Maybe I don't remember HS Civic's very well but I thought the point of bail was ONLY to prevent flight, not that it had been redefined to be large as a result of danger the innocent (until proved otherwise) person poses. He's being jailed not because he's a flight risk but because of political posturing by the DA, that is a serious miscarriage of justice. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the guy but bail is clearly being misused here.
It's still US territory, you and your belongings just haven't been formally accepted back in. This is the loophole that allows someone to be in the US without a Visa but not allowed to leave the international area of the airport because they can't get through customs. Any criminal violations while in the international portion of the airport would be governed by US (and state)law but Customs would have to admit you or acknowledge you as an illegal citizen (and involving INS) before allowing law enforcement to take you off site. This is why airports have jails, to give INS time to respond.
Why is everyone assuming that they use the translation of the word bank in the same context as we do in English (such as in reference to a blood or sperm repository)? The Sweedish language isn't romantic based and doesn't share the same base or grammar. As a result, even with the influence of English on their society, I'm not any where near confident as a non-Swedish speaker that the language would even use the translation of "Bank" in the same manner we do in English. Native speakers could likely comment on the usage of the word in the language but it's downright silly for speakers of another language without exposure to Scandinavian languages to believe the use of words would be similar to English.
Your analogy isn't even close to correct. In the Kodak case the film was the patented object, not the camera. Thus manufacture of the film was prevented, this didn't deprive use of the camera as the person still had it and could use it anyway they chose, they simply couldn't purchase Kodak film to fit the camera. You might think it's the same thing but it's not even close. The owner still has and can use the device in any manner they intend, including buying Poloroid film that fits the camera. It'd also argue that the loss of the ability to purchase film could be construed as violating sale doctrines and the owners of said camera could launch a class action against Kodak demanding reimbursement for the loss of functionality. Which is exactly what happened. http://www.ozcamera.com/k-instant.html
By June of 1986, several class action lawsuits had been filed against Kodak by instant camera owners. The courts brought Kodak's rebate plan to a halt pending the outcome of these suits, which asked, among other things, for a cash rebate option. The final settlement called for owners to return the camera's nameplate for a refund of cash and credits. This turn-in has been completed, and it appears that of the over 16.5 million Kodak instant cameras once in circulation, certainly there are more than enough examples, complete with their original nameplate, for all of the world's collectors at less than US$5 each. A few of the top-of-line models, special-purpose types, or commemorative models will attract more collector interest, as they would have done without the legal hoopla. The numerous Kodak Instant cameras without nameplates have virtually no collector or commercial value. Some Kodak instant cameras have the following names: Champ, Colorburst, EK, Handle, Happy Times, Kodamatic, Partyflash, Party Star, Partytime, Pleaser, Trimprint.
In the case of your DirectTV analogy, if DirectTV had advertised the feature, promoted it or promised it at the time of purchase and then removed it due to a lawsuit with TIVO they would in fact be liable to you the purchaser. In the real world you won't sue over it because the award wouldn't cover the legal fees, but that's the whole point of class action lawsuits. The reality is that DirecTV doesn't advertise features, they advertise that they have a DVR and that you can record shows, nothing more and it's not hard to understand why given the analogy.
Amazon made the actual sale, therefore they are liable to the publisher, MobileReference (MR) is then liable to Amazon, likely for abuse of the contract they had with Amazon. There is a chain of liability. Amazon is liable to the purchaser and the publisher as they are the actual seller. Had Amazon not deleted the book the Publisher would probably have sued both MR and Amazon and both liable for damages.
The general rule of suing is you sue everyone, regardless of level of involvement and the amount of the settlement/judgement payable will usually be computed by ability to pay, not necessarily by fault.
As long as the contract has the standard boiler plate server-ability clause the whole EULA won't be voided, only those parts deemed Unconscionable. Without having seen the EULA I know that the sever-ability clause is in there as it's standard language in any contract and no lawyer would allow a contract to be drafted without the clause.
During the heyday of stealing DirectTV service DTV estimated there were close to 100,000 people doing so. That's not a trivial number, particularly when at the time they had around 2 million subscribers, which totals out to 5% of the subscriber base which was stealing the signal. And those numbers don't even include the grey market in Canada where people were stealing the service because they couldn't legally subscribe to it. Now I don't know that I can say they didn't exaggerate the number, but I doubt you can prove they did either. It's not fair use to access satellite signals and regardless of what you might believe to be fair you don't own the radio spectrum on your property, the government does and the FCC has been given control over who uses it by your elected representatives. This is no different than you not owning the mineral rights on your property.
It's all pretty irrelevant anyway as the DMCA is simply one aspect of this. It's always been illegal to access satellite signals without permission, encryption or not, and has been illegal since BUD's (Big Ugly Dishs) when satellite broadcast took off in the early 80's and encryption didn't even exist outside the millitary. In the early days of satellite broadcast the FCC used to drive around looking for BUD's and then would check with the satellite companies to see if you had a subscription and if you didn't you ended up getting sent a $500 fine and told that if you didn't subscribe to service or dismantle your BUD they would be back to seize all your equipment and hit you with a fine that was 10 times larger.
For all your high and mighty talk about the benefits society has had from the free and open sharing of information what is happening in this case is nothing more than some criminal trying to crack a lock so some criminal enterprise can make money selling someone else's product. It's unethical, it's wrong and fortunately it's illegal. I wouldn't be surprised if this business in question is actually connected to the mafia, as selling other peoples products has been a hallmark of their business strategies since they crawled out of the criminal underground.
One of the News reports we've had is that all 3 of the "losing" candidates have alleged that as much as 20% of the ballots were missing key information added at the local polls that validated the ballots as legitimate. Now we have a report that there is 10% more votes than people that could legally vote combined with reports of 80% of the electorate voting, implying 30% of the votes are fabricated.
If 30% of the ballots cast are fabricated how much does that skew the percentages? It's pretty easy to throw an election when there isn't oversight. The dictator in charge didn't allow any of the other candidates to establish monitors in the polling places or ballot tabulation centers. This contrasts to any major democracy in the world where anyone and everyone can watch the votes being counted and observe the balloting process (with the exception of the privacy of actually casting the vote).
IMO the voting irregularities, such as more people voting then can vote (especially with a reported 80% of the electorate voting) there is legitimate cause to annul the vote and start from scratch with monitors, internal or external doesn't matter as long as there are impartial monitors of the polling. The continued effort by the Iranian administration to paint this as external meddling (for simply reporting the news) is a blatant attempt to influence their conservative groups.
The professor brings up the clear point I advocated in the first question to slashdot. There is no evidence whatsoever that Mediasentry had atomic calibrated clock information and the ISP did as well. All this evidence is based on a time stamp that could be anything, not to mention the role of Timezones. Without calibrated times at both the ISP and MediaSentry there is no validity to the evidence.
The ACLU like any civil liberties organization must take a definitive view of what they believe the constitution means then defend that position regardless of how other laws, congress or the courts acts on those issues. The ACLU since it's founding has taken the position that the second amendment is a collective right, not an individual right. This position was also the position of our courts since the supreme court decision in 1939 United states vs. Miller that upheld a ban on sawed off shotguns. The recent decision D.C. vs. Heller appears to reverse that position but the ACLU wouldn't be a civil rights organization if they didn't hold their own positions rather than the popular or contemporaneous answer the courts provide.
And before the page you linked was updated for the Heller decision it strictly noted that they didn't feel it was their issue to defend because organizations like the NRA are solely devoted to it and have been attempting to bring challenges to the supreme court yearly for the last 20 years (and failing every single year except for the very recent guns are a collective right. This is no way diminishes the ACLU as they still provide defense of civil liberties, just because you don't agree with their position on the 2nd amendment doesn't mean the organization is somehow less effective. In fact even though they might have a different view of the 2nd amendment than yourself this doesn't mean they are actively supporting gun control, they simply ignore the issue. In my view that is not justification to attack them as many are keen to do (until of course they need them, such as Rush's frequent diatribes on the ACLU defending bad people while at the same time he relied on them to defend him during his drug trial). The simple answer is that if you support all civil rights and gun control is an issue on your mind then you should support both the ACLU and the NRA. Not attack the ACLU and demonize them for failing to spend precious funds on 2nd amendment challenges when the NRA is already carrying that banner. I should also point out that if you don't agree with the ACLU's position on the 2nd amendment the easiest way to change it to join the ACLU and work to change their position from within the organization, not attack them and refuse to support them.
Locally the ACLU is hated because they sued the local school districts a number of times for imposing the dominant religion on all public school students. These attacks occurs even though the ACLU has actively defended this dominant faith in suits more than once where they weren't the dominant faith and were being discriminated against. I've notice many people that refer to the 2nd amendment issue, but when probed their actual hatred is usually related to the ACLU's defense of 1st amendment issues such as the recent lawsuits involving ten commandment displays where other faiths weren't given equal access. People like to pretend they support civil liberties but when it comes to true freedom of religion where all faiths have equal access in government they balk at the prospect and demonize the ACLU for forcing them to provide equal access or stop using the government to foist the dominant faith's view on the masses.
So you would rather the ACLU divide their resources so they can spend even less time on all the 1st amendment cases to fight for the right to bear arms when there is already several organizations that devote time and money to 2nd amendment challenges?
Personally I think if you believe that's a good idea you're a fool. If you want to devote your money to second amendment challenges then send your money into one of the dozen or more organizations solely devoted to the 2nd amendment, like the NRA. It would be foolish for the ACLU to divide their limited resources to action on the 2nd when there are so many more challenges to the 1st, 4th,, 5th, 6th, 8th and 14th that they need to devote money to and there are so many other organizations whose sole focus is the 2nd. There are very few organizations that spend as much effort on 1st let alone even care about the others. Only a fool would hate the ACLU for being pragmatic about distribution of their limited funds to challenges where they are the only organization working on them.
Your statement about the ACLU working on 2nd amendment challenges is as silly as someone asking the NRA to work on 1st amendment issues.
If both legal systems are part of the same circus than the Swedish system is the clown car where another clown keeps getting out of the car just when you think it's empty and the US system is the rampaging elephant that tramples the audience.
Honesty would be Gartner saying that Windows 7 is Windows Vista with a new coat of paint and that there is no real reason to upgrade to Windows 7. The press turned against Microsoft on Vista because of the IT backlash, but lets be honest they've bought the press lock stock and barrel on Windows 7. There isn't a damn thing different about Windows 7 and vista under the hood. The same things that Gartner and others blasted Vista for is being ignored with Windows 7. Microsoft must have paid the appropriate people really well in advance of the Windows 7 reviews because franly their's NO business incentive to upgrade from XP.
Having one party to a litigation in a meeting without the other to discuss any aspect of the case is a BIG BIG no no. This meeting having happened is grounds for a mistrial later and I doubt there is an appeals court that wouldn't immediately grant the mistrial simply because the meeting was held, even if they were discussing their favorite baseball teams. You can't have fair litigation if the judge is only listening to one side.
As far as your analogy about explaining technical items to the judge, that occurs in COURT, if it's a secrete it happens in a closed court with a sealed transcript but again, BOTH sides are present and both have the opportunity to argue the details and value of the information presented along with the legal right to rebut any information given. What's happened here is the defense is whispering in the ear of the judge and the plaintiff has no idea what was said, how it till affect the case or even if they need to rebut any of it.
The Judge should be removed from the bench or at the very least publicly reprimanded and removed from the case.
The problem with suing college students is that one of them could be the child of the dean of the school of law or some other highly placed or very capable individual. Most of them will be destitute students, but sue enough of them and you are going to sue someone not in your best interest.
Utopia will fail because of the predatory pricing of competitors. If you live where you can get utopia you can get Comcast internet for $24.99 without having to be a cable subscriber. Everywhere you can't get Utopia the price is $54.99 and requires that you get a cable subscription or pay $64.99 a month
Utopia's model is a great system, it takes the last mile out of the hands of the providers and opens it up to competition. The problem is the ILEC's aren't going to compete fairly to ensure their death they are going to use every monopolies favorite tactic to eliminate competition, under price the competitors below what they can offer.
NYCL, honest question here, is there a real procedure to file a response to an amicus curiae? I thought they were wholly independent input from outside observers to the Judge and that the litigating parties didn't have authority to "respond" to them? Maybe I'm naive on this but it seems to me that outside observers offering input should be off the table for responses from either of the litigants as the brief is filed by someone not affiliated with the case which the Judge is fully aware of. If this is legit to do, how often would you say litigants officially file responses to amicus curiae briefs? And if it's not very common how do you think a Judge would respond to receiving one (either negative, positive or neutral)? And finally, don't they have to ask permission before filing the brief?
Waddoups is an ass. Jack is an ass. When you tell someone to stop emailing you and they continue, the least it can be considered is harassment. Especially when the recipient pays for the delivery. Jack has NO right to talk to Waddoups. Jack isn't a resident of Utah and he has no dealings in Utah. If Jack want's to talk to his lawmakers he's free to talk to the ones in Florida and his national representatives. He has NO right to waste the tax money of the citizens of Utah speaking to their representatives. You're a fool if you believe otherwise.
Now lets clear up some lies in your post. The Utah legislative session ended over a month ago. The Utah legislature will not meet again until next year unless the governor calls a special session. This is not pending legislation, it's DEAD legislation as the bill was vetoed by the HIGHLY popular (won re-election with over 76% of the vote) republican governor. The claim of SPAM falls under the FEDERAL law. By all accounts the continued delivery of unsolicited email to the Utah legislators meets the federal definitions of SPAM. Jack isn't a resident of Utah, he has no right to speak to the them or bulk email them after he was asked to discontinue communication. Waddoups is not a member of the federal congress that passed the CAN-SPAM legislation.
I highly dislike Waddoups, but his actions in recognizing Jack for what he is and realizing that future support for such ill conceived legislation will result in harm to the state of Utah because believing Jack is STUPID. Removing future support because of how Jack acts is actually one of the smartest things he's done since throwing his hat in behind this legislation last year. But more importantly than anything, we elect representatives to represent us. In a perfect world that means they would vote for bills the public supports. In the real world, it means they vote how they want for whatever reason they want. Again, Waddoups is an ass, but this bill was dead dead dead. Jack was trying to get them to call a special session to overide the veto when they couldn't have done it as they didn't have the votes and the Huntsman veto killed much of the support for the bill. Jack was trying to get publicity for himself, not get sensible legislation passed that the public of Utah wanted. Jack tried to throw Waddoups into the fire after Waddoups told Jack the bill was dead. Jack then tried to nail the governor and AGO up. A VERY very popular governor and an AGO that was trying to keep Utah from spending millions defending laws that wouldn't make it through the court review. The AGO was trying to save money on bad legislation and Jack tried to nail them to a cross.
This legislation was never popularly supported in Utah. It passed solely because Waddoups put strong backing behind it and the Eagle-Forum supported it with Crazy Gail and her band of wacko's speaking highly of how "Smart" Jack was. He fell for Jack's BS in initially submitting and backing the bill. Now he's realized his mistake, thank god the governor is a very smart guy and simply vetoed it. My guess is now that it's hit the fan Waddoups has done some research on Jack and realized what a mistake he initially made. I truely believe Jack has been very belligerent, after all this was the first legislature to pass his pet legislation that I'm aware of. To have the governor then veto the bill probably pissed him off to no end. After all he's the self proclaimed expert in video game violence.
This millitary is composed of 18-24 year old foot soldiers. The sergeants and officers are usually older but the main fighting group is the frat boy age. This is why you don't use the military for civilian operations as it's like taking a hammer to any situation. Put these kids in charge of a detention facility (and don't believe for a minute that those 18 year old foot soldiers weren't his guards) and they do things like play movies that are humiliating to detainees. I would bet that every army in the world does stuff like this under these type of circumstances. The only thing you can do to mitigate it is to simply not put soldiers in control of detention facilities. The military really didn't have that option in this situation because Iraqi guards would have done FAR FAR worse to Saddam. So we end up taking the blame for the military acting like a bunch of Frat boys, which they are. Much of this likely could have been mitigated if other nations had donated veteran soldiers and officers to run these type of facilities.
C doesn't have a claim against A. But A has a claim against B and C. A can sue C for lawyer fee's and all the money they've made using the images. Because the images aren't registered with the copyright office they are limited on damages but the disbursement of revenue will be painfull along with the automatic payment of lawyer fee's for A. Copyright law puts EVERYTHING in the hands of the copyright holders. Assuming the original author can substantiate ownership. A should immediately submit all the images for copyright (and they should be images that include more data than the ones in the complaint) so that any ongoing use by B and C falls under statutory damages.
There is more than one company out there that believes they deserve a cut of Google's revenue. They honestly don't believe Google does anything. ATT, Comcast, the RIAA, MPAA and many many organazations have made public statements that they think Google is "stealing" from them. It's not that uncommon for people to see a successful company and be jealous, it's just these days some of the MBAossers we have running companies suggest government should get involved and force Google to share their revenue.
Remember, it has nothing to do with Google indexing their stuff, as they KNOW they could stop that with the change of a robots.txt file. What they want is Google to still index it and drive revenue on their site, but at the same time give them a cut of Ad revenue for the searching. This company isn't the first and will no doubt be the last to request government force Google to share revenue.
I'll admit my knowledge of climatology is very limited. I know the basics about the rain cycle, how the jet streams and rivers in the sea work.
I take a rather simple view of carbon emissions by simply looking at the history of this planet that geology reveals. A science that I understand quite well and is a very very old and well understood science. Through much of the 3 billion years that life has inhabited earth the planet has been extremely warm and extremely wet. Without polar caps the early earth had much more water coverage than today where billions of acre-ft (hectare-m) of water are sequestered in ice sitting on continental shelf's. Most of the geological record also indicates much higher temperatures than today's averages. Most of the early plants that inhabited this planet were ferns and other fungal plants. These plants must have high temperatures and moisture levels to survive. As a result of these conditions swamps and mudflats accumulated organic layers of material decade after decade for billions of years. As the organic material moved further down the geological deposits the temperatures and pressures reformed the stored organics into the fossil fuels (using a process that we can replicate today) we know today.
So it's simple. We had a planet that was MUCH MUCH warmer and wetter than it is today. Over the course of 3 billion years we sequestered much of the carbon in the atmosphere into the ground, buried it into the fossil fuels we use today. For the last several hundred million years the planet has been cycling between ice age and mild thaw with fairly even levels of carbon. The planet appears from my untrained eye to have reached an equilibrium where carbon sequestration has reached it's limit with further carbon losses causing the planet to cool dramatically trimming plant life until carbon levels can recoup.
There is a lot of evidence that the planet was on the verge of another ice age when the industrial age started. At that point we started taking those billions of pounds of carbon that are sequestered underground and started pumping them into the atmosphere.
From a simple perspective how hard is it to understand that over billions of years the earth stored carbon underground cooling the planet. We are now pumping that carbon back into the atmosphere with the only logical end result being temperatures that match the early earth. A temperature range I might add that most humans would find highly unpleasant. To me it's a fairly simple equation.
"ACMA is investigating this matter and is considering a range of possible actions it may take including referral to the Australian Federal Police. Any Australian involved in making this content publicly available would be at serious risk of criminal prosecution."
If the list is fake what exactly are they going to prosecute anyone for?
When my government denied their were secret CIA prisons then threatened to put people in jail for revealing stuff I nodded my head and said their are probably secret prisons. People don't threaten to call the police or put people in jail unless the item in question is real. I'm willing to bet that regardless of the fist pounding and outrage that this might not be today's list, and it might not be the August 8th list but it's the list at one time. No question about it because of the way he responded. The language makes you think they deny it's the list, but it appears to me their denial is very coached. It's not THE list. Not it's never been the list.
The US will never fully implement the metric system. And I mean NEVER (see my caveat below). It's an impediment to foreign companies supplying or working in our craft sector. Ever wonder why you don't see any European or Chinese sawn lumber or Chinese or European steel beams for purchase? Because they don't have factories that generate Imperial sizes. All the foreign factories are geared to the metric system. The only areas where I've seen a shift to metric was the car industry where foreign imports caused US manufacturers to start using metric parts and the plastic drink container industry where uniform packaging became a problem and they simply implemented metric sizes to negate the need for American specific sizing.
It's a perfectly legal impediment to open trade, much like many of the European ones that the US doesn't use. It keeps jobs and production in the US and (*)until the day the US stops importing more than we export it WON'T change. The government implemented a Metric requirement on Roadway design during the Carter administration. That requirement was completely waved at the end of the Clinton Administration because of the impact it would have had to the craft supply industries where they would have to compete against imported products subsidized by foreign governments.
The imperial measurement system keeps jobs in the US. It's serves a very important purpose beyond being what people know.
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Maybe I don't remember HS Civic's very well but I thought the point of bail was ONLY to prevent flight, not that it had been redefined to be large as a result of danger the innocent (until proved otherwise) person poses. He's being jailed not because he's a flight risk but because of political posturing by the DA, that is a serious miscarriage of justice. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the guy but bail is clearly being misused here.
It's still US territory, you and your belongings just haven't been formally accepted back in. This is the loophole that allows someone to be in the US without a Visa but not allowed to leave the international area of the airport because they can't get through customs. Any criminal violations while in the international portion of the airport would be governed by US (and state)law but Customs would have to admit you or acknowledge you as an illegal citizen (and involving INS) before allowing law enforcement to take you off site. This is why airports have jails, to give INS time to respond.
Why is everyone assuming that they use the translation of the word bank in the same context as we do in English (such as in reference to a blood or sperm repository)? The Sweedish language isn't romantic based and doesn't share the same base or grammar. As a result, even with the influence of English on their society, I'm not any where near confident as a non-Swedish speaker that the language would even use the translation of "Bank" in the same manner we do in English. Native speakers could likely comment on the usage of the word in the language but it's downright silly for speakers of another language without exposure to Scandinavian languages to believe the use of words would be similar to English.
Real estate is cheap, it's the cost of the building permit and materials thats the real SOB.
Your analogy isn't even close to correct. In the Kodak case the film was the patented object, not the camera. Thus manufacture of the film was prevented, this didn't deprive use of the camera as the person still had it and could use it anyway they chose, they simply couldn't purchase Kodak film to fit the camera. You might think it's the same thing but it's not even close. The owner still has and can use the device in any manner they intend, including buying Poloroid film that fits the camera. It'd also argue that the loss of the ability to purchase film could be construed as violating sale doctrines and the owners of said camera could launch a class action against Kodak demanding reimbursement for the loss of functionality. Which is exactly what happened. http://www.ozcamera.com/k-instant.html
In the case of your DirectTV analogy, if DirectTV had advertised the feature, promoted it or promised it at the time of purchase and then removed it due to a lawsuit with TIVO they would in fact be liable to you the purchaser. In the real world you won't sue over it because the award wouldn't cover the legal fees, but that's the whole point of class action lawsuits. The reality is that DirecTV doesn't advertise features, they advertise that they have a DVR and that you can record shows, nothing more and it's not hard to understand why given the analogy.
Amazon made the actual sale, therefore they are liable to the publisher, MobileReference (MR) is then liable to Amazon, likely for abuse of the contract they had with Amazon. There is a chain of liability. Amazon is liable to the purchaser and the publisher as they are the actual seller. Had Amazon not deleted the book the Publisher would probably have sued both MR and Amazon and both liable for damages.
The general rule of suing is you sue everyone, regardless of level of involvement and the amount of the settlement/judgement payable will usually be computed by ability to pay, not necessarily by fault.
As long as the contract has the standard boiler plate server-ability clause the whole EULA won't be voided, only those parts deemed Unconscionable. Without having seen the EULA I know that the sever-ability clause is in there as it's standard language in any contract and no lawyer would allow a contract to be drafted without the clause.
During the heyday of stealing DirectTV service DTV estimated there were close to 100,000 people doing so. That's not a trivial number, particularly when at the time they had around 2 million subscribers, which totals out to 5% of the subscriber base which was stealing the signal. And those numbers don't even include the grey market in Canada where people were stealing the service because they couldn't legally subscribe to it. Now I don't know that I can say they didn't exaggerate the number, but I doubt you can prove they did either. It's not fair use to access satellite signals and regardless of what you might believe to be fair you don't own the radio spectrum on your property, the government does and the FCC has been given control over who uses it by your elected representatives. This is no different than you not owning the mineral rights on your property.
It's all pretty irrelevant anyway as the DMCA is simply one aspect of this. It's always been illegal to access satellite signals without permission, encryption or not, and has been illegal since BUD's (Big Ugly Dishs) when satellite broadcast took off in the early 80's and encryption didn't even exist outside the millitary. In the early days of satellite broadcast the FCC used to drive around looking for BUD's and then would check with the satellite companies to see if you had a subscription and if you didn't you ended up getting sent a $500 fine and told that if you didn't subscribe to service or dismantle your BUD they would be back to seize all your equipment and hit you with a fine that was 10 times larger.
For all your high and mighty talk about the benefits society has had from the free and open sharing of information what is happening in this case is nothing more than some criminal trying to crack a lock so some criminal enterprise can make money selling someone else's product. It's unethical, it's wrong and fortunately it's illegal. I wouldn't be surprised if this business in question is actually connected to the mafia, as selling other peoples products has been a hallmark of their business strategies since they crawled out of the criminal underground.
One of the News reports we've had is that all 3 of the "losing" candidates have alleged that as much as 20% of the ballots were missing key information added at the local polls that validated the ballots as legitimate. Now we have a report that there is 10% more votes than people that could legally vote combined with reports of 80% of the electorate voting, implying 30% of the votes are fabricated.
If 30% of the ballots cast are fabricated how much does that skew the percentages? It's pretty easy to throw an election when there isn't oversight. The dictator in charge didn't allow any of the other candidates to establish monitors in the polling places or ballot tabulation centers. This contrasts to any major democracy in the world where anyone and everyone can watch the votes being counted and observe the balloting process (with the exception of the privacy of actually casting the vote).
IMO the voting irregularities, such as more people voting then can vote (especially with a reported 80% of the electorate voting) there is legitimate cause to annul the vote and start from scratch with monitors, internal or external doesn't matter as long as there are impartial monitors of the polling. The continued effort by the Iranian administration to paint this as external meddling (for simply reporting the news) is a blatant attempt to influence their conservative groups.
The professor brings up the clear point I advocated in the first question to slashdot. There is no evidence whatsoever that Mediasentry had atomic calibrated clock information and the ISP did as well. All this evidence is based on a time stamp that could be anything, not to mention the role of Timezones. Without calibrated times at both the ISP and MediaSentry there is no validity to the evidence.
The ACLU like any civil liberties organization must take a definitive view of what they believe the constitution means then defend that position regardless of how other laws, congress or the courts acts on those issues. The ACLU since it's founding has taken the position that the second amendment is a collective right, not an individual right. This position was also the position of our courts since the supreme court decision in 1939 United states vs. Miller that upheld a ban on sawed off shotguns. The recent decision D.C. vs. Heller appears to reverse that position but the ACLU wouldn't be a civil rights organization if they didn't hold their own positions rather than the popular or contemporaneous answer the courts provide.
And before the page you linked was updated for the Heller decision it strictly noted that they didn't feel it was their issue to defend because organizations like the NRA are solely devoted to it and have been attempting to bring challenges to the supreme court yearly for the last 20 years (and failing every single year except for the very recent guns are a collective right. This is no way diminishes the ACLU as they still provide defense of civil liberties, just because you don't agree with their position on the 2nd amendment doesn't mean the organization is somehow less effective. In fact even though they might have a different view of the 2nd amendment than yourself this doesn't mean they are actively supporting gun control, they simply ignore the issue. In my view that is not justification to attack them as many are keen to do (until of course they need them, such as Rush's frequent diatribes on the ACLU defending bad people while at the same time he relied on them to defend him during his drug trial). The simple answer is that if you support all civil rights and gun control is an issue on your mind then you should support both the ACLU and the NRA. Not attack the ACLU and demonize them for failing to spend precious funds on 2nd amendment challenges when the NRA is already carrying that banner. I should also point out that if you don't agree with the ACLU's position on the 2nd amendment the easiest way to change it to join the ACLU and work to change their position from within the organization, not attack them and refuse to support them.
Locally the ACLU is hated because they sued the local school districts a number of times for imposing the dominant religion on all public school students. These attacks occurs even though the ACLU has actively defended this dominant faith in suits more than once where they weren't the dominant faith and were being discriminated against. I've notice many people that refer to the 2nd amendment issue, but when probed their actual hatred is usually related to the ACLU's defense of 1st amendment issues such as the recent lawsuits involving ten commandment displays where other faiths weren't given equal access. People like to pretend they support civil liberties but when it comes to true freedom of religion where all faiths have equal access in government they balk at the prospect and demonize the ACLU for forcing them to provide equal access or stop using the government to foist the dominant faith's view on the masses.
So you would rather the ACLU divide their resources so they can spend even less time on all the 1st amendment cases to fight for the right to bear arms when there is already several organizations that devote time and money to 2nd amendment challenges?
Personally I think if you believe that's a good idea you're a fool. If you want to devote your money to second amendment challenges then send your money into one of the dozen or more organizations solely devoted to the 2nd amendment, like the NRA. It would be foolish for the ACLU to divide their limited resources to action on the 2nd when there are so many more challenges to the 1st, 4th,, 5th, 6th, 8th and 14th that they need to devote money to and there are so many other organizations whose sole focus is the 2nd. There are very few organizations that spend as much effort on 1st let alone even care about the others. Only a fool would hate the ACLU for being pragmatic about distribution of their limited funds to challenges where they are the only organization working on them.
Your statement about the ACLU working on 2nd amendment challenges is as silly as someone asking the NRA to work on 1st amendment issues.
If both legal systems are part of the same circus than the Swedish system is the clown car where another clown keeps getting out of the car just when you think it's empty and the US system is the rampaging elephant that tramples the audience.
Honesty would be Gartner saying that Windows 7 is Windows Vista with a new coat of paint and that there is no real reason to upgrade to Windows 7. The press turned against Microsoft on Vista because of the IT backlash, but lets be honest they've bought the press lock stock and barrel on Windows 7. There isn't a damn thing different about Windows 7 and vista under the hood. The same things that Gartner and others blasted Vista for is being ignored with Windows 7. Microsoft must have paid the appropriate people really well in advance of the Windows 7 reviews because franly their's NO business incentive to upgrade from XP.
Having one party to a litigation in a meeting without the other to discuss any aspect of the case is a BIG BIG no no. This meeting having happened is grounds for a mistrial later and I doubt there is an appeals court that wouldn't immediately grant the mistrial simply because the meeting was held, even if they were discussing their favorite baseball teams. You can't have fair litigation if the judge is only listening to one side.
As far as your analogy about explaining technical items to the judge, that occurs in COURT, if it's a secrete it happens in a closed court with a sealed transcript but again, BOTH sides are present and both have the opportunity to argue the details and value of the information presented along with the legal right to rebut any information given. What's happened here is the defense is whispering in the ear of the judge and the plaintiff has no idea what was said, how it till affect the case or even if they need to rebut any of it.
The Judge should be removed from the bench or at the very least publicly reprimanded and removed from the case.
The problem with suing college students is that one of them could be the child of the dean of the school of law or some other highly placed or very capable individual. Most of them will be destitute students, but sue enough of them and you are going to sue someone not in your best interest.
Utopia will fail because of the predatory pricing of competitors. If you live where you can get utopia you can get Comcast internet for $24.99 without having to be a cable subscriber. Everywhere you can't get Utopia the price is $54.99 and requires that you get a cable subscription or pay $64.99 a month
Utopia's model is a great system, it takes the last mile out of the hands of the providers and opens it up to competition. The problem is the ILEC's aren't going to compete fairly to ensure their death they are going to use every monopolies favorite tactic to eliminate competition, under price the competitors below what they can offer.
NYCL, honest question here, is there a real procedure to file a response to an amicus curiae? I thought they were wholly independent input from outside observers to the Judge and that the litigating parties didn't have authority to "respond" to them? Maybe I'm naive on this but it seems to me that outside observers offering input should be off the table for responses from either of the litigants as the brief is filed by someone not affiliated with the case which the Judge is fully aware of. If this is legit to do, how often would you say litigants officially file responses to amicus curiae briefs? And if it's not very common how do you think a Judge would respond to receiving one (either negative, positive or neutral)? And finally, don't they have to ask permission before filing the brief?
Waddoups is an ass. Jack is an ass. When you tell someone to stop emailing you and they continue, the least it can be considered is harassment. Especially when the recipient pays for the delivery. Jack has NO right to talk to Waddoups. Jack isn't a resident of Utah and he has no dealings in Utah. If Jack want's to talk to his lawmakers he's free to talk to the ones in Florida and his national representatives. He has NO right to waste the tax money of the citizens of Utah speaking to their representatives. You're a fool if you believe otherwise.
Now lets clear up some lies in your post. The Utah legislative session ended over a month ago. The Utah legislature will not meet again until next year unless the governor calls a special session. This is not pending legislation, it's DEAD legislation as the bill was vetoed by the HIGHLY popular (won re-election with over 76% of the vote) republican governor. The claim of SPAM falls under the FEDERAL law. By all accounts the continued delivery of unsolicited email to the Utah legislators meets the federal definitions of SPAM. Jack isn't a resident of Utah, he has no right to speak to the them or bulk email them after he was asked to discontinue communication. Waddoups is not a member of the federal congress that passed the CAN-SPAM legislation.
I highly dislike Waddoups, but his actions in recognizing Jack for what he is and realizing that future support for such ill conceived legislation will result in harm to the state of Utah because believing Jack is STUPID. Removing future support because of how Jack acts is actually one of the smartest things he's done since throwing his hat in behind this legislation last year. But more importantly than anything, we elect representatives to represent us. In a perfect world that means they would vote for bills the public supports. In the real world, it means they vote how they want for whatever reason they want. Again, Waddoups is an ass, but this bill was dead dead dead. Jack was trying to get them to call a special session to overide the veto when they couldn't have done it as they didn't have the votes and the Huntsman veto killed much of the support for the bill. Jack was trying to get publicity for himself, not get sensible legislation passed that the public of Utah wanted. Jack tried to throw Waddoups into the fire after Waddoups told Jack the bill was dead. Jack then tried to nail the governor and AGO up. A VERY very popular governor and an AGO that was trying to keep Utah from spending millions defending laws that wouldn't make it through the court review. The AGO was trying to save money on bad legislation and Jack tried to nail them to a cross.
This legislation was never popularly supported in Utah. It passed solely because Waddoups put strong backing behind it and the Eagle-Forum supported it with Crazy Gail and her band of wacko's speaking highly of how "Smart" Jack was. He fell for Jack's BS in initially submitting and backing the bill. Now he's realized his mistake, thank god the governor is a very smart guy and simply vetoed it. My guess is now that it's hit the fan Waddoups has done some research on Jack and realized what a mistake he initially made. I truely believe Jack has been very belligerent, after all this was the first legislature to pass his pet legislation that I'm aware of. To have the governor then veto the bill probably pissed him off to no end. After all he's the self proclaimed expert in video game violence.
- A resident of Utah.
This millitary is composed of 18-24 year old foot soldiers. The sergeants and officers are usually older but the main fighting group is the frat boy age. This is why you don't use the military for civilian operations as it's like taking a hammer to any situation. Put these kids in charge of a detention facility (and don't believe for a minute that those 18 year old foot soldiers weren't his guards) and they do things like play movies that are humiliating to detainees. I would bet that every army in the world does stuff like this under these type of circumstances. The only thing you can do to mitigate it is to simply not put soldiers in control of detention facilities. The military really didn't have that option in this situation because Iraqi guards would have done FAR FAR worse to Saddam. So we end up taking the blame for the military acting like a bunch of Frat boys, which they are. Much of this likely could have been mitigated if other nations had donated veteran soldiers and officers to run these type of facilities.
C doesn't have a claim against A. But A has a claim against B and C. A can sue C for lawyer fee's and all the money they've made using the images. Because the images aren't registered with the copyright office they are limited on damages but the disbursement of revenue will be painfull along with the automatic payment of lawyer fee's for A. Copyright law puts EVERYTHING in the hands of the copyright holders. Assuming the original author can substantiate ownership. A should immediately submit all the images for copyright (and they should be images that include more data than the ones in the complaint) so that any ongoing use by B and C falls under statutory damages.
There is more than one company out there that believes they deserve a cut of Google's revenue. They honestly don't believe Google does anything. ATT, Comcast, the RIAA, MPAA and many many organazations have made public statements that they think Google is "stealing" from them. It's not that uncommon for people to see a successful company and be jealous, it's just these days some of the MBAossers we have running companies suggest government should get involved and force Google to share their revenue.
Remember, it has nothing to do with Google indexing their stuff, as they KNOW they could stop that with the change of a robots.txt file. What they want is Google to still index it and drive revenue on their site, but at the same time give them a cut of Ad revenue for the searching. This company isn't the first and will no doubt be the last to request government force Google to share revenue.
I'll admit my knowledge of climatology is very limited. I know the basics about the rain cycle, how the jet streams and rivers in the sea work.
I take a rather simple view of carbon emissions by simply looking at the history of this planet that geology reveals. A science that I understand quite well and is a very very old and well understood science. Through much of the 3 billion years that life has inhabited earth the planet has been extremely warm and extremely wet. Without polar caps the early earth had much more water coverage than today where billions of acre-ft (hectare-m) of water are sequestered in ice sitting on continental shelf's. Most of the geological record also indicates much higher temperatures than today's averages. Most of the early plants that inhabited this planet were ferns and other fungal plants. These plants must have high temperatures and moisture levels to survive. As a result of these conditions swamps and mudflats accumulated organic layers of material decade after decade for billions of years. As the organic material moved further down the geological deposits the temperatures and pressures reformed the stored organics into the fossil fuels (using a process that we can replicate today) we know today.
So it's simple. We had a planet that was MUCH MUCH warmer and wetter than it is today. Over the course of 3 billion years we sequestered much of the carbon in the atmosphere into the ground, buried it into the fossil fuels we use today. For the last several hundred million years the planet has been cycling between ice age and mild thaw with fairly even levels of carbon. The planet appears from my untrained eye to have reached an equilibrium where carbon sequestration has reached it's limit with further carbon losses causing the planet to cool dramatically trimming plant life until carbon levels can recoup.
There is a lot of evidence that the planet was on the verge of another ice age when the industrial age started. At that point we started taking those billions of pounds of carbon that are sequestered underground and started pumping them into the atmosphere.
From a simple perspective how hard is it to understand that over billions of years the earth stored carbon underground cooling the planet. We are now pumping that carbon back into the atmosphere with the only logical end result being temperatures that match the early earth. A temperature range I might add that most humans would find highly unpleasant. To me it's a fairly simple equation.
"This is fake"
um ugh, hmph... and...
"ACMA is investigating this matter and is considering a range of possible actions it may take including referral to the Australian Federal Police. Any Australian involved in making this content publicly available would be at serious risk of criminal prosecution."
If the list is fake what exactly are they going to prosecute anyone for?
When my government denied their were secret CIA prisons then threatened to put people in jail for revealing stuff I nodded my head and said their are probably secret prisons. People don't threaten to call the police or put people in jail unless the item in question is real. I'm willing to bet that regardless of the fist pounding and outrage that this might not be today's list, and it might not be the August 8th list but it's the list at one time. No question about it because of the way he responded. The language makes you think they deny it's the list, but it appears to me their denial is very coached. It's not THE list. Not it's never been the list.
The US will never fully implement the metric system. And I mean NEVER (see my caveat below). It's an impediment to foreign companies supplying or working in our craft sector. Ever wonder why you don't see any European or Chinese sawn lumber or Chinese or European steel beams for purchase? Because they don't have factories that generate Imperial sizes. All the foreign factories are geared to the metric system. The only areas where I've seen a shift to metric was the car industry where foreign imports caused US manufacturers to start using metric parts and the plastic drink container industry where uniform packaging became a problem and they simply implemented metric sizes to negate the need for American specific sizing.
It's a perfectly legal impediment to open trade, much like many of the European ones that the US doesn't use. It keeps jobs and production in the US and (*)until the day the US stops importing more than we export it WON'T change. The government implemented a Metric requirement on Roadway design during the Carter administration. That requirement was completely waved at the end of the Clinton Administration because of the impact it would have had to the craft supply industries where they would have to compete against imported products subsidized by foreign governments.
The imperial measurement system keeps jobs in the US. It's serves a very important purpose beyond being what people know.