Good for you. Please, though, take my point that if you're in the UK then France is as far from you as, say, Iowa is from me. For you Spain is about as far away as Maryland is for me. A trip for you to Poland is about the same distance as a trip for me to Wyoming.
Maryland, Iowa, and Wyoming all require me to carry no more paperwork than my own state of Illinois, and the people in those places predominantly speak American English. I can (and have) left my home in the morning by auto and gone to bed over 1,600 km away, where the locals speak the same language, take the same currency, fly the same flag, and read the same national news.
There are lots of us Yanks who speak another language as a second language, or even a first. Yet the pressure to do so isn't as much, because we can see multiple oceans, multiple mountain ranges, multiple major rivers, multiple pockets of other cultures, multiple climates, multiple time zones, and even another country without leaving an area that is still primarily covered by a single language. The scale of the US and Canada is completely different. I would imagine that in Russia, Australia, and China there are similar pressures working against multilingualism. It's always good to know another language, but it really is less necessary for travel in some places than others.
Indexing it and linking to the newspaper's own site where the newspaper makes money on the ads is not the same as taking the whole article and putting it on Google's site with Google's ads. This newspaper published her whole work without her permission, and did not send her any revenue or any readers.
Irrelevant, or irrelevant in that one particular situation?
The students at Kent State were shot by US troops. The followers of Vernon Howell were killed by federal agents outside Waco. At Ruby Ridge, Idaho, fourteen-year-old Samuel Weaver was shot in the back and killed by a federal marshal while retreating from a firefight after the marshals had fired on his dog and the boy returned fire. The boy's father, Randy Weaver, was mislead by the government about the date of his court appearance, and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest when he didn't show up for the date he wasn't told to be there.
What about defending your home against invasion? What about emergency militias turning back armed drug cartels that cross the border? What about places like Columbus, New Mexico where US civilians less than a century ago fought alongside the US Cavalry to defend their town from an attack across the border by Pancho Villa?
Having a well-disposed all-volunteer army right now doesn't mean the US military has always been or will always remain that way. The US military was manned largely by draftees up until the 1970s.
The military isn't the only armed agency of the federal government. The marshals, the BATF, ICE, the FBI, the Secret Service, and more have armed agents. Then there are state, county, and local governments. Then, there are metropolitan and other special inter-jurisdictional armed forces of police. You have a right to defend yourself from any of them that are abusing their authority and misusing their weapons toward you. You also have the right to defend yourself against other ordinary citizens who are violent toward you. I hope you never need to, but you have the right.
I think the ideas many today have about "militia" and what some in the Federal government want you to consider "arms" cloud this discussion. In the days of Washington and Adams, "arms" meant weapons of war. A rifle or shotgun was a must on a farm, and most people farmed or lived in small towns near farms. A militia was the group formed when all able-bodied men (and often older boys) were called to military action on short notice. It had nothing to do with a standing army, a reserve unit, or the federal troops the governor gets to share (AKA the National Guard). The drafters of the US constitution had artillery and ship-mounted cannon including privateers when they fought Great Britain. Those are arms.
An AR-15 and ample ammunition is an arm, and an M-16A3 a better one. A pump-action shotgun with a three-round internal magazine is not an "arm", although a semi-auto shotgun with a clip or drum might be. A potato-launching air canister is not an arm, but a howitzer is. The second amendment has been chipped away for decades.
Up until the advent of the tank, the helicopter gunship, and the fighter plane military weapons were never that much more advanced than what private US citizens had. Gatling guns in private hands might have been rare, but they existed. The "Firearm Owners' Protections Act" outlawed manufacture of submachine guns for US civilians only as recently as 1986. In my father's lifetime a "quarter stick" (as in a quarter-stick of dynamite) was considered a farming tool, or during this time of year a firework. People used dynamite on their own land to clear stubborn stumps or to break up rocks in the soil.
Now I can't legally set off so much as a firecracker on my own land in my state without a permit and a $1,000,000 liability insurance policy. I can still buy at my local farm supply store a semi-auto 5.56mm rifle with a 20-round clip that will hold and fire NATO military rounds and has a top-mounted picatinny rail for a scope,. three fore-mounted picatinny rails for attachments, a circle/spot battle sight, and a collapsible folding stock. At that same store, I can ingredients for explosives but I must sign special paperwork for a whole class of decongestant medications if I have a cold.
I think those who say the second amendment was never of any use to a revolutionary force don't think about the history of weapons much. Furthermore, I think that although the protections it offers have been eroded that it's still not a lost cause if it ever came to armed civil conflict. A bunch of guys in a collapsed country that had been suppressed by the Baath party for decades can harass and threaten US troops occupying a country the size of California with a population much smaller than California. The US has over 300,000,000 people who are relatively well fed, relatively wealthy, relatively well connected by electronic means, relatively well trained and educated, and who are spread over an area nearly the size of Europe. I think it'd be damn difficult to stop a revolution or a civil war if two factions ever got to that point. There may be heavy casualties, but a few hundred thousand of even the best troops cannot control hundreds of millions of people.
Emergency medicine is generally available. It's preventative care and care for minor health problems that turn into major ones later that you'd be likely to be denied. The emergency room will treat you and bill you later, then hound you for years and sue you into bankruptcy, but at least you'd have that care. It'd be cheaper to prevent illnesses and accidental injuries that can be prevented, but that shifts the costs around. Any time you shift costs, you're going to be fighting the ones who profit more from the current scheme.
Being taxed to fund the campaigns of those already in power isn't democracy, either. Search for "matching funds". In the US, the two favored parties can fund their presidential candidate races largely with the public's own money. It's like paying someone to tell you what to think. I can buy books by Al Franken or Rush Limbaugh if I want that.
Nixon (GOP) isn't exactly the previous administration. He started the "war on drugs". Johnson (Democrat) started the "war on poverty". Carter (Democrat) started the departments of Energy and Education and gave us "stagflation". Clinton (Democrat) tried to force federalized healthcare on the US. Kennedy (Democrat) helped the Baath party (the party of Saddam Hussein) come to power in Iraq and wiretapped Martin Luther King, Jr. among others. Kennedy also broke a treaty (And a campaign promise) by relocating the Seneca. Truman (Democrat) ended a railroad strike by threatening to draft striking workers into the military.
Blaming GWB for all that has ever been wrong with the United States or for every growth of government power is beyond ludicrous.
Bullshit. In the US, the police are an authority. If you're completely innocent and are placed under arrest, you are still under arrest. You do not have the right to flee or resist. You get your day in court eventually, but you cannot flee or resist. If you flee arrest or resist arrest then you have committed a crime by fleeing or resisting. You don't even have to be arrested to be under the authority of a police officer. They can compel you to give a statement about something you witness.
They can direct you in traffic, which may be routine or may be specifically applied to you. They can remove you from traffic, search your car, search your person, tell you what building you may or may not enter, and more all without arresting you. All they need is "probable cause" and in some cases only "reasonable suspicion". They are supposed to have good reasons for any of these things and can get in big trouble for doing them without a good reason. However, if one chooses to abuse his or her power then until after the event is over and you can address the issue in the courts you are at the mercy of that officer.
The problem is we have two supposedly diametrically opposed parties that are both tyrannical. Where they do differ, one wants to tell me what to do with my speech, my land, my guns, and my money while the other wants to tell me what to do with my body, my soul, and again my speech (but for different reasons).
Napoleon was talking both of economics and logistics. Since he ruled fairly absolutely over a fairly resource-rich empire, you can guess he could have been talking more about logistics than economics. Still, your points stand about small forces causing disproportionate damage.
The success of the British empire was largely that the British army was as much clerical as military. Troops conquered land, but the occupation was performed largely by people working as management overseeing economic ventures.
If you want to invade a country, overwhelm its armies. If you want to occupy a land, make the people there more secure and prosperous. They are two very different things, and they require two very different sets of thinking. In both, though, logistics are important. Troops need field supplies, and civilians need fixed infrastructure.
Montreal is indeed a great place for Anglophones to get freedom of speech. The ones who understand English will ignore you anyway because you're not speaking French, so you don't have to worry what you say at all!;-)
The problem with having a big and powerful government in order to have services is that you still have a big and powerful government. It'd be better for the government to pay in large lump sums to universities to have doctors trained and to pay for drug, genetic, and surgical research to make treatment more easily affordable. The bureaucracy of keeping track of everyone's individual treatment on a nationwide scale employs more people, takes more money than funding the medical research and medical education, and puts the power for more decisions into the hands of unelected bureaucrats.
The practice of encouraging huge pharmaceutical companies to sink huge amounts of private funds into researching a drug, patenting it, and trying to slip it past the FDA watchdog is wasteful and drives up costs whether the government of the individual pays those costs. It'd be better for a streamlined disbursement system to reward university researchers for finding true results, positive or negative, than to have big drug companies trying to game the FDA. Then, the government-funded research would be available for any drug company to make unpatented, non-exclusive use of research they didn't have to fund. Exclusive rights enrich the few. Commodities enrich the many.
We in the US are apparently too busy selling everyone else trite Hollywood bullshit in our language to bother learning everyone else's languages. Thankfully, everyone else learns US English to be able to buy and watch that tripe.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, when you have a nation of over 300,000,000 people neighbored by a nation of over 30,000,000 that mostly speak the same language and which together cover the majority of a large continent, there's just not as much need to learn the languages of 49 countries (if you include Vatican City) that combined (10,180,000 km2) take up little more space than either the United States (9,826,630 km2) by itself or Canada (9,984,670) by itself.
OTOH, I did study both French and Spanish in high school and some Russian in college. I'm not strong in any of them, but I can ask for directions to a restaurant, hotel, library, taxi, hospital, shower, toilet, river, store, pen, and paper in a good portion of the world. Don't believe that stereotypes represent everyone.
Who is benefiting from the work? Isn't the newspaper selling copies of its papers? Don't you think this work of the girl's sold more copies? If the newspaper benefits from making copies of her work and has no rights to do so, then her copyright has been violated, hasn't it?
She is therefore, in my mind, entitled to the revenues generated -- some or all -- from the unlawful distribution of her work. It can't be lawful distribution, because it was a reprint of something already copied without permission by the person who submitted it to the paper, who was not reporting news or making commentary.
IANAL, but it seems fairly clear to me that damages include not compensating her for printing her work in whole (in order to sell papers) without her permission. I'd say she's owed something on those grounds.
If it's a simple matter to reprocess them locally, then the environmental impact isn't very high. My laptop batteries range from two hours use to 10 hours use. If I could get 100 hours out of my smaller, thinner laptops I'd be pretty damn pleased with that. For most of what I do on a laptop, my Psion series 5mx lasted all week on two AA batteries. If we end up with 10x as powerful batteries and 4x as efficient laptops, then you're looking at 400 hours usage -- nearly all the waking hours in a month.
If they last a month in my laptop, are cheap to replace, and can be conveniently dropped into a recycling bin where I pick up my new batteries, then I don't care so much. It's the logistics that matter as much as anything. It's usually the logistics that are overlooked.
If you lived, worked, and shopped within a few blocks, you wouldn't even worry about your car most days. That's logistics.
If you could replace gasoline with hydrogen, that'd be great. However, you'd also have to replace gasoline with hydrogen in all those gasoline stations. Yet you can't get rid of the gasoline at the stations until everyone else's car stops running on gasoline, too.
Electric cars are great, but most of them need to be recharged overnight. If you build a car than can recharge for a 200-mile trip in 5 minutes, you still need to have recharging stations that can deliver that amount of power that are easily accessible. See? Logistics.
Burning down some idiot's house who mistreats his laptop is totally worth you and me getting longer-lasting laptops, though. If they can be made safe enough for people who don't abuse them, they're safe enough. I haul gasoline in a big tank in my car right now, for example. There's some danger, but I've never been burned or blasted by it yet.
This gold isn't being sold so much as a money piece as a curiosity. CoinStar machines, BTW, do charge a portion of your coinage to issue it back to you in paper bills. You could go to a bank and have it done for free, but when you're using a vending machine for convenience, expect to pay a premium.
Thank you, Mr. Obvious. You know, attached to a story about them launching their first LED DLP projector, I was really worried that everyone who read that they had other projectors would think they were also LED DLP projectors.
Slashdot Mirror
Good for you. Please, though, take my point that if you're in the UK then France is as far from you as, say, Iowa is from me. For you Spain is about as far away as Maryland is for me. A trip for you to Poland is about the same distance as a trip for me to Wyoming.
Maryland, Iowa, and Wyoming all require me to carry no more paperwork than my own state of Illinois, and the people in those places predominantly speak American English. I can (and have) left my home in the morning by auto and gone to bed over 1,600 km away, where the locals speak the same language, take the same currency, fly the same flag, and read the same national news.
There are lots of us Yanks who speak another language as a second language, or even a first. Yet the pressure to do so isn't as much, because we can see multiple oceans, multiple mountain ranges, multiple major rivers, multiple pockets of other cultures, multiple climates, multiple time zones, and even another country without leaving an area that is still primarily covered by a single language. The scale of the US and Canada is completely different. I would imagine that in Russia, Australia, and China there are similar pressures working against multilingualism. It's always good to know another language, but it really is less necessary for travel in some places than others.
I'll accept "were exacerbated by". I don't agree that the drug czar, etc, were "the result of" because they simply were not.
Indexing it and linking to the newspaper's own site where the newspaper makes money on the ads is not the same as taking the whole article and putting it on Google's site with Google's ads. This newspaper published her whole work without her permission, and did not send her any revenue or any readers.
Irrelevant, or irrelevant in that one particular situation?
The students at Kent State were shot by US troops. The followers of Vernon Howell were killed by federal agents outside Waco. At Ruby Ridge, Idaho, fourteen-year-old Samuel Weaver was shot in the back and killed by a federal marshal while retreating from a firefight after the marshals had fired on his dog and the boy returned fire. The boy's father, Randy Weaver, was mislead by the government about the date of his court appearance, and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest when he didn't show up for the date he wasn't told to be there.
What about defending your home against invasion? What about emergency militias turning back armed drug cartels that cross the border? What about places like Columbus, New Mexico where US civilians less than a century ago fought alongside the US Cavalry to defend their town from an attack across the border by Pancho Villa?
Having a well-disposed all-volunteer army right now doesn't mean the US military has always been or will always remain that way. The US military was manned largely by draftees up until the 1970s.
The military isn't the only armed agency of the federal government. The marshals, the BATF, ICE, the FBI, the Secret Service, and more have armed agents. Then there are state, county, and local governments. Then, there are metropolitan and other special inter-jurisdictional armed forces of police. You have a right to defend yourself from any of them that are abusing their authority and misusing their weapons toward you. You also have the right to defend yourself against other ordinary citizens who are violent toward you. I hope you never need to, but you have the right.
I think the ideas many today have about "militia" and what some in the Federal government want you to consider "arms" cloud this discussion. In the days of Washington and Adams, "arms" meant weapons of war. A rifle or shotgun was a must on a farm, and most people farmed or lived in small towns near farms. A militia was the group formed when all able-bodied men (and often older boys) were called to military action on short notice. It had nothing to do with a standing army, a reserve unit, or the federal troops the governor gets to share (AKA the National Guard). The drafters of the US constitution had artillery and ship-mounted cannon including privateers when they fought Great Britain. Those are arms.
An AR-15 and ample ammunition is an arm, and an M-16A3 a better one. A pump-action shotgun with a three-round internal magazine is not an "arm", although a semi-auto shotgun with a clip or drum might be. A potato-launching air canister is not an arm, but a howitzer is. The second amendment has been chipped away for decades.
Up until the advent of the tank, the helicopter gunship, and the fighter plane military weapons were never that much more advanced than what private US citizens had. Gatling guns in private hands might have been rare, but they existed. The "Firearm Owners' Protections Act" outlawed manufacture of submachine guns for US civilians only as recently as 1986. In my father's lifetime a "quarter stick" (as in a quarter-stick of dynamite) was considered a farming tool, or during this time of year a firework. People used dynamite on their own land to clear stubborn stumps or to break up rocks in the soil.
Now I can't legally set off so much as a firecracker on my own land in my state without a permit and a $1,000,000 liability insurance policy. I can still buy at my local farm supply store a semi-auto 5.56mm rifle with a 20-round clip that will hold and fire NATO military rounds and has a top-mounted picatinny rail for a scope,. three fore-mounted picatinny rails for attachments, a circle/spot battle sight, and a collapsible folding stock. At that same store, I can ingredients for explosives but I must sign special paperwork for a whole class of decongestant medications if I have a cold.
I think those who say the second amendment was never of any use to a revolutionary force don't think about the history of weapons much. Furthermore, I think that although the protections it offers have been eroded that it's still not a lost cause if it ever came to armed civil conflict. A bunch of guys in a collapsed country that had been suppressed by the Baath party for decades can harass and threaten US troops occupying a country the size of California with a population much smaller than California. The US has over 300,000,000 people who are relatively well fed, relatively wealthy, relatively well connected by electronic means, relatively well trained and educated, and who are spread over an area nearly the size of Europe. I think it'd be damn difficult to stop a revolution or a civil war if two factions ever got to that point. There may be heavy casualties, but a few hundred thousand of even the best troops cannot control hundreds of millions of people.
Emergency medicine is generally available. It's preventative care and care for minor health problems that turn into major ones later that you'd be likely to be denied. The emergency room will treat you and bill you later, then hound you for years and sue you into bankruptcy, but at least you'd have that care. It'd be cheaper to prevent illnesses and accidental injuries that can be prevented, but that shifts the costs around. Any time you shift costs, you're going to be fighting the ones who profit more from the current scheme.
Being taxed to fund the campaigns of those already in power isn't democracy, either. Search for "matching funds". In the US, the two favored parties can fund their presidential candidate races largely with the public's own money. It's like paying someone to tell you what to think. I can buy books by Al Franken or Rush Limbaugh if I want that.
Nixon (GOP) isn't exactly the previous administration. He started the "war on drugs". Johnson (Democrat) started the "war on poverty". Carter (Democrat) started the departments of Energy and Education and gave us "stagflation". Clinton (Democrat) tried to force federalized healthcare on the US. Kennedy (Democrat) helped the Baath party (the party of Saddam Hussein) come to power in Iraq and wiretapped Martin Luther King, Jr. among others. Kennedy also broke a treaty (And a campaign promise) by relocating the Seneca. Truman (Democrat) ended a railroad strike by threatening to draft striking workers into the military.
Blaming GWB for all that has ever been wrong with the United States or for every growth of government power is beyond ludicrous.
Bullshit. In the US, the police are an authority. If you're completely innocent and are placed under arrest, you are still under arrest. You do not have the right to flee or resist. You get your day in court eventually, but you cannot flee or resist. If you flee arrest or resist arrest then you have committed a crime by fleeing or resisting. You don't even have to be arrested to be under the authority of a police officer. They can compel you to give a statement about something you witness.
They can direct you in traffic, which may be routine or may be specifically applied to you. They can remove you from traffic, search your car, search your person, tell you what building you may or may not enter, and more all without arresting you. All they need is "probable cause" and in some cases only "reasonable suspicion". They are supposed to have good reasons for any of these things and can get in big trouble for doing them without a good reason. However, if one chooses to abuse his or her power then until after the event is over and you can address the issue in the courts you are at the mercy of that officer.
The problem is we have two supposedly diametrically opposed parties that are both tyrannical. Where they do differ, one wants to tell me what to do with my speech, my land, my guns, and my money while the other wants to tell me what to do with my body, my soul, and again my speech (but for different reasons).
Let us know when you find a just government.
Napoleon was talking both of economics and logistics. Since he ruled fairly absolutely over a fairly resource-rich empire, you can guess he could have been talking more about logistics than economics. Still, your points stand about small forces causing disproportionate damage.
The success of the British empire was largely that the British army was as much clerical as military. Troops conquered land, but the occupation was performed largely by people working as management overseeing economic ventures.
If you want to invade a country, overwhelm its armies. If you want to occupy a land, make the people there more secure and prosperous. They are two very different things, and they require two very different sets of thinking. In both, though, logistics are important. Troops need field supplies, and civilians need fixed infrastructure.
Montreal is indeed a great place for Anglophones to get freedom of speech. The ones who understand English will ignore you anyway because you're not speaking French, so you don't have to worry what you say at all! ;-)
The problem with having a big and powerful government in order to have services is that you still have a big and powerful government. It'd be better for the government to pay in large lump sums to universities to have doctors trained and to pay for drug, genetic, and surgical research to make treatment more easily affordable. The bureaucracy of keeping track of everyone's individual treatment on a nationwide scale employs more people, takes more money than funding the medical research and medical education, and puts the power for more decisions into the hands of unelected bureaucrats.
The practice of encouraging huge pharmaceutical companies to sink huge amounts of private funds into researching a drug, patenting it, and trying to slip it past the FDA watchdog is wasteful and drives up costs whether the government of the individual pays those costs. It'd be better for a streamlined disbursement system to reward university researchers for finding true results, positive or negative, than to have big drug companies trying to game the FDA. Then, the government-funded research would be available for any drug company to make unpatented, non-exclusive use of research they didn't have to fund. Exclusive rights enrich the few. Commodities enrich the many.
It's still good for stapling to the coffins of the oppressors once the people take their rights back.
s/job/legal, taxed job/
We in the US are apparently too busy selling everyone else trite Hollywood bullshit in our language to bother learning everyone else's languages. Thankfully, everyone else learns US English to be able to buy and watch that tripe.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, when you have a nation of over 300,000,000 people neighbored by a nation of over 30,000,000 that mostly speak the same language and which together cover the majority of a large continent, there's just not as much need to learn the languages of 49 countries (if you include Vatican City) that combined (10,180,000 km2) take up little more space than either the United States (9,826,630 km2) by itself or Canada (9,984,670) by itself.
OTOH, I did study both French and Spanish in high school and some Russian in college. I'm not strong in any of them, but I can ask for directions to a restaurant, hotel, library, taxi, hospital, shower, toilet, river, store, pen, and paper in a good portion of the world. Don't believe that stereotypes represent everyone.
Who is benefiting from the work? Isn't the newspaper selling copies of its papers? Don't you think this work of the girl's sold more copies? If the newspaper benefits from making copies of her work and has no rights to do so, then her copyright has been violated, hasn't it?
She is therefore, in my mind, entitled to the revenues generated -- some or all -- from the unlawful distribution of her work. It can't be lawful distribution, because it was a reprint of something already copied without permission by the person who submitted it to the paper, who was not reporting news or making commentary.
IANAL, but it seems fairly clear to me that damages include not compensating her for printing her work in whole (in order to sell papers) without her permission. I'd say she's owed something on those grounds.
If it's a simple matter to reprocess them locally, then the environmental impact isn't very high. My laptop batteries range from two hours use to 10 hours use. If I could get 100 hours out of my smaller, thinner laptops I'd be pretty damn pleased with that. For most of what I do on a laptop, my Psion series 5mx lasted all week on two AA batteries. If we end up with 10x as powerful batteries and 4x as efficient laptops, then you're looking at 400 hours usage -- nearly all the waking hours in a month.
If they last a month in my laptop, are cheap to replace, and can be conveniently dropped into a recycling bin where I pick up my new batteries, then I don't care so much. It's the logistics that matter as much as anything. It's usually the logistics that are overlooked.
If you lived, worked, and shopped within a few blocks, you wouldn't even worry about your car most days. That's logistics.
If you could replace gasoline with hydrogen, that'd be great. However, you'd also have to replace gasoline with hydrogen in all those gasoline stations. Yet you can't get rid of the gasoline at the stations until everyone else's car stops running on gasoline, too.
Electric cars are great, but most of them need to be recharged overnight. If you build a car than can recharge for a 200-mile trip in 5 minutes, you still need to have recharging stations that can deliver that amount of power that are easily accessible. See? Logistics.
Burning down some idiot's house who mistreats his laptop is totally worth you and me getting longer-lasting laptops, though. If they can be made safe enough for people who don't abuse them, they're safe enough. I haul gasoline in a big tank in my car right now, for example. There's some danger, but I've never been burned or blasted by it yet.
This gold isn't being sold so much as a money piece as a curiosity. CoinStar machines, BTW, do charge a portion of your coinage to issue it back to you in paper bills. You could go to a bank and have it done for free, but when you're using a vending machine for convenience, expect to pay a premium.
The ARM is non-x86 whether it runs Linux or WinCE.
Thank you, Mr. Obvious. You know, attached to a story about them launching their first LED DLP projector, I was really worried that everyone who read that they had other projectors would think they were also LED DLP projectors.