There is a de-minimus argument that can be made: that the amount of the "offending material" that was copied was so minimal as to be pointless. However, by default, in the United States, the author of a text is the copyright holder of that text, and he doesn't have to give any sort of notice to protect his copyright. That means that when you copy someone else's work--even in the example you gave where you copied someone else's answer and posted it to a different forum--you are technically in violation of copyright.
In reality, of course, the whole point of the legal system is to arbitrate complaints raised by one person over another person's activity. So really what is "legal" is more like "what you can convince others is reasonable behavior." And in this case, I'd quietly ask the author of the original post (from a personal account, if possible) so I can gauge what sort of a pain in the ass he may become (most likely--not at all) if he were to find out you used 200 lines of his code--so the arguments can be lined up to make a "de-minimus" argument, that his code was so small as to be a relatively unimportant contribution to the overall code.
Generally whenever I post code on an open forum in response to an answer, I assume the code will be used by other people and so I generally treat my own code as if I just put it into the public domain unless I've explicitly said otherwise.
However, that's not the law. I believe that the code an author publishes on an open forum is copyrighted by the author by default.
Me; I'd probably drop the guy a brief informal note asking permission to reuse the code and see what he does. More often than not if he's like me he'll probably say "sure, I don't mind."
The compelling value proposition for the end-consumer would be in technical books, reference books and documents, such as the Universal Building Code books which are updated periodically, could be used quite often in the field, and are massive. (My parents are in the construction business, and they have a closet full of books which they have to refer to periodically that are otherwise a waste of space.)
Having all of these technical references (which are dated material and tend to go out of date about a half-dozen years after being first published) in a portable and convenient format would be a god-send to those who for business reasons have to refer to these documents and may wish to be able to use them in the field where there isn't even working electricity much less an internet connection.
I can think of literally dozens of different categories of technical reference books which contain dated material, which are used in a professional capacity, are more often referenced than read, and the convenience of having them on hand in your backpack rather than consuming a couple of dozen feet on a bookshelf would be a massive win.
Re:The iPhone as a weapon against the cell carrier
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Top Inventions of 2007
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· Score: 1
You've proved my point. Thanks.
The iPhone as a weapon against the cell carriers.
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Top Inventions of 2007
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The fact that the iPhone placed as "top invention" speaks more to the ubiquitousness of cell phones in our society and how irritated people are with the current state of affairs with respect to the cell carriers. Most of the Time article about the iPhone spoke about how poor current phones were (the iPhone is "pretty" because "Most high-tech companies don't take design seriously") and how it will encourage carriers to open up their sandboxes ("It's not a phone, it's a platform") than it did about how cool an "invention" the iPhone is.
It's also interesting because many of the complaints about the iPhone revolve around the fact that Apple somehow didn't go far enough to crack the cell carrier hegemony (the iPhone is locked to a single carrier, the iPhone contract is two years) than it goes towards actual design flaws in the physical unit.
In fact, I've never seen people get so worked up before over a single cell phone--and I suggest it's because we all hate the cell carriers and are hoping someone--either a powerful government or a powerful company (either Apple's iPhone or Google's Android OS) will force the cell carriers to improve.
From Apple's perspective they've built hardware (iPhone, iPod) and software with a built-in store (iTunes) which support the iPhone and iPod.
From NBC's perspective Apple has built a distribution network which is in direct competition of the distribution arm of NBC--one powerful enough to establish pricing, which is a distribution network's job.
Of course NBC wants Apple to go piss up a rope. All it would take is for Apple to start talking directly to the producers of the shows to completely bypass NBC's distribution arm, which is NBC's historic core business. (Remember: most companies such as NBC got into the production game in order to fill their distribution pipeline; they didn't build a distribution pipeline to distribute their production work.)
I think this and Apple's iTunes success stories indicate something that the record companies have never thought about. It's not that--outside of a very small number of people--that people want to pirate music. What they want is convenience: the convenience to download it and load it on their favorite device with little hassle.
What people in the music industry and the software development industries forget is that inconvenience is as much a price to pay as is actual money. Different people may place a different monetary amount on inconvenience than others may--but it's still just as much a price to pay. And from the sounds of it, it was more convenient to pirate Radiohead's music than it was to simply go to their web site and offer to pay nothing for the music.
Apple's iTunes has become quite successful because it has proved that for a sizeable percentage of the population, the convenience of point, click, buy, sync to player without the associated hassles around getting the right driver to work or setting up some weird subscription thingy is worth the $0.99 (in the US) per track. I bet you if Radiohead had some convenient distribution mechanism that was exceedingly easy for people to use--even easier to use than BitTorrant--then people would have happily paid $10 for the album.
I think this illustrates a larger trend: making things easy to use (that is, making them convenient) will be worth more and more money to people as they come to realize there is a choice. Any company which fails to make something easy to use or easy to buy or easy to play with will find itself squashed either by companies who 'get it', or by pirates who bypass the little inconveniences that groups like the RIAA insist upon imposing on us.
I think the Supremes ruled that when a computer looks at data, it cannot be spying: spying is when a human looks at data. Sadly the damages the government suffers from spying--that is, from having a human look at data you'd rather have hidden--is that without a warrant they can't use it in court, and if they embarrass you then you can sue for damages.
Reality is, however, there is a hell of a lot of private data floating out there that is being handled by lots and lots of strangers--things that we'd like to pretend are secret but are really not. The most fascinating part about all of these complaints about the NSA spying on us is that they show just how public our private data really is. While we may use the NSA as the boogyman in all of this, there is plenty of information that I'd rather have private (such as how much I paid last year in property taxes on my house) which can be found for free on web sites such as Zillow.com.
My understanding is that Vivendi (who is behind Universal and NBC Universal's position on iTunes) wants "differentiated pricing" so they can better "monitize" artists--and for certain hits they want the right to charge $2.49 per song rather than $.99 per song. $2.49 translates (for a 12-song album) into around $30 for a CD.
The desktop era will end just as soon as we have holographic projectors which can generate a 24' desktop monitor or larger out of thin air, and unfold a full size keyboard from a beautifully sculpted 1/2" thick hand-held form factor with keys that have good travel. Oh, and of course have enough compute power to run the tools people want to run and the latest games they want to run.
Until then I'm not holding my breath.
The reason why is that while there are cell phones which can be used for all the purposes you've stated--the iPhone, for example, really does a great job at browsing the web and getting e-mail--computers are not just large glorified typewriters married to web browsers.
So you are asking the difference between storing, then creating and maintaining an index vs just storing it that way to begin with? I don't think that even deserves an answer.
But think about it for a second: the only difference between creating and maintaining an index with column data and "storing it that way to begin with" is...what, exactly? Somewhere you have a data structure representing a table which gives the file name of the column data/index data (which I assume here is exactly the same thing, since an index is essentially column-oriented data stored using a data structure (B-Tree, hash table, etc) which optimizes read operations), and, for a row-oriented database, a paginated file containing the row data itself.
The only thing a column-oriented database seems to do is eliminate the row-oriented file and provide column-oriented information for each column instead.
Now for a database with a number of fixed-width fields, looking up a particular row should be relatively straight foward; each column data item is a fixed index into the file. But if you have a variable-width data field, you're going to have to store those data fields in some sort of paginated file structure anyway--which will look like a row-oriented database but with a whole bunch of small objects instead of a few large ones.
And if you have a table with five variable-width columns and perform a select statement on those five columns, you're going to wind up doing five times the work looking up the five column records within five paginated files.
I don't think that even deserves an answer.
Excuse me, but when you have something this complicated--which you admit when you wrote: "This is a non-article and there's no point in arguing it until multiple people have run good tests on the performance of each."--treating my question like it's a dumb one and like I'm an idiot is rather rude.
I'll bet you're also one of those people who write 'lusers' to talk about the customers of the code you write/manage/play with, too.
It sounded to me that part of the problem was that the BSD copyright notices were stripped out of the code, which is not just obnoxious or just locking away the code, but is illegal and immoral: it removes the notice of who was the original author of the code.
It also sounds obnoxious to take someone's code but to resubmit the changes and bug fixes under a more restrictive license--just as it would be obnoxious for a private company to submit bug fixes but to say "in order to distribute our changes you will have to license the code from us for a grand a year." But to my mind it's just that: obnoxious.
Here's what I don't understand. Most relational databases provide the ability to create one or more indexes upon one or more columns within a database--essentially creating an alternate, column-specific file which maps column values into the row data object. In other words, an 'index' upon a column is a column-oriented database object.
So how is it that creating a column store makes reading a database more efficient, when indexing a row-oriented database essentially creates a column store alongside the row-oriented data?
The only place where I can see column-oriented databases would be more efficient is by using uniformity of datatype across the data in a column can make finding un-indexed data far more efficient. In other words, if you have an un-indexed column storing integers, the file becomes dirt-simple: it's essentially an array of values on disk, and finding the 30th row in a particular column of integers is as simple as a fseek() followed by an fread().
It depends upon who is doing the interpretation. However, what you just wrote goes against the standard interpretation that I've heard from a number of circles--which is that the realm of money and taxation is not an area where the Church would be involved. That is, even though individuals have an obligation to live their lives in the light of Christ and find salvation through Him, they are also obligated as best they can to obey the laws (including tax laws) of the land in which they live.
In other words, Christianity is not an anti-normative religion.
Now if Google and Dell and other companies were breaking the law in order to avoid taxes, then clearly their actions would be a problem: it would be theft. However, Google and Dell and other companies are legally avoiding paying more taxes than they have to--which has more to do with the overly-complicated tax code than it does with cheating Caesar out of what is his.
Any Catholic encyclical that goes against the practice of off-shoring may make mention of Matthews 22:21--but the rational the Holy See will use to oppose off-shoring will undoubtedly not make use of this particular passage--and I would bet would go to great lengths to explain why the Church should comment on tax policy regardless of Christ's original sayings in Matthews.
The only thing a notary public is good for is to verify the signature and dates on a document that is being signed--that is, from a legal perspective they are a slightly beefed-up witness. (In California, on many of the documents I've been having signed, a notary public is equal to two independent witnesses.)
Worse, in California, a notary public does not keep a copy of the document that was signed. The only thing a notary is really good for is if the two signatories to a document decide to get into a legal court battle on the contents of the document, the notary can then attest to the fact that the two signatories actually signed the document. So they're great for contracts.
For IP protection, as others have pointed out, you can use the copyright office or the patent office. If you are simply concerned that you have a proper date on a document, you can write up your idea into a document and mail it to yourself; the postmark on a sealed envelop will serve as sufficient evidence that the document was written at the time of the postmark.
Ultimately, however, all of this only works in so far as you are willing to sue people in a court of law. In other words, if someone is hell bent on robbing you blind, your only recourse is to hire a lawyer and sue the bastard--and if it isn't worth it (or you don't have money to throw at a lawyer on the principle of the thing), all the copyright office notifications and patent notifications and sealed envelops in the world won't mean a damned thing.
The only thing these tools do is make it easier on the lawyer you hire to defend you.
Which is why I suspect in December NBC Universal will release a new press release talking about how Evil Apple is, and how horrible things are--but they're switching to a month-to-month model while they sort things out and try to change Apple's pro-consumer ways.
I think you misunderstood me. I said "The Native Americans suffered the worst of their indignities centuries ago," in comparison to today.
And you compared that to the Palestinians who you claimed still remember the indignities they suffered, given there were some in their 70's and 80's who still have keys to the houses they were evicted from--implying that the memories of indignities of the Indians were not relevant because they weren't suffered in recent times.
As I said, either you are ignorant--assuming the indignities of the Palestinians were worse than the Indians and thus worthy of terrorism (as opposed to the Indians, whose indignities are not)--or you are deliberately ignoring reality in order to score rhetorical points.
Either way, again, please STFU about shit you know nothing about--especially the part about how somehow the indignities of Native Americans are somehow not all that significant or so far in the past that it doesn't somehow count.
I'm actually quite good friends with a few native americans,...
And I'm sure some of your best friends are black, too.
Uh, never drove through New Mexico and saw the slums of the reservations that many Indians are still trapped on, have you? Don't know that in California atrocities continued until the 50's in many areas--including relatives of mine (Salinan Indians) who were murdered for the crime of having red skin by deputies who were a little drunk and trigger happy. Were you aware that in my lifetime (and I'm 41) that it has been illegal for "my kind" to drink alcohol in some southwestern counties?
If you think the indignities of the Native Americans ended "centuries ago", you're either an ignorant fool or you are putting on historic blinders just so you can make a point.
And if you think Native Americans all won the lottery of life by getting to universally open casinos and shop tax free, I have a newsflash: for each politically connected tribe which was able to persuade the government to allow them to open a casino and got rich, you have a dozen tribes who are either too remote to open a casino that raises any effective cash, and the dozens more who are not affiliated with a Bureau Of Indian Affairs recognized tribal family--cut out of the cash flow because Indians like everyone else suffer the same human weaknesses of greed and power hunger and are more than happy to cut their tribal competitors off at the knees.
And that sets aside the racist assumption that the only way us "injuns" are ever going to get off the rez is by scalping the white man of his hard earned cash.
So please, STFU about shit you don't know a damned thing about.
Imagine Native Americans living in refugee camps in Canada and Mexico.
You mean like reservations or something? 'Cause I was getting a little confused on this whole 'well, all the indignities of the Indians was over a hundred years ago, so they shouldn't be angry' crap.
I agree that the direction this country is headed in is insanity.
But let me pick a few nits:
We now torture as part of imprisonment along with imprison people without the protections that the Geneva Convention provides and appear to detain people without formally charging them or letting them know what they are being charged with.
Surprisingly the Geneva Conventions provides for this sort of behavior: the specific conventions the United States is signatory to does not protect individuals who are fighting in a war in a convert way. People who fight as soldiers but who are dressed as civilians are not protected--and in fact could be shot on the battlefield execution style.
One of the problem with the laws is that there are in fact two sets of laws: one for civilian legal enforcement--which is geared towards finding culpability after the fact, and one for fighting wars--which is geared towards blowing the other guy away before he blows you away. Where the line has gotten fuzzy--and in large part because of Terrorism tactics--is when you have what appears to be a band of civilians hell bent on blowing up a shopping mall. Do you prosecute them using the rules of wartime engagement and blow the fuckers away without a hearing? Or do you prosecute them using civilian enforcement rules and prosecute them after everyone is dead?
Or do you take a third path and try to find a line where you can get them before the fact but prosecute them under civilian rules of law enforcement? (If you answered 'curtain number three', welcome to the moral ambiguity of the 21st century where both Congress and the Administration find themselves.)
That said, this moral ambiguity should not be used to shred the Constitution and use it as toilet paper. Sadly, however, it seems everyone in Washington is hell bent on doing exactly this.
We have a fear mongering national obsession with security that despite all the money and bureaucracy spent and created still leaves us wide open to security threats while taxing business and limiting travel. Threat levels are increased without justification to apparently further political goals.
That's because--and it's a problem with all governments; we're just really sensitive to this--all bureaucracies want to be seen "doing something." Ohmygod, not enough security at the airport? Everyone take off your shoes. Not enforcing the national borders? Please show your internal papers. It's stupid in the extreme--and the fact that the Real ID act would require everyone to carry a fucking passport is because no-one wants to close the border with Mexico.
We have politicized education and science for political gain while at the same time stifled scientists from telling the facts/truth/scientific findings.
Oh, it gets worse: there are some avenues of expression--such as asserting publically that Global Warming is not happening--which some in our country would like to criminalize. Think about that for a second: it would be illegal--a federal violation--to post on Slashdot "I don't think global warming is happening, and here are my web links." Agree or disagree--but we are walking down the road that because of this politicization, people wish to make certain forms of expression against the law.
Taxation is only low for corporate and the most wealthy, while at the same time we have suppressed labor power and limited funding for intellectual and artistic pursuits.
Thank God for the Democrats who wish to raise taxes...
Your other points I haven't commented on because they've been true since almost the beginning of time.
The old forces which wanted to make the world into a totalitarian socialist "utopia" planted a number of seeds--'memes'--in the West which our public discourse is still sick from. Things like class resentment and using christian charity to encourage people to cede power to the Government are now running wild--creat
I'm amazed how every five years someone realizes what people knew 40 years ago, only to promptly forget it for the next wave of people to figure out five years from now.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a de-minimus argument that can be made: that the amount of the "offending material" that was copied was so minimal as to be pointless. However, by default, in the United States, the author of a text is the copyright holder of that text, and he doesn't have to give any sort of notice to protect his copyright. That means that when you copy someone else's work--even in the example you gave where you copied someone else's answer and posted it to a different forum--you are technically in violation of copyright.
In reality, of course, the whole point of the legal system is to arbitrate complaints raised by one person over another person's activity. So really what is "legal" is more like "what you can convince others is reasonable behavior." And in this case, I'd quietly ask the author of the original post (from a personal account, if possible) so I can gauge what sort of a pain in the ass he may become (most likely--not at all) if he were to find out you used 200 lines of his code--so the arguments can be lined up to make a "de-minimus" argument, that his code was so small as to be a relatively unimportant contribution to the overall code.
Generally whenever I post code on an open forum in response to an answer, I assume the code will be used by other people and so I generally treat my own code as if I just put it into the public domain unless I've explicitly said otherwise.
However, that's not the law. I believe that the code an author publishes on an open forum is copyrighted by the author by default.
Me; I'd probably drop the guy a brief informal note asking permission to reuse the code and see what he does. More often than not if he's like me he'll probably say "sure, I don't mind."
The compelling value proposition for the end-consumer would be in technical books, reference books and documents, such as the Universal Building Code books which are updated periodically, could be used quite often in the field, and are massive. (My parents are in the construction business, and they have a closet full of books which they have to refer to periodically that are otherwise a waste of space.)
Having all of these technical references (which are dated material and tend to go out of date about a half-dozen years after being first published) in a portable and convenient format would be a god-send to those who for business reasons have to refer to these documents and may wish to be able to use them in the field where there isn't even working electricity much less an internet connection.
I can think of literally dozens of different categories of technical reference books which contain dated material, which are used in a professional capacity, are more often referenced than read, and the convenience of having them on hand in your backpack rather than consuming a couple of dozen feet on a bookshelf would be a massive win.
You've proved my point. Thanks.
The fact that the iPhone placed as "top invention" speaks more to the ubiquitousness of cell phones in our society and how irritated people are with the current state of affairs with respect to the cell carriers. Most of the Time article about the iPhone spoke about how poor current phones were (the iPhone is "pretty" because "Most high-tech companies don't take design seriously") and how it will encourage carriers to open up their sandboxes ("It's not a phone, it's a platform") than it did about how cool an "invention" the iPhone is.
It's also interesting because many of the complaints about the iPhone revolve around the fact that Apple somehow didn't go far enough to crack the cell carrier hegemony (the iPhone is locked to a single carrier, the iPhone contract is two years) than it goes towards actual design flaws in the physical unit.
In fact, I've never seen people get so worked up before over a single cell phone--and I suggest it's because we all hate the cell carriers and are hoping someone--either a powerful government or a powerful company (either Apple's iPhone or Google's Android OS) will force the cell carriers to improve.
That behavior is by design and has been the way Apple handles directory overwrites since 1985.
From Apple's perspective they've built hardware (iPhone, iPod) and software with a built-in store (iTunes) which support the iPhone and iPod.
From NBC's perspective Apple has built a distribution network which is in direct competition of the distribution arm of NBC--one powerful enough to establish pricing, which is a distribution network's job.
Of course NBC wants Apple to go piss up a rope. All it would take is for Apple to start talking directly to the producers of the shows to completely bypass NBC's distribution arm, which is NBC's historic core business. (Remember: most companies such as NBC got into the production game in order to fill their distribution pipeline; they didn't build a distribution pipeline to distribute their production work.)
I think this and Apple's iTunes success stories indicate something that the record companies have never thought about. It's not that--outside of a very small number of people--that people want to pirate music. What they want is convenience: the convenience to download it and load it on their favorite device with little hassle.
What people in the music industry and the software development industries forget is that inconvenience is as much a price to pay as is actual money. Different people may place a different monetary amount on inconvenience than others may--but it's still just as much a price to pay. And from the sounds of it, it was more convenient to pirate Radiohead's music than it was to simply go to their web site and offer to pay nothing for the music.
Apple's iTunes has become quite successful because it has proved that for a sizeable percentage of the population, the convenience of point, click, buy, sync to player without the associated hassles around getting the right driver to work or setting up some weird subscription thingy is worth the $0.99 (in the US) per track. I bet you if Radiohead had some convenient distribution mechanism that was exceedingly easy for people to use--even easier to use than BitTorrant--then people would have happily paid $10 for the album.
I think this illustrates a larger trend: making things easy to use (that is, making them convenient) will be worth more and more money to people as they come to realize there is a choice. Any company which fails to make something easy to use or easy to buy or easy to play with will find itself squashed either by companies who 'get it', or by pirates who bypass the little inconveniences that groups like the RIAA insist upon imposing on us.
I think the Supremes ruled that when a computer looks at data, it cannot be spying: spying is when a human looks at data. Sadly the damages the government suffers from spying--that is, from having a human look at data you'd rather have hidden--is that without a warrant they can't use it in court, and if they embarrass you then you can sue for damages.
Reality is, however, there is a hell of a lot of private data floating out there that is being handled by lots and lots of strangers--things that we'd like to pretend are secret but are really not. The most fascinating part about all of these complaints about the NSA spying on us is that they show just how public our private data really is. While we may use the NSA as the boogyman in all of this, there is plenty of information that I'd rather have private (such as how much I paid last year in property taxes on my house) which can be found for free on web sites such as Zillow.com.
My understanding is that Vivendi (who is behind Universal and NBC Universal's position on iTunes) wants "differentiated pricing" so they can better "monitize" artists--and for certain hits they want the right to charge $2.49 per song rather than $.99 per song. $2.49 translates (for a 12-song album) into around $30 for a CD.
Are you prepared to pay $30 for a music CD?
The desktop era will end just as soon as we have holographic projectors which can generate a 24' desktop monitor or larger out of thin air, and unfold a full size keyboard from a beautifully sculpted 1/2" thick hand-held form factor with keys that have good travel. Oh, and of course have enough compute power to run the tools people want to run and the latest games they want to run.
Until then I'm not holding my breath.
The reason why is that while there are cell phones which can be used for all the purposes you've stated--the iPhone, for example, really does a great job at browsing the web and getting e-mail--computers are not just large glorified typewriters married to web browsers.
What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
The only thing a column-oriented database seems to do is eliminate the row-oriented file and provide column-oriented information for each column instead.
Now for a database with a number of fixed-width fields, looking up a particular row should be relatively straight foward; each column data item is a fixed index into the file. But if you have a variable-width data field, you're going to have to store those data fields in some sort of paginated file structure anyway--which will look like a row-oriented database but with a whole bunch of small objects instead of a few large ones.
And if you have a table with five variable-width columns and perform a select statement on those five columns, you're going to wind up doing five times the work looking up the five column records within five paginated files.Excuse me, but when you have something this complicated--which you admit when you wrote: "This is a non-article and there's no point in arguing it until multiple people have run good tests on the performance of each."--treating my question like it's a dumb one and like I'm an idiot is rather rude.
I'll bet you're also one of those people who write 'lusers' to talk about the customers of the code you write/manage/play with, too.
It sounded to me that part of the problem was that the BSD copyright notices were stripped out of the code, which is not just obnoxious or just locking away the code, but is illegal and immoral: it removes the notice of who was the original author of the code.
It also sounds obnoxious to take someone's code but to resubmit the changes and bug fixes under a more restrictive license--just as it would be obnoxious for a private company to submit bug fixes but to say "in order to distribute our changes you will have to license the code from us for a grand a year." But to my mind it's just that: obnoxious.
Here's what I don't understand. Most relational databases provide the ability to create one or more indexes upon one or more columns within a database--essentially creating an alternate, column-specific file which maps column values into the row data object. In other words, an 'index' upon a column is a column-oriented database object.
So how is it that creating a column store makes reading a database more efficient, when indexing a row-oriented database essentially creates a column store alongside the row-oriented data?
The only place where I can see column-oriented databases would be more efficient is by using uniformity of datatype across the data in a column can make finding un-indexed data far more efficient. In other words, if you have an un-indexed column storing integers, the file becomes dirt-simple: it's essentially an array of values on disk, and finding the 30th row in a particular column of integers is as simple as a fseek() followed by an fread().
My bet: Apple will release an API which allows third-party development for the iPod Touch and the iPhone, sometime in the next six months.
It depends upon who is doing the interpretation. However, what you just wrote goes against the standard interpretation that I've heard from a number of circles--which is that the realm of money and taxation is not an area where the Church would be involved. That is, even though individuals have an obligation to live their lives in the light of Christ and find salvation through Him, they are also obligated as best they can to obey the laws (including tax laws) of the land in which they live.
In other words, Christianity is not an anti-normative religion.
Now if Google and Dell and other companies were breaking the law in order to avoid taxes, then clearly their actions would be a problem: it would be theft. However, Google and Dell and other companies are legally avoiding paying more taxes than they have to--which has more to do with the overly-complicated tax code than it does with cheating Caesar out of what is his.
Any Catholic encyclical that goes against the practice of off-shoring may make mention of Matthews 22:21--but the rational the Holy See will use to oppose off-shoring will undoubtedly not make use of this particular passage--and I would bet would go to great lengths to explain why the Church should comment on tax policy regardless of Christ's original sayings in Matthews.
The only thing a notary public is good for is to verify the signature and dates on a document that is being signed--that is, from a legal perspective they are a slightly beefed-up witness. (In California, on many of the documents I've been having signed, a notary public is equal to two independent witnesses.)
Worse, in California, a notary public does not keep a copy of the document that was signed. The only thing a notary is really good for is if the two signatories to a document decide to get into a legal court battle on the contents of the document, the notary can then attest to the fact that the two signatories actually signed the document. So they're great for contracts.
For IP protection, as others have pointed out, you can use the copyright office or the patent office. If you are simply concerned that you have a proper date on a document, you can write up your idea into a document and mail it to yourself; the postmark on a sealed envelop will serve as sufficient evidence that the document was written at the time of the postmark.
Ultimately, however, all of this only works in so far as you are willing to sue people in a court of law. In other words, if someone is hell bent on robbing you blind, your only recourse is to hire a lawyer and sue the bastard--and if it isn't worth it (or you don't have money to throw at a lawyer on the principle of the thing), all the copyright office notifications and patent notifications and sealed envelops in the world won't mean a damned thing.
The only thing these tools do is make it easier on the lawyer you hire to defend you.
Indian Wars
Which is why I suspect in December NBC Universal will release a new press release talking about how Evil Apple is, and how horrible things are--but they're switching to a month-to-month model while they sort things out and try to change Apple's pro-consumer ways.
As I said, either you are ignorant--assuming the indignities of the Palestinians were worse than the Indians and thus worthy of terrorism (as opposed to the Indians, whose indignities are not)--or you are deliberately ignoring reality in order to score rhetorical points.
Either way, again, please STFU about shit you know nothing about--especially the part about how somehow the indignities of Native Americans are somehow not all that significant or so far in the past that it doesn't somehow count.And I'm sure some of your best friends are black, too.
Uh, never drove through New Mexico and saw the slums of the reservations that many Indians are still trapped on, have you? Don't know that in California atrocities continued until the 50's in many areas--including relatives of mine (Salinan Indians) who were murdered for the crime of having red skin by deputies who were a little drunk and trigger happy. Were you aware that in my lifetime (and I'm 41) that it has been illegal for "my kind" to drink alcohol in some southwestern counties?
If you think the indignities of the Native Americans ended "centuries ago", you're either an ignorant fool or you are putting on historic blinders just so you can make a point.
And if you think Native Americans all won the lottery of life by getting to universally open casinos and shop tax free, I have a newsflash: for each politically connected tribe which was able to persuade the government to allow them to open a casino and got rich, you have a dozen tribes who are either too remote to open a casino that raises any effective cash, and the dozens more who are not affiliated with a Bureau Of Indian Affairs recognized tribal family--cut out of the cash flow because Indians like everyone else suffer the same human weaknesses of greed and power hunger and are more than happy to cut their tribal competitors off at the knees.
And that sets aside the racist assumption that the only way us "injuns" are ever going to get off the rez is by scalping the white man of his hard earned cash.
So please, STFU about shit you don't know a damned thing about.
But let me pick a few nits:
Surprisingly the Geneva Conventions provides for this sort of behavior: the specific conventions the United States is signatory to does not protect individuals who are fighting in a war in a convert way. People who fight as soldiers but who are dressed as civilians are not protected--and in fact could be shot on the battlefield execution style.
One of the problem with the laws is that there are in fact two sets of laws: one for civilian legal enforcement--which is geared towards finding culpability after the fact, and one for fighting wars--which is geared towards blowing the other guy away before he blows you away. Where the line has gotten fuzzy--and in large part because of Terrorism tactics--is when you have what appears to be a band of civilians hell bent on blowing up a shopping mall. Do you prosecute them using the rules of wartime engagement and blow the fuckers away without a hearing? Or do you prosecute them using civilian enforcement rules and prosecute them after everyone is dead?
Or do you take a third path and try to find a line where you can get them before the fact but prosecute them under civilian rules of law enforcement? (If you answered 'curtain number three', welcome to the moral ambiguity of the 21st century where both Congress and the Administration find themselves.)
That said, this moral ambiguity should not be used to shred the Constitution and use it as toilet paper. Sadly, however, it seems everyone in Washington is hell bent on doing exactly this.
That's because--and it's a problem with all governments; we're just really sensitive to this--all bureaucracies want to be seen "doing something." Ohmygod, not enough security at the airport? Everyone take off your shoes. Not enforcing the national borders? Please show your internal papers. It's stupid in the extreme--and the fact that the Real ID act would require everyone to carry a fucking passport is because no-one wants to close the border with Mexico.
Oh, it gets worse: there are some avenues of expression--such as asserting publically that Global Warming is not happening--which some in our country would like to criminalize. Think about that for a second: it would be illegal--a federal violation--to post on Slashdot "I don't think global warming is happening, and here are my web links." Agree or disagree--but we are walking down the road that because of this politicization, people wish to make certain forms of expression against the law.
Thank God for the Democrats who wish to raise taxes...
Your other points I haven't commented on because they've been true since almost the beginning of time.
The old forces which wanted to make the world into a totalitarian socialist "utopia" planted a number of seeds--'memes'--in the West which our public discourse is still sick from. Things like class resentment and using christian charity to encourage people to cede power to the Government are now running wild--creat
I'm amazed how every five years someone realizes what people knew 40 years ago, only to promptly forget it for the next wave of people to figure out five years from now.