You don't have to join Obama's pre-election plan. It just offers it, and subsidizes certain economic levels. It doesn't require you buy in. Note: you are already paying for others healthcare through income and payroll taxes, so it's not like this is something new.
As for the spending, it's worth noting that the former president is responsible for 1/3 of the bailout/stimulus tab, and he was only involved for 3 months and then got to retire (with full healthcare benefits and a pension paid by the taxpayers, I might add).
I say we simply create a 95% marginal tax bracket at the $500,000 level for financial industry workers with a mandatory 3 year lookback period, which automatically expires when the stimulus borrowing is paid off. They broke it, they should pay for it.
I was going to make some snarky comment about leaving my laptop in the front sleeve of my backpack and putting all that "stuff" in the side pouches before I get to TSA, but then I realized that I use a $150+/- Kelty backpack for my trips, so going holier-than-thou on a $220 bag isn't exactly going to win me any points.
Personally, I practically never take a coat _on_ an airplane and I pre-pack my pocket bits, watch, and belt in the pack. That leaves slipping the laptop and pre-separated fluid bottles out of the bag and dropping my shoes. It takes longer to tie my shoes when I'm done than it does to prep. Since you have to be there so freaking early just in case the TSA lines are backed up there's always time to re-don my things while waiting for the plane.
What part of your car is a technical measure intended to protect access to a copyrighted work?
The Engine Control Module contains software which is copyrighted, and it controls most all aspects of the operation of modern vehicles. The code is generally not available for review or modification, and I suspect is protected in at least a basic non-trivial way.
I would say that is partially true, though it could be argued that the storage limitations at the time was an equal driving factor. We haven't always had penny-per-megabyte flash.
You could probably swap China for America or Russia in your comment, and it nearly as accurate. And I'm former NASA, so I'm not one to want to mix military and civilian space.
I pay for employer provided healthcare through my hard work, so I'm not getting it for free.
This is a reason I'd like to see government mandated group status for individuals. I was drawn to Obama last summer because one of this thoughts on healthcare was to open up the FEHB (federal employees) group to all Americans. Now, don't get me wrong, the federal full-service plan is expensive - but it is very good, and there are some HDHP options (I think). I am an employer (a small one), and I provide benefits for my employees, but for a while I was on my own. My rates were good (great, really, but I was thirty-something and healthy), but any year I became too expensive for my insurer I could have been dropped. Give people group status with such a large group has benefits primarily for the consumer, but the federal market of 2M+ insured is too big a chunk for most major healthcare companies to write off entirely.
If nobody got healthcare from their employers, and there were competition (as there is in FEHB) on the open market the system would be a bit more flexible. I don't think a single payer system will make healthcare better or more efficient. It's true that, to a certain extent, if you don't pay for top rate healthcare you don't get first rate healthcare. This is straying a bit for from the topic, as the ability to write reveiws or not does not (or should not) affect the rates you pay at the doctor's office, but it does speak to the breadth of choice. With more expensive coverage normally comes greater freedom of choice - which would allow you to vote with your feet. As with just about everything in life, the more you pay the more you can choose your path. I am not at the top of the money pile, so this is a bit of my own dogfood, but as mother used to say, "beggars can't be choosers." *shrug*
I know, bad form to self-reply. Just to clarify that when I typed "two," I was referring to a large value of two. Actually I'm going to claim that two refers to a bulleted list and a paragraph followup. Yeah.
1. You're not paying for your care, so you have less say in your treatment options. Welcome to socialized medicine.
2. You can attempt to alter the terms - mark it up.
3. Ask to speak to the doctor if #2 is rejected. Remember that you are taking billable time. Be polite but persistent.
4. Go get a lawyer to review the agreement (you can take it with you without seeing the doctor), and find out your options for redress. You may be able to lodge a complaint with the licensing board and/or the insurer.
5. Write your state legislator, or better yet stop by their office with a copy of the agreement and your problem and ask them to consider legislation limiting the practice. Technically they work for you. (please stop laughing).
6. Contact the local TV station and express your concern. Let them contact the doctor for response; let them contact a lawyer for an interpretation; let them contact your local representative for their position.
There are lots of potential avenues for addressing this sort of thing, you simply need to be creative, persistent, and professional about it. You may not get anywhere, or you may change things. In the end, if the doctor provides service which is harmful there are legal means of compensation. If the service is merely subpar, tell your friends and co-workers. There is a local pediatrician which most people I know won't see - they'll wait for another of the doctors to be on staff. The difficutly with primary care physicians is you have to catch a fresh-out that's good (i.e. get lucky) and hasn't filled his patient list out or b) hope that a good doctor has a bunch of patients die and gets openings in his patient list (i.e. get lucky), as all the good doctors generally have closed practices. The number of GPs is low compapred to the demand, and the money to be made in GP vs specialties isn't really attracting the masses. Sometimes you get what you pay for (I mean this in a statistical sense, not a anecdotal one).
If it is an agreement, both parties must agree to the conditions. It could be argued that your modified agreement, which was a contingency of receiving services, was accepted when they rendered services. That is their only acknowledgment, as they do not sign the agreement and provide you a copy. You receive services or you don't. It is a weak agreement, but an agreement nonetheless. Since all parties may make changes, subject to approval, there is no wrong in making the change and initialing it. The only drawback is if you do not retain a copy of your change for your records, it may be contested - especially if they only retain a "signature" sheet and not the entire agreement from you.
I'm no rocket scientist (okay, technically I am, but that's beside the point) but this seems to be an ideal way to create leads on local illegal activity. Would there be the same outcry if there were local Pot or Heroin ads? How long could you sell crack via Craigslist before the cops paid you a visit?
It's a tax break for a hobby. There are lots of things out there which are noble and good, but which don't qualify for tax breaks because the business never makes a profit, or not enough over the long term to call it a true "business."
I applaud OSS developers, but this is a carve out for a special interest. It happens to be "our" special interest, but that doesn't make it any better. I'd rather see the government actually use OSS and buy support contracts than give a handout.
That might be true, except that websites are - for all intents - raster based. Once a piece of clipart is rasterized and modified enough times (scale, skew, color, whatever) there's no way to prove you didn't get it from a particular, similar looking vector base.
There is no perfect solution. It's not fair to make content holders prove that a (practically) identical image was their work. It comes down to the need for everyone, everywhere to positively source all content. If you find the perfect image/art, but can't find the author or licensee, you can't use it. That's significantly stifling for most of the (non-commercial and small commercial) web. We don't have teams of lawyers at our fingertips to chase this stuff down.
...do everything! He's got a financial meltdown and some thorny foreign policy issues to deal with. There's no sense in bothering him with this kind of trivia (yet).:-)
Microsoft isn't exactly the most trustworthy when it comes to automatically installing anything they want on your computer, which is what you suggest. There doesn't seem to be a checkbox for "only fix security flaws" in Windows Update. I find I still have to sift through the options manually.
Except for the less polished langauge, it's the same thing that happens if you happen to grab an image off a CD from ten years ago which unluckily happens to be in the Getty imagebank and use it in your website. They'll send you a bill for a couple grand for an image they license at $30/yr. And you'll send a check, because if not they'll haul you to court, and any lawyer worth his salt will tell you you're fucked.
The problem is that there is no way to determine if the clip art (or images) you have infringe on anyone's copyright, because there is no way for an individual or small business to match images against the sea of information out there. Your only recourse is to have a physical paper of license in your hands before you do anything. Somehow, I don't think that was the intent behind Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the United States Constitution - that Congress shall have the power: "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." You may as well just lock up the web and throw it away.
m2/m1xdelta-v, or diminishingly small; that's the useful part about using planetary passes to change velocity - they affect the planet in a negligible way. Kind of like driving to the store makes a negligible change in the CO2 in the atmosphere vs. walking. If all the asteroids started going for a joy ride, or taking vacation past earth every summer just for the fun of it, we'd start to notice.;-)
Actually, the power companies would love it. See, they would make it work in their favor. They would pay you well for power during peak times, and pay you poorly for power during off-peak times. They would be perfectly happy to never have to build another power plant in their corporate lives. Power plants are expensive, highly regulated affairs with enormous capital costs and long development cycles. They do everything in their power to avoid having to produce more power.
They might even be happy if you replaced all your power needs with solar, so long as you stayed on grid and they acted as an intermediary for transfer of power. They're really just middlemen, taking a cut.
Yeah, but that's one tough son of a bitch to do watersports with a crocodile. Makes that whole trapeze, midget and running start thing seem pretty mainstream if you ask me.
Ah, but this is _not_ an audiobook. It is a e-book, which is neither book nor audiobook. The intent of an e-book is that the data is embedded in a file which is then rendered on an electronic device in a format which can be sensed by the purchaser of the e-book.
Here's a question: If you bought the e-book, and your reader only had TTS but no screen, would there be a problem? What about a braille version? A color version? Now, what if you combined a B&W reader with a braille stripe on the bottom of the reader.
If the e-book is only in digital form, than ANY rendering is a "derivative" work. Note that fair use is significant here. From wikipedia, the Galoob v Nintendo ruling of the 9th circuit stated: "a party who distributes a copyrighted work cannot dictate how that work is to be enjoyed". In other words, the end user can do (nearly) whatever her or she damned well pleases once purchased. To say that you can't have a book read to you - either by a friend, a relative, or your personal reading device, is simply absurd.
Any group of lawyers will cost $300-500 just to talk to, as they'll have to do a conflict of interest check against their current client base, get the legal papers in line, and start the process. The last time I needed one it ran me about $400. I had hoped my "friend" would take a look at the papers I needed reviewed, but he was too busy and had to pass it to a subordinate to work on. I'm not bitter; I provide the same type of service and know how fast you can blow an hour or two on setup and filing on the smallest job - just that unless you have a lawyer friend in a single office who doesn't care about checking conflicts you'll be in for a bigger bill than $100.
You don't have to join Obama's pre-election plan. It just offers it, and subsidizes certain economic levels. It doesn't require you buy in. Note: you are already paying for others healthcare through income and payroll taxes, so it's not like this is something new.
As for the spending, it's worth noting that the former president is responsible for 1/3 of the bailout/stimulus tab, and he was only involved for 3 months and then got to retire (with full healthcare benefits and a pension paid by the taxpayers, I might add).
I say we simply create a 95% marginal tax bracket at the $500,000 level for financial industry workers with a mandatory 3 year lookback period, which automatically expires when the stimulus borrowing is paid off. They broke it, they should pay for it.
I was going to make some snarky comment about leaving my laptop in the front sleeve of my backpack and putting all that "stuff" in the side pouches before I get to TSA, but then I realized that I use a $150+/- Kelty backpack for my trips, so going holier-than-thou on a $220 bag isn't exactly going to win me any points.
Personally, I practically never take a coat _on_ an airplane and I pre-pack my pocket bits, watch, and belt in the pack. That leaves slipping the laptop and pre-separated fluid bottles out of the bag and dropping my shoes. It takes longer to tie my shoes when I'm done than it does to prep. Since you have to be there so freaking early just in case the TSA lines are backed up there's always time to re-don my things while waiting for the plane.
Well said. You get a complimentary lawyer cap for the day.
I hope the script writer sees this, as it's a very good response to their takedown.
What part of your car is a technical measure intended to protect access to a copyrighted work?
The Engine Control Module contains software which is copyrighted, and it controls most all aspects of the operation of modern vehicles. The code is generally not available for review or modification, and I suspect is protected in at least a basic non-trivial way.
I would say that is partially true, though it could be argued that the storage limitations at the time was an equal driving factor. We haven't always had penny-per-megabyte flash.
You could probably swap China for America or Russia in your comment, and it nearly as accurate. And I'm former NASA, so I'm not one to want to mix military and civilian space.
I pay for employer provided healthcare through my hard work, so I'm not getting it for free.
This is a reason I'd like to see government mandated group status for individuals. I was drawn to Obama last summer because one of this thoughts on healthcare was to open up the FEHB (federal employees) group to all Americans. Now, don't get me wrong, the federal full-service plan is expensive - but it is very good, and there are some HDHP options (I think). I am an employer (a small one), and I provide benefits for my employees, but for a while I was on my own. My rates were good (great, really, but I was thirty-something and healthy), but any year I became too expensive for my insurer I could have been dropped. Give people group status with such a large group has benefits primarily for the consumer, but the federal market of 2M+ insured is too big a chunk for most major healthcare companies to write off entirely.
If nobody got healthcare from their employers, and there were competition (as there is in FEHB) on the open market the system would be a bit more flexible. I don't think a single payer system will make healthcare better or more efficient. It's true that, to a certain extent, if you don't pay for top rate healthcare you don't get first rate healthcare. This is straying a bit for from the topic, as the ability to write reveiws or not does not (or should not) affect the rates you pay at the doctor's office, but it does speak to the breadth of choice. With more expensive coverage normally comes greater freedom of choice - which would allow you to vote with your feet. As with just about everything in life, the more you pay the more you can choose your path. I am not at the top of the money pile, so this is a bit of my own dogfood, but as mother used to say, "beggars can't be choosers." *shrug*
I know, bad form to self-reply. Just to clarify that when I typed "two," I was referring to a large value of two. Actually I'm going to claim that two refers to a bulleted list and a paragraph followup. Yeah.
Two things:
1. You're not paying for your care, so you have less say in your treatment options. Welcome to socialized medicine.
2. You can attempt to alter the terms - mark it up.
3. Ask to speak to the doctor if #2 is rejected. Remember that you are taking billable time. Be polite but persistent.
4. Go get a lawyer to review the agreement (you can take it with you without seeing the doctor), and find out your options for redress. You may be able to lodge a complaint with the licensing board and/or the insurer.
5. Write your state legislator, or better yet stop by their office with a copy of the agreement and your problem and ask them to consider legislation limiting the practice. Technically they work for you. (please stop laughing).
6. Contact the local TV station and express your concern. Let them contact the doctor for response; let them contact a lawyer for an interpretation; let them contact your local representative for their position.
There are lots of potential avenues for addressing this sort of thing, you simply need to be creative, persistent, and professional about it. You may not get anywhere, or you may change things. In the end, if the doctor provides service which is harmful there are legal means of compensation. If the service is merely subpar, tell your friends and co-workers. There is a local pediatrician which most people I know won't see - they'll wait for another of the doctors to be on staff. The difficutly with primary care physicians is you have to catch a fresh-out that's good (i.e. get lucky) and hasn't filled his patient list out or b) hope that a good doctor has a bunch of patients die and gets openings in his patient list (i.e. get lucky), as all the good doctors generally have closed practices. The number of GPs is low compapred to the demand, and the money to be made in GP vs specialties isn't really attracting the masses. Sometimes you get what you pay for (I mean this in a statistical sense, not a anecdotal one).
If it is an agreement, both parties must agree to the conditions. It could be argued that your modified agreement, which was a contingency of receiving services, was accepted when they rendered services. That is their only acknowledgment, as they do not sign the agreement and provide you a copy. You receive services or you don't. It is a weak agreement, but an agreement nonetheless. Since all parties may make changes, subject to approval, there is no wrong in making the change and initialing it. The only drawback is if you do not retain a copy of your change for your records, it may be contested - especially if they only retain a "signature" sheet and not the entire agreement from you.
I'm no rocket scientist (okay, technically I am, but that's beside the point) but this seems to be an ideal way to create leads on local illegal activity. Would there be the same outcry if there were local Pot or Heroin ads? How long could you sell crack via Craigslist before the cops paid you a visit?
It's a tax break for a hobby. There are lots of things out there which are noble and good, but which don't qualify for tax breaks because the business never makes a profit, or not enough over the long term to call it a true "business."
I applaud OSS developers, but this is a carve out for a special interest. It happens to be "our" special interest, but that doesn't make it any better. I'd rather see the government actually use OSS and buy support contracts than give a handout.
Each time I see a steeple with a lightning rod, I wonder about substantial lack of faith on the part of the congregation.
That might be true, except that websites are - for all intents - raster based. Once a piece of clipart is rasterized and modified enough times (scale, skew, color, whatever) there's no way to prove you didn't get it from a particular, similar looking vector base.
There is no perfect solution. It's not fair to make content holders prove that a (practically) identical image was their work. It comes down to the need for everyone, everywhere to positively source all content. If you find the perfect image/art, but can't find the author or licensee, you can't use it. That's significantly stifling for most of the (non-commercial and small commercial) web. We don't have teams of lawyers at our fingertips to chase this stuff down.
...do everything! He's got a financial meltdown and some thorny foreign policy issues to deal with. There's no sense in bothering him with this kind of trivia (yet). :-)
Microsoft isn't exactly the most trustworthy when it comes to automatically installing anything they want on your computer, which is what you suggest. There doesn't seem to be a checkbox for "only fix security flaws" in Windows Update. I find I still have to sift through the options manually.
Except for the less polished langauge, it's the same thing that happens if you happen to grab an image off a CD from ten years ago which unluckily happens to be in the Getty imagebank and use it in your website. They'll send you a bill for a couple grand for an image they license at $30/yr. And you'll send a check, because if not they'll haul you to court, and any lawyer worth his salt will tell you you're fucked.
The problem is that there is no way to determine if the clip art (or images) you have infringe on anyone's copyright, because there is no way for an individual or small business to match images against the sea of information out there. Your only recourse is to have a physical paper of license in your hands before you do anything. Somehow, I don't think that was the intent behind Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the United States Constitution - that Congress shall have the power: "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." You may as well just lock up the web and throw it away.
m2/m1xdelta-v, or diminishingly small; that's the useful part about using planetary passes to change velocity - they affect the planet in a negligible way. Kind of like driving to the store makes a negligible change in the CO2 in the atmosphere vs. walking. If all the asteroids started going for a joy ride, or taking vacation past earth every summer just for the fun of it, we'd start to notice. ;-)
Actually, the power companies would love it. See, they would make it work in their favor. They would pay you well for power during peak times, and pay you poorly for power during off-peak times. They would be perfectly happy to never have to build another power plant in their corporate lives. Power plants are expensive, highly regulated affairs with enormous capital costs and long development cycles. They do everything in their power to avoid having to produce more power.
They might even be happy if you replaced all your power needs with solar, so long as you stayed on grid and they acted as an intermediary for transfer of power. They're really just middlemen, taking a cut.
Seems that might be a rare feature in future readers.
Yeah, but that's one tough son of a bitch to do watersports with a crocodile. Makes that whole trapeze, midget and running start thing seem pretty mainstream if you ask me.
As much as serenity is a popular favorite, Necessity is perhaps the best name mentioned so far. *golf clap*
Ah, but this is _not_ an audiobook. It is a e-book, which is neither book nor audiobook. The intent of an e-book is that the data is embedded in a file which is then rendered on an electronic device in a format which can be sensed by the purchaser of the e-book.
Here's a question: If you bought the e-book, and your reader only had TTS but no screen, would there be a problem? What about a braille version? A color version? Now, what if you combined a B&W reader with a braille stripe on the bottom of the reader.
If the e-book is only in digital form, than ANY rendering is a "derivative" work. Note that fair use is significant here. From wikipedia, the Galoob v Nintendo ruling of the 9th circuit stated: "a party who distributes a copyrighted work cannot dictate how that work is to be enjoyed". In other words, the end user can do (nearly) whatever her or she damned well pleases once purchased. To say that you can't have a book read to you - either by a friend, a relative, or your personal reading device, is simply absurd.
Any group of lawyers will cost $300-500 just to talk to, as they'll have to do a conflict of interest check against their current client base, get the legal papers in line, and start the process. The last time I needed one it ran me about $400. I had hoped my "friend" would take a look at the papers I needed reviewed, but he was too busy and had to pass it to a subordinate to work on. I'm not bitter; I provide the same type of service and know how fast you can blow an hour or two on setup and filing on the smallest job - just that unless you have a lawyer friend in a single office who doesn't care about checking conflicts you'll be in for a bigger bill than $100.
Waaayyyy back when the popular media got global cooling confused with global warming.