Arms dealers don't pay taxes and they have no problem not reporting anything going on.
Nor do they have "background checks" and "awaiting periods".
The more you go out of your way to 'ban' or 'tax' things like this, the harder it becomes for the government to monitor because they people will ALWAYS take the easiest/safest path for themselves, which won't be the legal one... which instantly means they can no longer be honest.
You can't 'ban' something a significant portion of the population wants, well you can, just won't be very effective.
Which is something governments never apper to learn. Otherwise the only place you'd be able to find out about drug prohibition would be a history book.
HFCS - high fructose corn syrup is what happened to the US Midwest, not sugar. That hfcs shit is nasty and doesn't taste as good as sugar.
But has a powerful lobby in the US.
Evolutuion knows what to do with cane sugar; HFCS, notsomuch.
How easy is it to get sucrose out of sugar cane compared with getting "corn syrup" out of maize anyway? It certainly appears to be the cqase that humans and fructose are not a good mix.
Except that counting calories isn't all there is to good nutrition, which is needed if you want that weight loss to be at all permanent.
At best doing so is a gross approximation. That's before you consider that the methods used do not take account of things like humans inability to digest cellulose (and other things which may well happen to burn in pure oxygen.) Also often ignored is the possibility of foods containing "drugs" which affect digestion and metabolic processes.
It's not a bad idea, but I think focusing on any one statistic like that is missing the point, and is also likely to lead to even more artificial garbage. Remember Olestra?
Olestra would come out very high in "calories" using regular testing. However the human gut hasn't evolved to handle indigestable sucrose based esters. The bacteria used in sewage treatment havn't either. Thus you have an alien compound to remove from drinking water.
Yeah, the solution isn't to make "diet" versions of everything, the solution is to make saner "regular" versions, and stop consuming stuff you don't need. Diet may be better than regular,
In some cases "diet" may be considerably worst than regular. It's also often the cae that "low fat" can equate to "high crab", "high salt", etc.
One of the videos on YouTube shows a bunch of students, bystanders, not looters, not even demonstrators, watching from a stairwell, trapped above and below by cops, then gassed. Complete SNAFU. Those cops should be fired.
That's too kind. They should at least be jailed if not gassed too.
Were you a peaceful protester your opinion ought to be heard. Were you a rioter, responding to you with violence is justified. As far as I'm concerned initiating violence removes your right to demand legal protection until such time as you stop and return to peaceful methods.
What should happen if violence is initiated by the police? Or if there appear to be agents provocateurs involved?
There is a difference between not investigating and how much resources you put into an investigation. If anyone else was caught using a weapon on another person or an animal they would be investigated. The police should be no different, whenever they use a weapon they should be investigated.
Since police are issued with weapons and given training on appropriate use of weapons it makes sense that potential misuse by police officers should be something of a priority.
The amount of resources used in the investigation should be determined by the preliminary investigation. If it becomes obvious in the preliminary investigation that there was an imminent threat to the officer or another citizen then what tool (weapon) they chose in the moment to eliminate the threat (gun, Taser, baton, fists, 2x4 that was nearby) is less important and should draw fewer resources. On the other hand if there is substantiated evidence that the officer was the one who escalated the situation by bringing a weapon into the situation, where it was unnecessary, then there should be a lot more resources for the investigation of abuse of power.
In the latter case the "officer" should be treated as a "criminal suspect".
There should be a requirement for ANY use of "non-lethal" weapons to be investigated as if it were the same as a lethal weapon.
This was the original claim behind issuing police with "less lethal" weapons.
Unless the cop would have used lethal force IN THE SAME SITUATION if "non-lethal" weapons were not available then the use of the "non-lethal" weapon should be enough to get said cop suspended.
I don't think they should be simply "suspended". Instead they should be treated at least as harshly as a member of the public who who discharged a firearm in such a way.
True, but: there is a mental (and often legal) barrier for the use of any weapon, and the less harmful a weapon is perceived to be, the lower that barrier is. Google "taser death" or "pepper spray injury"; cops perceive tasers and pepper spray to be harmless, so they use them indiscriminately.
There's also the issue of the consequences of misusing a weapon. Which often appear to be less for "cops" than for regular people. Actions which would get someone arrested and facing a criminal court may have police officers (or even their employer) facing a fine.
And speaking of indiscriminate use, there is also the matter of target discrimination: you have to mentally pick a person to strike with a baton and then physically hit him. You have to aim every rubber bullet you fire. This? Just sweep the entire crowd with the sound cannon - after all, it's harmless!
If it's so harmless would it be acceptable for the protestors to point one at the police? How about the protestors having rubber bullets, CS gas, batons, etc...
I think taxing corporations is pointless. For example if Washington State pisses off Microsoft, then they will simply move somewhere else
They'll pay the taxes if that is cheaper than moving. The real issue with a monopoly like Microsoft is that if you tax (or fine) them it's the customers who will end up paying.
run a movie theatre and send and receive a lot of freight (film cans and advertising materials) by bus. I have an account with the provincial bus company so they send me a bill once per month containing all of the waybills for that month.
This story goes back several years, as you will see.
Originally, I got a monthly bill that consisted of a strip of adding machine paper stapled to an invoice that totalled up my waybills for the month. Then the bus company decided to modernize and send out bills printed by computer, which were apparently aggregated by having a computer in each bus depot send in each days transactions by modem to a central computer that printed the monthly bills.
For the next year and a half, I got bills for anywhere from $10 to $30/month, nowhere near the $600-plus that I usually spent on bus freight.
18 months later I got a (manually generated) bill for $13,000.
The bus company has since stayed with manually generated bills and has never tried to computerize that part of their operation again.
This may have been a while ago, but it still appears to follow the "modern" idea of buying lots of hardware and software then trying to do something useful with it. As opposed to the old fashioned approach of "systems analysis".
If it is that resilient and fast growing, you will not be able to control it anyhow. Many, many examples of invasive species throughout the world show this. So, just learn how to harvest it and make biodiesel/biogas/electricity out of it.
It apparently burns even when green. So using it to fuel a powerstation is the most obvious use. BR> No intensive agriculture, ferilizers or herbicides needed.
Considering how much herbicide is needed to kill it it's only a matter of time before resistance evolves.
XXIX: Intentional circumvention of the preceding by the government or its agents should be chargeable as TREASON to all voluntarily participating parties,
Actually it should probably say high treason.
will the maximum sentence for such to be execution, implemented with utmost haste.
As a practical matter removing the innocent then bombing DC might be the most effective way to go about things.
why does the judge even need the Title. If a court orders it forfeit, can't they just issue something like a "court's lien" to the county department of deeds... the feds seem to do it all the time with no trouble.
Especially if he's in a position of not needing it for a while.
Rather like the lock company demanding he reimburse them the cost of redesigning their badly designed locks?
With or without proof that a) they actually changed the lock and b) whatever changes they made were relevent to the defect in question. If they discovered something else wrong in the process or made some unrelated changes isn't that their problem.
You explain the current situation rather well. I'd much prefer a system where IP, like patents, lasts a fixed period from being produced rather than the rather strange system of years from death. The ability to control your IP for 10, 15 or 20 years seems fair to reward the author, the current system that can leave works under copyright for 100 years can only stiffle the creation of more and better works.
It gets even dafter when you consider that a copyright can outlast any copy of the item in question. Copyright libraries simply cannot do their intended job because they cannot track when authors die. Especially if there are multiple authors or psudonyms are used. Whereas having a statement along the lines of "Public domain from 22nd September 2009." makes things easy.
Don't you have that backwards? Although the ideal is to let these works become public domain upon the artist's death, the second best choice for holder of the copyrights should be the SON of the creator, not some cold soulless corporation.
It would really be far simpler to go back to the idea of copyright lasting for a certain period of time from the first publication. Indeed having the death of the author be any kind of factor is an utter nonsense according to what many copyright laws (including that in the US) are claimed to be about.
Well, that's half anyway; really the basis of copyright is encouraging authors to create and publish the most, in exchange for the least copyright, so as to maximize the net public benefit.
AFAIK nobody has even tried to find out what the optimal copyright term might be to do this.
A work cannot benefit the public unless it is both created, just so it exists, and published, so that people beyond the author can actually get and use it.
Thing is that the publishing industry isn't always very good at doing this. As evidenced by very popular works which had a hard time getting initially published.
Because the author apparently misjudged the value of his copyright. He should've held out for more. The publisher apparently was the wiser party to the agreement. But it was a voluntary agreement. No one twisted the arm of the author. He was happy enough with the deal to sign on the dotted line. Hindsight is no excuse for breaking the deal without consequences.
Not that much different from publishers (and others) wanting extensions of existing copyright terms. Even though all parties were happy with the original deal decades ago.
Because then they'd lose their rights to Mickey Mouse, whose creator died 40 years ago. Heaven forbid Mickey fall into the public domain where anyone could use him to create fresh new stories. The horror. The horror.
How many fresh stories has Disney produced with The Mouse recently anyway?
The Sale of Goods Act in the UK places the responsibility on the retailer, not Sony.
Note that anything Sony offers is in addition to the responsibility of the retailer.
It also allows the consumer to claim against the retailer for up to six years after purchase.
Depending on the type of goods in question. Durable goods, which includes solid state electronics, being those where the maximum amount of time may be applicable.
When it comes right down to it the only way to stop anything from "assist[ing] copyright infringement" is to ban all energy, without movement data cannot be transferred hence no copies! Now how much energy will it take to cool Brazil down to absolute zero?
In one of our offices, failure to lock your screen means you'll send an email proposing your sexual favours to a bunch of same sex colleagues for a modicum of money.
Or presumably opposite sex ones if they are known to be gay.
Second offender in the same day makes the same offer, but to both sexes, and for a lower amount.
What happens if they actually are a cheap bisexual?
Um, what are they going to do if the drinking water on the ISS shows up as toxic? It's not like they can get any more in a hurry.
If they have fuel cells on board these provide pure water independent of the recycling system. There are also at least two separate water recycling systems on board. If all else fails the crew can return to Earth.
The test won't show whether the sieve is working, it'll just show whether you put the right number of iodine droplets in your bucket of filtered river water. Yeah, this is about as innovative as those paper strips you use to check the chlorine level in your pool.
The concentration in a pool is rather higher than for drinking water, since people don't swim in drinking water. Some pool systems use bromine. In theory you could use iodine but it would be far more expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
Arms dealers don't pay taxes and they have no problem not reporting anything going on.
... which instantly means they can no longer be honest.
Nor do they have "background checks" and "awaiting periods".
The more you go out of your way to 'ban' or 'tax' things like this, the harder it becomes for the government to monitor because they people will ALWAYS take the easiest/safest path for themselves, which won't be the legal one
You can't 'ban' something a significant portion of the population wants, well you can, just won't be very effective.
Which is something governments never apper to learn. Otherwise the only place you'd be able to find out about drug prohibition would be a history book.
HFCS - high fructose corn syrup is what happened to the US Midwest, not sugar. That hfcs shit is nasty and doesn't taste as good as sugar.
But has a powerful lobby in the US.
Evolutuion knows what to do with cane sugar; HFCS, notsomuch.
How easy is it to get sucrose out of sugar cane compared with getting "corn syrup" out of maize anyway?
It certainly appears to be the cqase that humans and fructose are not a good mix.
Except that counting calories isn't all there is to good nutrition, which is needed if you want that weight loss to be at all permanent.
At best doing so is a gross approximation. That's before you consider that the methods used do not take account of things like humans inability to digest cellulose (and other things which may well happen to burn in pure oxygen.) Also often ignored is the possibility of foods containing "drugs" which affect digestion and metabolic processes.
It's not a bad idea, but I think focusing on any one statistic like that is missing the point, and is also likely to lead to even more artificial garbage. Remember Olestra?
Olestra would come out very high in "calories" using regular testing. However the human gut hasn't evolved to handle indigestable sucrose based esters. The bacteria used in sewage treatment havn't either. Thus you have an alien compound to remove from drinking water.
Yeah, the solution isn't to make "diet" versions of everything, the solution is to make saner "regular" versions, and stop consuming stuff you don't need. Diet may be better than regular,
In some cases "diet" may be considerably worst than regular. It's also often the cae that "low fat" can equate to "high crab", "high salt", etc.
One of the videos on YouTube shows a bunch of students, bystanders, not looters, not even demonstrators, watching from a stairwell, trapped above and below by cops, then gassed. Complete SNAFU. Those cops should be fired.
That's too kind. They should at least be jailed if not gassed too.
Were you a peaceful protester your opinion ought to be heard. Were you a rioter, responding to you with violence is justified. As far as I'm concerned initiating violence removes your right to demand legal protection until such time as you stop and return to peaceful methods.
What should happen if violence is initiated by the police? Or if there appear to be agents provocateurs involved?
There is a difference between not investigating and how much resources you put into an investigation. If anyone else was caught using a weapon on another person or an animal they would be investigated. The police should be no different, whenever they use a weapon they should be investigated.
Since police are issued with weapons and given training on appropriate use of weapons it makes sense that potential misuse by police officers should be something of a priority.
The amount of resources used in the investigation should be determined by the preliminary investigation. If it becomes obvious in the preliminary investigation that there was an imminent threat to the officer or another citizen then what tool (weapon) they chose in the moment to eliminate the threat (gun, Taser, baton, fists, 2x4 that was nearby) is less important and should draw fewer resources. On the other hand if there is substantiated evidence that the officer was the one who escalated the situation by bringing a weapon into the situation, where it was unnecessary, then there should be a lot more resources for the investigation of abuse of power.
In the latter case the "officer" should be treated as a "criminal suspect".
There should be a requirement for ANY use of "non-lethal" weapons to be investigated as if it were the same as a lethal weapon.
This was the original claim behind issuing police with "less lethal" weapons.
Unless the cop would have used lethal force IN THE SAME SITUATION if "non-lethal" weapons were not available then the use of the "non-lethal" weapon should be enough to get said cop suspended.
I don't think they should be simply "suspended". Instead they should be treated at least as harshly as a member of the public who who discharged a firearm in such a way.
True, but: there is a mental (and often legal) barrier for the use of any weapon, and the less harmful a weapon is perceived to be, the lower that barrier is. Google "taser death" or "pepper spray injury"; cops perceive tasers and pepper spray to be harmless, so they use them indiscriminately.
There's also the issue of the consequences of misusing a weapon. Which often appear to be less for "cops" than for regular people. Actions which would get someone arrested and facing a criminal court may have police officers (or even their employer) facing a fine.
And speaking of indiscriminate use, there is also the matter of target discrimination: you have to mentally pick a person to strike with a baton and then physically hit him. You have to aim every rubber bullet you fire. This? Just sweep the entire crowd with the sound cannon - after all, it's harmless!
If it's so harmless would it be acceptable for the protestors to point one at the police? How about the protestors having rubber bullets, CS gas, batons, etc...
I think taxing corporations is pointless. For example if Washington State pisses off Microsoft, then they will simply move somewhere else
They'll pay the taxes if that is cheaper than moving. The real issue with a monopoly like Microsoft is that if you tax (or fine) them it's the customers who will end up paying.
run a movie theatre and send and receive a lot of freight (film cans and advertising materials) by bus. I have an account with the provincial bus company so they send me a bill once per month containing all of the waybills for that month. This story goes back several years, as you will see.
Originally, I got a monthly bill that consisted of a strip of adding machine paper stapled to an invoice that totalled up my waybills for the month. Then the bus company decided to modernize and send out bills printed by computer, which were apparently aggregated by having a computer in each bus depot send in each days transactions by modem to a central computer that printed the monthly bills.
For the next year and a half, I got bills for anywhere from $10 to $30/month, nowhere near the $600-plus that I usually spent on bus freight.
18 months later I got a (manually generated) bill for $13,000.
The bus company has since stayed with manually generated bills and has never tried to computerize that part of their operation again.
This may have been a while ago, but it still appears to follow the "modern" idea of buying lots of hardware and software then trying to do something useful with it.
As opposed to the old fashioned approach of "systems analysis".
If it is that resilient and fast growing, you will not be able to control it anyhow. Many, many examples of invasive species throughout the world show this. So, just learn how to harvest it and make biodiesel/biogas/electricity out of it.
It apparently burns even when green. So using it to fuel a powerstation is the most obvious use.
BR> No intensive agriculture, ferilizers or herbicides needed.
Considering how much herbicide is needed to kill it it's only a matter of time before resistance evolves.
XXIX: Intentional circumvention of the preceding by the government or its agents should be chargeable as TREASON to all voluntarily participating parties,
Actually it should probably say high treason.
will the maximum sentence for such to be execution, implemented with utmost haste.
As a practical matter removing the innocent then bombing DC might be the most effective way to go about things.
I've been getting calls from 202-495-7152 for about a week now, several times a day, and if I ask them to stop calling they hang up.
Maybe you should say that you are delighted that they have accepted your "call review service" at $X per call plus $Y per minute.
I stayed on the line to see what it's about and it's one of those, "You won a million dollars, send us $10,000 for shipping insurance" scams.
In which case you have an address to send them an invoice.
why does the judge even need the Title. If a court orders it forfeit, can't they just issue something like a "court's lien" to the county department of deeds... the feds seem to do it all the time with no trouble.
Especially if he's in a position of not needing it for a while.
Rather like the lock company demanding he reimburse them the cost of redesigning their badly designed locks?
With or without proof that a) they actually changed the lock and b) whatever changes they made were relevent to the defect in question. If they discovered something else wrong in the process or made some unrelated changes isn't that their problem.
You explain the current situation rather well. I'd much prefer a system where IP, like patents, lasts a fixed period from being produced rather than the rather strange system of years from death. The ability to control your IP for 10, 15 or 20 years seems fair to reward the author, the current system that can leave works under copyright for 100 years can only stiffle the creation of more and better works.
It gets even dafter when you consider that a copyright can outlast any copy of the item in question. Copyright libraries simply cannot do their intended job because they cannot track when authors die. Especially if there are multiple authors or psudonyms are used. Whereas having a statement along the lines of "Public domain from 22nd September 2009." makes things easy.
Don't you have that backwards? Although the ideal is to let these works become public domain upon the artist's death, the second best choice for holder of the copyrights should be the SON of the creator, not some cold soulless corporation.
It would really be far simpler to go back to the idea of copyright lasting for a certain period of time from the first publication. Indeed having the death of the author be any kind of factor is an utter nonsense according to what many copyright laws (including that in the US) are claimed to be about.
Well, that's half anyway; really the basis of copyright is encouraging authors to create and publish the most, in exchange for the least copyright, so as to maximize the net public benefit.
AFAIK nobody has even tried to find out what the optimal copyright term might be to do this.
A work cannot benefit the public unless it is both created, just so it exists, and published, so that people beyond the author can actually get and use it.
Thing is that the publishing industry isn't always very good at doing this. As evidenced by very popular works which had a hard time getting initially published.
Because the author apparently misjudged the value of his copyright. He should've held out for more. The publisher apparently was the wiser party to the agreement. But it was a voluntary agreement. No one twisted the arm of the author. He was happy enough with the deal to sign on the dotted line. Hindsight is no excuse for breaking the deal without consequences.
Not that much different from publishers (and others) wanting extensions of existing copyright terms. Even though all parties were happy with the original deal decades ago.
Because then they'd lose their rights to Mickey Mouse, whose creator died 40 years ago. Heaven forbid Mickey fall into the public domain where anyone could use him to create fresh new stories. The horror. The horror.
How many fresh stories has Disney produced with The Mouse recently anyway?
The Sale of Goods Act in the UK places the responsibility on the retailer, not Sony.
Note that anything Sony offers is in addition to the responsibility of the retailer.
It also allows the consumer to claim against the retailer for up to six years after purchase.
Depending on the type of goods in question. Durable goods, which includes solid state electronics, being those where the maximum amount of time may be applicable.
When it comes right down to it the only way to stop anything from "assist[ing] copyright infringement" is to ban all energy, without movement data cannot be transferred hence no copies! Now how much energy will it take to cool Brazil down to absolute zero?
You'd only really need to do that to the lawyers.
Other common distinctions are whether the burglary was of a residence or a commercial building.
Also if the burglary is carrying a weapon or something they could easily use as a weapon.
In one of our offices, failure to lock your screen means you'll send an email proposing your sexual favours to a bunch of same sex colleagues for a modicum of money.
Or presumably opposite sex ones if they are known to be gay.
Second offender in the same day makes the same offer, but to both sexes, and for a lower amount.
What happens if they actually are a cheap bisexual?
Um, what are they going to do if the drinking water on the ISS shows up as toxic? It's not like they can get any more in a hurry.
If they have fuel cells on board these provide pure water independent of the recycling system. There are also at least two separate water recycling systems on board. If all else fails the crew can return to Earth.
The test won't show whether the sieve is working, it'll just show whether you put the right number of iodine droplets in your bucket of filtered river water. Yeah, this is about as innovative as those paper strips you use to check the chlorine level in your pool.
The concentration in a pool is rather higher than for drinking water, since people don't swim in drinking water. Some pool systems use bromine. In theory you could use iodine but it would be far more expensive.