Government employees are also individuals. Tax dollars don't magically disappear when they go to the government, they get cycled back through the economy. The money many not be cycled through in the most effiecient way, but that is a seperate issue.
The first two paragraphs of my post are just the same arguement you made with "corporation" and "person" interchanged. I could ask you what gives you the power to decide what corporations are "desgined" for, but I would just be missing the point as badly as you are.
Ok, so which is it? Do "corporations" pay taxes, or do "people"? Well, the answer is both.
Incorrect. Individuals pay taxes. Corporations collect taxes on behalf of the government. The money that government gets has to come from somewhere. Whether or not one individual is trying to get more money to pay their higher taxes does not change the fact that, ultimately, money goes from individuals to government.
Your distinction between "pay" and "collect" is meaningless. Let's keep it simple. Both companies and people have sources of income and expenses. When the government applies a new tax, both people and companies have a new expense. They will either try to decrease another expense, increase their income by charging more for the goods and services they create or end up with less savings.
Money doesn't "ultimately" come from anywhere, it cycles through the economy. Sometimes it is in the possession of individuals, sometimes by corporations and sometimes by the government. If you are going to argue that money only has meaning when possessed by sentient beings, which corporations are not, then you will have to argue that it isn't meaningful to talk about the government getting money either. Your statement then becomes "taxes are paid by people to people", which is true, but not very useful.
When taxes are placed on one part of the economy, that part of the economy is rarely able to shift all of that tax onto the other parts. If you shifted all the taxes from individuals to corporations, the profits and investments of those corporations would go down. That, as far as I'm concerned, means that the corproations are "paying" those taxes. If you shifted all taxes to individuals, the their disposable incomes would go down. That, as far as I'm concerned, means that the individuals are "paying" those taxes. In either case, there is less money on the next stage of the cycle. When corporate profits go down, it means that shareholders have less. When disposable income goes down, it means sales to consumers will go down. Whether it is better for economy in the long run to decrease profits or decrease disposable income is not an easy question to answer, but that is a seperate question.
This needs to be repeated over and over again because many people do not understand it. People do not pay taxes. People collect taxes.
Here's how it works. A person is a legal entity designed to make money. It has a list of expenses and a list of revenues. One of those expenses is "taxes." When the government raises taxes on a person, the person has to make up for the higher costs. They do this by increasing their demand for wages. I.e., the corporation has to bear the brunt of the higer cost of the person's tax. I.e., the person is merely a tax proxy for the government.
Ok, so which is it? Do "corporations" pay taxes, or do "people"? Well, the answer is both. When the government raises taxes on either people or corporations, they both end up paying some of the tax. Who pays how much is determined by market. Rarely does the tax translate entirely into either higher wages or lower profits.
Another myth is that taxing corporations causes "double taxation". The government taxes most transactions, you can just as easily argue that taxing people is "double taxation".
Since corporations are legally a "person" and can own property, they need the protection of the national defense, and they use the nation's infrastructure, etc. there is no reason they shouldn't pay taxes. It could be argued that it would be fairer if we taxed both people and corporations exactly the same and instead of taxing only some transactions, we tax all transactions the same.
I was mostly on minna, but I met my (now ex) wife on a plato system at the University of Nebraska in the early 1980s.... I wonder how many plato systems there were in the world.
Lately, I've been wonder if the amount of spam you get is related to your email address.
These lists of "20 million clean email addresses" have to be placed in some order, and I would bet that most spammers don't get through the entire list for every spam. So, if your name appears near the top, you should get a lot more spam than if your name is near the bottom. A lot of spammers seem to sort by either the whole email address, or by the host name.
So, would aaron@aalig.org going to get a lot more email than zork@zyzzyva.com?
Companies that sell spam software and email lists will continue to make money as long as there are enough people who BELIEVE that spamming can make money. Everyone sees all this spam and think to themselves "maybe I can make a little more money this way." All it takes is for a tiny percentage of people to try, find out that it doesn't make money, and then either stop or get shut down (or both). But, as long as this "failure" convinces just one more person to try spamming, the myth will continue.
Spamming won't end when people stop buying products from spammers, spamming will end when everyone in the entire world has a clue and have as much money as they think they need. Global peace has a much better chance of happening.
Using the word "piracy" with respect to stealing intellectual property is not something new. I have read articles from the 1880s that refer to people who violate patents as pirates. There is no indication that this usage was somehow "new" back then, or that it was limited to patents.
A lot has changed in the English language over the last 120 years, back then being "gay" meant you were happy or merry and "computer" was someones job title. The use of "pirate", however, doesn't appear to have changed much.
You don't say what the results from using bash are, but your code worked just as I would expect on my Debian system using bash. That is, it prints out the user and group of each file in the current directory. Well, I had to change/sbin/ls to ls (or/bin/ls), but that doesn't seem to be a problem with bash...
I have used Eric's website since before he went to Wolfram, and I was really pissed when it went off the net. Eric has managed to bring it back, but in such a form that it appears that CRC will continue to receive income from the mear existance of the website, and will now be allowed to publish books based on the future changes.
To me, this means that this website is now proprietary. This is like what happened to the cddb, or SSH. Maybe it is time to start the equivalent of freedb and OpenSSH, and to replace Eric's website. Produce a website under a publishing equivalent of the GPL or the BSD source license.
Or is time to fork?
I've been slowly coming to the conclusion that the web really doesn't maintain freedom of information even to the extent that copyrighted books do. Books, at least, have multiple copies made and websites such as bookfiner.com can find many very old and long out of print books that had only a small number of copies made. A website, in contrast, is rarely duplicated. If the author decides to shut it down, then *poof* it is gone for good. Or, if the web hosting service goes belly up and there are no backups, it is gone. Or, when the author dies, and their heirs don't care about it, it is gone. Or, the website uses lots of active pages, and the software breaks on a new release and the *owner* (not the surfers) don't one cares enough to fix it, it will be gone. Actually, it doesn't even have to have lots of active pages, just a few key ones.
There are many many books that you can buy today where the author, and everyone else, has found no interest in touching/updating for decades. These books may still be of interest to readers and historians though. That's ok, because books can just sit, but a website has to be maintained.
It isn't just copyright law that is the problem, the whole technology of the web is very centeralized and lacks redundancy. Even if it was declared tomorrow that you could freely duplicate any website you wanted to, few websites would actually be mirrored. And, of course, you can't really mirror the active web pages anyway.
So, what is going to happen when VA Linux (or whatever its name de-jour is) decides that/. isn't worth it and shuts it down? Sure similar websites may well pop up to replace it, but all the history that/. has accumulated will be gone. There won't be the equivalent of dejanews for/. to preserve the past.
CRC has told Eric that it really doesn't care if his website just drops of the net forever. One day, Eric and Wolfram are going to get tired of pay for it, and it will go away. It, and really most of the web, are just walking zombies. The web is worse that even ebooks because ebooks are at least duplicated and eventually (in 100 years or so), they may be able to be reporduced. Almost no website of today will still be here in 20 years.
In reality, Eric's website may well be one of the few that will exist 200 years from now because there will still be printed copies of CRCs books.
When I have time, and I get a telemarketer, I try to get them to quit their job.
Remember, these are real people with feelings and they like to be treated like humans. I always ask for their name and ask if they ever get really rude comments when they call people. Normally, they say they do, and then I ask them if they understand why people are rude to them. Usually they start dancing around the issue of how their actions are the cause of other people being rude to them, and you have to firmly but politly talk to them about the issue. Tell them that you don't think they are they are the type of person who likes to be rude to people. You can also ask them how they feel about getting telemarketers at their home.
They will often bring up the subject how "this is just my job". To this, you have to explain that everyone is responsible for their own actions. Ask them if their employer asked them to steal from somone or to hurt someone, would they do it?
You can also bring up why so many of their coworkers quite after such a short period of time. Obviously, other people realize that what they are doing is wrong. The reason why the pay is "high" (for unskilled labor, but I don't say that) is because so few people want to be yelled at all day long.
Try to keep mentioning their name, try to connect with them. Try to get inside their minds and find their soft spots.
If nothing else, you have made the telemarketers waste a lot of time on a long distance call.
cold showers and the chimney effect
on
IgNobel Awards
·
· Score: 1
People seem to be dismissing the chimney effect of a shower by showing that the curtain still pulls in when you use cold water instead of hot water. While the temperature of the water certainly can play a part, there is another thing about the water that is important:
Water is wet. Really. You can go check if you want.
Now the funny thing about all this wet stuff all over the inside of the shower is that water vapor (H2O) is lighter than air (N2, O2, etc.). Yes, H2O (molecular weight of 2*1+16=18) is about 36% lighter than N2, O2 (molecular weight of 2*14=28, 2*16=32 etc.) This fact is well known by pilots, who have to deal with less lift when flying over large bodies of water and such.
I, for one, dismiss the "tornado" theory based on the fact that the shower curtain still pulls in when the shower is hitting my head.
MAPS decreases freedom on the net. [...] Thanks to MAPS its about impossible for me to send email directly from my server. Instead I am forced to use the email account of my service provider.
No, MAPS is not decreasing freedom on the net. Your right to throw a punch ends where my nose begins. You still have the ablility to attempt an SMTP connection to anywhere you want, and people who run SMTP servers, such as myself, still have the right to ignore you. You have no "right" to force people to accept your email, I have every right to use my property as I see fit. MAPS has every right to say what they want, as long as it is not libelous or desturbing the piece or breaking some other serious law. You and I are free to choose to listen to them or not.
Really, you aren't even seriously hampered by MAPS . You can still send email, all you have to do is use a machine with a fixed IP address and hasn't been involved in a lot of SPAM.
What you are doing is missplacing your anger. You should be mad at your ISP for its silly restrictions and costs of providing you with a fixed IP address. You should not be mad at MAPS, nor the people who choose to use MAPS.
If all the video cards, network interfaces, laptop BIOSes, etc. are proprietary and you can't get enough specs on them to let you boot Debian, it will be hard to continue to develop it.
(Oh, I've been running Debian as my only OS since the 0.98(?) days...)
Ok, there are wholes in all three of the "myths", but really, what "regulations" are they talking about?
People are acting as if the government is going to outlaw the web. That's nuts. It ain't gonna happen. There is no reason to and too many people would object.
What is happening is things that are illegal in the physical world, but have been unrestrained in cyberspace are being cracked down on. I have a problem with the length of time that something can be copyrighted, but copyright infringment is illegal and the vast majority of people do not want to see all copyrights abolished. Napster like music trading of new music will be forced into an underground, just like child pornography, stock market scams and credit card fraud.
The US government is too scared to even enact taxes on the internet, something they would love to do and they even arguably have a good reason since internet sales deprive the local governments of local sales taxes. The US government has backed down on most encryption export controls and the requirement for key escrow. There has been little done to stop pornographic (but not obscene) material, even though both the right wing religions freaks and the left wing feminists both hate it.
Ok, we appear to be losing some ground on copyright issues, but the war is far from being lost. One of the biggest hurdles for people who want reasonable copyright reform are the people who think they should be able to get the lastest DVD movie for free, much like pictures of abused 5 year olds hurt people arguing it is ok to have adult erotica.
Go back and read that article again. It is nothing but FUD and the only people it should scare are thoses that think it is ok to trade the lastest MP3s and DVDs.
The xlock -mode galaxy code is far from being an accurate simulation, it just looks interesting.
Long ago, I wrote up a more accurate n-body simulator called XStar, along with an introductory text on the n-body problem. XStar isn't that accurate either, as it is only a 2D simulation, rather than a 3D simulation, and the dynamics of a million particle system is very different than a system with only a couple dozen stars. Still, it is pretty accurate for what it does and will give you some insight on how stuff really works.
To give you some idea how old XStar is, it was designed on a 33MHz 486 on a 1024x768 display. If you run it, make sure you add more stars, as in "xstar -b 50" or even "xstar -b 200" if you have a fast computer.
Along a similar line of thought, ask that the computers be held in evidence. You will need to know the exact configuration of the computers in order to show whether the idle loop would really run, or if the computers will consume small amounts of additional energy. Any use of these computers could easily destroy the evidence of this massive crime.
While there seems to be a lot of discussion on the pros and cons of censorship and such, one thing that needs to be pointed out is that it is hazardous for non-custodial parents to be out of step with what society considers "proper parenting."
Many divorce parents don't get along, and all it takes is the custodial parent to find a judge that who agrees with them, and the non-custodial parent can lose all visitation rights. If you don't take all "reasonable and prudent measures" to "protect" your child, you are taking a big risk.
And when using the Google search engine if you are looking for information about the
book "Little Women" you should also include the author's name with your search.
Did you actually try a google search of Little Women? Everything on the first two pages looked clean to me, and most were references to the book.
Self promotion isn't a huge problem on DMOZ. That's not to say that it doesn't happen, but if you are too blatant about it, you will get in trouble quickly. Either your competitors will complain, or the editors who are higher up in the hierarchy will notice.
Just to become a DMOZ editor, you have to provide several *good* examples of websites that you would like to add to the category you are applying to. If you sell widgets, that means you probably have to submit sites about your competitors. Editors even have slight handicaps, such as they can not, for any reason, have their own site marked as "cool". It doesn't make any difference if their site really is the coolest in the category, or even if it was another editor who marked it cool. Even if it was marked cool before you applied, you are required to uncool it.
The vast majority of editors are very even handed. The vast majority of biased editors get kicked out quickly.
--
Re:Text of 5th Circuit Decision is copyrighted
on
Is Law Copyrighted?
·
· Score: 2
Well, they don't own the copyright to the actual case law, but they have contracts to be the sole publisher for court documents. They then intermix the public domain case law with their own works so that it is extremely hard to seperate their copyrighted additions from the rest. You want to practice law? You will end up paying yearly fees to these companies. The courts see this as a big plus because they don't have to publish this stuff themselves and no tax dollars are spent.
I've read several comments to the effect of "No Duh, of course low levels of radiation is bad!" and "the radiation levels from cleaning up Chernobyl is 'low'???".
From what I know, much of the knowledge about how radiation effects humans comes from studies of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during WWII. From these very high levels of radiation exposure, studies found that there was basically a linear relationship between the amount of radiation you received and the chance that you would get cancer. From this comes the "linear, no threashold" model of radiation exposure and the thought that all radiation, no matter how little, runs the risk of causing health problems. Most government regulations of radiation exposure is based on this linear, no threshold model.
There are other people who feel that the linear, no threshold model is seriously flawed when dealing with low levels of radiation. They point out that radiation is a natural part of world, and the amount of radiation you are exposed to varries widely depending on where you are. For example, people living in Denver get much more radiation than those living in San Francisco because of their higher elevation. Also, when life first started to evolve on earth, the background radiation levels were much higher than today. The basic claim is that the body can usually deal with low levels of radiation, and it is only when you pass a threashold and overload it, that you start seeing a linear increase in health problems.
Trying to determine if there is a threshold and how low levels of radiation really effect people is a hot area of study. Unfortunately, you can't ethically expose people to levels of radiation that might cause problems, so studies of Chernobyl survivers are of particular interest.
There is actually another group of people who think that low levels of radiation is good for you. These people believe in something called "radiation hormesis". These people are generally considered idiots and quacks by most other people who study radiation.
The burden of proof MUST always be on the accuser, and it IS incumbent on the RIAA to tell Napster WHAT to ban!
You are right!
What should be happening is that the RIAA should find cases where Napster is contributing to copyright infringement, the RIAA sould take them to court, and if the judge finds Napster to be in violation of the law, Napster should pay the fine. Gee, the RIAA has done that.
Fortunately for Napster, the Judge has let them off easy with a deal where they stop contributing to copyright infringement by filtering based on a list provided by the RIAA. Unfortunately for Napster, if this compromise fails, it will likely mean that they will either have to pay the fines or go out of business.
While the burden of proof is on the accuser, it is the burden on everyone to obey the law or suffer the consequences. If you think the law is unjust, work to change it or peacefully protest or whatever.
The burden is on Napster to obey the law, just like it is for everyone else. They can't turn a blind eye to the copyright infringement that is going on and claim that "oh, I didn't know about *that* case also!" Imaging you trying to argue that before you can get a speeding ticket, you would have to have a cop warn you and a speed limit sign would need to be on every block.
This is not good news for Napster. The judge's earlier decision was a compromise to try and let Napster survive. But, just like a pizza delivery company which can only stay in business if their drivers speed and run red lights, the likely result of failure to stay within the law is for the company to go out of business.
Now, I have problems with the length of time that the current copyright laws keep works from entering the public domain, I don't like the DMCA, and I would even support compulsary licenses in many cases. However, much of Napsters contributory infringement is on recent works and I can't see getting rid of copyrights all together.
Slashdot Mirror
Government employees are also individuals. Tax dollars don't magically disappear when they go to the government, they get cycled back through the economy. The money many not be cycled through in the most effiecient way, but that is a seperate issue.
Your distinction between "pay" and "collect" is meaningless. Let's keep it simple. Both companies and people have sources of income and expenses. When the government applies a new tax, both people and companies have a new expense. They will either try to decrease another expense, increase their income by charging more for the goods and services they create or end up with less savings.
Money doesn't "ultimately" come from anywhere, it cycles through the economy. Sometimes it is in the possession of individuals, sometimes by corporations and sometimes by the government. If you are going to argue that money only has meaning when possessed by sentient beings, which corporations are not, then you will have to argue that it isn't meaningful to talk about the government getting money either. Your statement then becomes "taxes are paid by people to people", which is true, but not very useful.
When taxes are placed on one part of the economy, that part of the economy is rarely able to shift all of that tax onto the other parts. If you shifted all the taxes from individuals to corporations, the profits and investments of those corporations would go down. That, as far as I'm concerned, means that the corproations are "paying" those taxes. If you shifted all taxes to individuals, the their disposable incomes would go down. That, as far as I'm concerned, means that the individuals are "paying" those taxes. In either case, there is less money on the next stage of the cycle. When corporate profits go down, it means that shareholders have less. When disposable income goes down, it means sales to consumers will go down. Whether it is better for economy in the long run to decrease profits or decrease disposable income is not an easy question to answer, but that is a seperate question.
Here's how it works. A person is a legal entity designed to make money. It has a list of expenses and a list of revenues. One of those expenses is "taxes." When the government raises taxes on a person, the person has to make up for the higher costs. They do this by increasing their demand for wages. I.e., the corporation has to bear the brunt of the higer cost of the person's tax. I.e., the person is merely a tax proxy for the government.
Ok, so which is it? Do "corporations" pay taxes, or do "people"? Well, the answer is both. When the government raises taxes on either people or corporations, they both end up paying some of the tax. Who pays how much is determined by market. Rarely does the tax translate entirely into either higher wages or lower profits.
Another myth is that taxing corporations causes "double taxation". The government taxes most transactions, you can just as easily argue that taxing people is "double taxation".
Since corporations are legally a "person" and can own property, they need the protection of the national defense, and they use the nation's infrastructure, etc. there is no reason they shouldn't pay taxes. It could be argued that it would be fairer if we taxed both people and corporations exactly the same and instead of taxing only some transactions, we tax all transactions the same.
I was mostly on minna, but I met my (now ex) wife on a plato system at the University of Nebraska in the early 1980s.... I wonder how many plato systems there were in the world.
In fact, doing a google search on "please leave now" returns Disney as their second hit.
These lists of "20 million clean email addresses" have to be placed in some order, and I would bet that most spammers don't get through the entire list for every spam. So, if your name appears near the top, you should get a lot more spam than if your name is near the bottom. A lot of spammers seem to sort by either the whole email address, or by the host name.
So, would aaron@aalig.org going to get a lot more email than zork@zyzzyva.com?
Spamming won't end when people stop buying products from spammers, spamming will end when everyone in the entire world has a clue and have as much money as they think they need. Global peace has a much better chance of happening.
While the message on raisethefist.com says that they need $300 to get their web site back, you can still view much of it by going to archive.org's version of raisethefist.com. Google cache was able to find their pipe bomb directions web page.
A lot has changed in the English language over the last 120 years, back then being "gay" meant you were happy or merry and "computer" was someones job title. The use of "pirate", however, doesn't appear to have changed much.
You don't say what the results from using bash are, but your code worked just as I would expect on my Debian system using bash. That is, it prints out the user and group of each file in the current directory. Well, I had to change /sbin/ls to ls (or /bin/ls), but that doesn't seem to be a problem with bash...
To me, this means that this website is now proprietary. This is like what happened to the cddb, or SSH. Maybe it is time to start the equivalent of freedb and OpenSSH, and to replace Eric's website. Produce a website under a publishing equivalent of the GPL or the BSD source license.
Or is time to fork?
I've been slowly coming to the conclusion that the web really doesn't maintain freedom of information even to the extent that copyrighted books do. Books, at least, have multiple copies made and websites such as bookfiner.com can find many very old and long out of print books that had only a small number of copies made. A website, in contrast, is rarely duplicated. If the author decides to shut it down, then *poof* it is gone for good. Or, if the web hosting service goes belly up and there are no backups, it is gone. Or, when the author dies, and their heirs don't care about it, it is gone. Or, the website uses lots of active pages, and the software breaks on a new release and the *owner* (not the surfers) don't one cares enough to fix it, it will be gone. Actually, it doesn't even have to have lots of active pages, just a few key ones.
There are many many books that you can buy today where the author, and everyone else, has found no interest in touching/updating for decades. These books may still be of interest to readers and historians though. That's ok, because books can just sit, but a website has to be maintained.
It isn't just copyright law that is the problem, the whole technology of the web is very centeralized and lacks redundancy. Even if it was declared tomorrow that you could freely duplicate any website you wanted to, few websites would actually be mirrored. And, of course, you can't really mirror the active web pages anyway.
So, what is going to happen when VA Linux (or whatever its name de-jour is) decides that /. isn't worth it and shuts it down? Sure similar websites may well pop up to replace it, but all the history that /. has accumulated will be gone. There won't be the equivalent of dejanews for /. to preserve the past.
CRC has told Eric that it really doesn't care if his website just drops of the net forever. One day, Eric and Wolfram are going to get tired of pay for it, and it will go away. It, and really most of the web, are just walking zombies. The web is worse that even ebooks because ebooks are at least duplicated and eventually (in 100 years or so), they may be able to be reporduced. Almost no website of today will still be here in 20 years.
In reality, Eric's website may well be one of the few that will exist 200 years from now because there will still be printed copies of CRCs books.
Remember, these are real people with feelings and they like to be treated like humans. I always ask for their name and ask if they ever get really rude comments when they call people. Normally, they say they do, and then I ask them if they understand why people are rude to them. Usually they start dancing around the issue of how their actions are the cause of other people being rude to them, and you have to firmly but politly talk to them about the issue. Tell them that you don't think they are they are the type of person who likes to be rude to people. You can also ask them how they feel about getting telemarketers at their home.
They will often bring up the subject how "this is just my job". To this, you have to explain that everyone is responsible for their own actions. Ask them if their employer asked them to steal from somone or to hurt someone, would they do it?
You can also bring up why so many of their coworkers quite after such a short period of time. Obviously, other people realize that what they are doing is wrong. The reason why the pay is "high" (for unskilled labor, but I don't say that) is because so few people want to be yelled at all day long.
Try to keep mentioning their name, try to connect with them. Try to get inside their minds and find their soft spots.
If nothing else, you have made the telemarketers waste a lot of time on a long distance call.
Water is wet. Really. You can go check if you want.
Now the funny thing about all this wet stuff all over the inside of the shower is that water vapor (H2O) is lighter than air (N2, O2, etc.). Yes, H2O (molecular weight of 2*1+16=18) is about 36% lighter than N2, O2 (molecular weight of 2*14=28, 2*16=32 etc.) This fact is well known by pilots, who have to deal with less lift when flying over large bodies of water and such. I, for one, dismiss the "tornado" theory based on the fact that the shower curtain still pulls in when the shower is hitting my head.
Really, you aren't even seriously hampered by MAPS . You can still send email, all you have to do is use a machine with a fixed IP address and hasn't been involved in a lot of SPAM.
What you are doing is missplacing your anger. You should be mad at your ISP for its silly restrictions and costs of providing you with a fixed IP address. You should not be mad at MAPS, nor the people who choose to use MAPS.
(Oh, I've been running Debian as my only OS since the 0.98(?) days...)
People are acting as if the government is going to outlaw the web. That's nuts. It ain't gonna happen. There is no reason to and too many people would object.
What is happening is things that are illegal in the physical world, but have been unrestrained in cyberspace are being cracked down on. I have a problem with the length of time that something can be copyrighted, but copyright infringment is illegal and the vast majority of people do not want to see all copyrights abolished. Napster like music trading of new music will be forced into an underground, just like child pornography, stock market scams and credit card fraud.
The US government is too scared to even enact taxes on the internet, something they would love to do and they even arguably have a good reason since internet sales deprive the local governments of local sales taxes. The US government has backed down on most encryption export controls and the requirement for key escrow. There has been little done to stop pornographic (but not obscene) material, even though both the right wing religions freaks and the left wing feminists both hate it.
Ok, we appear to be losing some ground on copyright issues, but the war is far from being lost. One of the biggest hurdles for people who want reasonable copyright reform are the people who think they should be able to get the lastest DVD movie for free, much like pictures of abused 5 year olds hurt people arguing it is ok to have adult erotica.
Go back and read that article again. It is nothing but FUD and the only people it should scare are thoses that think it is ok to trade the lastest MP3s and DVDs.
Long ago, I wrote up a more accurate n-body simulator called XStar, along with an introductory text on the n-body problem. XStar isn't that accurate either, as it is only a 2D simulation, rather than a 3D simulation, and the dynamics of a million particle system is very different than a system with only a couple dozen stars. Still, it is pretty accurate for what it does and will give you some insight on how stuff really works.
To give you some idea how old XStar is, it was designed on a 33MHz 486 on a 1024x768 display. If you run it, make sure you add more stars, as in "xstar -b 50" or even "xstar -b 200" if you have a fast computer.
--
--
Many divorce parents don't get along, and all it takes is the custodial parent to find a judge that who agrees with them, and the non-custodial parent can lose all visitation rights. If you don't take all "reasonable and prudent measures" to "protect" your child, you are taking a big risk.
--
Did you actually try a google search of Little Women? Everything on the first two pages looked clean to me, and most were references to the book.
--
Just to become a DMOZ editor, you have to provide several *good* examples of websites that you would like to add to the category you are applying to. If you sell widgets, that means you probably have to submit sites about your competitors. Editors even have slight handicaps, such as they can not, for any reason, have their own site marked as "cool". It doesn't make any difference if their site really is the coolest in the category, or even if it was another editor who marked it cool. Even if it was marked cool before you applied, you are required to uncool it.
The vast majority of editors are very even handed. The vast majority of biased editors get kicked out quickly.
--
Well, they don't own the copyright to the actual case law, but they have contracts to be the sole publisher for court documents. They then intermix the public domain case law with their own works so that it is extremely hard to seperate their copyrighted additions from the rest. You want to practice law? You will end up paying yearly fees to these companies. The courts see this as a big plus because they don't have to publish this stuff themselves and no tax dollars are spent.
From what I know, much of the knowledge about how radiation effects humans comes from studies of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during WWII. From these very high levels of radiation exposure, studies found that there was basically a linear relationship between the amount of radiation you received and the chance that you would get cancer. From this comes the "linear, no threashold" model of radiation exposure and the thought that all radiation, no matter how little, runs the risk of causing health problems. Most government regulations of radiation exposure is based on this linear, no threshold model.
There are other people who feel that the linear, no threshold model is seriously flawed when dealing with low levels of radiation. They point out that radiation is a natural part of world, and the amount of radiation you are exposed to varries widely depending on where you are. For example, people living in Denver get much more radiation than those living in San Francisco because of their higher elevation. Also, when life first started to evolve on earth, the background radiation levels were much higher than today. The basic claim is that the body can usually deal with low levels of radiation, and it is only when you pass a threashold and overload it, that you start seeing a linear increase in health problems.
Trying to determine if there is a threshold and how low levels of radiation really effect people is a hot area of study. Unfortunately, you can't ethically expose people to levels of radiation that might cause problems, so studies of Chernobyl survivers are of particular interest.
There is actually another group of people who think that low levels of radiation is good for you. These people believe in something called "radiation hormesis". These people are generally considered idiots and quacks by most other people who study radiation.
The burden is on Napster to obey the law, just like it is for everyone else. They can't turn a blind eye to the copyright infringement that is going on and claim that "oh, I didn't know about *that* case also!" Imaging you trying to argue that before you can get a speeding ticket, you would have to have a cop warn you and a speed limit sign would need to be on every block. This is not good news for Napster. The judge's earlier decision was a compromise to try and let Napster survive. But, just like a pizza delivery company which can only stay in business if their drivers speed and run red lights, the likely result of failure to stay within the law is for the company to go out of business. Now, I have problems with the length of time that the current copyright laws keep works from entering the public domain, I don't like the DMCA, and I would even support compulsary licenses in many cases. However, much of Napsters contributory infringement is on recent works and I can't see getting rid of copyrights all together.