I think the average is actually closer to 35-40% (hence the "tax-free" day being somewhere in May, or some such). Those lower on the scale pay more in SS and sales taxes, whereas those on the top end pay more in income (and tax on unearned income or gains).
Many regressive "taxes" are actually user fees, and are intended to capture the costs of use. Gasoline, personal property, and municipal utility fees are such user fees masquerading as taxes. Sales tax is usually not very regressive in those states which exempt (or limit) food and pharma from sales taxes. Property taxes are normally progressive - though can be entirely decoupled from income in places where long time owners have unrealized capital gains - and as a bonus tend to go almost exclusively to school costs.
Personally, I'd like to see a flat gross receivables tax for every entity (i.e. anyone with a TIN). It's very difficult to hide (there are no deductions), and discourages quick-turn-around transactions (day-trading, real-estate flipping) and multiple-middle-man industries (which benefits local direct merchants - farmers, etc.). Of course, to respond to the cry of regression, I would also institute a fixed exemption of 2087 x federal minimum wage for each unique TIN. So for each person in your household (or for a small business owned by an individual), you get to exclude the amount equal to the annual income of someone making minimum wage. You make minimum, you pay no taxes; you make more, you pay the flat fee. I think I calculated once that it would only take about 2.5-4% to cover the federal budget (which is too big, imho).
Yes, yes, yes. I know you can do that stuff. I've also built a HTPC with WMC (which is fuck-all unusable with ATI video card drivers). But it's still no good. Goddamnit, I want a TiVo w/ DVDprofiler. A seemingly trivial operation if it weren't for DRM and teams of swarming lawyers. WMC is close, though the browsing and asswipe driver and drm issues makes it damned near unusable.
Hell, I've got a Mivx box that will hold about 400 XviD movies, and I have some on there now, sorted by genre in the folder structure. But it looks like a hack job..or worse yet, a computer. I should be able to go to Target or some bix box electrocnics store) and pick up something more polished, like I can pick up a TiVo or a Philips DVD/Divx player. Or order a $75 software package to so the whole damned thing on generic hardware. But I've tried a couple out, and they all tend to center around recorded TV, photos, and music.
I can't do this with video, of course, because the content is DRMed with laywers. (The DRM is easy to get around, the lawyers are not). In fact, the content companies are so scared they won't even let you do the operation with "unencoded" discs - which would work fine since I have the slysoft software which decrypts in the background.
I dream of a day where I put a videodisc into the drive, and it rips, tags, files, and catalogs the content according to my predetermined scheme - a cross between Media Monkey (which does all of this for audio) and DVDprofiler (which catalogs my DVD collection).
I don't know about BD/HD discs, but full-length DVDs are often between 6 and 7.5GB, including all the trailers and extras. TV series often pack 8-9GB on a disc. Most animated movies are under the 5GB barrier, and when stripped of commercials and fluff often require no shrinking to fit within a single layer disc.
Yes, I do a little mental happy dance, too. It's actually infinitely frustrating for me, as I own about 300 DVDs and would like to stick them into an itune-ish interface on a single server so I can put the discs back in their cases and throw away my tempermental DVD jukebox. Except, of course, there's no cheap stock solution because of (1) DRM and (2) the "fear" that someone might use such a tool for netflix abuse. Bugs the hell out of me. I also like to rip my daughters discs down to just the movie so that it's easier to start the flick, and I don't have to sift through the enforced commercials and inane menus just to get the disc to play. She (4yo) can already work the pronto to select the disc from a paper thumbnail list I made for her, but since we try and keep the total TV time down, all that extra content is really just wasted time.
...on oosenetyea. I think Casino Royale was up about a month ago. Even at 3Mbps it would take a while to download and I don't have the horsepower/setup to play it back, yet. And, seriously, even if I had the computer to play it what good is a 1080p movie if I have to watch it on my little 24" LCD monitor to see all 1080x1920 pixels - I want to see that baby at 100+ inches. For me, in the $15-$25 price range, I'm probably going to buy the disc rather than waste the d/l bandwidth. And, surprise, the BD version of CR is available at half.com for $21+$3 shipping.
No, the 30" cinema monitor is too small, and I want it in a desk-like format with an integrated, transparent wacom surface. Kind of like the Cintiq monitor in the sibling post, but much much bigger.
For architecture work, the ability to see full drawings, full size is pretty critical to making the final output as readable as possible. The ability to edit at that scale is - I'll admit - a bit of a luxury rather than a necessity. Also, even the 30" cinema (or Dell's similar model) cannot display a typical 7-8MP digicam photograph at 1:1 and still have room for palettes and toolbars that don't cover up the actual work. Of course, I couldn't use this or a 30" panel, as my primary machine only has a single-link DVI port (it's a laptop). The internal card can run the resolution, but the connection cannot (supposedly), so I suffice with a 24" lcd at 1920x1200, which matches the laptop screen so my "desk" workspace layout matches my "road" workspace layout. Yes, I'm not offically rambling...better get back to work!
I suppose I can see the gaming aspect, but I probably wouldn't be willing to pay the cost of such a game (much less the table) - it would be a sideshow item at entertainment houses.
I'm not really convinced that a windowed environment would be more efficient using this technology. In fact, I've found most iterations of "standard" MS windows to be less efficient as time has progressed. I still have my desktop set to the most basic classic form. I already use two hands to manipulate the screen with shortcut keys and my mouse. I have yet to see any real improvement in efficiency since NT3.51. I can smoke just about anyone using all windows tools in autocad manipulations because I know keystrokes, text commands, and shortcuts. In fact, most of the "efficiencies" in the UI have come at the cost of actual efficiency - when I turn on the bells and whistles that make it easier for the novice, I type so quickly that the program can't keep up. Most of what you are doing, while it does have certain advantages (resize and move both corners of a window simultaneously, of example), is just simple task switching, and can be keyboard commanded with fewer total movements by minimizing, restoring, or maximizing windows, or switching desktops in linux or some win desktop managers.
Which brings us to the place where these things will be useful - simple operations for the novice. Enabling people who are afraid of mice and keyboards to perform very basic, easily scripted tasks. Of course, no complex manipulations will be useful in such an enviroment. Novices do terribly poorly at mouse gestures until they are taught the motions and practice them. Much of the efficiency will come from "knowing what the user means" when the windoes are sized/minimized/moved etc. I tend to turn such things off (html and smart directories in win, for example) because the process of undoing ro redoing an operation that is a "miss" by the UI is not worth the bother of learning the proper command or choosing the particular operation. Things are rarely labeled correctly (I spend countless hours retagging my ripped CDs to match my preferences) and often perform in ways which are non-optimal for the end user (I have only about 40-50 "artists" in my music collection, but my artist list in iTunes shows about 400 becuase I have a couple dozen comlipations - that's non-optimal in a very, very bad way).
No, this will be good for very simple, specific operations - games, ordering systems, dedicated uses. Beyond that it's more of a flying-car-in-the-future kind of device.
Interestingly, I've also gotten garbage spam from the eVA system (electronic vendor system for the state of Virginia). You have to be registered with their extortion house and pay a 1% revenue fee to the bastards if you want to work on any Virginia contract. I always add 5% to my Virginia bids to cover the annoyance.
You're right, I didn't read deep enough into TFA. It's everything that's annoying about Windows ("Hi, I see you have a digital camera! Would you like to download the pictures!?!) with a bunch of useless eyecandy (oooh! you can see the pictures actually _moving_ into the stroage device!) and a PAN with higher speed access than bluetooth. Yawn.
Yes, it has applications for what they said, and I'm sure it may help out for certain transactions. It's more cinema-kitch than practical, though. I mean, I suppose if you use it in a restaurant to order you might get to pay a lower bill since you won't need to tip the waiter. But the cost to buy and - here's the expensive part - custom program for your application will severely cut into its application for all but the biggest multi-site corporations.
It might have been useful. Oh well. I'm sure I'll see them popping up all over the place eventually, as person-to-person interactions get less and less common.
I work in the A&E field, and having a drafting board like this (though with a stylus) would be _very_ cool, indeed. Bump up that resolution (150-200dpi, like my laptop) and make it in a 16:10 with 26" or 32" vertical dimension and it would be a lot like drafting on paper. The extra real estate with a 16:9 would allow a real size "sheet" of space with room on the side for toolbars and/or palettes. I drool just thinking about it.
Oh, sure, you'd need an insane adapter to drive it (with about 4800x7680 resolution - QuadHD), but that's just the way things are. Now that I come to think of it, it might be useful for digital photo/image manipulation. At 200dpi, you could work with the images from the newest Hasselblad digitals at 1:1 pixel mapping. And, hey, if you've got $32k to drop on a camera body, you may as well pony up for the post processing, right?
This kind of thinking has to be ingrained early in childhood, by both word and deed. Those of us who teach this to our children are constantly frustrated by the parents who don't. And those who don't are in a decided majority.
Not that it would matter. No matter how inclusive and positive a group is, at some point someone will feel slighted as not all resouces are infinite. Once one person is turned against the group it becomes more and more likely that the system will break down. I'm not entirely certain that the societal limit isn't awfully close to the monkeyspace size.
...that's similar to that when you get food and/or sex from doing "good things", doesn't that possibly mean that doing good things is historically/genetically programmed into us as one common way to get more more food and sex? And if you are doing good deeds in anticipation of that "dinner and a movie," it isn't really altruistic, is it?
warning, possible flamebait follows: If you're a Christian, is it impossible to be altruistic? If you do good deeds, don't you ingratiate yourself witht he Lord, thereby increasing your chance of being admitted to heaven? So, even if you don't really "get" anything for doing good deeds, you're still going to get a reward for it in the afterlife right? Which would mean it wasn't really altrustic.
Clearly the point was somewhat lost on you. Killing everyone who opposes me in warfare is, by definition, how you win a war. If you consider surrender and option for "winning," I must point out that surrender is the other side deciding not to oppose you - under pain of death - and since you've killed everyone else, ergo the definition above. There is absolutely nothing noble or desirable about war.
Note also that I did not say that we should have gone to war. We don't have any fucking business in the middle east. They can keep all their oil, for all I care - $8/gallon for gasoline is just fine with me, and I drive quite a gas hog (it's a truck; I actually use it for work). There is no useful way out of this conflict. Our idiotic^Willustrious leader has managed to make many of the same mistakes that were made in Vietnam. It's all the more surprising since his advisors were mostly involved with Vietnam after things were in total disarray.
Again, what I meant was that if you go to WAR, you must be willing to destroy your enemy completely, with no trace that they ever existed. Anything else is just sport. Thing is, this "sport" our administration is playing looks like war to them - and they are reacting properly to it. Those people really hate us, and they hate us more every day. We will win this war, or we will lose this war - there are no other outcomes. And, quite honestly, since turning Iraq into radioactive glass is not a realistic option either (since it is the only way to "win" this "war"). Unfortunately, our president has too small a penis to admit that he has utterly failed.
-- And, for the record, I was very popular in school. You see, I was objective and understood consequences of actions - from the beginning. It came across as being fair and honest. I'm a consultant now, and people hire me because I am honest.
No, we still weren't allowed to kill _everybody_, we were trying to "free" them. Worked well, as you stated.
I can finish of the insurgency in Iraq with one word: nukes. I'd put one in Afghanistan, too. Actually, Afghanistan should have been first.
That's right, one large piece of radioactive glass. We'll call it "New Arizona" and in a few thousand years resettle it. Thing is, the US military (or, at least, the administration) doesn't have the balls to fight to win. Modern militaries in first world countries have forgotton their pasts - any war where there are rules will always be decided in favor of the side which ignores the rules. We may as well wear bright red coats and march in a line at this point.
..but the aerodynamics of these laptops may be suboptimal, as well as the danger of imflicting impact wounds (beat's minefield hopscotch, though, I suppose).
Thank you for the tip, even if I did have to view the html source (actually, I browsed the posts to look for it before I posted, and just couldn't find an example quickly enough)
If the PP says my +1 Insightful view on it is this, it's not required that you mod him that way.
Unless, of course, you're creationists. In which case you really ought to just believe what he says. He is telling the Truth, you know, so there's no sense in questioning it.
I know, I know, this is about FM transmitters. Give them up and go spend a couple bills on one of the new low end Alpine head units.
Like this one (9883, $200) or this one (9885, $300) and then drop in their dedicated $30 ipod adapter. That's what - $230...about 40 pounds, nowadays, right? (I kid! and no, I don't know how to put the symbol in slashcode)
Best audio connection, browsing by all the ways you can browse the iPod text interface, and song info on the screen. I'm certain the UK versions are similar (Alpine shows the same adapter for Alpine-Europe). Yes, it's more money than a cheap FM transmitter , but the difference is pretty phenominal, and there's no worries about getting tramped on by a commercial station or someone else's adapter. And no looking down, fiddling with the ipod on the passenger seat (you can ignroe the road while you look at the head unit;-)
I actually purchased the head unit first, then the ipod to go with it. For $70 I picked up an old gen 4, 20 gig ipod off ebay. Scratched, battery only takes about 1/2 a charge, but who cares - it's in the glove box with all my tunes (Thanks to foobar and Nero AAC) and powered off the head unit. Cheaper than a disc changer - and much more useful. I never really figured to get an iPod, but for the application, it turns out to be a good item at the right price.
Actually, the definition is no better than the "effective" language
"in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work"
Now, this is really being picky, but the letter of the law requires that the technological measure be applied with the authority of the copyright owner. That could mean that a techological measure is not necessarily applicable when the copyright owner is not actively approving or denying use - i.e.: through a call-home interface. A contractual agreement between the encryption license holder and the consumer electronics manufacturer may not constitute actual copyright holder authorization of an access key to an end user which is not a party to the contract. Probably not the case, but a legitimate arguement.
Also, SCOTUS often looks to international rulings when reviewing case law to apply to their decisions. This is but a drop of fresh water in an ocean, but it is nice to see that a pro-consumer ruling does exist somewhere in the world.
I mostly agree with you that the chance of anything happening in the US is nearly zero. I still prefer to use the adjective nearly, instead of absolutly. Sort of like I have a nearly zero chance of winning the lottery and becoming independently wealthy. Using absolutely is just too depressing.
Slashdot Mirror
I can come up with a few:
I think the average is actually closer to 35-40% (hence the "tax-free" day being somewhere in May, or some such). Those lower on the scale pay more in SS and sales taxes, whereas those on the top end pay more in income (and tax on unearned income or gains).
Many regressive "taxes" are actually user fees, and are intended to capture the costs of use. Gasoline, personal property, and municipal utility fees are such user fees masquerading as taxes. Sales tax is usually not very regressive in those states which exempt (or limit) food and pharma from sales taxes. Property taxes are normally progressive - though can be entirely decoupled from income in places where long time owners have unrealized capital gains - and as a bonus tend to go almost exclusively to school costs.
Personally, I'd like to see a flat gross receivables tax for every entity (i.e. anyone with a TIN). It's very difficult to hide (there are no deductions), and discourages quick-turn-around transactions (day-trading, real-estate flipping) and multiple-middle-man industries (which benefits local direct merchants - farmers, etc.). Of course, to respond to the cry of regression, I would also institute a fixed exemption of 2087 x federal minimum wage for each unique TIN. So for each person in your household (or for a small business owned by an individual), you get to exclude the amount equal to the annual income of someone making minimum wage. You make minimum, you pay no taxes; you make more, you pay the flat fee. I think I calculated once that it would only take about 2.5-4% to cover the federal budget (which is too big, imho).
...plus an old XBOX1 hacked to run...
Yes, yes, yes. I know you can do that stuff. I've also built a HTPC with WMC (which is fuck-all unusable with ATI video card drivers). But it's still no good. Goddamnit, I want a TiVo w/ DVDprofiler. A seemingly trivial operation if it weren't for DRM and teams of swarming lawyers. WMC is close, though the browsing and asswipe driver and drm issues makes it damned near unusable.
Hell, I've got a Mivx box that will hold about 400 XviD movies, and I have some on there now, sorted by genre in the folder structure. But it looks like a hack job..or worse yet, a computer. I should be able to go to Target or some bix box electrocnics store) and pick up something more polished, like I can pick up a TiVo or a Philips DVD/Divx player. Or order a $75 software package to so the whole damned thing on generic hardware. But I've tried a couple out, and they all tend to center around recorded TV, photos, and music.
I can't do this with video, of course, because the content is DRMed with laywers. (The DRM is easy to get around, the lawyers are not). In fact, the content companies are so scared they won't even let you do the operation with "unencoded" discs - which would work fine since I have the slysoft software which decrypts in the background.
I dream of a day where I put a videodisc into the drive, and it rips, tags, files, and catalogs the content according to my predetermined scheme - a cross between Media Monkey (which does all of this for audio) and DVDprofiler (which catalogs my DVD collection).
...for which you're not sure whether you have permission (but isn't protected), but it still won't rip the DVD I purchased. Nice. Thanks.
I don't know about BD/HD discs, but full-length DVDs are often between 6 and 7.5GB, including all the trailers and extras. TV series often pack 8-9GB on a disc. Most animated movies are under the 5GB barrier, and when stripped of commercials and fluff often require no shrinking to fit within a single layer disc.
Yes, I do a little mental happy dance, too. It's actually infinitely frustrating for me, as I own about 300 DVDs and would like to stick them into an itune-ish interface on a single server so I can put the discs back in their cases and throw away my tempermental DVD jukebox. Except, of course, there's no cheap stock solution because of (1) DRM and (2) the "fear" that someone might use such a tool for netflix abuse. Bugs the hell out of me. I also like to rip my daughters discs down to just the movie so that it's easier to start the flick, and I don't have to sift through the enforced commercials and inane menus just to get the disc to play. She (4yo) can already work the pronto to select the disc from a paper thumbnail list I made for her, but since we try and keep the total TV time down, all that extra content is really just wasted time.
...on oosenetyea. I think Casino Royale was up about a month ago. Even at 3Mbps it would take a while to download and I don't have the horsepower/setup to play it back, yet. And, seriously, even if I had the computer to play it what good is a 1080p movie if I have to watch it on my little 24" LCD monitor to see all 1080x1920 pixels - I want to see that baby at 100+ inches. For me, in the $15-$25 price range, I'm probably going to buy the disc rather than waste the d/l bandwidth. And, surprise, the BD version of CR is available at half.com for $21+$3 shipping.
No, the 30" cinema monitor is too small, and I want it in a desk-like format with an integrated, transparent wacom surface. Kind of like the Cintiq monitor in the sibling post, but much much bigger.
For architecture work, the ability to see full drawings, full size is pretty critical to making the final output as readable as possible. The ability to edit at that scale is - I'll admit - a bit of a luxury rather than a necessity. Also, even the 30" cinema (or Dell's similar model) cannot display a typical 7-8MP digicam photograph at 1:1 and still have room for palettes and toolbars that don't cover up the actual work. Of course, I couldn't use this or a 30" panel, as my primary machine only has a single-link DVI port (it's a laptop). The internal card can run the resolution, but the connection cannot (supposedly), so I suffice with a 24" lcd at 1920x1200, which matches the laptop screen so my "desk" workspace layout matches my "road" workspace layout. Yes, I'm not offically rambling...better get back to work!
Stuff starts showing up on your printouts!
I suppose I can see the gaming aspect, but I probably wouldn't be willing to pay the cost of such a game (much less the table) - it would be a sideshow item at entertainment houses.
I'm not really convinced that a windowed environment would be more efficient using this technology. In fact, I've found most iterations of "standard" MS windows to be less efficient as time has progressed. I still have my desktop set to the most basic classic form. I already use two hands to manipulate the screen with shortcut keys and my mouse. I have yet to see any real improvement in efficiency since NT3.51. I can smoke just about anyone using all windows tools in autocad manipulations because I know keystrokes, text commands, and shortcuts. In fact, most of the "efficiencies" in the UI have come at the cost of actual efficiency - when I turn on the bells and whistles that make it easier for the novice, I type so quickly that the program can't keep up. Most of what you are doing, while it does have certain advantages (resize and move both corners of a window simultaneously, of example), is just simple task switching, and can be keyboard commanded with fewer total movements by minimizing, restoring, or maximizing windows, or switching desktops in linux or some win desktop managers.
Which brings us to the place where these things will be useful - simple operations for the novice. Enabling people who are afraid of mice and keyboards to perform very basic, easily scripted tasks. Of course, no complex manipulations will be useful in such an enviroment. Novices do terribly poorly at mouse gestures until they are taught the motions and practice them. Much of the efficiency will come from "knowing what the user means" when the windoes are sized/minimized/moved etc. I tend to turn such things off (html and smart directories in win, for example) because the process of undoing ro redoing an operation that is a "miss" by the UI is not worth the bother of learning the proper command or choosing the particular operation. Things are rarely labeled correctly (I spend countless hours retagging my ripped CDs to match my preferences) and often perform in ways which are non-optimal for the end user (I have only about 40-50 "artists" in my music collection, but my artist list in iTunes shows about 400 becuase I have a couple dozen comlipations - that's non-optimal in a very, very bad way).
No, this will be good for very simple, specific operations - games, ordering systems, dedicated uses. Beyond that it's more of a flying-car-in-the-future kind of device.
You too, huh? They denied it up and down to me.
Interestingly, I've also gotten garbage spam from the eVA system (electronic vendor system for the state of Virginia). You have to be registered with their extortion house and pay a 1% revenue fee to the bastards if you want to work on any Virginia contract. I always add 5% to my Virginia bids to cover the annoyance.
You're right, I didn't read deep enough into TFA. It's everything that's annoying about Windows ("Hi, I see you have a digital camera! Would you like to download the pictures!?!) with a bunch of useless eyecandy (oooh! you can see the pictures actually _moving_ into the stroage device!) and a PAN with higher speed access than bluetooth. Yawn.
Yes, it has applications for what they said, and I'm sure it may help out for certain transactions. It's more cinema-kitch than practical, though. I mean, I suppose if you use it in a restaurant to order you might get to pay a lower bill since you won't need to tip the waiter. But the cost to buy and - here's the expensive part - custom program for your application will severely cut into its application for all but the biggest multi-site corporations.
It might have been useful. Oh well. I'm sure I'll see them popping up all over the place eventually, as person-to-person interactions get less and less common.
Damned AC beat me to it.
I work in the A&E field, and having a drafting board like this (though with a stylus) would be _very_ cool, indeed. Bump up that resolution (150-200dpi, like my laptop) and make it in a 16:10 with 26" or 32" vertical dimension and it would be a lot like drafting on paper. The extra real estate with a 16:9 would allow a real size "sheet" of space with room on the side for toolbars and/or palettes. I drool just thinking about it.
Oh, sure, you'd need an insane adapter to drive it (with about 4800x7680 resolution - QuadHD), but that's just the way things are. Now that I come to think of it, it might be useful for digital photo/image manipulation. At 200dpi, you could work with the images from the newest Hasselblad digitals at 1:1 pixel mapping. And, hey, if you've got $32k to drop on a camera body, you may as well pony up for the post processing, right?
If you're already searching usenet, why not just get your programs there?
Oh, damn, right...first rule of usenet. Sorry.
This kind of thinking has to be ingrained early in childhood, by both word and deed. Those of us who teach this to our children are constantly frustrated by the parents who don't. And those who don't are in a decided majority.
Not that it would matter. No matter how inclusive and positive a group is, at some point someone will feel slighted as not all resouces are infinite. Once one person is turned against the group it becomes more and more likely that the system will break down. I'm not entirely certain that the societal limit isn't awfully close to the monkeyspace size.
...that's similar to that when you get food and/or sex from doing "good things", doesn't that possibly mean that doing good things is historically/genetically programmed into us as one common way to get more more food and sex? And if you are doing good deeds in anticipation of that "dinner and a movie," it isn't really altruistic, is it?
warning, possible flamebait follows:
If you're a Christian, is it impossible to be altruistic? If you do good deeds, don't you ingratiate yourself witht he Lord, thereby increasing your chance of being admitted to heaven? So, even if you don't really "get" anything for doing good deeds, you're still going to get a reward for it in the afterlife right? Which would mean it wasn't really altrustic.
Clearly the point was somewhat lost on you. Killing everyone who opposes me in warfare is, by definition, how you win a war. If you consider surrender and option for "winning," I must point out that surrender is the other side deciding not to oppose you - under pain of death - and since you've killed everyone else, ergo the definition above. There is absolutely nothing noble or desirable about war.
Note also that I did not say that we should have gone to war. We don't have any fucking business in the middle east. They can keep all their oil, for all I care - $8/gallon for gasoline is just fine with me, and I drive quite a gas hog (it's a truck; I actually use it for work). There is no useful way out of this conflict. Our idiotic^Willustrious leader has managed to make many of the same mistakes that were made in Vietnam. It's all the more surprising since his advisors were mostly involved with Vietnam after things were in total disarray.
Again, what I meant was that if you go to WAR, you must be willing to destroy your enemy completely, with no trace that they ever existed. Anything else is just sport. Thing is, this "sport" our administration is playing looks like war to them - and they are reacting properly to it. Those people really hate us, and they hate us more every day. We will win this war, or we will lose this war - there are no other outcomes. And, quite honestly, since turning Iraq into radioactive glass is not a realistic option either (since it is the only way to "win" this "war"). Unfortunately, our president has too small a penis to admit that he has utterly failed.
--
And, for the record, I was very popular in school. You see, I was objective and understood consequences of actions - from the beginning. It came across as being fair and honest. I'm a consultant now, and people hire me because I am honest.
Because you just look so fucking cool pressing a button for everything.
;-)
What part of "oooh, pretty, shiney!" don't you understand?
No, we still weren't allowed to kill _everybody_, we were trying to "free" them. Worked well, as you stated.
I can finish of the insurgency in Iraq with one word: nukes. I'd put one in Afghanistan, too. Actually, Afghanistan should have been first.
That's right, one large piece of radioactive glass. We'll call it "New Arizona" and in a few thousand years resettle it. Thing is, the US military (or, at least, the administration) doesn't have the balls to fight to win. Modern militaries in first world countries have forgotton their pasts - any war where there are rules will always be decided in favor of the side which ignores the rules. We may as well wear bright red coats and march in a line at this point.
..but the aerodynamics of these laptops may be suboptimal, as well as the danger of imflicting impact wounds (beat's minefield hopscotch, though, I suppose).
Maybe dodgeball^h^h^h^hsquare?
£
Thank you for the tip, even if I did have to view the html source (actually, I browsed the posts to look for it before I posted, and just couldn't find an example quickly enough)
If the PP says my +1 Insightful view on it is this, it's not required that you mod him that way.
Unless, of course, you're creationists. In which case you really ought to just believe what he says. He is telling the Truth, you know, so there's no sense in questioning it.
The fundementalist wings already are. Or have you been under some rock for the last six years?
...the UK version of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? will be a big hit.
I know, I know, this is about FM transmitters. Give them up and go spend a couple bills on one of the new low end Alpine head units.
;-)
Like this one (9883, $200) or this one (9885, $300) and then drop in their dedicated $30 ipod adapter. That's what - $230...about 40 pounds, nowadays, right? (I kid! and no, I don't know how to put the symbol in slashcode)
Best audio connection, browsing by all the ways you can browse the iPod text interface, and song info on the screen. I'm certain the UK versions are similar (Alpine shows the same adapter for Alpine-Europe). Yes, it's more money than a cheap FM transmitter , but the difference is pretty phenominal, and there's no worries about getting tramped on by a commercial station or someone else's adapter. And no looking down, fiddling with the ipod on the passenger seat (you can ignroe the road while you look at the head unit
I actually purchased the head unit first, then the ipod to go with it. For $70 I picked up an old gen 4, 20 gig ipod off ebay. Scratched, battery only takes about 1/2 a charge, but who cares - it's in the glove box with all my tunes (Thanks to foobar and Nero AAC) and powered off the head unit. Cheaper than a disc changer - and much more useful. I never really figured to get an iPod, but for the application, it turns out to be a good item at the right price.
Actually, the definition is no better than the "effective" language
"in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work"
Now, this is really being picky, but the letter of the law requires that the technological measure be applied with the authority of the copyright owner. That could mean that a techological measure is not necessarily applicable when the copyright owner is not actively approving or denying use - i.e.: through a call-home interface. A contractual agreement between the encryption license holder and the consumer electronics manufacturer may not constitute actual copyright holder authorization of an access key to an end user which is not a party to the contract. Probably not the case, but a legitimate arguement.
Also, SCOTUS often looks to international rulings when reviewing case law to apply to their decisions. This is but a drop of fresh water in an ocean, but it is nice to see that a pro-consumer ruling does exist somewhere in the world.
I mostly agree with you that the chance of anything happening in the US is nearly zero. I still prefer to use the adjective nearly, instead of absolutly. Sort of like I have a nearly zero chance of winning the lottery and becoming independently wealthy. Using absolutely is just too depressing.