I just wish banks would connect those machines to the ATM system like a deposit ATM, so you didn't have to go and queue up after you've deposited the money.
I've got five things I'd tell them they ought to put in the constitution right back at the start:
That they should add a clause that requires that powers granted to Congress be used only for the stated purpose. ("To promote the sciences and useful arts", anyone?)
That the second amendment needs clarifying (it is perfectly clear, its meaning is exactly what I think is sensible gun policy)
That the commerce clause is a ridiculous loophole
That the federal government should be explicitly forbidden from paying or withholding money (or other benefits) to other entities on any basis which would create a requirement to act in a way which it cannot force with primary legislation (E.g. drinking age)
That the government should be prohibited from engaging any other person to perform an act which would be unconstitutional for it to do itself
Fixing the second is effectively impossible since it would basically mean deciding to replace it with a new amendment, and most people would oppose it for either being too tight or too lax. The rest would be impossible to fix now because of the huge amount of current law it would invalidate.
I suppose for Windows and OS X you could sell compiled binaries like Xchat does, but that doesn't really work so well for Linux where people expect to be able to manage updates through their package manager.
It was patent law: they were using unlicensed light bulbs, so they moved to California where the distance and lax law enforcement allowed them and their suppliers to violate the Edison patents.
It depends whether the question is one of fact or law. OJ got off because the jurors believed that it was not proven that he'd done the killing, not because the judge decided that the killing was legal.
If it's available on iTunes for $5.99, that's easy, it's $5.99.
It gets better: it is only 70% of $5.99 because Apple charge 30%, then there's the tax they would have paid if damages are untaxed. Also, since they are neither selling you a copy nor licensing it, they might well not have to pay any residuals, so that is another slice off the damages. If it is a DVD rip, it is even better because their margins on a DVD are typically lower (since you don't have to pay for the handling or their marginal costs). If parallel imports are legal, you also have the option of arguing that the damages should be based on the foreign price.
For music, things get even more interesting if the artists own their own copyright, since the damages would then be their few cents of loss rather than the record company's rather larger loss, even if the court buys the idea that a download is a lost sale.
I suspect that is why no-one has bothered to sue a downloader in Australia, because if they did the downloader would laugh, pay up, and tell everyone how little they got sued for. At that point, a lot of people would start looking very silly.
Sunset provisions would put a finite limit on the total amount of primary legislation, since the entire statute book has to be read out periodically, and then everything has to be debated, have pork added, and be voted on. At the very least, the poor sod who has to re-introduce the tax code would probably be tempted to simplify it a bit.
Doesn't GCC build some optimisation into the parser, so some dead code and redundant assignments never make it to the AST? That makes the C and C++ front-ends useless for an IDE, so it might just be that he wanted a better-sounding reason than "it would take too much work to make it useful".
Emacs was the solution to TECO, an editor/language with all the power of traditional unix stream tools and the readability of perl golf, in a monolithic program. (It had similar search power to pcre, but a totally different syntax to the regexes we know today.)
Emacs provided all the power of TECO in an editor which was easier to use. (Indeed, it was originally some Editor MACroS for TECO.)
That is why, whenever you are parsing user input, you should be doing all the conversions in the UI layer and, once they have entered the value, display what you think they've asked for, before doing anything potentially irreversible. Likewise, your validation should come after you've parsed the data, not before.
Of course, just because that's something which should have been pointed out in Intro to Computing right after atoi(3) is mentioned doesn't mean that people actually remember to do it, but you would think that people would get that sort of thing right in important software.
You'd probably have to give the government power to appoint directors for the duration of the sentence too, to prevent a sudden upsurge in infrastructure spending (or paperclip purchase).
They could be treated like other non-profit groups, the same as social and activity clubs - a local football club arguably does more for the community than the operational and worship side of a church anyway, since at least they are providing green space and encouraging fitness.
The strictly charitable aspects are usually incorporated separately anyway, since that provides separation for liability reasons and allows separate management more easily More importantly, here charity donations are tax-deductible, whereas religious offerings are not. That means that there's a complete separation between charitable and operational money here.
The left's support for the Palestinian cause goes right back to the early days of the PLO, which was relatively secular and tolerant (and remember that Israel not only has special treatment for Jews (apart from the Rule of Return, special rights and exemptions for some ultra-orthodox Jews) but in those days limited recognition of foreign rabbis on theological grounds (essentially creating established religion in Israel, and undermining its claim to be about the Jewish "race" rather than the Jewish religion).
The Israel lobby likes to emphasise the importance of Israel as an American ally and a bulwark of western values in the region, so that pretty much guarantees opposition to Israel (and thus support for Palestine on the "enemy of my enemy" principle) from the anti-American (or at least anti-American-intervention) elements of the global left.
It is fairly widely claimed that Hamas was originally supported by western powers to undermine support for the Soviet-linked (and IRA-linked) PLO: I haven't actually looked into that, but if true it is hardly unprecedented.
Well, in 1919 East Prussia (or part of it) would have been an obvious choice: close to the ethnic homeland of most of the European Jews, belonging to a defeated nation, fairly good land, not promised to anyone else, and a useful place to have a western protectorate.
The only place where I can think of secularism and racism coming together in a way which can be argued to be anti-semitic is in attempts to ban non-theraputic child circumcision, but even then the racists are aiming more at Arabs than Jews, while the secularists place it as a matter of the child's human rights (since it has a permanent effect, unlike, say, baptism)[1]. The best argument that it is anti-semitic is that the impact falls most strongly on Jews, since they cannot defer it until later (whereas Muslims can, and in some regions do until the early-mid teens anyway). OTOH, religious requirements which become regarded as barbaric or which are outlawed effectively do tend to become optional, and there are limited exemptions anyway.
There are some Jews (or supporters, anyway), who argue that since circumcision is an essential part of Judaism, banning child circumcision is tantamount to banning Judaism, which does tend to elicit responses along the lines of "well, in that case it is better that Judaism should die out than that the rights of children continue to be violated", which is close enough to wanting the destruction of all people with Jewish beliefs for propaganda purposes.
I suppose the only other aspect would be that Judaism is dying out in some regions, and no doubt there are those who would see the disappearance of a formerly significant religion as a step towards victory. For example, in my city Judaism is probably doomed as a religion worthy of notice, and seeing what was once the number 2 religion in the state (albeit a very distant second) die out as an institution would probably attract a bit of crowing. However, anyone who cares can probably see the writing on the wall, so it isn't as though anyone would be silly enough to try to speed up their decline (which would be counter-productive).
[1] If you believe that the harm outweighs the benefits, it is then a matter of line-drawing - is the harm more or less than that of other permanent non-theraputic body modifications we allow parents to have done on their children (i.e. tattoos, piercing), and if more, where should the line be drawn. Then there's questions of licensing practitioners, age limits, allowable techniques, and so on.
The British actually managed to screw up Palestine worse than most places by promising the whole space to both the Arabs and the Jews - most of the time, they just promised the whole lot to the wrong people, or split the space in the wrong place.
At frist the British actually supported the Arabs over the Jews, hence Irgun and the Jewish terrorist attacks, but later British public opinion began to switch sides (partly because Zionism, the Jewish question, and the Balfour Declaration were more int he public consciousness than Laurence of Arabia and the Middle East Campaign, the declaration after Jerusalem fell, and so on). However, Churchill mentions in his history of WWII that there was some debate in Cabinet about which side to disarm when the security troops were moved out of the Mandates into Egypt. Of course, they then cocked up by trying to disarm the Arabs, failing miserably, and thus having two sets of armed factions with grudges.
You could do a lot by making sure that politicians have the same kind of restrictions on future employment as senior public servants have in most developed countries, by providing public financing for political campaigns, and by mandating equitable access to politicians and senior officials (and requiring that all conversations relating to their duties are minuted as part of the official record, and sworn to be true and accurate). That would reduce the importance of corporate connections, campaign donations, and "golfing buddies", improving ordinary people's ability to petition the government.
Breaking up media groups would also help reduce the ability of media barons to dictate policy to governments: Murdoch is of course the most famous example of that sort of thing.
Well, it is pretty strong evidence in Kim Dotcom's favour come the actual court case: if it had no significant effect, he obviously wasn't doing the eleventy trillion dollars damage which they will ask for. It also helps show that the takedown was unreasonable.
It also provides evidence for copyright reformists who want statutory damages abolished: someone getting sued for huge damages without dong any harm is clearly wrong.
Couldn't the Inventions Secrecy Act be trivially circumvented by filing simultaneously in several countries if the idea would be more valuable with foreign patents but no US protection than as a trade secret. As a new, supposedly more secure, cryptosystem would be worthless without publication, that avenue would be a pretty obvious choice, especially for academic cryptographers who want to publish to advance their careers.
Copper is not something that's routinely recycled.
Yes it is: most of the scrapyards in my city will take copper, both clean and plastic coated. I used to sell quite bit of old wire to a friend who worked in a scrapyard (who delivered it there and got staff rates), but they also bought front he general public. Electricians collecting offcuts and removed wire adds up to a decent amount of money.
Stealing copper is an easy way for an opportunistic thief to make a low-risk profit.
Slashdot Mirror
I just wish banks would connect those machines to the ATM system like a deposit ATM, so you didn't have to go and queue up after you've deposited the money.
<doctype html$lt; is the correct doctype for WHATWG HTML and HTML 5 (but not for the XML serialisation).
a first-post robot?
I've got five things I'd tell them they ought to put in the constitution right back at the start:
Fixing the second is effectively impossible since it would basically mean deciding to replace it with a new amendment, and most people would oppose it for either being too tight or too lax. The rest would be impossible to fix now because of the huge amount of current law it would invalidate.
I suppose for Windows and OS X you could sell compiled binaries like Xchat does, but that doesn't really work so well for Linux where people expect to be able to manage updates through their package manager.
It was patent law: they were using unlicensed light bulbs, so they moved to California where the distance and lax law enforcement allowed them and their suppliers to violate the Edison patents.
It depends whether the question is one of fact or law. OJ got off because the jurors believed that it was not proven that he'd done the killing, not because the judge decided that the killing was legal.
If it's available on iTunes for $5.99, that's easy, it's $5.99.
It gets better: it is only 70% of $5.99 because Apple charge 30%, then there's the tax they would have paid if damages are untaxed. Also, since they are neither selling you a copy nor licensing it, they might well not have to pay any residuals, so that is another slice off the damages. If it is a DVD rip, it is even better because their margins on a DVD are typically lower (since you don't have to pay for the handling or their marginal costs). If parallel imports are legal, you also have the option of arguing that the damages should be based on the foreign price.
For music, things get even more interesting if the artists own their own copyright, since the damages would then be their few cents of loss rather than the record company's rather larger loss, even if the court buys the idea that a download is a lost sale.
I suspect that is why no-one has bothered to sue a downloader in Australia, because if they did the downloader would laugh, pay up, and tell everyone how little they got sued for. At that point, a lot of people would start looking very silly.
Did Canada end up buying (or making their own) versions of the plastic banknotes Australia has been using for ages?
They do have one vulnerability: hair spray makes them shrink. :)
Sunset provisions would put a finite limit on the total amount of primary legislation, since the entire statute book has to be read out periodically, and then everything has to be debated, have pork added, and be voted on. At the very least, the poor sod who has to re-introduce the tax code would probably be tempted to simplify it a bit.
Doesn't GCC build some optimisation into the parser, so some dead code and redundant assignments never make it to the AST? That makes the C and C++ front-ends useless for an IDE, so it might just be that he wanted a better-sounding reason than "it would take too much work to make it useful".
Emacs was the solution to TECO, an editor/language with all the power of traditional unix stream tools and the readability of perl golf, in a monolithic program. (It had similar search power to pcre, but a totally different syntax to the regexes we know today.)
Emacs provided all the power of TECO in an editor which was easier to use. (Indeed, it was originally some Editor MACroS for TECO.)
That is why, whenever you are parsing user input, you should be doing all the conversions in the UI layer and, once they have entered the value, display what you think they've asked for, before doing anything potentially irreversible. Likewise, your validation should come after you've parsed the data, not before.
Of course, just because that's something which should have been pointed out in Intro to Computing right after atoi(3) is mentioned doesn't mean that people actually remember to do it, but you would think that people would get that sort of thing right in important software.
You'd probably have to give the government power to appoint directors for the duration of the sentence too, to prevent a sudden upsurge in infrastructure spending (or paperclip purchase).
1 if you ever deal with %bignum% amount of actual cash in a bust then the Secret Service will just about call you
That does make a certain amount of sense, since the Secret Service was originally the Treasury Department's enforcement arm.
They could be treated like other non-profit groups, the same as social and activity clubs - a local football club arguably does more for the community than the operational and worship side of a church anyway, since at least they are providing green space and encouraging fitness.
The strictly charitable aspects are usually incorporated separately anyway, since that provides separation for liability reasons and allows separate management more easily More importantly, here charity donations are tax-deductible, whereas religious offerings are not. That means that there's a complete separation between charitable and operational money here.
The left's support for the Palestinian cause goes right back to the early days of the PLO, which was relatively secular and tolerant (and remember that Israel not only has special treatment for Jews (apart from the Rule of Return, special rights and exemptions for some ultra-orthodox Jews) but in those days limited recognition of foreign rabbis on theological grounds (essentially creating established religion in Israel, and undermining its claim to be about the Jewish "race" rather than the Jewish religion).
The Israel lobby likes to emphasise the importance of Israel as an American ally and a bulwark of western values in the region, so that pretty much guarantees opposition to Israel (and thus support for Palestine on the "enemy of my enemy" principle) from the anti-American (or at least anti-American-intervention) elements of the global left.
It is fairly widely claimed that Hamas was originally supported by western powers to undermine support for the Soviet-linked (and IRA-linked) PLO: I haven't actually looked into that, but if true it is hardly unprecedented.
Well, in 1919 East Prussia (or part of it) would have been an obvious choice: close to the ethnic homeland of most of the European Jews, belonging to a defeated nation, fairly good land, not promised to anyone else, and a useful place to have a western protectorate.
The only place where I can think of secularism and racism coming together in a way which can be argued to be anti-semitic is in attempts to ban non-theraputic child circumcision, but even then the racists are aiming more at Arabs than Jews, while the secularists place it as a matter of the child's human rights (since it has a permanent effect, unlike, say, baptism)[1]. The best argument that it is anti-semitic is that the impact falls most strongly on Jews, since they cannot defer it until later (whereas Muslims can, and in some regions do until the early-mid teens anyway). OTOH, religious requirements which become regarded as barbaric or which are outlawed effectively do tend to become optional, and there are limited exemptions anyway.
There are some Jews (or supporters, anyway), who argue that since circumcision is an essential part of Judaism, banning child circumcision is tantamount to banning Judaism, which does tend to elicit responses along the lines of "well, in that case it is better that Judaism should die out than that the rights of children continue to be violated", which is close enough to wanting the destruction of all people with Jewish beliefs for propaganda purposes.
I suppose the only other aspect would be that Judaism is dying out in some regions, and no doubt there are those who would see the disappearance of a formerly significant religion as a step towards victory. For example, in my city Judaism is probably doomed as a religion worthy of notice, and seeing what was once the number 2 religion in the state (albeit a very distant second) die out as an institution would probably attract a bit of crowing. However, anyone who cares can probably see the writing on the wall, so it isn't as though anyone would be silly enough to try to speed up their decline (which would be counter-productive).
[1] If you believe that the harm outweighs the benefits, it is then a matter of line-drawing - is the harm more or less than that of other permanent non-theraputic body modifications we allow parents to have done on their children (i.e. tattoos, piercing), and if more, where should the line be drawn. Then there's questions of licensing practitioners, age limits, allowable techniques, and so on.
The British actually managed to screw up Palestine worse than most places by promising the whole space to both the Arabs and the Jews - most of the time, they just promised the whole lot to the wrong people, or split the space in the wrong place.
At frist the British actually supported the Arabs over the Jews, hence Irgun and the Jewish terrorist attacks, but later British public opinion began to switch sides (partly because Zionism, the Jewish question, and the Balfour Declaration were more int he public consciousness than Laurence of Arabia and the Middle East Campaign, the declaration after Jerusalem fell, and so on). However, Churchill mentions in his history of WWII that there was some debate in Cabinet about which side to disarm when the security troops were moved out of the Mandates into Egypt. Of course, they then cocked up by trying to disarm the Arabs, failing miserably, and thus having two sets of armed factions with grudges.
You could do a lot by making sure that politicians have the same kind of restrictions on future employment as senior public servants have in most developed countries, by providing public financing for political campaigns, and by mandating equitable access to politicians and senior officials (and requiring that all conversations relating to their duties are minuted as part of the official record, and sworn to be true and accurate). That would reduce the importance of corporate connections, campaign donations, and "golfing buddies", improving ordinary people's ability to petition the government.
Breaking up media groups would also help reduce the ability of media barons to dictate policy to governments: Murdoch is of course the most famous example of that sort of thing.
Well, it is pretty strong evidence in Kim Dotcom's favour come the actual court case: if it had no significant effect, he obviously wasn't doing the eleventy trillion dollars damage which they will ask for. It also helps show that the takedown was unreasonable.
It also provides evidence for copyright reformists who want statutory damages abolished: someone getting sued for huge damages without dong any harm is clearly wrong.
Are you sure you mean the Lisbon Treaty? Wikipedia doesn't list a Treaty of Lisbon during his premiership, and the last one was signed under Labour?
Couldn't the Inventions Secrecy Act be trivially circumvented by filing simultaneously in several countries if the idea would be more valuable with foreign patents but no US protection than as a trade secret. As a new, supposedly more secure, cryptosystem would be worthless without publication, that avenue would be a pretty obvious choice, especially for academic cryptographers who want to publish to advance their careers.
Copper is not something that's routinely recycled.
Yes it is: most of the scrapyards in my city will take copper, both clean and plastic coated. I used to sell quite bit of old wire to a friend who worked in a scrapyard (who delivered it there and got staff rates), but they also bought front he general public. Electricians collecting offcuts and removed wire adds up to a decent amount of money.
Stealing copper is an easy way for an opportunistic thief to make a low-risk profit.