It's a civil issue not criminal. But you can sue for defamation if you are reported to be in collections for a debt after you notify them that the debt is not valid.
As soon as it hits your credit report, you run down to the nearest lawyer and threaten to sue for defamation. The lawyer will likely take it on commission so it won't cost you a dime out of pocket. I'm just guessing that most companies will quickly drop the collection attempt and settle out of court because they are going to loose this one.
Getting the report removed might take a bit of work though. You are going to have to challenge the report at all the reporting agencies after you get their settlement.
Now I'm an old farm boy and I've had to heard cows a few times. We ran a small dairy operation so I'm pretty familiar with the process. I can tell you that robots are simply not required, nor would they be worth the effort. Cows are only a bit harder to herd than ducks or sheep, but I can tell you that unless you are really stupid you could likely do it in your sleep. I know I did it in my sleep a few times....
Cows will generally move themselves around the twice daily milking route without much input from you. Dairy cows are smart enough to remember what to do and instinctively follow the other cows if they don't know. At milking time, once we got one or two cows trained that they go into that holding pen and walk though that gate to get into the place where you get to eat grain and get milked. It was then eat, drink and repeat for days on end. All we ever really needed to do was to start up the milker and open and close the right gates, even when they where out grazing. They'd usually be waiting at the barn when we got there to milk and if not would come when the milker started up. Sometimes a newer cow would be balky and you'd have to crowd them into the barn, but after a few days they would catch on to the program.
You simply don't need a robot to move cows around. In fact, some of the more productive dairy operations have "self milking". The cows decide when they get milked. They queue up, enter the milking stall and get milked all on their own schedule. It takes a bit of automation (a robot if you like) to get the milker on, but the cows move themselves around.
Now, getting your robot to heard cats... THAT would be something. Herding Cows is something most people can do in their sleep.
So... A City of refuge didn't look like jail in any possible way?
It's pretty clear Biblical principle that governments have the right to detain or kill folks. Prisons exist as early as Genesis and clearly existed when John was exiled and wrote Revelation and no country is condemned for having prisons, even though they are for not being just. There may not have been a direct "Thou shalt have prisons" but their justified use is not condemned either. Then you have the City of Refuge thing, where an accidental killer could be confined until the High Priest changed. Looks something like a prison to me.
There are many things which are not directly commanded that we still justifiably do. I'm not told to inhale, but I do. Governments are not told to build roads, but they do that too. So your logic is flawed.
So I guess our founding fathers should have just surrendered to British law and "paid the price".
No, but the signers of the Declaration of Independence all knew that they risked death to forward their cause and accepted that fact. Many of them *did* get caught and as far as I know, none of them started crying about how unfair and misunderstood they where in an effort to get out of being punished or sway public opinion. They lost their fortunes, families and lives for their cause.
They where well aware of the possible consequences of their "crime" and where prepared to pay the price for doing what they felt had to be done. This story is about some guy complaining about how harsh the 10 year sentence is. I'm not impressed.
So, yes, if you are unwilling to do the time, don't do the crime...
Hey, if folks can claim the moon landings where staged and area 51 has alien remains in storage...
Seriously This whole "climate change" thing is way over blown and is *far* from a settled issue when you start trying to project what's going to happen in the future. We have some interesting data and some models that seem to fit the data, but there are still valid questions about our ability to forecast the future. The whole system is vastly more complex than the models are and there is no way we know we have captured all the significant variables. We've never observed what the more alarmist models are forecasting so there IS doubt about their certainty. There is also doubt about the data being fed into the models too and how scientists have (or have not) massaged the data to account for inconsistencies in how and where it's been collected.
For instance, a lot of our observations are made at airports these days. Airports have only really existed for the last 75 years and there are obvious ways this might cause increases in temperature to be observed. Pavement can increase surface temperatures, jet exhaust is pretty hot, heating and cooling buildings both could drive up observations, so how do you account for these effects? If the temperature is going up at the airport, or in urban areas, does that mean it's going up world wide? How do you know your data set doesn't have significant issues or that if it does you have applied the correct factors to account for it?
There are valid questions about all this so I feel the whole "global warming" thing is a bit over blown. Advocates of global warming have been pretty bad at forecasting what's going to happen in the past. Al Gore and others routinely overshot with their hype. They have foretasted sea level rises which have not materialized and temperature changes which haven't happened. They are routinely having to revise down their death and destruction hype as it becomes clear it's not happening, despite their assurances we couldn't avoid it that theirs was the accepted "scientific" view and science is never wrong. What it really was about was politics and world view, at least with some of them. Creating the crisis was the point, not the science, At least it was for Al Gore who was struggling to remain relevant enough to run for president again after the narrow loss to Bush.
All this is why I choose to poke fun from time to time. Quite frankly they deserve it, co-opting science for political gain is *never* a good idea in the long run.
Global Cooling advocates from the 70's claim their analysis was wrong by a factor of 2. The world is cooling faster than expected based on their data with the blank areas estimated (fudged) too.. The freezing of the arctic regions is expected to continue during the winter months, endangering polar bears and penguins who are not adapted fully to the new level of cold. No comment yet from Al Gore.
TSA is not about providing security, despite the word being in it's name. TSA is about the appearance of security..
If it was about security, they would have never spent a billion on such worthless tripe. They would have spent a billion buying blue gloves for pat downs, doing background checks and buying boat loads of video cameras to watch.
This was somebodies billion dollar boondoggle idea to try and sound like they where doing something.
You need three things to set up a server farm (apart from the servers and people to manage it..)
1. A Building with lots of floor space.... Yea, An ex-auto repair building could do for that. Check..
2. Connectivity to the internet... Uh, going to have to spend money on that one.. NO check..
3. Electrical power, backup power, cooling, security infrastructure? Uh on, we don't have that either... No Check... But you'd have to spend money of all this anyway.
I don't think this will work out all that well for them. All they have is floor space that is likely pretty expensive if it is located near any major retail but it will be fixed in size. They won't be building new buildings here or expanding by adding more stories. They won't be saving any money doing the conversion from auto repair stalls to server racks because they'd have to do that anyplace else they wanted to set this up. What's going to kill them is the network infrastructure, unless they don't care about reliability and have SLA's for their service that matches. Getting redundant high bandwidth links to these buildings could be expensive, if they are not already near high speed network connections. Comparing their costs to their competitors, I just don't see this working out. Their competition will be working on much larger facilities, located much closer to network infrastructure with lower cost structures and less limitations on their building sizes. Sears may be getting the building for free, but their other setup and operating costs will be higher.
About the only way this is going to pay, even marginally, is if they can use their unique locations to provide points of presence for services like Netflix or Amazon video to cache content locally or something along those lines. Other than that, I just don't see this working out.
Who needs to print a gun in the middle east? They seem to be awash in Russian weapons and starting to build up an inventory of US made ones too. Obtaining one should not be a problem.
I don't think the DA, judge or jury will care about the order and it will be off to the "big house" for a very long time, unless you are in a death penalty state where it's off to "death row" for a few years.
I don't think so. I think the intent was that by allowing mining and then making it harder and harder over time you would enhance the currency's stability. Remember that the miners are really just doing a lot of hard house keeping and then getting paid for their efforts in BitCoin. The point was to get a lot of people processing the transactions to keep the ratio of honest brokers to fraudsters high enough so no one entity could possibly take over and "fake" transactions. I don't think the intent was to somehow create or control value, even though it does seem interesting.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the last coin is issued and mining comes to an abrupt end. I have a feeling that if BitCoin is still viable, they will revise their final count and issue more coins to keep the mining industry in business.
This makes me wonder how many bitcoins are now effectively lost and out of circulation. The problem of people loosing their wallets and taking coins out of circulation could doom the currency eventually.
Problem for the US though is that as long as there are countries that allow BitCoin exchanges to *not* report then there will be a way. But, aside from the custom's limit of undeclared cash going in or out of the country, there's no real way to keep you from doing the same thing with cash.
Tisk tisk... That's what they are BEST at. Discussing something they don't understand then passing laws which don't fix the perceived problem but make matters worse while patting themselves on the back claiming "progress".
It's the same thing. The US government is about to tell a bunch of nerds they can't have something, so they want it even more now.
I don't agree that they will say you can't have BitCoin, but the net effect may be the same.
What the government seems likely to do is regulate the exchange of currency in and out of BitCoin to make it reportable. This will mean that you will have the same reporting requirements of services like Western Union, Pay Pal and the like. They are not going to prevent you from buying and selling BitCoin. You will still be allowed to own them. You, and the exchanges who buy and sell BitCoin, will be legally required to report transactions.
Now how they enforce this is the real question... But preventing money laundering and such has always been an enforcement nightmare.
Read their information page. The fans in the Oil do turn much slower than in air, but they are really not necessary when the whole thing is submerged in oil. They also have had a system in operation since 2007 with no fan failures, or any other failures. Apparently the oil dissipates any heating effects of turning slow. I wouldn't expect that the fans would ever wear out in this situation. When fans fail, they get noisy and then stop turning. The primary failure mode is the bearings wearing out due to dust build up in the bearings and the stress of imbalances due to dust on the blades. None of this will happen when dunked in oil.
Somebody needs to figure out how to cool the oil below room temperature. If you could get things down to 0C, overclockers would have a hay day.
Slashdot Mirror
Time to sue for defamation then.
It's a civil issue not criminal. But you can sue for defamation if you are reported to be in collections for a debt after you notify them that the debt is not valid.
As soon as it hits your credit report, you run down to the nearest lawyer and threaten to sue for defamation. The lawyer will likely take it on commission so it won't cost you a dime out of pocket. I'm just guessing that most companies will quickly drop the collection attempt and settle out of court because they are going to loose this one.
Getting the report removed might take a bit of work though. You are going to have to challenge the report at all the reporting agencies after you get their settlement.
{ click click click }
that is the sound of handcuffs ratcheting, closing on your wrists.
How did you know he had three hands?
We expanded that a bit in my house... If you shot it, you had to eat it, unless there was a very good reason you needed to kill it.
Now I'm an old farm boy and I've had to heard cows a few times. We ran a small dairy operation so I'm pretty familiar with the process. I can tell you that robots are simply not required, nor would they be worth the effort. Cows are only a bit harder to herd than ducks or sheep, but I can tell you that unless you are really stupid you could likely do it in your sleep. I know I did it in my sleep a few times....
Cows will generally move themselves around the twice daily milking route without much input from you. Dairy cows are smart enough to remember what to do and instinctively follow the other cows if they don't know. At milking time, once we got one or two cows trained that they go into that holding pen and walk though that gate to get into the place where you get to eat grain and get milked. It was then eat, drink and repeat for days on end. All we ever really needed to do was to start up the milker and open and close the right gates, even when they where out grazing. They'd usually be waiting at the barn when we got there to milk and if not would come when the milker started up. Sometimes a newer cow would be balky and you'd have to crowd them into the barn, but after a few days they would catch on to the program.
You simply don't need a robot to move cows around. In fact, some of the more productive dairy operations have "self milking". The cows decide when they get milked. They queue up, enter the milking stall and get milked all on their own schedule. It takes a bit of automation (a robot if you like) to get the milker on, but the cows move themselves around.
Now, getting your robot to heard cats... THAT would be something. Herding Cows is something most people can do in their sleep.
So... A City of refuge didn't look like jail in any possible way?
It's pretty clear Biblical principle that governments have the right to detain or kill folks. Prisons exist as early as Genesis and clearly existed when John was exiled and wrote Revelation and no country is condemned for having prisons, even though they are for not being just. There may not have been a direct "Thou shalt have prisons" but their justified use is not condemned either. Then you have the City of Refuge thing, where an accidental killer could be confined until the High Priest changed. Looks something like a prison to me.
There are many things which are not directly commanded that we still justifiably do. I'm not told to inhale, but I do. Governments are not told to build roads, but they do that too. So your logic is flawed.
So I guess our founding fathers should have just surrendered to British law and "paid the price".
No, but the signers of the Declaration of Independence all knew that they risked death to forward their cause and accepted that fact. Many of them *did* get caught and as far as I know, none of them started crying about how unfair and misunderstood they where in an effort to get out of being punished or sway public opinion. They lost their fortunes, families and lives for their cause.
They where well aware of the possible consequences of their "crime" and where prepared to pay the price for doing what they felt had to be done. This story is about some guy complaining about how harsh the 10 year sentence is. I'm not impressed.
So, yes, if you are unwilling to do the time, don't do the crime...
Not *all* crimes.. Just those which lead to profit... Steal from the company and it's the slammer for you.
One of these days... One of these days...To the moon, Alice! -- Ralph
Hey, if folks can claim the moon landings where staged and area 51 has alien remains in storage...
Seriously This whole "climate change" thing is way over blown and is *far* from a settled issue when you start trying to project what's going to happen in the future. We have some interesting data and some models that seem to fit the data, but there are still valid questions about our ability to forecast the future. The whole system is vastly more complex than the models are and there is no way we know we have captured all the significant variables. We've never observed what the more alarmist models are forecasting so there IS doubt about their certainty. There is also doubt about the data being fed into the models too and how scientists have (or have not) massaged the data to account for inconsistencies in how and where it's been collected.
For instance, a lot of our observations are made at airports these days. Airports have only really existed for the last 75 years and there are obvious ways this might cause increases in temperature to be observed. Pavement can increase surface temperatures, jet exhaust is pretty hot, heating and cooling buildings both could drive up observations, so how do you account for these effects? If the temperature is going up at the airport, or in urban areas, does that mean it's going up world wide? How do you know your data set doesn't have significant issues or that if it does you have applied the correct factors to account for it?
There are valid questions about all this so I feel the whole "global warming" thing is a bit over blown. Advocates of global warming have been pretty bad at forecasting what's going to happen in the past. Al Gore and others routinely overshot with their hype. They have foretasted sea level rises which have not materialized and temperature changes which haven't happened. They are routinely having to revise down their death and destruction hype as it becomes clear it's not happening, despite their assurances we couldn't avoid it that theirs was the accepted "scientific" view and science is never wrong. What it really was about was politics and world view, at least with some of them. Creating the crisis was the point, not the science, At least it was for Al Gore who was struggling to remain relevant enough to run for president again after the narrow loss to Bush.
All this is why I choose to poke fun from time to time. Quite frankly they deserve it, co-opting science for political gain is *never* a good idea in the long run.
Global Cooling advocates from the 70's claim their analysis was wrong by a factor of 2. The world is cooling faster than expected based on their data with the blank areas estimated (fudged) too.. The freezing of the arctic regions is expected to continue during the winter months, endangering polar bears and penguins who are not adapted fully to the new level of cold. No comment yet from Al Gore.
Mod up... TSA is about the appearance of security first. Actual security is a distant second or third priority.
TSA is not about providing security, despite the word being in it's name. TSA is about the appearance of security..
If it was about security, they would have never spent a billion on such worthless tripe. They would have spent a billion buying blue gloves for pat downs, doing background checks and buying boat loads of video cameras to watch.
This was somebodies billion dollar boondoggle idea to try and sound like they where doing something.
You need three things to set up a server farm (apart from the servers and people to manage it..)
1. A Building with lots of floor space.... Yea, An ex-auto repair building could do for that. Check..
2. Connectivity to the internet... Uh, going to have to spend money on that one.. NO check..
3. Electrical power, backup power, cooling, security infrastructure? Uh on, we don't have that either... No Check... But you'd have to spend money of all this anyway.
I don't think this will work out all that well for them. All they have is floor space that is likely pretty expensive if it is located near any major retail but it will be fixed in size. They won't be building new buildings here or expanding by adding more stories. They won't be saving any money doing the conversion from auto repair stalls to server racks because they'd have to do that anyplace else they wanted to set this up. What's going to kill them is the network infrastructure, unless they don't care about reliability and have SLA's for their service that matches. Getting redundant high bandwidth links to these buildings could be expensive, if they are not already near high speed network connections. Comparing their costs to their competitors, I just don't see this working out. Their competition will be working on much larger facilities, located much closer to network infrastructure with lower cost structures and less limitations on their building sizes. Sears may be getting the building for free, but their other setup and operating costs will be higher.
About the only way this is going to pay, even marginally, is if they can use their unique locations to provide points of presence for services like Netflix or Amazon video to cache content locally or something along those lines. Other than that, I just don't see this working out.
Who needs to print a gun in the middle east? They seem to be awash in Russian weapons and starting to build up an inventory of US made ones too. Obtaining one should not be a problem.
I don't think the DA, judge or jury will care about the order and it will be off to the "big house" for a very long time, unless you are in a death penalty state where it's off to "death row" for a few years.
I don't think so. I think the intent was that by allowing mining and then making it harder and harder over time you would enhance the currency's stability. Remember that the miners are really just doing a lot of hard house keeping and then getting paid for their efforts in BitCoin. The point was to get a lot of people processing the transactions to keep the ratio of honest brokers to fraudsters high enough so no one entity could possibly take over and "fake" transactions. I don't think the intent was to somehow create or control value, even though it does seem interesting.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the last coin is issued and mining comes to an abrupt end. I have a feeling that if BitCoin is still viable, they will revise their final count and issue more coins to keep the mining industry in business.
This makes me wonder how many bitcoins are now effectively lost and out of circulation. The problem of people loosing their wallets and taking coins out of circulation could doom the currency eventually.
But the dollar at least USED to have a defined value in gold and could be exchanged for gold on demand. BitCoin *never* had that.
Problem for the US though is that as long as there are countries that allow BitCoin exchanges to *not* report then there will be a way. But, aside from the custom's limit of undeclared cash going in or out of the country, there's no real way to keep you from doing the same thing with cash.
Tisk tisk... That's what they are BEST at. Discussing something they don't understand then passing laws which don't fix the perceived problem but make matters worse while patting themselves on the back claiming "progress".
Case is point? The ACA....
It's the same thing. The US government is about to tell a bunch of nerds they can't have something, so they want it even more now.
I don't agree that they will say you can't have BitCoin, but the net effect may be the same.
What the government seems likely to do is regulate the exchange of currency in and out of BitCoin to make it reportable. This will mean that you will have the same reporting requirements of services like Western Union, Pay Pal and the like. They are not going to prevent you from buying and selling BitCoin. You will still be allowed to own them. You, and the exchanges who buy and sell BitCoin, will be legally required to report transactions.
Now how they enforce this is the real question... But preventing money laundering and such has always been an enforcement nightmare.
BitCoin will become a game-changer (oh, that phrase!) simply because nothing can stop it.
Apparently it already IS a game changer. Why else would they be calling meeting about it in congress?
Read their information page. The fans in the Oil do turn much slower than in air, but they are really not necessary when the whole thing is submerged in oil. They also have had a system in operation since 2007 with no fan failures, or any other failures. Apparently the oil dissipates any heating effects of turning slow. I wouldn't expect that the fans would ever wear out in this situation. When fans fail, they get noisy and then stop turning. The primary failure mode is the bearings wearing out due to dust build up in the bearings and the stress of imbalances due to dust on the blades. None of this will happen when dunked in oil.
Somebody needs to figure out how to cool the oil below room temperature. If you could get things down to 0C, overclockers would have a hay day.