Pick up the phone. Ask them who they're calling from, have them spell your name specifically, state you "do not recall" such alleged debt. If you can, record the call. ("It's for my own records" if they ask.) Don't ever give them ANY information. If they insist on collection, ask them to send you a physical claim. If such arrives, find a defect and tell them about it when they call back. (unless, of course, they have an actually-toll-free number, which they have to pay for.)
Oh, and always, ALWAYS make them repeat themselves. Repeat yourself ad-naueum, as well.
Just don't make any false statements, or agree to the validity of any debt you are not willing to pay.
(Honestly, though, I'd expect a scam to drop at "I'm recording this call, and your name is?")
Quickoffice was a document-editing program way back in the PalmOS days, and it was the only major player to make a WebOS version.
Quickoffice does not require Google Docs to work. Although it does have some features which are counter-intuitive and don't work depending on the view you're in.
> 3) Its battery life is pathetic, so it makes up for it with a mediocre ICE to charge with. Wake me when it has a range near 1000 miles, which is what a setup like this should be sporting.
This is a serial electric hybrid. You are evaluating a metric that only really matters for an all-electric car.
A Volt (or any other car with a gasoline engine) can make a journey of 1,000 miles significantly faster than any car tesla makes. They can also be rescued if energy runs out with a common plastic container, instead of a tow truck.
An electric car is an excellent choice if your daily commute and fiscal budget allow it. (I know people whose daily commute is well over 100 miles each way.). But they are simply not the same category as hybrid cars, be those hybrids serial or parallel.
(And, yes, I know that the Volt's engine and likely the ESR have a physical connection to the drivetrain that is used at certain highway speeds. That makes it a semi-paralel hybrid, not an electric car.)
I've tried and tried to wrap my head around this, but it makes no sense to me. How can you have fractional-reserve banking if the coins have to match a digital signature? Fractional-reserve banking creates money out of thin air. How can you create bitcoins out of thin air?
1: It's "wealth", not "money." Fractional reserve banking doesn't create more US dollars, it just creates a debt from one part to another and formalizes the transfer of debts instead of the physical exchange of bank notes.
2: Annuities and futures. If I loan you 500 bitcoins to buy a car, with terms that you pay me back over 12 months with interest, I have ~500 BTC as an asset I can promise to others.
but what I have not seen is a technical discussion on how Bitcoin is going to be shut down.
Assuming for the moment as a given that the feds describe to shut down BitCoin (let's say Congress passes a law banning it), I'd wager that the implementation would not be not dissimilar to the approach they take against child porn. Ban the practice outright, impose punitive sentences for dealing with it, and employ police officers to track down those engaging in the practice.
And if that happens, I wager domestic bitcoin usage would just shutter rather than deal with persecution. Bitcoin 2 would be written to concur with the law, and likely overtake its predecessor due to simple market weight.
In the United States, people cannot... trade real goods and services with BC -- because the U.S. gov'...will enforce the dollar as the sole legal tender
That's not what "legal tender" means.
I could set up shop today in New York State and accept only bitcoins if I wanted to. The government wouldn't stop me, and in fact they'd back up my right to set my prices as whatever my little heart desires, in whatever strange currency I want.
But as soon as I ask the police to force a shoplifter to pay, I'll wind up having to deal with dollars, because that's all the government will force anyone to pay a debt in. And if I am on the other end of that transaction, I might wind up having to convert some bitcoins to dollars at a sub-optimal time when the bill comes due.
(That I'll also have to pay my taxes in dollars and likely pay my vendors and suppliers in the same means I'll have to deal with some local currency regardless. but that's a different issue.)
For every $1000 in deposits, that means they can lend $10,000 at 5% above their costs and payouts, or more, yielding a $500 profit... wow!
1: It's $1,000 in assets. That includes a whole bunch of things beyond deposits, such as certain bonds.
2: That's $500 in revenue, not profit. From that revenue, they need to pay for all of their bills, and their payroll, and account for losses due to uncollectable accounts and outright thievery.
This $500 is spent by them eventually, and helps dilute the value of your original $1000 by inflation... so your "savings" loses value, as they leverage against it in multiple manners....
3: Inflation is a feature, not a bug. The work you did picking tomatoes last year is less valuable to the species than the work you did picking tomatoes today. The species would be better served if you used that same frugality to horde useful items instead of tokens, which is why the market rewards investment over savings.
My money is a few bits in my bank's private datacenter.
Your liquid wealth is a properly formatted record and data trail at your bank's private data center. (more than a few bits. At least a few integers for value and date/time for each transaction you've ever had.)
I don't know about you, but these days I have very little money. If i want some I just redeem some of the debt that my credit unit owes me for some, although most merchants I deal with will accept an electronic debt assignment instead of requiring money.
Bitcoin does have an intrinsic value: the computing time it takes to mine a bitcoin.
Stop. Bitcoins have an intrinsic COST. The computing time that goes into producing a bitcoin is comparable to the paper and ink used to print a physical US dollar, or the wages and electricity cost of the "creation" of purely electronic dollars. (Which are really debts, rather than currency, but that's an entirely different boneheaded idea that the one you're postulating.)
Once a bitcoin is produced, it cannot be redeemed for an equal amount of computer time. In fact, using a bitcoin requires SOMEONE ELSE to pay for the verification chain that makes this electronic currency at all feasible.
(you're right that it's a bubble, and I'm not here to argue the system's inherent merits or flaws.)
Having said all that: the dollar, in contrast, really does have no practical intrinsic value. Ever since 1971, when Nixon threw the last vestiges of any standard away. (And defaulted on U.S. debt in the process, by the way. People who said the "fiscal cliff" would be the first time the U.S. ever defaulted on debt simply don't know their history.)
The US dollar is backed up by an almost non-intuitive fact of modern society. It's legal tender for payment of debts. As in, if you don't pay your employees or pay for that meal in a restaurant, or if you just wrong someone more generally, the courts will denote whatever judgement is finally ordered against you in US dollars, and if your wealth is denominated in some other currency, you'll be subject to whatever market exchange rate you can manage to produce sufficient dollars to pay the debt.
Or, in short, "people who say the US dollar isn't backed up by anything don't know what they're talking about."
On a different note, though, I'd be interested if you could point to a US debt that was denoted in a weight of precious metal and not redeemed for sufficient value to satisfy the bond-holder. Just because in 1971 the President of the United States stopped offering gold for dollars doesn't mean the US "defaulted" any more than Wal-Mart selling out of ammo means they "defaulted' on that gift card you bought. (The phrase "Redeemable in gold on demand at the United States Treasury, or in gold or lawful money at any Federal Reserve Bank" was gone from bank notes decades before. And still did not specify the amount of gold.)
"You give us the right to make derivative works from your stuff" is just about as far away from "usual" as you can get it.
With a clause like that, Dropbox can do the smallest of alterations to your stuff, sell it, and not give you a dime. Even if it's something that you sell for $$ and don't give away for free. Hell, with a clause like that, Dropbox can take your software code and release it under any license they want, essentially as if they were you.
No part of the law requires them to not list out what they do. "Make any derivitive works necessary for this service" would do it. This isn't the law -- this is their lawyers being either dickish or lazy.
Can they enforce what you do with an iPad? Not legally. They can do some PRACTICAL things, and they aren't necessarily doing criminal things to stop you... but the things they can do to keep you from using, selling, breaking, or whatever with your iPad after you buy it are pretty short.
Now, there IS some authority that attaches to advertising that uses their trademarks... but, AFAIK (IANAL - don't trust legal advice you get from the internet) as long as you're not claiming to be Apple, claiming to be associated with Apple, or spreading misinformation about their products, they don't really have much legs to stand on.
To wit: the same laws that say you CAN buy five iPads and tell everyone around that you are giving away five free iPads are also the ones that say you can buy an iPad, review it, and then tell everyone your opinion about it.
Oh, and also:
It's certainly their prerogative if they want to say that any of those things void my warranty, but I don't think they can enforce any of their demands on me.
Warranties come in two parts. What's legally required in the jurisdiction of sale, and what the company does above and beyond that. While they can add special conditions to that part of the warranty that goes beyond your local legal mandates, said mandates themselves are applied based on your local law and not the arbitrary dictates of the manufacturer.
(What kind of warranties are forced? Well, for starters there's the warranty that the iPad won't burn down your house due to a flaw in design or manufacturing. So, that's something.)
Why not recommend he light a homeopathic candle while he's at it?
Sheesh. And I won't even comment on your food choice, aside from noting that "organic" food is, by and large, more expensive for little or no gain. So-called "organic" foods are farmed differently... but unless you care enough about their farming practices to pay the surcharge, the "non-organic" ones are just fine.
(And when's the last time you saw "in-organic" food, anyway? And salt doesn't count.;) )
They are noteworthy because their survivals are unusual -- and each one you cite, including Vesna, suffered injuries that could have very easily killed them.
If all the info you have is that someone/something at IP 12.34.56.78 downloaded kiddie porn, that's no evidence at all.
See:
1: Probable Cause 2: Personality Profiling 3: Jury trials.
A DA doesn't need to prove your kiddie porn habit to a geek-fandom level. He just needs to convince 12 more or less random strangers that it's very likely you traffic in child porn. And that's only if he wants to throw you in jail. If he just wants to harass you, he just needs to show a judge that IP address -- and he's got "probable cause" to bust down your door and take your PC from you. (Hell, if we're talking about a vice squad geek and not a DA, he can put off the judge until latter -- since you're so likely to alter your own logs or try and cover your tracks.)
How would Slashdotters go about picking a solid, basic laptop for Web surfing and document editing that won't be obsolete in two years?
Few laptops will be anything but "obsolete" in two years. But that's the same if you buy an HP, Apple, Dell, Acer, or whatever. Just keep an eye out on any forthcoming tech bumps (Wireless-N, Blue-ray, # of cores, discrete vs. shared video ram) and you'll do fine.
I pick laptops on vendor first (Gateway didn't get their reputation for crappy computers for nothing, for example -- and I like HP, as I have a bunch of laptops that all use the same power cords), features second (I'm a sucker for the touchsmart laptop), and price third.
Price on the web first, but don't forget to check your local big-box stores. I scored a sweet deal on my first laptop from best buy -- they had it for the same price it would have been built and shipped from HP, but with more options than I needed.
(FWIW, My current recommendation would be at least a dual-core CPU, Wireless-N if you have it now or will before you replace the laptop, and skip the blue-ray or DVD player unless there's no additional charge or they're very important to you. Discrete RAM is entirely dependent on if you're going to do any gaming with the laptop; if it's just email and word docs, don't bother. If you're going to fire up The Sims or City of Heroes or Eve Online, it's a must.)
You are the devil. Sorry, but that was clear by the end of your first sentence.
If the company needed you to spend 100 hour weeks to keep from going bust, then it should have gone bust. That's how capitalism works. If the company had ANY value, it would have been bought by a competitor and its foolish owners would have been let go. If the company wasn't bought, even when it had to put itself up for pennies on the dollar... well, then it didn't have any value, and it's just a value-sucking leech.
Look, I don't care what kool-aid you drink. We're suffering the worst recession since FDR, and it's the fault of YOUR chosen market segment. The risk of sub-prime mortgages should NEVER have been so hidden by derivatives, and the short-term profit that your ilk extracted has brought about the long-term pain that the world is suffering through now. If the CEO and CFO don't understand at a gut level what the fiance-geeks are doing... then they shouldn't be doing it. Period, full stop, end of story. And shame on the finance-geeks for letting them do it!
Wow. Someone doesn't appreciate just what legal benefits a marriage grants. Let me start with the big ones:
1: Presumption of paternity. I'm married, and my daughter is sitting beside me. I do NOT need to do anything to prove that she is my daughter, and should it ever come up (like, say, if my wife decided to leave me after becoming pregnant) the burden of proof is on whomever is saying my child is not mine.
2: Tax benefits. In addition to being able to pool income for income tax purposes (which would be much more significant if we didn't both work), we also jointly own all marital property. Which means when one of us passes away, the other one doesn't "inherit" anything -- and so, even if we owned billions of dollars, there would be no inheritance tax. It also means we can give each other money without having to have the other one potentially report it as gift income. (Yes, the benefit is fairly mediocre for most folks. But if you're an edge case, it can be a lot.)
3: Legal protection. The only person who is absolutely prohibited from testifying against you in court is your spouse. (Ok, not "absolutely", but provided it's not a domestic crime, it's pretty high. Higher than lawyers or doctors or priests.)
4: Automatic visitation / power of attorney. When one of us goes into the hospital, not only can the other one automatically visit, but we also automatically get a limited power of attorney for medical decisions as the next of kin.
5: Inheritance rights. She can't write me out of her will, and I cannot write her out of mine. (see #2, above. And yes, it does matter in several cases.)
So, those are the benefits that a polygamist (or a polyandrist, or a polymorist) gains. But multiple concurrent marriages aren't illegal because they somehow grant too many benefits; they're illegal because they stress the dating pool. If we adopted bigamy, for example, we'd have ~25% of the population that simply cannot find a wife, because they're all taken. And that 25% of the population might just stay home and play video games -- or they might go out and take wives wherever they can be found, including acts as vile as rape and murder among the instances which would increase.
(And, yes, a gender-neutral multiple marriage law would make sense. But it also makes sense to just ban them altogether.)
Look at TV ratings - a top show in the 70s used to be watched by 40% of America. Now it's downto 7-8% with nets like CW scrapping the bottom at only 1%
In the 70s, there were only three nationwide networks, and the typical household had maybe a dozen channels to pick from, many of whom were just duplicates of the same nationwide network.
Forty years later, a typical household has well over a hundred networks -- possibly a lot more. A tenfold increase in options equating to less than a tenfold drop in the top popularity doesn't really describe TV "collapsing."
And mass-media does fairly well, btw. Pure digital typesetting and Print-on-demand can let a typical mass-media book do very well on surprisingly narrow margins. Hell, if you want a good example look at comic books. In the 70s there were, what, four publishers, two of which were Disney and Archie comics? And today there are, easily, a solid half-dozen publishers on the rack, and the big two produce far more variety than they did in the 70s.
Tell me again, how exactly copyright encourages creation of new works?
It keeps publishers from simply taking whatever they want and re-selling it, without giving a dime to the author. If you abandoned copyright and relied only on contract law protection, you would quickly find publishers creating subsidiary corporations with the intent of having said subsidiary declare bankruptcy and thus nullify the contract. This unprotected script would then be re-printed with wild abandon by the publisher, and the author would be without any recourse to gain any share of their revenue. If the author attempted to publish themselves, they would soon find a greater and greater share of their time spent on the legal and managerial aspects of publishing, instead of creating a new work.
Or, in other words, COPYRIGHT MAKES IT PROFITABLE TO BE CREATIVE.
(Maybe you were wondering about the current duration of copyright law, which is an entirely separate matter than the inherent reason of copyright itself.)
HP's webOS ships with a Linux-based OS and a simple, easy way to get root access on your device. In fact, they provide instructions on how to do so on their website.
And it doesn't even come close to voiding your warranty. Even if you put on custom software.
Look folks, it's a we told you so moment. You bought the shiny hardware despite the warnings that you're going to be trapped in a walled garden. You are now at the whims of Apple and it's your own damn fault.
The rhetorical "you" here is "en oh tea" NOT trapped by the whims of Apple. If you buy a non-DRM'd file, you can read it on the device of your choice -- and it's apple's loss if they try banning the neat reader that your document vendor so nicely put in Apple's app store, just because it serves its purpose as pointing you to a place where you can buy more tasty e-books.
"You" are trapped by the DRM'd files you bought from your document vendor. THEY are the ones trapped by apple's whims.
How is this "unlimited consumer lawsuits from unlimited plaintiffs!"? What I see in this article is a substantial but limited number of lawsuits from one plaintiff.
In this case, as with software, "unlimited" means that there is no arbitrary limitation on the number of plantiffs or lawsuits. Sure, there is a theoretical maximum of some 308 million plantiffs, and a further theoretical maximum of some six billion defendants... meaning that if the theoretical maximum were reached, we'd have more lawsuits on this law than have ever been filed in the history of our jurisprudence.
either way given the short window given for this DoS as long as people aren't trying to hide who they are when sending them then they aren't breaking the law.
Yes, yes they are. Read up on "harassment" for starters, and that's just the one I know off the top of my head.
Slashdot Mirror
Pick up the phone. Ask them who they're calling from, have them spell your name specifically, state you "do not recall" such alleged debt. If you can, record the call. ("It's for my own records" if they ask.) Don't ever give them ANY information. If they insist on collection, ask them to send you a physical claim. If such arrives, find a defect and tell them about it when they call back. (unless, of course, they have an actually-toll-free number, which they have to pay for.)
Oh, and always, ALWAYS make them repeat themselves. Repeat yourself ad-naueum, as well.
Just don't make any false statements, or agree to the validity of any debt you are not willing to pay.
(Honestly, though, I'd expect a scam to drop at "I'm recording this call, and your name is?")
Turn the heat down? Yeah, I tried that... and the guy who came to repair my pipes pointed out that up north, water freezes when it gets below 32F.
You seem to have confused "down" with "off."
Quickoffice was a document-editing program way back in the PalmOS days, and it was the only major player to make a WebOS version.
Quickoffice does not require Google Docs to work. Although it does have some features which are counter-intuitive and don't work depending on the view you're in.
> 3) Its battery life is pathetic, so it makes up for it with a mediocre ICE to charge with. Wake me when it has a range near 1000 miles, which is what a setup like this should be sporting.
This is a serial electric hybrid. You are evaluating a metric that only really matters for an all-electric car.
A Volt (or any other car with a gasoline engine) can make a journey of 1,000 miles significantly faster than any car tesla makes. They can also be rescued if energy runs out with a common plastic container, instead of a tow truck.
An electric car is an excellent choice if your daily commute and fiscal budget allow it. (I know people whose daily commute is well over 100 miles each way.). But they are simply not the same category as hybrid cars, be those hybrids serial or parallel.
(And, yes, I know that the Volt's engine and likely the ESR have a physical connection to the drivetrain that is used at certain highway speeds. That makes it a semi-paralel hybrid, not an electric car.)
Making a zip gun from plastic tubing is, however. And that's what a 3-d printed gun barrel is.
I've tried and tried to wrap my head around this, but it makes no sense to me. How can you have fractional-reserve banking if the coins have to match a digital signature? Fractional-reserve banking creates money out of thin air. How can you create bitcoins out of thin air?
1: It's "wealth", not "money." Fractional reserve banking doesn't create more US dollars, it just creates a debt from one part to another and formalizes the transfer of debts instead of the physical exchange of bank notes.
2: Annuities and futures. If I loan you 500 bitcoins to buy a car, with terms that you pay me back over 12 months with interest, I have ~500 BTC as an asset I can promise to others.
but what I have not seen is a technical discussion on how Bitcoin is going to be shut down.
Assuming for the moment as a given that the feds describe to shut down BitCoin (let's say Congress passes a law banning it), I'd wager that the implementation would not be not dissimilar to the approach they take against child porn. Ban the practice outright, impose punitive sentences for dealing with it, and employ police officers to track down those engaging in the practice.
And if that happens, I wager domestic bitcoin usage would just shutter rather than deal with persecution. Bitcoin 2 would be written to concur with the law, and likely overtake its predecessor due to simple market weight.
In the United States, people cannot ... trade real goods and services with BC -- because the U.S. gov' ...will enforce the dollar as the sole legal tender
That's not what "legal tender" means.
I could set up shop today in New York State and accept only bitcoins if I wanted to. The government wouldn't stop me, and in fact they'd back up my right to set my prices as whatever my little heart desires, in whatever strange currency I want.
But as soon as I ask the police to force a shoplifter to pay, I'll wind up having to deal with dollars, because that's all the government will force anyone to pay a debt in. And if I am on the other end of that transaction, I might wind up having to convert some bitcoins to dollars at a sub-optimal time when the bill comes due.
(That I'll also have to pay my taxes in dollars and likely pay my vendors and suppliers in the same means I'll have to deal with some local currency regardless. but that's a different issue.)
For every $1000 in deposits, that means they can lend $10,000 at 5% above their costs and payouts, or more, yielding a $500 profit... wow!
1: It's $1,000 in assets. That includes a whole bunch of things beyond deposits, such as certain bonds.
2: That's $500 in revenue, not profit. From that revenue, they need to pay for all of their bills, and their payroll, and account for losses due to uncollectable accounts and outright thievery.
This $500 is spent by them eventually, and helps dilute the value of your original $1000 by inflation... so your "savings" loses value, as they leverage against it in multiple manners....
3: Inflation is a feature, not a bug. The work you did picking tomatoes last year is less valuable to the species than the work you did picking tomatoes today. The species would be better served if you used that same frugality to horde useful items instead of tokens, which is why the market rewards investment over savings.
My money is a few bits in my bank's private datacenter.
Your liquid wealth is a properly formatted record and data trail at your bank's private data center. (more than a few bits. At least a few integers for value and date/time for each transaction you've ever had.)
I don't know about you, but these days I have very little money. If i want some I just redeem some of the debt that my credit unit owes me for some, although most merchants I deal with will accept an electronic debt assignment instead of requiring money.
Bitcoin does have an intrinsic value: the computing time it takes to mine a bitcoin.
Stop. Bitcoins have an intrinsic COST. The computing time that goes into producing a bitcoin is comparable to the paper and ink used to print a physical US dollar, or the wages and electricity cost of the "creation" of purely electronic dollars. (Which are really debts, rather than currency, but that's an entirely different boneheaded idea that the one you're postulating.)
Once a bitcoin is produced, it cannot be redeemed for an equal amount of computer time. In fact, using a bitcoin requires SOMEONE ELSE to pay for the verification chain that makes this electronic currency at all feasible.
(you're right that it's a bubble, and I'm not here to argue the system's inherent merits or flaws.)
Having said all that: the dollar, in contrast, really does have no practical intrinsic value. Ever since 1971, when Nixon threw the last vestiges of any standard away. (And defaulted on U.S. debt in the process, by the way. People who said the "fiscal cliff" would be the first time the U.S. ever defaulted on debt simply don't know their history.)
The US dollar is backed up by an almost non-intuitive fact of modern society. It's legal tender for payment of debts. As in, if you don't pay your employees or pay for that meal in a restaurant, or if you just wrong someone more generally, the courts will denote whatever judgement is finally ordered against you in US dollars, and if your wealth is denominated in some other currency, you'll be subject to whatever market exchange rate you can manage to produce sufficient dollars to pay the debt.
Or, in short, "people who say the US dollar isn't backed up by anything don't know what they're talking about."
On a different note, though, I'd be interested if you could point to a US debt that was denoted in a weight of precious metal and not redeemed for sufficient value to satisfy the bond-holder. Just because in 1971 the President of the United States stopped offering gold for dollars doesn't mean the US "defaulted" any more than Wal-Mart selling out of ammo means they "defaulted' on that gift card you bought. (The phrase "Redeemable in gold on demand at the United States Treasury, or in gold or lawful money at any Federal Reserve Bank" was gone from bank notes decades before. And still did not specify the amount of gold.)
It's the usual clause companies have to put
"You give us the right to make derivative works from your stuff" is just about as far away from "usual" as you can get it.
With a clause like that, Dropbox can do the smallest of alterations to your stuff, sell it, and not give you a dime. Even if it's something that you sell for $$ and don't give away for free. Hell, with a clause like that, Dropbox can take your software code and release it under any license they want, essentially as if they were you.
No part of the law requires them to not list out what they do. "Make any derivitive works necessary for this service" would do it. This isn't the law -- this is their lawyers being either dickish or lazy.
Can they enforce what you do with an iPad? Not legally. They can do some PRACTICAL things, and they aren't necessarily doing criminal things to stop you... but the things they can do to keep you from using, selling, breaking, or whatever with your iPad after you buy it are pretty short.
Now, there IS some authority that attaches to advertising that uses their trademarks... but, AFAIK (IANAL - don't trust legal advice you get from the internet) as long as you're not claiming to be Apple, claiming to be associated with Apple, or spreading misinformation about their products, they don't really have much legs to stand on.
To wit: the same laws that say you CAN buy five iPads and tell everyone around that you are giving away five free iPads are also the ones that say you can buy an iPad, review it, and then tell everyone your opinion about it.
Oh, and also:
It's certainly their prerogative if they want to say that any of those things void my warranty, but I don't think they can enforce any of their demands on me.
Warranties come in two parts. What's legally required in the jurisdiction of sale, and what the company does above and beyond that. While they can add special conditions to that part of the warranty that goes beyond your local legal mandates, said mandates themselves are applied based on your local law and not the arbitrary dictates of the manufacturer.
(What kind of warranties are forced? Well, for starters there's the warranty that the iPad won't burn down your house due to a flaw in design or manufacturing. So, that's something.)
Why not recommend he light a homeopathic candle while he's at it?
Sheesh. And I won't even comment on your food choice, aside from noting that "organic" food is, by and large, more expensive for little or no gain. So-called "organic" foods are farmed differently... but unless you care enough about their farming practices to pay the surcharge, the "non-organic" ones are just fine.
(And when's the last time you saw "in-organic" food, anyway? And salt doesn't count. ;) )
They are noteworthy because their survivals are unusual -- and each one you cite, including Vesna, suffered injuries that could have very easily killed them.
If all the info you have is that someone/something at IP 12.34.56.78 downloaded kiddie porn, that's no evidence at all.
See:
1: Probable Cause
2: Personality Profiling
3: Jury trials.
A DA doesn't need to prove your kiddie porn habit to a geek-fandom level. He just needs to convince 12 more or less random strangers that it's very likely you traffic in child porn. And that's only if he wants to throw you in jail. If he just wants to harass you, he just needs to show a judge that IP address -- and he's got "probable cause" to bust down your door and take your PC from you. (Hell, if we're talking about a vice squad geek and not a DA, he can put off the judge until latter -- since you're so likely to alter your own logs or try and cover your tracks.)
How would Slashdotters go about picking a solid, basic laptop for Web surfing and document editing that won't be obsolete in two years?
Few laptops will be anything but "obsolete" in two years. But that's the same if you buy an HP, Apple, Dell, Acer, or whatever. Just keep an eye out on any forthcoming tech bumps (Wireless-N, Blue-ray, # of cores, discrete vs. shared video ram) and you'll do fine.
I pick laptops on vendor first (Gateway didn't get their reputation for crappy computers for nothing, for example -- and I like HP, as I have a bunch of laptops that all use the same power cords), features second (I'm a sucker for the touchsmart laptop), and price third.
Price on the web first, but don't forget to check your local big-box stores. I scored a sweet deal on my first laptop from best buy -- they had it for the same price it would have been built and shipped from HP, but with more options than I needed.
(FWIW, My current recommendation would be at least a dual-core CPU, Wireless-N if you have it now or will before you replace the laptop, and skip the blue-ray or DVD player unless there's no additional charge or they're very important to you. Discrete RAM is entirely dependent on if you're going to do any gaming with the laptop; if it's just email and word docs, don't bother. If you're going to fire up The Sims or City of Heroes or Eve Online, it's a must.)
You are the devil. Sorry, but that was clear by the end of your first sentence.
If the company needed you to spend 100 hour weeks to keep from going bust, then it should have gone bust. That's how capitalism works. If the company had ANY value, it would have been bought by a competitor and its foolish owners would have been let go. If the company wasn't bought, even when it had to put itself up for pennies on the dollar... well, then it didn't have any value, and it's just a value-sucking leech.
Look, I don't care what kool-aid you drink. We're suffering the worst recession since FDR, and it's the fault of YOUR chosen market segment. The risk of sub-prime mortgages should NEVER have been so hidden by derivatives, and the short-term profit that your ilk extracted has brought about the long-term pain that the world is suffering through now. If the CEO and CFO don't understand at a gut level what the fiance-geeks are doing... then they shouldn't be doing it. Period, full stop, end of story. And shame on the finance-geeks for letting them do it!
Wow. Someone doesn't appreciate just what legal benefits a marriage grants. Let me start with the big ones:
1: Presumption of paternity. I'm married, and my daughter is sitting beside me. I do NOT need to do anything to prove that she is my daughter, and should it ever come up (like, say, if my wife decided to leave me after becoming pregnant) the burden of proof is on whomever is saying my child is not mine.
2: Tax benefits. In addition to being able to pool income for income tax purposes (which would be much more significant if we didn't both work), we also jointly own all marital property. Which means when one of us passes away, the other one doesn't "inherit" anything -- and so, even if we owned billions of dollars, there would be no inheritance tax. It also means we can give each other money without having to have the other one potentially report it as gift income. (Yes, the benefit is fairly mediocre for most folks. But if you're an edge case, it can be a lot.)
3: Legal protection. The only person who is absolutely prohibited from testifying against you in court is your spouse. (Ok, not "absolutely", but provided it's not a domestic crime, it's pretty high. Higher than lawyers or doctors or priests.)
4: Automatic visitation / power of attorney. When one of us goes into the hospital, not only can the other one automatically visit, but we also automatically get a limited power of attorney for medical decisions as the next of kin.
5: Inheritance rights. She can't write me out of her will, and I cannot write her out of mine. (see #2, above. And yes, it does matter in several cases.)
So, those are the benefits that a polygamist (or a polyandrist, or a polymorist) gains. But multiple concurrent marriages aren't illegal because they somehow grant too many benefits; they're illegal because they stress the dating pool. If we adopted bigamy, for example, we'd have ~25% of the population that simply cannot find a wife, because they're all taken. And that 25% of the population might just stay home and play video games -- or they might go out and take wives wherever they can be found, including acts as vile as rape and murder among the instances which would increase.
(And, yes, a gender-neutral multiple marriage law would make sense. But it also makes sense to just ban them altogether.)
Look at TV ratings - a top show in the 70s used to be watched by 40% of America. Now it's downto 7-8% with nets like CW scrapping the bottom at only 1%
In the 70s, there were only three nationwide networks, and the typical household had maybe a dozen channels to pick from, many of whom were just duplicates of the same nationwide network.
Forty years later, a typical household has well over a hundred networks -- possibly a lot more. A tenfold increase in options equating to less than a tenfold drop in the top popularity doesn't really describe TV "collapsing."
And mass-media does fairly well, btw. Pure digital typesetting and Print-on-demand can let a typical mass-media book do very well on surprisingly narrow margins. Hell, if you want a good example look at comic books. In the 70s there were, what, four publishers, two of which were Disney and Archie comics? And today there are, easily, a solid half-dozen publishers on the rack, and the big two produce far more variety than they did in the 70s.
Tell me again, how exactly copyright encourages creation of new works?
It keeps publishers from simply taking whatever they want and re-selling it, without giving a dime to the author. If you abandoned copyright and relied only on contract law protection, you would quickly find publishers creating subsidiary corporations with the intent of having said subsidiary declare bankruptcy and thus nullify the contract. This unprotected script would then be re-printed with wild abandon by the publisher, and the author would be without any recourse to gain any share of their revenue. If the author attempted to publish themselves, they would soon find a greater and greater share of their time spent on the legal and managerial aspects of publishing, instead of creating a new work.
Or, in other words, COPYRIGHT MAKES IT PROFITABLE TO BE CREATIVE.
(Maybe you were wondering about the current duration of copyright law, which is an entirely separate matter than the inherent reason of copyright itself.)
Hah!
HP's webOS ships with a Linux-based OS and a simple, easy way to get root access on your device. In fact, they provide instructions on how to do so on their website.
And it doesn't even come close to voiding your warranty. Even if you put on custom software.
balderdash.
Look folks, it's a we told you so moment. You bought the shiny hardware despite the warnings that you're going to be trapped in a walled garden. You are now at the whims of Apple and it's your own damn fault.
The rhetorical "you" here is "en oh tea" NOT trapped by the whims of Apple. If you buy a non-DRM'd file, you can read it on the device of your choice -- and it's apple's loss if they try banning the neat reader that your document vendor so nicely put in Apple's app store, just because it serves its purpose as pointing you to a place where you can buy more tasty e-books.
"You" are trapped by the DRM'd files you bought from your document vendor. THEY are the ones trapped by apple's whims.
How is this "unlimited consumer lawsuits from unlimited plaintiffs!"? What I see in this article is a substantial but limited number of lawsuits from one plaintiff.
"Unlimited" does not mean "infinite." Think, "there is no two." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_One_Infinity
In this case, as with software, "unlimited" means that there is no arbitrary limitation on the number of plantiffs or lawsuits. Sure, there is a theoretical maximum of some 308 million plantiffs, and a further theoretical maximum of some six billion defendants... meaning that if the theoretical maximum were reached, we'd have more lawsuits on this law than have ever been filed in the history of our jurisprudence.
So, yeah, "unlimited" sounds about right.
either way given the short window given for this DoS as long as people aren't trying to hide who they are when sending them then they aren't breaking the law.
Yes, yes they are. Read up on "harassment" for starters, and that's just the one I know off the top of my head.