Be prepared to give up some freedoms. How about what the government may consider a risky lifestyle? Be prepared to give that up or lose your health coverage.
Hogwash. People in Canada or the EU still get treatment for skiing and snowboarding accidents (although seeing an orthopedist might take a while so that the wait gives you time to think about being more in control in the future). What they'll do is, where possible, increase taxes on certain products to support the associated increased risk. Like they do in Canada and the EU with cigarettes and liquor. They probably won't bother to go that far unless it's such a sufficiently widespread and damaging activity (like smoking and excessive drinking) that it significantly affects healthcare costs. The monetary barriers to entry on skiing, snowboarding, and skydiving are such that it's a small segment of the population that's affected and the bureaucratic overhead of a tax isn't worthwhile. For instance, ~1300 injuries and 30 fatalities yearly by 34,000 skydivers don't warrant the same attention and expenditure that the hundreds of millions that are obese, or abusing alcohol and cigarettes do, since the latter lead to cardiac, oncological, and other expensive medical treatments. The ROI just isn't comparable.
On the contrary, it's the private insurers who tend to tell you they won't cover you if you
have a pre-existing condition,
can't make the co-payments on really expensive treatments,
fall within the umpteen pages of other exclusionary fine print in the contract.
In a choice between paying a little more to perform a more risky hobby vs. getting bankrupted by a non-preventable disease beyond my control, I like the former better than the latter. Socialize the costs of the uncontrollable risks and, where the costs make it worthwhile, place more of the cost of the controllable risks on the individual responsible.
Yeah, but maybe, just maybe, the fact that the government has to pay for the costs of those self-destructive behaviours was behind public awareness campaigns to decrease those behaviours through other government departments like school lectures, documentaries and public service announcements on public TV, sin taxes on liquor and cigarettes, etc. There is little profit motive in the private-sector health system in the USA to co-ordinate a similarly effective response. The USA also has a shortage of GPs because training costs drive doctors to specialize and maximize their earnings potentials. That means fewer first-line response doctors to do more prevention counselling, and more specialists who want you to have serious enough problems to warrant their attention. There's an incentive in the government single payer system to get you to live a healthy lifestyle and keep costs down. There's less incentive in the private US system to do the same because disease prevention is a low profit activity for health care providers. In addition, all those non-insured people only get dealt with when their condition is so serious that they need (relatively more expensive and taxpayer-funded) emergency care.
That's why your population health indicator averages suck. The USA "private" system is geared provide the most expensive treatments to the rich people who can afford it; the rest get mediocre treatment that bankrupts them because they're not in the financial class the treatments are geared to, or are allowed to deteriorate until their condition is so critical that the taxpayer can be stuck with the bill from an emergency room.
You see a similar effect in Crown-owned power utilities in Canada that subsidize/encourage energy conservation through the use of low power appliances, better home insulation and heat efficiency, use of more efficient lighting, etc. We've had those kinds of programs for decades. In the USA, the private corporations want you to increase your power consumption until they overtax production capability and get brownouts, because that allows them to maximize profits for their current infrastructure investment. The resulting scarcity means that they can crank up rates without changing costs without worrying about decreased consumption, and thereby increase their profits. Of course, NIMBY opposition to any power project really helps in maintaining that scarcity. But for every US NIMBY, there's gotta be at least one guy who insists he needs a single occupancy SUV to drive to their urban job, keeps their swimming pool heated year-round, or who still uses appliances and lighting from the 60s or earlier. Arguably, some of the "NIMBY" concerns regarding quality-of-life and environmental impact of new power generation are valid.
If there's one thing that should be taken away from the current mortgage and credit crisis, it's that market economics are often superior when you can get solid competition between players, but fail miserably when costs, risks, and responsibilities/end goals aren't aligned/tied to profit making. The current US private health care system is a lot more like the latter than the former. The HMOs and hospital transfer as much of the risks and financial responsibilities to patients, employers and the taxpayer as they can get away with (and since it's a small cartel of HMOs they get away with quite a bit). The reason why private health organizations are so against a public system is that it would re-align risks and responsibilities with costs and revenue. Now, certainly some of the risk should be on the patient to provide an incentive to live in a healthier manner and keep health costs down, but the patients need information on how to do that. The US system financially discourages the care providers from providing that information as a service as long as the economy can support continued premium increases by HMOs instead. That's a critical structural problem with the USA's private health care system.
Public health care systems suffer from the usual problems of government bureaucracies, but those can be more easily dealt with than fundamental structural flaws.
Well, yes but there you're in a foreign country subject to criticism by the EU, UN, etc. Let's face it, if it ever came to putting down an internal insurrection, they would start nicely at first. But if the US government was failing with the soft touch and looking weak enough that they might lose political power, the kid gloves would come off and they would teach the Chinese a thing or two about handling "internal matters" that would make Tiananmen Square look like a hunting trip with Dick Cheney. All they have to do is deploy the Red state troops in the Blue states and vice versa. Before you can say "Kurds vs. Saddam Hussein", you'll get the white phosporous shells, nerve gases, and all the other nastiness in the USA arsenal (short of tactical nukes) used to wipe you out and, aside from some holdouts in the Rocky Mountains, most assault rifles will be nicely plucked from their owners' cold dead fingers before they've been fired. As for finding someone to replace you in your job, they would just relax the immigration laws from Mexico, Central America, and India (for the high tech jobs).
On the other hand, "greater evil" got you George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. What you need is to fundamentally overhaul the election model to something other than first past the post and other current political barriers to entry to get rid of the duopoly. Your best bet is to start state by state, switching to STV (or something similar) in a smaller state, show that the End of the World hasn't happened, and get more states to make the switch.
Start in some small New England states and build. Then move to the West Coast. If you can eventually convince California to make a go of it for a decade, then it won't be too long until you can get some Federal representatives elected on that platform and work towards a constitutional amendment. I suspect that's about the only thing that can break the duopoly at this point.
I think it's a tossup. The LaTeX macros are still built on TeX which is a layout language. That means that you can have a lot of layout-related information in a LaTeX document (i.e. to avoid overfull HBuf or VBuf warnings) that have nothing to do with the document content and distract from it. Something like DocBook XML tagging is, IMHO, more limited, but also more informative and less intrusive.
Well, there are certainly plenty of right wing pundits and politicians everywhere who try to conflate Marxist-derived communism with anything more socialist than pure anarcho-capitalism. It's just that the American populace is sufficiently ignorant, ill informed, and easily manipulated for a democratically-significant portion of that population to actually believe it.
Communism is based on the idea that people will reasonably hard to contribute to the public well being. In general that doesn't hold true for sufficient people to maintain a society. While there may be some people who do fit that profile (scientists who perform long hours on research because they are driven by the need for discovery or fame, politicians pursuing power, etc.), it's fairly rare to find people who will do more than the absolute minimum necessary for personal survival if their job is very unpleasant like hauling away garbage or backbreaking agricultural stoop labour. This particularly holds true when some bureaucrat running a centrally planned economy decided what work you are "best suited to" and places you in a job you have no interest in. So there are fundamental assumptions about human nature at the core of communist philosophy which are just plain wrong. Otherwise you wouldn't need gulags, cultural revolutions, and killing fields "pour encourager les autres".
Generally, "Industry" refers to the organizations responsible for the mass production or distribution of a category of products or standard services. Conversely an artist is a person who creates original works or performs their own individual interpretation of an existing work. The two are pretty well mutually exclusive, although there often is significant interaction between the two groups. Industry participants need new products to manufacture to distinguish themselves from their competitors, and may hire or contract with artists, designers, or researchers to develop those products for them. The recording industry has historically imposed strongly asymmetric contracts on artists because the industry has had exclusionary access to or control of the major means of distribution (record stores and radio) through economies of scale and related barriers to entry, illegal kickback deals (radio payola), and other oligopolistic tactics.
Well, sure, but semantic tagging in XML can make the contents easier to read than a binary dump. The tradeoff on legalese in theory is that you exchange readability for greater precision. In practice, that's often debatable (or else trials wouldn't take so long) because the politicking by lawmakers deliberately builds in ambiguity and contradictions into the law. It then takes years and millions of dollars for those ambiguities to be struck down by the legal system.
What we really need is a law-verifying AI/compiler that rejects laws that conflict with themselves or existing and superseding legislation:-). It would save a lot of time and money and put more than a few lawyers and judges out of business.
Technically, that's not quite true unless you're dealing with DRM-type code protected by the DMCA. You could do a clean room re-implementation (separate teams to reverse-engineer a detailed functional spec, and rebuild the software from scratch using the funct. spec.). That's how Phoenix and Award BIOSes were done. However that's a lot of work for something like an openGL/DirectX video driver, let alone 4 or more families of them (nVidia, AMD/ATI, Matrox, Intel, etc.).
Eliminating copyright for software would allow you to decompile the driver, make the changes you want and recompile the results. Alternatively, you could identify the hardware-specific code in a video driver and re-use as much of it as possible along with new glue/interface code for a new O/S environment (i.e Windows-> Linux or BSD). You could also do a security review and clean up the bugs along the way that the vendor has ignored because they're not considered sufficiently high priority. That would also incidentally render all forms of DRM useless (by disabling HDCP checks for instance).
It's pretty silly to protest those things when, not only are they true, but their members and admirers are proud about it. It's like Che Guevarra protesting "But he called me a Commie, your honor!". Yeah, so? It's true, isn't it?
The point is that it's empty rhetoric that's completely irrelevant to the legal argument. Somebody could be a politician notorious for advocating legalizing marijuana. If they saw and filmed you assaulting without provocation some guy on the street who had light up a joint, just because that politician advocates for marijuana doesn't render invalid or affect their recordings and testimony of your unprovoked assault.
You could try that kind of crappy approach if you're in front of a jury in republican country, but the opposing lawyer should object as soon as it was clear where you were going with the line of reasoning and the judge should sustain it and slap you with contempt of court if you persisted. Submitting that kind of argument in writing to the judge doesn't make it any more proper or relevant or render you immune to repercussions.
In other words, being a "Commie", while indicating a significant misunderstanding of human nature, doesn't automatically invalidate a person's direct observations and arguments on a point of law. The kind of rhetoric you are championing might be unfortunately effective in grade school, campaign trails, and government committee hearings but, by long established precedent, it has no place in a court of law.
in other words, it'd be the BSD MIT license, which Stallman is starkly against.
Sort of. The BSD/MIT licence doesn't just allow somebody to slightly modify and close the source. It allows somebody to do that and re-licence under a closed copyright that prevents copying (as long as credit/attribution for the original work is given) - which I think is what Stallman is really against.
Without copyright, if somebody tried to do the above, (like Microsoft did with the AD Kerberos group extensions, for instance), you would be able to decompile Microsoft's code, identify changes from the original release, clean up and optimize the changed/decompiled source, and re-release it in commented source form, all without fear of legal reprisals. That would certainly be more work than the current system under the GPL, but you would effectively still have most of the rights that Stallman advocates for: the ability to own, maintain, and redistribute software you have placed an investment in, be it through development or purchase.
So I think Stallman would prefer the current status quo with GPL protection because itrequires less maintenance effort once GPL code has enough market share that network effects work in its favour, but would be satisfied with a copyright-free world.
I always wondered if someone set off a large explosive in the eye or center of a hurricane what would happen? Would it be enough to break up the storm?
Well, it was first speculated upon in a French science fiction comic book in the late 70s. Roger Leloup didn't stop at your limitations either.
If they're using equipment for polarized glasses, you could always get a pair of glasses made where the polarization is the same in both lenses. That would get you a standard 2D view by making both eyes see the same picture.
Clearly, you haven't met my wife. Now, if you'd said "all single women" you may have had a better argument. The good ones do tend to get snapped up earlier. However, there are exceptions; I got lucky to be in the right place at the right time.
A lot of pre-paid phone plans are not covered for cross-border travel and coverage with partner telcos. My wife has a telus pre-paid phone setup but it doesn't work outside Canada.
All of the accusations come from one source who doesn't meet credibility standards for informants.
If all there were were uncorroborated accusations then that would be true. However some of the harrassment accusations are backed up by substantial corroborating evidence (presumably the mail system had a copy of the harassment mass e-mail, in addition to all the DHCP and proxy logs identified in the warrant request).
The accused sounds like he fits the profile of someone with an inferiority complex who bragged to his roommate about what he could accomplish to try to impress the other guy and gain acceptance. Then later, when things didn't work out, our antihero tried to demoralize the roommate into submission by anonymously accusing him of behaviour that (unfortunately due to widespread USA puritanical attitudes) would inflict significant social and emotional stress. This behaviour constitutes cyberbullying and there may be applicable statutes in Massachusetts.
All the other accusations of copyright infringement, unauthorized use of a computer system, and academic misconduct are just gravy. However, if they find something relevant to those accusations, it makes the roommate's testimony more credible at trial for having predicted it. It also makes it less likely that the defense could challenge the search warrant as a fishing expedition if the police discovered nothing on the harassment charge but something on the other accusations instead.
Now mind you, if the guy did what he was accused of and did it under Ubuntu with encrypted partition(s), I suspect it will be beyond Sgt. Murphy's ability to deal with it. Then again, so far the student's purported "cracker skills" sound more like script-kiddie level stuff; something that may have made him 1337 in a backwater high school, but hardly Legion of Doom stuff. If the kid thought "bootleg-laptop" was a smart name for a laptop and left DHCP and proxy log footprints while harassing someone else, he may not have been smart enough to use an encryption password that would resist a dictionary attack. Really, with a laptop, I'd think he would do some WARdriving outside campus to find an open hotspot and cover his tracks better. So if the laptop gets sent to the FBI for further analysis, they may have a chance to crack it.
Now if some judge fidns him guilty and winds up giving him 10 years for this (while Scooter Libby got his sentence commuted to a 2-year probation), or they find unauthorized copies of media that lead to an RIAA/MPAA demand for a $500,000 punitive fine, I'll get upset. But if he did do what he's accused of, then he's long overdue for a reality check.
That said, I hope that somebody shows Obama a copy of this week's episode of Bill Moyer's Journal. Hopefully followed by Obama demanding Geithner's resignation and replacing him with somebody who will do what needs to be done to clean up the banking sector, and that's not just buying up toxic assets.
Well, the GP did actually say that as a result of Obama picking Biden (who has strong *AA ties) for VP, that there are a number of ex-*AA lawyers appointed to the Justice Department. So he did try to establish a line of responsibility
In fact, the transition committee, which was composed of a number of Democratic party old guard, probably said "who can we get for these Justice positions?" and Biden could have thrown the names of some people he knew in the hat. Obama is said to have personally approved at least the cabinet level candidates once vetted by the search committee. In practice, the vetting process sucked and the *AA background of those people may not have been on the fact sheet that would have shown up in front of Obama. The ones that weren't picked by that committee would have been picked by Holder. At some point though, the President has to delegate or nothing gets done, and that means that things get out of his direct control. He can't stay on top of what's happening in the US government like he did with his campaign
Now if some more SNAFUs like this happen and Obama doesn't call people on the carpet for it, then I think there will be some reason to blame him, but I think it's a little early to do that. Let's face it, with the crap he's got on his plate right now, this is small potatoes that he just doesn't have time for. Now if something like this happens again in a year, I'd be more interested in seeing if he puts a few Justice heads on the chopping block.
My 32-bit applications work just the same on my 64-bit operating system.
That's because your operating system is hiding some of the thunking that happens between 32-bit apps and the 64-bit kernel.
I believe that at some point in the distant future we'll switch but to compare the IPv6 transition with moving to 64-bit is fundamentally absurd.
The IPv4->IPv6 equivalent to the 32-bit->64bit thunking are IPv4->IPv6 gateways that - surprise, surprise - are in use so that IPv6 network clients (which are more widespread in Asia because they don't have enough v4 address space allocated) can access IPv4 hosts across the rest of the Internet. If you want to run your legacy IPv4 apps, you'll be welcome to do the reverse: run them on your private IPv4 network behind a NATting firewall/protocol gateway while the rest of the Internet runs IPv6.
They're harder to solve because they're relatively anonymous
Their motivation - hate - is more likely to lead to repeat offenses of life-endangering violence than poverty or crimes of passion.
So somebody who kills or attacks somebody else because of the color of their skin or because they held hands with the "wrong" sex of person, for instance, is both harder to track down (because most violent crimes are either local or involve people with some type of pre-existing relationship) and likely to re-offend or encourage similar behaviour. So a number of people think that those qualities need the stronger deterrence of longer prison sentences than the equivalent crime without a "hate" motivation. Now normally conservatives are the ones clamoring for stronger deterrents against crime, but for some reason in this instance....
Slashdot Mirror
Hogwash. People in Canada or the EU still get treatment for skiing and snowboarding accidents (although seeing an orthopedist might take a while so that the wait gives you time to think about being more in control in the future). What they'll do is, where possible, increase taxes on certain products to support the associated increased risk. Like they do in Canada and the EU with cigarettes and liquor. They probably won't bother to go that far unless it's such a sufficiently widespread and damaging activity (like smoking and excessive drinking) that it significantly affects healthcare costs. The monetary barriers to entry on skiing, snowboarding, and skydiving are such that it's a small segment of the population that's affected and the bureaucratic overhead of a tax isn't worthwhile. For instance, ~1300 injuries and 30 fatalities yearly by 34,000 skydivers don't warrant the same attention and expenditure that the hundreds of millions that are obese, or abusing alcohol and cigarettes do, since the latter lead to cardiac, oncological, and other expensive medical treatments. The ROI just isn't comparable.
On the contrary, it's the private insurers who tend to tell you they won't cover you if you
In a choice between paying a little more to perform a more risky hobby vs. getting bankrupted by a non-preventable disease beyond my control, I like the former better than the latter. Socialize the costs of the uncontrollable risks and, where the costs make it worthwhile, place more of the cost of the controllable risks on the individual responsible.
Yeah, but maybe, just maybe, the fact that the government has to pay for the costs of those self-destructive behaviours was behind public awareness campaigns to decrease those behaviours through other government departments like school lectures, documentaries and public service announcements on public TV, sin taxes on liquor and cigarettes, etc. There is little profit motive in the private-sector health system in the USA to co-ordinate a similarly effective response. The USA also has a shortage of GPs because training costs drive doctors to specialize and maximize their earnings potentials. That means fewer first-line response doctors to do more prevention counselling, and more specialists who want you to have serious enough problems to warrant their attention. There's an incentive in the government single payer system to get you to live a healthy lifestyle and keep costs down. There's less incentive in the private US system to do the same because disease prevention is a low profit activity for health care providers. In addition, all those non-insured people only get dealt with when their condition is so serious that they need (relatively more expensive and taxpayer-funded) emergency care.
That's why your population health indicator averages suck. The USA "private" system is geared provide the most expensive treatments to the rich people who can afford it; the rest get mediocre treatment that bankrupts them because they're not in the financial class the treatments are geared to, or are allowed to deteriorate until their condition is so critical that the taxpayer can be stuck with the bill from an emergency room.
You see a similar effect in Crown-owned power utilities in Canada that subsidize/encourage energy conservation through the use of low power appliances, better home insulation and heat efficiency, use of more efficient lighting, etc. We've had those kinds of programs for decades. In the USA, the private corporations want you to increase your power consumption until they overtax production capability and get brownouts, because that allows them to maximize profits for their current infrastructure investment. The resulting scarcity means that they can crank up rates without changing costs without worrying about decreased consumption, and thereby increase their profits. Of course, NIMBY opposition to any power project really helps in maintaining that scarcity. But for every US NIMBY, there's gotta be at least one guy who insists he needs a single occupancy SUV to drive to their urban job, keeps their swimming pool heated year-round, or who still uses appliances and lighting from the 60s or earlier. Arguably, some of the "NIMBY" concerns regarding quality-of-life and environmental impact of new power generation are valid.
If there's one thing that should be taken away from the current mortgage and credit crisis, it's that market economics are often superior when you can get solid competition between players, but fail miserably when costs, risks, and responsibilities/end goals aren't aligned/tied to profit making. The current US private health care system is a lot more like the latter than the former. The HMOs and hospital transfer as much of the risks and financial responsibilities to patients, employers and the taxpayer as they can get away with (and since it's a small cartel of HMOs they get away with quite a bit). The reason why private health organizations are so against a public system is that it would re-align risks and responsibilities with costs and revenue. Now, certainly some of the risk should be on the patient to provide an incentive to live in a healthier manner and keep health costs down, but the patients need information on how to do that. The US system financially discourages the care providers from providing that information as a service as long as the economy can support continued premium increases by HMOs instead. That's a critical structural problem with the USA's private health care system. Public health care systems suffer from the usual problems of government bureaucracies, but those can be more easily dealt with than fundamental structural flaws.
Well, yes but there you're in a foreign country subject to criticism by the EU, UN, etc. Let's face it, if it ever came to putting down an internal insurrection, they would start nicely at first. But if the US government was failing with the soft touch and looking weak enough that they might lose political power, the kid gloves would come off and they would teach the Chinese a thing or two about handling "internal matters" that would make Tiananmen Square look like a hunting trip with Dick Cheney. All they have to do is deploy the Red state troops in the Blue states and vice versa. Before you can say "Kurds vs. Saddam Hussein", you'll get the white phosporous shells, nerve gases, and all the other nastiness in the USA arsenal (short of tactical nukes) used to wipe you out and, aside from some holdouts in the Rocky Mountains, most assault rifles will be nicely plucked from their owners' cold dead fingers before they've been fired. As for finding someone to replace you in your job, they would just relax the immigration laws from Mexico, Central America, and India (for the high tech jobs).
On the other hand, "greater evil" got you George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. What you need is to fundamentally overhaul the election model to something other than first past the post and other current political barriers to entry to get rid of the duopoly. Your best bet is to start state by state, switching to STV (or something similar) in a smaller state, show that the End of the World hasn't happened, and get more states to make the switch.
Start in some small New England states and build. Then move to the West Coast. If you can eventually convince California to make a go of it for a decade, then it won't be too long until you can get some Federal representatives elected on that platform and work towards a constitutional amendment. I suspect that's about the only thing that can break the duopoly at this point.
I think it's a tossup. The LaTeX macros are still built on TeX which is a layout language. That means that you can have a lot of layout-related information in a LaTeX document (i.e. to avoid overfull HBuf or VBuf warnings) that have nothing to do with the document content and distract from it. Something like DocBook XML tagging is, IMHO, more limited, but also more informative and less intrusive.
Well, there are certainly plenty of right wing pundits and politicians everywhere who try to conflate Marxist-derived communism with anything more socialist than pure anarcho-capitalism. It's just that the American populace is sufficiently ignorant, ill informed, and easily manipulated for a democratically-significant portion of that population to actually believe it.
Communism is based on the idea that people will reasonably hard to contribute to the public well being. In general that doesn't hold true for sufficient people to maintain a society. While there may be some people who do fit that profile (scientists who perform long hours on research because they are driven by the need for discovery or fame, politicians pursuing power, etc.), it's fairly rare to find people who will do more than the absolute minimum necessary for personal survival if their job is very unpleasant like hauling away garbage or backbreaking agricultural stoop labour. This particularly holds true when some bureaucrat running a centrally planned economy decided what work you are "best suited to" and places you in a job you have no interest in. So there are fundamental assumptions about human nature at the core of communist philosophy which are just plain wrong. Otherwise you wouldn't need gulags, cultural revolutions, and killing fields "pour encourager les autres".
Generally, "Industry" refers to the organizations responsible for the mass production or distribution of a category of products or standard services. Conversely an artist is a person who creates original works or performs their own individual interpretation of an existing work. The two are pretty well mutually exclusive, although there often is significant interaction between the two groups. Industry participants need new products to manufacture to distinguish themselves from their competitors, and may hire or contract with artists, designers, or researchers to develop those products for them. The recording industry has historically imposed strongly asymmetric contracts on artists because the industry has had exclusionary access to or control of the major means of distribution (record stores and radio) through economies of scale and related barriers to entry, illegal kickback deals (radio payola), and other oligopolistic tactics.
What we really need is a law-verifying AI/compiler that rejects laws that conflict with themselves or existing and superseding legislation :-). It would save a lot of time and money and put more than a few lawyers and judges out of business.
Eliminating copyright for software would allow you to decompile the driver, make the changes you want and recompile the results. Alternatively, you could identify the hardware-specific code in a video driver and re-use as much of it as possible along with new glue/interface code for a new O/S environment (i.e Windows-> Linux or BSD). You could also do a security review and clean up the bugs along the way that the vendor has ignored because they're not considered sufficiently high priority. That would also incidentally render all forms of DRM useless (by disabling HDCP checks for instance).
The point is that it's empty rhetoric that's completely irrelevant to the legal argument. Somebody could be a politician notorious for advocating legalizing marijuana. If they saw and filmed you assaulting without provocation some guy on the street who had light up a joint, just because that politician advocates for marijuana doesn't render invalid or affect their recordings and testimony of your unprovoked assault.
You could try that kind of crappy approach if you're in front of a jury in republican country, but the opposing lawyer should object as soon as it was clear where you were going with the line of reasoning and the judge should sustain it and slap you with contempt of court if you persisted. Submitting that kind of argument in writing to the judge doesn't make it any more proper or relevant or render you immune to repercussions.
In other words, being a "Commie", while indicating a significant misunderstanding of human nature, doesn't automatically invalidate a person's direct observations and arguments on a point of law. The kind of rhetoric you are championing might be unfortunately effective in grade school, campaign trails, and government committee hearings but, by long established precedent, it has no place in a court of law.
Sort of. The BSD/MIT licence doesn't just allow somebody to slightly modify and close the source. It allows somebody to do that and re-licence under a closed copyright that prevents copying (as long as credit/attribution for the original work is given) - which I think is what Stallman is really against.
Without copyright, if somebody tried to do the above, (like Microsoft did with the AD Kerberos group extensions, for instance), you would be able to decompile Microsoft's code, identify changes from the original release, clean up and optimize the changed/decompiled source, and re-release it in commented source form, all without fear of legal reprisals. That would certainly be more work than the current system under the GPL, but you would effectively still have most of the rights that Stallman advocates for: the ability to own, maintain, and redistribute software you have placed an investment in, be it through development or purchase.
So I think Stallman would prefer the current status quo with GPL protection because itrequires less maintenance effort once GPL code has enough market share that network effects work in its favour, but would be satisfied with a copyright-free world.
Well, it was first speculated upon in a French science fiction comic book in the late 70s. Roger Leloup didn't stop at your limitations either.
If they're using equipment for polarized glasses, you could always get a pair of glasses made where the polarization is the same in both lenses. That would get you a standard 2D view by making both eyes see the same picture.
Clearly, you haven't met my wife. Now, if you'd said "all single women" you may have had a better argument. The good ones do tend to get snapped up earlier. However, there are exceptions; I got lucky to be in the right place at the right time.
+10 Insightful
Y'all y'all need to read this
A lot of pre-paid phone plans are not covered for cross-border travel and coverage with partner telcos. My wife has a telus pre-paid phone setup but it doesn't work outside Canada.
That could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy someday.
If all there were were uncorroborated accusations then that would be true. However some of the harrassment accusations are backed up by substantial corroborating evidence (presumably the mail system had a copy of the harassment mass e-mail, in addition to all the DHCP and proxy logs identified in the warrant request).
The accused sounds like he fits the profile of someone with an inferiority complex who bragged to his roommate about what he could accomplish to try to impress the other guy and gain acceptance. Then later, when things didn't work out, our antihero tried to demoralize the roommate into submission by anonymously accusing him of behaviour that (unfortunately due to widespread USA puritanical attitudes) would inflict significant social and emotional stress. This behaviour constitutes cyberbullying and there may be applicable statutes in Massachusetts.
All the other accusations of copyright infringement, unauthorized use of a computer system, and academic misconduct are just gravy. However, if they find something relevant to those accusations, it makes the roommate's testimony more credible at trial for having predicted it. It also makes it less likely that the defense could challenge the search warrant as a fishing expedition if the police discovered nothing on the harassment charge but something on the other accusations instead.
Now mind you, if the guy did what he was accused of and did it under Ubuntu with encrypted partition(s), I suspect it will be beyond Sgt. Murphy's ability to deal with it. Then again, so far the student's purported "cracker skills" sound more like script-kiddie level stuff; something that may have made him 1337 in a backwater high school, but hardly Legion of Doom stuff. If the kid thought "bootleg-laptop" was a smart name for a laptop and left DHCP and proxy log footprints while harassing someone else, he may not have been smart enough to use an encryption password that would resist a dictionary attack. Really, with a laptop, I'd think he would do some WARdriving outside campus to find an open hotspot and cover his tracks better. So if the laptop gets sent to the FBI for further analysis, they may have a chance to crack it.
Now if some judge fidns him guilty and winds up giving him 10 years for this (while Scooter Libby got his sentence commuted to a 2-year probation), or they find unauthorized copies of media that lead to an RIAA/MPAA demand for a $500,000 punitive fine, I'll get upset. But if he did do what he's accused of, then he's long overdue for a reality check.
Time to register bhl.badtlds
That said, I hope that somebody shows Obama a copy of this week's episode of Bill Moyer's Journal. Hopefully followed by Obama demanding Geithner's resignation and replacing him with somebody who will do what needs to be done to clean up the banking sector, and that's not just buying up toxic assets.
Well, the GP did actually say that as a result of Obama picking Biden (who has strong *AA ties) for VP, that there are a number of ex-*AA lawyers appointed to the Justice Department. So he did try to establish a line of responsibility
In fact, the transition committee, which was composed of a number of Democratic party old guard, probably said "who can we get for these Justice positions?" and Biden could have thrown the names of some people he knew in the hat. Obama is said to have personally approved at least the cabinet level candidates once vetted by the search committee. In practice, the vetting process sucked and the *AA background of those people may not have been on the fact sheet that would have shown up in front of Obama. The ones that weren't picked by that committee would have been picked by Holder. At some point though, the President has to delegate or nothing gets done, and that means that things get out of his direct control. He can't stay on top of what's happening in the US government like he did with his campaign
Now if some more SNAFUs like this happen and Obama doesn't call people on the carpet for it, then I think there will be some reason to blame him, but I think it's a little early to do that. Let's face it, with the crap he's got on his plate right now, this is small potatoes that he just doesn't have time for. Now if something like this happens again in a year, I'd be more interested in seeing if he puts a few Justice heads on the chopping block.
That's because your operating system is hiding some of the thunking that happens between 32-bit apps and the 64-bit kernel.
The IPv4->IPv6 equivalent to the 32-bit->64bit thunking are IPv4->IPv6 gateways that - surprise, surprise - are in use so that IPv6 network clients (which are more widespread in Asia because they don't have enough v4 address space allocated) can access IPv4 hosts across the rest of the Internet. If you want to run your legacy IPv4 apps, you'll be welcome to do the reverse: run them on your private IPv4 network behind a NATting firewall/protocol gateway while the rest of the Internet runs IPv6.
So somebody who kills or attacks somebody else because of the color of their skin or because they held hands with the "wrong" sex of person, for instance, is both harder to track down (because most violent crimes are either local or involve people with some type of pre-existing relationship) and likely to re-offend or encourage similar behaviour. So a number of people think that those qualities need the stronger deterrence of longer prison sentences than the equivalent crime without a "hate" motivation. Now normally conservatives are the ones clamoring for stronger deterrents against crime, but for some reason in this instance....