If you do that, make sure you do it with gift cards and not a credit card. Your $.99 Canadian iTunes purchase will result in a $3.00 foreign currency exchange fee on your credit card. Plus, the $.99 for the song.
This fee is probably a matter between you and your credit card company. Others may charge no fee (likely with a worst than market rate of exchange), a percentage or a different fixed fee.
If they don't want to sell something to you but they'd be willing to sell it to someone else, then you should be allowed to just take it anyway?
With most real property this would be pointless because the "someone else" can sell it to "you" anyway. The thing is that copyright is a legal fiction to pretend that information is property. In some cases it is very obviously a fiction.
What I've never understood is why the bother to block other regions (looks like there are regions 7 and 8 for special purposes). Then again, maybe they don't, I don't have a R7 or R8 dvd to test that.
8 is "Aircaft and Cruise ships", things would be rather dodgy if these cannot play any DVDs their flag would otherwise allow. 7 is "special purpose", not sure if any of these actually exist.
How can this be? I thought that the CSS license required the players to obey the regional restrictions.
It dosn't trump the "law of the land". e.g. selling something which couldn't play both R2 and R5 in the EU would be utterly stupid. Also IIRC region coding is illegal in Australia. (Probably because most Aussies are, rightfully, fed up of being on the end of several distribution chains.)
A great example of this is Battlestar Galactica from Sci-Fi. It has at least a 6 month lag time before it hits the UK from the States. Luckily for the Brits, people always throw up a high-quality rip on thepiratebay the day after the show airs.
Actually it's rather more random that that. Some episodes were shown first in the US, some first in the UK, possibly even some first elsewhere. However they were available through "alternative means" soon after they aired anywhere. A better example might be the 2005 Doctor Who series, which was shown in the US long after it had aired in both the UK and Canada.
Now just think of the viewership (and corresponding ad revenue) if it was aired in both places at the same time (with localized ads of course).
Even a delay of up to 48 hours would probably be acceptable to most viewers. However the US broadcasters' method of showing some episodes, then repeating them (possibly out of order) would not go down well. Very few broadcasters would even try to do this, since it means they get deluged with letters, emails, phone calls and faxes from irate viewers. (Indeed it's a mystery why viewers in the US arn't rioting.)
Copyright is more than just a monopoly on distribution: it also protects unpublished works.
Copyright is entirely a man made concept. It simply didn't exist until a few centuries ago and it has been modified quite a bit in that comparativly short history. According to some justifications for copyright (e.g. the US one) having it apply to unpublished works is nonsensical or even counter productive.
This has been plainly visible since stores started selling online at all.
The other thing which online stores can show up is where there is excess profiteering. i.e. if something is cheaper to buy from overseas on a one off basis then it is very overpriced. (Especially if the postage is a substatial proportion of the price paid.)
It's not like very many Americans are lining up to buy Japanese music that's not available overseas, but Terry Pratchett fans in the US were complaining for years about the way his novels were available exclusively in the UK for months before that got changed.
Do they get the original or a special US only version though?
Physical media have never had anything to do with it. It's entirely to do with international licensing agreements and international laws, and the way a culture of piracy dictates how the same CD or DVD can be sold for wildly different prices in different countries.
There is also the culture of publishers. Indeed they appear to have had a lot more input into these various agreements and treaties than readers, listeners and viewers.
The movie industry tried to 'fix' this, rather than embracing it, by introducing region codes. Now, the DVD you bought from the USA wouldn't play on your player (although most stand-alone DVD players sold in the UK are now region-free, laptop drives are often not, which is irritating).
An interesting twist is that selling a player which cannot play both region 2 and region 5 discs is most likely illegal anywhere within the EU...
A bigger problem than music and film, however, is TV shows. These are typically broadcast in one country up to a year before they are syndicated elsewhere.
Actually it can be "up to several years". Note that in some cases these delays are actually longer than they were 20-30 years ago. Dispite increased "bandwidth" available to TV broadcasters.
There is no option to buy them legally through any channel[1], but you can download them from the Internet within a few hours of their original release. The movie industry woke up to this and started launching things at the same time worldwide, but the music and TV industries are still stuck in the regional distribution model.
No doubt all CDs and DVDs are actually made in the cheapest places on the planet the companies concerned can find...
This, to my mind, means that they should not be protected by copyright. If you intentionally exclude a region, then it is not in the best interests of that region to grant you a monopoly on distribution.
AFAIK the only place this actually is the law is Canada.
I think it just says that those Windows users are perfectly content. People who use it like it and don't see any reason to switch. If somebody owned a certain make of car and liked it so much they refused to buy any other car, does that automatically "defeat their arguemnet" that it's a great car?
It's hard to say if something is good or bad in a monopoly marketplace. In many cases people get Windows as "Hobson's choice". You even see situations where Windows machines are operating as dumb terminals with Hyperterm maximised. The same hardware running Linux or even a real terminal would be little different. Possibly better since there wouldn't be screenspace wasted as a border (or even the Windows taskbar.)
You should always use the best tools for the job, whatever you're doing. People's impressions of what tool does the best job varies,
It also helps to know the job in question. Things which can be a help for one job can be a handicap in another. e.g. for an embeded system not being able to remove anything unrelated to the task in hand is a minus.
but I think anyone who's a zealot for any ONE system is a moron.
Here's the thing, windows often DOESNT do what the users want, and it's only getting worse (DRM etc)... Linux on the other hand, does exactly what the user wants providing the user has sufficient knowledge to tell it what he wants, and the required level of knowledge is decreasing all the time.
In many cases where computers are used as a tool what can matter more is what the owner or the sysadmin wants. Here Windows is playing "catch up", with DRM at best neutral, at worst another "problem user" type addition.
My frend works in IT and he says that linux is rubbish and you cant even put in the dvds and theirs no games and he says no proper business would use it because it wont let microsoft run their programs on it so it is useless for all serious thing
Your friend's business must manage to get a lot of work done if all the staff are playing games and watching DVDs all day... There is actually quite an industry selling Windows addons to make it more difficult for end users alter configurations, install software, etc. Because in a great many environments this is a minus rather than a plus.
Linux (and Unix) have a far better security model than Windows. This is mainly because limited accounts have just the right amount of power (and it's configurable, and changeable at the drop of a hat) - so it's perfectly fine to use limited accounts and sudo in to the system when necessary. Windows (XP) has such a shit limited account that nobody can really make any use of it - most programs require admin accounts to play. Thus everyone uses Admin and there is no security. From what I've heard Vista changed this around a bit but limited is still far too restrictive, and there's no "sudo".
Actually Windows, at least from NT onwards does have a decent security model. Probably only because it was copied from VAX/VMS though. The problem is more one of application writers actually bothering to use it. Hence you get all this kind of nonsense about having to run software as "admin". (Even software which cannot cope with it's data files being on read only media.) Another thing that Windows app writers often fail to get is it can make a lot of sense to split "server applications" between "services" and user apps to monitor/control. Thus you can end up with Windows servers which need to permenently logged in with various apps running or even such daftness as anti-virus/spyware which will only attempt to do updates if someone is logged in (worst case senario only if someone is logged in as a privileged user.)
For more examples, Linux doesn't let any program rampantly change the registry, or set itself to run on startup (and that's the main problem with Windows). (In fact for another example, Linux doesn't even have a bloated difficult-to-recover, easy-to-corrupt settings file for all programs). This probably comes back to the fact that Linux users do not normally use root, while Windows users almost always use Admin.
This is also an implimentation issue. There is nothing to stop a Windows application completly ignoring the Registry and using text configuration files. There are, no doubt ported from unix, Windows applications which do this.
What if a crazy man just straps some bombs on, walks up to the security checkpoint and sets himself off? There's no security check to protect the first security check. Better add one.
What you'd need would be explosive detectors at the main doors to the airport. But also at train stations, sports stadiums, etc. There is no reason to assume that suicide bombers (or the people who pick their targets) are obsessed with air travel. You also need a low rate of false positives. As well as being able to deal with the situation of a bomb carrier who does not realise they are carrying a bomb. e.g. "Deliver this package for me and I'll pay you when you come back".
hows about this you setup your rig it gets put in the cargo hold and then at 30K it goes off and turns into a glob of metal
Thermite creates moltern iron. Which will follow the force of gravity until it encounters something strong (and heat resistant enough) to stop it.
1 fire on the plane torch the luggage (fail the airframe)
Even if the luggage is entirely flame retardant it's unlikely to do much to stop the molten iron.
2 very large hole in the plane (the cargo hold drops to not many psi or 0.0?? atmospheres)
The cargo hold has the same pressurisation as the cabin. Which measured as an altitude of 8,000 feet.
4 depending on what the plane is doing you might hit a fuel tank (fails the airframe OOH NIFTY KABOOM)
The only thing in any fuel tank which can explode is the fuel vapour/air mixture in the top of the tank. Then only if the fuel vapour and air are mixed in the right ratio. Airliner fuel tanks are unpressurised and vented. About the only chance of a fuel/air explosion would be from termite placed in the cabin above the centre wing tank. The complication is that a soon as the molten iron entered the tank it would be followed by higher preassure air from the cabin. Thus you'd need an explosive mixture to exist before the iron fell into the liquid fuel.
Okay, well, thermite is some really fun stuff, but it's hardly an explosive. Damned hot molten iron, to be sure, but it's not going to go "ka-boom". Or do you know something I don't?
Melting through the skin of an airliner in flight is quite likely to cause an explosive decompression. Possibly more dangerous if set off above the cargo areas than the Centre Wing Tank.
With some research, you may even be able to use your kitchen microwave to generate some fusion reactions.
Just hope no-one misunderstands this and forces everyone buying a microwave to prove they are not a terrorist trying to produce a thermonuclear weapon.
They had this on the BBC yesterday too, I think in the morning they had suggested everyone microwave their sponges and then in the evening news they had a man with a ginger mustache from ROSPA who said that he wouldn't advise microwaving sponges because there is no setting on microwaves for sponges
The typical microwave has settings for two paramaters. How long to microwave something for and how much power to use (the latter usually done by turning the magnetron on and off with a certain mark/space ratio). If you had a button for everything you could cook the control panel would be huge. Maybe they should first get someone who has actually used a microwave...
Just a few months ago my friend put a bag of microwaveable popcorn into the microwave and left it for a few minutes. He came back and the microwave was smoking and the bag was on fire. Apparently the butter and kernels stuck together and burned.
What did the instructions say? Could they have been along the lines of "open bag, put contents into bowl, put bowl into microwave"...
The microwave steralizes the wet sponge because it makes the water hot enough to kill anything living. The same effect can be had by dunking the sponge in a pot of boiling water.
Using a pot of boiling water would need the sponge to stay in for quite a while, probably held down with a wooden spoon, then you need to safely remove a sponge soaked in boiling water. Using a microwave uses less energy and probably carries less risk of personal injury.
It's all about expecting people to use abilities they don't have, like the ability to fly, or the ability to understand something complex they know nothing about.
Or even the ability to read instructions! Which is why the likes of Brainiac state "Don't try this at home" when demonstrating what not to put in a microwave. (Though they might consider having someone other than Richard Hammond do the warning.)
Expecting them to use their understanding of microwaves would be like asking President Bush to use his understanding of diplomacy.
The last two words of this sentence are most likely redundant.
To the average person a microwave is a magic box which makes food hot. In theory without heating the container. (Except that heat can travel by conduction and some materials can be heated perfectly well by microwaves.)
Microwaves have a wave length measured in the centimetre. The size of a bacterial spore is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller The size of a bateria is a lot smaller than this again.
I'm not sure about bacterial spores being larger than live bacteria. A spore has no cytoplasm, just DNA in a tough shell.
This means that if you wanted to destroy the blighters with radiation alone you have to choose a frequency a lot higher than microwaves,
You also need a much higher radiation flux, bacteria (espcially inspored ones) can be quite tough. As well as there being a risk of mutating something harmless into something dangerous. The vast majority of bacteria cannot survive inside mammals in the first place.
I don't know if all the US is like this, but every spawling area that I've been to in the US is insanely pedestrian unfriendly. There are very few crosswalks on major roads, forcing people to dash across, typically to an offramp that has "no pedestrians" signs on it, even though there is no pedestrian access ways nearby.
The US also has the concept of "jaywalking" where crossing the road in the "wrong" place has the risk of being assaulted by police as well as any traffic hazards.
Compare this to Australia and Europe, where there is as much urban sprawl as the worst parts of the US but every road has a sidewalk, every set of lights has a crosswalk, and foot bridges and tunnels are commonplace.
Even if these wern't there certainly in Europe pedestrians have right of way over motorised traffic. Be it crossing the road or walking along the road. Any driver who were to hit a pedestrian with their car would be considered to blame under virtually all circumstances.
The Amendments are part of the constitution. They are called amendments because they were amended on to the constitution. Just like when there are amendments to a bill.
The version which stands is the most recently ammended version however. e.g. the "Commerce Clause" is subservient to the 10th ammendment. Copyright and patents are subservient to freedom of speach.
Natural rights are not granted by the Constitution or any other document. Freedom of Speech was not 'granted' by the Constitution in 1789, and is still is not granted today. It exists because it is a natural right. The First Amendment is an explicit protection of rights, but it is not a granting of rights. You can't be granted something that you already have!
The First Ammendment is actually a restriction on the ability of The US Congress to pass laws. i.e. "Congress shall pass no law..." It is also a restriction on how law enforcement may apply such laws. Even a law otherwise Constitutional becomes unconstitutional were it to be used to do any of the things the First Ammendment states laws passed by Congress cannot do.
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If you do that, make sure you do it with gift cards and not a credit card. Your $.99 Canadian iTunes purchase will result in a $3.00 foreign currency exchange fee on your credit card. Plus, the $.99 for the song.
This fee is probably a matter between you and your credit card company. Others may charge no fee (likely with a worst than market rate of exchange), a percentage or a different fixed fee.
If they don't want to sell something to you but they'd be willing to sell it to someone else, then you should be allowed to just take it anyway?
With most real property this would be pointless because the "someone else" can sell it to "you" anyway. The thing is that copyright is a legal fiction to pretend that information is property. In some cases it is very obviously a fiction.
What I've never understood is why the bother to block other regions (looks like there are regions 7 and 8 for special purposes). Then again, maybe they don't, I don't have a R7 or R8 dvd to test that.
8 is "Aircaft and Cruise ships", things would be rather dodgy if these cannot play any DVDs their flag would otherwise allow. 7 is "special purpose", not sure if any of these actually exist.
How can this be? I thought that the CSS license required the players to obey the regional restrictions.
It dosn't trump the "law of the land". e.g. selling something which couldn't play both R2 and R5 in the EU would be utterly stupid. Also IIRC region coding is illegal in Australia. (Probably because most Aussies are, rightfully, fed up of being on the end of several distribution chains.)
A great example of this is Battlestar Galactica from Sci-Fi. It has at least a 6 month lag time before it hits the UK from the States. Luckily for the Brits, people always throw up a high-quality rip on thepiratebay the day after the show airs.
Actually it's rather more random that that. Some episodes were shown first in the US, some first in the UK, possibly even some first elsewhere. However they were available through "alternative means" soon after they aired anywhere.
A better example might be the 2005 Doctor Who series, which was shown in the US long after it had aired in both the UK and Canada.
Now just think of the viewership (and corresponding ad revenue) if it was aired in both places at the same time (with localized ads of course).
Even a delay of up to 48 hours would probably be acceptable to most viewers. However the US broadcasters' method of showing some episodes, then repeating them (possibly out of order) would not go down well. Very few broadcasters would even try to do this, since it means they get deluged with letters, emails, phone calls and faxes from irate viewers. (Indeed it's a mystery why viewers in the US arn't rioting.)
Copyright is more than just a monopoly on distribution: it also protects unpublished works.
Copyright is entirely a man made concept. It simply didn't exist until a few centuries ago and it has been modified quite a bit in that comparativly short history. According to some justifications for copyright (e.g. the US one) having it apply to unpublished works is nonsensical or even counter productive.
This has been plainly visible since stores started selling online at all.
The other thing which online stores can show up is where there is excess profiteering. i.e. if something is cheaper to buy from overseas on a one off basis then it is very overpriced. (Especially if the postage is a substatial proportion of the price paid.)
It's not like very many Americans are lining up to buy Japanese music that's not available overseas, but Terry Pratchett fans in the US were complaining for years about the way his novels were available exclusively in the UK for months before that got changed.
Do they get the original or a special US only version though?
Physical media have never had anything to do with it. It's entirely to do with international licensing agreements and international laws, and the way a culture of piracy dictates how the same CD or DVD can be sold for wildly different prices in different countries.
There is also the culture of publishers. Indeed they appear to have had a lot more input into these various agreements and treaties than readers, listeners and viewers.
The movie industry tried to 'fix' this, rather than embracing it, by introducing region codes. Now, the DVD you bought from the USA wouldn't play on your player (although most stand-alone DVD players sold in the UK are now region-free, laptop drives are often not, which is irritating).
An interesting twist is that selling a player which cannot play both region 2 and region 5 discs is most likely illegal anywhere within the EU...
A bigger problem than music and film, however, is TV shows. These are typically broadcast in one country up to a year before they are syndicated elsewhere.
Actually it can be "up to several years". Note that in some cases these delays are actually longer than they were 20-30 years ago. Dispite increased "bandwidth" available to TV broadcasters.
There is no option to buy them legally through any channel[1], but you can download them from the Internet within a few hours of their original release. The movie industry woke up to this and started launching things at the same time worldwide, but the music and TV industries are still stuck in the regional distribution model.
No doubt all CDs and DVDs are actually made in the cheapest places on the planet the companies concerned can find...
This, to my mind, means that they should not be protected by copyright. If you intentionally exclude a region, then it is not in the best interests of that region to grant you a monopoly on distribution.
AFAIK the only place this actually is the law is Canada.
I think it just says that those Windows users are perfectly content. People who use it like it and don't see any reason to switch. If somebody owned a certain make of car and liked it so much they refused to buy any other car, does that automatically "defeat their arguemnet" that it's a great car?
It's hard to say if something is good or bad in a monopoly marketplace. In many cases people get Windows as "Hobson's choice". You even see situations where Windows machines are operating as dumb terminals with Hyperterm maximised. The same hardware running Linux or even a real terminal would be little different. Possibly better since there wouldn't be screenspace wasted as a border (or even the Windows taskbar.)
You should always use the best tools for the job, whatever you're doing. People's impressions of what tool does the best job varies,
It also helps to know the job in question. Things which can be a help for one job can be a handicap in another. e.g. for an embeded system not being able to remove anything unrelated to the task in hand is a minus.
but I think anyone who's a zealot for any ONE system is a moron.
They might be paid to act that way.
Here's the thing, windows often DOESNT do what the users want, and it's only getting worse (DRM etc)... Linux on the other hand, does exactly what the user wants providing the user has sufficient knowledge to tell it what he wants, and the required level of knowledge is decreasing all the time.
In many cases where computers are used as a tool what can matter more is what the owner or the sysadmin wants. Here Windows is playing "catch up", with DRM at best neutral, at worst another "problem user" type addition.
My frend works in IT and he says that linux is rubbish and you cant even put in the dvds and theirs no games and he says no proper business would use it because it wont let microsoft run their programs on it so it is useless for all serious thing
Your friend's business must manage to get a lot of work done if all the staff are playing games and watching DVDs all day...
There is actually quite an industry selling Windows addons to make it more difficult for end users alter configurations, install software, etc. Because in a great many environments this is a minus rather than a plus.
Linux (and Unix) have a far better security model than Windows. This is mainly because limited accounts have just the right amount of power (and it's configurable, and changeable at the drop of a hat) - so it's perfectly fine to use limited accounts and sudo in to the system when necessary. Windows (XP) has such a shit limited account that nobody can really make any use of it - most programs require admin accounts to play. Thus everyone uses Admin and there is no security. From what I've heard Vista changed this around a bit but limited is still far too restrictive, and there's no "sudo".
Actually Windows, at least from NT onwards does have a decent security model. Probably only because it was copied from VAX/VMS though. The problem is more one of application writers actually bothering to use it. Hence you get all this kind of nonsense about having to run software as "admin". (Even software which cannot cope with it's data files being on read only media.)
Another thing that Windows app writers often fail to get is it can make a lot of sense to split "server applications" between "services" and user apps to monitor/control. Thus you can end up with Windows servers which need to permenently logged in with various apps running or even such daftness as anti-virus/spyware which will only attempt to do updates if someone is logged in (worst case senario only if someone is logged in as a privileged user.)
For more examples, Linux doesn't let any program rampantly change the registry, or set itself to run on startup (and that's the main problem with Windows). (In fact for another example, Linux doesn't even have a bloated difficult-to-recover, easy-to-corrupt settings file for all programs). This probably comes back to the fact that Linux users do not normally use root, while Windows users almost always use Admin.
This is also an implimentation issue. There is nothing to stop a Windows application completly ignoring the Registry and using text configuration files. There are, no doubt ported from unix, Windows applications which do this.
What if a crazy man just straps some bombs on, walks up to the security checkpoint and sets himself off? There's no security check to protect the first security check. Better add one.
What you'd need would be explosive detectors at the main doors to the airport. But also at train stations, sports stadiums, etc. There is no reason to assume that suicide bombers (or the people who pick their targets) are obsessed with air travel.
You also need a low rate of false positives. As well as being able to deal with the situation of a bomb carrier who does not realise they are carrying a bomb. e.g. "Deliver this package for me and I'll pay you when you come back".
hows about this you setup your rig it gets put in the cargo hold and then at 30K it goes off and turns into a glob of metal
Thermite creates moltern iron. Which will follow the force of gravity until it encounters something strong (and heat resistant enough) to stop it.
1 fire on the plane torch the luggage (fail the airframe)
Even if the luggage is entirely flame retardant it's unlikely to do much to stop the molten iron.
2 very large hole in the plane (the cargo hold drops to not many psi or 0.0?? atmospheres)
The cargo hold has the same pressurisation as the cabin. Which measured as an altitude of 8,000 feet.
4 depending on what the plane is doing you might hit a fuel tank (fails the airframe OOH NIFTY KABOOM)
The only thing in any fuel tank which can explode is the fuel vapour/air mixture in the top of the tank. Then only if the fuel vapour and air are mixed in the right ratio. Airliner fuel tanks are unpressurised and vented. About the only chance of a fuel/air explosion would be from termite placed in the cabin above the centre wing tank. The complication is that a soon as the molten iron entered the tank it would be followed by higher preassure air from the cabin. Thus you'd need an explosive mixture to exist before the iron fell into the liquid fuel.
Okay, well, thermite is some really fun stuff, but it's hardly an explosive. Damned hot molten iron, to be sure, but it's not going to go "ka-boom". Or do you know something I don't?
Melting through the skin of an airliner in flight is quite likely to cause an explosive decompression. Possibly more dangerous if set off above the cargo areas than the Centre Wing Tank.
With some research, you may even be able to use your kitchen microwave to generate some fusion reactions.
Just hope no-one misunderstands this and forces everyone buying a microwave to prove they are not a terrorist trying to produce a thermonuclear weapon.
They had this on the BBC yesterday too, I think in the morning they had suggested everyone microwave their sponges and then in the evening news they had a man with a ginger mustache from ROSPA who said that he wouldn't advise microwaving sponges because there is no setting on microwaves for sponges
The typical microwave has settings for two paramaters. How long to microwave something for and how much power to use (the latter usually done by turning the magnetron on and off with a certain mark/space ratio). If you had a button for everything you could cook the control panel would be huge.
Maybe they should first get someone who has actually used a microwave...
Just a few months ago my friend put a bag of microwaveable popcorn into the microwave and left it for a few minutes. He came back and the microwave was smoking and the bag was on fire. Apparently the butter and kernels stuck together and burned.
What did the instructions say? Could they have been along the lines of "open bag, put contents into bowl, put bowl into microwave"...
The microwave steralizes the wet sponge because it makes the water hot enough to kill anything living. The same effect can be had by dunking the sponge in a pot of boiling water.
Using a pot of boiling water would need the sponge to stay in for quite a while, probably held down with a wooden spoon, then you need to safely remove a sponge soaked in boiling water. Using a microwave uses less energy and probably carries less risk of personal injury.
It's all about expecting people to use abilities they don't have, like the ability to fly, or the ability to understand something complex they know nothing about.
Or even the ability to read instructions! Which is why the likes of Brainiac state "Don't try this at home" when demonstrating what not to put in a microwave. (Though they might consider having someone other than Richard Hammond do the warning.)
Expecting them to use their understanding of microwaves would be like asking President Bush to use his understanding of diplomacy.
The last two words of this sentence are most likely redundant.
How else did they expect it to work?
To the average person a microwave is a magic box which makes food hot. In theory without heating the container. (Except that heat can travel by conduction and some materials can be heated perfectly well by microwaves.)
Microwaves have a wave length measured in the centimetre. The size of a bacterial spore is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller The size of a bateria is a lot smaller than this again.
I'm not sure about bacterial spores being larger than live bacteria. A spore has no cytoplasm, just DNA in a tough shell.
This means that if you wanted to destroy the blighters with radiation alone you have to choose a frequency a lot higher than microwaves,
You also need a much higher radiation flux, bacteria (espcially inspored ones) can be quite tough. As well as there being a risk of mutating something harmless into something dangerous. The vast majority of bacteria cannot survive inside mammals in the first place.
I don't know if all the US is like this, but every spawling area that I've been to in the US is insanely pedestrian unfriendly. There are very few crosswalks on major roads, forcing people to dash across, typically to an offramp that has "no pedestrians" signs on it, even though there is no pedestrian access ways nearby.
The US also has the concept of "jaywalking" where crossing the road in the "wrong" place has the risk of being assaulted by police as well as any traffic hazards.
Compare this to Australia and Europe, where there is as much urban sprawl as the worst parts of the US but every road has a sidewalk, every set of lights has a crosswalk, and foot bridges and tunnels are commonplace.
Even if these wern't there certainly in Europe pedestrians have right of way over motorised traffic. Be it crossing the road or walking along the road. Any driver who were to hit a pedestrian with their car would be considered to blame under virtually all circumstances.
The Amendments are part of the constitution. They are called amendments because they were amended on to the constitution. Just like when there are amendments to a bill.
The version which stands is the most recently ammended version however. e.g. the "Commerce Clause" is subservient to the 10th ammendment. Copyright and patents are subservient to freedom of speach.
Natural rights are not granted by the Constitution or any other document. Freedom of Speech was not 'granted' by the Constitution in 1789, and is still is not granted today. It exists because it is a natural right. The First Amendment is an explicit protection of rights, but it is not a granting of rights. You can't be granted something that you already have!
The First Ammendment is actually a restriction on the ability of The US Congress to pass laws. i.e. "Congress shall pass no law..." It is also a restriction on how law enforcement may apply such laws. Even a law otherwise Constitutional becomes unconstitutional were it to be used to do any of the things the First Ammendment states laws passed by Congress cannot do.