No, everyone who wants to run for office should get a statutory allowance, funded through tax dollars. A limited a mount of local TV time, radio play, etc. -- for each and every candidate -- should be required, by statute, of broadcasters as a condition of operating on the public airwaves. (Cable operators and the like might be able to opt out by agreeing not to run any campaign ads whatsoever).
This would have been extremely problematic in California's recent election... Even the lesser amount of equal-time required (I'm unclear on the details; I got the impression everyone was) was already creating confusion, with radio stations afraid to give interviews for fear of having to give 10 minutes to all 135 candidates.
And I don't see how not running any campaign ads whatsoever is going to improve democracy--sounds like a bigger advantage for incumbents and the independently famous than there already is.
In WWII, eight German soldiers infiltrated the U.S. to commit acts of sabotage. They were captured, tried for espionage before a military tribunal, and found guilty. Six were executed, and two served long prison sentences. As they were engaged in clandestine acts of espionage and sabotage, they were not covered under the Geneva convention, and were not Prisoners of War, so it was perfectly legal to try and execute them. How is the current situation with Al Qaeda different?
Well, the Supreme Court decision that said the military had the right to try and execute them was based on an interpretation of U.S. laws that have been totally overhauled (by Congress) in the ~60 years since that case, so what was legal then may no longer be.
From the picture of on the CNN site, it looks like they changed the green part to be closer to the monopoly $20... I wonder if they'll change the $50 to blue and $100 to yellow so as to match.
It would certainly be a shame if people who didn't like the new silly-looking currency took a hole-punch and made a small hole in each new pinkish-greenish $20 that passed through their hands...
Any good ideas for an address for them to send the resulting confetti to?
A retailer that only does 500 transactions/month for 50c each (5/95 of $10) is only making $250 a month, which is almost certain to not cover expenses.
I'm too tired to work the math out right now, but I doubt it's probable for a reasonably small account to off of the correct value by more than $100.
Why would people who, in general, sanely handle the certainty of their own death and the deaths of everyone they know in a few decades suddenly turn into senseless idiots when the time scale gets compressed by about 10x or a little more?
Not to mention that however minuscale the chance of preventing such an asteroid collision, it's probably much better than the chances of preventing any particular individual's death by simple aging.
I thought that half-life weapon was an mp5, not an assault rifle (it fires the same ammo as the pistol, although it does inexplicably have a grenade-launcher attched)
Re:Why can't we change the diffinition of copyrigh
on
Copyright Rumblings
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· Score: 1
If Sisko and Ebert can review a recent copyrighted movie with footage then why can't a documentary include footage from the early half of the 20th century?
It depends on what the documentary is doing with the clip, if it's a documentary *about* the footage, then that would probably be fair use, if they just want free stock footage, then no, they'd have to get permission as long as it's copyrighted. afaik, that's not some new-fangled extension to copyright powers, it's always been that way.
-- Benjamin Coates, IANAL
p.s. it's Ebert and Roeper now, Gene Siskel died in 1999.
Firstly, referring to women as girls in a derogatory sense has been recognised as sexist for some time now... look at your topic then report yourself for re-education, comrade.
Firstly, I truly fail to see how a weapon like this will make that much difference against an enemy that regards Kalashnikows and rocket-propelled grenades as high tech and has had it's most significant success using box-cutters.
Even al Queda used things like civilian vehicles and radios, which would be sensitive to this sort of weapon. North Korea and Iraq have more vulnerable technology than that.
Secondly, it seems that this weapon could very well be used against humans if used at similar frequencies to microwave ovens.
Microwaves would have to be used at energy levels capable of actually cooking your internal organs to be harmful, that's a whole lot more than you need to induce a current to destroy microelectronics. While these weapons radiate a lot of power (a few gigawatts), they do so for nanoseconds, so the total energy output might be around a kilojoule or less--about the amount of microwave energy a home microwave puts out in a second.
The conventional explosives used to create the microwave burst, or just being hit by the heavy flying object itself would be a far greater danger to humans.
Thirdly, all this glory halleluyah for high-tech weapons is more than a little bit sick. In the real world, real people die in wars. Killing and maiming more people will make the USA even more unpopular globally than it is today and will most surely attract more attacks by fanatics who have nothing except their lives to lose.
The entire point of this weapon is to kill and maim less people when we go to war. Many of the things we bomb these days are infrastructure, if we can destroy them with less risk to people nearby, isn't that a good thing?
Fourthly, the most recent use of high-tech biological weapons was in the USA, against Americans, most probably by an American. And, ironically your FBI has yet to name a suspect.
I'm not sure where you're going with this item... is this a general argument that technology is bad or something?
Fifthly, most of the rest of the world thinks that the USA has no real problem with Saddam, and that what the USA really wants is the oil. The rest of the world will not forget this, nor will they forget the paradox of the USA's treatment of North Korea, a country that has openly admitted having worked on nuclear weapons.
Um. Ok then. Right. HAND.
-- Benjamin Coates
Re:question for all you Java experts
on
Effective Java
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· Score: 1
I don't think i understand what you're doing here; it sounds like you're using totally different benchmarks in C and java, so the numbers shouldn't be comparable at all, should they?
At best you might be able to compare jvms with it, but since the benchmark is designed to measure cpu performance (isn't it?) it might not give meaningful results for that either.
Cuz I don't want to shuffle ~100 DVD-Rs by hand...
Unless there's an economical way of automating disks for computers out there, in which case I'd like to know about it, *D-R media appears to be consistently much cheaper than hard drives.
I get just as annoyed at telemarketers as everyone else, but these calls are providing real employment for people who would otherwise be living marginal or supported lives.
Just because you're doing something overseas doesn't magically protect you from liability; you could be tracked to South America and right back to the US if you're running the operation remotely.
Even if you're actually based in South America, or wherever, your clients (the companies that sell the products being advertised by spam) might not be, and a good law would let you go after them directly. It's not easy to sell something to Americans without any operations in the US whatsoever; at the very least you probably need to take credit cards drawn on US banks, and the law could do something similar to what was proposed for overseas gambling, requiring the US credit card companies to dishonor the debt. (I don't recall if that was actually implemented or just discussed)
Those "databases which store known spammers" are the RBLs which Lessig is saying are unsatisfactory, and the entire reason for an alternative approach.
That's really cool. (and I like the "micro-donations" term you floated in k5 better than micropayments.)
One big question I have is auditing. I'll know when I'm supposed to send the money, but it's a little unsettling to just send it off to someone with no assurance that it's actually going to the right place.
Have you considered dealing with the bootstrap problem by temporarily using an escrow system, where a donor would give their money to an intermediary (some bank account you or some trusted party manage) in order to validate those donations, but not have the money released until recipients have built up sufficent numbers of validated amounts to get paid? Its probably impractical (too many fees) to use a proper escrow account at a bank for that, but if you could manage some sort of equivalent, building up a few hundred dollars* of float would make working out the matches much easier--and you wouldn't have to go to the substantial risk of paying people on the assumption that their donors will eventually pay up.
* A guess, enough money that you would have a reasonable selection of people waiting for payments, but not so much that people would be suspicious you were siphoning off interest or about to run away with it.
How do you stop people from changing their cookies and/or renegotiating their IP address and/or moving to the next internet cafe machine over for free instead?
American Imperialism in Europe and the Pacific was certainly real.
Something of an oversimplification, but whatever. Why would that mean the American public is being maniuplated? Most people around here I know seem to like having a reasonably secure and stable world to do their business in.
Then terrorists may be able to use it to their advantage to find weakspots in (for eg) Mount Rushmore. I imagine they will be able to find flaws in rushmore that could be exploited by high explosives.
Well, There's this exhaust port, but it's at the end of this narrow canyon and only like two meters wide...
Slashdot Mirror
No, everyone who wants to run for office should get a statutory allowance, funded through tax dollars. A limited a mount of local TV time, radio play, etc. -- for each and every candidate -- should be required, by statute, of broadcasters as a condition of operating on the public airwaves. (Cable operators and the like might be able to opt out by agreeing not to run any campaign ads whatsoever).
This would have been extremely problematic in California's recent election... Even the lesser amount of equal-time required (I'm unclear on the details; I got the impression everyone was) was already creating confusion, with radio stations afraid to give interviews for fear of having to give 10 minutes to all 135 candidates.
And I don't see how not running any campaign ads whatsoever is going to improve democracy--sounds like a bigger advantage for incumbents and the independently famous than there already is.
--
Benjamin Coates
In WWII, eight German soldiers infiltrated the U.S. to commit acts of sabotage. They were captured, tried for espionage before a military tribunal, and found guilty. Six were executed, and two served long prison sentences. As they were engaged in clandestine acts of espionage and sabotage, they were not covered under the Geneva convention, and were not Prisoners of War, so it was perfectly legal to try and execute them. How is the current situation with Al Qaeda different?
Well, the Supreme Court decision that said the military had the right to try and execute them was based on an interpretation of U.S. laws that have been totally overhauled (by Congress) in the ~60 years since that case, so what was legal then may no longer be.
iirc, ianal
--
Benjamin Coates
What's your nick on #freenet, and roughly when did this happen?
--
Benjamin Coates
From the picture of on the CNN site, it looks like they changed the green part to be closer to the monopoly $20... I wonder if they'll change the $50 to blue and $100 to yellow so as to match.
It would certainly be a shame if people who didn't like the new silly-looking currency took a hole-punch and made a small hole in each new pinkish-greenish $20 that passed through their hands...
Any good ideas for an address for them to send the resulting confetti to?
Really.
A retailer that only does 500 transactions/month for 50c each (5/95 of $10) is only making $250 a month, which is almost certain to not cover expenses.
I'm too tired to work the math out right now, but I doubt it's probable for a reasonably small account to off of the correct value by more than $100.
--
Benjamin Coates
Why would people who, in general, sanely handle the certainty of their own death and the deaths of everyone they know in a few decades suddenly turn into senseless idiots when the time scale gets compressed by about 10x or a little more?
Not to mention that however minuscale the chance of preventing such an asteroid collision, it's probably much better than the chances of preventing any particular individual's death by simple aging.
--
Benjamin Coates
looks like 3 years, but redistributing it would probably be a new offense and wouldn't help you.
--
Benjamin Coates
I thought that half-life weapon was an mp5, not an assault rifle (it fires the same ammo as the pistol, although it does inexplicably have a grenade-launcher attched)
--
Benjamin Coates
didja get it x-rayed at security?
If Sisko and Ebert can review a recent copyrighted movie with footage then why can't a documentary include footage from the early half of the 20th century?
It depends on what the documentary is doing with the clip, if it's a documentary *about* the footage, then that would probably be fair use, if they just want free stock footage, then no, they'd have to get permission as long as it's copyrighted. afaik, that's not some new-fangled extension to copyright powers, it's always been that way.
--
Benjamin Coates, IANAL
p.s. it's Ebert and Roeper now, Gene Siskel died in 1999.
Firstly, referring to women as girls in a derogatory sense has been recognised as sexist for some time now... look at your topic then report yourself for re-education, comrade.
Firstly, I truly fail to see how a weapon like this will make that much difference against an enemy that regards Kalashnikows and rocket-propelled grenades as high tech and has had it's most significant success using box-cutters.
Even al Queda used things like civilian vehicles and radios, which would be sensitive to this sort of weapon. North Korea and Iraq have more vulnerable technology than that.
Secondly, it seems that this weapon could very well be used against humans if used at similar frequencies to microwave ovens.
Microwaves would have to be used at energy levels capable of actually cooking your internal organs to be harmful, that's a whole lot more than you need to induce a current to destroy microelectronics. While these weapons radiate a lot of power (a few gigawatts), they do so for nanoseconds, so the total energy output might be around a kilojoule or less--about the amount of microwave energy a home microwave puts out in a second.
The conventional explosives used to create the microwave burst, or just being hit by the heavy flying object itself would be a far greater danger to humans.
Thirdly, all this glory halleluyah for high-tech weapons is more than a little bit sick. In the real world, real people die in wars. Killing and maiming more people will make the USA even more unpopular globally than it is today and will most surely attract more attacks by fanatics who have nothing except their lives to lose.
The entire point of this weapon is to kill and maim less people when we go to war. Many of the things we bomb these days are infrastructure, if we can destroy them with less risk to people nearby, isn't that a good thing?
Fourthly, the most recent use of high-tech biological weapons was in the USA, against Americans, most probably by an American. And, ironically your FBI has yet to name a suspect.
I'm not sure where you're going with this item... is this a general argument that technology is bad or something?
Fifthly, most of the rest of the world thinks that the USA has no real problem with Saddam, and that what the USA really wants is the oil. The rest of the world will not forget this, nor will they forget the paradox of the USA's treatment of North Korea, a country that has openly admitted having worked on nuclear weapons.
Um. Ok then. Right. HAND.
--
Benjamin Coates
I don't think i understand what you're doing here; it sounds like you're using totally different benchmarks in C and java, so the numbers shouldn't be comparable at all, should they?
At best you might be able to compare jvms with it, but since the benchmark is designed to measure cpu performance (isn't it?) it might not give meaningful results for that either.
--
Benjamin Coates
Why not just buy a DVD burner?
Cuz I don't want to shuffle ~100 DVD-Rs by hand...
Unless there's an economical way of automating disks for computers out there, in which case I'd like to know about it, *D-R media appears to be consistently much cheaper than hard drives.
--
Benjamin Coates
I won't mind. I'll be living on a free taxpayer ride. Maybe I'll become a crimnal too, and take advantage of that great prison system!
If you'd rather, then you'd better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
It's not my business; It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly.
Good afternoon.
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Benjamin Coates
I get just as annoyed at telemarketers as everyone else, but these calls are providing real employment for people who would otherwise be living marginal or supported lives.
Are there no prisons?
And the workhouses, are they still in operation?
Is welfare and public assistance still in effect?
I help to support these establisments -- they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.
--
Benjamin Coates
Just because you're doing something overseas doesn't magically protect you from liability; you could be tracked to South America and right back to the US if you're running the operation remotely.
Even if you're actually based in South America, or wherever, your clients (the companies that sell the products being advertised by spam) might not be, and a good law would let you go after them directly. It's not easy to sell something to Americans without any operations in the US whatsoever; at the very least you probably need to take credit cards drawn on US banks, and the law could do something similar to what was proposed for overseas gambling, requiring the US credit card companies to dishonor the debt. (I don't recall if that was actually implemented or just discussed)
Those "databases which store known spammers" are the RBLs which Lessig is saying are unsatisfactory, and the entire reason for an alternative approach.
--
Benjamin Coates
Also the reason we have 360 degrees in a circle despite the fact that radians make much more sense is because greek
"Drive 3 blocks north, then take the one-quarter pi radian turn right, and go another block."
Yeah, that's a real useful unit.
--
Benjamin Coates
That's really cool. (and I like the "micro-donations" term you floated in k5 better than micropayments.)
One big question I have is auditing. I'll know when I'm supposed to send the money, but it's a little unsettling to just send it off to someone with no assurance that it's actually going to the right place.
Have you considered dealing with the bootstrap problem by temporarily using an escrow system, where a donor would give their money to an intermediary (some bank account you or some trusted party manage) in order to validate those donations, but not have the money released until recipients have built up sufficent numbers of validated amounts to get paid? Its probably impractical (too many fees) to use a proper escrow account at a bank for that, but if you could manage some sort of equivalent, building up a few hundred dollars* of float would make working out the matches much easier--and you wouldn't have to go to the substantial risk of paying people on the assumption that their donors will eventually pay up.
* A guess, enough money that you would have a reasonable selection of people waiting for payments, but not so much that people would be suspicious you were siphoning off interest or about to run away with it.
--
Benjamin Coates
How do you stop people from changing their cookies and/or renegotiating their IP address and/or moving to the next internet cafe machine over for free instead?
--
Benjamin Coates
I thought the push fad died off like 5 years ago.
But if you can find a way to get people to pay for it, have fun.
American Imperialism in Europe and the Pacific was certainly real.
Something of an oversimplification, but whatever. Why would that mean the American public is being maniuplated? Most people around here I know seem to like having a reasonably secure and stable world to do their business in.
--
Benjamin Coates
The Communists and Japanese were made up?
--
Benjamin Coates
Then terrorists may be able to use it to their advantage to find weakspots in (for eg) Mount Rushmore. I imagine they will be able to find flaws in rushmore that could be exploited by high explosives.
Well, There's this exhaust port, but it's at the end of this narrow canyon and only like two meters wide...
--
Benjamin Coates
Hence the bright shiny copper will become green after some time, as you should know if you are Dr. Science.
He's not a real doctor. He has a Master's degree.
--
Benjamin Coates