I feel no obligation in complying with laws that arn't in sync with my own moral code.
As far as I'm concerned trademark law & copyright law should be treated & enforced no differently than Patent law. Meaning Nintendo's only recourse should be to use the civil court system to sue the makers, sellers & end-users of products that break their copyrights or use their trademarks. Copyright law should not be the business of the criminal court & if copyright holders want to prevent end-users from buying & using products that break their copyrights, it's only recourse should be to sue each end-user individually.
So while the corporate world's lobbyists & the US govt have been using their influence to get govts arround the world put copyright provisions in their criminal law codes (a process that's been going on in one form or another since WWII), I'll make my protest by feeling no obligation to comply with copyright laws. As such if you have some hangup over your woman's game controller, I'm quite happy to take it (or maybe her) off your hands.
But it's extremly rare to find anything made for any voltage between 220v & 250 that doesn't work or cause problems.
Really other than things made for the US & other weird places, everthing made to run on mains for the last 50 years is to designed to run on any voltage between 220v & 250v wihtout a hiccup.
It's amazing where they turn up, under loads of crap in garages & back sheds, even though they've been legislated out of existence.
Just keep a bottle of kero in the garage & you'll be right.
Or just do what lazy tight arses like I do & save on the heating bill by using a duna, a pair of traky dak's under one's jeans, with a AU$7 flannalette shirt from Woolies up top, with a baggy sloppy Joe ontop of it graced by a old M65 jacket with a custom made Alpaca pile lining buttoned inside it (including the hood).
Combined with the fact that all the light sockets at home have either 5, 8 or 11 watt flouro globes in them & on most nights I only have two 5 watters going, my quarterlly electricity bills never get over AU$70, & that's with the telly & the computer on 15 hours a day or more..
I'm getted a handed-down gas-stove in about a month, then I'll replace the electric hot-water heater with a instantaneous gas one, then hopefully my electricty bill will get under AU$40 a quarter.
Of course getting a Kelpie to keep one's feet warm while in bed or on the couch helps alot.
I live in a early Victorian sandstone row-house in inner-city Sydney & I have visitors from Europe & North America that are so spoilt by central heating they think my home is the coldest house they've ever experianced. Wait till they've experianced how cold old rural Australian weatherboard houses with pressed metal ceilings can get on winter nights, especially when the lead windows are missing the odd bit here or there.
Remember the Geode is just a MediaGX embedded X86 chip, basically a Cyrix 686 with a embedded chipset (PS2, Serial, Parrallel, PCI/ISA bus & a memory controller & IDE controller)) & embedded multimedia (Video out, TV out & standard Audio I/O) all on a propietry socket & board.
They were developed by Cyrix to create a real cheap Pentium class platform. NatSemi bought Cyrix to get the Geode & sold the rest of Cyrix to VIA, then sold the Geode line to AMD about a year ago. AMD has also since bought out a new low powered Embedded Geode line based on underclocked Athlons. But I'm pretty sure these new web appliances are based on the traditional Geode platform, which still forms the majority of the range - chips don't go obsolete so quickly in the embedded market.
Actually in many cases developers will not develop applications that utilise a specific embedded chip unless they're confident the chip will be available for many years from the manufacturer. Mind you in cases where the embedded chip is basically a re-labeled PC chip, I assume the fabs just make a huge run before they ramp up to the newer/better/faster/whatever for the PC market, to cover demand in the embedded market for so many years. Hence the new vacume sealed Intel 486s with "Intel Embedded" or something similar printed on them, I saw in the IC section of a Yellow Pages sized Electronics components catalogue recently for about AU$15 each, & less than half that in quantity. & considering the list prices in these Farnell style, "deliver within one day" catalogues, they're bound to be heaps cheaper elseware.
Tick the box next to your favourite candidate voting which is hand counted & hand scrutineered.
The trouble with the Yanks is they vote on a work day which means there isn't the availability of thousands apon thousands of volunteer scrutineers from the political parties to stand over hand counters' shoulders & watch them count.
I myself has said many times that simple, keep it stupid 'tick the box' paper ballots are best, but that's too simple & easy for those who like to wank off with unnecessary technology
Gez you can even do preferential voting the KISS way, 'number the boxes in order of preferance' is pretty self explanatory.
Plus hand counting scales fine.
The US holding an election would be no different than if Canada, the US, Oz, Germany, & Denmark etc all just held their elections the same day - now would the election system in Oz overload just because the UK is having an election too?.
Remember when the US has an election its actually just 50 seperate states having an election the same day, most smaller than Canada
I'll tell you how hand counting is done, many halls, standiums & conference centres are hired in the country & people are paid to count, with each counter having 2 scrutineers looking over his/her shoulder, one from the Labour party & one from the conservative coalition, simple aye. Problem is for some stupid reason the Yanks vote on a work day, meaning there just isn't the availability of party volunteers to scrutinise hand counting. Why they don't change to voting on a saturday like most people? Who knows?
Another problem for the US is that they hold so many elections on the same day. But there's no real requirement that state or local elections should be held the same day.
Well if hypothetically all fed/state elections are 4 year term elections, then the state elections could be held when the traditional mid term elections occured, then local elections at the same time as both the federal & state elections.
It's done in similar ways as that in many places. Being a saturday people just pop into the local school while out 'n about.
Also you just have a different ballot papers for each election on the same day. When people reach their spot they're given a ballot paper for the judge, another for the sheriff another for the senate, another for their congressional rep. The different ballets are colour coded - after ticking or numbering the preferances (if it's a preferantial election), one just sticks them in what ever box matches their colour.
Meaning 3 ballot papers in 3 different colours matching 3 different ballot box colours on federal election day (President/VP, Senate, House), 3 ballot papers in 3 different colours matching 3 different ballot box colours on state election day (Governor, State Senate, State House). Then one follows the same procedure for local positions that are being voted one, unless there's only one or 2 candidates running for different positions in which case you could merge some elections onto a sectional ballot paper.
That's how it's done in Oz (except we go through the added expense of having local elections on a different day, but that's only for councillors or maybe the mayor. depending on the council) & we useally know the election outcome the same (sat) night, with official confirmation the next day. Actually it's extremly rare in Oz for us not to know the outcome by monday morning at the latest
With every car I've owned, locking the steering involves turning the key all the way to the left, while turning the ignition off involves turning the key just one notch to the left.
Useally the key has settings something like this:
-Lock -Acc -Ignition -Start
Meaning turning the key to "Acc" will turn the engine off without locking the wheel.
Afterall the US is one of the top countries in regards possesing WMD & has the worst recordd in the world in regards the deliberate targeting of civilians with it's WMD.
Remember virtually all the people Iraq targeted with WMD in the Iran-Iraq war were soldiers, while it's use of gas in the Kurdish insurgency only caused 4 figure fatalities - less than 10,000, which is less than the number of Iraqi dead in Shrub's War, while the ratio of civilian dead relative to belligerent dead is not significantly different. Now compare that to the hundreds of thousands of casualties at Hiroshima & Nagasaki, more than 95% of which were innocent civilians.
Now if we are going to claim Saddam was evil because he waged aggressive war, used WMD & repressed minorities, then the only conclusion we can make is that the US is even more evil.
Afterall the US has waged many more wars than Baathist Iraq ever did (over 200 wars in the 220 odd years since the American revolution) & has been involved in many more agressive wars.
The US has also killed many more people with WMD too, & a much higher proportion of civilians to combatents too.
While the US has repressed minorities more than Baathist Iraq ever did. Just look at the genocide or virtual genocide of the 500 North American Indian nations. Now compare that to Baathist Iraq, where Shias & Kurds still form the majority in most of the regions where they formed majorities before the Baathists came to power.
The nursing shortage is due to the fact that a huge percentage of nurses leave the industry because the financial compensation isn't worth the demands of the job.
For instance most of the people I know who became registed nurses (either they did whay could be described as a apprenticeship as a nurse for 4 years to become a sister or they went to Uni for 4 years) or enrolled nurses (2 year mix of on the job training & college) don't work in fields remotely related to healthcare.
The rest of the world has a commonsense system where those who elect to make a phone call pay all the costs associated with the call. Americans have to do something different & charge the reciever too, WTF?
Don't mobile phone numbers in the US have prefixes that informer the caller that he/she's dialing a mobile number, so he/she can make a informed decision about whether to dial a mobile number & absorb all hte costs involved?
If not may I dare ask why the US has some silly system where mobile phone networks don't have indicating prefixes for phone numbers on their networks?
The last time spending a few months slowly Amtraking across from San Fransisco to Miami, stopping over & spending many days in places like Oakland, LA, San Antonio, New Orleans, Birmingham, & Orlando on the way.
Of course I'm generalising & of course other places also have knee-jerk polies & law 'n order auctions at election time, but rarely at anything like close to similar levels, & when it does occure it's useally via local polies who look to the US for political inspiration (like Bob Carr in New South Wales who did a PHD on American political history & shamelessly plays American style Knee-jerk politics whenever his administration stagnates.
why do Americans fall for such crap?
on
Judges Junk Jailcam
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It seems the US is about the worst place for knee-jerk publicity seeking tough on crime laws & law 'n order auctions every election campaign.
In regards knee jerkism, look at the way many state & local authorities banned GHB within days of sensationalist reports of body builders abusing this vetinary anasthetic (to aid testosterone production from deep sleep) & gays getting off on thershold dose recreational use. The end result was the new illegal status attracted publicity way out of proportion to the recreational reality of the drug itself & pharmacuetical supplies were replaced by underground chemist supplies, which of course leads to dangerous quantity/quality irregularities, which is the very thing that makes GHB dangerous.
So the chief effect of politicians taking a opportunity to knee-jerk over the American public's anger over people daring to get off on things they shouldn't get off on, are law 'n order bills which have made the drug much more attractive to use & inherently much many more dangerous to use too. The end result being a logrithmic increase in overdoses from virtually none before hand (relative to the US population)
Now in regards the law 'n oder auctions every elections, the end result has been the US having both incarceration & policing rates that are logrithmically higher than anywhere else in the world (there's that big L word again).
This has led to a significant proportion of a significant American minority being totally disenfranchised & huge costs to the American tax-payers that get sucked in by all this law 'n order fear mongering. To the point that many US states now spend more on jails than education (which definitly doesn't bode well for the future), the maning, building & servicing of jails has become the biggest growth industry in the US & if US incarceration levels continue to grow at the same rate they have over the last 15 years, then by 2037 every American will be either employed by the 'jail industry' or incarcerated themselves.
This has been devastating to America's underclass - just look at those snitch snowballs in Tulia, Texas & Union, Alabama caused by knee-jerk & law 'n order election year 'auction' bills for mandatory minimums & forfeiture legislation. In both cases we had cops arresting people based on the uncorroberated testimony of a paid snitch & then threatened with mandatory minimums if they didn't snitch on any of their mates that were poor but had property (via such things as inheritances, redundency payouts, divorce settlements or people that had done well in the past but are now down on their luck). Meaning they were good forfeiture material as they were worth persecuting but didn't have the incomes to stand up for themselves in the justice system.
This leads to a snowballing effect as people are threatened with the mandatory minimum to plead out on lesser chargse (meaning they still get convicted & all their property forfeited) on the condition they snitch on any aquaintence, relative or mate that the cops want them to snitch on. Meaning a huge snowballing tragedy of justice in which the evidence is rarely tested in court & when it is tested, it's tested in some hick court where the judge & jury automatically take the cops side, with the legal aid lawyer is hung-over & nodding off in court all day (leading to situations where jurors refuse to admit their mistake & are still convinced that certain defendents are guilty, even though they won appeals due to ironclad alibies, simply because their adament that 'cops are good & don't lie').
Or look at the many Americans that feel the need to keeped a loaded firearm within axcess of the bed to protect the family from home intruders. Nevermind the fact that if one isn't a drug dealer or a Asian business man/woman with a reputation of keeping large quantities of cash at home, the chances of one's family falling victim to a home invasion if one's a member of the suburban middle class, is probabl
No more tray icons/startup processes without permision & no more file extension theivery from other programs without permision either.
It's quite good the way the advanced install button lets one chose what file extensions get opened by by Realplayer 10.
Pity there's no install options like "only link so far un-attributed media file types to Realplayer 10" or "only open Real developed file types with Realplayer 10", as going through that media file extension list took longer than I liked.
I don't even know what everyones talking about in regards this problem & my Opera 7.23 Win32 install beens logging onto slashdot every day since before it was a Opera 4 install, & the only problem I had with Slasdot was a Pink screen I had for about a week a couple of years ago.
Employees should register their own companies & officially employ themselves as freelancers during their freetime (the same way the self employed dodge tax by listing their spouse 'n kids as employess & then on paper spread the income to cover their 'wages').
So both their real employer & their own company has equal claim to their thoughts.
Re:Atlantis tragedy made economicly possible?...
on
Soyuz To The Moon?
·
· Score: 1
So it's not a accident if lightning strikes & knocks down a tree directly in your car's path, a second before you are due to arrive at that spot on the road where the tree ended up?
I assume you're talking about the legal principle of less liability in regards gifts.
Liftoff: free = gift Trip to lunar orbit: free = gift Return to Earth: free = gift Re-entry: free = gift, therefore Deployment of parachutes: $100 million is the only item with the implied liability of a commercial transaction.
Mind you with the millions of statutes in US civil law destroying any posibility of minimising legal counsel, I doubt such logic would work in a US juristiction. However Russian spacecraft are Russian registed meaning generally Russian juristiction, & I have a funny feeling that one maybe able to get away with such logic in a Russian court.
In Europe soccer players don't go off to uni to further their career, they simply go & get a job at a footy club playing soccer.
Here in Sydney, Australia, Rugby League players don't go off to uni to further their career, they simply go of & get a job at a footy club playing the greatest game on earth. Then later they retire & buy a pub or sports store or become a commentator.
It seems to me in the US a college education has become a prestigue/class thing that everyone's expected to have if they don't want to be consided a red neck illiterate, never mind the fact it's not desirable for everyone to desire a college education.
AFAIC sports people are much better off pursueing their sporting career by playing their sport when they're young 'n strong. They can always go to uni mature-age in their 30's after they've retired from injuries.
Slashdot Mirror
As per normal with the media
I feel no obligation in complying with laws that arn't in sync with my own moral code.
As far as I'm concerned trademark law & copyright law should be treated & enforced no differently than Patent law. Meaning Nintendo's only recourse should be to use the civil court system to sue the makers, sellers & end-users of products that break their copyrights or use their trademarks. Copyright law should not be the business of the criminal court & if copyright holders want to prevent end-users from buying & using products that break their copyrights, it's only recourse should be to sue each end-user individually.
So while the corporate world's lobbyists & the US govt have been using their influence to get govts arround the world put copyright provisions in their criminal law codes (a process that's been going on in one form or another since WWII), I'll make my protest by feeling no obligation to comply with copyright laws. As such if you have some hangup over your woman's game controller, I'm quite happy to take it (or maybe her) off your hands.
But it's extremly rare to find anything made for any voltage between 220v & 250 that doesn't work or cause problems.
Really other than things made for the US & other weird places, everthing made to run on mains for the last 50 years is to designed to run on any voltage between 220v & 250v wihtout a hiccup.
It's amazing where they turn up, under loads of crap in garages & back sheds, even though they've been legislated out of existence.
Just keep a bottle of kero in the garage & you'll be right.
Or just do what lazy tight arses like I do & save on the heating bill by using a duna, a pair of traky dak's under one's jeans, with a AU$7 flannalette shirt from Woolies up top, with a baggy sloppy Joe ontop of it graced by a old M65 jacket with a custom made Alpaca pile lining buttoned inside it (including the hood).
Combined with the fact that all the light sockets at home have either 5, 8 or 11 watt flouro globes in them & on most nights I only have two 5 watters going, my quarterlly electricity bills never get over AU$70, & that's with the telly & the computer on 15 hours a day or more..
I'm getted a handed-down gas-stove in about a month, then I'll replace the electric hot-water heater with a instantaneous gas one, then hopefully my electricty bill will get under AU$40 a quarter.
Of course getting a Kelpie to keep one's feet warm while in bed or on the couch helps alot.
I live in a early Victorian sandstone row-house in inner-city Sydney & I have visitors from Europe & North America that are so spoilt by central heating they think my home is the coldest house they've ever experianced. Wait till they've experianced how cold old rural Australian weatherboard houses with pressed metal ceilings can get on winter nights, especially when the lead windows are missing the odd bit here or there.
Remember the Geode is just a MediaGX embedded X86 chip, basically a Cyrix 686 with a embedded chipset (PS2, Serial, Parrallel, PCI/ISA bus & a memory controller & IDE controller)) & embedded multimedia (Video out, TV out & standard Audio I/O) all on a propietry socket & board.
They were developed by Cyrix to create a real cheap Pentium class platform. NatSemi bought Cyrix to get the Geode & sold the rest of Cyrix to VIA, then sold the Geode line to AMD about a year ago. AMD has also since bought out a new low powered Embedded Geode line based on underclocked Athlons. But I'm pretty sure these new web appliances are based on the traditional Geode platform, which still forms the majority of the range - chips don't go obsolete so quickly in the embedded market.
Actually in many cases developers will not develop applications that utilise a specific embedded chip unless they're confident the chip will be available for many years from the manufacturer. Mind you in cases where the embedded chip is basically a re-labeled PC chip, I assume the fabs just make a huge run before they ramp up to the newer/better/faster/whatever for the PC market, to cover demand in the embedded market for so many years. Hence the new vacume sealed Intel 486s with "Intel Embedded" or something similar printed on them, I saw in the IC section of a Yellow Pages sized Electronics components catalogue recently for about AU$15 each, & less than half that in quantity. & considering the list prices in these Farnell style, "deliver within one day" catalogues, they're bound to be heaps cheaper elseware.
Tick the box next to your favourite candidate voting which is hand counted & hand scrutineered.
The trouble with the Yanks is they vote on a work day which means there isn't the availability of thousands apon thousands of volunteer scrutineers from the political parties to stand over hand counters' shoulders & watch them count.
I myself has said many times that simple, keep it stupid 'tick the box' paper ballots are best, but that's too simple & easy for those who like to wank off with unnecessary technology
Gez you can even do preferential voting the KISS way, 'number the boxes in order of preferance' is pretty self explanatory.
Plus hand counting scales fine.
The US holding an election would be no different than if Canada, the US, Oz, Germany, & Denmark etc all just held their elections the same day - now would the election system in Oz overload just because the UK is having an election too?.
Remember when the US has an election its actually just 50 seperate states having an election the same day, most smaller than Canada
I'll tell you how hand counting is done, many halls, standiums & conference centres are hired in the country & people are paid to count, with each counter having 2 scrutineers looking over his/her shoulder, one from the Labour party & one from the conservative coalition, simple aye. Problem is for some stupid reason the Yanks vote on a work day, meaning there just isn't the availability of party volunteers to scrutinise hand counting. Why they don't change to voting on a saturday like most people? Who knows?
Another problem for the US is that they hold so many elections on the same day. But there's no real requirement that state or local elections should be held the same day.
Well if hypothetically all fed/state elections are 4 year term elections, then the state elections could be held when the traditional mid term elections occured, then local elections at the same time as both the federal & state elections.
It's done in similar ways as that in many places. Being a saturday people just pop into the local school while out 'n about.
Also you just have a different ballot papers for each election on the same day. When people reach their spot they're given a ballot paper for the judge, another for the sheriff another for the senate, another for their congressional rep. The different ballets are colour coded - after ticking or numbering the preferances (if it's a preferantial election), one just sticks them in what ever box matches their colour.
Meaning 3 ballot papers in 3 different colours matching 3 different ballot box colours on federal election day (President/VP, Senate, House), 3 ballot papers in 3 different colours matching 3 different ballot box colours on state election day (Governor, State Senate, State House). Then one follows the same procedure for local positions that are being voted one, unless there's only one or 2 candidates running for different positions in which case you could merge some elections onto a sectional ballot paper.
That's how it's done in Oz (except we go through the added expense of having local elections on a different day, but that's only for councillors or maybe the mayor. depending on the council) & we useally know the election outcome the same (sat) night, with official confirmation the next day. Actually it's extremly rare in Oz for us not to know the outcome by monday morning at the latest
nt
& it seems like it's easier to get out of John Wayne Gacy's house alive after smoking pot than cancel a AOL account.
They just work together, no changing of settings or anything.
Of course the ebay toolbar doesn't work with Opera, as it's a IE toolbar extension.
With every car I've owned, locking the steering involves turning the key all the way to the left, while turning the ignition off involves turning the key just one notch to the left.
Useally the key has settings something like this:
-Lock
-Acc
-Ignition
-Start
Meaning turning the key to "Acc" will turn the engine off without locking the wheel.
Afterall the US is one of the top countries in regards possesing WMD & has the worst recordd in the world in regards the deliberate targeting of civilians with it's WMD.
Remember virtually all the people Iraq targeted with WMD in the Iran-Iraq war were soldiers, while it's use of gas in the Kurdish insurgency only caused 4 figure fatalities - less than 10,000, which is less than the number of Iraqi dead in Shrub's War, while the ratio of civilian dead relative to belligerent dead is not significantly different. Now compare that to the hundreds of thousands of casualties at Hiroshima & Nagasaki, more than 95% of which were innocent civilians.
Now if we are going to claim Saddam was evil because he waged aggressive war, used WMD & repressed minorities, then the only conclusion we can make is that the US is even more evil.
Afterall the US has waged many more wars than Baathist Iraq ever did (over 200 wars in the 220 odd years since the American revolution) & has been involved in many more agressive wars.
The US has also killed many more people with WMD too, & a much higher proportion of civilians to combatents too.
While the US has repressed minorities more than Baathist Iraq ever did. Just look at the genocide or virtual genocide of the 500 North American Indian nations. Now compare that to Baathist Iraq, where Shias & Kurds still form the majority in most of the regions where they formed majorities before the Baathists came to power.
The threatre release itself went through 63 different bloody endings before the film actually finished.
The nursing shortage is due to the fact that a huge percentage of nurses leave the industry because the financial compensation isn't worth the demands of the job.
For instance most of the people I know who became registed nurses (either they did whay could be described as a apprenticeship as a nurse for 4 years to become a sister or they went to Uni for 4 years) or enrolled nurses (2 year mix of on the job training & college) don't work in fields remotely related to healthcare.
The rest of the world has a commonsense system where those who elect to make a phone call pay all the costs associated with the call. Americans have to do something different & charge the reciever too, WTF?
Don't mobile phone numbers in the US have prefixes that informer the caller that he/she's dialing a mobile number, so he/she can make a informed decision about whether to dial a mobile number & absorb all hte costs involved?
If not may I dare ask why the US has some silly system where mobile phone networks don't have indicating prefixes for phone numbers on their networks?
& have been to the US twice.
The last time spending a few months slowly Amtraking across from San Fransisco to Miami, stopping over & spending many days in places like Oakland, LA, San Antonio, New Orleans, Birmingham, & Orlando on the way.
Of course I'm generalising & of course other places also have knee-jerk polies & law 'n order auctions at election time, but rarely at anything like close to similar levels, & when it does occure it's useally via local polies who look to the US for political inspiration (like Bob Carr in New South Wales who did a PHD on American political history & shamelessly plays American style Knee-jerk politics whenever his administration stagnates.
It seems the US is about the worst place for knee-jerk publicity seeking tough on crime laws & law 'n order auctions every election campaign.
In regards knee jerkism, look at the way many state & local authorities banned GHB within days of sensationalist reports of body builders abusing this vetinary anasthetic (to aid testosterone production from deep sleep) & gays getting off on thershold dose recreational use. The end result was the new illegal status attracted publicity way out of proportion to the recreational reality of the drug itself & pharmacuetical supplies were replaced by underground chemist supplies, which of course leads to dangerous quantity/quality irregularities, which is the very thing that makes GHB dangerous.
So the chief effect of politicians taking a opportunity to knee-jerk over the American public's anger over people daring to get off on things they shouldn't get off on, are law 'n order bills which have made the drug much more attractive to use & inherently much many more dangerous to use too. The end result being a logrithmic increase in overdoses from virtually none before hand (relative to the US population)
Now in regards the law 'n oder auctions every elections, the end result has been the US having both incarceration & policing rates that are logrithmically higher than anywhere else in the world (there's that big L word again).
This has led to a significant proportion of a significant American minority being totally disenfranchised & huge costs to the American tax-payers that get sucked in by all this law 'n order fear mongering. To the point that many US states now spend more on jails than education (which definitly doesn't bode well for the future), the maning, building & servicing of jails has become the biggest growth industry in the US & if US incarceration levels continue to grow at the same rate they have over the last 15 years, then by 2037 every American will be either employed by the 'jail industry' or incarcerated themselves.
This has been devastating to America's underclass - just look at those snitch snowballs in Tulia, Texas & Union, Alabama caused by knee-jerk & law 'n order election year 'auction' bills for mandatory minimums & forfeiture legislation. In both cases we had cops arresting people based on the uncorroberated testimony of a paid snitch & then threatened with mandatory minimums if they didn't snitch on any of their mates that were poor but had property (via such things as inheritances, redundency payouts, divorce settlements or people that had done well in the past but are now down on their luck). Meaning they were good forfeiture material as they were worth persecuting but didn't have the incomes to stand up for themselves in the justice system.
This leads to a snowballing effect as people are threatened with the mandatory minimum to plead out on lesser chargse (meaning they still get convicted & all their property forfeited) on the condition they snitch on any aquaintence, relative or mate that the cops want them to snitch on. Meaning a huge snowballing tragedy of justice in which the evidence is rarely tested in court & when it is tested, it's tested in some hick court where the judge & jury automatically take the cops side, with the legal aid lawyer is hung-over & nodding off in court all day (leading to situations where jurors refuse to admit their mistake & are still convinced that certain defendents are guilty, even though they won appeals due to ironclad alibies, simply because their adament that 'cops are good & don't lie').
Or look at the many Americans that feel the need to keeped a loaded firearm within axcess of the bed to protect the family from home intruders. Nevermind the fact that if one isn't a drug dealer or a Asian business man/woman with a reputation of keeping large quantities of cash at home, the chances of one's family falling victim to a home invasion if one's a member of the suburban middle class, is probabl
No more tray icons/startup processes without permision & no more file extension theivery from other programs without permision either.
It's quite good the way the advanced install button lets one chose what file extensions get opened by by Realplayer 10.
Pity there's no install options like "only link so far un-attributed media file types to Realplayer 10" or "only open Real developed file types with Realplayer 10", as going through that media file extension list took longer than I liked.
I don't even know what everyones talking about in regards this problem & my Opera 7.23 Win32 install beens logging onto slashdot every day since before it was a Opera 4 install, & the only problem I had with Slasdot was a Pink screen I had for about a week a couple of years ago.
Well in regards to a percentage of one's thoughts
Employees should register their own companies & officially employ themselves as freelancers during their freetime (the same way the self employed dodge tax by listing their spouse 'n kids as employess & then on paper spread the income to cover their 'wages').
So both their real employer & their own company has equal claim to their thoughts.
So it's not a accident if lightning strikes & knocks down a tree directly in your car's path, a second before you are due to arrive at that spot on the road where the tree ended up?
I assume you're talking about the legal principle of less liability in regards gifts.
Liftoff: free = gift
Trip to lunar orbit: free = gift
Return to Earth: free = gift
Re-entry: free = gift, therefore
Deployment of parachutes: $100 million is the only item with the implied liability of a commercial transaction.
Mind you with the millions of statutes in US civil law destroying any posibility of minimising legal counsel, I doubt such logic would work in a US juristiction. However Russian spacecraft are Russian registed meaning generally Russian juristiction, & I have a funny feeling that one maybe able to get away with such logic in a Russian court.
In Europe soccer players don't go off to uni to further their career, they simply go & get a job at a footy club playing soccer.
Here in Sydney, Australia, Rugby League players don't go off to uni to further their career, they simply go of & get a job at a footy club playing the greatest game on earth. Then later they retire & buy a pub or sports store or become a commentator.
It seems to me in the US a college education has become a prestigue/class thing that everyone's expected to have if they don't want to be consided a red neck illiterate, never mind the fact it's not desirable for everyone to desire a college education.
AFAIC sports people are much better off pursueing their sporting career by playing their sport when they're young 'n strong. They can always go to uni mature-age in their 30's after they've retired from injuries.
Do any in Sydney do that, as I've never noticed them before.
BTW you do know that the US has the highest incarceration levels in the world by a huge margin, & has the highest policing levels in the world too..
Some freedom, unlike Europe one can't even take the dog for a walk at night without being harassed by cops.
The only differance between boxing & assualt is consent.
The only differance going on a private garden tour & trespassing is consent.
You see once one consents then the action is no longer a crime.
Afterall the only differance between borowing & theiving is consent