My sister has a problem with her dogs eating cat feces. Cats' digestive systems are very primitive so their excrement is rich in protein, especially if the cats have a good diet like high-quality cat food. My sister adores her animals so you can guess that they do.
Well, anyway, one of the cats liked to use one spot in the corner, so my sister put an empty tray there to keep it from stinking things up. I watched as three dogs were hovering over that cat like drivers during a mall sale hovering over a parking space, waiting for her to finish manufacturing their next snack! I thought it was hilarious.
He said he works at a dealership, and I can only assume that he means a car dealership.
Have you ever seen a car dealership on a college campus?
A "campus" means a collection of buildings; the location of the largest software company in the world is sometimes referred to as the Microsoft Campus. While he doesn't say so, I suspect that either it's a multi-brand car dealership ("dealership" is usually used to refer to places that sell cars, but technically could be any franchised retail operation), which has several buildings on a large lot, say, a Ford office, a Chrysler office and a combined repair shop.
The push for RFID chips is not about security, it's about shifting the burden on the user, instead of the banks.
The burden has never been on the banks. If my card is lost and used to buy $2,000 worth of crap at Best Buy then Best Buy is going to be out the money when they lose the chargeback. You think the bank is going to allow themselves to take the hit?
Uh, yes it is. If the merchant has a signature on a receipt, the merchant is covered; if the customer denies the charge, then it's a stolen card and the bank is responsible. The bank can only stick it to the merchant on a telephone or unsigned transaction. That's the whole point of getting a signature; if the receipt is signed, the merchant is covered.
The reasoning behind it is not one of convenience, it is to allow more fraud to occur. Smaller cases of fraud are more likely to go unnoticed and uncontested.
The push for RFID chips is not about security, it's about shifting the burden on the user, instead of the banks. Fraud? User must have lost their card and failed to report it in time. They get nothing.
You're only required to report an error within 60 days of when you notice, and your maximum liability for all fraud committed during the period of the incidents is $50, and some credit cards don't even impose that.
Poison might be useful but here's a solution that avoids poison. Mix up trays consisting of 1/2 flour and 1/2 cement. Provide plenty of trays of water. Because as some of the posters here have indicated, you may not be able to shut off their food supply.
I think the use of putting the GPL into open source Windows Software is because typically the installer programs are set up to have a "stop" for a license agreement, and rather than disable this stop on a standard install package, they just drop in the GPL. I don't think it has anything with requiring agreement to the GPL to use the software as much as not wanting to break a known-good install or not wanting to bother to rewrite the pre-built script from standard install packages, and rather than put nothing in the 'you must agree to this license' provision, they put the GPL in rather than some unimportant text. Most programmers are not lawyers and most don't care. The install script has a spot for a license; they have the GPL license, so they stick it in there because they presume that's what it's for.
The citizenship of Obama's parents is absolutely irrelevant to whether or not he would be a citizen of the United States with one exception (which I will explain below, and is not applicable here.) All that matters is that he was born in a U.S. state. The 14th Amendment controls:
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
He was born in Hawaii after 1959 (when it became a state and was no longer a territory), that makes him a citizen. End of story.
The only possible exception - which is not applicable here - is if his parents had diplomatic immunity from some other country, and he also had it as the child of foreign diplomats, and thus was not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Since no one has made the slightest claim that either of his parents were in the diplomatic service of another country, this possible exception does not apply.
Women all the time who are pregnant come visit the U.S. (usually California) from Mexico to have their baby in an American hospital. Since they (and possibly their husband or boyfriend) are Mexican nationals, the child is probably one too. But since the parents are not diplomatic personnel, the child gets that precious birth certificate issued by the hospital which indicates the child is a U.S. Citizen. So, years later, this man who has lived in Mexico all his life, can simply walk right up to the border, present his Mexican ID card and his U.S. birth certificate to the border patrol agent at the gateway, and walk into the U.S. just like any other American Citizen, because he is one same as anyone else born here.
This is a common issue in a number of countries where, because of laws of each country, a child of parents from one country are born in another, the child ends up having dual citizenship by birth. If someone is the child of two American Citizens and is born in a hospital in Toronto, what country are they a citizen of? Both the U.S. and Canada. And if their mother is Jewish and they visit Israel, by law they are also a citizen of that country as well, so they could be a citizen of three countries.
It probably won't apply to cameras, and I personally have three of them that are all about the same size as a cell phone, and none of them make noise when they take either snapshots or video (with sound, no less.)
Is this going to apply to existing phones that do not have sound on taking pictures or where the feature can be turned off? I doubt this is possible and I doubt they're going to order existing cell phones with cameras to be discarded.
Just another example of feel-good laws that don't really do much. So let me understand this correctly, if I take a picture with a still or video camera that does not make a sound, or if I take a picture with a cell phone that does not make a sound but is an old model I commit no crime, but if I take a picture with a cell phone that does not make a sound, but it's a recent model, I am subject to fines and potentially imprisonment?
And if I'm using a cell phone that takes pictures, I'm supposed to know the difference by...?
So, setting up elaborate structures to avoid being convicted of, say, murder, is also acceptable in your eyes?
You can't use a corporate structure to evade criminal responsibility for one's actions. But let me give you an example. You and a guy don't like each other and both of you would like to kill the other. If you or him do that, the winner can get charged with murder and maybe face the death penalty. But, if you go to California and publicly have a duel, by law the maximum the winner can be charged with is 'duelling' which has a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison.
While I'm kind of carrying your (inaccurate) example to an example of ridiculousness, it is possible for people to structure their affairs in ways that would otherwise defeat some legal restrictions. Where such restrictions are criminal, the actions are a crime. Where such restrictions are legal, and have to do with money and what we own, control or earn, we call that 'estate and tax planning.' While we don't particularly like people doing criminal planning to try and reduce penalties, there is nothing illegal or immoral to use the law to reduce what one owes in taxes; to again refer to Learned Hand, "taxes are collected by distraint they are not voluntary contributions" and "no one owes a duty to pay more than the law requires." As long as there are legal ways to change one's taxes to reduce them, even to zero if possible, one would be a fool not to take advantage of every one. My understanding is lots of people don't use all of them, primarily because they can't afford the $500 an hour experts to tell them how.
Let me give one example. For a lot of people, even those making small amounts of money, turning a hobby into a business could turn something that costs them a few thousand a year could become a legal way to reduce taxes by allowing them to deduct what they spend on that hobby. Plus, they get three years to try to make money before they can no longer take the deduction. So if they close that business and start over with a new hobby, it becomes a brand-new business and the three-year clock starts over. By making some small changes in how they operate their hobby, they can declare it a business and deduct some expenses and potentially reduce their taxes. But most people don't bother, and they pay more. Is it wrong for them to do this (to use the law to reduce their taxes) if the law permits it? If you say yes, you're saying nobody should be allowed to potentially start a new business that might become successful, since all successful businesses start as small operations and many start as hobbies that became successful and make money. If you say no, then you're just engaging in class warfare where you resent rich people because they have more money (and thus more opportunities) than you.
The billions and billions of dollars that sit in corporate bank accounts shouldn't be taxed? CEOs will just start using expense accounts for everything instead of multi-million dollar salaries.
Let me ask you a question: does the money that is in corporate bank accounts get left in a mattress, or is it likely that the bank would be loaning out the part not being spent, which allows the economy to function? I have money 'sitting' in a share account ("savings account" at a bank) at a credit union; do you think they don't loan it out to other members while I'm not using it?
They all go through it. But apparently it's too mean to use on the planner of 9/11.
You got one big difference people either don't think about or fail to mention. While soldiers might have had waterboarding or something similar applied to them (probably to train them to be less sensitized to it if done to them), the soldier is not going to be murdered by his superiors. They're never going to go overboard or make serious mistakes on their own comrades, and whether anyone admits this or not, anyone having this done to them (by their own military) is going to realize this.
A 'detainee' doesn't have this protection; he has no idea how far they will go and can fully expect to be drowned to death if he doesn't give them what they want (or what he hopes they want that he has so that he won't be murdered).
Even Hollywood recognized this, and years before 9/11 happened; go watch The Siege and look at Bruce Willis' part in the film; or even the whole movie, and maybe you'll understand the significance of why the treatment of so-called detainees will never be the same as treatment of ordinary people or those not considered to be combatants of any kind.
But going back to the use of simulated waterboarding in training, no matter how close the training is for our troops, it can never be the same conditions as someone who was grabbed by our military because they have no real protections that our own people have vis-a-vis their teammates and supervisors. (Does anyone seriously believe a guy is going to treat his buddy as badly as he would someone they've grabbed or bought from an Afghan warlord as presumably a combatant?)
I'll give you another example; use of torture or misconduct by soldiers encourages its use against them by others. Does anyone remember the stories of American Indians scalping people? Do you know why they did that? Because the white men (soldiers) did that to the Indians they found, and the Indians thought it was a sign of respect to warriors or at least it was a legitimate practice since the white men did it, so they did it too. But they didn't start doing it until after they saw how the white soldiers did it first.
I don't think a demo is going to make a bit of difference in the sales of a good quality game; it is probably, more than anything else, likely to work exactly like good advertising of a product. Good advertising of a lousy product will cause people to get hold of it faster, thus causing the 'early adopters' to get it into their hands ahead of the ordinary customer. These early adopter people, if the product sucks, will tell lots of their friends and will sink it faster than no advertising or even ineffective advertising. This is a point that goes back to the 1960s I read in a book about the subject of advertising.
As another poster here pointed out, you could get the complete DOOM in the first episode for free, never buy another thing and play it forever, and it basically convinced almost everyone to buy the other two episodes. At least it did for me, and I'm a messy cheapskate
I bought The Orange Box based strictly on the strength of the video demos of Portal, and in fact, if I had gotten a playable demo of part of Portal it would have convinced me even stronger to buy the game. (A video showing the game on YouTube convinced my sister it would make her too dizzy and she wouldn't like it.) A demo sells the game as well as the game is. A great demo for a sucky game is going to let more people know how badly it sucks faster than no demo at all, because having actually tried it they'll buy it faster than they would otherwise. This gets a smaller number of copies out faster than when a lot of people buy it over time, and the even quicker sales to a small number of people make its faults more obvious.
Critics point this out for motion pictures; a red flag in most cases is when the distributor won't screen it in advance of release for critics; it usually means they know the movie is going to be terrible. James Cameron tells how when they were getting ready to release Terminator they needed to get a strong exposure to critics in order to start a buzz, and by making sure lots of them saw it - for free, of course - it made the film even more successful because even the critics loved it and the 'buzz' they generated got more people out to see it, including people who might not otherwise have gone to see a typical 'action' type film.
If, however, the demo proves the value of the product, it builds 'buzz' and gets people talking. This is even more critical now that you don't just have word of mouth, but "word of blog," too. I mean, I run a tiny blog but I still get as many as a thousand people reading some of my articles; if, say, I bash a game, I'm another person confirming to as many as a thousand other people that it's lousy. Imagine what the effect of a comment is from someone who has a couple million visitors a month.
I suspect it's the exact opposite of what you would normally expect: hoarding (as in not giving away free samples) only works where you've got trash; sharing your stuff works better for you when you have really good stuff. if your game is good, giving away a sample is going to make people more interested in buying it, if your game is terrible, a demo is going to make people know this even faster because the demo will sell the game to people who will scream bloody murder.
I wanted to be fucking funny by posting a goddamn comment with shitty profanity in it, only problem was I got fucked in the ass when the stupid browser ate my comment, and twice no less. This law is so motherfucking unconstitutional as to be dead the instant the son-of-a-bitch is enacted, but that's not why I'm mad; I'm actually kind of amused at how assinine these cocksuckers in the state capital can be. What I'm mad about is the browser ate my comments, twice and I let it get away with it.
Stupid Asshole me allows this shitty browser to lose what I typed in here, then I re-enter the message but instead of using an external program to store the comment until I could post it, I allow myself to be fucked-in-the-ass a second time and it loses my comment while I'm formatting it. I am typing this in a separate program, I won't get bit a third time.
Here's how the statute is unconstitutional:
Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971), guy is wearing jacket in the county courthouse (but not in the courtrooms) which reads "fuck the draft." Is convicted for disturbing the peace. Conviction overturned; these mere words are inadequate to constitute disturbing the peace, and the idea does have First Amendment Protection
People v. Boomer, 655 N.W.2d 255 (Mich. App. 2002), guy in canoe hits rock, dumps him into river, he responds with loud curses that are heard quite a distance away by police officer and a family with kids.
The police officer ticketed Boomer, citing him for violating a more than 100-year-old Michigan law that criminalized the use of profane language in front of women and children.
The Michigan Court of Appeals threw out Boomer's conviction and overturned the Michigan law, stating that "allowing a prosecution where one utters 'insulting' language could possibly subject a vast percentage of the populace to a misdemeanor conviction." The court went on to hold that the law violated the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech and that it would be "difficult to conceive of a statute that would be more vague." First Amendment Center
Idaho v. Suiter (2003), man goes to police station to talk to them about a check fraud case dealing with his friend, but apparently they can't do anything with him because he's not the one who committed the crime. This gets him mad, and after he's told to leave, tells the cop to go fuck himself, and turns to walk out the door; is charged and convicted for disturbing the peace. Idaho Court of Appeals upholds conviction. Idaho Supreme Court overturns conviction; "the phrase was the vulgar equivalent of saying 'go jump in the lake.'"
There are far too many others to list, but even misdemeanor or fine-only charges have been struck down; a felony law wouldn't stand 30 seconds.
I have my own, for lack of a better name, "Reply All" incident.
I am on a list of bidders for potential contracts with the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority, which operates the Metrobus and Metrorail for Washington, DC and the nearby suburbs in Maryland and Virginia. The annual budget for the Authority is in excess of a billion dollars; it's larger than the budget of the entire State of Montana, for example.
One time I got a message with more than 25 recipients on it regarding a change in the way they were operating their procurement website. Well, I suspected that it was some spammer pretending to be from the Authority, because one of the "red flag" signs of being spammed is more than 10 recipients on the same messsage. But I discovered that it really was from the Transit Authority, it was simply an ordinary announcement with no url links and nothing but the announcement. But instead of simply either making the recipients BCC recipients, and sending it to an internal transit authority e-mail address as To:, or sending individual messages to each potential supplier, the contracting agent had simply sent it out To: listing all persons who were registered as bidders with the authority.
My e-mail address was one of these potential suppliers along with a few other people.
1,627 other people to be precise. This was the longest To: list on an e-mail message I have ever seen on a piece of e-mail that wasn't spam; 1,628 contacts. No, I didn't reply all, but I couldn't think of a way to refer to this incident as a "Send All" message and tie into this story. The other half of this incident was that the procurement agent had also just given all potential suppliers to the Authority, every other supplier's e-mail address, too.
The last thing the book talks about is how a man discovered a lot of partially processed secret materials and he had to find a way to get rid of all of it, a considerable pile, and discovered a useful way. Which it doesn't tell us, other than to say the explanation is hidden in the message, using an innocent intervention, or something like that.
So, given that it has something to do with purloined letter methods, my guess is they took the lot of paper down to a processing center, where the paper absolutely has to be clean, and they ground up and processed it to make newsprint, where the formerly classified material has been so destroyed that it could be used to print the next day's newspapers. Would be sort of ironic that way, and would fit with his emphasis on 'innocent' information systems.
I would agree that the way homeopathy is done most of it is worthless, but there are a number of non-medicinal remedies that do work (anyone care to claim that use of Vitamin C and Zinc are ineffective on colds?)
But this book is basically just another of organized medicine's slams on anything that threatens its cartel-like powers to control the delivery of sick care (we do not provide health care in this country, most doctors are too busy treating symptoms of problems, not preventing illness). A large part of what is claimed by the book is probably either misleading or is simply 'tarring with the same brush' ineffective practices with things that might have value.
One example, the claims by manufacturers of FDA unapproved products that 'this product is not intended to cure, prevent or treat any disease'. They are required to say this because if they make any claims at all not proven by double-blind studies their products are subject to seizure and fines. If a seller of limes (the fruit) was to announce their product cures scurvy - absolutely known to be true since the British Navy started giving limes to sailors, hence their nickname - the company would be in violation of FDA rules and its crops would be seized and destroyed, because federal law makes it illegal other than for a manufactured drug which is licensed for distribution by the FDA to claim it can cure any disease, even though the statement is true.
Some of these practices - especially chiropractic - may have use in some cases. But this is an old, old rivalry; MDs hate chiropractic and have been trying to have it outlawed for decades. There are many people who have had relief for various conditions as a result. But since it can't be patented, nobody is going to spend huge amounts of money to do double-blind tests on these various methods, because organized medicine - as well as pharmaceutical companies, who, if people use other methods, they get less money - sees it as cutting into their profits, and it's best that there be no evidence available to argue in their favor.
The whole issue is similar to the sad state of affairs in the copyright and patent arenas today. People trying to make money today and tomorrow on the work they do today. Lets face it, the world is "so what have you done for me lately?" Evolve with this or die out. If you want to make money tomorrow, you'd better be ready to work for it tomorrow too.
A TV commercial from the 1970s for a hotel chain sums it up exactly, at the end of the commercial came their jingle with the end line, "What has Sheraton done for you lately? What has Sheraton done for you now?"
The more successful a business, the more people want to enter that industry to grab a piece of that pie. People used to enter the oil business just so they could get bought out by Rockefeller. And he only had 60% or so of the market. We may not have seen Windows clones come out in the late nineties during the heyday of the Microsoft monopoly, but we did see an explosion of software development all competing with various bits and pieces of Windows.
The end result is the same. After that explosion of software development for Windows Microsoft began buying up smaller software vendors and leveraging their OS monopoly in other areas. This had little to do with government intervention. Right now Microsoft is ready to take a huge chunk out of the antivirus business when they start including their AV software with Windows. They aren't going to take a chunk out of the AV business by being a superior product but simply by bundling it with their monopoly operating system. This seems antithetical to the goals of the free market to me.
It is exactly part of the free market. No one has a vested right to have a particular market. If Microsoft chooses to add a feature, that's their choice. Is GM liable for the failure of other radio makers if it chooses to include a radio in its cars? Or if it chooses to start including CD players in lower end models that it didn't before? Note that most cars include a radio in them, but that doesn't stop some people who want better radios to buy one and replace the one that came with it. Not as many as would buy a radio for their car if it didn't come with one, but some still do.
Further, it's arguable that the need for AV software was the result of bad design choices by Microsoft in not making Windows immune to viruses. (Which, I note, that in general Linux, because of its security policies, is.) If Microsoft were to seriously make Windows so that it's not vulnerable it would be the same thing, and those who depended upon it to remain unsafe would have to change to other lines of business.
In the pre-win95 era there were a number of "windows clones" (in that they had similar functionality to Windows, rather than necessarilly running the same software) which were arguably better - GeoWorks and OS/2 spring to mind (given the choice between GeoWorks and Windows 3, I think I'd choose GeoWorks every time).
Geoworks Ensemble had its chance. It was far faster on a 286 than Windows 3.0 was on a 386 and had WYSIWYG screen and printer fonts before TrueType. Unfortunately, they didn't get an SDK out as promised, and when Windows 3.1 came out, it was all over.
I wouldn't be surprised. It wasn't so much that Windows won the market as all of their competitors lost and failed to react. They didn't bother to do the work necessary to stay alive, and they died.
I've used both GeoWorks and OS/2. They were good systems. They failed, but not because of Microsoft, but because of bad marketing and the failure to position themselves as development platforms.
I agree. Turbo Pascal for DOS, version 6, will not run on Windows 95 or 98 or maybe both, I don't remember. But TP6 ran just fine under OS/2. And if I'm not mistaken, OS/2 was a true 32-bit system except for the Windows 3.1 box. Win 95 and to some extent 98 were basically 16 bit systems with 32 bit support because so many programs needed to run as 15-bit applications. I believe OS/2 would run them as separate processes. I never had the sort of problems with running applications under OS/2 that I did under 95/98.
You can almost certainly make a burger at home for $1 that will have less saturated fat and more protein. That means fewer empty calories. And that's just burgers. Using leaner meats, forgoing the bun, and replacing the cheese with milk, almonds, and apples, you can get a fuller, healthier, better tasting meal for $1.
The real value McDonald's offers is convenience.
I think it's going to be extremely difficult to make the equivalent of a double cheeseburger for $1. You priced milk, almonds and apples lately? Milk is around $4 a gallon, almonds are around $5.50 a pound, apples at $2.50. You're not going to do it for $1 unless you're buying many dollars worth, which I think defeats your argument. If you're going to buy at least $20 worth of supplies you might be right, but for someone who wants $1 or $2 worth of cheeseburgers it's going to cost much more to make it the way you suggested. For bulk purchases it might work, but not for small amounts.
You have a constitutional right to infringe copyrights?
I don't think that is being said. On the other hand, there may be no constitutional right for the State of Tennessee to enforce copyright since it is arguable that Congress has completely usurped the subject of copyright and taken any and all jurisdiction over the subject away from the states.
For example, the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th, ending prohibition and providing that importation of alcohol into a state in violation of its laws is illegal. Thus it was argued that it means that there is one exception that states have no jurisdiction over interstate commerce; the exception had to do with alcoholic beverage shipments to a state, where the state would have jurisdiction over interstate commerce in this one particular instance. However, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the 21st Amendment did not give states jurisdiction at all over interstate commerce even when it dealt with importing alcoholic beverages.
So while one can say that one is not saying that someone has a constitutional right to infringe copyright, what can be said is that a state has no constitutional right to enforce it either.
It's like shopping: receiving stolen goods is illegal (IANAL), but there is no way you, as a shopper, can know whether the goods you buy at a shop are legit or not. You see some nice clothes and you buy them, but what if the shopkeeper sold you stolen clothes? You can't know that.
That is a good point, but we also have the rule of good faith - in most cases - in which, when a person acts in good faith this is an excuse for misconduct. Also, to claim criminality there must be a condition called "scienter," which means you have to know or have reason to know that your action was illegal. If you go into a regular store or walk up to a street-corner merchant who appears to be legitimate, and purchase something, and especially if they give you a receipt, this would generally be enough to defeat scienter, since it is not typical practice for a fence to give a receipt for stolen goods and it would be reasonable to expect that someone in a normal business location who is not selling stolen or counterfeit goods to act in this fashion.
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Well, anyway, one of the cats liked to use one spot in the corner, so my sister put an empty tray there to keep it from stinking things up. I watched as three dogs were hovering over that cat like drivers during a mall sale hovering over a parking space, waiting for her to finish manufacturing their next snack! I thought it was hilarious.
He said he works at a dealership, and I can only assume that he means a car dealership. Have you ever seen a car dealership on a college campus?
A "campus" means a collection of buildings; the location of the largest software company in the world is sometimes referred to as the Microsoft Campus. While he doesn't say so, I suspect that either it's a multi-brand car dealership ("dealership" is usually used to refer to places that sell cars, but technically could be any franchised retail operation), which has several buildings on a large lot, say, a Ford office, a Chrysler office and a combined repair shop.
The push for RFID chips is not about security, it's about shifting the burden on the user, instead of the banks.
The burden has never been on the banks. If my card is lost and used to buy $2,000 worth of crap at Best Buy then Best Buy is going to be out the money when they lose the chargeback. You think the bank is going to allow themselves to take the hit?
Uh, yes it is. If the merchant has a signature on a receipt, the merchant is covered; if the customer denies the charge, then it's a stolen card and the bank is responsible. The bank can only stick it to the merchant on a telephone or unsigned transaction. That's the whole point of getting a signature; if the receipt is signed, the merchant is covered.
The reasoning behind it is not one of convenience, it is to allow more fraud to occur. Smaller cases of fraud are more likely to go unnoticed and uncontested.
The push for RFID chips is not about security, it's about shifting the burden on the user, instead of the banks. Fraud? User must have lost their card and failed to report it in time. They get nothing.
You're only required to report an error within 60 days of when you notice, and your maximum liability for all fraud committed during the period of the incidents is $50, and some credit cards don't even impose that.
Poison might be useful but here's a solution that avoids poison. Mix up trays consisting of 1/2 flour and 1/2 cement. Provide plenty of trays of water. Because as some of the posters here have indicated, you may not be able to shut off their food supply.
I think the use of putting the GPL into open source Windows Software is because typically the installer programs are set up to have a "stop" for a license agreement, and rather than disable this stop on a standard install package, they just drop in the GPL. I don't think it has anything with requiring agreement to the GPL to use the software as much as not wanting to break a known-good install or not wanting to bother to rewrite the pre-built script from standard install packages, and rather than put nothing in the 'you must agree to this license' provision, they put the GPL in rather than some unimportant text. Most programmers are not lawyers and most don't care. The install script has a spot for a license; they have the GPL license, so they stick it in there because they presume that's what it's for.
He was born in Hawaii after 1959 (when it became a state and was no longer a territory), that makes him a citizen. End of story.
The only possible exception - which is not applicable here - is if his parents had diplomatic immunity from some other country, and he also had it as the child of foreign diplomats, and thus was not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Since no one has made the slightest claim that either of his parents were in the diplomatic service of another country, this possible exception does not apply.
Women all the time who are pregnant come visit the U.S. (usually California) from Mexico to have their baby in an American hospital. Since they (and possibly their husband or boyfriend) are Mexican nationals, the child is probably one too. But since the parents are not diplomatic personnel, the child gets that precious birth certificate issued by the hospital which indicates the child is a U.S. Citizen. So, years later, this man who has lived in Mexico all his life, can simply walk right up to the border, present his Mexican ID card and his U.S. birth certificate to the border patrol agent at the gateway, and walk into the U.S. just like any other American Citizen, because he is one same as anyone else born here.
This is a common issue in a number of countries where, because of laws of each country, a child of parents from one country are born in another, the child ends up having dual citizenship by birth. If someone is the child of two American Citizens and is born in a hospital in Toronto, what country are they a citizen of? Both the U.S. and Canada. And if their mother is Jewish and they visit Israel, by law they are also a citizen of that country as well, so they could be a citizen of three countries.
It probably won't apply to cameras, and I personally have three of them that are all about the same size as a cell phone, and none of them make noise when they take either snapshots or video (with sound, no less.)
Is this going to apply to existing phones that do not have sound on taking pictures or where the feature can be turned off? I doubt this is possible and I doubt they're going to order existing cell phones with cameras to be discarded.
Just another example of feel-good laws that don't really do much. So let me understand this correctly, if I take a picture with a still or video camera that does not make a sound, or if I take a picture with a cell phone that does not make a sound but is an old model I commit no crime, but if I take a picture with a cell phone that does not make a sound, but it's a recent model, I am subject to fines and potentially imprisonment?
And if I'm using a cell phone that takes pictures, I'm supposed to know the difference by...?
So, setting up elaborate structures to avoid being convicted of, say, murder, is also acceptable in your eyes?
You can't use a corporate structure to evade criminal responsibility for one's actions. But let me give you an example. You and a guy don't like each other and both of you would like to kill the other. If you or him do that, the winner can get charged with murder and maybe face the death penalty. But, if you go to California and publicly have a duel, by law the maximum the winner can be charged with is 'duelling' which has a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison.
While I'm kind of carrying your (inaccurate) example to an example of ridiculousness, it is possible for people to structure their affairs in ways that would otherwise defeat some legal restrictions. Where such restrictions are criminal, the actions are a crime. Where such restrictions are legal, and have to do with money and what we own, control or earn, we call that 'estate and tax planning.' While we don't particularly like people doing criminal planning to try and reduce penalties, there is nothing illegal or immoral to use the law to reduce what one owes in taxes; to again refer to Learned Hand, "taxes are collected by distraint they are not voluntary contributions" and "no one owes a duty to pay more than the law requires." As long as there are legal ways to change one's taxes to reduce them, even to zero if possible, one would be a fool not to take advantage of every one. My understanding is lots of people don't use all of them, primarily because they can't afford the $500 an hour experts to tell them how.
Let me give one example. For a lot of people, even those making small amounts of money, turning a hobby into a business could turn something that costs them a few thousand a year could become a legal way to reduce taxes by allowing them to deduct what they spend on that hobby. Plus, they get three years to try to make money before they can no longer take the deduction. So if they close that business and start over with a new hobby, it becomes a brand-new business and the three-year clock starts over. By making some small changes in how they operate their hobby, they can declare it a business and deduct some expenses and potentially reduce their taxes. But most people don't bother, and they pay more. Is it wrong for them to do this (to use the law to reduce their taxes) if the law permits it? If you say yes, you're saying nobody should be allowed to potentially start a new business that might become successful, since all successful businesses start as small operations and many start as hobbies that became successful and make money. If you say no, then you're just engaging in class warfare where you resent rich people because they have more money (and thus more opportunities) than you.
The billions and billions of dollars that sit in corporate bank accounts shouldn't be taxed? CEOs will just start using expense accounts for everything instead of multi-million dollar salaries.
Let me ask you a question: does the money that is in corporate bank accounts get left in a mattress, or is it likely that the bank would be loaning out the part not being spent, which allows the economy to function? I have money 'sitting' in a share account ("savings account" at a bank) at a credit union; do you think they don't loan it out to other members while I'm not using it?
You got one big difference people either don't think about or fail to mention. While soldiers might have had waterboarding or something similar applied to them (probably to train them to be less sensitized to it if done to them), the soldier is not going to be murdered by his superiors. They're never going to go overboard or make serious mistakes on their own comrades, and whether anyone admits this or not, anyone having this done to them (by their own military) is going to realize this.
A 'detainee' doesn't have this protection; he has no idea how far they will go and can fully expect to be drowned to death if he doesn't give them what they want (or what he hopes they want that he has so that he won't be murdered).
Even Hollywood recognized this, and years before 9/11 happened; go watch The Siege and look at Bruce Willis' part in the film; or even the whole movie, and maybe you'll understand the significance of why the treatment of so-called detainees will never be the same as treatment of ordinary people or those not considered to be combatants of any kind.
But going back to the use of simulated waterboarding in training, no matter how close the training is for our troops, it can never be the same conditions as someone who was grabbed by our military because they have no real protections that our own people have vis-a-vis their teammates and supervisors. (Does anyone seriously believe a guy is going to treat his buddy as badly as he would someone they've grabbed or bought from an Afghan warlord as presumably a combatant?)
I'll give you another example; use of torture or misconduct by soldiers encourages its use against them by others. Does anyone remember the stories of American Indians scalping people? Do you know why they did that? Because the white men (soldiers) did that to the Indians they found, and the Indians thought it was a sign of respect to warriors or at least it was a legitimate practice since the white men did it, so they did it too. But they didn't start doing it until after they saw how the white soldiers did it first.
As another poster here pointed out, you could get the complete DOOM in the first episode for free, never buy another thing and play it forever, and it basically convinced almost everyone to buy the other two episodes. At least it did for me, and I'm a messy cheapskate
I bought The Orange Box based strictly on the strength of the video demos of Portal, and in fact, if I had gotten a playable demo of part of Portal it would have convinced me even stronger to buy the game. (A video showing the game on YouTube convinced my sister it would make her too dizzy and she wouldn't like it.) A demo sells the game as well as the game is. A great demo for a sucky game is going to let more people know how badly it sucks faster than no demo at all, because having actually tried it they'll buy it faster than they would otherwise. This gets a smaller number of copies out faster than when a lot of people buy it over time, and the even quicker sales to a small number of people make its faults more obvious.
Critics point this out for motion pictures; a red flag in most cases is when the distributor won't screen it in advance of release for critics; it usually means they know the movie is going to be terrible. James Cameron tells how when they were getting ready to release Terminator they needed to get a strong exposure to critics in order to start a buzz, and by making sure lots of them saw it - for free, of course - it made the film even more successful because even the critics loved it and the 'buzz' they generated got more people out to see it, including people who might not otherwise have gone to see a typical 'action' type film.
If, however, the demo proves the value of the product, it builds 'buzz' and gets people talking. This is even more critical now that you don't just have word of mouth, but "word of blog," too. I mean, I run a tiny blog but I still get as many as a thousand people reading some of my articles; if, say, I bash a game, I'm another person confirming to as many as a thousand other people that it's lousy. Imagine what the effect of a comment is from someone who has a couple million visitors a month.
I suspect it's the exact opposite of what you would normally expect: hoarding (as in not giving away free samples) only works where you've got trash; sharing your stuff works better for you when you have really good stuff. if your game is good, giving away a sample is going to make people more interested in buying it, if your game is terrible, a demo is going to make people know this even faster because the demo will sell the game to people who will scream bloody murder.
Stupid Asshole me allows this shitty browser to lose what I typed in here, then I re-enter the message but instead of using an external program to store the comment until I could post it, I allow myself to be fucked-in-the-ass a second time and it loses my comment while I'm formatting it. I am typing this in a separate program, I won't get bit a third time.
Here's how the statute is unconstitutional:
There are far too many others to list, but even misdemeanor or fine-only charges have been struck down; a felony law wouldn't stand 30 seconds.
I still have the message, there were 1255 recipients, me plus 1244 not me plus 1627.
I am on a list of bidders for potential contracts with the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority, which operates the Metrobus and Metrorail for Washington, DC and the nearby suburbs in Maryland and Virginia. The annual budget for the Authority is in excess of a billion dollars; it's larger than the budget of the entire State of Montana, for example.
One time I got a message with more than 25 recipients on it regarding a change in the way they were operating their procurement website. Well, I suspected that it was some spammer pretending to be from the Authority, because one of the "red flag" signs of being spammed is more than 10 recipients on the same messsage. But I discovered that it really was from the Transit Authority, it was simply an ordinary announcement with no url links and nothing but the announcement. But instead of simply either making the recipients BCC recipients, and sending it to an internal transit authority e-mail address as To:, or sending individual messages to each potential supplier, the contracting agent had simply sent it out To: listing all persons who were registered as bidders with the authority.
My e-mail address was one of these potential suppliers along with a few other people.
1,627 other people to be precise. This was the longest To: list on an e-mail message I have ever seen on a piece of e-mail that wasn't spam; 1,628 contacts. No, I didn't reply all, but I couldn't think of a way to refer to this incident as a "Send All" message and tie into this story. The other half of this incident was that the procurement agent had also just given all potential suppliers to the Authority, every other supplier's e-mail address, too.
The last thing the book talks about is how a man discovered a lot of partially processed secret materials and he had to find a way to get rid of all of it, a considerable pile, and discovered a useful way. Which it doesn't tell us, other than to say the explanation is hidden in the message, using an innocent intervention, or something like that.
So, given that it has something to do with purloined letter methods, my guess is they took the lot of paper down to a processing center, where the paper absolutely has to be clean, and they ground up and processed it to make newsprint, where the formerly classified material has been so destroyed that it could be used to print the next day's newspapers. Would be sort of ironic that way, and would fit with his emphasis on 'innocent' information systems.
I would agree that the way homeopathy is done most of it is worthless, but there are a number of non-medicinal remedies that do work (anyone care to claim that use of Vitamin C and Zinc are ineffective on colds?)
But this book is basically just another of organized medicine's slams on anything that threatens its cartel-like powers to control the delivery of sick care (we do not provide health care in this country, most doctors are too busy treating symptoms of problems, not preventing illness). A large part of what is claimed by the book is probably either misleading or is simply 'tarring with the same brush' ineffective practices with things that might have value.
One example, the claims by manufacturers of FDA unapproved products that 'this product is not intended to cure, prevent or treat any disease'. They are required to say this because if they make any claims at all not proven by double-blind studies their products are subject to seizure and fines. If a seller of limes (the fruit) was to announce their product cures scurvy - absolutely known to be true since the British Navy started giving limes to sailors, hence their nickname - the company would be in violation of FDA rules and its crops would be seized and destroyed, because federal law makes it illegal other than for a manufactured drug which is licensed for distribution by the FDA to claim it can cure any disease, even though the statement is true.
Some of these practices - especially chiropractic - may have use in some cases. But this is an old, old rivalry; MDs hate chiropractic and have been trying to have it outlawed for decades. There are many people who have had relief for various conditions as a result. But since it can't be patented, nobody is going to spend huge amounts of money to do double-blind tests on these various methods, because organized medicine - as well as pharmaceutical companies, who, if people use other methods, they get less money - sees it as cutting into their profits, and it's best that there be no evidence available to argue in their favor.
The whole issue is similar to the sad state of affairs in the copyright and patent arenas today. People trying to make money today and tomorrow on the work they do today. Lets face it, the world is "so what have you done for me lately?" Evolve with this or die out. If you want to make money tomorrow, you'd better be ready to work for it tomorrow too.
A TV commercial from the 1970s for a hotel chain sums it up exactly, at the end of the commercial came their jingle with the end line, "What has Sheraton done for you lately? What has Sheraton done for you now?"
The end result is the same. After that explosion of software development for Windows Microsoft began buying up smaller software vendors and leveraging their OS monopoly in other areas. This had little to do with government intervention. Right now Microsoft is ready to take a huge chunk out of the antivirus business when they start including their AV software with Windows. They aren't going to take a chunk out of the AV business by being a superior product but simply by bundling it with their monopoly operating system. This seems antithetical to the goals of the free market to me.
It is exactly part of the free market. No one has a vested right to have a particular market. If Microsoft chooses to add a feature, that's their choice. Is GM liable for the failure of other radio makers if it chooses to include a radio in its cars? Or if it chooses to start including CD players in lower end models that it didn't before? Note that most cars include a radio in them, but that doesn't stop some people who want better radios to buy one and replace the one that came with it. Not as many as would buy a radio for their car if it didn't come with one, but some still do.
Further, it's arguable that the need for AV software was the result of bad design choices by Microsoft in not making Windows immune to viruses. (Which, I note, that in general Linux, because of its security policies, is.) If Microsoft were to seriously make Windows so that it's not vulnerable it would be the same thing, and those who depended upon it to remain unsafe would have to change to other lines of business.
In the pre-win95 era there were a number of "windows clones" (in that they had similar functionality to Windows, rather than necessarilly running the same software) which were arguably better - GeoWorks and OS/2 spring to mind (given the choice between GeoWorks and Windows 3, I think I'd choose GeoWorks every time).
Geoworks Ensemble had its chance. It was far faster on a 286 than Windows 3.0 was on a 386 and had WYSIWYG screen and printer fonts before TrueType. Unfortunately, they didn't get an SDK out as promised, and when Windows 3.1 came out, it was all over.
I wouldn't be surprised. It wasn't so much that Windows won the market as all of their competitors lost and failed to react. They didn't bother to do the work necessary to stay alive, and they died.
I've used both GeoWorks and OS/2. They were good systems. They failed, but not because of Microsoft, but because of bad marketing and the failure to position themselves as development platforms.
I agree. Turbo Pascal for DOS, version 6, will not run on Windows 95 or 98 or maybe both, I don't remember. But TP6 ran just fine under OS/2. And if I'm not mistaken, OS/2 was a true 32-bit system except for the Windows 3.1 box. Win 95 and to some extent 98 were basically 16 bit systems with 32 bit support because so many programs needed to run as 15-bit applications. I believe OS/2 would run them as separate processes. I never had the sort of problems with running applications under OS/2 that I did under 95/98.
You can almost certainly make a burger at home for $1 that will have less saturated fat and more protein. That means fewer empty calories. And that's just burgers. Using leaner meats, forgoing the bun, and replacing the cheese with milk, almonds, and apples, you can get a fuller, healthier, better tasting meal for $1.
The real value McDonald's offers is convenience.
I think it's going to be extremely difficult to make the equivalent of a double cheeseburger for $1. You priced milk, almonds and apples lately? Milk is around $4 a gallon, almonds are around $5.50 a pound, apples at $2.50. You're not going to do it for $1 unless you're buying many dollars worth, which I think defeats your argument. If you're going to buy at least $20 worth of supplies you might be right, but for someone who wants $1 or $2 worth of cheeseburgers it's going to cost much more to make it the way you suggested. For bulk purchases it might work, but not for small amounts.
I do have a constitutional right to face my accuser in court...
That only applies in criminal cases. Very few copyright cases are criminal in nature; less than 20 a year, I think.
You have a constitutional right to infringe copyrights?
I don't think that is being said. On the other hand, there may be no constitutional right for the State of Tennessee to enforce copyright since it is arguable that Congress has completely usurped the subject of copyright and taken any and all jurisdiction over the subject away from the states.
For example, the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th, ending prohibition and providing that importation of alcohol into a state in violation of its laws is illegal. Thus it was argued that it means that there is one exception that states have no jurisdiction over interstate commerce; the exception had to do with alcoholic beverage shipments to a state, where the state would have jurisdiction over interstate commerce in this one particular instance. However, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the 21st Amendment did not give states jurisdiction at all over interstate commerce even when it dealt with importing alcoholic beverages.
So while one can say that one is not saying that someone has a constitutional right to infringe copyright, what can be said is that a state has no constitutional right to enforce it either.
It's like shopping: receiving stolen goods is illegal (IANAL), but there is no way you, as a shopper, can know whether the goods you buy at a shop are legit or not. You see some nice clothes and you buy them, but what if the shopkeeper sold you stolen clothes? You can't know that.
That is a good point, but we also have the rule of good faith - in most cases - in which, when a person acts in good faith this is an excuse for misconduct. Also, to claim criminality there must be a condition called "scienter," which means you have to know or have reason to know that your action was illegal. If you go into a regular store or walk up to a street-corner merchant who appears to be legitimate, and purchase something, and especially if they give you a receipt, this would generally be enough to defeat scienter, since it is not typical practice for a fence to give a receipt for stolen goods and it would be reasonable to expect that someone in a normal business location who is not selling stolen or counterfeit goods to act in this fashion.