Until the budget is balanced, we don't need shit like this.
So you'll happily accept cutting your ridiculous military expenditure right? You spend more than the next 10 countries combined, most of which goes to military contractors on cost+ contracts. How about a 10% cut. That's $60B, not counting what you spend on the Iraq and Afghanistan boondoogles, they're not paid for either.
Or allow the government to negotiate drug and medical procedure prices with private industry and use its negotiating power as a large buyer in Medicare/Tricare right? You expect government to buy everything else at the cheapest possible price, why subsidize pharmaceuticals?
Or stop subsidizing ethanol production which promotes overproduction, artificial food inflation by diverting food production to uneconomic fuel production and socializes rural industry at the cost of urban individuals?
All of those would save substantially more than you are worried about in terms of year-on-year expenditure. But it doesn't fit into everyone's "omg the sky is falling" bullshit.
Even then I say balance the budget and pay down the debt first.
Why? Most of the debt you owe to yourselves. You can borrow from yourselves and the world at 3%. Balancing the budget is easy. Halve your military... there's $300 billion / year. Allow Medicare to negotiate prices as a single payer and stop subsidizing the medical industry. There's another chunk of change.
Stop subsidizing ethanol production to maintain congresscritter seats in mid-west states. The subsidies are totally wasteful, cause food production costs to rise, and are an urban sop to the rural minority.
Balancing the budget is exactly the wrong thing to do as a Federal government during a recession. Government spending (and borrowing) is only bad when it takes away from private capacity. There is no pressure on interest rates to go up because the government is crowding out private borrowing. There is no pressure on labor capacity by the government creating jobs and crowding out private job creation.
In other words, stop wasting money on unproductive subsidies and start actually using government funds for things that improve infrastructure, reduce economic inefficiences and assist in job creation and industrial renewal.
a) Of the people who filed to squash the subpoena, 3 of the 4 people actually revealed the pertinent information (name, address etc) as part of their filings b) That the subpoena was for the ISP to reveal name and address c) That fulfilling the subpoena was not burdensome d) That the time and place to defend against the accusation would be after the plaintiff actually filed to litigate against individuals
Sounds to me like at this point in the process, it's a solid ruling on the merits. Of course, once the plaintiff refiles against an individual, they can respond to the accusation with (in roughly this order):
* this court doesn't have jurisdiction * you don't have standing to sue me in the US * you can't prove (on balance of probabilities) it was my IP address at the time without getting the ISP to reveal my traffic through them * you can't prove (on balance of probabilities) that my equipment wasn't a) hacked or b) setup in accordance with the ISPs instructions so any possible downloading was by intrusion on their equipment (ie, it's their fault) * If it was on my IP, you can't prove which individual was connected to that IP at the time (wifi etc) * if I did download it, you can't prove I infringed your copyright (is downloading an infringement) * If I infringed your copyright, you can't prove there was any financial loss * If there was financial loss, it was minimal * If it was minimal, then the case should never have been brought at this level and it should be refiled in small claims (or equivalent)
"letting it seed" isn't transmitting it ("making available") or copying it. It's made available once (seeded), and then each individual downloading is infringing. This means that even if they do manage to prosecute an individual, it will be for one copy made (if they catch them downloading), and one making available (if they catch them seeding).
That severely limits the potential liability, makes it a civil offence, not a criminal one and probably not worth the studio's time.
Which part of deficit spending don't you understand? You think your taxes have paid for all that lovely money showered on Halliburton et al over the past 8 years?
The people who are paying for this aren't born yet. I guess you think that's an argument against Roe v Wade too?
I am sure they would love to ignore the Republicans... Unlike the House rules, however, the senate requires 60 votes to get anything substantial done. Meaning, they have something called filibuster rules that allow individual senators to slow/stop bills in its tracks...
No, it means that if the Republicans want to filibuster, the Democrats should let them try.
Make them stand there and talk and read the phone book and carry on. Cloture requires 60 votes, otherwise debate continues until no one wants to speak anymore. The Democrats should just call the Republican's bluff.
That is so much Fox Noise bullshit talking points.
That era is now over, thanks to Congress.
No, that era is now over, thanks to a de-regulated market that used securitization to not only spread risk but to totally disconnect any responsibility for loan quality from the ultimate lenders.
Not to mention that the de-regulation of financial services allowed monolithic structures to be created that are "too big to fail" requiring the badly managed "bailout".
Now, tax cuts - in a normal economic environment - do stimulate the economy.
That's why it made so much sense to cut taxes at the same time as you're trying to fund two land wars.
And it was entirely ACORN's fault that complete de-regulation of the financial market led to fraud and inappropriate incentives for loan sellers to get bad loans and securitize them, taking a commission and absolving them of responsibility.
And it was the government's fault, not the so-called "rating agencies" that these bad loans were packaged and sold as triple A rated.
Face it, the last 8 years were a clusterfuck of enormous proportions. Republicans are convinced that government is a bad idea, and whenever they're in power, they do their best to prove it.
How come Cleveland has more spending on its public schools than most other G8 nations, but they are all shitholes. Maybe the students are stupid and unwilling to learn? Maybe they come from a culture that denegrates education before it even starts?
Maybe because parents don't want their precious snowflakes egos to be upset by having to work hard?
Democrats... continue to spend billions on an arts and media that does nothing but continually denegrate culture, learning, and refinement?
This the NEA that Republicans always bitching about? The one that pays for art and orchestras and stuff? The one with the 144 *million* dollar budget? That's about 50 cents for each of you a year...
So maybe take some of that money you waste on spending in the military (more than the next 45 countries *combined*) and spend it on education or bi-lingual teaching materials.
Having the "legal" population learn Spanish wouldn't hurt them either. You could have ESL and SSL classes.
Did you ever consider the reason *why* those kids are in the country? Maybe some foreign aid would help? Oh, no, better to spend it on a pointless fence and yet more pseudo-military forces.
No, much easier to just bitch about it. There's no way that all those illegals are going anywhere, cheap labor is needed to do the stuff that you guys are too proud to do yourselves.
No, Bush was spending like a *Republican*. Tax cuts and bigger government. Government grew under Reagan and under Bush I and under Bush II.
Economy has done better under Democrats back 100 years, middle class has done better under Democrats.
Middle class is being wiped out by the "trickle down" bullshit. If the middle class gets decimated, then the economy really is fucked. Who's going to buy stuff to keep the rich rich?
The king has pardoned almost anyone convicted of Leste Majesty in recent years, Thai and Farang alike.
He better pardon the poor bastard from Australia that wrote one sentence in a book that sold 7 copies that got sentenced to 3 years jail. The sentence in question referred to a non-existent, fictional junior prince.
"lese majesty" is a bullshit offence. The King of Thailand earned respect, he doesn't need a law.
Actually, there is. There's 2 bodies that do censorship in Australia.
OFLC reviews media for compliance. It's an independent body that reports to Parliament.
ACMA is responsible for online/broadcast regulation. It answers to the Minister for Communications (ie Conroy). It refers things that it thinks need to be classified to the OFLC.
Australia doesn't have free speech anyway, except that hinted at in the Magna Carta and common law.
Not quite true... The Aussie High Court says that there is an "implied" right to free political speech in the Australian Constitution. It came out of a case where the government tried to ban political ads for a certain amount of time before an election.
Java is a statically typed language, has only just recently implemented generics in any form and suffers from stupidities like not having its basic types (eg int) be objects.
Javascript has a logical implementation of OO based on prototyping, allowing for "duck typing" (if it looks like a duck...).
It's a functional language, allowing for closures and other very useful programming structures. Once you've understood them and used them, you won't go back and you'll feel like you're programming in a straightjacket in any language that doesn't support them.
It suffers from browser limitations with incompatibilities in the DOM model (something that applies to any language that runs in the browser) and Microsoft's inability to implement CSS correctly. The other limitation is being single threaded within the browser, which can cause problems with XMLHttpRequests and other background tasks.
These limitations could be fixed, and there are libraries that provide cross-browser compatibility and workarounds transparently (eg prototype).
Java and C# are the "toy" languages, with their hand-holding of programmers. OO is a useful paradigm, but static typing leads to bloat and incomprehensible templating efforts. But they have the library/IDE support that Javascript doesn't.
Vendors don't like Javascript because it doesn't "lock in" programmers to their server-side implementations. If you want to see what can be done with Javascript when it does have full library support and isn't "sandboxed", then look at Firefox. Most of the UI is Javascript driven.
IANALBIDWT (I Am Not A Lawyer, But I Deal With Them)
Let me dissect your analysis of the analysis...
First, algorithms have always been held to be inherently unpatentable. The problem is not that computer algorithms are reducible to a machine. The problem is that they are implemented on a general purpose machine. The idea of a general purpose machine is a patentable idea (lets not get into arguing that Turing is an algorithm, reductio ad absurdum). But having achieved a general purpose machine, ideas and/or algorithms reduced to concrete form by using that machine should not be patentable. The Jacquard loom was a general purpose weaving machine. The idea of using the cards to decide which hooks to use is patentable. But patterns expressed in those cards is not.
Second, copyright doesn't only protect a particular implementation of an algorithm. Depending on the court and circuit, there are differing abstraction and filtration tests, mise en scene tests, implementation dictated by external effects tests etc that either remove copyright or enhance it.
Third, I don't have an argument with your argument concernign disclosure. However, once the basic problem of allowing patenting of algorithms and/or business processes is resolved (hopefully by not allowing them), the disclosure issue is moot.
Fourth, the problem with litigation is what is accepted as "prior art" in the field of algorithmic and process patents. If the patent offices are willing to accept a new area of patentability, as they have with these sorts of patents, then it is only fair that they accept new inclusions of definitions of "prior art" that can be used to challenge these patents.
Fifth, the KSR opinion is like a breath of fresh air in the field of patentability. Triviality and obviousness are two different aspects that often combine in the area of software and business process patents. Most of the patents that so infuriate the software developers of the world are both.
Go get the degree. Just having the letters after your name is worth it to start, and the HECS fees won't hurt. At the same time, get a job at some corporate or small business as a part-time IT helpdesk or admin. The stuff you learn there will be much more useful than what you learn at Uni, but doesn't get your resume past the HR site filters.
Slashdot Mirror
Until the budget is balanced, we don't need shit like this.
So you'll happily accept cutting your ridiculous military expenditure right? You spend more than the next 10 countries combined, most of which goes to military contractors on cost+ contracts. How about a 10% cut. That's $60B, not counting what you spend on the Iraq and Afghanistan boondoogles, they're not paid for either.
Or allow the government to negotiate drug and medical procedure prices with private industry and use its negotiating power as a large buyer in Medicare/Tricare right? You expect government to buy everything else at the cheapest possible price, why subsidize pharmaceuticals?
Or stop subsidizing ethanol production which promotes overproduction, artificial food inflation by diverting food production to uneconomic fuel production and socializes rural industry at the cost of urban individuals?
All of those would save substantially more than you are worried about in terms of year-on-year expenditure. But it doesn't fit into everyone's "omg the sky is falling" bullshit.
Even then I say balance the budget and pay down the debt first.
Why? Most of the debt you owe to yourselves. You can borrow from yourselves and the world at 3%. Balancing the budget is easy. Halve your military... there's $300 billion / year. Allow Medicare to negotiate prices as a single payer and stop subsidizing the medical industry. There's another chunk of change.
Stop subsidizing ethanol production to maintain congresscritter seats in mid-west states. The subsidies are totally wasteful, cause food production costs to rise, and are an urban sop to the rural minority.
Balancing the budget is exactly the wrong thing to do as a Federal government during a recession. Government spending (and borrowing) is only bad when it takes away from private capacity. There is no pressure on interest rates to go up because the government is crowding out private borrowing. There is no pressure on labor capacity by the government creating jobs and crowding out private job creation.
In other words, stop wasting money on unproductive subsidies and start actually using government funds for things that improve infrastructure, reduce economic inefficiences and assist in job creation and industrial renewal.
IANAL
If you read the ruling, the judge said that:
a) Of the people who filed to squash the subpoena, 3 of the 4 people actually revealed the pertinent information (name, address etc) as part of their filings
b) That the subpoena was for the ISP to reveal name and address
c) That fulfilling the subpoena was not burdensome
d) That the time and place to defend against the accusation would be after the plaintiff actually filed to litigate against individuals
Sounds to me like at this point in the process, it's a solid ruling on the merits. Of course, once the plaintiff refiles against an individual, they can respond to the accusation with (in roughly this order):
* this court doesn't have jurisdiction
* you don't have standing to sue me in the US
* you can't prove (on balance of probabilities) it was my IP address at the time without getting the ISP to reveal my traffic through them
* you can't prove (on balance of probabilities) that my equipment wasn't a) hacked or b) setup in accordance with the ISPs instructions so any possible downloading was by intrusion on their equipment (ie, it's their fault)
* If it was on my IP, you can't prove which individual was connected to that IP at the time (wifi etc)
* if I did download it, you can't prove I infringed your copyright (is downloading an infringement)
* If I infringed your copyright, you can't prove there was any financial loss
* If there was financial loss, it was minimal
* If it was minimal, then the case should never have been brought at this level and it should be refiled in small claims (or equivalent)
Bankrupting the health insurance industry would be one of the most productive things you could do to assist the US economy.
You're absolutely right.
If your neighbor's house is burning down, why should you have to pay for the fire brigade to put it out.
If the girl next door is being raped, it's not your problem, so why should you pay for the police.
You're like that joke on the movie Airplane... "They bought their tickets, I say let 'em crash!"
What benefit do you get?
'cos it's all about you right?
I agree with you, you shouldn't have to buy health insurance. You should be taxed for it.
"letting it seed" isn't transmitting it ("making available") or copying it. It's made available once (seeded), and then each individual downloading is infringing. This means that even if they do manage to prosecute an individual, it will be for one copy made (if they catch them downloading), and one making available (if they catch them seeding).
That severely limits the potential liability, makes it a civil offence, not a criminal one and probably not worth the studio's time.
.gov is "non-national"? Since when?
The US Gov't has NEVER launched a large scale IT initiative, on time and on budget. If they have, post it.
I've heard that this internet thingy they've been working on at DARPA might be big one day...
Which part of deficit spending don't you understand? You think your taxes have paid for all that lovely money showered on Halliburton et al over the past 8 years?
The people who are paying for this aren't born yet. I guess you think that's an argument against Roe v Wade too?
A vote on a bill takes 50+1 to pass. A vote to stop debate on a bill and bring the bill to the vote takes 60.
The Democrats should just call the Republicans bluff. Which part of "you lost" isn't obvious?
I am sure they would love to ignore the Republicans... Unlike the House rules, however, the senate requires 60 votes to get anything substantial done. Meaning, they have something called filibuster rules that allow individual senators to slow/stop bills in its tracks...
No, it means that if the Republicans want to filibuster, the Democrats should let them try.
Make them stand there and talk and read the phone book and carry on. Cloture requires 60 votes, otherwise debate continues until no one wants to speak anymore. The Democrats should just call the Republican's bluff.
America is no longer a capitalist nation.
That is so much Fox Noise bullshit talking points.
That era is now over, thanks to Congress.
No, that era is now over, thanks to a de-regulated market that used securitization to not only spread risk but to totally disconnect any responsibility for loan quality from the ultimate lenders.
Not to mention that the de-regulation of financial services allowed monolithic structures to be created that are "too big to fail" requiring the badly managed "bailout".
Now, tax cuts - in a normal economic environment - do stimulate the economy.
That's why it made so much sense to cut taxes at the same time as you're trying to fund two land wars.
And it was entirely ACORN's fault that complete de-regulation of the financial market led to fraud and inappropriate incentives for loan sellers to get bad loans and securitize them, taking a commission and absolving them of responsibility.
And it was the government's fault, not the so-called "rating agencies" that these bad loans were packaged and sold as triple A rated.
Face it, the last 8 years were a clusterfuck of enormous proportions. Republicans are convinced that government is a bad idea, and whenever they're in power, they do their best to prove it.
How come Cleveland has more spending on its public schools than most other G8 nations, but they are all shitholes. Maybe the students are stupid and unwilling to learn? Maybe they come from a culture that denegrates education before it even starts?
Maybe because parents don't want their precious snowflakes egos to be upset by having to work hard?
Democrats ... continue to spend billions on an arts and media that does nothing but continually denegrate culture, learning, and refinement?
This the NEA that Republicans always bitching about? The one that pays for art and orchestras and stuff? The one with the 144 *million* dollar budget? That's about 50 cents for each of you a year...
So maybe take some of that money you waste on spending in the military (more than the next 45 countries *combined*) and spend it on education or bi-lingual teaching materials.
Having the "legal" population learn Spanish wouldn't hurt them either. You could have ESL and SSL classes.
Did you ever consider the reason *why* those kids are in the country? Maybe some foreign aid would help? Oh, no, better to spend it on a pointless fence and yet more pseudo-military forces.
No, much easier to just bitch about it. There's no way that all those illegals are going anywhere, cheap labor is needed to do the stuff that you guys are too proud to do yourselves.
Socialist my ass.
"I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization." - Oliver Wendell Holmes
No, Bush was spending like a *Republican*. Tax cuts and bigger government. Government grew under Reagan and under Bush I and under Bush II.
Economy has done better under Democrats back 100 years, middle class has done better under Democrats.
Middle class is being wiped out by the "trickle down" bullshit. If the middle class gets decimated, then the economy really is fucked. Who's going to buy stuff to keep the rich rich?
The king has pardoned almost anyone convicted of Leste Majesty in recent years, Thai and Farang alike.
He better pardon the poor bastard from Australia that wrote one sentence in a book that sold 7 copies that got sentenced to 3 years jail. The sentence in question referred to a non-existent, fictional junior prince.
"lese majesty" is a bullshit offence. The King of Thailand earned respect, he doesn't need a law.
Almost as stupid as blasphemy.
Actually, there is. There's 2 bodies that do censorship in Australia.
OFLC reviews media for compliance. It's an independent body that reports to Parliament.
ACMA is responsible for online/broadcast regulation. It answers to the Minister for Communications (ie Conroy). It refers things that it thinks need to be classified to the OFLC.
Actually, you're not required to vote. You're required to attend a voting place or submit an absentee ballot and get crossed off the electoral roll.
What you decide to record on your vote (including nothing at all) is up to you.
Australia doesn't have free speech anyway, except that hinted at in the Magna Carta and common law.
Not quite true... The Aussie High Court says that there is an "implied" right to free political speech in the Australian Constitution. It came out of a case where the government tried to ban political ads for a certain amount of time before an election.
Is that a metric elephant or imperial?
Java is a statically typed language, has only just recently implemented generics in any form and suffers from stupidities like not having its basic types (eg int) be objects.
Javascript has a logical implementation of OO based on prototyping, allowing for "duck typing" (if it looks like a duck...).
It's a functional language, allowing for closures and other very useful programming structures. Once you've understood them and used them, you won't go back and you'll feel like you're programming in a straightjacket in any language that doesn't support them.
It suffers from browser limitations with incompatibilities in the DOM model (something that applies to any language that runs in the browser) and Microsoft's inability to implement CSS correctly. The other limitation is being single threaded within the browser, which can cause problems with XMLHttpRequests and other background tasks.
These limitations could be fixed, and there are libraries that provide cross-browser compatibility and workarounds transparently (eg prototype).
Java and C# are the "toy" languages, with their hand-holding of programmers. OO is a useful paradigm, but static typing leads to bloat and incomprehensible templating efforts. But they have the library/IDE support that Javascript doesn't.
Vendors don't like Javascript because it doesn't "lock in" programmers to their server-side implementations. If you want to see what can be done with Javascript when it does have full library support and isn't "sandboxed", then look at Firefox. Most of the UI is Javascript driven.
IANALBIDWT (I Am Not A Lawyer, But I Deal With Them)
Let me dissect your analysis of the analysis...
First, algorithms have always been held to be inherently unpatentable. The problem is not that computer algorithms are reducible to a machine. The problem is that they are implemented on a general purpose machine. The idea of a general purpose machine is a patentable idea (lets not get into arguing that Turing is an algorithm, reductio ad absurdum). But having achieved a general purpose machine, ideas and/or algorithms reduced to concrete form by using that machine should not be patentable. The Jacquard loom was a general purpose weaving machine. The idea of using the cards to decide which hooks to use is patentable. But patterns expressed in those cards is not.
Second, copyright doesn't only protect a particular implementation of an algorithm. Depending on the court and circuit, there are differing abstraction and filtration tests, mise en scene tests, implementation dictated by external effects tests etc that either remove copyright or enhance it.
Third, I don't have an argument with your argument concernign disclosure. However, once the basic problem of allowing patenting of algorithms and/or business processes is resolved (hopefully by not allowing them), the disclosure issue is moot.
Fourth, the problem with litigation is what is accepted as "prior art" in the field of algorithmic and process patents. If the patent offices are willing to accept a new area of patentability, as they have with these sorts of patents, then it is only fair that they accept new inclusions of definitions of "prior art" that can be used to challenge these patents.
Fifth, the KSR opinion is like a breath of fresh air in the field of patentability. Triviality and obviousness are two different aspects that often combine in the area of software and business process patents. Most of the patents that so infuriate the software developers of the world are both.
Go get the degree. Just having the letters after your name is worth it to start, and the HECS fees won't hurt. At the same time, get a job at some corporate or small business as a part-time IT helpdesk or admin. The stuff you learn there will be much more useful than what you learn at Uni, but doesn't get your resume past the HR site filters.