Buy a first generation EeePC and install a modern Linux on it. It's only slightly heavier and slightly bigger than what you have in mind, but includes a keyboard that one can get used to, touchpad, loudspeakers, microphone, webcam, wifi, battery. You may or may not have to replace the battery, and you should also add an SD card for storage because 2 GB is probably not enough. No problem at all to slide this thing into your handluggage somewhere, and it might even fit somewhere into your coat (=> weight 0 for airline purposes). Oh, and it can take a *lot* of abuse. Mine survived falling out of my rucksack on a stone floor, protected only by the thin protective sleeve. Nothing broke.
Completing the unfinished sentence: My first experience with them was during a vacation in (then socialist) Hungary. Milk was only available in such bags there at the time, and my family did not know how to deal with them. So we made a mess before we realised there was a special container.
The West is actually beginning to use them again. They have become more popular recently because they are the ideal solution from an ecological point of view. I used to use them myself for years in south-west Germany. (I no longer do, because I now live in a region where they are not easily available.) They are perfectly convenient if you put them into the dedicated plastic container before opening. Only getting them home is slightly more risky. My first experience with them was in
Sorry to disappoint you, but you read something into the second definition that simply isn't there. As Raenex explicitly and correctly said, "[t]he first one only applies to quotes, the second one is more general". Also, the reason "so" doesn't make sense on its own is that it is ambiguous. "Sic", on the other hand, is no more ambiguous in this context than "thus".
I know you must feel bad for making an awkward mistake while ridiculing someone else for much less, but these things happen and one needs a face-keeping exit strategy when they do. Humour works. Lying about things that are in plain sight only makes everything a lot worse.
Besides, there is an obvious need for a quick way of indicating: "I wrote something weird. It's not a misspelling but I really meant it." This need doesn't arise very often outside quotations, so we are not used to seeing "sic" in this context outside quotations. But this use of "sic" is still perfectly valid because the only way it can be misunderstood is when someone doesn't know the well established use of "sic" in quotations. With a language such as English (without something like the Académie Française), the users are perfectly free to innovate in this way whenever they feel like it. Provided they make themselves understood. Everything else matters very little anyway, but in this fact it has even made it into Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia. Wikipedia discusses it in the following section of the "sic" article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic#In_newly_generated_text .
It's not just a reminder. They are asking the police to take measures that *will* remove the *qualified* immunity. To quote from the letter:
"For example, policies should affirmatively state that individuals have a First Amendment right to record police officers and include examples of the places where individuals can lawfully record police activity and the types of activity that can be recorded."
Footnote 3 gives the context: "Because the right [to record traffic stops] was not clearly established, the officer involved was entitled to qualified immunity. The Third Circuit expressly did not reach the question of whether the First Amendment protects the recording of police activity during a traffic stop, because it did not need to reach that question to decide that the officer should receive qualified immunity."
Police officers must often make decisions that would be hard even for lawyers and judges, which they are not. According to Wikipedia, qualified immunity applies to officers who break constitutional rights, and depends on "whether a hypothetical reasonable person in the defendant's position would have known that his/her actions violated clearly established law." At the moment, police officers cannot be expected to know that harrassing people for recording violates clearly established law, although it does. The DoJ asks the police department to take measures which will change that.
"revoked their qualified immunity when acting in egregious violation of law" -- I would be surprised if they could do that retroactively, and I think the purpose of this letter was to do just that for the future. The law(s) concerning qualified immunity are probably more or less OK. The problem in the past seems to have been that absurd, unconstitutional state laws as well as the occasional verdict denying constitutional protection for recording police have created sufficient legal uncertainty to create this qualified immunity. If the police department in question does what it is instructed to do, its officers will not be profiting from qualified immunity next time this kind of thing happens, and that opens the path towards proper punishment of uniformed thugs.
It's not so much that Germany has done a good job about that, but the US did an excellent job of reeducating Germans after the Second World War. They treated the general population fairly and helped them survive. But they also had a reeducation scheme in which they forced groups of ordinary people to look at piles of dead bodies found at concentration camps, etc.
The Soviet Union, in contrast, had a different scheme that did not work. Essentially it amounted to drawing as much profit from the country as possible and torturing random people. This is why nazism is very strong in the east of Germany even today, long after reunification.
Unfortunately, the US seems to have lost the knowledge of how to deal with a conquered nation. In Iraq, for example, they behaved essentially like the Soviet Union did in East Germany.
(I just lost a longer response because I followed the Options link from the preview, not knowing that if I change my options it will nuke my comment.)
First you should keep in mind that the banks love internet banking because it saves them a lot of money. And from a purely formal point of view the fraud started with the bank transferring money abroad in the mistaken believe that their customer asked them to do that. As he didn't, he can ask for his money back *unless* they can prove it was really his fault.
If you look at it with the logic of fairness and efficiency, rather than the logic of individualism, then the situation is as follows:
To minimise the fraud, the damage must be shouldered by whoever is in the best position to prevent it. (If the ultimate victim can't do anything to prevent the fraud, and those who are in a position to increase security have no incentive to prevent it, then we have a problem.) If the fraud is possible due to the customer's recklessness, then the customer should pay. If it could have happened to almost every customer, then it's outside the customer's control and the banks should pay. In borderline cases it is more efficient if the banks pay as well: If they are losing too much money to fraud they can improve security to reduce it, or they can raise their fees, acting in effect as a very cheap and efficient insurance company for their customers if you believe that the customers should be liable.
That's why the considerations in the decision were somewhat analogous to those in an insurance case.
Not sure where the parking fine comes from, but according to page 2 of the ruling (linked from the Register's story): "In 1998, seven years before the incidents at issue, petitioner [...] was arrested after fleeing from police officers in Essex County, New Jersey. He was charged with obstruction of justice and use of a deadly weapon. Petitioner entered a plea of guilty to two lesser
offenses and was sentenced to pay a fine in monthly installments. In 2003, after he fell behind on his payments and failed to appear at an enforcement hearing, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. He paid the outstanding balance less than a week later; but, for some unexplained reason, the warrant remained in a statewide computer database."
Not exactly the same thing as a parking fine. Maybe he just wasn't the right person to challenge this outrageous practice successfully...
You are assuming that it's even possible for Japanese citizens to legally change their names. I am not sure that it is. I do know that in Germany, for example, you can only change your (first or last) name under very specific circumstances. Apart from adopting your husband's or wife's last name upon marriage, the only reason you can change your name is when you can convince the bureaucrats that your name puts you at a severe disadvantage. That would no doubt be the case for the person in question, but Japanese laws may be even stricter.
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Buy a first generation EeePC and install a modern Linux on it. It's only slightly heavier and slightly bigger than what you have in mind, but includes a keyboard that one can get used to, touchpad, loudspeakers, microphone, webcam, wifi, battery. You may or may not have to replace the battery, and you should also add an SD card for storage because 2 GB is probably not enough. No problem at all to slide this thing into your handluggage somewhere, and it might even fit somewhere into your coat (=> weight 0 for airline purposes). Oh, and it can take a *lot* of abuse. Mine survived falling out of my rucksack on a stone floor, protected only by the thin protective sleeve. Nothing broke.
Completing the unfinished sentence: My first experience with them was during a vacation in (then socialist) Hungary. Milk was only available in such bags there at the time, and my family did not know how to deal with them. So we made a mess before we realised there was a special container.
The West is actually beginning to use them again. They have become more popular recently because they are the ideal solution from an ecological point of view. I used to use them myself for years in south-west Germany. (I no longer do, because I now live in a region where they are not easily available.) They are perfectly convenient if you put them into the dedicated plastic container before opening. Only getting them home is slightly more risky. My first experience with them was in
I couldn't find any up-to-date photos of such a container, but here is one from East Germany before reunification: http://www.braincolor.de/?p=478 . (The one I had ten years ago in the West was more convenient.) You can also buy bagged milk in Switzerland: http://www.onlinereports.ch/OEkologie.113+M52a046ca50c.0.html .
And here is the very recent UK version: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/11/milk-bottle-sainsburys-environment .
Sorry to disappoint you, but you read something into the second definition that simply isn't there. As Raenex explicitly and correctly said, "[t]he first one only applies to quotes, the second one is more general". Also, the reason "so" doesn't make sense on its own is that it is ambiguous. "Sic", on the other hand, is no more ambiguous in this context than "thus".
I know you must feel bad for making an awkward mistake while ridiculing someone else for much less, but these things happen and one needs a face-keeping exit strategy when they do. Humour works. Lying about things that are in plain sight only makes everything a lot worse.
Besides, there is an obvious need for a quick way of indicating: "I wrote something weird. It's not a misspelling but I really meant it." This need doesn't arise very often outside quotations, so we are not used to seeing "sic" in this context outside quotations. But this use of "sic" is still perfectly valid because the only way it can be misunderstood is when someone doesn't know the well established use of "sic" in quotations. With a language such as English (without something like the Académie Française), the users are perfectly free to innovate in this way whenever they feel like it. Provided they make themselves understood. Everything else matters very little anyway, but in this fact it has even made it into Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia. Wikipedia discusses it in the following section of the "sic" article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic#In_newly_generated_text .
It's not just a reminder. They are asking the police to take measures that *will* remove the *qualified* immunity. To quote from the letter:
"For example, policies should affirmatively state that individuals have a First Amendment right to record police officers and include examples of the places where individuals can lawfully record police activity and the types of activity that can be recorded."
Footnote 3 gives the context: "Because the right [to record traffic stops] was not clearly established, the officer involved was entitled to qualified immunity. The Third Circuit expressly did not reach the question of whether the First Amendment protects the recording of police activity during a traffic stop, because it did not need to reach that question to decide that the officer should receive qualified immunity."
Police officers must often make decisions that would be hard even for lawyers and judges, which they are not. According to Wikipedia, qualified immunity applies to officers who break constitutional rights, and depends on "whether a hypothetical reasonable person in the defendant's position would have known that his/her actions violated clearly established law." At the moment, police officers cannot be expected to know that harrassing people for recording violates clearly established law, although it does. The DoJ asks the police department to take measures which will change that.
"revoked their qualified immunity when acting in egregious violation of law" -- I would be surprised if they could do that retroactively, and I think the purpose of this letter was to do just that for the future. The law(s) concerning qualified immunity are probably more or less OK. The problem in the past seems to have been that absurd, unconstitutional state laws as well as the occasional verdict denying constitutional protection for recording police have created sufficient legal uncertainty to create this qualified immunity. If the police department in question does what it is instructed to do, its officers will not be profiting from qualified immunity next time this kind of thing happens, and that opens the path towards proper punishment of uniformed thugs.
True. But the situation is very complicated and subtle, and what you are saying only superficially contradicts what I said.
It's not so much that Germany has done a good job about that, but the US did an excellent job of reeducating Germans after the Second World War. They treated the general population fairly and helped them survive. But they also had a reeducation scheme in which they forced groups of ordinary people to look at piles of dead bodies found at concentration camps, etc.
The Soviet Union, in contrast, had a different scheme that did not work. Essentially it amounted to drawing as much profit from the country as possible and torturing random people. This is why nazism is very strong in the east of Germany even today, long after reunification.
Unfortunately, the US seems to have lost the knowledge of how to deal with a conquered nation. In Iraq, for example, they behaved essentially like the Soviet Union did in East Germany.
(I just lost a longer response because I followed the Options link from the preview, not knowing that if I change my options it will nuke my comment.)
First you should keep in mind that the banks love internet banking because it saves them a lot of money. And from a purely formal point of view the fraud started with the bank transferring money abroad in the mistaken believe that their customer asked them to do that. As he didn't, he can ask for his money back *unless* they can prove it was really his fault.
If you look at it with the logic of fairness and efficiency, rather than the logic of individualism, then the situation is as follows:
To minimise the fraud, the damage must be shouldered by whoever is in the best position to prevent it. (If the ultimate victim can't do anything to prevent the fraud, and those who are in a position to increase security have no incentive to prevent it, then we have a problem.) If the fraud is possible due to the customer's recklessness, then the customer should pay. If it could have happened to almost every customer, then it's outside the customer's control and the banks should pay. In borderline cases it is more efficient if the banks pay as well: If they are losing too much money to fraud they can improve security to reduce it, or they can raise their fees, acting in effect as a very cheap and efficient insurance company for their customers if you believe that the customers should be liable.
That's why the considerations in the decision were somewhat analogous to those in an insurance case.
Not sure where the parking fine comes from, but according to page 2 of the ruling (linked from the Register's story): "In 1998, seven years before the incidents at issue, petitioner [...] was arrested after fleeing from police officers in Essex County, New Jersey. He was charged with obstruction of justice and use of a deadly weapon. Petitioner entered a plea of guilty to two lesser offenses and was sentenced to pay a fine in monthly installments. In 2003, after he fell behind on his payments and failed to appear at an enforcement hearing, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. He paid the outstanding balance less than a week later; but, for some unexplained reason, the warrant remained in a statewide computer database." Not exactly the same thing as a parking fine. Maybe he just wasn't the right person to challenge this outrageous practice successfully...
You are assuming that it's even possible for Japanese citizens to legally change their names. I am not sure that it is. I do know that in Germany, for example, you can only change your (first or last) name under very specific circumstances. Apart from adopting your husband's or wife's last name upon marriage, the only reason you can change your name is when you can convince the bureaucrats that your name puts you at a severe disadvantage. That would no doubt be the case for the person in question, but Japanese laws may be even stricter.