The people liked us shortly after the revolution and blue jeans and MTV could have really made for a good relationship, in my arm-chair general opinion. That's probably true. There were many different groups behind the revolutions in Iran and Cuba. The Fundamentalists and Communists respectively were in the minority for a while afterwards. But then they started killing and torturing the people who held different views. In both cases lots died, more fled into exile, and pretty soon the Fundamentalists and the Communists had complete control.
So the idea that the US unnecessarily soured its relationships with both countries is simply wrong. The groups that murdered their way into power hated the US with a passion and, short of invading to crush those particular groups, there is nothing the US could have done to maintain good relations.
What the general populations in Iran and Cuba thought of the US simply didn't figure. Anyone who continued to voice positive views of the US soon got a bullet in the head.
Acquitted by the Senate maybe, but then convicted in court. (Feel free to look that up if you like.)
Regarding Clinton's January 17, 1998, deposition where he was placed under oath, the judge wrote:
"Simply put, the president's deposition testimony regarding whether he had ever been alone with Ms. (Monica) Lewinsky was intentionally false, and his statements regarding whether he had ever engaged in sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky likewise were intentionally false...."
I guess the idea was that because it was VR, and the subjects knew it was VR, all paranoid thoughts were inappropriate. None of it was real, and they knew it wasn't real, so it made no sense to wonder whether the laughter was aimed at them, etc.
The problem I see with this methodology is that it may be detecting which people are able to play the game, and which people don't have enough imagination to do it. Maybe in a similar *real* situation 100% of people would have paranoid thoughts, while in a VR situation only 40% are able to imerse themselves enough to have realistic responses. The other 60% were just thinking "wow, nice graphics" and otherwise zoning out for 4 minutes.
In theory, such a system would let you call your cable company, tell them "Screw You!", hang up, call a different cable company and say "I wanna give you my money!", hang up, and in 5 minutes turn on the TV and watch with the new company.
Sounds great. What do you do if you're unhappy with the service you get from the giant state-owned monopoly that actually provides your cable connection? Vote libertarian?
Most of the stuff people don't like about cable companies in the US results from the lack of local competition. Replacing all the local monopolies with one big super-monopoly (run by the government!) is hardly going to make that stuff any better.
>The UK has 3 major parties (4 or more on its constituting parts).
Only two of which have formed governments since 1920.
>Mexico has 3 plus 2 minor ones.
Only two of which have formed governments ever (and until recently just one).
>Germany has 4 major parties (although they normally themselves in two blocks).
So like I said - two dominant parties or coalitions.
>Israel, Italy, France have so many that nobody bothers to count them.
In France, since WWII, there have always been two dominant parties at any given time - though the parties themselves have sometimes changed when one collapsed to be replaced by a new party.
For most of the period since WWII Israel and Italy were dominated by just one party (Labour in Israel, under various names, and the Christian Democrats in Italy). More recently they have shifted to a two way split between center-left, and center-right coalitions.
Power does not need to change hands to be a multiparty system. If you have three stable parties, with each having achieved 33.33333% of the votes for the last 100 years, it's still a multiparty system. Fine. Give one example where this has happened. Hell - I'll make it easy - give one example where this has happened three elections in a row.
In very rare circumstances you can get a three way split, but the 66% of the population who lose such elections very rarely make the same mistake twice, so three way splits are inherently unstable. A two way split is the only stable state.
Now, there are 67 countries on that list that I just typed in......and almost every one of them is dominated by either two parties, or two stable coalitions. A small handful are dominated by just one party or coalition (Singapore for example). There are *none* where power regularly changes hands between three, or more, parties or coalitions.
where were you during your high school government course?
Paying more attention than you obviously. The US is a multi-party democracy in which two parties dominate. Which is how things work in almost all democracies.
Democracies tend to develop into two party (or two coalition) systems. That tends to deliver undue power into the hands of the party hierarchies, because they control the two options offered to the public. Campaign spending controls reinforce this effect because the result of such controls is usually to ensure that only the established parties can communicate with the public on any significant scale.
The US primary system may be arcane and quirky - but it gives the public far more control over the two options that are eventually offered in the election proper. The relatively open campaign spending rules, and the small scale of early primaries, also allows a diverse array of candidates to compete in the early stages - without the support of the party hierarchies.
The poster above is almost right - in most US jurisdictions celebrities have a "right of publicity" which works in a similar way to a trademark, and allows them to exclude the use of their name or image for certain commercial purposes. At one extreme factual reports about famous people (news, history, or biography) are protected as free speech. At the other extreme uses in advertising, especially if they imply any sort of endorsement, are not protected.
Used to work that way - a long time ago. Now original works are protected by copyright as soon as they are committed to a tangible medium (i.e. written down, recorded, etc). Copyrighted works still have to be registered with the LoC before any legal action can start - but that is just a formality that the copyright holder can satisfy at any time prior to taking legal action.
This is really why it makes sense. You can send the ro-boat to investigate without having to worry about whether it gets blown up or shot up when it runs into trouble. Of course, until they make a robot boarding party its use is still going to be limited.
That's what I was talking about. The 5th Amendment isn't some kind of get out of jail free card when they come looking for evidence. They can't make you say "I did it" but they can make you say make you answer questions like "where's the video of you doing it?" and "what's the password?". The answers to those questions are not incriminating - it's the stuff on the video that's incriminating.
That's not true either. You can't be forced to give testimony that would, in itself, be evidence of your guilt. But the court can force you to reveal the location of evidence that would incriminate you, or other facts needed to access such evidence, like passwords.
If you destroy evidence of a crime you can be busted for obstruction of justice. IIRC the prosecution doesn't even need to prove that a crime was committed - just that you destroyed stuff that you thought might be used as evidence.
This is a piss-poor performance by the BBC. It almost looks like the deliberately left out most of the relevant details in order to make the prosecution look unreasonable.
How do you figure that? TFA clearly says that federal funding has been steadily increasing. Measured in constant dollars federal funding increased under Reagan, declined slightly and Bush I, was flat under Clinton, and increased rapidly again under Bush II. Is Bu$h supposed to be responsible for rising research costs, or private corporations spending less on blue sky research?
TFA mentions that a lot of private funding has been refocused towards research that can be turned into products - or in other words research that can be patented or otherwise converted into intellectual property. Improved protection for intellectual property rights may well have increased total expenditure on R&D, but it has also drawn research money away from basic science towards product development.
Nixon didn't get into trouble for recording conversations that he was a part of - he got into trouble because those recordings revealed that he was aware of illegal activities being performed on his behalf, or on his orders.
Contributory infringement covers a lot more besides helping with the copying part of making an unauthorized copy. It can also involve providing a way to add or remove content in a way that would resu8lt in an unauthorized derivative work, and so on. Also, interference with a contract doesn't require coercion. Just offering someone an incentive to break a contract is enough.
In both cases it's the fact that WoWGlider is specific to WoW that is likely to get them into trouble. If they made a general purpose artificial agent that could play games like WoW, including some that allow bots, then they would be OK. If WoWGlider had been made solely for academic purposes (just to see if it would work etc) it would probably be OK as well. The problem is that WoWGlider has no legitimate uses and the makers are encouraging people to use it for illegitimate purposes.
There's nothing new or abusive about the idea of contributory infringement or interference with a contract. The only thing you can use this bot for is cheating and neither Blizzard nor the vast majority of their customers want cheats around. If WoWGlider had any legitimate use then it would be a different story.
Most of the shock and horror reactions to this story revolve around "what if" cases like Blizzard objecting to people using anti-virus software, or windows, or downloading porn while they play, or whatever. In most of those cases the courts probably would decide that such restrictions are anti-competitive, or not in the public interest, or sufficiently weird that a click-wrap license would not be sufficient to obtain consent.
Eh? The case pretty obviously involves both copyright and contract and I pretty obviously discussed both. When you "read" my comment did you actually make it to the end of the second sentence?
Slashdot Mirror
The people liked us shortly after the revolution and blue jeans and MTV could have really made for a good relationship, in my arm-chair general opinion.
That's probably true. There were many different groups behind the revolutions in Iran and Cuba. The Fundamentalists and Communists respectively were in the minority for a while afterwards. But then they started killing and torturing the people who held different views. In both cases lots died, more fled into exile, and pretty soon the Fundamentalists and the Communists had complete control.
So the idea that the US unnecessarily soured its relationships with both countries is simply wrong. The groups that murdered their way into power hated the US with a passion and, short of invading to crush those particular groups, there is nothing the US could have done to maintain good relations.
What the general populations in Iran and Cuba thought of the US simply didn't figure. Anyone who continued to voice positive views of the US soon got a bullet in the head.
"I want my personal nuclear weapons!"
That's just crazy. Obviously the dissenters were right, and the second amendment means that every state has a right to keep its own nuclear arsenal.
I guess if that happened we wouldn't see any more of the feds meddling with states rights.
Acquitted by the Senate maybe, but then convicted in court. (Feel free to look that up if you like.)
... ."
Regarding Clinton's January 17, 1998, deposition where he was placed under oath, the judge wrote:
"Simply put, the president's deposition testimony regarding whether he had ever been alone with Ms. (Monica) Lewinsky was intentionally false, and his statements regarding whether he had ever engaged in sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky likewise were intentionally false
Regular people go to jail for that kind of thing.
I guess the idea was that because it was VR, and the subjects knew it was VR, all paranoid thoughts were inappropriate. None of it was real, and they knew it wasn't real, so it made no sense to wonder whether the laughter was aimed at them, etc.
The problem I see with this methodology is that it may be detecting which people are able to play the game, and which people don't have enough imagination to do it. Maybe in a similar *real* situation 100% of people would have paranoid thoughts, while in a VR situation only 40% are able to imerse themselves enough to have realistic responses. The other 60% were just thinking "wow, nice graphics" and otherwise zoning out for 4 minutes.
In theory, such a system would let you call your cable company, tell them "Screw You!", hang up, call a different cable company and say "I wanna give you my money!", hang up, and in 5 minutes turn on the TV and watch with the new company.
Sounds great. What do you do if you're unhappy with the service you get from the giant state-owned monopoly that actually provides your cable connection? Vote libertarian?
Most of the stuff people don't like about cable companies in the US results from the lack of local competition. Replacing all the local monopolies with one big super-monopoly (run by the government!) is hardly going to make that stuff any better.
The war costs about $275 million a day - so $100 billion is more like the cost of the war for one year.
>The UK has 3 major parties (4 or more on its constituting parts).
Only two of which have formed governments since 1920.
>Mexico has 3 plus 2 minor ones.
Only two of which have formed governments ever (and until recently just one).
>Germany has 4 major parties (although they normally themselves in two blocks).
So like I said - two dominant parties or coalitions.
>Israel, Italy, France have so many that nobody bothers to count them.
In France, since WWII, there have always been two dominant parties at any given time - though the parties themselves have sometimes changed when one collapsed to be replaced by a new party.
For most of the period since WWII Israel and Italy were dominated by just one party (Labour in Israel, under various names, and the Christian Democrats in Italy). More recently they have shifted to a two way split between center-left, and center-right coalitions.
Power does not need to change hands to be a multiparty system. If you have three stable parties, with each having achieved 33.33333% of the votes for the last 100 years, it's still a multiparty system.
Fine. Give one example where this has happened. Hell - I'll make it easy - give one example where this has happened three elections in a row.
In very rare circumstances you can get a three way split, but the 66% of the population who lose such elections very rarely make the same mistake twice, so three way splits are inherently unstable. A two way split is the only stable state.
Now, there are 67 countries on that list that I just typed in... ...and almost every one of them is dominated by either two parties, or two stable coalitions. A small handful are dominated by just one party or coalition (Singapore for example). There are *none* where power regularly changes hands between three, or more, parties or coalitions.
where were you during your high school government course?
Paying more attention than you obviously. The US is a multi-party democracy in which two parties dominate. Which is how things work in almost all democracies.
Democracies tend to develop into two party (or two coalition) systems. That tends to deliver undue power into the hands of the party hierarchies, because they control the two options offered to the public. Campaign spending controls reinforce this effect because the result of such controls is usually to ensure that only the established parties can communicate with the public on any significant scale.
The US primary system may be arcane and quirky - but it gives the public far more control over the two options that are eventually offered in the election proper. The relatively open campaign spending rules, and the small scale of early primaries, also allows a diverse array of candidates to compete in the early stages - without the support of the party hierarchies.
The poster above is almost right - in most US jurisdictions celebrities have a "right of publicity" which works in a similar way to a trademark, and allows them to exclude the use of their name or image for certain commercial purposes. At one extreme factual reports about famous people (news, history, or biography) are protected as free speech. At the other extreme uses in advertising, especially if they imply any sort of endorsement, are not protected.
Used to work that way - a long time ago. Now original works are protected by copyright as soon as they are committed to a tangible medium (i.e. written down, recorded, etc). Copyrighted works still have to be registered with the LoC before any legal action can start - but that is just a formality that the copyright holder can satisfy at any time prior to taking legal action.
...and high political costs for casualties.
This is really why it makes sense. You can send the ro-boat to investigate without having to worry about whether it gets blown up or shot up when it runs into trouble. Of course, until they make a robot boarding party its use is still going to be limited.
That's what I was talking about. The 5th Amendment isn't some kind of get out of jail free card when they come looking for evidence. They can't make you say "I did it" but they can make you say make you answer questions like "where's the video of you doing it?" and "what's the password?". The answers to those questions are not incriminating - it's the stuff on the video that's incriminating.
That's not true either. You can't be forced to give testimony that would, in itself, be evidence of your guilt. But the court can force you to reveal the location of evidence that would incriminate you, or other facts needed to access such evidence, like passwords.
If you destroy evidence of a crime you can be busted for obstruction of justice. IIRC the prosecution doesn't even need to prove that a crime was committed - just that you destroyed stuff that you thought might be used as evidence.
This is a piss-poor performance by the BBC. It almost looks like the deliberately left out most of the relevant details in order to make the prosecution look unreasonable.
None of it went into education. I was talking about research spending.
How do you figure that? TFA clearly says that federal funding has been steadily increasing. Measured in constant dollars federal funding increased under Reagan, declined slightly and Bush I, was flat under Clinton, and increased rapidly again under Bush II. Is Bu$h supposed to be responsible for rising research costs, or private corporations spending less on blue sky research?
TFA mentions that a lot of private funding has been refocused towards research that can be turned into products - or in other words research that can be patented or otherwise converted into intellectual property. Improved protection for intellectual property rights may well have increased total expenditure on R&D, but it has also drawn research money away from basic science towards product development.
Nixon didn't get into trouble for recording conversations that he was a part of - he got into trouble because those recordings revealed that he was aware of illegal activities being performed on his behalf, or on his orders.
Contributory infringement covers a lot more besides helping with the copying part of making an unauthorized copy. It can also involve providing a way to add or remove content in a way that would resu8lt in an unauthorized derivative work, and so on. Also, interference with a contract doesn't require coercion. Just offering someone an incentive to break a contract is enough.
In both cases it's the fact that WoWGlider is specific to WoW that is likely to get them into trouble. If they made a general purpose artificial agent that could play games like WoW, including some that allow bots, then they would be OK. If WoWGlider had been made solely for academic purposes (just to see if it would work etc) it would probably be OK as well. The problem is that WoWGlider has no legitimate uses and the makers are encouraging people to use it for illegitimate purposes.
There's nothing new or abusive about the idea of contributory infringement or interference with a contract. The only thing you can use this bot for is cheating and neither Blizzard nor the vast majority of their customers want cheats around. If WoWGlider had any legitimate use then it would be a different story.
Most of the shock and horror reactions to this story revolve around "what if" cases like Blizzard objecting to people using anti-virus software, or windows, or downloading porn while they play, or whatever. In most of those cases the courts probably would decide that such restrictions are anti-competitive, or not in the public interest, or sufficiently weird that a click-wrap license would not be sufficient to obtain consent.
Eh? The case pretty obviously involves both copyright and contract and I pretty obviously discussed both. When you "read" my comment did you actually make it to the end of the second sentence?