"... why in the hell would I even try to get market share [when the tax rate punishes me for it]?"
You have made two mistakes here. First, you have missed the point altogether, that we want large companies not to get more market share. So your implicit complaint that we are discouraging growth is in fact the goal of this tax. You ask why this is a good thing. It is because when a company grows too much, it becomes harmful to society instead of helpful. (Or at least so some people think. I'm taking that as an assumption in this explanation, not defending it.) You have implicitly assumed that bigger is better. Maybe it is for the person who is bigger, but that does not mean it is better for society in general. E.g., any individual might make themselves safer by getting a bigger, heavier car, but that could make everybody else a bit less safe. If bigger were better, we should merge all businesses into one big huge company. Obviously, that would be awful.
Second, a tax rate that is progressive on market share does not necessarily penalize a company for being "good," or, more accurately, big. Depending on the tax structure, it may decrease the reward for being big. The specific proposal was a sales tax rate equal to market share. That might mean that if Microsoft charges $100 for Windows 3000 and has a 90% market share, they would have to collect $190 from the purchaser and send $90 to the government. In that case, additional sales would get harder and harder, but each sale would still increase post-tax revenue.
"... I doubt Forbes would see it in the light they do..."
Forbes just reported a story about something new going on. They didn't say it was a good technique or that it was effective. They quoted only a Rackspace representative and not anybody with a different view or a customer. The story presents no research and no investigation. There is no "light" presented about the value of the technique.
"Not to offend but I checked your personal site."
It is not offensive, but it is not a valid way of making a point. Your comments are simply ad hominem. I have little (but not zero) experience in the selling side of retail sales, but I have plenty of experience, as most people do, in the buying side, and I have the demographics to be a valuable customer. I know what annoys me, and no argument will convince me that I am not annoyed by pushy sales tactics.
"However, the majority of the customers who cross our path want help and advice, and are only thrilled that we contact them."
It would be a fallacy to believe that a technique that the majority like is necessarily the best business technique. Suppose 60% of people like the technique and it results in them spending 10% more. The technique simultaneously could annoy 10% of people and cause them to spend 80% less. Even if it causes 10% of people to spend 40% less, but they have twice as much to spend, it could be a losing proposition.
"If companies like HP, Hitachi, Verio, Thawte, and Rackspace have done feasibility studies, real world testing, and weighed all odds(included annoying.000000001% of the population) and decided that it was a good idea, then they probably are right."
Okay, have they? Are those the results? Of course, they cannot be, since your hypothetical statistic would mean less than one-tenth of one person in the entire world is annoyed. Observed data guarantees an actual quantity many orders of magnitude higher.
"We might have a difference of opinion but the proofs in the pudding. We are doing a thriving business, and our customers do really love our product."
Yes, of course, that is proof, because no business in all of history has ever loved a product that ultimately hurt them. No business has ever made a wrong decision and pursued it relentlessly into failure. Every product ever sold in a thriving business has been the best thing ever.
Proof is not a representative of the selling company saying how wonderful their product is. Proof would be in measurement of actual effects (long-term return on investment). Of course, the long-term is not immediately available, in which case estimates can be made by comparing the sales made to shoppers who are not bothered with the sales made to shoppers who are bothered, including estimated corrections for shoppers who cannot be tracked (due to refusing cookies, shopping from different IP addresses on different days, et cetera).
"Fine, start a company that doesn't advertise. You'll be able to sell your product much cheaper."
If I recall correctly, Hershey's did no consumer advertising for their first 70 years. While you do need to get your name out there, you do not need to shove it in people's faces.
"You have a reader that reads everything on the card on the way in, so they get the public key."
You don't send a key, you send a challenge that somebody with the private key can answer. There are challenge-response protocols that reveal zero knowledge to eavesdroppers. One of them works something like this: The card knows secret number X. The bank computer knows secret number X^2. (All arithmetic is done modulo a preselected large number with certain properties.) For one challenge, the card makes up a random number R and transmits (RX)^2. The bank flips a coin and asks the card for either RX or R^2. If the card really knows X, it can easily answer either question. In either case, the eavesdropper sees (RX)^2 and either RX or R^2, but, because of R, these are just random numbers -- if R is uniformally distributed (over the modular domain), then RX is also uniformally distributed; there is no information in it. An eavesdropper can learn what X^2 is, but the numbers are chosen so that it is (believed to be) extremely difficult to find X from X^2 (modulo the preselected number).
Could somebody pretend to know X? Instead of sending RX, they could make up a number S and send S^2. Then if asked for RX, they could send S, and it would pass the check. Alternately, they could spoof in a way that allows them to correctly answer a request for R^2. However, it is as difficult to be able to answer both as it is to find X from X^2, because being able to answer both gives you the information needed to find X.
Since a malicious person could spoof the test half the time, you repeat the test many times, say 30 for a one-in-a-billion chance of passing. Various caveats apply; search for "zero-knowledge proofs" for more details.
"... worth far more than mastery of assembly in today's environment, what with the size and scope of most programming tasks nowadays."
If you take away most of the billions of dollars spent on programming tasks nowadays, you are left with only a few billions for which mastery of assembly might be useful. That's the point.
For most programming tasks, compilers do fine, or they do okay and it isn't worth expending the effort to do better. But if you are building an expensive system with many processors, you can save money by hiring a high-performance assembly-language master to do what the compilers cannot. And if you are a company that sells high-performance computers, you absolutely need engineers with those skills to produce optimized code.
There are some tasks compilers still aren't good at. An expert can write an assembly-language FFT that's faster than the code produced by compilers, even those specialized for high-performance parallel applications. If the percentage speed improvement in the application multiplied by the cost of the processor multiplied by the number of processors you need is lower than the expert's cost, then you hire the expert.
"There is no such thing as the singular 'they'. This is a commonly mistake; 'they' is always plural."
If you check the Oxford English Dictionary, you will see that "they", "them", "their", and even "themselves" are used in the singular and have been for at least six hundred years. The notion that "they" is only plural is a modern invention, not based in actual use. Shakespeare and Chaucer used these words as singular.
In looking at the older OED citations, such as "Bath ware made sun and mon, Aither wit ther ouen light" from the 1300s, it is remarkable to note the singularity of "their" has remained steady in the English language while so much else changed around it. Any feature that has survived so much change over so long a period is clearly well established. The notion that it is plural only is a myth that deserves to be dismissed.
"Speaking of phobia, can anyone seriously explain the need to periodically change passwords?"
As time goes by, the probability the password has been compromised increases: The password was shared with a coworker who needed access, the storage location of the plaintext password (the place you wrote it down) was compromised, et cetera.
"Didn't anyone learn anything from losers like Kevin Mitnick?"
No. I worked in the VMS group at Digital when Mitnick stole a copy of the VMS sources. Digital instituted procedures requiring cumbersome and often-changed passwords. Digital did not tell employees not to give passwords over the phone or trust people they did not know, as far as I ever saw. That's like putting bars on the window after a burglar walks in the front door.
Apparently political correctness is higher in their priorities than good education. "Those" is plural, but "kind" is singular. For $149, I expect proper grammar.
"... why would anybody be less likely to risk their life just because of their potential logevity?"
Because they have more to lose. The value of a wager with $10 to gain and $1000 to lose changes if it becomes $2000 to lose while the win amount and the probability stay the same.
Few risks can be measured exactly, but the values involved do affect decisions. For one thing, even if the human propensity for risk taking did not change, the number of people who avoided risk more would increase, because they would live out their longer lives while the risk takers died at a relatively higher rate. Then societal feelings about risk would move a bit away from risk-taking.
And although you cannot calculate most risks and make a mathematical decision, dreaming about a long retirement can influence your decisions.
"Are people in third world countries more likely to endager their lives because their life expectancy is only half that of the first world?"
I would expect so. On average, of course, not every specific individual. Why would you think that a person's prospects would not influence their decision making?
"The First Amendment is not a 'Federal law', nor is it a law at all."
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is a law. Perhaps you mean it is not a statute.
Laws are everything in the collection of rules about governing. Statutes are laws. Bills made into law are laws even if not codified as statutes. Treaties are laws. Court decisions are laws. Regulations are laws. The Constitution is a law, or several laws. They have different force and effect and jurisdictions, but they are all laws.
There's no need to pay for expensive software to detect bugs. I used to have a freeware bug detector. You would drop an executable on it, and it would display a message indicating whether or not there was a bug in the executable.
A near as I could tell, for almost any executable you gave it, it reported there was a bug. The exception is that if you dropped its own executable on itself (even a renamed copy), it reported no bug. That seems pretty accurate to me.
"If someone out of state sues you (or a DA charges you with a criminal offense) in an out of state court, what can they possibly do to make you show up?"
You cannot always force somebody to show up for a civil hearing, but that is not the point. What you really want to know is how you can enforce judgment.
As the plaintiff, you go to court and make some argument about why the court has jurisdiction, and some argument about why you should prevail. If the court finds in your favor, you mail a copy to the appropriate court in the defendant's state and ask them to enter judgment in their records. Then you can ask for the order to be enforced in that state, and a sheriff with a court order can go seize property from the defendant.
That's my understand based on bits and pieces I have picked up here and there. I haven't tried it.
From the other side, if you are a defendant in a bogus suit, you file an answer saying the court has no jurisdiction because you do not live in the state, were not in the state, and did not cause things to happen in the state or otherwise do anything to let the court have jurisdiction. Then it is up to the plaintiff to show otherwise. If you do travel to the state to fight jurisdiction, the state does not acquire jurisdiction from that.
Of course, this information is good only until it actually happens, at which point you should ask a lawyer.
"... let the machine put the software through every input/output possiblity."
Great, I've got an atan2 routine with two 64-bit floating-point inputs and one output. Would you mind running it through all 2^128 inputs and letting me know when you're done?
If you've got a trillion computers each doing a trillion atan2 checks a second, it shouldn't take you much longer than ten billion millenia to finish.
The article poses the problem of finding integer (cent) values for coins but falsely asserts that a 1-cent coin is necessary to make every value representable. For example, if you had coins with values of 7 cents and -3 cents, you could make 1 cent with one 7 and two -3s.
Naturally, discarding negative coins would have to be made a crime, like littering, but worse. Enforcement could be combined with the solution to another problem. As other posters have mentioned, cashiers would have problems with odd coinage systems. Cash registers would have to tell the cashier exactly what coins to return.
Since the registers are counting the individual coins, they might as well track which customer the coins are given to and report this to the government. Then the government can audit each citizen to ensure their negative coins are accounted for and have not been thrown out a car window somewhere. Slashdot participants will appreciate the value of this scheme immensely.
Also, the article considers only minimizing coins that form a transaction value. However, the cost of a coinage system is not just in how many coins are returned when you pay with whole dollars but in how many coins are exchanged in a transaction and how many coins are carried around. E.g., I am not just going to accumulate coins. At some point, I will give the cashier not whole dollars but dollars and coins. What coinage system minimizes the total exchange?
More generally, suppose there is a cost x per coin exchanged (time to count and hand over, etc.), a cost y per coin carried in a pocket (calories, emptying pockets at home, adding to compute time when deciding what to give to cashier, etc.), and a cost z per coin carried in a cash register (time to get stock from bank, to return stock to bank, to count at end of day, etc.). What coin system minimizes the total cost?
"People shouldn't be allowed to spam me with unsolicited advertising for their church or political party..."
Yes, but this needs to be done carefully. First, we ought to accept any good spam bill. If it is effective against commercial speech, that will reduce spam from a serious problem to a nuisance, for two reasons. One, non-commercial speech doesn't have the powerful engine of money driving it, so it won't be so explosive. Two, if commercial spam dried up, there would not be spamming operations and tools so readily available for non-commercial spam.
If non-commercial spam is to be targeted, it should be done in separate legislation, so that court rulings finding such legislation unconstitutional in whole or part will not affect commercial spam laws. And such legislation should frame the issue as property rights. Instead of making non-commercial spam illegal and subject to action by the government, it might be necessary to treat it as a civil issue and make non-commercial spam a kind of trespass. The right to sue or complain has to remain with the property owners, so it is clear it is they who object to their use of their property, not the government objecting to the speech.
"How the hell would I prove that a telemarketer called me?"
First, your testimony is evidence, and that is probably sufficient for most cases. It is ancient technology, examining people as they tell their stories, but it works in most cases.
Second, you can take a photograph of your calling-line display.
Third, if they leave a message on your answering machine, you can take a recording to court.
Fourth, you can keep a log of unwanted calls you receive. This is better than your testimony alone, because it shows you are being careful and are making accurate records.
Fifth, many telemarketing suits involve multiple calls. You can give the judge a list of people you spoke to, on what dates, what you told them, and so on. The combined facts make it very unlikely that the defendant did not call you as you claim, and you only need a preponderance of the evidence to prevail.
Sixth, you can ask your friends and neighbors if they received similar calls. Any telemarketer violating the do-not-call list is calling everyone, so you will find other witnesses to verify your report.
Seventh, if it gets to that point is important enough, you can subpoena their records and so on. But then you are into real discovery and may not be able to use small claims court.
I like this passage:
"[eBay] has used pseudo buyers for which it constructs comprehensive simulated histories, including simulated feedbacks, all for the sake of incriminating those suspected of theft. 'eBay is not willing to tolerate acts of fraud carried out on its site,' explains Pursglove."
Isn't simulating history and feedback for the purpose of getting somebody else to enter into a sale an act of fraud?
I was thinking the same thing. But take it further. Not just 3 Gore votes for 2 Nader votes -- how about 3 votes in the next election for two votes in this one? Then we can lend votes and get interest back. Or write contracts on the future vote-exchange rate, and then you can buy and sell puts and calls. A shrewd candidate could corner the market and win the election without campaigning at all.
In theory, this can work. In practice, it's rare, and you should evaluate the expected return carefully. Some multi-state lottery recently reached around US$400 million or so due to rollovers from non-winning selections. There were somewhere around 80 million equally probable combinations, so you'd think a $1 ticket for a one-in-80-million chance at $400 million is a good deal, or $80 million for a 100% chance of sharing the jackpot is a good deal.
However, there were three or four winners, so that reduces the jackpot. Then taxes reduce your net win. And the announced amount is a lie; it is the sum of current and future payments. The true immediate lump sum or net present value is closer to half the announced value. In the end, each winner got less than the $80 million or so needed to make it a fair game.
Slashdot Mirror
You have made two mistakes here. First, you have missed the point altogether, that we want large companies not to get more market share. So your implicit complaint that we are discouraging growth is in fact the goal of this tax. You ask why this is a good thing. It is because when a company grows too much, it becomes harmful to society instead of helpful. (Or at least so some people think. I'm taking that as an assumption in this explanation, not defending it.) You have implicitly assumed that bigger is better. Maybe it is for the person who is bigger, but that does not mean it is better for society in general. E.g., any individual might make themselves safer by getting a bigger, heavier car, but that could make everybody else a bit less safe. If bigger were better, we should merge all businesses into one big huge company. Obviously, that would be awful.
Second, a tax rate that is progressive on market share does not necessarily penalize a company for being "good," or, more accurately, big. Depending on the tax structure, it may decrease the reward for being big. The specific proposal was a sales tax rate equal to market share. That might mean that if Microsoft charges $100 for Windows 3000 and has a 90% market share, they would have to collect $190 from the purchaser and send $90 to the government. In that case, additional sales would get harder and harder, but each sale would still increase post-tax revenue.
Forbes just reported a story about something new going on. They didn't say it was a good technique or that it was effective. They quoted only a Rackspace representative and not anybody with a different view or a customer. The story presents no research and no investigation. There is no "light" presented about the value of the technique.
"Not to offend but I checked your personal site."
It is not offensive, but it is not a valid way of making a point. Your comments are simply ad hominem. I have little (but not zero) experience in the selling side of retail sales, but I have plenty of experience, as most people do, in the buying side, and I have the demographics to be a valuable customer. I know what annoys me, and no argument will convince me that I am not annoyed by pushy sales tactics.
"However, the majority of the customers who cross our path want help and advice, and are only thrilled that we contact them."
It would be a fallacy to believe that a technique that the majority like is necessarily the best business technique. Suppose 60% of people like the technique and it results in them spending 10% more. The technique simultaneously could annoy 10% of people and cause them to spend 80% less. Even if it causes 10% of people to spend 40% less, but they have twice as much to spend, it could be a losing proposition.
"If companies like HP, Hitachi, Verio, Thawte, and Rackspace have done feasibility studies, real world testing, and weighed all odds(included annoying .000000001% of the population) and decided that it was a good idea, then they probably are right."
Okay, have they? Are those the results? Of course, they cannot be, since your hypothetical statistic would mean less than one-tenth of one person in the entire world is annoyed. Observed data guarantees an actual quantity many orders of magnitude higher.
"We might have a difference of opinion but the proofs in the pudding. We are doing a thriving business, and our customers do really love our product." Yes, of course, that is proof, because no business in all of history has ever loved a product that ultimately hurt them. No business has ever made a wrong decision and pursued it relentlessly into failure. Every product ever sold in a thriving business has been the best thing ever.
Proof is not a representative of the selling company saying how wonderful their product is. Proof would be in measurement of actual effects (long-term return on investment). Of course, the long-term is not immediately available, in which case estimates can be made by comparing the sales made to shoppers who are not bothered with the sales made to shoppers who are bothered, including estimated corrections for shoppers who cannot be tracked (due to refusing cookies, shopping from different IP addresses on different days, et cetera).
An advantage that annoys prospective customers is not an advantage.
"And what is wrong with saying just browsing."
It does not matter what is wrong with it. If a customer's annoyed, they're annoyed. You can't argue somebody out of being annoyed.
If I recall correctly, Hershey's did no consumer advertising for their first 70 years. While you do need to get your name out there, you do not need to shove it in people's faces.
You don't send a key, you send a challenge that somebody with the private key can answer. There are challenge-response protocols that reveal zero knowledge to eavesdroppers. One of them works something like this: The card knows secret number X. The bank computer knows secret number X^2. (All arithmetic is done modulo a preselected large number with certain properties.) For one challenge, the card makes up a random number R and transmits (RX)^2. The bank flips a coin and asks the card for either RX or R^2. If the card really knows X, it can easily answer either question. In either case, the eavesdropper sees (RX)^2 and either RX or R^2, but, because of R, these are just random numbers -- if R is uniformally distributed (over the modular domain), then RX is also uniformally distributed; there is no information in it. An eavesdropper can learn what X^2 is, but the numbers are chosen so that it is (believed to be) extremely difficult to find X from X^2 (modulo the preselected number).
Could somebody pretend to know X? Instead of sending RX, they could make up a number S and send S^2. Then if asked for RX, they could send S, and it would pass the check. Alternately, they could spoof in a way that allows them to correctly answer a request for R^2. However, it is as difficult to be able to answer both as it is to find X from X^2, because being able to answer both gives you the information needed to find X.
Since a malicious person could spoof the test half the time, you repeat the test many times, say 30 for a one-in-a-billion chance of passing. Various caveats apply; search for "zero-knowledge proofs" for more details.
If you take away most of the billions of dollars spent on programming tasks nowadays, you are left with only a few billions for which mastery of assembly might be useful. That's the point.
For most programming tasks, compilers do fine, or they do okay and it isn't worth expending the effort to do better. But if you are building an expensive system with many processors, you can save money by hiring a high-performance assembly-language master to do what the compilers cannot. And if you are a company that sells high-performance computers, you absolutely need engineers with those skills to produce optimized code.
There are some tasks compilers still aren't good at. An expert can write an assembly-language FFT that's faster than the code produced by compilers, even those specialized for high-performance parallel applications. If the percentage speed improvement in the application multiplied by the cost of the processor multiplied by the number of processors you need is lower than the expert's cost, then you hire the expert.
If you check the Oxford English Dictionary, you will see that "they", "them", "their", and even "themselves" are used in the singular and have been for at least six hundred years. The notion that "they" is only plural is a modern invention, not based in actual use. Shakespeare and Chaucer used these words as singular.
In looking at the older OED citations, such as "Bath ware made sun and mon, Aither wit ther ouen light" from the 1300s, it is remarkable to note the singularity of "their" has remained steady in the English language while so much else changed around it. Any feature that has survived so much change over so long a period is clearly well established. The notion that it is plural only is a myth that deserves to be dismissed.
As time goes by, the probability the password has been compromised increases: The password was shared with a coworker who needed access, the storage location of the plaintext password (the place you wrote it down) was compromised, et cetera.
No. I worked in the VMS group at Digital when Mitnick stole a copy of the VMS sources. Digital instituted procedures requiring cumbersome and often-changed passwords. Digital did not tell employees not to give passwords over the phone or trust people they did not know, as far as I ever saw. That's like putting bars on the window after a burglar walks in the front door.
That would be Burst.com vs. Microsoft, not, as used in Slashdot's article title, Microsoft vs. Burst.com.
Apparently political correctness is higher in their priorities than good education. "Those" is plural, but "kind" is singular. For $149, I expect proper grammar.
Because they have more to lose. The value of a wager with $10 to gain and $1000 to lose changes if it becomes $2000 to lose while the win amount and the probability stay the same.
Few risks can be measured exactly, but the values involved do affect decisions. For one thing, even if the human propensity for risk taking did not change, the number of people who avoided risk more would increase, because they would live out their longer lives while the risk takers died at a relatively higher rate. Then societal feelings about risk would move a bit away from risk-taking.
And although you cannot calculate most risks and make a mathematical decision, dreaming about a long retirement can influence your decisions. "Are people in third world countries more likely to endager their lives because their life expectancy is only half that of the first world?" I would expect so. On average, of course, not every specific individual. Why would you think that a person's prospects would not influence their decision making?
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is a law. Perhaps you mean it is not a statute.
Laws are everything in the collection of rules about governing. Statutes are laws. Bills made into law are laws even if not codified as statutes. Treaties are laws. Court decisions are laws. Regulations are laws. The Constitution is a law, or several laws. They have different force and effect and jurisdictions, but they are all laws.
A near as I could tell, for almost any executable you gave it, it reported there was a bug. The exception is that if you dropped its own executable on itself (even a renamed copy), it reported no bug. That seems pretty accurate to me.
"If someone out of state sues you (or a DA charges you with a criminal offense) in an out of state court, what can they possibly do to make you show up?"
You cannot always force somebody to show up for a civil hearing, but that is not the point. What you really want to know is how you can enforce judgment.
As the plaintiff, you go to court and make some argument about why the court has jurisdiction, and some argument about why you should prevail. If the court finds in your favor, you mail a copy to the appropriate court in the defendant's state and ask them to enter judgment in their records. Then you can ask for the order to be enforced in that state, and a sheriff with a court order can go seize property from the defendant.
That's my understand based on bits and pieces I have picked up here and there. I haven't tried it.
From the other side, if you are a defendant in a bogus suit, you file an answer saying the court has no jurisdiction because you do not live in the state, were not in the state, and did not cause things to happen in the state or otherwise do anything to let the court have jurisdiction. Then it is up to the plaintiff to show otherwise. If you do travel to the state to fight jurisdiction, the state does not acquire jurisdiction from that.
Of course, this information is good only until it actually happens, at which point you should ask a lawyer.
Great, I've got an atan2 routine with two 64-bit floating-point inputs and one output. Would you mind running it through all 2^128 inputs and letting me know when you're done?
If you've got a trillion computers each doing a trillion atan2 checks a second, it shouldn't take you much longer than ten billion millenia to finish.
Naturally, discarding negative coins would have to be made a crime, like littering, but worse. Enforcement could be combined with the solution to another problem. As other posters have mentioned, cashiers would have problems with odd coinage systems. Cash registers would have to tell the cashier exactly what coins to return.
Since the registers are counting the individual coins, they might as well track which customer the coins are given to and report this to the government. Then the government can audit each citizen to ensure their negative coins are accounted for and have not been thrown out a car window somewhere. Slashdot participants will appreciate the value of this scheme immensely.
Also, the article considers only minimizing coins that form a transaction value. However, the cost of a coinage system is not just in how many coins are returned when you pay with whole dollars but in how many coins are exchanged in a transaction and how many coins are carried around. E.g., I am not just going to accumulate coins. At some point, I will give the cashier not whole dollars but dollars and coins. What coinage system minimizes the total exchange?
More generally, suppose there is a cost x per coin exchanged (time to count and hand over, etc.), a cost y per coin carried in a pocket (calories, emptying pockets at home, adding to compute time when deciding what to give to cashier, etc.), and a cost z per coin carried in a cash register (time to get stock from bank, to return stock to bank, to count at end of day, etc.). What coin system minimizes the total cost?
Yes, but this needs to be done carefully. First, we ought to accept any good spam bill. If it is effective against commercial speech, that will reduce spam from a serious problem to a nuisance, for two reasons. One, non-commercial speech doesn't have the powerful engine of money driving it, so it won't be so explosive. Two, if commercial spam dried up, there would not be spamming operations and tools so readily available for non-commercial spam.
If non-commercial spam is to be targeted, it should be done in separate legislation, so that court rulings finding such legislation unconstitutional in whole or part will not affect commercial spam laws. And such legislation should frame the issue as property rights. Instead of making non-commercial spam illegal and subject to action by the government, it might be necessary to treat it as a civil issue and make non-commercial spam a kind of trespass. The right to sue or complain has to remain with the property owners, so it is clear it is they who object to their use of their property, not the government objecting to the speech.
1000. A gibinova would be 1024 times stronger. See http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html.
First, your testimony is evidence, and that is probably sufficient for most cases. It is ancient technology, examining people as they tell their stories, but it works in most cases.
Second, you can take a photograph of your calling-line display.
Third, if they leave a message on your answering machine, you can take a recording to court.
Fourth, you can keep a log of unwanted calls you receive. This is better than your testimony alone, because it shows you are being careful and are making accurate records.
Fifth, many telemarketing suits involve multiple calls. You can give the judge a list of people you spoke to, on what dates, what you told them, and so on. The combined facts make it very unlikely that the defendant did not call you as you claim, and you only need a preponderance of the evidence to prevail.
Sixth, you can ask your friends and neighbors if they received similar calls. Any telemarketer violating the do-not-call list is calling everyone, so you will find other witnesses to verify your report.
Seventh, if it gets to that point is important enough, you can subpoena their records and so on. But then you are into real discovery and may not be able to use small claims court.
Isn't simulating history and feedback for the purpose of getting somebody else to enter into a sale an act of fraud?
I was thinking the same thing. But take it further. Not just 3 Gore votes for 2 Nader votes -- how about 3 votes in the next election for two votes in this one? Then we can lend votes and get interest back. Or write contracts on the future vote-exchange rate, and then you can buy and sell puts and calls. A shrewd candidate could corner the market and win the election without campaigning at all.
I think self-destructing DVDs are a great idea as long as I can pay for them with dollars printed with disappearing ink.
In theory, this can work. In practice, it's rare, and you should evaluate the expected return carefully. Some multi-state lottery recently reached around US$400 million or so due to rollovers from non-winning selections. There were somewhere around 80 million equally probable combinations, so you'd think a $1 ticket for a one-in-80-million chance at $400 million is a good deal, or $80 million for a 100% chance of sharing the jackpot is a good deal.
However, there were three or four winners, so that reduces the jackpot. Then taxes reduce your net win. And the announced amount is a lie; it is the sum of current and future payments. The true immediate lump sum or net present value is closer to half the announced value. In the end, each winner got less than the $80 million or so needed to make it a fair game.
This page presents a pedigree for the statement.