- If you are shopping in a regular retail outlet, the outlet is not obligated to accept ANY type of payment whatsoever. They are certainly not required to "post signs" or anything like that.
The "legal tender" designation is only relevant to debts, and then technically only at the court level (if you refuse to accept payment of a debt in legal tender, and take it to court, the court would order it paid in legal tender anyway, so it's moot. Further, you'd never get to court for being so stupid in the first place).
Further to that, you are not required to make change for a payment. If you owe me $191.12, I can demand that you pay me $191.12, exactly. You, however, are free to pay this in pennies if you so wish. That is, if we are talking about a debt.
When you shop in a normal retail outlet, you are not racking up a debt. When you take your goods to the cashier, how you conclude the exchange of goods is up to you and the store. Jellybeans, sexual favors, smiles and kisses, pakistani coins, or good old US currency. There is no debt, you are both free to leave without concluding the transaction, you leave the goods behind, the store gets no money, everyone is happy.
Try snopes: Pennies are legal for the payment of any size debt.
After you bought your car and took it home, there wasn't a shrink-wrapped contract on your rims requiring you to agree to a bunch of terms in order to use them. You also didn't have a contract that stated you could return the rims to the manufacturer if you didn't agree to their terms.
" But what about all the companies that have invested to put WiFi where it is?"
Who told them they had exclusive rights? WiFi is unlicensed.. meaning anyone can potentially compete with them. They have no exclusive use of the band.
If a neighborhood wants to set up their own hotspots and you ulose the business there, that's your problem. So what if a whole city wants to?
My hometown put in a new water treatment plant, at a cost of many millions of dollars. It produces water cleaner than what comes out of the local bottled water delivery companies. Should those companies now go after the municipality for "competing" with them in their fresh water business? (Which WILL suffer once the system is flushed and the water quality goes way up)
I realize the issue is primarily about telecom regulations that say the government can't compete in telecom...
Laptops with 15" 1600x1200 panels are becoming really scarce. I think Dell still has them, but Toshiba, for instance, has dropped them.
Why? I personally saw many people opt for lower resolution displays (an act inconcievable to me) because the text was "too small" on the high res display. Sales probably dropped because of it.
1600x1200 on 15" was a great density (napkin says 130dpi).
My 23" Apple Cinema HD is 1920x1200.. works out to about 100dpi. Big difference.
IN fact, I can't seem to find any other LCD in production, other than on laptops, that has the DPI ratings of your laptop.
Do you know a 22" LCD that can do 3840x2400? (200dpi)
Color reproduction on new high end LCDs is just fine, and easier to keep calibrated.
Academic? It's Computing SCIENCE for crap sakes. it should be academic. If they just want to turn out technicians, there are far better, faster ways to do that.
CS should turn out science-oriented poeple, not technicians and code monkeys.
You shoouldn't spend money developing software and just give it away. Nobody is forcing you to, certainly not the GPL authors.
All they are saying is that, if instead of writing your own code from scratch, you want to use ours as a base, you have to give away the result, just as we gave this to you.
If you DON'T want to use the code given freely to you as a base, you don't have to, and shouldn't. You are free to write it yourself, or find some other commercial solution that has licensing terms that fit your business.
It's about reciprocity, always has been. Tourist dollars flow both ways. We won't get as many US tourist dollars? We won't be spending as much there, either.
Why?
Because the American public needs to experience a bit of what it allows to be dished out. Jacking up visa requirements, asking for fingerprints and demanding new visas is a pain in the ass to the entire world.. why should Americans then be able to travel easily and freely everywhere else, when they don't reciprocate? Actions need to have consequences. The consequence of allowing most of hte developed worled to travel with no visa or paperwork to the US was a lot of tourism, and easy access for americans everywhere in return. That's all changing now.
How do you figure? The US/Canada have always had a special arrangement regarding passports. Similar economies, cultures, and people. There isn't a flood of illegals one way or the other, so there is no reason logistically to crack down. Sure, there are canadians who go to the US and overstay their allotted time, and the same happens in Canada with americans. No big deal. Further, what value does a passport add, in your opinion? Passports are a way to cut down on the number of documents required to let someone enter your country, to prove that they have somewhere to go back to, etc. This is why passports are used internationally.
At the Canada/US border, it's simple and convenient to accept driver's licenses and birth certificates or other proof of citizenship or residency.
The bottom line is, a boatload of people travel both ways daily, and this will inconvenience a great many people. Further, it's sad to see Americans, who should be against identifying yourself to the government when not rquired, to be going backwards and asking for more and more identification.
When I go to the movies, I'm paying for a service.
You are buying into the last few years of brainwashing by the movie industry.. you ALWAYS had the right to change channels on commercials, you ALWAYS had the right ot fast forward through crap you didn't want to see on videotape.
Copyright controls the overall act of copying, but not minute details about how you view the material. An author CANNOT legally force you to read his book in a certain order. A band cannot force you to listen to their entire album if you only want songs 1, 3, and the last few seconds of track 8.
Copyright does not grant the people the level of control you are implying, except indirectly through the DMCA, (you have the right ot skip the FBI warning, but anyone who manufactures a device to allow you to do so is breaking the law.)
Because it's not a feature, it's something that is specifically disabled.
The point isn't that they should be required to or not, the point is that MY RIGHT to view the content how I want should be absolute. I shouldn't be committing a crime by not wanting to watch some segment of a video I BOUGHT.
Circumventing copyright protection is still allowed, however
producing a device (Or software) who's primary purpose is to circumvent a copy protection mechanism is another matter.
In other words: you are allowed to reverse engineer the copy protection scheme yourself and make personal copies. You are not allowed to write software to do it and distribute it.
In most countries, and in the US up until recently, (before the DMCA), copyright owners also had no recourse if their anti-copying measures were circumvented. They implemented them to make a statistical difference, not a legal one (and it worked more or less)
Fair use was not spelled out, but was a defence against copyright violation. Nowadays, in the US, if you break copy protection in order to make fair use of the work, you have STILL broken copyright law.. making fair use moot.
It's not black and white, but the fact is, the DMCA and other proposed legislations put far too much power in the hands of copyright holders; where before there was balance, now there is not.
Power generating plants are built to operate at their highest efficiency all the time. Cars by nature do not. If cars were more efficient at generating power than large generating plants, we would have fields of cars generating electricity instead of giant plants.
I don't think science has a hatred of God, it's just that matters of faith add no value to science.
Whether or not God created the universe, the method we need to use to figure it out is the same.
They worry that science might prove that God doesn't exist, but that just seems to indicate a lack of understanding of their own religion. No matter what we find out in science, about the origins of hte universe, we will always be left with a primary set of conditions, or equations, or SOMETHING, beyond which our current analysis methods can't penetrate. THere will always be a place where God can live beyond which we can see.
There is plenty of place for sarcasm, and it's about time people started speaking up.
Creationism and Evolution are not even in the same CATEGORY. Creationism is a belief based on religious faith. Evolution is a scientific theory. One belong in science class, one does NOT.
It's fine if you believe in creationism, or intelligent design. Perfectly fine. It's fine if you believe in God, or Allah, or whatever you want, and it's also fine for you to spread your beliefs around.
The vast majority of religious people, including very learned scientists, don't see a conflict here. Believing that God created the universe does not conflict with exploring that universe and coming up with scientific theories, it merely underpins everything.
A vocal minority, however, has been getting way, way too much press saying that their religious beliefs should be taught in science class, and that Evolution is a big lie.
This is not about belief, it's about science. Scientific American is a science magazine, and they are right to ridicule the spin doctors who want to get them to publish unscientific information based on their religious beliefs.
Look, focusing on the word "theory" like this, and saying "it's all just THEORIES, why can't we teach them all?" is misleading. Anything can be a theory, with or without merit.
Don't mix up science and faith. Faith is about belief in soemthing you cannot emperically test. Science is about theories you can test and refine.
Evolution is a theory, yes, but it's also backed up by decades of research. We don't know EVERYTHING yet, but so far, we have a very complicated, very huge model that fits, with a mountain of repeatable scientific evidence. Every year, more is added to this pile of evidence, and the theory is refined.
Creationism, Intelligent Design, all of these cannot be tested scientifically. This is not to say that they are necessarily wrong, just that there is no possible test to prove it either way; they are matters of faith, not science.
What I fail to see is why people can't say something like "If God created everything, and we have evidence of evolution, then god created evolution for his divine purposes." Science and religion need not, and never have needed to be at odds with each other.
If you want your children taught the persepctives you feel are important, that's absolutely your right. The problem is this: ID is not an 'other side' except to a vocal religious minority. It has no scientific merit. Saying "we won't try to figure any more out, we'll just assume something made it that way in the first place" isn't science.
If the course in college was "current popular theories on where life originated" then YES, ID, Creationism, and Evolution should be on equal footing. But if the course is biology, or science, then ID has no place.
If it sounds better than mp3 at 320kbps, it's probably your audio hardware.
Blind tests repeatedly show that people can almost never hear a difference between 320kbps mp3 and raw CD audio.
That aside... the problem is you have to encode mp3 to atrac and back. The minidisc is a bad format for the mp3/internet age, and a good example of a product that could have been great but settled for mediocre.
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No, because no contractual debt exists between the customer and the 7-11.
The 7-11 is free to simply not sell the goods to the customer.
- If you are shopping in a regular retail outlet, the outlet is not obligated to accept ANY type of payment whatsoever. They are certainly not required to "post signs" or anything like that.
p
The "legal tender" designation is only relevant to debts, and then technically only at the court level (if you refuse to accept payment of a debt in legal tender, and take it to court, the court would order it paid in legal tender anyway, so it's moot. Further, you'd never get to court for being so stupid in the first place).
Further to that, you are not required to make change for a payment. If you owe me $191.12, I can demand that you pay me $191.12, exactly. You, however, are free to pay this in pennies if you so wish. That is, if we are talking about a debt.
When you shop in a normal retail outlet, you are not racking up a debt. When you take your goods to the cashier, how you conclude the exchange of goods is up to you and the store. Jellybeans, sexual favors, smiles and kisses, pakistani coins, or good old US currency. There is no debt, you are both free to leave without concluding the transaction, you leave the goods behind, the store gets no money, everyone is happy.
Try snopes: Pennies are legal for the payment of any size debt.
http://www.snopes.com/business/money/pennies.as
The ones at The French Maid in Calgary sure do....
After you bought your car and took it home, there wasn't a shrink-wrapped contract on your rims requiring you to agree to a bunch of terms in order to use them. You also didn't have a contract that stated you could return the rims to the manufacturer if you didn't agree to their terms.
You find them powerful because you understand evolution, as do I, and many others.
To those who don't, these words do nothing to help them understand, and bring about entirely the wrong imagery to mind.
" But what about all the companies that have invested to put WiFi where it is?"
Who told them they had exclusive rights? WiFi is unlicensed.. meaning anyone can potentially compete with them. They have no exclusive use of the band.
If a neighborhood wants to set up their own hotspots and you ulose the business there, that's your problem. So what if a whole city wants to?
My hometown put in a new water treatment plant, at a cost of many millions of dollars. It produces water cleaner than what comes out of the local bottled water delivery companies. Should those companies now go after the municipality for "competing" with them in their fresh water business? (Which WILL suffer once the system is flushed and the water quality goes way up)
I realize the issue is primarily about telecom regulations that say the government can't compete in telecom...
Laptops with 15" 1600x1200 panels are becoming really scarce. I think Dell still has them, but Toshiba, for instance, has dropped them.
Why? I personally saw many people opt for lower resolution displays (an act inconcievable to me) because the text was "too small" on the high res display. Sales probably dropped because of it.
1600x1200 on 15" was a great density (napkin says 130dpi).
My 23" Apple Cinema HD is 1920x1200.. works out to about 100dpi. Big difference.
IN fact, I can't seem to find any other LCD in production, other than on laptops, that has the DPI ratings of your laptop.
Do you know a 22" LCD that can do 3840x2400? (200dpi)
Color reproduction on new high end LCDs is just fine, and easier to keep calibrated.
Academic? It's Computing SCIENCE for crap sakes. it should be academic. If they just want to turn out technicians, there are far better, faster ways to do that.
CS should turn out science-oriented poeple, not technicians and code monkeys.
You shoouldn't spend money developing software and just give it away. Nobody is forcing you to, certainly not the GPL authors.
All they are saying is that, if instead of writing your own code from scratch, you want to use ours as a base, you have to give away the result, just as we gave this to you.
If you DON'T want to use the code given freely to you as a base, you don't have to, and shouldn't. You are free to write it yourself, or find some other commercial solution that has licensing terms that fit your business.
Why?
It's about reciprocity, always has been. Tourist dollars flow both ways. We won't get as many US tourist dollars? We won't be spending as much there, either.
Why?
Because the American public needs to experience a bit of what it allows to be dished out. Jacking up visa requirements, asking for fingerprints and demanding new visas is a pain in the ass to the entire world.. why should Americans then be able to travel easily and freely everywhere else, when they don't reciprocate? Actions need to have consequences. The consequence of allowing most of hte developed worled to travel with no visa or paperwork to the US was a lot of tourism, and easy access for americans everywhere in return. That's all changing now.
How do you figure? The US/Canada have always had a special arrangement regarding passports. Similar economies, cultures, and people. There isn't a flood of illegals one way or the other, so there is no reason logistically to crack down. Sure, there are canadians who go to the US and overstay their allotted time, and the same happens in Canada with americans. No big deal.
Further, what value does a passport add, in your opinion? Passports are a way to cut down on the number of documents required to let someone enter your country, to prove that they have somewhere to go back to, etc. This is why passports are used internationally.
At the Canada/US border, it's simple and convenient to accept driver's licenses and birth certificates or other proof of citizenship or residency.
The bottom line is, a boatload of people travel both ways daily, and this will inconvenience a great many people. Further, it's sad to see Americans, who should be against identifying yourself to the government when not rquired, to be going backwards and asking for more and more identification.
So why is it that in the last 20 years, there was this sudden need to demand papers and have all kinds of formerly police-state-only tactics?
SURE you can justify them, sensibly.. but it all adds up to America changing, and straying from it's roots.
The rule of law is important, but is being identified every time you travel that important? Does it prevent criminals from committing crime?
That's exactly what trademark is supposed to be:
Simply a way that you can market a brand without having someone else steal that brand.
People are still free, or supposed to be, to use that trademarked name to refer to YOUR products, even in ways you don't approve of.
The EU, and the rest of the world, should call the American's bluff on this one.. just not produce the new funky passports to appease the US.
Further, I hope Canada reciprocates and requires americans to have valid passports.
And you do have these rights.
Unfortunately, anyone who distributes the knowledge about how to modify your DVD player to let you exercise these rights is breaking the law (DMCA).
When I go to the movies, I'm paying for a service.
You are buying into the last few years of brainwashing by the movie industry.. you ALWAYS had the right to change channels on commercials, you ALWAYS had the right ot fast forward through crap you didn't want to see on videotape.
Copyright controls the overall act of copying, but not minute details about how you view the material. An author CANNOT legally force you to read his book in a certain order. A band cannot force you to listen to their entire album if you only want songs 1, 3, and the last few seconds of track 8.
Copyright does not grant the people the level of control you are implying, except indirectly through the DMCA, (you have the right ot skip the FBI warning, but anyone who manufactures a device to allow you to do so is breaking the law.)
Because it's not a feature, it's something that is specifically disabled.
The point isn't that they should be required to or not, the point is that MY RIGHT to view the content how I want should be absolute. I shouldn't be committing a crime by not wanting to watch some segment of a video I BOUGHT.
Decrypting isn't illegal per the DMCA.
Circumventing copyright protection is still allowed, however
producing a device (Or software) who's primary purpose is to circumvent a copy protection mechanism is another matter.
In other words: you are allowed to reverse engineer the copy protection scheme yourself and make personal copies. You are not allowed to write software to do it and distribute it.
No, they don't.
However.
In most countries, and in the US up until recently, (before the DMCA), copyright owners also had no recourse if their anti-copying measures were circumvented. They implemented them to make a statistical difference, not a legal one (and it worked more or less)
Fair use was not spelled out, but was a defence against copyright violation.
Nowadays, in the US, if you break copy protection in order to make fair use of the work, you have STILL broken copyright law.. making fair use moot.
It's not black and white, but the fact is, the DMCA and other proposed legislations put far too much power in the hands of copyright holders; where before there was balance, now there is not.
very unlikely.
Power generating plants are built to operate at their highest efficiency all the time. Cars by nature do not. If cars were more efficient at generating power than large generating plants, we would have fields of cars generating electricity instead of giant plants.
It no more inhibits the use of VOIP than it does normal satellite phone calls.
Yes, there is a delay, and it can be annoying, but voip works just fine.
THe real enemy of voip is wildly fluctuating latency. Any latency will do, as long as it's relatively constant.
I don't think science has a hatred of God, it's just that matters of faith add no value to science.
Whether or not God created the universe, the method we need to use to figure it out is the same.
They worry that science might prove that God doesn't exist, but that just seems to indicate a lack of understanding of their own religion. No matter what we find out in science, about the origins of hte universe, we will always be left with a primary set of conditions, or equations, or SOMETHING, beyond which our current analysis methods can't penetrate. THere will always be a place where God can live beyond which we can see.
There is plenty of place for sarcasm, and it's about time people started speaking up.
Creationism and Evolution are not even in the same CATEGORY. Creationism is a belief based on religious faith. Evolution is a scientific theory. One belong in science class, one does NOT.
It's fine if you believe in creationism, or intelligent design. Perfectly fine. It's fine if you believe in God, or Allah, or whatever you want, and it's also fine for you to spread your beliefs around.
The vast majority of religious people, including very learned scientists, don't see a conflict here. Believing that God created the universe does not conflict with exploring that universe and coming up with scientific theories, it merely underpins everything.
A vocal minority, however, has been getting way, way too much press saying that their religious beliefs should be taught in science class, and that Evolution is a big lie.
This is not about belief, it's about science. Scientific American is a science magazine, and they are right to ridicule the spin doctors who want to get them to publish unscientific information based on their religious beliefs.
Look, focusing on the word "theory" like this, and saying "it's all just THEORIES, why can't we teach them all?" is misleading. Anything can be a theory, with or without merit.
Don't mix up science and faith. Faith is about belief in soemthing you cannot emperically test. Science is about theories you can test and refine.
Evolution is a theory, yes, but it's also backed up by decades of research. We don't know EVERYTHING yet, but so far, we have a very complicated, very huge model that fits, with a mountain of repeatable scientific evidence. Every year, more is added to this pile of evidence, and the theory is refined.
Creationism, Intelligent Design, all of these cannot be tested scientifically. This is not to say that they are necessarily wrong, just that there is no possible test to prove it either way; they are matters of faith, not science.
What I fail to see is why people can't say something like "If God created everything, and we have evidence of evolution, then god created evolution for his divine purposes." Science and religion need not, and never have needed to be at odds with each other.
If you want your children taught the persepctives you feel are important, that's absolutely your right. The problem is this:
ID is not an 'other side' except to a vocal religious minority. It has no scientific merit. Saying "we won't try to figure any more out, we'll just assume something made it that way in the first place" isn't science.
If the course in college was "current popular theories on where life originated" then YES, ID, Creationism, and Evolution should be on equal footing. But if the course is biology, or science, then ID has no place.
If it sounds better than mp3 at 320kbps, it's probably your audio hardware.
Blind tests repeatedly show that people can almost never hear a difference between 320kbps mp3 and raw CD audio.
That aside... the problem is you have to encode mp3 to atrac and back. The minidisc is a bad format for the mp3/internet age, and a good example of a product that could have been great but settled for mediocre.