I think you completely failed to understand his point, that is to resolve ambiguities not unfairness. Everybody that drafts a contract does so in the way that is most favorable to themselves, so if your employer created the employment contract it will be favorable towards employers. Contract law is a really long rope to hang yourself with, there's a few exceptions of unconscionable terms but for the most part you're permitted to make and will be held to contracts that are very shitty for yourself. It's usually a bad idea to assume you can wiggle your way out of it in a court of law anyway.
Maybe it's easier to understand in a business to business setting, where there's a lot more negotiation. I'm sure your company lawyer could give you lots of examples of a supplier-friendly and a customer-friendly contract for delivery of the exact same item or service. They like to give you the impression that this is the standard terms of delivery, either you sign it or you're gone. Same with employee agreements, but in reality it's negotiable. Trust me, they have systems to deal with individual contracts...
And before all the ID-10-Ts start whinging about "non-exempt" - forget it - there is NOTHING an ermployer can do except fire you,
And sue you and get injunctions to prevent you making money from it. So now you're out of work, paying lawyer fees burning through the nest egg you were supposed to start a business with.
They cannot claim your off-the-clock work, since you were neither hired to do it, nor paid to do it.
They will find some bullshit way to say your work is tainted by some IP you've used or seen at your job, and you will be forced to defend against that. The cost of proving that you work is clean and only using general methods and skills is enough that even if you win, you lose.
But what exactly is the positive benefit to the producer that you're taking away? They say once it's out on the Internet, it's there forever and people are still sharing things made in the 70s but there's nobody collecting royalties on it. It's not like a producer can go to the courts and sue for copyright infringement either, it is essentially like a society with no copyright. Isn't it the artificial scarcity, the control of reproduction and distribution that gives it value? For the drug kingpin, ever drug user will trickle through a system of dealers into demand, the drugs can't just appear out of thin air. But another copy of the same pictures can appear out of thin air, every time it's shared around. What's the trickle-through effect? None.
Don't get me wrong, in small circles I see how producers can make money, but I don't see how driving them underground helps. Instead of one big P2P network you get hundreds or thousands of closed little circles, each producing their own material. Perhaps it's the theory that if was spread to more people, more people would get induced into doing something in real life. But for those looking to turn a profit, rarity is a help not a hindrance. It's pretty damn hard to make people pay for something you can download for free on the Internet, particularly when you know money is infinitely more traceable than bits and bytes.
It also doesn't help that parts of the US has completely lost perspective, I think the worst states are up to 10 years/count. So you could either download 10 pictures off the Internet, or you can go out and kidnap/rape/kill a kid. Either way you're spending the rest of your life in prison if you get caught, it might end up being somewhat shorter in a death penalty state but you've lost all incentive to just sit in front of your PC jacking off which is ultimately rather harmless. It's like pretending there would be no such thing as horny teenagers if Playboy didn't exist, you can take away the porn but it's not like people stop having sexual desires all the same.
That's fine to keep your IP... but it's very hard to keep your job if they no longer want you employed. If you like to be able to do it on the side, hitting them over the head with the law might not be the best approach.
for the same reason I support the Death Penalty: Necessary in a practical sense, but over all pretty gross...
There's at least one good reason I will never support the death penalty, and that is that the justice system is imperfect. Probably the best example are rape cases where DNA has shown they were in fact innocent many years later, but we've had murder sentences lifted based on deathbed confessions. Sometimes they've even confessed because they were half retarded, they were misidentified by witnesses and wrongly picked out in a lineup, beyond reasonable doubt does not mean beyond and and all doubt. Currently the US is executing around 50 people a year, if we say they live on average 60 years in prison instead that's 3000 people in a population of 300 million or 0.0001% the population. I'm prettty sure the justice system would not collapse over that, particularly since you would free up many other resources too.
The notion that space is only for machines, even for the realistically reachable objects, and men is destined to forever stay on Earth is depressing.
Do you also find it depressing that most production is done by industrial robots these days? Sure there's nothing wrong with having a hand molded, hand welded, hand assembled, hand painted car but you'll be in the Ferrari price class. It's the same with space probes and rovers, we could send a rover that's radiation hardened, needs no atmosphere, no oxygen, no food, survives all sorts of G-forces and will live off a light bulb's worth of power. Or we could send a human, whose flexibility and versatility is completely crippled by the travel complexity, the decent complexity, the living complexity, the same cost to bring scientific equipment and the political need for a return journey.
A Mars landing will not be anything like the Moon landing, in practice they'll look much more like tourists coming for a stay in a bunker. We've kinda established now that as long as you keep human conditions on the inside, it doesn't matter what's on the outside. Can we keep 20C inside a Mars base? Sure, it's only a matter of cost. Can we keep radiation out? Sure, with a lead shield it's only a matter of cost. Can we pack CO2 filters and lunch packs for the trip? Sure, it's only a matter of cost. But we're probably going to run into a cost level where it's unfeasible to actually have astronauts out there in the field, robots are coming and going while the humans are mostly sitting in their bunker. And then we've not really accomplished much if we've just brought the robot control center a little closer...
There are upstanding, progressive regimes in Europe where there are literally things you can say that don't involve a threat of violence or which won't cause immediate danger to those around you ("I'm going to kill you!" or "Fire!") which are still considered illegal.
Perhaps because you've never experienced it, the US might have had some small problems with the Ku Klux Klan and such - we had the Holocaust. It's estimated that in the whole history of the KKK they killed maybe 2000 people, while millions and millions of Jews died in Europe. The actual order to kill came very late in the war, but long before they had been demonized, dehumanized, blamed for anything and everything like a modern day witch hunt. Maybe it's hard to understand but by then a lot of people had been convinced to let it happen, hate speech is not outlawed because someone's feelings might get hurt. Hate speech is outlawed because it's seen as preparation for and prelude to genocide, to bury old atrocities as lies to pave the way for new ones.
By the time it came to be immediate danger, they were already in a concentration camp heading for the gas chambers. Nothing about it was immediate, someone had designed those camps, those chambers, the furnaces to burn the bodies, organized the military units to operate the camps, gathering them into ghettos and shipping them off to the camps. Perhaps all of those should be guilty of a conspiracy to commit genocide. But even before that there was people stoking the fires, agitating the people. Perhaps the most common allegory the Nazis used were vermin, rats for example. They didn't need to tell people what to do with rats, they were a pest and a plague and best exterminated. Perhaps our courts are not so naive as to ignore the message, rather than just the words?
1. the person who pays needs to be the same as the one who is on the invoice. So you can't give a subscription to anyone without having it in your own name.
Strictly speaking this is false. The subscription is in your name but you can always look up the payment id (KID) and pay it from a different account or by a different person or manually in a counter. But I don't think there's an easy way to gift a subscription, no. This would have to be solved outside the eFaktura system as having one delivery and one billing address.
2. the invoices are not kept by my bank but by a service provider, using different standards with different quirks
Not sure what you're referring to here, my links stay in my bank's domain and the standard has been PDF for everything.
3. making a local copy of these HTML/PDF/txt documents is horribly slow. They all have different systems filenames, which have nothing to do with the invoice.
Mine are generally 20-100 kB somewhere, they're direct digital invoices not 1+ MB scans. I do agree there's no consistent naming though and I do have to get them one by one.
4. I need to have at least one paper invoice before I can get them electronically.
That is also not true on two accounts. One they can have you fill out and sign a paper form authorizing an eFaktura agreement (my gym did that when I signed up). The other is that you can actually look up the eFaktura providers and create an agreement before the first invoice, though almost nobody does. It's actually with good reason because they don't want the invoice fraud companies that sends bills for services you haven't signed up for to use the system.
More and more companies here in Norway now offer eInvoice (eFaktura). Basically they arrive at my online bank as a PDF that I can download and archive/print or just leave there for reference, the archive goes back years. You can use it with or without automatic billing, so if you prefer to manually approve each invoice you can do that. It also gives you a simple link back from payment to invoice, brilliant. No fiddling with papers and a scanner, no large documents, no OCR issues, cheaper for them, easier for me, a win all around and much more secure than my email, as secure as my online bank. Why the rest of the world hasn't adopted it I don't know, I'd say it's a brilliant system.
With the single exception of launching satellites, practically all the money for say a Mars mission is likely to come from Congress one way or the other. What they must stay out of is the government's cost plus contracts. They're certainly useful sometimes for experimental technology no company would risk putting a price tag on, but they give all the wrong incentives. It reminds me a little bit of the state lottery here in Norway, I've been to their offices. All the profit is distributed to various organizations, the salaries are regulated but they practically have an unlimited expense account. That means the offices, facilities, meeting rooms, exercise room, cafeteria (heavily subsidized), training budget and so on is top notch.
Cost plus contracts I suspect end up the same way, everything you can get a refund for is fine even if it's excessive or extravagant, of course there's probably rules trying to curb this but I have a hard time thinking it works in practice. And you get busy trying to stuff costs into your cost plus projects, even if they're really more overhead or general costs of doing business, throw in a little Hollywood accounting to bill the project at inflated internal rates for various services and you're well on your way to becoming another government contractor. As long as they stay on normal contracts where a dollar saved is a dollar earned, I think they'll do fine even if the fraction of government contracts grow high.
It may be a long time until the attention is elsewhere. Right now the German Pirate Party is the one with most popular support, far more than in Sweden. They scored a huge number of seats in Berlin and if it was national election today they would get anywhere from 4-8% of the votes, there's a 5% threshold but they'd pas it today. Unfortunately it's not election for another year and a half but a long drawn out fight over ACTA is just the thing they need...
Probably because most communist parties have had as an outspoken goal to violate basic human rights, in addition to the armed revolution:
Article 17. (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
I have a bit of a problem with permitting e.g. a racist party that have as policy to take away human rights that per definition should be inalienable and no government should have the right to take away. Even if 51% were to vote for that party (or 2/3rds or 3/4ths or whatever it'd take to change the constitution) it'd still be wrong. It's not something I think should be possible through "democratic" ways, and so not really within the political positions a democracy should accept.
Because I can't imagine somebody buying a a big screen TV or even a laptop based solely on online descriptions
I did, a 60" LCD that came on sale. Personally I think the value of looking at it in a store is quite inferior to reading a dozen reviews online, as well as user reviews - but looking out for astroturfers and astroslammers (or whatever you'd like the people paid to write bad reviews on the competition's products). It came and it delivered, just as expected - I did the same for the sound system too. But then I've done this for lots of things, my fridge/stove/dishwasher/washer-dryer combo all came from an online store. I don't feel I get anything from looking at a fridge at the store and the staff is worthless.
In fact, that was my MO getting all the furniture for my apartment, even though we went to the store and bought it I had a shopping list from many different furniture stores ready long before I entered the first store. Couch, shelves, DVD shelf and nightstand one place, table and lounge chair another, TV table a third, bed a fourth. Never once did I change my opinion in the store, since I was already there I looked it over but nothing of what I picked disappointed and nothing else caught my eye. If it wasn't for the transport cost, I could have had that just delivered to me too.
And laptops? Heh, computers and computer components are the least useful things to go look at in a store. It was probably the first thing I started ordering online, even things like the laptop screen is tested for brightness, contrast, color accuracy, response time etc. these days. The only thing you don't really get a good grip on is build quality but unless you're looking for something particularly rugged they're usually all okay. Everything else like CPU/GPU/RAM/HDD/ports and whatnot is better to research online.
Most of the "climate reporting" is completely retarded. High and low pressures alternate, air is always flowing from high to low. Like now Eastern Europe has been very cold, well at Svalbard they've had record warmth because the high pressure has pushed low pressures with warm, moist air north. These lead to huge local year-to-year variations with mild and cold winters. And every mild season people go "ooh, must be global warming" and every cold season people go "ooh, global warming is a hoax" and the media isn't helping with their sensationalism. To say if it was really a global effect you need lots of data and would probably end up in a boring conclusion like "Average world temperature rose by 0.08C this year".
What's that, zero point zero something degrees you say? 8C in 100 years would actually be extremely much, but it sounds very little, very boring. So 99% of it is sensationalist hype from local extremes, because if you look at a huge mass of data and cherry pick results you'll always find some that are way outside the normal. That's at least what I consider healthy skepticism, in fact I'd apply it to most things found in mainstream media. Extrapolating from the fields where I know they butcher the truth, I don't expect the others to fare any better. I bet that for example doctors are tearing their hair out over the medical reporting, where almost any result is hyped like a major breakthrough or a cure being right around the corner to get readers.
On a purely anecdotal experience, around 2007-2008 sometimes I had a box where WinXP -> samba/ubuntu worked like shit with 100 kbps transfer speed over GigE while standard TCP/UDP tests ran at 3-400 Mbps and WinXP -> windows server worked fine, and the people I asked for help were nothing but insulting and obnoxious and insisting that despite having no clue what the problem was, it must be my "wintendo" box. Wasted many hours on it and it never worked right on that machine, so yeah... like most things on Linux it's just quirks instead of just works.
Well, for one it sounds like he's still employed, if he had just rage quit that would be different. If you don't want to be a Microsoft admin, why stay in an all-Microsoft shop? As long as you feel the new job is as secure as the old one - which may be very low - there's nothing wrong with moving sideways as long as you've got the new job lined up before you leave your old one. He's just not finding the jobs he expected. As he said open source and not Linux servers, I'm guessing he's a developer. And his problem, as far as I've seen it is that you almost never hire a random person to work on an open source project. You almost always pick some person that has worked on it for a long time already and turn a volunteer job into a paid job.
There's so many people that already know the code base with first hand experience of code quality, commitment, coding style and personality that just lack the money to do it full time already, why would you search on monster.com for one? That would only be like he found for the odd contract job, though I'd try the project's mailing list first, unless that's frowned upon but usually they have one open for commercial requests/offers. Of course you can see if Red Hat etc. is hiring but that's a pretty damn small pool. There's custom development and CotS development, paid OSS development is actually rare.
Why should you be arsed to wipe their data? I'd just use it after a quick format, unless I was returning them. Personally I wouldn't bother as long as they were supposed to be refurbished and so technically okay from my point of view, but it would be fun if you could get some info off the disk and notify them directly so the victims can scream at Newegg.
1. In the US 2. Actually it proves the US can't just push world law 3. Not all countries will accept such US claims 4. Piracy has been on the edges since Napster in 2001, doesn't matter one bit. Speeds go up,cost/GB goes down in all civilized countries. If the US wants to shoot itself in the foot, it'll do it alone. 5./6. Yes. On the other hand music on iTunes etc. is now DRM free and BluRay seems permanently broken. It is hard to put the cat back in the bag. And on NetMarketshare Linux is now finally moving out of the ~1% band it's been in for years, passing 1.5% last month. They're trying harder, I'm not sure they're winning. 7. You mean VPN? It's not the only way, nor is it required except in the US. At worst you will get a small fine if they pick you from the millions of file sharers.
If you can hear a repeating pattern here, it's "US". I'd say you're looking at an increasingly desperate battle because no many victories they claim, they're losing ground in the public opinion. I guess you've heard of the mythical hydra, chop off one head and two new appear? Their victories will be short lived, remember suprnova? Oh yes, the torrent world would now collapse.... nope. Will file hosts go away because MegaUpload did? Nope. And if they did, something better would appear.
Movies like The Matrix got me thinking: why would I want a sentient machine? What I mean is I want better tools to do whatever I want, but I do not need "thinking" tools that have their own opinions or desires other than "do whatever is told". (...) Then why create sentient machines in the first place?
Because the two are practically indistinguishable, the question is simply if it's your goals or its own it is pursuing. I'd like a robot I can tell "do the housekeeping" and it can work out itself what needs to be vacuumed, what needs to be washed, what needs to be dusted, what needs to be tidied up, put on the dishwasher, put on the washing machine, in short it needs to take short abstract tasks and turn them into actual work items, schedules and so on. That alone probably requires strong AI.
In the garden I'd like to tell it I'd like a bed of flowers here, and let the robot work out all the practical details of getting the tools, making the bed, buying and planting the seeds, using fertilizer, remove weeds, water it during droughts and so on. Once you have advanced goal-seeking algorithms like that, it's not a good enough solution that it'll go into the nearest seed store, grab some flower seeds and walk out. It would need to have an understanding of ownership, sales and purchases. In fact, I don't want it to break any laws - at least not without my direct permission. That definitively takes strong AI.
If I give it both tasks, I also don't want to manually prioritize everything happening in parallel, I'd like it to both tend to the house and the garden - it'll have to work out a reasonable schedule based on weakly defined priorities like more important, less important, preempts like that I need this shirt washed, everything. It'll also need to follow non-functional requirements like no noisy work at night and impose those restrictions on its plans. Maybe this is just fuzzy logic and scheduling, but I don't think you'd get the parameters right without strong AI.
I could go on but I think the point is rather clear, there's a reason rich people have personal assistants. They're not there to serve their own desires or opinions, though of course a personal trainer will have opinions on your training but they're there to turn your abstract needs and wants into solutions. If you're there you're certainly at intelligence, and only the smallest step from sentience. All that would be different is that the main goals would be internal, not external.
Speaking from Norway, this is actually a big problem with successful entrepreneurs and not only stock, but options too. Here we do have a wealth tax and they're both taxed at market value, even if the options can't actually be exercised and sold yet. They're actually forced to liquidate assets somehow to pay their taxes, and since it's a wealth tax you don't get anything back if you have to sit on them through a boom-bust cycle, you pay plenty taxes in the boom and get nothing in the bust. But then our socialist government seem to hate people that make too much money anyway...
Well, my first response to that would be "How secure is the rest of the plane to an EMP blast?", because if charts are all you got and the remaining electronics just got fried, I'd guess you're in big trouble anyway. These are after all cargo planes, they're not what you plan to use on your front lines. Your RORO ships aren't exactly the best at naval warfare either....
If I recall correctly, the law distinguishes between those copies that are only a technical requirement of storing or playing the work, like RAID1 or copying it to RAM and the sound card buffer, and those that functionally create two copies. Perhaps you can with specialized software argue that this temporary duplication is an technical implementation detail in moving a file, but I doubt your average P2P software would apply. I would think you must show that the software will transfer the bits only once to one person and delete them upon confirmation, which is not the typical mode of operation.
Movies could be produced for far less than what is typically spent on them, and at a reasonable quality level. What makes a movie like The Matrix great is not the special effects or the bogus accounting, but the story that it tells, and that story could be told on a lower budget, with good acting, good directing, and good camerawork replacing much of the technology that is thrown at movies today. Movies are indeed part of our culture; special effects need not be.
Oh please, it takes a lot to make good sci-fi. It takes a lot to create good historical drama that actually looks like medieval Rome or something like that. The only thing that is cheap is reality shows that make no pretense of being anything but in the here and now. I figure Keanau Reeves would do the role anyway, because you get plenty fame and A-list celebrity status and perks. All the invisible people that got zero minutes of screen time, but only helped with sets or special effects or clothing or makeup or sound effects or lights or cameras or transport or supporting all those people again they won't be there. And nobody would pay the $millions they actually cost, without the absurd "star" wages. I've been a consultant and if there's one thing you get an attachment to it's the cost of time. If you want to spend one hour of my time without any direct benefit to me, you'd better be paying good. It's scarce and it's valuable, I won't work for you for pennies on the dollar. Neither will anyone else that doesn't get face time in the movie.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell me, is a picture of a little girl biting a banana considered as "Child Porn" ?
obligatory not XKCD
I think you completely failed to understand his point, that is to resolve ambiguities not unfairness. Everybody that drafts a contract does so in the way that is most favorable to themselves, so if your employer created the employment contract it will be favorable towards employers. Contract law is a really long rope to hang yourself with, there's a few exceptions of unconscionable terms but for the most part you're permitted to make and will be held to contracts that are very shitty for yourself. It's usually a bad idea to assume you can wiggle your way out of it in a court of law anyway.
Maybe it's easier to understand in a business to business setting, where there's a lot more negotiation. I'm sure your company lawyer could give you lots of examples of a supplier-friendly and a customer-friendly contract for delivery of the exact same item or service. They like to give you the impression that this is the standard terms of delivery, either you sign it or you're gone. Same with employee agreements, but in reality it's negotiable. Trust me, they have systems to deal with individual contracts...
And before all the ID-10-Ts start whinging about "non-exempt" - forget it - there is NOTHING an ermployer can do except fire you,
And sue you and get injunctions to prevent you making money from it. So now you're out of work, paying lawyer fees burning through the nest egg you were supposed to start a business with.
They cannot claim your off-the-clock work, since you were neither hired to do it, nor paid to do it.
They will find some bullshit way to say your work is tainted by some IP you've used or seen at your job, and you will be forced to defend against that. The cost of proving that you work is clean and only using general methods and skills is enough that even if you win, you lose.
But what exactly is the positive benefit to the producer that you're taking away? They say once it's out on the Internet, it's there forever and people are still sharing things made in the 70s but there's nobody collecting royalties on it. It's not like a producer can go to the courts and sue for copyright infringement either, it is essentially like a society with no copyright. Isn't it the artificial scarcity, the control of reproduction and distribution that gives it value? For the drug kingpin, ever drug user will trickle through a system of dealers into demand, the drugs can't just appear out of thin air. But another copy of the same pictures can appear out of thin air, every time it's shared around. What's the trickle-through effect? None.
Don't get me wrong, in small circles I see how producers can make money, but I don't see how driving them underground helps. Instead of one big P2P network you get hundreds or thousands of closed little circles, each producing their own material. Perhaps it's the theory that if was spread to more people, more people would get induced into doing something in real life. But for those looking to turn a profit, rarity is a help not a hindrance. It's pretty damn hard to make people pay for something you can download for free on the Internet, particularly when you know money is infinitely more traceable than bits and bytes.
It also doesn't help that parts of the US has completely lost perspective, I think the worst states are up to 10 years/count. So you could either download 10 pictures off the Internet, or you can go out and kidnap/rape/kill a kid. Either way you're spending the rest of your life in prison if you get caught, it might end up being somewhat shorter in a death penalty state but you've lost all incentive to just sit in front of your PC jacking off which is ultimately rather harmless. It's like pretending there would be no such thing as horny teenagers if Playboy didn't exist, you can take away the porn but it's not like people stop having sexual desires all the same.
That's fine to keep your IP... but it's very hard to keep your job if they no longer want you employed. If you like to be able to do it on the side, hitting them over the head with the law might not be the best approach.
for the same reason I support the Death Penalty: Necessary in a practical sense, but over all pretty gross...
There's at least one good reason I will never support the death penalty, and that is that the justice system is imperfect. Probably the best example are rape cases where DNA has shown they were in fact innocent many years later, but we've had murder sentences lifted based on deathbed confessions. Sometimes they've even confessed because they were half retarded, they were misidentified by witnesses and wrongly picked out in a lineup, beyond reasonable doubt does not mean beyond and and all doubt. Currently the US is executing around 50 people a year, if we say they live on average 60 years in prison instead that's 3000 people in a population of 300 million or 0.0001% the population. I'm prettty sure the justice system would not collapse over that, particularly since you would free up many other resources too.
The notion that space is only for machines, even for the realistically reachable objects, and men is destined to forever stay on Earth is depressing.
Do you also find it depressing that most production is done by industrial robots these days? Sure there's nothing wrong with having a hand molded, hand welded, hand assembled, hand painted car but you'll be in the Ferrari price class. It's the same with space probes and rovers, we could send a rover that's radiation hardened, needs no atmosphere, no oxygen, no food, survives all sorts of G-forces and will live off a light bulb's worth of power. Or we could send a human, whose flexibility and versatility is completely crippled by the travel complexity, the decent complexity, the living complexity, the same cost to bring scientific equipment and the political need for a return journey.
A Mars landing will not be anything like the Moon landing, in practice they'll look much more like tourists coming for a stay in a bunker. We've kinda established now that as long as you keep human conditions on the inside, it doesn't matter what's on the outside. Can we keep 20C inside a Mars base? Sure, it's only a matter of cost. Can we keep radiation out? Sure, with a lead shield it's only a matter of cost. Can we pack CO2 filters and lunch packs for the trip? Sure, it's only a matter of cost. But we're probably going to run into a cost level where it's unfeasible to actually have astronauts out there in the field, robots are coming and going while the humans are mostly sitting in their bunker. And then we've not really accomplished much if we've just brought the robot control center a little closer...
There are upstanding, progressive regimes in Europe where there are literally things you can say that don't involve a threat of violence or which won't cause immediate danger to those around you ("I'm going to kill you!" or "Fire!") which are still considered illegal.
Perhaps because you've never experienced it, the US might have had some small problems with the Ku Klux Klan and such - we had the Holocaust. It's estimated that in the whole history of the KKK they killed maybe 2000 people, while millions and millions of Jews died in Europe. The actual order to kill came very late in the war, but long before they had been demonized, dehumanized, blamed for anything and everything like a modern day witch hunt. Maybe it's hard to understand but by then a lot of people had been convinced to let it happen, hate speech is not outlawed because someone's feelings might get hurt. Hate speech is outlawed because it's seen as preparation for and prelude to genocide, to bury old atrocities as lies to pave the way for new ones.
By the time it came to be immediate danger, they were already in a concentration camp heading for the gas chambers. Nothing about it was immediate, someone had designed those camps, those chambers, the furnaces to burn the bodies, organized the military units to operate the camps, gathering them into ghettos and shipping them off to the camps. Perhaps all of those should be guilty of a conspiracy to commit genocide. But even before that there was people stoking the fires, agitating the people. Perhaps the most common allegory the Nazis used were vermin, rats for example. They didn't need to tell people what to do with rats, they were a pest and a plague and best exterminated. Perhaps our courts are not so naive as to ignore the message, rather than just the words?
1. the person who pays needs to be the same as the one who is on the invoice. So you can't give a subscription to anyone without having it in your own name.
Strictly speaking this is false. The subscription is in your name but you can always look up the payment id (KID) and pay it from a different account or by a different person or manually in a counter. But I don't think there's an easy way to gift a subscription, no. This would have to be solved outside the eFaktura system as having one delivery and one billing address.
2. the invoices are not kept by my bank but by a service provider, using different standards with different quirks
Not sure what you're referring to here, my links stay in my bank's domain and the standard has been PDF for everything.
3. making a local copy of these HTML/PDF/txt documents is horribly slow. They all have different systems filenames, which have nothing to do with the invoice.
Mine are generally 20-100 kB somewhere, they're direct digital invoices not 1+ MB scans. I do agree there's no consistent naming though and I do have to get them one by one.
4. I need to have at least one paper invoice before I can get them electronically.
That is also not true on two accounts. One they can have you fill out and sign a paper form authorizing an eFaktura agreement (my gym did that when I signed up). The other is that you can actually look up the eFaktura providers and create an agreement before the first invoice, though almost nobody does. It's actually with good reason because they don't want the invoice fraud companies that sends bills for services you haven't signed up for to use the system.
More and more companies here in Norway now offer eInvoice (eFaktura). Basically they arrive at my online bank as a PDF that I can download and archive/print or just leave there for reference, the archive goes back years. You can use it with or without automatic billing, so if you prefer to manually approve each invoice you can do that. It also gives you a simple link back from payment to invoice, brilliant. No fiddling with papers and a scanner, no large documents, no OCR issues, cheaper for them, easier for me, a win all around and much more secure than my email, as secure as my online bank. Why the rest of the world hasn't adopted it I don't know, I'd say it's a brilliant system.
With the single exception of launching satellites, practically all the money for say a Mars mission is likely to come from Congress one way or the other. What they must stay out of is the government's cost plus contracts. They're certainly useful sometimes for experimental technology no company would risk putting a price tag on, but they give all the wrong incentives. It reminds me a little bit of the state lottery here in Norway, I've been to their offices. All the profit is distributed to various organizations, the salaries are regulated but they practically have an unlimited expense account. That means the offices, facilities, meeting rooms, exercise room, cafeteria (heavily subsidized), training budget and so on is top notch.
Cost plus contracts I suspect end up the same way, everything you can get a refund for is fine even if it's excessive or extravagant, of course there's probably rules trying to curb this but I have a hard time thinking it works in practice. And you get busy trying to stuff costs into your cost plus projects, even if they're really more overhead or general costs of doing business, throw in a little Hollywood accounting to bill the project at inflated internal rates for various services and you're well on your way to becoming another government contractor. As long as they stay on normal contracts where a dollar saved is a dollar earned, I think they'll do fine even if the fraction of government contracts grow high.
It may be a long time until the attention is elsewhere. Right now the German Pirate Party is the one with most popular support, far more than in Sweden. They scored a huge number of seats in Berlin and if it was national election today they would get anywhere from 4-8% of the votes, there's a 5% threshold but they'd pas it today. Unfortunately it's not election for another year and a half but a long drawn out fight over ACTA is just the thing they need...
Probably because most communist parties have had as an outspoken goal to violate basic human rights, in addition to the armed revolution:
Article 17.
(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
I have a bit of a problem with permitting e.g. a racist party that have as policy to take away human rights that per definition should be inalienable and no government should have the right to take away. Even if 51% were to vote for that party (or 2/3rds or 3/4ths or whatever it'd take to change the constitution) it'd still be wrong. It's not something I think should be possible through "democratic" ways, and so not really within the political positions a democracy should accept.
Because I can't imagine somebody buying a a big screen TV or even a laptop based solely on online descriptions
I did, a 60" LCD that came on sale. Personally I think the value of looking at it in a store is quite inferior to reading a dozen reviews online, as well as user reviews - but looking out for astroturfers and astroslammers (or whatever you'd like the people paid to write bad reviews on the competition's products). It came and it delivered, just as expected - I did the same for the sound system too. But then I've done this for lots of things, my fridge/stove/dishwasher/washer-dryer combo all came from an online store. I don't feel I get anything from looking at a fridge at the store and the staff is worthless.
In fact, that was my MO getting all the furniture for my apartment, even though we went to the store and bought it I had a shopping list from many different furniture stores ready long before I entered the first store. Couch, shelves, DVD shelf and nightstand one place, table and lounge chair another, TV table a third, bed a fourth. Never once did I change my opinion in the store, since I was already there I looked it over but nothing of what I picked disappointed and nothing else caught my eye. If it wasn't for the transport cost, I could have had that just delivered to me too.
And laptops? Heh, computers and computer components are the least useful things to go look at in a store. It was probably the first thing I started ordering online, even things like the laptop screen is tested for brightness, contrast, color accuracy, response time etc. these days. The only thing you don't really get a good grip on is build quality but unless you're looking for something particularly rugged they're usually all okay. Everything else like CPU/GPU/RAM/HDD/ports and whatnot is better to research online.
Most of the "climate reporting" is completely retarded. High and low pressures alternate, air is always flowing from high to low. Like now Eastern Europe has been very cold, well at Svalbard they've had record warmth because the high pressure has pushed low pressures with warm, moist air north. These lead to huge local year-to-year variations with mild and cold winters. And every mild season people go "ooh, must be global warming" and every cold season people go "ooh, global warming is a hoax" and the media isn't helping with their sensationalism. To say if it was really a global effect you need lots of data and would probably end up in a boring conclusion like "Average world temperature rose by 0.08C this year".
What's that, zero point zero something degrees you say? 8C in 100 years would actually be extremely much, but it sounds very little, very boring. So 99% of it is sensationalist hype from local extremes, because if you look at a huge mass of data and cherry pick results you'll always find some that are way outside the normal. That's at least what I consider healthy skepticism, in fact I'd apply it to most things found in mainstream media. Extrapolating from the fields where I know they butcher the truth, I don't expect the others to fare any better. I bet that for example doctors are tearing their hair out over the medical reporting, where almost any result is hyped like a major breakthrough or a cure being right around the corner to get readers.
On a purely anecdotal experience, around 2007-2008 sometimes I had a box where WinXP -> samba/ubuntu worked like shit with 100 kbps transfer speed over GigE while standard TCP/UDP tests ran at 3-400 Mbps and WinXP -> windows server worked fine, and the people I asked for help were nothing but insulting and obnoxious and insisting that despite having no clue what the problem was, it must be my "wintendo" box. Wasted many hours on it and it never worked right on that machine, so yeah... like most things on Linux it's just quirks instead of just works.
Well, for one it sounds like he's still employed, if he had just rage quit that would be different. If you don't want to be a Microsoft admin, why stay in an all-Microsoft shop? As long as you feel the new job is as secure as the old one - which may be very low - there's nothing wrong with moving sideways as long as you've got the new job lined up before you leave your old one. He's just not finding the jobs he expected. As he said open source and not Linux servers, I'm guessing he's a developer. And his problem, as far as I've seen it is that you almost never hire a random person to work on an open source project. You almost always pick some person that has worked on it for a long time already and turn a volunteer job into a paid job.
There's so many people that already know the code base with first hand experience of code quality, commitment, coding style and personality that just lack the money to do it full time already, why would you search on monster.com for one? That would only be like he found for the odd contract job, though I'd try the project's mailing list first, unless that's frowned upon but usually they have one open for commercial requests/offers. Of course you can see if Red Hat etc. is hiring but that's a pretty damn small pool. There's custom development and CotS development, paid OSS development is actually rare.
Why should you be arsed to wipe their data? I'd just use it after a quick format, unless I was returning them. Personally I wouldn't bother as long as they were supposed to be refurbished and so technically okay from my point of view, but it would be fun if you could get some info off the disk and notify them directly so the victims can scream at Newegg.
1. In the US ,cost/GB goes down in all civilized countries. If the US wants to shoot itself in the foot, it'll do it alone.
2. Actually it proves the US can't just push world law
3. Not all countries will accept such US claims
4. Piracy has been on the edges since Napster in 2001, doesn't matter one bit. Speeds go up
5./6. Yes. On the other hand music on iTunes etc. is now DRM free and BluRay seems permanently broken. It is hard to put the cat back in the bag. And on NetMarketshare Linux is now finally moving out of the ~1% band it's been in for years, passing 1.5% last month. They're trying harder, I'm not sure they're winning.
7. You mean VPN? It's not the only way, nor is it required except in the US. At worst you will get a small fine if they pick you from the millions of file sharers.
If you can hear a repeating pattern here, it's "US". I'd say you're looking at an increasingly desperate battle because no many victories they claim, they're losing ground in the public opinion. I guess you've heard of the mythical hydra, chop off one head and two new appear? Their victories will be short lived, remember suprnova? Oh yes, the torrent world would now collapse.... nope. Will file hosts go away because MegaUpload did? Nope. And if they did, something better would appear.
Movies like The Matrix got me thinking: why would I want a sentient machine? What I mean is I want better tools to do whatever I want, but I do not need "thinking" tools that have their own opinions or desires other than "do whatever is told". (...) Then why create sentient machines in the first place?
Because the two are practically indistinguishable, the question is simply if it's your goals or its own it is pursuing. I'd like a robot I can tell "do the housekeeping" and it can work out itself what needs to be vacuumed, what needs to be washed, what needs to be dusted, what needs to be tidied up, put on the dishwasher, put on the washing machine, in short it needs to take short abstract tasks and turn them into actual work items, schedules and so on. That alone probably requires strong AI.
In the garden I'd like to tell it I'd like a bed of flowers here, and let the robot work out all the practical details of getting the tools, making the bed, buying and planting the seeds, using fertilizer, remove weeds, water it during droughts and so on. Once you have advanced goal-seeking algorithms like that, it's not a good enough solution that it'll go into the nearest seed store, grab some flower seeds and walk out. It would need to have an understanding of ownership, sales and purchases. In fact, I don't want it to break any laws - at least not without my direct permission. That definitively takes strong AI.
If I give it both tasks, I also don't want to manually prioritize everything happening in parallel, I'd like it to both tend to the house and the garden - it'll have to work out a reasonable schedule based on weakly defined priorities like more important, less important, preempts like that I need this shirt washed, everything. It'll also need to follow non-functional requirements like no noisy work at night and impose those restrictions on its plans. Maybe this is just fuzzy logic and scheduling, but I don't think you'd get the parameters right without strong AI.
I could go on but I think the point is rather clear, there's a reason rich people have personal assistants. They're not there to serve their own desires or opinions, though of course a personal trainer will have opinions on your training but they're there to turn your abstract needs and wants into solutions. If you're there you're certainly at intelligence, and only the smallest step from sentience. All that would be different is that the main goals would be internal, not external.
Speaking from Norway, this is actually a big problem with successful entrepreneurs and not only stock, but options too. Here we do have a wealth tax and they're both taxed at market value, even if the options can't actually be exercised and sold yet. They're actually forced to liquidate assets somehow to pay their taxes, and since it's a wealth tax you don't get anything back if you have to sit on them through a boom-bust cycle, you pay plenty taxes in the boom and get nothing in the bust. But then our socialist government seem to hate people that make too much money anyway...
Well, my first response to that would be "How secure is the rest of the plane to an EMP blast?", because if charts are all you got and the remaining electronics just got fried, I'd guess you're in big trouble anyway. These are after all cargo planes, they're not what you plan to use on your front lines. Your RORO ships aren't exactly the best at naval warfare either....
Grow a spine and use a mod that can be metamoderated, you "-1, Disagree" modtard.
If I recall correctly, the law distinguishes between those copies that are only a technical requirement of storing or playing the work, like RAID1 or copying it to RAM and the sound card buffer, and those that functionally create two copies. Perhaps you can with specialized software argue that this temporary duplication is an technical implementation detail in moving a file, but I doubt your average P2P software would apply. I would think you must show that the software will transfer the bits only once to one person and delete them upon confirmation, which is not the typical mode of operation.
Movies could be produced for far less than what is typically spent on them, and at a reasonable quality level. What makes a movie like The Matrix great is not the special effects or the bogus accounting, but the story that it tells, and that story could be told on a lower budget, with good acting, good directing, and good camerawork replacing much of the technology that is thrown at movies today. Movies are indeed part of our culture; special effects need not be.
Oh please, it takes a lot to make good sci-fi. It takes a lot to create good historical drama that actually looks like medieval Rome or something like that. The only thing that is cheap is reality shows that make no pretense of being anything but in the here and now. I figure Keanau Reeves would do the role anyway, because you get plenty fame and A-list celebrity status and perks. All the invisible people that got zero minutes of screen time, but only helped with sets or special effects or clothing or makeup or sound effects or lights or cameras or transport or supporting all those people again they won't be there. And nobody would pay the $millions they actually cost, without the absurd "star" wages. I've been a consultant and if there's one thing you get an attachment to it's the cost of time. If you want to spend one hour of my time without any direct benefit to me, you'd better be paying good. It's scarce and it's valuable, I won't work for you for pennies on the dollar. Neither will anyone else that doesn't get face time in the movie.