Yes, it's happened to me. But I didn't feel quite as threatened as I have on several occasions while driving. Nonetheless, I haven't developed some kind of complex that leads me to go around saying that people should only be allowed to drive monster trucks with three tires.
And the fact that approximately 3,000,000 Americans are licensed to carry a concealed pistol hasn't changed the fact that you're at least a hundred times more likely to be killed in a car accident than you are to be shot accidentally [and of course you're almost always the one who does it when it happens]. And that's what you haven't done-- explained why a pistol is more dangerous than any other gun. And if you don't want to invite the jealous defense of liberty, don't propose arbitrary restrictions upon its free exercise.
You're begging the question as to whether you have any authority to tell me what I can and can't do with my pistol. You don't. Ignorance and arrogance go hand and hand it seems.
You've passed into that mode where you're arguing just for the sake of it, and doing a very poor job at that. It's painfully obvious that you've never even handled a real rifle, or pistol for that matter, much less carried either around all day. If you ever get the chance, try running, or even walking at a brisk pace, with that "SMG" strapped to you. Now try it with both hands free. Imagine grocery shopping with it, or cutting your grass, or drinking coffee, or cooking dinner, or working on your car, etc., etc. I can do all of those things without a second thought while carrying my pistol, but all are impracticable or dangerous with a rifle bouncing around.
The idea that imaginative poseurs like yourself might actually influence some other naive soul is depressing.
For a civilian? Put a strap on your shotgun and carry it like a purse. Talk about yer man purse.
You've got to realize how ridiculous that sounds. You've obviously never "strapped on" a gun in your life. The pistol exists because it serves a need better than anything else, and that need is much broader than concealability.
Well, it's a stupid argument. Why do cops carry pistols? Not because they can be concealed, but because they can be holstered and carried around all day without getting in the way.
A quick primer: you can "error scan" DVD+/-R media with a drive that supports it. CDSpeed, a [free, IIRC] utility distributed by/with Nero, can easily save these scans. DVD enthusiasts often compare their scans... cdfreaks.com is a great discussion site.
Some media have been observed to degrade fairly rapidly, others are quite stable. About a year ago, and again recently, I scanned a number of relatively old DVD-R discs [backups, uh, owned by a friend] burned from fall of 2002 on. You can see my post here:
Funny thing is that most of the discs I used were of a brand widely lambasted as "cheap ____" and I was told that they wouldn't last six months. Curiously enough you can see that the cheaper "Princo" media has held up better than the "gold standard of the day" Riteks [although both are much better than some]. You can also see that one of older discs was scanned recently, and more than a year ago. It shows almost no degradation during that time [and what it does could easily be attributed to the aging scanning drive].
The CDFreaks forum has a lot more scans, including of older media. If you've got some discs and are worried about their aging stability, here's a good place to start:
I suppose that "nomadic hunter-gatherers" isn't quite fair since many Indians, particularly in the Southeast did farm, but it was small-scale horticulture, supplemented by hunting and gathering. This took a lot of land, and was dependent on a low population density, which was why it was such a struggle to make the Indians self-sustaining.
We never killed the women and children of or ememies. We only did that to you when you all started killing our children.
Now there's a crock if I've ever heard one. You can say with absolute certainty what hundreds of tribes of American Indians did for thousands of years... all without the benefit of writing!
Hey stupid. I am sitting it this chair living and breathing. I do exist and no I am not going away. You missed and didn't kill us all. I am alive and I am Tsalagi (Cherokee).
Pretty remarkable for a nomadic stone-age hunter-gatherer to be using a computer!
I do think we can agree without a flame war, but I think there's two points that need addressing. The treatment of Indians was markedly better than that of, say, blacks. Without more research I can point to two very clear examples: intermarriage and soldiery.
Also, you'd do well to check up on the "smallpox blankets" myth. As far as I know, it never actually happened; and was only discussed once, during the French and Indian War [late 1750s-early 1760s], in [IIRC, personal] correspondences by a British officer [but there's no proof he ever carried it out, or that it worked]. The other instance attributed to the idea was invented by none other than Ward Churchill, the nutjob who pretends to be an Indian and called the 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns." As far as I know he's the only one who actually believes it.
I'm going to disagree with you and say that the goal of Americans was always assimilation. But what assimilation meant was that the Indians would have to give up their way of life. The problem was that it took a lot of land to support a few Indians, who didn't use or organize resources like Americans. The settlers saw the land as being unexploited, and of course they wanted it.
The best proof of the lack of genocidal intent is, I think, the fact that once the Indian resistance stopped, and the Indians were driven into land areas more consistent with their numbers, the Indian Wars ended. There's also the generally fair treatment of Indians who adopted Western ways or limited themselves to the land reserved for them in the East [and subsequently in the West].
The problem with calling it a genocide is that it happened over a very long period of time and on a very small scale. Scholars have added up the number of Indians killed [combatant and civilian] in conflicts with Americans between Independence and the end of the Indian Wars, and found it to be a very small number [up to something like 50,000; compare with 20,000 whites killed by Indians]. Remember that the biggest atrocities like the "trail of tears" only claimed a couple thousand lives and most famous like Wounded Knee only a few hundred.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_massacres has an extensive list of massacres. As you can see the scale is absolutely tiny compared to the Armenian "genocide" which killed hundreds of thousands in a few short years.
I think the parent post is proof-positive of Western culture's superiority. How many other peoples truly lament what their ancestors did 500 years ago, to the point of inventing mythologies where they are the bad guys?
Anybody whose "education in History" also included critical thinking should realize that almost every people in the entire world got where they are by way "genocide." When one group of people moves to land occupied by another people, they invariably throughout history have either displaced them [ethnic clensing], killed them entirely [genocide], assimilated them ["cultural" genocide often achieved by killing the men & boys, and taking the women and young children], or disappeared themselves. Make no mistake about it, every single Indian tribe present when the first English set foot on North America got where they were by "genociding" the previous inhabitants of their lands. From that point to the present, the vast majority of Indians were killed by... other Indians.
In the early days, the "noble savages" tried to exterminate the European settlers, over and over. They tried to genocide us; we did genocide them. We're the bad guys because we won. They can be idealized because they don't exist anymore. It's not like this is a unique situation-- how many damned romance novels are there about the Highlanders of Scotland? They were universally reviled while they posed a threat, then idealized after they were broken and forgotten for a while. A vaguely-understood, heavily-idealized, or entirely-imagined "little guy" struggling against the oppressive modern society whose faults everyone knows-- well, it makes for a good story.
If I sound unsympathetic, well, it's probably because I reserve for another stone-age people my ancestors genocided, the pre-pre-Celtic inhabitants of Southern France. Damn them and their iron working [a skill the American Indians never picked up]. My stone-age ancestors didn't stand a chance. And damn those Gauls, and Romans, and Franks, and Bretons, and Normans, and English, and...
I'm not embarassing myself because what I'm saying is correct. You keep changing the legal scenario and wont address it the way I'm stating it. You are attacking a straw man. You know that amazon's position can not be that the contract is VOID because according to the article Amazon is going ahead and billing peoples credit cards for what it deems is a corrected price.
Amazon has said that the "purchasers" can either return the DVDs or pay for them. This is entirely consistent with their treating the contract as voidable.
Amazons position is not that its own obligations under the contract are anulled, it is claiming that the PURCHASERS obligations are AUGMENTED. This is something completely different.
It's not.
Further the principle of unilateral mistake can not be used to reimburse amazon for doing something that has already happened, it is to free amazon from obligation now that its noticed the mistake. But once I transfer ownership of a DVD to you the DVD is presumptively yours. Its history. That fact that Amazon had no obligation to do something, doesn't change the fact that IT DID IT.
Bull. The effect of unilateral mistake is making the contract voidable, and voiding the contract would be as if the contract never existed. No contract means that the "buyer" is now holding the property of the "seller," and either has to return the goods or pay the fair market value for them. This is exactly what Amazon is asking for.
Finally the principle requires that the other party have reason to be aware of the mistake.
Such as, for example, not being charged for goods? Courts have regularly found unilateral mistakes where a buyer snaps up an offer that sounds "too good to be true." There's a dozen cases in any contracts casebook.
Is Amazon going to litigate these cases? Of course not. But this is too ridiculous to continue. You say "the court will," but you have no idea what a real court would do-- apply the law. Feel free to pick up the conversation after you've taken a contracts class or two.
That's a lot of words to say absolutely nothing. If the contract is voided it doesn't make any difference whether actually Amazon shipped you the product or not. If they shipped it, and you keep it without paying, you've been unjustly enriched and you owe them. There is an exception for unsolicited goods, but just because the contract has been voided doesn't mean that you didn't ask for the goods.
I think I should reiterate this: you need to be more careful posting about things you don't understand. Not only are you embarrassing yourself, but you're giving bad legal advice.
If hard drives are anything like car engines [especially those made with iron and aluminum], the designers have taken the standard operating temperature into account in the design. The parts of varying composition fit together best at the right temperature, and temperatures higher or lower result in damage or accelerated wear.
This is why, if you want your engine to last, you should let your car warm up before driving it hard.
Their only remedy is to take you to court if they really think you owe them. However they wont bother because they would lose. They can't prove that the buyer contributed to them making a mistake. The buyer is only on the hook if the buyer CAUSED the mistake in the first place by commiting fraud. Just because I notice you making a mistake that doesn't make me responsible in any way unless I commit fraud or try to conceal your error from you.
You really shouldn't talk about the law if you have no clue as to how it works. Look up "unilateral mistake" sometime, or see Section 153/154 of the restatement 2d of contracts. Notice the key language is going to be whether "the other party had reason to know of the mistake." There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Being over 18 gives you the license to take and distribute nude photographs of yourself... what a difference a day can make, right?
It does sound arbitrary, doesn't it? But what's the alternative? That for each individual, we hold a separate trial, where a random jury decides how mature an individual is, whether they're being taken advantage of, how young they look, etc., etc.?
A bright-line rule is a hell of a lot easier [and cheaper] to administer. Even if it's silly sometimes, everybody knows exactly where they stand. It's consistent. There's some value in that, I think.
A guy over the age of majority sleeps with a girl under the statutory age. He's charged with statutory rape-- after she snuck into his house and quite literally slipped into his bed naked. She got charged and convicted of... conspiracy to commit statutory rape and as an accessory to her own rape. The appeals court in that case overturned the conviction and held that as a matter of law she couldn't be charged, because, you guessed it, the laws were intended to protect her.
However, I somehow doubt that that's going to be the holding in this case. If being under 18 gave you license to take and distribute nude photographs of yourself, you can only imagine the consequences. Actually, I think they did an episode of Law & Order about this.
People like Wal-Mart, not only because of the convenience and the fair and consistent prices, but because they have no-hassle return policy. It might not seem like much to you, today, but try taking something back to a store 20 or 30 years ago-- much less after you've opened it.
We live in a country where the average working citizen works four or five months out of the year to pay for a bloated, corrupt, and evil government -- and you're bitching about not being able to enter into a state-sanctioned "marriage" with your homosexual lover? Give me a freakin' break!
He didn't say those words exactly but he has said these words: "our wardrobe of ever-changing negative Commerce Clause fashions"
The "negative" commerce clause is the logical implication that, if the power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce goes to the federal government, then the states, by implication, can't regulate interstate commerce themselves. What Scalia was talking about was using a broader interpretation of the commerce clause to strike down [i]state[/i] laws, through extremely attenuated arguments-- for example, if a school bans chewing gum, it affects interstate commerce because less gum is shipped to that state... therefore, states can't ban chewing gum? The liberals would say yes, at least, they would, if you substituted chewing gum, for something more popular with liberals, like, say, gay sex toys.
Morrison deals with a commerce clause case that goes well beyond even the broader definition of commerce that Thomas hates so much. It's not inconsistent with Scalia's concurrence in Raich.
Now, that said, yes, Scalia is definitely more willing to twist his claimed beliefs to achieve a result (or, more often, to influence a decision with the 5th vote). How exactly he justifies this I don't know.
I hope Thomas lives to be a hundred, 'cause there ain't never going to be another man like him on the Court.
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Yes, it's happened to me. But I didn't feel quite as threatened as I have on several occasions while driving. Nonetheless, I haven't developed some kind of complex that leads me to go around saying that people should only be allowed to drive monster trucks with three tires.
And the fact that approximately 3,000,000 Americans are licensed to carry a concealed pistol hasn't changed the fact that you're at least a hundred times more likely to be killed in a car accident than you are to be shot accidentally [and of course you're almost always the one who does it when it happens]. And that's what you haven't done-- explained why a pistol is more dangerous than any other gun. And if you don't want to invite the jealous defense of liberty, don't propose arbitrary restrictions upon its free exercise.
You're begging the question as to whether you have any authority to tell me what I can and can't do with my pistol. You don't. Ignorance and arrogance go hand and hand it seems.
You've passed into that mode where you're arguing just for the sake of it, and doing a very poor job at that. It's painfully obvious that you've never even handled a real rifle, or pistol for that matter, much less carried either around all day. If you ever get the chance, try running, or even walking at a brisk pace, with that "SMG" strapped to you. Now try it with both hands free. Imagine grocery shopping with it, or cutting your grass, or drinking coffee, or cooking dinner, or working on your car, etc., etc. I can do all of those things without a second thought while carrying my pistol, but all are impracticable or dangerous with a rifle bouncing around.
The idea that imaginative poseurs like yourself might actually influence some other naive soul is depressing.
For a civilian? Put a strap on your shotgun and carry it like a purse. Talk about yer man purse.
You've got to realize how ridiculous that sounds. You've obviously never "strapped on" a gun in your life. The pistol exists because it serves a need better than anything else, and that need is much broader than concealability.
Well, it's a stupid argument. Why do cops carry pistols? Not because they can be concealed, but because they can be holstered and carried around all day without getting in the way.
A quick primer: you can "error scan" DVD+/-R media with a drive that supports it. CDSpeed, a [free, IIRC] utility distributed by/with Nero, can easily save these scans. DVD enthusiasts often compare their scans... cdfreaks.com is a great discussion site.
o stcount=294
Some media have been observed to degrade fairly rapidly, others are quite stable. About a year ago, and again recently, I scanned a number of relatively old DVD-R discs [backups, uh, owned by a friend] burned from fall of 2002 on. You can see my post here:
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.php?p=1733269&p
Funny thing is that most of the discs I used were of a brand widely lambasted as "cheap ____" and I was told that they wouldn't last six months. Curiously enough you can see that the cheaper "Princo" media has held up better than the "gold standard of the day" Riteks [although both are much better than some]. You can also see that one of older discs was scanned recently, and more than a year ago. It shows almost no degradation during that time [and what it does could easily be attributed to the aging scanning drive].
The CDFreaks forum has a lot more scans, including of older media. If you've got some discs and are worried about their aging stability, here's a good place to start:
http://club.cdfreaks.com/forumdisplay.php?f=33
I suppose that "nomadic hunter-gatherers" isn't quite fair since many Indians, particularly in the Southeast did farm, but it was small-scale horticulture, supplemented by hunting and gathering. This took a lot of land, and was dependent on a low population density, which was why it was such a struggle to make the Indians self-sustaining.
Now there's a crock if I've ever heard one. You can say with absolute certainty what hundreds of tribes of American Indians did for thousands of years... all without the benefit of writing!
Pretty remarkable for a nomadic stone-age hunter-gatherer to be using a computer!
Maybe you can fix the fact that the site doesn't "fit" in an 800-pixel wide Firefox window. I freakin' hate horizontal scroll bars.
I do think we can agree without a flame war, but I think there's two points that need addressing. The treatment of Indians was markedly better than that of, say, blacks. Without more research I can point to two very clear examples: intermarriage and soldiery.
Also, you'd do well to check up on the "smallpox blankets" myth. As far as I know, it never actually happened; and was only discussed once, during the French and Indian War [late 1750s-early 1760s], in [IIRC, personal] correspondences by a British officer [but there's no proof he ever carried it out, or that it worked]. The other instance attributed to the idea was invented by none other than Ward Churchill, the nutjob who pretends to be an Indian and called the 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns." As far as I know he's the only one who actually believes it.
I'm going to disagree with you and say that the goal of Americans was always assimilation. But what assimilation meant was that the Indians would have to give up their way of life. The problem was that it took a lot of land to support a few Indians, who didn't use or organize resources like Americans. The settlers saw the land as being unexploited, and of course they wanted it.
The best proof of the lack of genocidal intent is, I think, the fact that once the Indian resistance stopped, and the Indians were driven into land areas more consistent with their numbers, the Indian Wars ended. There's also the generally fair treatment of Indians who adopted Western ways or limited themselves to the land reserved for them in the East [and subsequently in the West].
The problem with calling it a genocide is that it happened over a very long period of time and on a very small scale. Scholars have added up the number of Indians killed [combatant and civilian] in conflicts with Americans between Independence and the end of the Indian Wars, and found it to be a very small number [up to something like 50,000; compare with 20,000 whites killed by Indians]. Remember that the biggest atrocities like the "trail of tears" only claimed a couple thousand lives and most famous like Wounded Knee only a few hundred.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_massacres has an extensive list of massacres. As you can see the scale is absolutely tiny compared to the Armenian "genocide" which killed hundreds of thousands in a few short years.
I think the parent post is proof-positive of Western culture's superiority. How many other peoples truly lament what their ancestors did 500 years ago, to the point of inventing mythologies where they are the bad guys?
Anybody whose "education in History" also included critical thinking should realize that almost every people in the entire world got where they are by way "genocide." When one group of people moves to land occupied by another people, they invariably throughout history have either displaced them [ethnic clensing], killed them entirely [genocide], assimilated them ["cultural" genocide often achieved by killing the men & boys, and taking the women and young children], or disappeared themselves. Make no mistake about it, every single Indian tribe present when the first English set foot on North America got where they were by "genociding" the previous inhabitants of their lands. From that point to the present, the vast majority of Indians were killed by... other Indians.
In the early days, the "noble savages" tried to exterminate the European settlers, over and over. They tried to genocide us; we did genocide them. We're the bad guys because we won. They can be idealized because they don't exist anymore. It's not like this is a unique situation-- how many damned romance novels are there about the Highlanders of Scotland? They were universally reviled while they posed a threat, then idealized after they were broken and forgotten for a while. A vaguely-understood, heavily-idealized, or entirely-imagined "little guy" struggling against the oppressive modern society whose faults everyone knows-- well, it makes for a good story.
If I sound unsympathetic, well, it's probably because I reserve for another stone-age people my ancestors genocided, the pre-pre-Celtic inhabitants of Southern France. Damn them and their iron working [a skill the American Indians never picked up]. My stone-age ancestors didn't stand a chance. And damn those Gauls, and Romans, and Franks, and Bretons, and Normans, and English, and...
Amazon has said that the "purchasers" can either return the DVDs or pay for them. This is entirely consistent with their treating the contract as voidable.
It's not.
Bull. The effect of unilateral mistake is making the contract voidable, and voiding the contract would be as if the contract never existed. No contract means that the "buyer" is now holding the property of the "seller," and either has to return the goods or pay the fair market value for them. This is exactly what Amazon is asking for.
Such as, for example, not being charged for goods? Courts have regularly found unilateral mistakes where a buyer snaps up an offer that sounds "too good to be true." There's a dozen cases in any contracts casebook.
Is Amazon going to litigate these cases? Of course not. But this is too ridiculous to continue. You say "the court will," but you have no idea what a real court would do-- apply the law. Feel free to pick up the conversation after you've taken a contracts class or two.
That's a lot of words to say absolutely nothing. If the contract is voided it doesn't make any difference whether actually Amazon shipped you the product or not. If they shipped it, and you keep it without paying, you've been unjustly enriched and you owe them. There is an exception for unsolicited goods, but just because the contract has been voided doesn't mean that you didn't ask for the goods.
I think I should reiterate this: you need to be more careful posting about things you don't understand. Not only are you embarrassing yourself, but you're giving bad legal advice.
If hard drives are anything like car engines [especially those made with iron and aluminum], the designers have taken the standard operating temperature into account in the design. The parts of varying composition fit together best at the right temperature, and temperatures higher or lower result in damage or accelerated wear.
This is why, if you want your engine to last, you should let your car warm up before driving it hard.
You really shouldn't talk about the law if you have no clue as to how it works. Look up "unilateral mistake" sometime, or see Section 153/154 of the restatement 2d of contracts. Notice the key language is going to be whether "the other party had reason to know of the mistake." There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
It does sound arbitrary, doesn't it? But what's the alternative? That for each individual, we hold a separate trial, where a random jury decides how mature an individual is, whether they're being taken advantage of, how young they look, etc., etc.?
A bright-line rule is a hell of a lot easier [and cheaper] to administer. Even if it's silly sometimes, everybody knows exactly where they stand. It's consistent. There's some value in that, I think.
A guy over the age of majority sleeps with a girl under the statutory age. He's charged with statutory rape-- after she snuck into his house and quite literally slipped into his bed naked. She got charged and convicted of... conspiracy to commit statutory rape and as an accessory to her own rape. The appeals court in that case overturned the conviction and held that as a matter of law she couldn't be charged, because, you guessed it, the laws were intended to protect her.
However, I somehow doubt that that's going to be the holding in this case. If being under 18 gave you license to take and distribute nude photographs of yourself, you can only imagine the consequences. Actually, I think they did an episode of Law & Order about this.
People like Wal-Mart, not only because of the convenience and the fair and consistent prices, but because they have no-hassle return policy. It might not seem like much to you, today, but try taking something back to a store 20 or 30 years ago-- much less after you've opened it.
The oceans cover 71% of the Earth's surface and are, on average, about 2 miles deep. Puddles my ass.
We live in a country where the average working citizen works four or five months out of the year to pay for a bloated, corrupt, and evil government -- and you're bitching about not being able to enter into a state-sanctioned "marriage" with your homosexual lover? Give me a freakin' break!
And now nobody can buy hot coffee! Aren't you glad we have an army of lawyers defending us [and making themselves rich in the process]?
Don't forget 2-3 alarmist "global warming" stories.
He didn't say those words exactly but he has said these words: "our wardrobe of ever-changing negative Commerce Clause fashions"
The "negative" commerce clause is the logical implication that, if the power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce goes to the federal government, then the states, by implication, can't regulate interstate commerce themselves. What Scalia was talking about was using a broader interpretation of the commerce clause to strike down [i]state[/i] laws, through extremely attenuated arguments-- for example, if a school bans chewing gum, it affects interstate commerce because less gum is shipped to that state... therefore, states can't ban chewing gum? The liberals would say yes, at least, they would, if you substituted chewing gum, for something more popular with liberals, like, say, gay sex toys.
Morrison deals with a commerce clause case that goes well beyond even the broader definition of commerce that Thomas hates so much. It's not inconsistent with Scalia's concurrence in Raich.
Now, that said, yes, Scalia is definitely more willing to twist his claimed beliefs to achieve a result (or, more often, to influence a decision with the 5th vote). How exactly he justifies this I don't know.
I hope Thomas lives to be a hundred, 'cause there ain't never going to be another man like him on the Court.