How many cases are there of spousal abuse are there in society? Was the former view of "a woman's place is in the home" appropriately respectful? Is the bible's view of women serving men respecting a woman's capable decision making capacity and rights as a fellow person?
You're right, a lot of my examples were fairly corporation-centric. You can chalk that up to me having watched a documentary "The Corporation" a day or two prior. Putting that driver aside, though, the claim that "men respect naturally" would seem to imply that in all situations, men naturally are respectful. However, if that were to be true, then you would see it reflected in every aspect of a male's life, both in their interpersonal relationships, in their behavior towards the common man at large, and in their stewardship of their living space (in a local sense, their town. In a broad sense, the environment). I just don't see that reflection.
To drop a few more disrespectful things on the platter, slavery (an arguably male-initiated institution), littering (something that irritates me to no end about smokers), crusades (yay for religious idealism), and even the treatment of our criminals (prison is not rehabilitation) shows the lack of respect that we as a society have as a whole. We may all be capable of respect, as evidenced by your examples, but I dispute the idea that any one gender is built for it naturally.
There may be some things that one gender does better than another. Child rearing and other physiologically defined roles are certainly roles one falls into by nature because of your gender. However, to have blind faith those roles are the only ones that you are naturally suited to is doing a disservice to the immense similarities between the genders and to the vast diversity of our species. I have a feeling that, though you tout defined systems a lot in your response, things are nowhere near as cut and dried as you may believe.
If you're going to do this on a regular basis, it's better to use the styles. Set up your normal style to do double spacing, or create a new style with that set up. Then, you just select text, and assign that style to it.
A lot of corporate image is about making sure that the logo is portrayed with just the right shading of colors, just the right dimensions, etc etc. I had worked for a company at one point where we had put the company logo into our signatures. We were told we had to take them out because when the logos were printed or when they were viewed on the screen, they failed to comply with corporate governance over how the logo should be seen.
With a bashed up car, you'll get the Ford/Chevy/Honda/whatever logo all f'd up and then noone would recognize it for the product it is!
If God designed man and woman for their respective roles, is that an indication that women could never successfully lead? I'd have to argue against that idea, as matriarchal societies have been come about and done as well as many patriarchal ones. I have but to think of Queen Elizabeth to come up with a fairly well known woman-led society. It is even speculated that the idea of a male-led society really came about once the notion of possession of the offspring was realized.
Second, I don't believe for one second that men respect naturally. In this patriarchal society we live in now, where many businesses and corporations are led by men, respect is non-existent. Respect for their fellow man (sweatshops, predatory terms and conditions, usurping things such as water rights of others) and respect for their environment (toxic dumping, strip mining, careless and inefficient use of resources) are fairly rampant, and the only reason why they seem to give a care at all is because without a positive perception, not as many people will give them money. You can't tell me for one minute that men are naturally respectful when there is so little of it present in the day to day life of our society.
I agree with the idea that you need to be respectful, that you need to be considerate of your partner, and that any decisions you make should be made with full understanding of how it impacts them. Communication is key, without it little non-issues become major ones. These things can be done without a reliance of hard and fast 'designs' or limitations believed to be imposed on a particular gender.
AT&T has been blocking outbound port 25 access for quite some time, ever since I got my DSL line set up 3 years ago. They will, however, lift that block on request, or did when I asked.
Here is my question. Does it matter where you drove? Here is my thought process on this. As most of us are traveling on public roads anyways, the special case of 'primarily private usage' need not come up for this example.
You drive 10,000 miles for the year and are assessed your tax burden for your travels. You travel primarily in your home state, but your state has fairly good interstate roads and don't need to be fixed or upgraded for an estimated 5 more years. However, a neighboring state does need repairs done to their interstates.
Option 1: If the money were simply divided by 50 (or other distribution method) and doled out for projects, states needing no repairs or enhancements to their federally funded roads would have an excess of money they couldn't/wouldn't use for roadway projects and states that needed heavy repairs wouldn't have enough money to complete them. This opens up states to the common 'rob peter to pay paul' mentality, drawing on available but not needed funds to supply projects unrelated to the reason the tax was collected.
Option 2: In this scenario, regardless of where they are, it might be better to repair the roads that need it and enhance those on priority with the remainder of the funds. This has the benefit of a constantly maintained infrastructure for the entire country (for those times you need it) and has makes the most effective use of resources at hand for current needs.
In the case of 'primarily private usage' vehicles, just like tax exempt status is now, a person could file for a 'private usage' exemption, with the understanding that the vehicles are not to be on public roads for more than a specified percentage of the time.
I can download an album, but if I already have the existing album in another form (CD, maybe even iTunes AAC), I'm covered by fair use.
I hate to be a troll, but I have to wonder about this statement. My understanding of Fair Use, as far as the legal definition in Copyright Law, doesn't cover this aspect at all. I'm familiar with timeshifting as relating to the Sony Betamax case, but what I'm not familiar is case law or written law covering format shifting under fair use. Perhaps a reference is in order?
I would imagine giving copies of US Currency is not covered under copyright law, but rather law relating to counterfeit. A nit, but since you brought up money, it seems appropriate to mention that.
There is a precedent for humans murdering other humans. Shall we go overly broad and say that because of that, we should incarcerate all humans? Or more focused on the Slashdot crowd, since people on P2P networks are trading copyrighted songs, should that mean that all P2P users should be scrutinized as criminals? Yes, these are examples to the extreme, but by making the statement that 'kids', a big broad general category, 'bringing drugs/weapons into schools', an activity that thankfully a minority of students do, you justify the precedent of treating all kids (your defined group) as suspect. Seems a lot extreme to me.
I have no problem with the idea of school administrators being tasked with the creation of a safe environment in which to educate students. What I have a problem with is that the administrator in this case overreached his authority and did something that should probably have had either the police or at least the girl's parents present for. The parents (or legal guardian) are the only ones that can really give legal consent to such matters. That this was done without parental supervision is really an insult to the role of the parents in this whole matter and a lack of understanding of what the police are paid for.
As a technician supporting my users, I am often remotely connected to the user's workstation. I see what they see, and while I might not get their Window's logon password with some remote tools, I sure as hell might accidentally see their application passwords, or passwords as they access a site while I'm trying to assist them with their problem. These are pieces of information that I really just Do Not Want to know. If I don't know it, it would be harder to hold me accountable for problems that come up.
Hey, here's a thought. The child Did Not have the suspected drugs on her person, and was searched on suspicion of such. The parents, in your argument, did the correct thing and ensured that their child did not carry the inappropriate item to school, but they administrators did the search anyways.
Would you like to review your argument and get back to us a little later?
Worse, why can you not use 3rd party batteries after your warranty has expired? Why would Panasonic give a crap about that? If it damages it, then you are more likely to buy a new camera, possibly even theirs!
Don't want to show a police officer your ID? If he or she has probable cause, it's a crime now to refuse. If they don't have cause to see your ID, then you can refuse.
How do you, at the time of a traffic stop, know whether or not probable cause is in play? Will there not being probable cause, say a cop stopping you on the street to ask for your ID, stop them from arresting you if you refuse? Perhaps the cop is investigating a crime that happened the next block over, and you happened to match the description of the alleged perpetrator? You don't know that, and the cop is not likely to offer that up to you.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, but it does feel a little like a slippery slope. If you can't refuse at certain points (ie: it's a crime), how do you know when you can refuse if not all elements of the situation are known to you?
You can give up to $12,000 (2008) or $13,000 (2009+) in gifts to any single individual through the year and not have to pay a gift tax on it. However, once you gift more than that to any one person, you are obligated by federal law to pay federal taxes on it. At least, that was my understanding when I looked it up last year. However, the person receiving the gift does not have to claim it as income, as the responsibility is placed on the giver.
Sales tax is a different beast, and yes, is applied when you use the gift card at a location. So nice when the government goes double dipping in the same pool of money.
Source, please. I've tried reading up on what's coming for this game and I have yet to find official word whether or not this is an incremental or complete change from the original.
Not all systems that a technician might SSH into are visible from the outside world. Sometimes, VPN gets you more than just encryption. It gets you visibility to far more systems than those on the Internet get to see.
It doesn't really matter if it is reversible or not. The fact that they touched your property in order to modify it (and attaching a device, even via magnets or tape, is modification), they need to be seeking a warrant for it. It would seem to me that the following comparison would hold true; GPS tracking bugs are to a tailing a suspect what wiretaps are to listening to a conversation in public. The former in both (should) require a warrant due to the expectation of privacy in person and property, the latter does not as there cannot be an expectation of privacy when you are out amongst the public.
This aught to clue most people in. If you travel onto a private drive or property (possibly, as I did once, a military base to evade some unruly students) and the police cannot follow, gaining information beyond that point they must stop is a violation of your privacy.
What sort of limited resource (other than bandwidth) are you consuming when you use the Internet vs Electricity? With Electricity, you are consuming power generation at the power plants, a non-unlimited source. With the Internet, the only thing limited are the resources to get you what you want, not the actual data you are concerned about. Does Google run out of bits to send you? Does your trading software say 'Oops, no more bits today'? No, it doesn't. Instead of comparing Internet Bandwidth to power generation, perhaps you would liken it better to roads (yay car analogies!). Even metered (tolls), it still exceeds it's maximum capacity (traffic jams). The only resolution is to build out the infrastructure (bigger road) to handle more traffic at once.
Really, there are set numbers on how much of a work can be used? Because I seem to recall (as noted above) that the law doesn't give specific numbers, but only that whether a use is fair must take into account how much of the work is used. It also includes criteria such as the type of use, how it impacts the market for that work, and whether it is commercial or not. If there is case law that sets precedent for this, you might be well to include those references to back up your numbers.
Given that at least half of peer-to-peer traffic is other peoples' copyrighted material, you have no obligation to assist people to break the law. Threats of legal action could readily be countered by profiling/capturing the traffic sent through the ISP for legal discovery purposes.
The problem with this statement is that, at least in the USA, we have this little thing called innocent til proven guilty. As much as it has been trampled and abused, unless you can prove an individual and specific user is breaking the law, treating him or her like a criminal is going to piss them off (if they learn of it) and possibly open up the ISP to legal action. I wonder what the ratio of legitimate SMTP traffic now is to the Email equivalent of mail fraud. Is that to indicate that perhaps SMTP traffic should be blocked or reduced to drastically reduced levels, because the ratio indicates that it is now predominantly illegal?
It is truely difficult to point to a day and state that is when conception actually occurs. Even at the second of conception, said new entity is truly on it's own and not leeching nourishment from the womb. Only after it commits it's first act of aggression, by assaulting the woman it's within possibly against her will, does it become capable of growing into a full fledged adult. However, when the two are bonded together like that, who's rights take priority? The adult, who is capable of existing on without the child, or the child, that might kill the adult in the process of being born? Gestation is a highly dangerous affair for both mother and child, and even though we've advanced so far from our club-wielding ancestors, we STILL have infant and maternal fatalities in the process of bringing new life into the world.
It might be that a birth is an arbitrary milestone to measure a valid legal entity, but whether that child lives or dies after birth is really the deciding factor on whether that child can grow up to be a member of society. It may be nice to think that a fertilized egg is a legal entity that has rights, but most people forget that legal entities also have responsibilities that prohibit actions that a fertilized egg must take in order to further life. When deciding when abortions are palatable by society, I would argue that the idea of 'likelihood to survive' might be applicable. If the child is likely to survive on it's own (usually no earlier than 20-22 weeks of gestation), then it probably shouldn't be done. Earlier than that? Even nature induces abortions (miscarriages), often for a good reason such as the failure of the fetus to develop properly.
I'd like to think that one statement I heard about abortion would become our morality on it. That they should be allowed, and rarely used.
How about this less extreme take? What if it's a couple raising their children in a way you don't particularly like? Spanking responsibly (ie: not beating), but you feel Time Outs are the only proper way? There really is a point at which, no matter what your personal opinion on the matter is, unless you can prove a personal stake in the matter, you should just let it go. By utilizing your freedoms and inflicting your will on others, you restrict their freedom unfairly, just because you think what they're doing is wrong. Get over it.
I once read an article (the referenced article below is not it) about the theory that cancer is a stem cell gone awry. The reason, it seems to me, that cancer is so resistant to treatment is that stem cells are so resistant to being killed, and they'd have to be. Stem cells are responsible for the renewal of your tissues and possibly the growth of new tissue (ie: muscle mass) when needed. They have to live your entire life while still being able to divide in a controlled fashion. The referenced article touches on the experiment of injecting cancer cells that don't contain (suspected) stem cells into mice and how no tumors resulted, yet the cancerous stem cells did.
It seems to me that it's more like our current cancer treatments are like our cough medication. They do a lot with the symptoms and side effects, but do very little to address the root cause of the ailment.
File associations are not permissions, they are conveniences that the operating system uses to allow a program to predefine what application runs a particular data file. IE: Notepad is the application assocated with.txt, but Wordpad, Word, Textpad, and any number of other applications can be associated with.txt or even run it when the association is not with them.
Also, if you have a binary program that understands.txt files, but you don't want it to go modifying any of those.txt files in your home directory because you're testing it for viruses or just want to see what it is, you could specify that that application is to be giving read access only (not write) to any.txt file in your home directory. THAT is what the patent describes, not associations or fancy applications that do some sort of proprietary encryption on a particular data file.
I don't agree with the patent, I find it reprehensible to wait so long to sue someone, or even to just troll, but at least get your facts straight before spouting off about what you think constitutes prior art.
Actually, I would say that restrictions on how you use your car are defined when you get your license to drive on public roads (and that's what your license is, a license to drive on public roads). By getting your license, you agree to those restrictions for the safety of all. However, this doesn't stop anyone from recklessly using their car on private land, e.g. racing at 100+ mph on a drag strip or playing bumper cars on a farm.
Slashdot Mirror
How many cases are there of spousal abuse are there in society? Was the former view of "a woman's place is in the home" appropriately respectful? Is the bible's view of women serving men respecting a woman's capable decision making capacity and rights as a fellow person?
You're right, a lot of my examples were fairly corporation-centric. You can chalk that up to me having watched a documentary "The Corporation" a day or two prior. Putting that driver aside, though, the claim that "men respect naturally" would seem to imply that in all situations, men naturally are respectful. However, if that were to be true, then you would see it reflected in every aspect of a male's life, both in their interpersonal relationships, in their behavior towards the common man at large, and in their stewardship of their living space (in a local sense, their town. In a broad sense, the environment). I just don't see that reflection.
To drop a few more disrespectful things on the platter, slavery (an arguably male-initiated institution), littering (something that irritates me to no end about smokers), crusades (yay for religious idealism), and even the treatment of our criminals (prison is not rehabilitation) shows the lack of respect that we as a society have as a whole. We may all be capable of respect, as evidenced by your examples, but I dispute the idea that any one gender is built for it naturally.
There may be some things that one gender does better than another. Child rearing and other physiologically defined roles are certainly roles one falls into by nature because of your gender. However, to have blind faith those roles are the only ones that you are naturally suited to is doing a disservice to the immense similarities between the genders and to the vast diversity of our species. I have a feeling that, though you tout defined systems a lot in your response, things are nowhere near as cut and dried as you may believe.
If you're going to do this on a regular basis, it's better to use the styles. Set up your normal style to do double spacing, or create a new style with that set up. Then, you just select text, and assign that style to it.
A lot of corporate image is about making sure that the logo is portrayed with just the right shading of colors, just the right dimensions, etc etc. I had worked for a company at one point where we had put the company logo into our signatures. We were told we had to take them out because when the logos were printed or when they were viewed on the screen, they failed to comply with corporate governance over how the logo should be seen.
With a bashed up car, you'll get the Ford/Chevy/Honda/whatever logo all f'd up and then noone would recognize it for the product it is!
I wonder a few things.
If God designed man and woman for their respective roles, is that an indication that women could never successfully lead? I'd have to argue against that idea, as matriarchal societies have been come about and done as well as many patriarchal ones. I have but to think of Queen Elizabeth to come up with a fairly well known woman-led society. It is even speculated that the idea of a male-led society really came about once the notion of possession of the offspring was realized.
Second, I don't believe for one second that men respect naturally. In this patriarchal society we live in now, where many businesses and corporations are led by men, respect is non-existent. Respect for their fellow man (sweatshops, predatory terms and conditions, usurping things such as water rights of others) and respect for their environment (toxic dumping, strip mining, careless and inefficient use of resources) are fairly rampant, and the only reason why they seem to give a care at all is because without a positive perception, not as many people will give them money. You can't tell me for one minute that men are naturally respectful when there is so little of it present in the day to day life of our society.
I agree with the idea that you need to be respectful, that you need to be considerate of your partner, and that any decisions you make should be made with full understanding of how it impacts them. Communication is key, without it little non-issues become major ones. These things can be done without a reliance of hard and fast 'designs' or limitations believed to be imposed on a particular gender.
AT&T has been blocking outbound port 25 access for quite some time, ever since I got my DSL line set up 3 years ago. They will, however, lift that block on request, or did when I asked.
Here is my question. Does it matter where you drove? Here is my thought process on this. As most of us are traveling on public roads anyways, the special case of 'primarily private usage' need not come up for this example.
You drive 10,000 miles for the year and are assessed your tax burden for your travels. You travel primarily in your home state, but your state has fairly good interstate roads and don't need to be fixed or upgraded for an estimated 5 more years. However, a neighboring state does need repairs done to their interstates.
Option 1:
If the money were simply divided by 50 (or other distribution method) and doled out for projects, states needing no repairs or enhancements to their federally funded roads would have an excess of money they couldn't/wouldn't use for roadway projects and states that needed heavy repairs wouldn't have enough money to complete them. This opens up states to the common 'rob peter to pay paul' mentality, drawing on available but not needed funds to supply projects unrelated to the reason the tax was collected.
Option 2:
In this scenario, regardless of where they are, it might be better to repair the roads that need it and enhance those on priority with the remainder of the funds. This has the benefit of a constantly maintained infrastructure for the entire country (for those times you need it) and has makes the most effective use of resources at hand for current needs.
In the case of 'primarily private usage' vehicles, just like tax exempt status is now, a person could file for a 'private usage' exemption, with the understanding that the vehicles are not to be on public roads for more than a specified percentage of the time.
I hate to be a troll, but I have to wonder about this statement. My understanding of Fair Use, as far as the legal definition in Copyright Law, doesn't cover this aspect at all. I'm familiar with timeshifting as relating to the Sony Betamax case, but what I'm not familiar is case law or written law covering format shifting under fair use. Perhaps a reference is in order?
I would imagine giving copies of US Currency is not covered under copyright law, but rather law relating to counterfeit. A nit, but since you brought up money, it seems appropriate to mention that.
There is a precedent for humans murdering other humans. Shall we go overly broad and say that because of that, we should incarcerate all humans? Or more focused on the Slashdot crowd, since people on P2P networks are trading copyrighted songs, should that mean that all P2P users should be scrutinized as criminals? Yes, these are examples to the extreme, but by making the statement that 'kids', a big broad general category, 'bringing drugs/weapons into schools', an activity that thankfully a minority of students do, you justify the precedent of treating all kids (your defined group) as suspect. Seems a lot extreme to me.
I have no problem with the idea of school administrators being tasked with the creation of a safe environment in which to educate students. What I have a problem with is that the administrator in this case overreached his authority and did something that should probably have had either the police or at least the girl's parents present for. The parents (or legal guardian) are the only ones that can really give legal consent to such matters. That this was done without parental supervision is really an insult to the role of the parents in this whole matter and a lack of understanding of what the police are paid for.
Two more words:
Remote Assistance
As a technician supporting my users, I am often remotely connected to the user's workstation. I see what they see, and while I might not get their Window's logon password with some remote tools, I sure as hell might accidentally see their application passwords, or passwords as they access a site while I'm trying to assist them with their problem. These are pieces of information that I really just Do Not Want to know. If I don't know it, it would be harder to hold me accountable for problems that come up.
Hey, here's a thought. The child Did Not have the suspected drugs on her person, and was searched on suspicion of such. The parents, in your argument, did the correct thing and ensured that their child did not carry the inappropriate item to school, but they administrators did the search anyways.
Would you like to review your argument and get back to us a little later?
Worse, why can you not use 3rd party batteries after your warranty has expired? Why would Panasonic give a crap about that? If it damages it, then you are more likely to buy a new camera, possibly even theirs!
How do you, at the time of a traffic stop, know whether or not probable cause is in play? Will there not being probable cause, say a cop stopping you on the street to ask for your ID, stop them from arresting you if you refuse? Perhaps the cop is investigating a crime that happened the next block over, and you happened to match the description of the alleged perpetrator? You don't know that, and the cop is not likely to offer that up to you.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, but it does feel a little like a slippery slope. If you can't refuse at certain points (ie: it's a crime), how do you know when you can refuse if not all elements of the situation are known to you?
You can give up to $12,000 (2008) or $13,000 (2009+) in gifts to any single individual through the year and not have to pay a gift tax on it. However, once you gift more than that to any one person, you are obligated by federal law to pay federal taxes on it. At least, that was my understanding when I looked it up last year. However, the person receiving the gift does not have to claim it as income, as the responsibility is placed on the giver.
Sales tax is a different beast, and yes, is applied when you use the gift card at a location. So nice when the government goes double dipping in the same pool of money.
Ref: http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=108139,00.html
Source, please. I've tried reading up on what's coming for this game and I have yet to find official word whether or not this is an incremental or complete change from the original.
Not all systems that a technician might SSH into are visible from the outside world. Sometimes, VPN gets you more than just encryption. It gets you visibility to far more systems than those on the Internet get to see.
It doesn't really matter if it is reversible or not. The fact that they touched your property in order to modify it (and attaching a device, even via magnets or tape, is modification), they need to be seeking a warrant for it. It would seem to me that the following comparison would hold true; GPS tracking bugs are to a tailing a suspect what wiretaps are to listening to a conversation in public. The former in both (should) require a warrant due to the expectation of privacy in person and property, the latter does not as there cannot be an expectation of privacy when you are out amongst the public.
This aught to clue most people in. If you travel onto a private drive or property (possibly, as I did once, a military base to evade some unruly students) and the police cannot follow, gaining information beyond that point they must stop is a violation of your privacy.
What sort of limited resource (other than bandwidth) are you consuming when you use the Internet vs Electricity? With Electricity, you are consuming power generation at the power plants, a non-unlimited source. With the Internet, the only thing limited are the resources to get you what you want, not the actual data you are concerned about. Does Google run out of bits to send you? Does your trading software say 'Oops, no more bits today'? No, it doesn't. Instead of comparing Internet Bandwidth to power generation, perhaps you would liken it better to roads (yay car analogies!). Even metered (tolls), it still exceeds it's maximum capacity (traffic jams). The only resolution is to build out the infrastructure (bigger road) to handle more traffic at once.
Really, there are set numbers on how much of a work can be used? Because I seem to recall (as noted above) that the law doesn't give specific numbers, but only that whether a use is fair must take into account how much of the work is used. It also includes criteria such as the type of use, how it impacts the market for that work, and whether it is commercial or not. If there is case law that sets precedent for this, you might be well to include those references to back up your numbers.
The problem with this statement is that, at least in the USA, we have this little thing called innocent til proven guilty. As much as it has been trampled and abused, unless you can prove an individual and specific user is breaking the law, treating him or her like a criminal is going to piss them off (if they learn of it) and possibly open up the ISP to legal action. I wonder what the ratio of legitimate SMTP traffic now is to the Email equivalent of mail fraud. Is that to indicate that perhaps SMTP traffic should be blocked or reduced to drastically reduced levels, because the ratio indicates that it is now predominantly illegal?
It is truely difficult to point to a day and state that is when conception actually occurs. Even at the second of conception, said new entity is truly on it's own and not leeching nourishment from the womb. Only after it commits it's first act of aggression, by assaulting the woman it's within possibly against her will, does it become capable of growing into a full fledged adult. However, when the two are bonded together like that, who's rights take priority? The adult, who is capable of existing on without the child, or the child, that might kill the adult in the process of being born? Gestation is a highly dangerous affair for both mother and child, and even though we've advanced so far from our club-wielding ancestors, we STILL have infant and maternal fatalities in the process of bringing new life into the world.
It might be that a birth is an arbitrary milestone to measure a valid legal entity, but whether that child lives or dies after birth is really the deciding factor on whether that child can grow up to be a member of society. It may be nice to think that a fertilized egg is a legal entity that has rights, but most people forget that legal entities also have responsibilities that prohibit actions that a fertilized egg must take in order to further life. When deciding when abortions are palatable by society, I would argue that the idea of 'likelihood to survive' might be applicable. If the child is likely to survive on it's own (usually no earlier than 20-22 weeks of gestation), then it probably shouldn't be done. Earlier than that? Even nature induces abortions (miscarriages), often for a good reason such as the failure of the fetus to develop properly.
I'd like to think that one statement I heard about abortion would become our morality on it. That they should be allowed, and rarely used.
How about this less extreme take? What if it's a couple raising their children in a way you don't particularly like? Spanking responsibly (ie: not beating), but you feel Time Outs are the only proper way? There really is a point at which, no matter what your personal opinion on the matter is, unless you can prove a personal stake in the matter, you should just let it go. By utilizing your freedoms and inflicting your will on others, you restrict their freedom unfairly, just because you think what they're doing is wrong. Get over it.
I once read an article (the referenced article below is not it) about the theory that cancer is a stem cell gone awry. The reason, it seems to me, that cancer is so resistant to treatment is that stem cells are so resistant to being killed, and they'd have to be. Stem cells are responsible for the renewal of your tissues and possibly the growth of new tissue (ie: muscle mass) when needed. They have to live your entire life while still being able to divide in a controlled fashion. The referenced article touches on the experiment of injecting cancer cells that don't contain (suspected) stem cells into mice and how no tumors resulted, yet the cancerous stem cells did.
It seems to me that it's more like our current cancer treatments are like our cough medication. They do a lot with the symptoms and side effects, but do very little to address the root cause of the ailment.
Ref: http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12202589
File associations are not permissions, they are conveniences that the operating system uses to allow a program to predefine what application runs a particular data file. IE: Notepad is the application assocated with .txt, but Wordpad, Word, Textpad, and any number of other applications can be associated with .txt or even run it when the association is not with them.
Also, if you have a binary program that understands .txt files, but you don't want it to go modifying any of those .txt files in your home directory because you're testing it for viruses or just want to see what it is, you could specify that that application is to be giving read access only (not write) to any .txt file in your home directory. THAT is what the patent describes, not associations or fancy applications that do some sort of proprietary encryption on a particular data file.
I don't agree with the patent, I find it reprehensible to wait so long to sue someone, or even to just troll, but at least get your facts straight before spouting off about what you think constitutes prior art.
Actually, I would say that restrictions on how you use your car are defined when you get your license to drive on public roads (and that's what your license is, a license to drive on public roads). By getting your license, you agree to those restrictions for the safety of all. However, this doesn't stop anyone from recklessly using their car on private land, e.g. racing at 100+ mph on a drag strip or playing bumper cars on a farm.