The question "is there a creator" is completely irrelevant. If you don't believe in a creator, this question doesn't even come to your mind. Philip K. Dick once observed that reality is, what doesn't go away, though you stopped believing in it.
If you stop believing in masses attracting each other, you still don't start to fly. If you stop believing in strychnine killing you, it will still be toxic. So the effects of gravity are real, and strychnine is a real toxin. But if I stop believing in a creator, the creator just disappears. I can ask where the 2.7 Kelvin radiation comes from without asking "is there a creator".
Germany's nuclear power share was somewhere arount 23% at its maximum. Currently green energy produces 17% of the available power in Germany, with solar energy of about 0,7%
BTW, nearly all of these developments are from large, commercial research labs like Sharp, Boeing and Fraunhofer.
The Fraunhofer society, operator of the diverse Fraunhofer institutes, is not a commercial research lab. Actually, 40 percent of the money comes from the German government, 60 percent from clients and buyers of Fraunhofer research results.
The number of intended users is not now, and never has been, part of the definition of "personal" in PC.
Which is blatantly wrong, because the number of intended users has ever been the defining part of "personal" in PC, starting out with the first computer ever labelling itself a "personal computer", the Apple II. IBM's late entry to the game, the IBM PC, was exactly that: a computer as a personal tool for someone, different to all the terminal session based mainframes and minis, IBM was selling.
She's a member of a christian-conservative party, so no, she wouldn't blame it on patriarchy and ask the sisters for help.
Nice insight in your ideas about women's rights tough.
I can't imagine any legal grounds anyone would have for a lawsuit, in this instance. You can sell or trade or give away your games all you want, leaving the first sale doctrine intact. The fact that the game no longer works for the poor guy who bought it isn't Microsoft's problem since they aren't obligated to provide support for used products.
It won't work in the E.U., given current rulings of the European Court of Justice. It explicitely ruled that making available a permanent copy of a software to a customer for a fee is a sale (independently of the name in the contract, just naming it "license" doesn't make a difference), and thus the First Sale Doctrin applies. The copyright holder is not allowed to oppose such a seal, and technical means to render a resold copy unusable will probably be seen as an opposition of the copyright holder to a sale -- thus making them illegal.
The ruling goes even further:
Therefore the new acquirer of the user licence, such as a customer of UsedSoft, may, as a
lawful acquirer of the corrected and updated copy of the computer program concerned,
download that copy from the copyright holder’s website.
And then you run afoul the ruling of the European Court of Justice, that allows explicitely for resale, and requires the original seller to remove all hindrances for a resale should the current owner want to.
And don't come up with that "it's only licensed!" stuff, this doesn't fly in the E.U. It's either a sale (and all the usual conditions for a sale apply), or it's a rent (and then the usual conditions for a rent apply).
For reference
Where the copyright holder makes available to his customer a copy – tangible or intangible – and at the same time concludes, in return form payment of a fee, a licence agreement granting the customer the right to use that copy for an unlimited period, that rightholder sells the copy to the customer and thus exhausts his exclusive distribution right.
Er, you can scratch one of those things off the list. Matter being ingested into a black hole is known to be reversible. Stephen Hawking worked out the math to describe it, and it was so unexpected, it got named after him. Black holes can emit Hawking Radiation.
Yes, but this process is quite different than the ingesting of matter. For instance, two black holes can form a new one, but one single black hole will not split into two black holes.
The problem with this is that it is completely wrong.
It's solely determined by culture which roles are considered suitable for men and women. I could watch the effect in real life, when former Eastern Europe went from communism to capitalism. The comp science at my local university was quite equally distributed male and female until 1990. And then came the end of the soviet dominated block, and inscriptions of female students plummeted. There were the same females than before, they even went through the same schools than before, just the last few years, when the career gets determined, were different. Suddenly business schools had a majority of female students, and comp science went to a 50:1 ratio of males and females.
If all it takes to change the ratio of males and females interested in a subject is a change of the environment, then it's completely unacceptable to describe differences in the preferences without referring to the environment which determines the differences.
Time is a mechanism to explain causality. The flow of time is determined by non-reversable processes, like entropy increasing or matter being ingested into black holes.
And then this insurance is backed by AIG, which is on the verge of bankruptcy. Basicly you are playing domino in the hope that one of the blocks will not drop.
You know what happens if a bank goes bankrupt? The chapter 11 trustee will go around and try go get hold of any outstanding debt including your $2490. You will have to pay off all your credit card balance now. All debt that can't be collected now will be part of the assets the creditors get.
Bankrupting your bank will do nothing for your credit card balance. Just the creditor changes, and the repayment rules will become harsher.
Because the government is a profit seeking entity, right? They should, of course, be basing their decisions on the same motives that drive the corporations! If they can profit on it, it was the right decision.
Every dollar in profits the government makes is a dollar of taxes you don't pay. Where is the problem in that?
And why do you specifically mention governments? Business also wants information. If I'm going to the store of a certain coffee seller for new capsules, they ask me lots of questions about the type of coffee machine, its location, the variants of coffee I prefer, how many people are using the machine etc.pp. Departement stores often ask me for my ZIP at the cashier. Online shops always want to know where I first heard of them. None of those information is necessary to proceed with the sale. I still get asked.
As far as I know, hotels have strict rules what they have to report about their guests to the police (e.g. country of origin, home address and passport number), and thus the city of Amsterdam wants to know who has to report. If an acommodation service with publicly available information helps them to improve on their internal data, they will do it.
The difference being that in the case of Richard III, they didn't just dig everywhere and submitted each found corpse for testing, they were digging where ground radar were indicating the foundations of a destroyed abbey in the vincinity of exactly the place where documents and history books were saying Richard III was buried in an abbey.
With Jimmy Hoffa, there is no single account of his end and no indication of a place where his remainings are buried.
There is a subtle difference between the lottery and the insurance. Yes, in both cases, the average return on investment is ~60%. But the difference is, where the 40% go. If you model the insurance and the lottery as their respective inverse, then the insurer is the inverse lottery player, paying inverse small sums to you as a bet, and inversely hoping for the big inverse win. While in the real lottery, the 40% are kept by the lottery company, in the insurance lottery, the 40% are kept by the inverse lottery player.
Interest rates are a political price signal, because you have big oligopolies playing. Central Bank interest rates in big economies are in most cases purely political, because no other monetary institution comes close in market penetration. The central banks are the prime producers of money, and thus they have to quite arbitrarly set the price for money. (And how arbitrarly interest rates are set if you are an oligopoly was demonstrated with the big LIBOR fixing scandal.)
It is quite illusionary to believe that there was a market mechanism to determine Central Bank interest rates.
And what makes you think, that this culture has developed in the U.S.?
In fact, it's never been different. The notion that morally flawed deeds get rewarded while good behaviour doesn't is so old, that many religions incorporated concepts about a later reward for the good ones and a later punishment for the evil in their systems of faith, because reality seems not fair enough to us. And through the times you find cultural pessimists who complain and whine how bad it has become. It's one of the recurring themes of the world (others being the children being worse and worse educated and only interested in partying and being lazy and the death of real art and their replacement by cheap, uncreative and superficial knockoffs).
Thus let me assure you: We invented better and better methods to minimize those problems. We call them laws, investigations, public scrutinity, accountability and responsibility. They are not perfect, they are as flawed as we as humans are. But we are improving.
Because this suit is based on a decision of the European Court of Justice, which states that each buyer has the right to resell used software, and the First Doctrin applies also on downloads and other means to get the software. No license agreement can change this, also not Valve's. This effectively renders technical means to stop the resale of used software illegal in the whole E.U.
Actually, no, or you have a very strange notion about contracts. If two parties agree for instance into a trade, then yes, both side could be considerated to give up rights to their respective properties. But actually, they don't. They exchange property rights. The loss of property into one item traded is only happening if at the same time the right of property to the other item goes over to them.
And for instance no employer for instance ends my right to be where I want. All he can do is to end his obligation to compensate me (e.g. terminating the contract), if I am not where he wants me.
No. It's Germans who make a contract with a german outlet of Valve, following german law.
If Valve's infrastructure is not able to handle the problem, they shouldn't do business in Germany.
And a change in an EULA does neither change a court verdict nor a law in Germany. The new EULA has to adhere to german law too, and german law says that either Valve rents the game or it sells it, so either the legal framework of a rent or that of a sale applies. No EULA can change this legal fact.
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The question "is there a creator" is completely irrelevant. If you don't believe in a creator, this question doesn't even come to your mind. Philip K. Dick once observed that reality is, what doesn't go away, though you stopped believing in it. If you stop believing in masses attracting each other, you still don't start to fly. If you stop believing in strychnine killing you, it will still be toxic. So the effects of gravity are real, and strychnine is a real toxin. But if I stop believing in a creator, the creator just disappears. I can ask where the 2.7 Kelvin radiation comes from without asking "is there a creator".
Germany's nuclear power share was somewhere arount 23% at its maximum. Currently green energy produces 17% of the available power in Germany, with solar energy of about 0,7%
BTW, nearly all of these developments are from large, commercial research labs like Sharp, Boeing and Fraunhofer.
The Fraunhofer society, operator of the diverse Fraunhofer institutes, is not a commercial research lab. Actually, 40 percent of the money comes from the German government, 60 percent from clients and buyers of Fraunhofer research results.
Your 486 running Linux with several different accounts would have been considered a workstation, not a PC.
The number of intended users is not now, and never has been, part of the definition of "personal" in PC.
Which is blatantly wrong, because the number of intended users has ever been the defining part of "personal" in PC, starting out with the first computer ever labelling itself a "personal computer", the Apple II. IBM's late entry to the game, the IBM PC, was exactly that: a computer as a personal tool for someone, different to all the terminal session based mainframes and minis, IBM was selling.
That's why Valve is currently dragged into a German court.
She's a member of a christian-conservative party, so no, she wouldn't blame it on patriarchy and ask the sisters for help.
Nice insight in your ideas about women's rights tough.
I can't imagine any legal grounds anyone would have for a lawsuit, in this instance. You can sell or trade or give away your games all you want, leaving the first sale doctrine intact. The fact that the game no longer works for the poor guy who bought it isn't Microsoft's problem since they aren't obligated to provide support for used products.
It won't work in the E.U., given current rulings of the European Court of Justice. It explicitely ruled that making available a permanent copy of a software to a customer for a fee is a sale (independently of the name in the contract, just naming it "license" doesn't make a difference), and thus the First Sale Doctrin applies. The copyright holder is not allowed to oppose such a seal, and technical means to render a resold copy unusable will probably be seen as an opposition of the copyright holder to a sale -- thus making them illegal.
The ruling goes even further:
Therefore the new acquirer of the user licence, such as a customer of UsedSoft, may, as a lawful acquirer of the corrected and updated copy of the computer program concerned, download that copy from the copyright holder’s website.
And don't come up with that "it's only licensed!" stuff, this doesn't fly in the E.U. It's either a sale (and all the usual conditions for a sale apply), or it's a rent (and then the usual conditions for a rent apply).
For reference
Where the copyright holder makes available to his customer a copy – tangible or intangible – and at the same time concludes, in return form payment of a fee, a licence agreement granting the customer the right to use that copy for an unlimited period, that rightholder sells the copy to the customer and thus exhausts his exclusive distribution right.
Er, you can scratch one of those things off the list. Matter being ingested into a black hole is known to be reversible. Stephen Hawking worked out the math to describe it, and it was so unexpected, it got named after him. Black holes can emit Hawking Radiation.
Yes, but this process is quite different than the ingesting of matter. For instance, two black holes can form a new one, but one single black hole will not split into two black holes.
The problem with this is that it is completely wrong.
It's solely determined by culture which roles are considered suitable for men and women. I could watch the effect in real life, when former Eastern Europe went from communism to capitalism. The comp science at my local university was quite equally distributed male and female until 1990. And then came the end of the soviet dominated block, and inscriptions of female students plummeted. There were the same females than before, they even went through the same schools than before, just the last few years, when the career gets determined, were different. Suddenly business schools had a majority of female students, and comp science went to a 50:1 ratio of males and females.
If all it takes to change the ratio of males and females interested in a subject is a change of the environment, then it's completely unacceptable to describe differences in the preferences without referring to the environment which determines the differences.
Time is a mechanism to explain causality. The flow of time is determined by non-reversable processes, like entropy increasing or matter being ingested into black holes.
You are only one egg. You can't save an egg by putting it in several baskets at the same time.
And then this insurance is backed by AIG, which is on the verge of bankruptcy. Basicly you are playing domino in the hope that one of the blocks will not drop.
You know what happens if a bank goes bankrupt? The chapter 11 trustee will go around and try go get hold of any outstanding debt including your $2490. You will have to pay off all your credit card balance now. All debt that can't be collected now will be part of the assets the creditors get. Bankrupting your bank will do nothing for your credit card balance. Just the creditor changes, and the repayment rules will become harsher.
Because the government is a profit seeking entity, right? They should, of course, be basing their decisions on the same motives that drive the corporations! If they can profit on it, it was the right decision.
Every dollar in profits the government makes is a dollar of taxes you don't pay. Where is the problem in that?
And why do you specifically mention governments? Business also wants information. If I'm going to the store of a certain coffee seller for new capsules, they ask me lots of questions about the type of coffee machine, its location, the variants of coffee I prefer, how many people are using the machine etc.pp. Departement stores often ask me for my ZIP at the cashier. Online shops always want to know where I first heard of them. None of those information is necessary to proceed with the sale. I still get asked.
As far as I know, hotels have strict rules what they have to report about their guests to the police (e.g. country of origin, home address and passport number), and thus the city of Amsterdam wants to know who has to report. If an acommodation service with publicly available information helps them to improve on their internal data, they will do it.
The difference being that in the case of Richard III, they didn't just dig everywhere and submitted each found corpse for testing, they were digging where ground radar were indicating the foundations of a destroyed abbey in the vincinity of exactly the place where documents and history books were saying Richard III was buried in an abbey. With Jimmy Hoffa, there is no single account of his end and no indication of a place where his remainings are buried.
There is a subtle difference between the lottery and the insurance. Yes, in both cases, the average return on investment is ~60%. But the difference is, where the 40% go. If you model the insurance and the lottery as their respective inverse, then the insurer is the inverse lottery player, paying inverse small sums to you as a bet, and inversely hoping for the big inverse win. While in the real lottery, the 40% are kept by the lottery company, in the insurance lottery, the 40% are kept by the inverse lottery player.
Interest rates are a political price signal, because you have big oligopolies playing. Central Bank interest rates in big economies are in most cases purely political, because no other monetary institution comes close in market penetration. The central banks are the prime producers of money, and thus they have to quite arbitrarly set the price for money. (And how arbitrarly interest rates are set if you are an oligopoly was demonstrated with the big LIBOR fixing scandal.) It is quite illusionary to believe that there was a market mechanism to determine Central Bank interest rates.
And what makes you think, that this culture has developed in the U.S.?
In fact, it's never been different. The notion that morally flawed deeds get rewarded while good behaviour doesn't is so old, that many religions incorporated concepts about a later reward for the good ones and a later punishment for the evil in their systems of faith, because reality seems not fair enough to us. And through the times you find cultural pessimists who complain and whine how bad it has become. It's one of the recurring themes of the world (others being the children being worse and worse educated and only interested in partying and being lazy and the death of real art and their replacement by cheap, uncreative and superficial knockoffs).
Thus let me assure you: We invented better and better methods to minimize those problems. We call them laws, investigations, public scrutinity, accountability and responsibility. They are not perfect, they are as flawed as we as humans are. But we are improving.
Because this suit is based on a decision of the European Court of Justice, which states that each buyer has the right to resell used software, and the First Doctrin applies also on downloads and other means to get the software. No license agreement can change this, also not Valve's. This effectively renders technical means to stop the resale of used software illegal in the whole E.U.
Actually, no, or you have a very strange notion about contracts. If two parties agree for instance into a trade, then yes, both side could be considerated to give up rights to their respective properties. But actually, they don't. They exchange property rights. The loss of property into one item traded is only happening if at the same time the right of property to the other item goes over to them. And for instance no employer for instance ends my right to be where I want. All he can do is to end his obligation to compensate me (e.g. terminating the contract), if I am not where he wants me.
It means also that Valve has no legal standing in Germany, which might not be very desirable for them.
No. It's Germans who make a contract with a german outlet of Valve, following german law. If Valve's infrastructure is not able to handle the problem, they shouldn't do business in Germany. And a change in an EULA does neither change a court verdict nor a law in Germany. The new EULA has to adhere to german law too, and german law says that either Valve rents the game or it sells it, so either the legal framework of a rent or that of a sale applies. No EULA can change this legal fact.