseptic hospitals that every medical student really should have the opportunity to know what a hospital ward filled with gangrene and goiters smells like. Bonus points if there are birds flying down the halls and flies buzzing around open wounds (actually kind of handy with necrotic tissue). Be sure to have your family members come in to change your dressings every few days, the hospital certainly isn't giving you those things for free!
Ideologues are certainly likely to solve the problem, if their reasoning is sound.
Hospitals are not allowed to refuse necessary medical procedures.
Life-threatening chronic problems are common, and are not covered under such emergency treatment laws. That's why I specifically said "or unable to work for the rest of your life", because someone with such problems is unable to receive necessary care until the condition is so debilitating that they qualify for long-term assistance.
The only thing health insurance does for you, is that it prevents you from going bankrupt after you get better and leave the hospital and have a ton of medical bills to pay... I am undecided whether you were being deliberately melodramatic or whether you truly did not know this.
I spent about 10 years working in a hospital, so yes I'm quite familiar with how it works. Private hospitals are only required to stabilize patients with life-threatening injuries, at which point they will be asked to leave (usually on an ambulance to a public hospital, where they may or may not receive treatment). There is no requirement that hospitals give you full treatment until you walk out healthy with only financial consequences. Health insurance affects more than the financial aspect of your care.
even if you want to limit it to redistribution only
That's how the law limits it.
think Google's cache & the Internet Archive, both of which are still up last time I checked... They seem to get by with implicit permission, at least until someone makes it explicit that they're not allowed to any more.
They get by with the claim of Fair Use, which requires no permission. If you check earlier Slashdot stories you'll see that some publishers are challenging even that, and winning in some courts. It comes down to the practical matter of most people finding it more beneficial to be indexed/cached by Google than exerting their full possible rights to exclusive control.
I remember the joy of trying to log in at 12:01 every night to three or four different BBSes to do my daily turns on the door games. And the amazing joy when BBS linkups started happening, so you could pass messages to people outside your own area code and play door games with someone in another city with only 12 or 24 hours delay!
Yeah, the only problem is that I don't believe any of those things. You spend entirely too much time trying to show how smug you can be, and not enough time listening to what people actually say so that you can engage them in actual conversation and possibly learn something (I know, it's a crazy idea!).
And, FWIW, I've worked in international health care for the last decade of my life and have seen every variation on free to market based health care that exists. Both Ayn Rand and Karl Marx lose a little of their brilliance when translated to the real world. I'm not sure how such a statement fits into your worldview where everyone either agrees with you 100% or is functionally retarded. Needless to say, ideologues are unlikely to solve this problem, so you should probably give that mirror a glance yourself every now and then.
I would be happy to look through any case histories or precidents you can list on this topic.
The US Code spells it out pretty clearly. Of course, any book on copyright will say the same thing, and probably in a more readable form. Tad Crawford, who taught the first class I ever took on the subject, has written a few dozen books on the subject specifically geared towards visual artists. I know the laws on audio recordings and motion pictures have slight variations. Also keep in mind that we are signatories to the Berne Convention, which generally strengthened author's rights and requires a bit more formality when the courts interpret it since it is an international treaty.
The quickest way to a police state is to enact laws that are only selectively enforced.
You won't find much disagreement with me on that. But copyright is generally enforced through civil litigation, so it isn't usually an issue of police enforcement. Since civil lawsuits cost money to start, it wouldn't make sense for people to go after every minor violation. I certainly wouldn't like to be required for some reason to shell out thousands of dollars every time someone photocopies a drawing of mine without asking first.
It would be a violation for you to redistribute what the author makes available to you, unless the author specifically states that it is okay.
Whether or not Bittorrent constitutes redistribution is something for the courts to decide. Assuming the tracker is authorized by the copyright owner to distribute the material, since it is coordinating who is allowed into the peer group it would make sense to say the tracker is really controlling the distribution from a legal standpoint. But we've seen crazier decisions about what constitutes redistribution and duplication.
There is also a huge difference between what is technically a violation and what anyone actually cares about. Like traffic violations, most of us unintentionally commit copyright infringement on a regular basis, but 99% of it is pretty harmless an even if the creator was standing right next to you he wouldn't care. Every artist I know photocopies the work of other artists to send to each other and we don't give it a second thought, even though we know it is technically wrong. We just assume the original artist isn't a total douche who goes around suing people for distributing copies of his sketches to other artists. But there are some who don't like it, and people respect that without requiring lawyers to get involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft screwed over a business partner by agreeing to do something and then backing out after the partner upheld their end of the deal? Wow, is it Sunday again already?
I have to admit to being curious why any company would get involved in a business deal with Microsoft. I can understand being their customer, but willingly partnering with a company that stabs partners in the back on a regular basis just seems crazy. "Yes, just step over those corpses on the way into the conference room -- pay no attention to the ghost of Stacker rattling those noisey chains, I assure you this is a win-win situation!"
GE used to be one of the largest nuclear weapon manufacturers on Earth (of course they were also one of the largest companies doing nuclear power in general).
*groan*
well-played, sir.
You should hear how horrible the blowjobs are on his private jet!
this is just another result of American self importance and ignorance. The writers of the US constitution were English and the reason they recognised certain human rights is because they were already used to them under English law. Habeus Corpus for example goes all the way back to the Magna Carta.
Forgive my self-important ignorance, but I was under the impression the Enlightenment postdated the Magna Carta and Charter of Liberites by a few centuries. While Enlightenment thinking certainly was most heavily developed in England and France, the United States was the first nation to set forth Enlightenment principles as the founding authority for the government, stating unequivocally that the government exists to defend the natural rights that man has by virtue of being an intelligent being, and that neither Church nor King is required to grant, or may abridge, those rights.
The Magna Carta and Charter of Liberties both explicitly recognize the exact opposite -- that the crown, by authority of (Christian) God, grants some liberties to the people and choses to allow the people to hold the monarchy to account when it may fail to observe the liberties so graciously given.
It may not make much practical difference to the accused prisoner why habeas corpus is observed in the judicial system, but it makes a great deal of difference historically and politically.
Whilst the US constitution was probably an incremental improvement over other "constitutions" of the time it was neither groundbreaking nor significant, and it only has historical importance because of the current superpower status of the US
I'm sure that would be interesting news to the nations who modeled their own constitutions on the US Constitution well before the US achieved anything approaching "superpower" status. While many parliamentary systems have subesequently achieved many of the same practical results as the US's Constitutional system, don't kid yourself that the US Constitution was some minor variation on a theme when it was written..
it's very naive to think that America's history with respect to civil liberties is special in any way.
The United States has never claimed to have the most effective or practical or pragmatic system. That has never been our strength (indeed, most of our major errors were due to overzealous pragmatism). What we got right was saying that people, by virtue of existing, have civil liberties that are not at the pleasure of government or society at large, even if it the exercise of those rights is not in the best short-term interest of the community or government. That was groundbreaking and significant and historically important, no matter how frequently we forget those ideals, or how much more effectively other nations may be at upholding them on a daily basis.
Everyone should have a battery powered radio receiver. Hurricanes, Earthquakes, Flooding, Volcanos (like Mt. St. Helens) happen, and you need a way to receive emergency information about which way to run.
No, everyone should own a hand-crank radio receiver that does AM/FM/Shortwave for a situation like that. $40 and it will last you a lifetime and be ready for any emergency, even a nation-wide one where the only reliable broadcasts are from out of the country, the stores are out of batteries and the electric grid is down.
The detainees are unlawful combatants. We didn't offer habeus corpus to German POWs during WWII, either. They didn't get lawyers, they got tossed into a cage for the duration.
That's because they weren't accused of any crimes, they were simply POWs treated according to the Geneva Conventions until the war was over, at which point they would be sent home. Torturing them was not standard policy and they were allowed contact with neutral parties to verify their treatment, as well as allowed regular access to communications like postal mail.
Congress hasn't declared war on anybody, last time I checked. And the people being held in Gitmo are not being treated as either military prisoners (as the Germans were) or civilian prisoners. We're told they're guilty of some civil crimes, but nobody is allowed to see the evidence, or even the charges themselves. They aren't (weren't) allowed access to attorneys or any communication with the outside world to even verify they were alive. And there's no way to know when the war is over, since we're not fighting anyone in particular, so when they might get sent home is anyone's guess.
You need to take a serious dose of reality, the President just invented out of whole cloth a whole new category of people, who for some magic reason are completely outside any law on Earth. We managed to defeat Germany and the Soviet Union without inventing such a lame excuse for violating our founding principles.
I simply don't get why dell can't just produce machines with clean lines and subdued colors. Minimalism is the easiest school of art to imitate.
Minimalism is the hardest aesthetic to do well. Minimalism means every millimeter has to be exactly right. The corner radius has to be just right, every curve has to be smooth, every surface has to be flawless, every edge has to fit perfectly.
I know NASA has flown at least one married couple, as well as other couples who wound up marrying later. The Soviets also flew couples who married. I can think of a half-dozen Astronaut couples who are married, and I spoke to one of the female astronauts from a married couple on my last experiment (In the KC-135 "Vomit Comet", to keep on-topic), and she confirmed that at least one couple has had sex on the shuttle, though she wouldn't say who (not that I blame her!). It's pretty much the worst-kept "secret" at NASA, as several other sources who worked in the manned spaceflight groups had said as much during my years working there.
Notice how the economy is always ascribed to the president when in reality he has very little to do with it.
I don't disagree with the gist of your post, but I always have to correct people when they say the president has nothing to do with the economy. First of all, the President appoints the Chair of the Federal Reserve, who more than any other single person on Earth can directly manipulate the economy to achive specific goals.
He also acts as probably the most significant factor when it comes to affecting consumer confidence. Policy proposals that on paper would have a neutral economic effect can have a very benefical or negative effect depending on how well the President sells that policy to the public.
One of the criticisms levied against both Presidents Bush is that they were not effective at convincing the general public they were concerned about economic well-being or were working to improve things. Indeed, rather than doing so they both simply tried to explain that the President doesn't have much power over the economy. Contrast them with Reagan and Clinton, who both had very different outlooks and economic policies but through sheer force of charisma convinced mainstream America that the economy would improve (regardless of whether they were doing anything tangible to bring about such an improvement).
There is also the matter of budgetary power, which varies greatly depending on whether the President's party is in control of Congress. Yes, Congress officially is the one who controls the budget, but when both branches are controlled by the same party, the President is the one in the driver's seat, as his proposed budget is usually introduced by party loyalists with few changes. When the parties are in opposition, the President can only control a few major budget matters through the use of the bully pulpit and the veto, but the Congress will take more of the credit or blame for the overall budget during that time.
It is these times of opposition where you'll have the most disagreement over who deserves credit -- obviously by my example above (Reagan/Clinton), I tend to credit the President more than the Congress, since I think consumer confidence matters more to overall economic performance than any particular part of a reasonable federal budget.
but when it is a bipartisan effort that is a bad idea (No Child Left Behind), we dare not give anyone besides the president any blame.
Yeah, the critical difference here being that NCLB was the President's policy proposal, and he requested members of congress to introduce it for a vote. He championed the proposal and made support for it a fundamental requirement for party loyalty.
He had nothing whatsoever to do with the OBD.
So yes, if the president proposes something and it is a bad idea, he'll get blamed (and so should the congresspeople who voted for it). If he has no involvement with something that is a good idea, he doesn't get credit for just not vetoing it.
This is not very difficult to understand for anyone who can look past ideological blinders.
I don't think you've ever participated in medical research or spoken to a real doctor about it. All research goes through a review board, and the primary critereon is that the risks be as minimal as possible and that the subject volunteers be fully informed. No research would ever take place if your standards applied, and all medical progress would halt since even the most benign advances require study in human populations before they are accepted by the medical community.
Is there some great need for surgery in space?
There will be. Most space agencies figure it's a good idea to figure out how to do it now, rather than in the 24 hours someone has to survive.
fluids to contend with, such as stomach acid, anal leakage and urine.
:P
LOL, I don't think this is the kind of flight you're thinking of
But seriously, this is not the first time any of these problems have been dealt with in microgravity. We've flown sutures and needles and liquids and all this other stuff before. The gound crew would not be taking these guys up if they couldn't explin what mechanisms were in place to prevent it all from getting out. I can't really tell from the stories circulating now, but I would imagine they'll be using mostly fixed instruments (as that's what we'd use for real surgery in space) and probably have a tent or container around the area to be worked on.
Who can do *anything* well in a Vomit Comet? This stunt has no value.
We have run many surgical simulation missions onboard the KC-135, and there's plenty of research value. What happens on the ISS is very conservative and small scale, because it's so darn expensive to fly a pound of material up there.
You just don't do anything during the 2g period (which only lasts about 45 seconds). You're right, it isn't exactly the same as space, but it's also not as dangerous or as expensive. We try things out first on the ground, then in the plane, and finally if everything goes right, in space.
If these guys really wanted to experiment (and it is an experiment) with low-gravity surgery they would be doing it on animals long before human trials.
It has been done on animals. I worked with a NASA surgical research group for years and one of the many projects we did was surgical simulation (both computer with haptic feedback and with traditional box simulators) in microgravity. Other groups did surgical procedures on animals in microgravity. We've flown every possible piece of the puzzle, many times. This is the logical next step, and yes it is experimental, but that's what researchers do.
There are many things that could go wrong, and no doubt they'll tell the pilot to level the plane if that happens. Being in control of the gravity makes it a lot safer than trying it for the first time in an emergency aboard the space station. Sooner or later this has to be done -- I admit when I first heard this story on the news, I was hoping it was my old group doing it.
And like a 5 year old I totally mixed up left and right. I spent most of my time in EAST Africa, not West. West Africa had too much kidnapping (obviously I steered clear of Somalia and some other areas in the East as well).
I can't read your mind, but it doesn't matter: you just naively support those that do believe those things, which is worse.
You're right, you can't read my mind, so why do you keep trying? I don't support people who believe those things (naively or otherwise).
Don't flatter yourself -- you didn't tell me anything I hadn't heard a hundred times from people equally as reluctant to think.
Ditto. I find many teenagers in America are enamored of Ayn Rand, but usually when they get jobs and see more of the world and the people who inhabit it, they understand that her particular ideology is as based in reality as that she was rebelling against. She escaped one of the worst tyrranies in modern history -- overreaction is perfectly understandable. But growing up in modern America in the greatest comfort the world has ever seen and then believing you created it single-handedly and don't need anyone else's help is merely a conceit of immaturity and ignorance.
Really? Where exactly did you work where doctors were not monopolized through licensure, which Ayn Rand makes quite explicit is a fundamental part of a free market in health care? In which of these places did insurers not have to give mandatory coverage to certain conditions, so that people could choose to only insure genuinely catastrophic events, which is much cheaper? Where was health insurance decoupled from the government and one's employer?
Most of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia/the Indian subcontinent. It's pretty much a free market fantasy in the majority of African nations and most areas outside of the major cities in the other areas (well, I can't speak of much of East Africa from firsthand experience though my colleagues have said it is similar, I spent most of my time in West Africa, the Middle East and Asia/india). You can buy anything you want, any insurance, you can be left to die on the doorstep of the hospital, nobody is required to treat you, nobody is required to do much of anything. If you show up at a hospital without cash in hand, you'll be turned away (well, if you're white they assume you're a rich foreigner and treat you, but God only knows whether their equipment will be sterile or if the blood is infected with Hep or HIV or any of a hundred other things -- wise visitors buy insurance that covers medevac to another country and refuse transfusions whenever possible!).
The public hospitals that do exist are mostly places people go to die, not to get better. The private hospitals in large cities are just as modern as any you'd see in the US or Europe or Japan, and just as expensive, so only 1% of the population ever gets treatment beyond the local pharmacist/herbalist/shaman/medicine man. It's very similar to what the US was like when the barber and the doctor were the same man.
It is a fantastic free market without any restrictions, no wasteful public spending on health care to drag the economy down (most of what is spent on public health is foreign money) and no minimum requirements for physicians, facilities, medicinal quality/contents, or insurance companies. They are great places to take medical students, since they can see diseases that haven't existed in the US for a century, and they can see what the end stages of easily treatable problems look like. I don't think most people can appreciate how difficult it is these days to find a good patient dying of syphilis or tetanus. And seriosuly, we get so used to the antiseptic hospitals that every medical student really should have the opportunity to know what a hospital ward filled with gangrene and goiters smells like. Bonus points if there are birds flying down the halls and flies buzzing around open wounds (actually kind of handy with necrotic tissue). Be sure to have your family members come in to change your dressings every few days, the hospital certainly isn't giving you those things for free!
Ideologues are certainly likely to solve the problem, if their reasoning is sound.
No, ideologues are
Hospitals are not allowed to refuse necessary medical procedures.
Life-threatening chronic problems are common, and are not covered under such emergency treatment laws. That's why I specifically said "or unable to work for the rest of your life", because someone with such problems is unable to receive necessary care until the condition is so debilitating that they qualify for long-term assistance.
The only thing health insurance does for you, is that it prevents you from going bankrupt after you get better and leave the hospital and have a ton of medical bills to pay... I am undecided whether you were being deliberately melodramatic or whether you truly did not know this.
I spent about 10 years working in a hospital, so yes I'm quite familiar with how it works. Private hospitals are only required to stabilize patients with life-threatening injuries, at which point they will be asked to leave (usually on an ambulance to a public hospital, where they may or may not receive treatment). There is no requirement that hospitals give you full treatment until you walk out healthy with only financial consequences. Health insurance affects more than the financial aspect of your care.
even if you want to limit it to redistribution only
That's how the law limits it.
think Google's cache & the Internet Archive, both of which are still up last time I checked... They seem to get by with implicit permission, at least until someone makes it explicit that they're not allowed to any more.
They get by with the claim of Fair Use, which requires no permission. If you check earlier Slashdot stories you'll see that some publishers are challenging even that, and winning in some courts. It comes down to the practical matter of most people finding it more beneficial to be indexed/cached by Google than exerting their full possible rights to exclusive control.
I remember the joy of trying to log in at 12:01 every night to three or four different BBSes to do my daily turns on the door games. And the amazing joy when BBS linkups started happening, so you could pass messages to people outside your own area code and play door games with someone in another city with only 12 or 24 hours delay!
Yeah, the only problem is that I don't believe any of those things. You spend entirely too much time trying to show how smug you can be, and not enough time listening to what people actually say so that you can engage them in actual conversation and possibly learn something (I know, it's a crazy idea!).
And, FWIW, I've worked in international health care for the last decade of my life and have seen every variation on free to market based health care that exists. Both Ayn Rand and Karl Marx lose a little of their brilliance when translated to the real world. I'm not sure how such a statement fits into your worldview where everyone either agrees with you 100% or is functionally retarded. Needless to say, ideologues are unlikely to solve this problem, so you should probably give that mirror a glance yourself every now and then.
I would be happy to look through any case histories or precidents you can list on this topic.
The US Code spells it out pretty clearly. Of course, any book on copyright will say the same thing, and probably in a more readable form. Tad Crawford, who taught the first class I ever took on the subject, has written a few dozen books on the subject specifically geared towards visual artists. I know the laws on audio recordings and motion pictures have slight variations. Also keep in mind that we are signatories to the Berne Convention, which generally strengthened author's rights and requires a bit more formality when the courts interpret it since it is an international treaty.
The quickest way to a police state is to enact laws that are only selectively enforced.
You won't find much disagreement with me on that. But copyright is generally enforced through civil litigation, so it isn't usually an issue of police enforcement. Since civil lawsuits cost money to start, it wouldn't make sense for people to go after every minor violation. I certainly wouldn't like to be required for some reason to shell out thousands of dollars every time someone photocopies a drawing of mine without asking first.
It would be a violation for you to redistribute what the author makes available to you, unless the author specifically states that it is okay.
Whether or not Bittorrent constitutes redistribution is something for the courts to decide. Assuming the tracker is authorized by the copyright owner to distribute the material, since it is coordinating who is allowed into the peer group it would make sense to say the tracker is really controlling the distribution from a legal standpoint. But we've seen crazier decisions about what constitutes redistribution and duplication.
There is also a huge difference between what is technically a violation and what anyone actually cares about. Like traffic violations, most of us unintentionally commit copyright infringement on a regular basis, but 99% of it is pretty harmless an even if the creator was standing right next to you he wouldn't care. Every artist I know photocopies the work of other artists to send to each other and we don't give it a second thought, even though we know it is technically wrong. We just assume the original artist isn't a total douche who goes around suing people for distributing copies of his sketches to other artists. But there are some who don't like it, and people respect that without requiring lawyers to get involved.