[My apologies for the lack of links: Google is your friend. The editor is being a bitch.]
If it reacts with acid, it's carbonate (such as calcium carbonate, CaCO2). The classic test for carbonates is to dump a 5% solution of HCl (hydrochloric acid, available as muriatic acid in any hardware store) onto the sample; if it bubbles, it's a carbonate. (I know one geologist who calls this test "barbaric.") You can also use common household vinegar.
99.99% of all carbonates on the Earth are sedimentary. Usually, they form in shallow to medium depth water when microscopic critters with calcium shells die by the kazillions and fall to the ocean floor, where they pile into layers that give us things like limestone. There is one exception, however: Oldoinyo Lengai is a volcano in Tanzania that produces carbonate lava (the only carbonate-producing volcano in the world -- all the rest produce silicates, products based on SiO2). Someday I would like to see a sample of this igneous carbonate, because while silicates are really really important in geology, they're also really really common, and thus really really boring.
A relatively inexpensive bulk chemical analysis could tell you the exact composition of your samples, and you would probably find a pretty high iron content, which accounts for the trigger on your metal detector. My educated guess is the mineral siderite, FeCO3. It is common both in hydrothermal veins and in sedimentary formations.
Sinkholes can form when subterrainian water flows dissolve minerals (such as carbonates), forming a cave that later collapses. When this happens, you get a crater. And yes, you can get a pretty big one, depending on how deep the cave is.
i find the gameplay to be excellent, but the game itself is unstable.
i run it on a dual-head hp desktop with a 1.86ghz processor, 3g of ram, and an nvidia geforce 9400 gt. i'm using windows 7 pro, fully patched, with dx11 and the steam version of the game installed. it's not a great machine, but it certainly should be adequate to play this game in single-player mode.
it's not. it often crashes during game in initialization, and randomly in the middle of the game, and it doesn't seem to matter if it's in dx9 or dx11. when i am in windowed mode and minimize, the entire machine lugs. when i maximize the window again, it doesn't redraw the screen or respond to keyboard input. my only option was to kill the process, losing the game state. even when not minimized, the load on the machine seems quite high.
not better than microsoft. microsoft has merely made a well-announced, long-planned strategic decision to stop supporting XP on new products. this isn't a surprise, and anyone who complains about it needs to stop living in 2001.
It's incredibly difficult (and expensive) to get credit card processing for an adult entertainment business, and the cartels (Visa/MC/Discover/Amex) don't want to make it easier. In my three years' work for a site dealing with just this kind of issue, here's what I found:
You pretty much can't get processing in your own business name if you're up-front about what you do, in the United States.
You can't get processing in Europe, either, unless you're actually in the EU. Opening a shell corporation won't help, and even then, it's also impossible.
You might be able to get "high risk" processing outside of the United States, out of somewhere like Vietnam or the Philippines. If you do, you can expect games with your money.
You can expect to have your bank hold on to your funds a minimum of three months. This is not something like a 5% rolling reserve. It is, instead, a 100% rolling reserve.
You can expect your contract to say that when you end your contract (even at the end of term in the normal course of business), your processor can hold onto 100% of your money for an additional year, starting as soon as you give your required six months notice.
You can expect your contract to say that you surrender your domain name to your processor in perpetuity.
You can expect to pay as much as 25% of revenue for this "service."
You can expect to find it impossible to open even a normal checking account into which to deposit your funds, because no bank in the universe will want to deal with you, simply because you run an adult business.
About the only semi-reputable (caveat emptor) business that will do billing for adult websites is CCBill. You can expect to pay CCBill at LEAST 10% of your revenue, and if you want to take Visa, you have to pony up another $750 non-refundable startup fee, and a $500 annual fee, on top. Approximately 40% of adult transactions are Visa, so not accepting Visa isn't a viable option for most businesses.
CCB's software absolutely sucks. It is bloated, slow, doesn't give good control over affiliates and their production, and doesn't produce usable reports. And, I have never once given an email address to CCBill (yes, I use unique addresses for such transactions) that didn't get sold to a spammer. This includes addresses I gave to them in a business relationship, not just buying a website subscription.
Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode, which are supposed to eliminate chargebacks, are not available to adult entertainment sites. No explanation has ever been given about why this is so, but if you run porn, you can't use these "enhanced security" services.
CCBill supports only subscription-based services. They don't support physical good sales. Want to sell DVDs, t-shirts, photographic prints, USB keychains, or other goods along with your site subscriptions? Too bad.
No well-known payment service aside from CCBill allows porn. This includes PayPal, Google Checkout, Moneybookers, and the rest. Want to sell legal second-hand DVDs on eBay? Good luck figuring out how to get paid. I have a warehouse full of stuff I basically can't sell because I can't get paid.
One of the reasons problems are so rampant in credit card processing in adult entertainment is that the cartels have made it nearly impossible to get legitimate processing, and so businesses that want to take credit cards have to resort to quasi-legal tactics to be able to run them. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
One of the things I looked into was the possibility of creating, essentially, a pornographer's bank. The bank would adhere to customary American banking law, but would explicitly accept legal adult entertainment business. The question we co
put together the numbers of what this will cost, and complain to your elected supervisors. suggest terminating the cableco's franchise. god forbid they should lose their right to print money by... delivering service.
I've incurred overdraft fees based on merchant error a number of times, and every bankIhaveeverhad has done everything they can to screw their customers out of as much money as possible.
EA expecting banks to refund overdraft fees is like asking EA to... I don't know... behave like a company that cares about its customers.
> That's actually how it worked pre-bill, > the poorest people qualified for Medicaid
And that depends entirely on where you happen to live.
If you live in a state like Massachusetts, which several years ago enacted many of the same reforms contained in this bill -- coverage mandate, subsidies, and guaranteed issue -- you might indeed qualify for Medicaid.
If you live in Texas, it doesn't matter how poor you are. If you're an adult and you're a) not pregnant and b) not so disabled you eat your food through an abdominal tube, you can't get Medicaid. There isn't a box to tick on the integrated application form where you may apply for it, because average adults -- working or not -- do not qualify, ever, for any reason.
The expansion in states like Texas will be slow in coming and relatively miserly, meaning that even if you qualify under the newly-expanded eligibility, chances are greater than 50/50 that you'll still be left with nothing, depending entirely on where you live.
By the way -- please don't give me that "so move to another state!" crap. There are all kinds of reasons why someone can't simply pack their shit and move, such as, in my case, children who live with an ex-spouse that I'd like to continue seeing on a regular basis.
> > When you load it into RAM, you have made a copy for purposes of copyright law.
> That is simply not true. See, e.g. the Cartoon Networks which held that copies in RAM
> and buffered for 1.2 seconds were not in RAM for a long enough period to be considered
> "copies" under the Copyright Act.
There is now a circuit split on the issue. See M.A.I. Systems Corp. v Peak Electronics, 991 F.2d 511 (9th Cir. 1993), where the appeals court held that a copy of software loaded into RAM does qualify as a copy under copyright law. While not related to music specifically, a good researcher might turn this case up and make your life miserable. The changes to the Copyright Act that overturned this decision provided an exemption for repair shops, but did not invalidate this interpretation of "copy."
As a side note, Peak Electronics was unable to appeal this to the Supreme Court because they ran out of money. I was on the staff at an electronics servicer's trade association at the time.
This case is headed to the Supreme Court, and there is a decent chance they may agree to hear it. There is a directly conflicting ruling out of the 10th Circuit in Denver. A split on a point of law (a Circuit split) is often a reason for the Supreme Court to step in, so that the conflict can be resolved.
I had to deal with 2257 compliance in my work for an adult website. It works like this:
1. The photographer (or production company) must verify identity with a government-issued ID. If shot in the United States, the government-issued ID must be an American identification, even if the model is not from the United States, such as a cute chick on vacation for a couple weeks just traveling on her passport. Note that if you shoot outside the United States, a foreign ID is fine. Are you shooting in El Paso? You can go to prison for shooting your Estonian model on her passport and visitor's visa, but if you take her to Juarez and shoot her there, you're in the clear.
2. The photographer must keep a copy of the ID, the model's contract, AND the pictures for five years after the last publication of the photographs. In addition, if published on the Internet, you have to keep a complete list of all URLs (including thumbnails!) of any picture you publish, even when those URLs change or come down. You better not be using any database-driven stuff with auto-generated URLs, because you now have to track every one of them, no matter how they change.
3. The records must be cross-indexed by model's real name, any stage names, any dates of publication, any dates of recording, title of product or production, and URL. Use three year old footage in a new DVD? You get to dig back through your compliance records and update your cross-indexes.
4. The records must be SEPARATE from your normal day-to-day business records. That is, you have to keep this stuff for the ordinary course of your business, and THEN you must keep a SEPARATE copy for the government.
5. You must publish the REAL name and address of the person who holds the records on each copy of your product -- DVD, mag, or book -- AND on EVERY PAGE of your website (a "click here for 2257 info" link is *not* acceptable).
6. This person must be available at least 20 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, for unannounced visits from the FBI, who may rifle through your records (and copy any or all of them, to dig through at their pleasure) looking for violations without a warrant or any cause at all, probable or not.
7. Violation of any of this can land you in prison, even if your models are not under the age of 18. You can do years in prison and pay thousands in fines if the only thing wrong is that you screwed up the cross-indexing.
8. If you sub-license or sell your content (such as your website's affiliates), you have to give un-redacted copies of your records to the person you sell/give the content to. Are you a DVD producer who posts your movies on HotMovies? HotMovies gets a copy of your records, complete with the model's real name and address. The model doesn't get any right to opt out, either; if they can also turn around and sell or sub-license your content, THEIR licensees get your model's information, and YOU can't do anything about it, and you have no control over who it all goes to!
9. If you receive sub-licensed or sold content, you likewise have to keep a complete set of records. It is *not* sufficient to simply keep track of where your content came from so the FBI can back-track. You have to have your own independent, complete set of records, all lined up, cross-indexed and separated from your daily business records, and ready for inspection whenever the FBI decides to materialize.
10. You are required to keep records even if you go out of business, be available for FBI inspection 20 business-time hours per week even if you go on vacation or operat
Most download taxes that are based on "what" rather than "how much" you download are unconstitutional, for the same reason a tax targeting pornography is unconstitutional:
It is a content-based tax. Content-based taxes discriminate against certain kinds of (disfavored) content, and First Amendment law is well established on the point that content-based taxes are a no-no.
You can tax goods and services, but your taxes must be structured in such a way that they do not discriminate against content. You may tax paper and DVD stock, or you may tax all sales, but you can not tax just books but not movies, or just magazines but not books, or only pornographic movies and magazines but not Time and Newsweek.
In the context of a download tax, the only possibly permissible way it could work is by-the-bit (or other unit of arbitrary measure). You have to tax email exactly the same as web pages exactly the same as software downloads exactly the same as movies from Netflix. To do anything else introduces an impermissible content-based discrimination (along with the impossibility of measuring what you're taxing).
And while lawmakers may not want to target pornography because it might "legitimize" the product, they fail to realize that adult content purveyors have decades of experience fighting this sort of nonsense in jurisdictions all over the nation, and on this point, they consistently win.
Rudeness is always appropriate for private machines. So I name mine using euphemisms for female anatomy.
A female friend of mine didn't really appreciate the name "splitlips" and asked me to give the computer a "nice name" instead. So I added a CNAME for "nicename" and told her to use it. What she didn't realize until she actually logged into the shell was that I'd changed her Bash prompt to say "my nice name is still splitlips $"
Besides buying a domain and using Google Apps on it (which isn't actually intended for home users), I was thinking on having a domain of my own and choosing a commercial email provider that should provide just that: email (POP3, SMTP, IMAP, with a decent storage space).
I don't understand why Google Apps is not appropriate for your use.
I have an extremely old domain -- registered over 10 years ago. I receive, on average, 30k spams a month. I am loathe to change it because it is my last name; simply abandoning my email address really isn't a functional alternative for me.
For a long time I did my own email hosting on a Linux/qmail/spamassassin/procmail box, and was still overwhelmed by spam and the maintenance it took to keep it all running. So I investigated alternatives, and settled on Google Apps. It seems to me that Google Apps meets all the criteria you've specified:
Excellent spam filtering
IMAP access
POP3 access
Web access through a very fast interface
Even good mobile access from your phone/PDA
Excellent storage (25g for the pay product)
Inbound and outbound aliasing
Fantastic sorting and filtering
Lightning-fast searches through the web interface
An extremely competative price ($50/yr per box)
It will even do a direct import from your existing IMAP mailbox! The import turns your IMAP folders into GMail tags, preserving your structure.
I use it every day. I don't mess with the rest of the Google Apps product, as I really have no need for it. But compared to the price of a commercial service and/or an annoying challenge-response spam filter service, it's a bargain.
1) Billing errors occur. Don't allow them to take your money until you've verified the bill is correct. Otherwise, even if they correct the bill, you will never, ever get a refund.
2) Balance errors occur. Most banks will slap you for a $30-$40 NSF fee if someone sends an ACH debit transaction that's in excess of your available funds, whether or not they actually pay the ACH. Further, many banks play games about how fast they credit ACH deposits (like your direct deposited paycheck), or regular deposits (like your paper paycheck), in an effort to increase the likelihood you'll have an overdraft. What's more, when you swipe your debit card at a merchant, they can place a hold on your funds even if the final charge isn't anywhere close to the actual transaction amount. (Example: Buy $20 in gas at your local pump and find they "authorized" your card for $75. The bank holds the $75 for anywhere from 3 to 30 days. If you try to spend any of the $55 difference, they slap you with an overdraft fee because the funds were not "available," even though they're still "yours.")
3) Emergencies occur. If I need to take my kid to the ER and shell a large amount of money so that he'll have an eye tomorrow, I shouldn't have to call the electric company to get them to stop the payment so I can do it.
Most banks allow online bill payment, and many don't even charge a fee to use it. The good ones will even present my remembered vendors in a list, and allow me to simply enter the amount I want to pay, the date I want to pay, and click "send." Automatic payment benefits only the vendors and the banks, never the customer. I do not exist for a company's benefit; they exist for mine. Just because they prefer to swipe my account on the due date doesn't mean it's to my benefit to let them. They can take a paper check (or a CheckFree deposit) when I'm damned well good and ready to send it to them, and not a day before.
I agree. But I am expecting the RIAA's lawyers, who on a daily basis have been making many false statements of fact to the courts, working with unlicensed investigators, misstating the law, and using illegal procedures, to be called to task eventually. It will no doubt be too little, too late, but I'm expecting repercussions for what they've done.
Why have you (and other attorneys fighting them) not already filed complaints with their state bars?
This kind of thing won't fly. Even if it passes the legislature and the Governator signs it, a federal judge won't buy it. It is a content-based tax -- that is, it is a tax based on the type of material bought. While that's not unusual (there are different taxes for cars than there are for, say, cigarettes), the key difference is that music is protected by the First Amendment (and, by the way, so is porn). It's clear enough that music is First Amendment-protected expression that I'll spare you the citations on that one.
In McCulloch v Maryland(17 US 316, 1819), Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that "the power to tax is the power to destroy." While that ruling was in a different context, that principle still holds today. For example, in Speiser v Randall (357 US 513 [1958], citing an earlier case, sorry can't get Findlaw working for this one), the Supreme Court held that "It is settled that speech can be effectively limited by the exercise of the taxing power."
It is legal to tax First Amendment-protected material, but such a tax must never:
1. Single out the press
2. Target one group of speakers over another group
3. Discriminate on the basis of content of taxpayer speech.
So, while you pay sales tax on a CD, you pay the same tax on your CD as you pay on your couch and your Jolt! cola. Such a tax applies, but it does not apply only to something that is protected. It encompasses protected things, but it does not single out protected things as the subject of the tax. You pay sales tax on books, but you do not pay a tax that applies only to books.
A "music download tax" targets a specific kind of expression --music -- and is thus illegal under the First Amendment. Similarly, porn taxes are illegal for exactly the same reason, and in Texas bar owners are litigating a tax on admission to topless bars (because dancing, including nude dancing, is also protected, although the extent of that protection is far from settled). One poster asked if the porn industry has a lobby. Yes.
There are two ways such a tax could work:
1. An internet sales tax that applies to all goods and services sold over the internet. This has obvious problems.
2. An internet download tax that covers all downloads, eg, including your web traffic, email, and so on, essentially a bandwidth consumption tax. This has other problems in that pretty much everything on the internet can be construed as speech in one way or another, and thus the argument can be made that the tax targets only internet-based speech, which would be protected.
Note that the First Amendment itself does not differentiate between commercial and non-commercial speech, and thus the courts have tended to err on the side of freedom in commercial speech. There are of course exceptions for things that are deceptive, defamatory, libelous, and harmful; however, for the most part, if what you have to say, even in a commercial enterprise, if it's true, it's pretty much fair game.
What does NOT work on SP1 is the Anytime Upgrade I bought. I have a copy of Vista Business OEM, and for various reasons I bought an Ultimate key through the Anytime Upgrade program.
It works like this:
- Install Vista Business OEM - Activate Vista Business OEM - Run key package for Vista Ultimate Anytime Upgrade - Run installer from Vista Business OEM DVD, that actually does an upgrade install - takes hours
Here's the wrinkle:
- Install Vista Business OEM - Activate Business OEM - Use Business for a while because I have more pressing things to do than a second OS installation. - Install SP1. - Run key backage for Vista Ultimate Anytime Upgrade - Run installer from Vista Business OEM DVD, but instead of doing an upgrade install, the upgrade option is deactivated and it will only do a full format and install.
Thanks, MS. Guess I'll wait until the next time I format the machine (two or three months) to go back to Ultimate.
> You do realize precedent is only downward (and to some extent sideways).
> Precedent set in one circuit does not hold for another circuit and only
> the Supreme Court can set precedent for all courts, and trial courts
> can't set precedent at all.
Yes and no.
The parent refers to the concept of stare decisis. However, courts also recognize the power of pursuasive precedent. That is, a court may recognize that another court has ruled on an issue in a certain way, and the fact (and rationale) of that ruling gives weight to a litigant's argument. While in this situation a court is not required to follow such a precedent, such precedents are relevant and are considered by judges when weighing case law in a given matter. It is always appropriate for a litigant to cite supporting precedents of horizontal or lower courts when no binding precedent from a higher court exists. There is also a corresponding responsibility to cite persuasive precedent that opposes your own position, but then you're allowed to argue why that ruling was incorrect or somehow doesn't apply to the facts of your case.
Courts generally try to resolve questions of law surrounding identical facts in the same way, to provide continuity in the legal system, which is the whole point of stare decisis. However, it's certainly common for horizontal (that is, same-level) courts to enter differing rulings on a given subject, and when this happens the courts (especially the one issuing the later ruling) will explain why it reached a different conclusion. When it happens at the Circuit Court of Appeals level in the United States, this is called a circuit split. A circuit split is one factor the Supreme Court may weigh when deciding whether or not to hear a given case; if a case is the subject of a split, the Supreme Court may step in and issue a ruling to resolve the circuit split and provide continuity throughout the legal system.
My complaint isn't activation. My complaint is that I can't take my retail box copy of any MS product and uninstall it and put it on a new/different computer.
Each MS product comes with a limited number of activations, and that activation ties the copy to a particular computer. It isn't possible, without calling and begging Microsoft for permission, to:
a) Deactivate a piece of software; b) Register that deactivation with MS's activation servers; c) Uninstall the software; d) Install the software on another machine; e) Activate the software on that other machine.
I'm not even talking about OEM versions, which are tied to hardware by their license. No, this is fully-independent retail products you'd buy at .
If I buy a new computer, I not only have to buy the box and the hardware-tied OS, I also have to buy Office again.
I can move my retail copy of Adobe Creative Suite from computer to computer using a deactivation feature -- and I don't even have to uninstall the software, which saves me time later if I want to move my license back. Why can't I do it with my retail copy of Office?
Slashdot Mirror
[My apologies for the lack of links: Google is your friend. The editor is being a bitch.]
If it reacts with acid, it's carbonate (such as calcium carbonate, CaCO2). The classic test for carbonates is to dump a 5% solution of HCl (hydrochloric acid, available as muriatic acid in any hardware store) onto the sample; if it bubbles, it's a carbonate. (I know one geologist who calls this test "barbaric.") You can also use common household vinegar.
99.99% of all carbonates on the Earth are sedimentary. Usually, they form in shallow to medium depth water when microscopic critters with calcium shells die by the kazillions and fall to the ocean floor, where they pile into layers that give us things like limestone. There is one exception, however: Oldoinyo Lengai is a volcano in Tanzania that produces carbonate lava (the only carbonate-producing volcano in the world -- all the rest produce silicates, products based on SiO2). Someday I would like to see a sample of this igneous carbonate, because while silicates are really really important in geology, they're also really really common, and thus really really boring.
A relatively inexpensive bulk chemical analysis could tell you the exact composition of your samples, and you would probably find a pretty high iron content, which accounts for the trigger on your metal detector. My educated guess is the mineral siderite, FeCO3. It is common both in hydrothermal veins and in sedimentary formations.
Sinkholes can form when subterrainian water flows dissolve minerals (such as carbonates), forming a cave that later collapses. When this happens, you get a crater. And yes, you can get a pretty big one, depending on how deep the cave is.
So yes, it's a probably a sinkhole.
Are the "Jury of your peers" seriously that gullible that they feel they have to institute massive punitive damages on an individual?
Yes.
Next stupid question?
i find the gameplay to be excellent, but the game itself is unstable.
i run it on a dual-head hp desktop with a 1.86ghz processor, 3g of ram, and an nvidia geforce 9400 gt. i'm using windows 7 pro, fully patched, with dx11 and the steam version of the game installed. it's not a great machine, but it certainly should be adequate to play this game in single-player mode.
it's not. it often crashes during game in initialization, and randomly in the middle of the game, and it doesn't seem to matter if it's in dx9 or dx11. when i am in windowed mode and minimize, the entire machine lugs. when i maximize the window again, it doesn't redraw the screen or respond to keyboard input. my only option was to kill the process, losing the game state. even when not minimized, the load on the machine seems quite high.
i'm very disappointed with the stability.
not better than microsoft. microsoft has merely made a well-announced, long-planned strategic decision to stop supporting XP on new products. this isn't a surprise, and anyone who complains about it needs to stop living in 2001.
One of the reasons problems are so rampant in credit card processing in adult entertainment is that the cartels have made it nearly impossible to get legitimate processing, and so businesses that want to take credit cards have to resort to quasi-legal tactics to be able to run them. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
One of the things I looked into was the possibility of creating, essentially, a pornographer's bank. The bank would adhere to customary American banking law, but would explicitly accept legal adult entertainment business. The question we co
If you pick your jobs right, you could make as much as $3/hr on Mechanical Turk. I know because at one point it was the only income I had.
Texas has had this since 1984. What's the story here?
put together the numbers of what this will cost, and complain to your elected supervisors. suggest terminating the cableco's franchise. god forbid they should lose their right to print money by ... delivering service.
I've incurred overdraft fees based on merchant error a number of times, and every bank I have ever had has done everything they can to screw their customers out of as much money as possible. EA expecting banks to refund overdraft fees is like asking EA to ... I don't know ... behave like a company that cares about its customers.
> That's actually how it worked pre-bill,
> the poorest people qualified for Medicaid
And that depends entirely on where you happen to live.
If you live in a state like Massachusetts, which several years ago enacted many of the same reforms contained in this bill -- coverage mandate, subsidies, and guaranteed issue -- you might indeed qualify for Medicaid.
If you live in Texas, it doesn't matter how poor you are. If you're an adult and you're a) not pregnant and b) not so disabled you eat your food through an abdominal tube, you can't get Medicaid. There isn't a box to tick on the integrated application form where you may apply for it, because average adults -- working or not -- do not qualify, ever, for any reason.
The expansion in states like Texas will be slow in coming and relatively miserly, meaning that even if you qualify under the newly-expanded eligibility, chances are greater than 50/50 that you'll still be left with nothing, depending entirely on where you live.
By the way -- please don't give me that "so move to another state!" crap. There are all kinds of reasons why someone can't simply pack their shit and move, such as, in my case, children who live with an ex-spouse that I'd like to continue seeing on a regular basis.
Cry me a fucking river.
I was in perhaps 6th grade, and the teacher came in and said the "satellite just ... exploded." She wasn't emotional at all.
I thought she was talking about Voyager.
There is now a circuit split on the issue. See M.A.I. Systems Corp. v Peak Electronics, 991 F.2d 511 (9th Cir. 1993), where the appeals court held that a copy of software loaded into RAM does qualify as a copy under copyright law. While not related to music specifically, a good researcher might turn this case up and make your life miserable. The changes to the Copyright Act that overturned this decision provided an exemption for repair shops, but did not invalidate this interpretation of "copy."
As a side note, Peak Electronics was unable to appeal this to the Supreme Court because they ran out of money. I was on the staff at an electronics servicer's trade association at the time.
This case is headed to the Supreme Court, and there is a decent chance they may agree to hear it. There is a directly conflicting ruling out of the 10th Circuit in Denver. A split on a point of law (a Circuit split) is often a reason for the Supreme Court to step in, so that the conflict can be resolved.
I had to deal with 2257 compliance in my work for an adult website. It works like this:
1. The photographer (or production company) must verify identity with a government-issued ID. If shot in the United States, the government-issued ID must be an American identification, even if the model is not from the United States, such as a cute chick on vacation for a couple weeks just traveling on her passport. Note that if you shoot outside the United States, a foreign ID is fine. Are you shooting in El Paso? You can go to prison for shooting your Estonian model on her passport and visitor's visa, but if you take her to Juarez and shoot her there, you're in the clear.
2. The photographer must keep a copy of the ID, the model's contract, AND the pictures for five years after the last publication of the photographs. In addition, if published on the Internet, you have to keep a complete list of all URLs (including thumbnails!) of any picture you publish, even when those URLs change or come down. You better not be using any database-driven stuff with auto-generated URLs, because you now have to track every one of them, no matter how they change.
3. The records must be cross-indexed by model's real name, any stage names, any dates of publication, any dates of recording, title of product or production, and URL. Use three year old footage in a new DVD? You get to dig back through your compliance records and update your cross-indexes.
4. The records must be SEPARATE from your normal day-to-day business records. That is, you have to keep this stuff for the ordinary course of your business, and THEN you must keep a SEPARATE copy for the government.
5. You must publish the REAL name and address of the person who holds the records on each copy of your product -- DVD, mag, or book -- AND on EVERY PAGE of your website (a "click here for 2257 info" link is *not* acceptable).
6. This person must be available at least 20 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, for unannounced visits from the FBI, who may rifle through your records (and copy any or all of them, to dig through at their pleasure) looking for violations without a warrant or any cause at all, probable or not.
7. Violation of any of this can land you in prison, even if your models are not under the age of 18. You can do years in prison and pay thousands in fines if the only thing wrong is that you screwed up the cross-indexing.
8. If you sub-license or sell your content (such as your website's affiliates), you have to give un-redacted copies of your records to the person you sell/give the content to. Are you a DVD producer who posts your movies on HotMovies? HotMovies gets a copy of your records, complete with the model's real name and address. The model doesn't get any right to opt out, either; if they can also turn around and sell or sub-license your content, THEIR licensees get your model's information, and YOU can't do anything about it, and you have no control over who it all goes to!
9. If you receive sub-licensed or sold content, you likewise have to keep a complete set of records. It is *not* sufficient to simply keep track of where your content came from so the FBI can back-track. You have to have your own independent, complete set of records, all lined up, cross-indexed and separated from your daily business records, and ready for inspection whenever the FBI decides to materialize.
10. You are required to keep records even if you go out of business, be available for FBI inspection 20 business-time hours per week even if you go on vacation or operat
Most download taxes that are based on "what" rather than "how much" you download are unconstitutional, for the same reason a tax targeting pornography is unconstitutional:
It is a content-based tax. Content-based taxes discriminate against certain kinds of (disfavored) content, and First Amendment law is well established on the point that content-based taxes are a no-no.
You can tax goods and services, but your taxes must be structured in such a way that they do not discriminate against content. You may tax paper and DVD stock, or you may tax all sales, but you can not tax just books but not movies, or just magazines but not books, or only pornographic movies and magazines but not Time and Newsweek.
In the context of a download tax, the only possibly permissible way it could work is by-the-bit (or other unit of arbitrary measure). You have to tax email exactly the same as web pages exactly the same as software downloads exactly the same as movies from Netflix. To do anything else introduces an impermissible content-based discrimination (along with the impossibility of measuring what you're taxing).
And while lawmakers may not want to target pornography because it might "legitimize" the product, they fail to realize that adult content purveyors have decades of experience fighting this sort of nonsense in jurisdictions all over the nation, and on this point, they consistently win.
Rudeness is always appropriate for private machines. So I name mine using euphemisms for female anatomy.
A female friend of mine didn't really appreciate the name "splitlips" and asked me to give the computer a "nice name" instead. So I added a CNAME for "nicename" and told her to use it. What she didn't realize until she actually logged into the shell was that I'd changed her Bash prompt to say "my nice name is still splitlips $"
Take a look at Alice. There are even textbooks based on it.
I don't understand why Google Apps is not appropriate for your use.
I have an extremely old domain -- registered over 10 years ago. I receive, on average, 30k spams a month. I am loathe to change it because it is my last name; simply abandoning my email address really isn't a functional alternative for me.
For a long time I did my own email hosting on a Linux/qmail/spamassassin/procmail box, and was still overwhelmed by spam and the maintenance it took to keep it all running. So I investigated alternatives, and settled on Google Apps. It seems to me that Google Apps meets all the criteria you've specified:
I use it every day. I don't mess with the rest of the Google Apps product, as I really have no need for it. But compared to the price of a commercial service and/or an annoying challenge-response spam filter service, it's a bargain.
None, for several reasons.
1) Billing errors occur. Don't allow them to take your money until you've verified the bill is correct. Otherwise, even if they correct the bill, you will never, ever get a refund.
2) Balance errors occur. Most banks will slap you for a $30-$40 NSF fee if someone sends an ACH debit transaction that's in excess of your available funds, whether or not they actually pay the ACH. Further, many banks play games about how fast they credit ACH deposits (like your direct deposited paycheck), or regular deposits (like your paper paycheck), in an effort to increase the likelihood you'll have an overdraft. What's more, when you swipe your debit card at a merchant, they can place a hold on your funds even if the final charge isn't anywhere close to the actual transaction amount. (Example: Buy $20 in gas at your local pump and find they "authorized" your card for $75. The bank holds the $75 for anywhere from 3 to 30 days. If you try to spend any of the $55 difference, they slap you with an overdraft fee because the funds were not "available," even though they're still "yours.")
3) Emergencies occur. If I need to take my kid to the ER and shell a large amount of money so that he'll have an eye tomorrow, I shouldn't have to call the electric company to get them to stop the payment so I can do it.
Most banks allow online bill payment, and many don't even charge a fee to use it. The good ones will even present my remembered vendors in a list, and allow me to simply enter the amount I want to pay, the date I want to pay, and click "send." Automatic payment benefits only the vendors and the banks, never the customer. I do not exist for a company's benefit; they exist for mine. Just because they prefer to swipe my account on the due date doesn't mean it's to my benefit to let them. They can take a paper check (or a CheckFree deposit) when I'm damned well good and ready to send it to them, and not a day before.
I agree. But I am expecting the RIAA's lawyers, who on a daily basis have been making many false statements of fact to the courts, working with unlicensed investigators, misstating the law, and using illegal procedures, to be called to task eventually. It will no doubt be too little, too late, but I'm expecting repercussions for what they've done.
Why have you (and other attorneys fighting them) not already filed complaints with their state bars?
> Being able to aquire medical care when in need is a basic human right.
You obviously do not live in the United States.
In McCulloch v Maryland (17 US 316, 1819), Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that "the power to tax is the power to destroy." While that ruling was in a different context, that principle still holds today. For example, in Speiser v Randall (357 US 513 [1958], citing an earlier case, sorry can't get Findlaw working for this one), the Supreme Court held that "It is settled that speech can be effectively limited by the exercise of the taxing power."
It is legal to tax First Amendment-protected material, but such a tax must never:
1. Single out the press
2. Target one group of speakers over another group
3. Discriminate on the basis of content of taxpayer speech.
So, while you pay sales tax on a CD, you pay the same tax on your CD as you pay on your couch and your Jolt! cola. Such a tax applies, but it does not apply only to something that is protected. It encompasses protected things, but it does not single out protected things as the subject of the tax. You pay sales tax on books, but you do not pay a tax that applies only to books.
A "music download tax" targets a specific kind of expression --music -- and is thus illegal under the First Amendment. Similarly, porn taxes are illegal for exactly the same reason, and in Texas bar owners are litigating a tax on admission to topless bars (because dancing, including nude dancing, is also protected, although the extent of that protection is far from settled). One poster asked if the porn industry has a lobby. Yes.
There are two ways such a tax could work:
1. An internet sales tax that applies to all goods and services sold over the internet. This has obvious problems.
2. An internet download tax that covers all downloads, eg, including your web traffic, email, and so on, essentially a bandwidth consumption tax. This has other problems in that pretty much everything on the internet can be construed as speech in one way or another, and thus the argument can be made that the tax targets only internet-based speech, which would be protected.
Note that the First Amendment itself does not differentiate between commercial and non-commercial speech, and thus the courts have tended to err on the side of freedom in commercial speech. There are of course exceptions for things that are deceptive, defamatory, libelous, and harmful; however, for the most part, if what you have to say, even in a commercial enterprise, if it's true, it's pretty much fair game.
Great to know this thing still works on SP1.
What does NOT work on SP1 is the Anytime Upgrade I bought. I have a copy of Vista Business OEM, and for various reasons I bought an Ultimate key through the Anytime Upgrade program.
It works like this:
- Install Vista Business OEM
- Activate Vista Business OEM
- Run key package for Vista Ultimate Anytime Upgrade
- Run installer from Vista Business OEM DVD, that actually does an upgrade install - takes hours
Here's the wrinkle:
- Install Vista Business OEM
- Activate Business OEM
- Use Business for a while because I have more pressing things to do than a second OS installation.
- Install SP1.
- Run key backage for Vista Ultimate Anytime Upgrade
- Run installer from Vista Business OEM DVD, but instead of doing an upgrade install, the upgrade option is deactivated and it will only do a full format and install.
Thanks, MS. Guess I'll wait until the next time I format the machine (two or three months) to go back to Ultimate.
> Precedent set in one circuit does not hold for another circuit and only
> the Supreme Court can set precedent for all courts, and trial courts
> can't set precedent at all.
Yes and no.
The parent refers to the concept of stare decisis . However, courts also recognize the power of pursuasive precedent. That is, a court may recognize that another court has ruled on an issue in a certain way, and the fact (and rationale) of that ruling gives weight to a litigant's argument. While in this situation a court is not required to follow such a precedent, such precedents are relevant and are considered by judges when weighing case law in a given matter. It is always appropriate for a litigant to cite supporting precedents of horizontal or lower courts when no binding precedent from a higher court exists. There is also a corresponding responsibility to cite persuasive precedent that opposes your own position, but then you're allowed to argue why that ruling was incorrect or somehow doesn't apply to the facts of your case.
Courts generally try to resolve questions of law surrounding identical facts in the same way, to provide continuity in the legal system, which is the whole point of stare decisis. However, it's certainly common for horizontal (that is, same-level) courts to enter differing rulings on a given subject, and when this happens the courts (especially the one issuing the later ruling) will explain why it reached a different conclusion. When it happens at the Circuit Court of Appeals level in the United States, this is called a circuit split. A circuit split is one factor the Supreme Court may weigh when deciding whether or not to hear a given case; if a case is the subject of a split, the Supreme Court may step in and issue a ruling to resolve the circuit split and provide continuity throughout the legal system.
My complaint isn't activation. My complaint is that I can't take my retail box copy of any MS product and uninstall it and put it on a new/different computer.
Each MS product comes with a limited number of activations, and that activation ties the copy to a particular computer. It isn't possible, without calling and begging Microsoft for permission, to:
a) Deactivate a piece of software;
b) Register that deactivation with MS's activation servers;
c) Uninstall the software;
d) Install the software on another machine;
e) Activate the software on that other machine.
I'm not even talking about OEM versions, which are tied to hardware by their license. No, this is fully-independent retail products you'd buy at .
If I buy a new computer, I not only have to buy the box and the hardware-tied OS, I also have to buy Office again.
I can move my retail copy of Adobe Creative Suite from computer to computer using a deactivation feature -- and I don't even have to uninstall the software, which saves me time later if I want to move my license back. Why can't I do it with my retail copy of Office?