Actually, they wouldn't have a case for either. I'm at work so I can't visit that site (not even going to try). But if the usage is "I like Metroid" then it's a form of review. Nintendo can't send a cease and desist for a commercial magazine that reviews their released game (pre-release contracts are different). Well, they can, but they'll be laughed out of court.
That's why Nintendo is "settling" and bribing the site, because the higher lawyers looked at the situation and publicity and say "we're in trouble".
Actually, it's not very clear in America to draw the line. You still have people who think that exposing the ankle is an outrage(don't ask about pants). There are people who think that full nudity is nothing. Then you get the people who still manage to find 100% coverage erotic.
As the judge said "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." But some people consider the statue of david pornographic, and some consider it a "study of the ideal human form" or whatever.
Besides, humans are naturally sexual, why should we try to deny that?
Has anybody ever heard of a study where they ask people to rate pictures as pornographic or not? Say, a couple hundred people and a thousand or so pictures? Maybe give them a list of choices: sexual, scientific, artistic, deviant; Check any that apply.
It's already a nightmare for companies doing business in multiple states
Except that this would be a national tax, so it would be flat for the entire organization. Once they adjusted for it, it'd be easy compared to working with all the state, city, and county sales taxes.
Also, a vat brings up the problem of people getting taxed twice. Granpa, for example, has paid his taxes all his life. Now he's retired and living off what he's got left, which was already taxed for the last 50 years. Suddenly we have national sales tax replacing income tax, and he's suddenly paying taxes again for basically the same money. Double taxation.
Didn't grandpa stash his money into IRAs, 401(k)'s, and other such tax deferred plans? I'd tend to think that it'd even out. The people who paid into ROTH IRA's would be screwed, however. I guess you could fix this by giving a refund check for the sales tax when people cash those in.
I haven't heard anything about taxes on gas being increased. I thought the increased price was due to high oil prices caused by 1) Increased demand in developing countries, notably China 2) instability in the arabic region 3) instability in some African countries with wells 4) work stoppages in Russia 5) The series of hurricanes interupting production in US coastal wells.
Basically, you scrap all corporate and personal income taxes for a single rate sales tax(proposed 23% inclusive, 30% 'on top'). This includes estate taxes and such. Each american citizen would get a "rebate" check each month for the amount of tax up to the federal poverty level (check for one person one month in 2003: $172.12)
I like it because: 1) Much simpler than the income tax 2) No easier to evade 3) Crooks end up paying it (And you can still prosecute them for not collecting & paying sales tax, rather than income tax) 4) Corporate taxes are easy to figure (for a company that only sells new items, pay 23% of gross). Evasion easy to spot, because it's businesses that would have motive to evade it. 5) Individuals don't have to file anymore. 6) Foreign goods and domestic goods on same tax footing. (Kerry's "loophole")
Problems: Fraud involving business goods (not taxed) being used for private use, but that happens with the income tax too (My car is a business expense). It would be harder, because the person doing it would have to be a business, subject to auditing. Also, you'd have the same hijinks with sole ownership businesses underreporting their income (my dad was offered a 20% discount if he paid in cash when he had additional insulation installed, guess what the contracter was looking to do?).
They'll stop alpha/beta/gamma just fine, but are pretty much useless against neutrons.
I think that neutrons are one of the easily stopped ones. Gamma rays, however, are the very difficult to stop ones. Best shielding for them is distance.
I think that most of our ideas are that we'll become rational about it at some point and either recycle the waste for usage in the then current reactors or actually dump it in a subduction zone, probably some combination of the two.
It's not really necessary to wait until the stuff reaches ambiant radiation levels.
Just caught me funny that the technology intended to mimick the brain is used to refer back to the brain itself... My thought was that that to mimick "just" the part of the brain that deals with visual analysis would require a rather large supercomputer. A little much to stuff into a plane, much less a vehicle meant to navagate on land without being as big as one of these
The person in my plane is just fine(he's a pilot)
on
Battle Roomba Tractor
·
· Score: 1
Not as much of a concern. Yes, there are all sorts of hairy things that can happen on a plane. But I was answering about why we have robot planes/cruise missiles when we can't even make an autopilot for a truck on the highway.
You can reverse Not very quickly at 55-75 mph, and not even at 25 if the AI isn't quick enough. Besides, do you want to reverse after smaking into a wierdly painted sign at 65, or do you think inching along at 5-10 mph is sufficient?
Flying is not easier then driving. You gain some ease in detecting obstacles (everything you detect is an obstacle to be avoided) but loose in having to control something in a far more fluid enviroment. A car driving up an incline that is to steep will simply come to a stop. An aircraft trying to climb to fast to avoid a hill will either stall and crash or plow into the hill.
And for many vehicles today if the "hill" is too steep to climb, the car is just as capable of crashing into it. My point was that planes don't have to worry about all sorts of little "crash" objects if they stay high enough.
Terrestrial life devotes quite a bit of brainpower to handling this, but so far technology has conquered robotic flight better.
That's because they were designed to withstand the rocket exploding around and to break apart into controlled chunks, which can't be inhaled (and presumably easy for ground recovery crews to find and contain).
Flying is easier than walking for machines
on
Battle Roomba Tractor
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The drone planes can also attack remotely now (hellfire missiles).
Flying is actually easier than driving because you don't have to worry about terrain and collisions as much. Take something as simple as a hill. The calculations and sensors to figure out that it's a hill, not a curb or other blockage, then figure out whether the slope is within climbing margins, etc, is actualy quite difficult. We're getting there, but people and animals have the equivalent of a supercomputer neural net trained for years just for processing visual information for this.
4: devotes a much smaller amount of space to heating/cooling system 5: designed for a low duty cycle most of the time (previously stated). 6: better insulated inside, only relevant if you're trying to keep the CPU below ambiant.
A large refridgerator would probably be able to do it. A chest deep freezer would probably work better, and take up less space. Designed to keep stuff colder, so probably has a beefier moter.
And better yet, there are conditioners that you can put in to prevent this. Antifreeze contains them, however the temperature range is more limited for computer cooling, so you can go without the glycol (or equivalent). Even if you go with 100% of one metal, there could still be enough difference to cause problems over time.
On the other hand you're getting a deal on their wages Monthly Pay: E-1:1193.40 E-2:1337.70 E-3:1407.00 Figur e four fourty hour weeks, 160 hours a month E-1: $7.46 E-2: $8.36 E-3: $8.79 Now, you have lots of other benefits, but ask yourself. Does that really counterbalance the three months to a year over in the desert, with the chance of being shot or blown up, if you're not a patriot?
If you believe the medical qualities they might just provide them. We already know that the stuff grows well hydroponically, and views on it are changing in the USA, so it might be medically legal by then.
Stop loss has been in place for certain "career fields" because we're short of them. They missed on how many would be needed, and were caught short. Sort of like the Air Force was very short of Security Forces for a few years because they forgot about the need for ground security. Stop loss does come into effect for deploying troops because you don't want the chaos of troop changes when you're going into the field. So you "freeze" the unit with it's current manning.
Reenlistment is a record levels. All goals are being exceeded, with ease. The Air Force has had to tighten reenlistment requirements. People are getting kicked out for less.
And the link to the document provided did not say that the Selective Service says that they need to be re-activated, they reported that for best performance if they are ever activated, some changes need to be made. It even lists Rep Rangel and Sen Hollings as the ones that introduced a bill to reactivate the draft. They're both democrats!
Recruitment is down because reenlistment is so high. We don't need to replace as many troops because more are staying in. The waiting period for enlistment can be a year!
Total death toll for americans, depending on where you pin the start of your WWIV, is 4-5 thousand. I tend to place it earlier than September 11, due to the earlier attacks on the Cole, the barrack attacks, etc.
WWI lists american deaths at above 100,000.
WWII alone cost the United States 291,557 KIA + 113,842 "other" according to the DoD. Heck, it even lists around 6k american civilian deaths.
If you count Korea, Vietnam as part of the "cold war" as WWIII, Korea was 36,576. Vietnam was 58,169.
WWIV so far has been exraordinarily bloodless so far. And as far as the continued guerilla fighting goes, that actually happened in both Japan and Germany after WWII was officially over. I think that what kept that low key was that down was that people had been ground down after years of war. Here the "active" phase was so quick that people hardly realized it happened. Much of what's happening in Iraq is from foreign imports of extremists, supplies, and money to fund terroristic attacks. If they were more carefull of civilians, I'd call it an insurgency, but they're striking Iraqies more than Americans and allies now.
And when have we used them other than in the very beginning, during an already very hotly fought war?
We could of very easily just nuked Baghdad, Fallujah, and any other town that offered resistance. Instead we're sacrificing the lives of our soldiers to prevent more civilian casualties.
If you look at history and read medal of honor award packages, I think that you'll find that there are soldiers out there that would, given a serious enough need. But like you said, when artillery and air support is there, why do it?
I find the terrorist's ultimate goal of a worldwide muslim theocracy and the deliberate targeting of civilians over military targets abhorant. That is something we must fight.
1- The kyoto supporters admit that any reduction in warming would only delay the temperature increase by about 3 years in the next 100. The cost to the US economy (remember, we want jobs too!) would be more than that of relocating New Orleans and such. I think that better solutions can be found. 2-See Black Pages answer. I didn't spend hours researching this, I was trained on this. I will add that we do have multiple year mines, but they're the ones that are networked, and used to protect longer-term bases. We can shut them off for collection when we leave. 3-Bingo! On the other hand, there's no benefit to being limp wristed and agreeing to everything. Everybody likes a chump. The chump doesn't get rich.
You could of just called me a bloodthirsty barbarian.;) I'm a firm believer in the MAD theory of peace. When it comes to terrorists, I'd like to chop the M off.
pre-adolescent fantasy of world conquest
I don't want the world, despite my enjoyment of games like civilization. I just want to blow up those who want to harm us. And as far as international relations, I'd try to play around less with the skunkworks and deals with the lesser evils.
Oh - as long as our kids are paying for it all, that is...
Like I'm having to play clean up for the cold war generation. On one hand I support a balanced budget, putting me at odds with Sir-spends-alot. On the other hand, from looking at congressional records, my choice is between him and Sir-wants-to-spend-alot-more.
As a libertarian I'm alarmed by Kerry's solutions seem to be universally more government, more spending, paid for by tax increases. So, like I said, I'm voting for Badnirak this time, and hoping for Bush.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they wouldn't have a case for either. I'm at work so I can't visit that site (not even going to try). But if the usage is "I like Metroid" then it's a form of review. Nintendo can't send a cease and desist for a commercial magazine that reviews their released game (pre-release contracts are different). Well, they can, but they'll be laughed out of court.
That's why Nintendo is "settling" and bribing the site, because the higher lawyers looked at the situation and publicity and say "we're in trouble".
Actually, it's not very clear in America to draw the line. You still have people who think that exposing the ankle is an outrage(don't ask about pants). There are people who think that full nudity is nothing. Then you get the people who still manage to find 100% coverage erotic.
As the judge said "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." But some people consider the statue of david pornographic, and some consider it a "study of the ideal human form" or whatever.
Besides, humans are naturally sexual, why should we try to deny that?
Has anybody ever heard of a study where they ask people to rate pictures as pornographic or not? Say, a couple hundred people and a thousand or so pictures? Maybe give them a list of choices: sexual, scientific, artistic, deviant; Check any that apply.
It's already a nightmare for companies doing business in multiple states
Except that this would be a national tax, so it would be flat for the entire organization. Once they adjusted for it, it'd be easy compared to working with all the state, city, and county sales taxes.
Also, a vat brings up the problem of people getting taxed twice. Granpa, for example, has paid his taxes all his life. Now he's retired and living off what he's got left, which was already taxed for the last 50 years. Suddenly we have national sales tax replacing income tax, and he's suddenly paying taxes again for basically the same money. Double taxation.
Didn't grandpa stash his money into IRAs, 401(k)'s, and other such tax deferred plans? I'd tend to think that it'd even out. The people who paid into ROTH IRA's would be screwed, however. I guess you could fix this by giving a refund check for the sales tax when people cash those in.
If you want a car made in the USA, you buy from a japanese company, if you by from a US company, you get one made in mexico.
increased gas taxes
I haven't heard anything about taxes on gas being increased. I thought the increased price was due to high oil prices caused by
1) Increased demand in developing countries, notably China
2) instability in the arabic region
3) instability in some African countries with wells
4) work stoppages in Russia
5) The series of hurricanes interupting production in US coastal wells.
Little more detail:
Basically, you scrap all corporate and personal income taxes for a single rate sales tax(proposed 23% inclusive, 30% 'on top'). This includes estate taxes and such. Each american citizen would get a "rebate" check each month for the amount of tax up to the federal poverty level (check for one person one month in 2003: $172.12)
I like it because:
1) Much simpler than the income tax
2) No easier to evade
3) Crooks end up paying it (And you can still prosecute them for not collecting & paying sales tax, rather than income tax)
4) Corporate taxes are easy to figure (for a company that only sells new items, pay 23% of gross). Evasion easy to spot, because it's businesses that would have motive to evade it.
5) Individuals don't have to file anymore.
6) Foreign goods and domestic goods on same tax footing. (Kerry's "loophole")
Problems: Fraud involving business goods (not taxed) being used for private use, but that happens with the income tax too (My car is a business expense). It would be harder, because the person doing it would have to be a business, subject to auditing. Also, you'd have the same hijinks with sole ownership businesses underreporting their income (my dad was offered a 20% discount if he paid in cash when he had additional insulation installed, guess what the contracter was looking to do?).
And that'll piss off everybody below the mason-dixon line. ;)
They'll stop alpha/beta/gamma just fine, but are pretty much useless against neutrons.
I think that neutrons are one of the easily stopped ones. Gamma rays, however, are the very difficult to stop ones. Best shielding for them is distance.
Death reports for coal
Indeed, which is why I propose we build one of these plants in your back yard. You can put your money where your mouth is.
Actually it'd be more like you putting your money where my mouth is, as you'll be buying power from the plant where I work in that case.
I think that most of our ideas are that we'll become rational about it at some point and either recycle the waste for usage in the then current reactors or actually dump it in a subduction zone, probably some combination of the two.
It's not really necessary to wait until the stuff reaches ambiant radiation levels.
Just caught me funny that the technology intended to mimick the brain is used to refer back to the brain itself...
My thought was that that to mimick "just" the part of the brain that deals with visual analysis would require a rather large supercomputer. A little much to stuff into a plane, much less a vehicle meant to navagate on land without being as big as one of these
Not as much of a concern. Yes, there are all sorts of hairy things that can happen on a plane. But I was answering about why we have robot planes/cruise missiles when we can't even make an autopilot for a truck on the highway.
You can reverse
Not very quickly at 55-75 mph, and not even at 25 if the AI isn't quick enough. Besides, do you want to reverse after smaking into a wierdly painted sign at 65, or do you think inching along at 5-10 mph is sufficient?
Flying is not easier then driving. You gain some ease in detecting obstacles (everything you detect is an obstacle to be avoided) but loose in having to control something in a far more fluid enviroment. A car driving up an incline that is to steep will simply come to a stop. An aircraft trying to climb to fast to avoid a hill will either stall and crash or plow into the hill.
And for many vehicles today if the "hill" is too steep to climb, the car is just as capable of crashing into it. My point was that planes don't have to worry about all sorts of little "crash" objects if they stay high enough.
Terrestrial life devotes quite a bit of brainpower to handling this, but so far technology has conquered robotic flight better.
That's because they were designed to withstand the rocket exploding around and to break apart into controlled chunks, which can't be inhaled (and presumably easy for ground recovery crews to find and contain).
The drone planes can also attack remotely now (hellfire missiles).
Flying is actually easier than driving because you don't have to worry about terrain and collisions as much. Take something as simple as a hill. The calculations and sensors to figure out that it's a hill, not a curb or other blockage, then figure out whether the slope is within climbing margins, etc, is actualy quite difficult. We're getting there, but people and animals have the equivalent of a supercomputer neural net trained for years just for processing visual information for this.
4: devotes a much smaller amount of space to heating/cooling system
5: designed for a low duty cycle most of the time (previously stated).
6: better insulated inside, only relevant if you're trying to keep the CPU below ambiant.
A large refridgerator would probably be able to do it. A chest deep freezer would probably work better, and take up less space. Designed to keep stuff colder, so probably has a beefier moter.
And better yet, there are conditioners that you can put in to prevent this. Antifreeze contains them, however the temperature range is more limited for computer cooling, so you can go without the glycol (or equivalent). Even if you go with 100% of one metal, there could still be enough difference to cause problems over time.
On the other hand you're getting a deal on their wagesr e four fourty hour weeks, 160 hours a month
Monthly Pay:
E-1:1193.40
E-2:1337.70
E-3:1407.00
Figu
E-1: $7.46
E-2: $8.36
E-3: $8.79
Now, you have lots of other benefits, but ask yourself. Does that really counterbalance the three months to a year over in the desert, with the chance of being shot or blown up, if you're not a patriot?
If you believe the medical qualities they might just provide them. We already know that the stuff grows well hydroponically, and views on it are changing in the USA, so it might be medically legal by then.
Stop loss has been in place for certain "career fields" because we're short of them. They missed on how many would be needed, and were caught short. Sort of like the Air Force was very short of Security Forces for a few years because they forgot about the need for ground security. Stop loss does come into effect for deploying troops because you don't want the chaos of troop changes when you're going into the field. So you "freeze" the unit with it's current manning.
Reenlistment is a record levels. All goals are being exceeded, with ease. The Air Force has had to tighten reenlistment requirements. People are getting kicked out for less.
And the link to the document provided did not say that the Selective Service says that they need to be re-activated, they reported that for best performance if they are ever activated, some changes need to be made. It even lists Rep Rangel and Sen Hollings as the ones that introduced a bill to reactivate the draft. They're both democrats!
Recruitment is down because reenlistment is so high. We don't need to replace as many troops because more are staying in. The waiting period for enlistment can be a year!
Total death toll for americans, depending on where you pin the start of your WWIV, is 4-5 thousand. I tend to place it earlier than September 11, due to the earlier attacks on the Cole, the barrack attacks, etc.
WWI lists american deaths at above 100,000.
WWII alone cost the United States 291,557 KIA + 113,842 "other" according to the DoD. Heck, it even lists around 6k american civilian deaths.
If you count Korea, Vietnam as part of the "cold war" as WWIII, Korea was 36,576. Vietnam was 58,169.
WWIV so far has been exraordinarily bloodless so far. And as far as the continued guerilla fighting goes, that actually happened in both Japan and Germany after WWII was officially over. I think that what kept that low key was that down was that people had been ground down after years of war. Here the "active" phase was so quick that people hardly realized it happened. Much of what's happening in Iraq is from foreign imports of extremists, supplies, and money to fund terroristic attacks. If they were more carefull of civilians, I'd call it an insurgency, but they're striking Iraqies more than Americans and allies now.
And when have we used them other than in the very beginning, during an already very hotly fought war?
We could of very easily just nuked Baghdad, Fallujah, and any other town that offered resistance. Instead we're sacrificing the lives of our soldiers to prevent more civilian casualties.
You call that guy lightly armed or armored? He could kill an Abrams tank by himself!
If you look at history and read medal of honor award packages, I think that you'll find that there are soldiers out there that would, given a serious enough need. But like you said, when artillery and air support is there, why do it?
I find the terrorist's ultimate goal of a worldwide muslim theocracy and the deliberate targeting of civilians over military targets abhorant. That is something we must fight.
1- The kyoto supporters admit that any reduction in warming would only delay the temperature increase by about 3 years in the next 100. The cost to the US economy (remember, we want jobs too!) would be more than that of relocating New Orleans and such. I think that better solutions can be found.
2-See Black Pages answer. I didn't spend hours researching this, I was trained on this. I will add that we do have multiple year mines, but they're the ones that are networked, and used to protect longer-term bases. We can shut them off for collection when we leave.
3-Bingo! On the other hand, there's no benefit to being limp wristed and agreeing to everything. Everybody likes a chump. The chump doesn't get rich.
complete lack of ethical sensibility
;)
You could of just called me a bloodthirsty barbarian.
I'm a firm believer in the MAD theory of peace. When it comes to terrorists, I'd like to chop the M off.
pre-adolescent fantasy of world conquest
I don't want the world, despite my enjoyment of games like civilization. I just want to blow up those who want to harm us.
And as far as international relations, I'd try to play around less with the skunkworks and deals with the lesser evils.
Oh - as long as our kids are paying for it all, that is...
Like I'm having to play clean up for the cold war generation. On one hand I support a balanced budget, putting me at odds with Sir-spends-alot. On the other hand, from looking at congressional records, my choice is between him and Sir-wants-to-spend-alot-more.
As a libertarian I'm alarmed by Kerry's solutions seem to be universally more government, more spending, paid for by tax increases. So, like I said, I'm voting for Badnirak this time, and hoping for Bush.