You show up sweaty, go take a shower and get changed into your work clothes
You presume that he works somewhere that has a shower. The place I work now has a shower, but my experience is that showers are a rarity for most workplaces. Even those that do tend to have them reserved for executives, and even then, only for the most senior one or two.
If they make it into jurisdictions where US courts hold sway, they are subject to the Constitution. Certain rights are reserved for citizens, and certain others are for anyone at all within that jurisdiction. For example, rights to free speech and due process apply no matter what may be the immigration status of a person.
Of course, this presumes that that courts see an intelligent non-human as a person, which they might, given that the concept of 'person' in a legal sense may incorporate non-human entities and concepts such as legal representatives and corporations.
If I wanted to leap to conclusions, sure, I could. But I prefer to avoid doing that.
There are a billion people in the country. The place is building rapidly, and politics are changing. The leader of Uttar Pradesh, a state with something like 150 million people, is an 'untouchable.'
I have little idea what a specific region's jails are like. Perhaps you do. If that's the case, then by all means, provide us the information that we need.
Concealment itself is not evil. An intention behind concealment may be evil, but the act itself is not.
Consider:
Is placing a witness to mafia crimes in the Witness Protection Program to safeguard his life and the lives of his family an evil act by the government? By your definition, this conceals information from someone (the mafia), and therefore it is evil, despite the fact that their lives would be in danger otherwise.
On a more mundane level, is concealing one's home phone number by declining to have it listed in the white pages evil? By your definition, it is, though it may allow someone to avoid easy contact from people he or she would prefer to avoid (perhaps an problematic ex).
It's actually on more than two of their pages. It's in a few places on their investor relations pages and on some other pages that discuss their policies. But you're right in that they're not announcing it everywhere.
Did they have reason to believe that the man would have been treated this way? I don't know much about the conditions of jails in most other parts of the world. I suspect that jails in, say, Belgium are fairly clean and suspects' rights are generally respected. I believe that Egyptian jails are probably pretty dirty and it's dangerous to be a suspect. These are, however, based on very limited knowledge, and I have no idea of the conditions for a jail in India. It's even possible that the conditions vary significantly based on the region, with some clean and respectful and others slums that should be torn down and the local police drawn up on charges.
The TechGoss article linked mentions a compensation demand of 20 crore rupees, which I think equals 200 million rupees, and according to XE, that works out to about US$4.7 million. Whether he actually gets that is yet to be determined, of course.
It's been illegal to snoop on cell phone calls since 1986, and law enforcement does require permission from a judge to tap your cell phone.
And to my knowledge, digital cell phone calls are encrypted. Since there is very little of the analog network remaining, that means that essentially all of them are encrypted. It may not be the best, but it is encrypted.
When it comes to 100+ ton payloads, I'm a little less picky about costs, especially since even high costs are often a small fraction of the development costs of said payloads.
That's quite possible. But there's a lot left to do. And even if the Falcon 9 heavy succeeds and keeps its manned launch costs down, there's still room for the Ares V to be developed, as its maximum payload is nearly five times greater, and will be important for getting the most massive launches into space. There's something to be said for ultra-heavy launch platforms; had we been a little more forward-looking and continued evolving the Saturn platform, we might have been able to get the space station up there faster.
I look forward to success in the Falcon series, but as yet, there has not been a successful launch of even the Falcon 1. I seem to remember watching one of the two launches on a web stream, until the video cut out due to control problems. I'm hoping that they can get a better result in the third launch, which I understand is due soon, though news on it seems to be a bit unclear.
The Ares systems, while being somewhat new in some ways, uses proven technologies derived from the shuttle. We'll see a first test of that in April 2009 with an initial suborbital flight test, though we have to wait another four years after that for the next test.
Lemme say that the oversight for flying on a manned launch vehicle was enormous. That's a completely unnecessary burden for most launches. The single-use unmanned boosters are a much more effective method for putting everything but people into orbit.
What are your thoughts on the multi-platform Ares I/V designs, which effectively split the mission into manned and unmanned segments?
Judges are intended to face moral dilemmas between two parties. They also have more latitude to recuse themselves from cases if there is evidence that they may be biased in one way or the other. For example, since he worked on RIAA cases, he may be asked to recuse himself from related cases.
This is true, but again, he may have been assigned the cases by his law firm, in which case he may have had little choice other than to resign. This is always an option when presented with a moral dilemma, but he may just not have been torn as much as you or I might have been.
He may have never believed in their specific goal, but it's my understanding that if he believed that they had a legal case and he was willing to take up that case, then he was ethically bound to take all legal measures to support his clients while employed by them. It's also possible that he was assigned the case by his superiors at the law firm, which can be difficult to turn down short of a clear conflict of interest.
A lawyer cannot throw a case just because he doesn't like his client. There are penalties for that, including those handed down from the bar and possible civil remedies.
I tried the Sony Reader in a store for maybe 10 minutes, reading a chapter or so of some book that was loaded in the display model. It's possible that more time on it would allow me to adjust to it, but it's an expensive purchase to take such a chance.
I don't like reading things off of PDAs or smartphones, and I don't consider desktop or notebook screens good surfaces for reading ebooks. It's just my preference, as I know that there are those who devour ebooks on these devices. I find ebook readers to be attractive because of their form factor and limited functionality: when I read a book, I just want to read the book.
I'd love to buy one, but two things hurt them right now:
1. Refresh time on turning pages. I know that it doesn't bother some people, but I do notice it. I'm told that it's getting better, though, and that gives me some hope.
2. Price of digital books. The price is still too close to the cost of physical books. The discount from the physical edition is only a couple of dollars, despite not having to come up with materials and shipping. I don't mind paying a little for convenience, but not that much.
Going along with the price is the issue of title selection (not many science or computer books seem to have made the jump yet), but that will improve. Early in the CD days, many things in which I would have been interested were unavailable in that format.
That is analogue to the government telling how we can use copyrighted stuff, which it does (i.e.: DON'T REDISTRIBUTE IT WITHOUT PERMISSION).
For the most part, the government doesn't tell us how we can use copyrighted materials. The government provides certain limits which the copyright holder may enforce, and then the copyright holder makes an agreement with the user (explicitly by contract, or implicitly by defaulting to copyright law) on how it can be used, including how often it can be copied, under what circumstances, and how it may (or may not) be modified. Exceptions are provided in the law regarding parody and certain other fair use exceptions and a few mandatory licenses, but copyright is essentially entirely between the holder and the customer.
From a practical use standpoint, I don't think Blizzard's assertion has any sort of solid footing in reality. I would think that the EULA would cover this, but it doesn't seem to me that this falls at all under copyright law.
Strictly answering your point, no, there were almost certainly no significant quantities of prohibited weapons. The only ones likely remaining were the random buried ones that were lost by the Iraqi military during the Iran-Iraq War.
Please point out to me where I said it was just and/or fair. There were some very significant issues about it, and unlike some of those who, like me, supported the invasion, I had no issues with people like Ramsey Clark coming forward in an attempt to defend Hussein, as all defendants deserve competent counsel, no matter what they've done. I look back at the Nuremberg trials as a model of how such trials should be dealt with (which also tried people for charges that didn't exist before the trials). Had he not been executed and the trials continued, it would be, in my eyes, a victory for the court system if he had been exonerated of some charge because the actions were carried out by others outside of his command, whether or not he failed to punish them later.
I'm inclined to believe that the US complicity in the trial was largely limited to turning him over on a regular basis, as it's my understanding that he remained in US custody when not in court. The rest of it was simply Shi'ite vengeance. There were at least some in the US military and political structures who argued vociferously regarding the trial and, especially, the rush to execute Hussein. In the end, Hussein went out in as dignified a manner as he could muster, and his executioners looked like the bloodthirsty mob that they had become. But truth be told, his fate was a foregone conclusion when he was captured. Much like Nicolae CeauÅYescu, no one in the West was going to seriously intervene in his execution at the end of a trial put on mainly to go through the motions.
Since he was bluffing it explains why we didn't find WMDs in Iraq.
The FBI agent who interviewed him most recently said that while he had no active programs, Hussein was waiting for sanctions to be lifted to resume the programs. Nothing for us to find then, but had we waited a year or two for the sanctions to start subsiding, it might have been a different story.
There were a couple of articles in the last few days about the rate cuts in the US (expected to stop for at least a few months), and looming rate cuts in the EU zone (expected to start soon to avoid recession). The credit crunch hit hard over there, too, and central banks there, eager to keep their own countries' growth in the black, are looking at cutting rates, which will be favorable to the US dollar. Just in the last week, the US dollar has picked up a fair amount, closing at $1.5424 to the euro on Friday, up from $1.5630 on April 25, a change of 1.3%. Even with interest rate cuts on the part of the Europeans, though, it will take some time to get back closer to the $1.30 mark, as that needs to be a soft landing lest the markets get a little spooked about too rapid a change.
Two of Iran's neighboring nations have been invaded, and the rulers at the times of the invasions have been killed publicly. The nation that did the invading stated at the begining of this that they also wanted to invade another country, North Korea.
Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by an Iraqi judge in an Iraqi court, and executed by the Iraqi government. The US supported this government, but opposed his execution (at least as quickly as it happened). Afghanistan has not had a leader executed by an invading party in recent memory; the last one to be killed was Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan, executed during a Communist coup in 1978.
The budget for the NHS is £105.6 billion this year. That's about £1730 per person in the UK, or £2580 per person in the 15-64 age bracket. That's not free, nor does it count the costs of the one in nine Britons covered by private health care, or those that pay cash to avoid the sometimes otherwise-lengthy waits for basic checkups. Then there's the NHS Injury Cost Recovery scheme, which allows the NHS to recover treatment costs from successful personal injury claims.
On top of that, dentistry is not free, either, and coverage has slipped with many dentists opting out of the system because they can make more from private business.
what better thing to hear from your GP saying "we will continue doing whatever tests you need until YOU are completely satisfied and sure it is IBS (although the doctor already told you it is IBS but you want to be 200% sure)"
Regardless of the rhetoric about US health insurance companies, most claims are not denied. There may be some haggling over necessity, but by and large, they are approved without question. You do get some additional freedom with certain types, such as PPOs, at the risk of greater annual out-of-pocket costs, but even with HMOs, treatment options are usually very wide, and it's rare that an X-ray, MRI, or even a CT or PET scan is blocked if the doctor believes it to be necessary. For most of those that cannot afford to pay, there is supplemental insurance in the form of Medicaid, and all one has to do is fill out the forms provided at the doctor's office or even hospital.
There are positive changes that can be made, yes, but fully socialized systems have their own problems that I'd sooner avoid, and which may yet bring far more strain on the countries using them.
Slashdot Mirror
You show up sweaty, go take a shower and get changed into your work clothes
You presume that he works somewhere that has a shower. The place I work now has a shower, but my experience is that showers are a rarity for most workplaces. Even those that do tend to have them reserved for executives, and even then, only for the most senior one or two.
If they make it into jurisdictions where US courts hold sway, they are subject to the Constitution. Certain rights are reserved for citizens, and certain others are for anyone at all within that jurisdiction. For example, rights to free speech and due process apply no matter what may be the immigration status of a person.
Of course, this presumes that that courts see an intelligent non-human as a person, which they might, given that the concept of 'person' in a legal sense may incorporate non-human entities and concepts such as legal representatives and corporations.
If I wanted to leap to conclusions, sure, I could. But I prefer to avoid doing that.
There are a billion people in the country. The place is building rapidly, and politics are changing. The leader of Uttar Pradesh, a state with something like 150 million people, is an 'untouchable.'
I have little idea what a specific region's jails are like. Perhaps you do. If that's the case, then by all means, provide us the information that we need.
Concealment itself is not evil. An intention behind concealment may be evil, but the act itself is not.
Consider:
Is placing a witness to mafia crimes in the Witness Protection Program to safeguard his life and the lives of his family an evil act by the government? By your definition, this conceals information from someone (the mafia), and therefore it is evil, despite the fact that their lives would be in danger otherwise.
On a more mundane level, is concealing one's home phone number by declining to have it listed in the white pages evil? By your definition, it is, though it may allow someone to avoid easy contact from people he or she would prefer to avoid (perhaps an problematic ex).
It's actually on more than two of their pages. It's in a few places on their investor relations pages and on some other pages that discuss their policies. But you're right in that they're not announcing it everywhere.
Did they have reason to believe that the man would have been treated this way? I don't know much about the conditions of jails in most other parts of the world. I suspect that jails in, say, Belgium are fairly clean and suspects' rights are generally respected. I believe that Egyptian jails are probably pretty dirty and it's dangerous to be a suspect. These are, however, based on very limited knowledge, and I have no idea of the conditions for a jail in India. It's even possible that the conditions vary significantly based on the region, with some clean and respectful and others slums that should be torn down and the local police drawn up on charges.
The TechGoss article linked mentions a compensation demand of 20 crore rupees, which I think equals 200 million rupees, and according to XE, that works out to about US$4.7 million. Whether he actually gets that is yet to be determined, of course.
Analog networks in the US were just switched off a few months ago.
It's been illegal to snoop on cell phone calls since 1986, and law enforcement does require permission from a judge to tap your cell phone.
And to my knowledge, digital cell phone calls are encrypted. Since there is very little of the analog network remaining, that means that essentially all of them are encrypted. It may not be the best, but it is encrypted.
It can't be a real technical conference. The media isn't posted in a format locked to Windows.
When it comes to 100+ ton payloads, I'm a little less picky about costs, especially since even high costs are often a small fraction of the development costs of said payloads.
That's quite possible. But there's a lot left to do. And even if the Falcon 9 heavy succeeds and keeps its manned launch costs down, there's still room for the Ares V to be developed, as its maximum payload is nearly five times greater, and will be important for getting the most massive launches into space. There's something to be said for ultra-heavy launch platforms; had we been a little more forward-looking and continued evolving the Saturn platform, we might have been able to get the space station up there faster.
I look forward to success in the Falcon series, but as yet, there has not been a successful launch of even the Falcon 1. I seem to remember watching one of the two launches on a web stream, until the video cut out due to control problems. I'm hoping that they can get a better result in the third launch, which I understand is due soon, though news on it seems to be a bit unclear.
The Ares systems, while being somewhat new in some ways, uses proven technologies derived from the shuttle. We'll see a first test of that in April 2009 with an initial suborbital flight test, though we have to wait another four years after that for the next test.
Lemme say that the oversight for flying on a manned launch vehicle was enormous. That's a completely unnecessary burden for most launches. The single-use unmanned boosters are a much more effective method for putting everything but people into orbit.
What are your thoughts on the multi-platform Ares I/V designs, which effectively split the mission into manned and unmanned segments?
Judges are intended to face moral dilemmas between two parties. They also have more latitude to recuse themselves from cases if there is evidence that they may be biased in one way or the other. For example, since he worked on RIAA cases, he may be asked to recuse himself from related cases.
This is true, but again, he may have been assigned the cases by his law firm, in which case he may have had little choice other than to resign. This is always an option when presented with a moral dilemma, but he may just not have been torn as much as you or I might have been.
He may have never believed in their specific goal, but it's my understanding that if he believed that they had a legal case and he was willing to take up that case, then he was ethically bound to take all legal measures to support his clients while employed by them. It's also possible that he was assigned the case by his superiors at the law firm, which can be difficult to turn down short of a clear conflict of interest.
A lawyer cannot throw a case just because he doesn't like his client. There are penalties for that, including those handed down from the bar and possible civil remedies.
I tried the Sony Reader in a store for maybe 10 minutes, reading a chapter or so of some book that was loaded in the display model. It's possible that more time on it would allow me to adjust to it, but it's an expensive purchase to take such a chance.
I don't like reading things off of PDAs or smartphones, and I don't consider desktop or notebook screens good surfaces for reading ebooks. It's just my preference, as I know that there are those who devour ebooks on these devices. I find ebook readers to be attractive because of their form factor and limited functionality: when I read a book, I just want to read the book.
I'd love to buy one, but two things hurt them right now:
1. Refresh time on turning pages. I know that it doesn't bother some people, but I do notice it. I'm told that it's getting better, though, and that gives me some hope.
2. Price of digital books. The price is still too close to the cost of physical books. The discount from the physical edition is only a couple of dollars, despite not having to come up with materials and shipping. I don't mind paying a little for convenience, but not that much.
Going along with the price is the issue of title selection (not many science or computer books seem to have made the jump yet), but that will improve. Early in the CD days, many things in which I would have been interested were unavailable in that format.
That is analogue to the government telling how we can use copyrighted stuff, which it does (i.e.: DON'T REDISTRIBUTE IT WITHOUT PERMISSION).
For the most part, the government doesn't tell us how we can use copyrighted materials. The government provides certain limits which the copyright holder may enforce, and then the copyright holder makes an agreement with the user (explicitly by contract, or implicitly by defaulting to copyright law) on how it can be used, including how often it can be copied, under what circumstances, and how it may (or may not) be modified. Exceptions are provided in the law regarding parody and certain other fair use exceptions and a few mandatory licenses, but copyright is essentially entirely between the holder and the customer.
From a practical use standpoint, I don't think Blizzard's assertion has any sort of solid footing in reality. I would think that the EULA would cover this, but it doesn't seem to me that this falls at all under copyright law.
Strictly answering your point, no, there were almost certainly no significant quantities of prohibited weapons. The only ones likely remaining were the random buried ones that were lost by the Iraqi military during the Iran-Iraq War.
Please point out to me where I said it was just and/or fair. There were some very significant issues about it, and unlike some of those who, like me, supported the invasion, I had no issues with people like Ramsey Clark coming forward in an attempt to defend Hussein, as all defendants deserve competent counsel, no matter what they've done. I look back at the Nuremberg trials as a model of how such trials should be dealt with (which also tried people for charges that didn't exist before the trials). Had he not been executed and the trials continued, it would be, in my eyes, a victory for the court system if he had been exonerated of some charge because the actions were carried out by others outside of his command, whether or not he failed to punish them later.
I'm inclined to believe that the US complicity in the trial was largely limited to turning him over on a regular basis, as it's my understanding that he remained in US custody when not in court. The rest of it was simply Shi'ite vengeance. There were at least some in the US military and political structures who argued vociferously regarding the trial and, especially, the rush to execute Hussein. In the end, Hussein went out in as dignified a manner as he could muster, and his executioners looked like the bloodthirsty mob that they had become. But truth be told, his fate was a foregone conclusion when he was captured. Much like Nicolae CeauÅYescu, no one in the West was going to seriously intervene in his execution at the end of a trial put on mainly to go through the motions.
The FBI agent who interviewed him most recently said that while he had no active programs, Hussein was waiting for sanctions to be lifted to resume the programs. Nothing for us to find then, but had we waited a year or two for the sanctions to start subsiding, it might have been a different story.
There were a couple of articles in the last few days about the rate cuts in the US (expected to stop for at least a few months), and looming rate cuts in the EU zone (expected to start soon to avoid recession). The credit crunch hit hard over there, too, and central banks there, eager to keep their own countries' growth in the black, are looking at cutting rates, which will be favorable to the US dollar. Just in the last week, the US dollar has picked up a fair amount, closing at $1.5424 to the euro on Friday, up from $1.5630 on April 25, a change of 1.3%. Even with interest rate cuts on the part of the Europeans, though, it will take some time to get back closer to the $1.30 mark, as that needs to be a soft landing lest the markets get a little spooked about too rapid a change.
Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by an Iraqi judge in an Iraqi court, and executed by the Iraqi government. The US supported this government, but opposed his execution (at least as quickly as it happened). Afghanistan has not had a leader executed by an invading party in recent memory; the last one to be killed was Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan, executed during a Communist coup in 1978.
The budget for the NHS is £105.6 billion this year. That's about £1730 per person in the UK, or £2580 per person in the 15-64 age bracket. That's not free, nor does it count the costs of the one in nine Britons covered by private health care, or those that pay cash to avoid the sometimes otherwise-lengthy waits for basic checkups. Then there's the NHS Injury Cost Recovery scheme, which allows the NHS to recover treatment costs from successful personal injury claims.
On top of that, dentistry is not free, either, and coverage has slipped with many dentists opting out of the system because they can make more from private business.
Regardless of the rhetoric about US health insurance companies, most claims are not denied. There may be some haggling over necessity, but by and large, they are approved without question. You do get some additional freedom with certain types, such as PPOs, at the risk of greater annual out-of-pocket costs, but even with HMOs, treatment options are usually very wide, and it's rare that an X-ray, MRI, or even a CT or PET scan is blocked if the doctor believes it to be necessary. For most of those that cannot afford to pay, there is supplemental insurance in the form of Medicaid, and all one has to do is fill out the forms provided at the doctor's office or even hospital.
There are positive changes that can be made, yes, but fully socialized systems have their own problems that I'd sooner avoid, and which may yet bring far more strain on the countries using them.