dealing with a source of energy where a worst case scenario has such catastrophic consequences
Like what? From what I've seen in the worst case scenario we lose Florida over thousands of years. And that isn't even a realistic scenario.
Sure, global warming sucks for people who have houses near the shore, but I'd say losing 5 million jobs today is more catastrophic than losing Florida over the next 1000 years.
Additionally, do you think a multi-hundred-million dollar campaign (i.e. Kerry/Edwards) is just ignoring this? That no one on their staff is INTIMATELY aware of these situations and allegations. Quite the contrary.
That's a good reason we should have a truly independent source check the software now. What if the machines are just set to give 1/3 of the Nader votes to Kerry and 2/3 of the Badnarik votes to Bush? Manipulate the numbers or whatever and I'm sure you could find an agreement acceptable to both parties.
This isn't about Bush vs. Kerry. This is about an inherently flawed process which threatens Democracy. Even if it makes no difference in the 2004 election, these issues need to be addressed now because 20 years from now you will have much less chance of changing the status quo.
Screwing someone over and defending yourself from getting screwed over isn't hypocrisy, it's the American way.
Seriously, it'd only be hypocrisy if they said Edison was wrong because there shouldn't be IP laws and then said copyright violaters were wrong because there should be IP laws. It's not even hypocrisy to utilize a law you don't believe in. That would kind of defeat the whole purpose of the FSF and GPL, now wouldn't it?
I don't see why it's unfortunate. Boycotting a company because they exercise their legal right to sue someone for copyright infringement is pretty stupid. Maybe we should boycott Mysql and the FSF too.
While I don't think the word "stealing" should be used in either case, spam clearly is harassment, and I support at least civil laws against harassment. Distributing something which happened to written by someone else is completely different though. It's copyright infringement, not harassment, and I don't support laws against people who infringe copyright for non-profit purposes - civil or criminal.
It's very simple -- insert a short ad into your "official" content. Track its distribution on file-sharing systems to report back to your advertisers.
As soon as Windows/Intel get a decent DRM system built into computers you can be sure this is what they're going to do. In the mean time, it's impossible to track this type of distribution.
Now now, the exit polls matched the election results. They always matched the election results and CNN always predicted a Bush win. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs -- all have been rectified.
If anyone wants to be a moron and voluntarily raise their income tax rate, I don't think anyone would have a problem with that.
Bush would. He only supports recognition of civil unions at a state level. The federal government would continue to tax the couple as single.
And your knowledge of federal tax law is incomplete. If a couple has a similar income, yes, they pay more in taxes by filing as married. But in a one-income household you pay less by filing married than you do by filing single.
The ones you listed are not going to cause anyone to directly lose money, they are mostly victimless.
While they might not cause anyone to lose money, they are most certainly not victimless.
It's more like someone running a garbage company and dumping garbage illegally on your property. Except they just dump one bag of garbage on every lot in town.
I don't think that analogy captures the fact that the whole point of an email account is to receive email. It's more like putting ads on people's windshields. Is that illegal? Probably, but people shouldn't be going to jail for it.
If a company did that, they would be in jail in a second for trespass and illegal dumping.
In most states you can't go to jail for simple tresspass, and this might not even qualify for that. I don't know about illegal dumping, but it certainly shouldn't be a felony. I'd even argue against any jail time, unless there was an injunction in place.
Spamming is not a victimless crime.
I never said it was. What I said was that it was a nuisance crime. Nuisance crimes have victims, but I don't think you should go locking up everyone who bothers someone.
if it takes an AOL user an average of just 3 seconds of their time to see this, decide what to do with it and delete it
But it certainly doesn't. Many of the AOL users don't even bother checking their AOL email, and those that do usually know what to delete just by looking at the header, we're talking more like 1/3 second.
If a spammer was this active for more than 21 days, then they are going to be spending less time in jail than they stole from other people.
If you are playing with absolutely terrible players, can you get a hint of whether or not they're strong or weak based on certain things they do, body language and mannerisms? Yes.
I find the opposite to be true. While I can get a good sense of the hand of an average player, you can pretty much never tell what the terrible player has. And considering that there's usually only one of these players at a full table, it really doesn't matter all that much unless you can get the game heads up. Yeah, you know the person will raise with almost anything, in some lame attempt to bluff everyone out of the pot, but you've still gotta assume someone else has a good hand. So you wait until you've got a monster, and then checkraise or something to signal to all the decent players to fold. Then, once you've got it heads up, bet and bet and hope the idiot doesn't by sheer luck happen to already have a hand or catch one. Hopefully you've got a big bankroll, because the moron will catch with annoying frequency.
My guess is you haven't played much poker for real money, at least not against opponents who aren't god-awful.
I have, a lot, and while I think you're right when it comes to the average casino game, where a good player can win just by playing tight, to beat a tough game you've gotta exploit some tells, and you have to make sure that you don't have any.
Of course, I mainly play stud, not holdem. It's a lot easier to read people's hands in stud, because you get to actually see 4/7ths of it.
None of the gambling sites I know of take egold. Neteller and Firepay, but not e-gold.
Yes, you don't get protection from fraud, but that's part of why the transaction costs are so low. Would I pay to buy a $114.00 item from a stranger using e-gold? Heck no. But would a merchant ever accept a $0.05 payment through paypal? Absolutely not.
I've got $0.09 in my e-gold account. Now if only I could find somewhere to spend it.
Not for simply and easily accepting credit card payments, but there are a number of alternatives to credit card payments which can make sense depending on the details of the transaction. As a seller, my favorite is the USPS money order, as they can be turned into cold hard cash at any post office. Any other payment method requires you to happen to have the bank on which the check is drawn in your local area or a waiting period before you can access your money. When I was selling on ebay I gave a $1.75 rebate to anyone who paid me with a USPS money order. They're really that much better than any other form of payment, for the seller, anyway. Paypal is there to protect the buyer, and ultimately, that protection winds up costing the buyer quite a bit, probably on the order of 10-15% on a $20 purchase, when you consider insurance, delivery confirmation, and of course the paypal fees themselves. Yes, you're not allowed to pass on these fees directly, but you can be sure that they're factored in.
has a ridiculous EULA which would prevent anyone with a knowledge of law from using them
Depends. If you have a good enough knowledge of law, you'll realize that the EULA doesn't really bind you (as a buyer) to anything you can't get out of. If you don't receive the product you paid for, you have the right under the law to chargeback your credit card. Paypal can't take that right away, no matter what their EULA says.
primarily the disadvantage that you can defraud me and I have little recourse other than to beg PayPal to give me my money back.
You don't give up your right to chargeback your credit card when you buy through paypal. Paypal really doesn't want you to do that, so they'll almost always take the side of the purchaser, though.
With PayPal the burden of proof is on the purchaser.
I've sold a lot of items on ebay, and while I accepted paypal I strongly preferred a check or money order (especially a USPS money order). The reason for that is because the opposite of what you said is actually true. With a check or money order (which is actually a type of check), once the instrument cleared the burden of proof was on the purchaser (and USPS money orders can be cashed at any post office so they clear instantly). But with paypal, the burder of proof is on the vendor for the first 30 or 60 days (I forget which). And I wasn't about to wait 30 to 60 days to ship.
Depends on your usage profile. Egold is hard to get started with, but the per transaction cost is much cheaper. Egold is a great solution if you can find people who actually use it. But there aren't that many people who use it.
No matter how many wrongs you add up, you will never create a right.
But I wasn't talking about right and wrong, I was talking about constitutional and unconstiutional.
I'm well aware of the federal government intruding in states rights in all sorts of ways.
But this wouldn't be one of them. What "right" would this infringe, anyway, the right for states to not allow its citizens to receive $10 million? I guess not, since the state could refuse to participate.
And you have just forced a state to do something they don't want to.
Presumably it's something they do want to do, otherwise they wouldn't do it.
It is not fair for people in some state that does not want a lottery to pay taxes that would then go to someone in a different state that takes the lottery money.
There's no constitutional requirement that taxation has to be "fair". More importantly, taxation applies to the person, not the state. The federal government taxes people "unfairly" in this way all the time. They even do things which are much worse, like withhold highway funds to states which refuse to lower the speed limit or raise the drinking age. This doesn't require the states to do anything.
I don't know what king of monkeys are running the elections in your precinct but the last time I voted it took me at most ten minutes, and it was probably closer to five.
I've never voted in my precinct, so I wasn't basing it on that. I'd say ten minutes is a lot more than five, and I've heard reports of places where it takes hours.
If you can't spare the time to show up in person request an absentee ballot. Fill it out at your liesure in the privacy of your own home and mail it in at your convenience. How much easier does it need to be?
I'd like to be able to vote online or via telephone. They can do it with tax returns, why not ballots?
Slashdot Mirror
dealing with a source of energy where a worst case scenario has such catastrophic consequences
Like what? From what I've seen in the worst case scenario we lose Florida over thousands of years. And that isn't even a realistic scenario.
Sure, global warming sucks for people who have houses near the shore, but I'd say losing 5 million jobs today is more catastrophic than losing Florida over the next 1000 years.
C'mon you know the second these shows get distributed on P2P someone is going to remove the ads and put them up without ads.
Additionally, do you think a multi-hundred-million dollar campaign (i.e. Kerry/Edwards) is just ignoring this? That no one on their staff is INTIMATELY aware of these situations and allegations. Quite the contrary.
That's a good reason we should have a truly independent source check the software now. What if the machines are just set to give 1/3 of the Nader votes to Kerry and 2/3 of the Badnarik votes to Bush? Manipulate the numbers or whatever and I'm sure you could find an agreement acceptable to both parties.
This isn't about Bush vs. Kerry. This is about an inherently flawed process which threatens Democracy. Even if it makes no difference in the 2004 election, these issues need to be addressed now because 20 years from now you will have much less chance of changing the status quo.
Screwing someone over and defending yourself from getting screwed over isn't hypocrisy, it's the American way.
Seriously, it'd only be hypocrisy if they said Edison was wrong because there shouldn't be IP laws and then said copyright violaters were wrong because there should be IP laws. It's not even hypocrisy to utilize a law you don't believe in. That would kind of defeat the whole purpose of the FSF and GPL, now wouldn't it?
No films will be made or records released.
You misread him. No MPAA films will be made.
I don't see why it's unfortunate. Boycotting a company because they exercise their legal right to sue someone for copyright infringement is pretty stupid. Maybe we should boycott Mysql and the FSF too.
While I don't think the word "stealing" should be used in either case, spam clearly is harassment, and I support at least civil laws against harassment. Distributing something which happened to written by someone else is completely different though. It's copyright infringement, not harassment, and I don't support laws against people who infringe copyright for non-profit purposes - civil or criminal.
It's very simple -- insert a short ad into your "official" content. Track its distribution on file-sharing systems to report back to your advertisers.
As soon as Windows/Intel get a decent DRM system built into computers you can be sure this is what they're going to do. In the mean time, it's impossible to track this type of distribution.
Now now, the exit polls matched the election results. They always matched the election results and CNN always predicted a Bush win. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs -- all have been rectified.
What president wouldn't save the skin of somebody that saved theirs?
Susan McDougal spent a while in jail before being pardoned by Clinton on the last day of his Presidency.
Besides, this is a violation of state law. I don't think the President can pardon someone for violating state law.
Bush may win, but the popular vote is still quite close, which means that roughly half the voters didn't want Bush .
That's probably what it means, but it could mean that people just want Kerry more.
If anyone wants to be a moron and voluntarily raise their income tax rate, I don't think anyone would have a problem with that.
Bush would. He only supports recognition of civil unions at a state level. The federal government would continue to tax the couple as single.
And your knowledge of federal tax law is incomplete. If a couple has a similar income, yes, they pay more in taxes by filing as married. But in a one-income household you pay less by filing married than you do by filing single.
With a name like "Magic Cube" if the toy is anything at all like a Rubic's Cube then it almost certainly does infringe on the Rubic's Cube trademark.
Yeah, cause how dare they call a six-faced object with square faces a "Cube". I mean, they even capitalized the C!
The ones you listed are not going to cause anyone to directly lose money, they are mostly victimless.
While they might not cause anyone to lose money, they are most certainly not victimless.
It's more like someone running a garbage company and dumping garbage illegally on your property. Except they just dump one bag of garbage on every lot in town.
I don't think that analogy captures the fact that the whole point of an email account is to receive email. It's more like putting ads on people's windshields. Is that illegal? Probably, but people shouldn't be going to jail for it.
If a company did that, they would be in jail in a second for trespass and illegal dumping.
In most states you can't go to jail for simple tresspass, and this might not even qualify for that. I don't know about illegal dumping, but it certainly shouldn't be a felony. I'd even argue against any jail time, unless there was an injunction in place.
Spamming is not a victimless crime.
I never said it was. What I said was that it was a nuisance crime. Nuisance crimes have victims, but I don't think you should go locking up everyone who bothers someone.
if it takes an AOL user an average of just 3 seconds of their time to see this, decide what to do with it and delete it
But it certainly doesn't. Many of the AOL users don't even bother checking their AOL email, and those that do usually know what to delete just by looking at the header, we're talking more like 1/3 second.
If a spammer was this active for more than 21 days, then they are going to be spending less time in jail than they stole from other people.
So when you net it out I guess they gained time.
Err, except that you can't "steal" time.
There should be some punishment though.
In civil court, maybe. Punitive damages, sure. But putting someone in jail for what is essentially a nuisance? No, I don't buy it.
Sure, you can go to jail for other nuisances, obscenity, public nudity, panhandling, public intoxication. But those are bad laws too.
Sending email is a felony now? Where has this country gone?
If you are playing with absolutely terrible players, can you get a hint of whether or not they're strong or weak based on certain things they do, body language and mannerisms? Yes.
I find the opposite to be true. While I can get a good sense of the hand of an average player, you can pretty much never tell what the terrible player has. And considering that there's usually only one of these players at a full table, it really doesn't matter all that much unless you can get the game heads up. Yeah, you know the person will raise with almost anything, in some lame attempt to bluff everyone out of the pot, but you've still gotta assume someone else has a good hand. So you wait until you've got a monster, and then checkraise or something to signal to all the decent players to fold. Then, once you've got it heads up, bet and bet and hope the idiot doesn't by sheer luck happen to already have a hand or catch one. Hopefully you've got a big bankroll, because the moron will catch with annoying frequency.
My guess is you haven't played much poker for real money, at least not against opponents who aren't god-awful.
I have, a lot, and while I think you're right when it comes to the average casino game, where a good player can win just by playing tight, to beat a tough game you've gotta exploit some tells, and you have to make sure that you don't have any.
Of course, I mainly play stud, not holdem. It's a lot easier to read people's hands in stud, because you get to actually see 4/7ths of it.
None of the gambling sites I know of take egold. Neteller and Firepay, but not e-gold.
Yes, you don't get protection from fraud, but that's part of why the transaction costs are so low. Would I pay to buy a $114.00 item from a stranger using e-gold? Heck no. But would a merchant ever accept a $0.05 payment through paypal? Absolutely not.
I've got $0.09 in my e-gold account. Now if only I could find somewhere to spend it.
There are no better alternatives to PayPal.
Not for simply and easily accepting credit card payments, but there are a number of alternatives to credit card payments which can make sense depending on the details of the transaction. As a seller, my favorite is the USPS money order, as they can be turned into cold hard cash at any post office. Any other payment method requires you to happen to have the bank on which the check is drawn in your local area or a waiting period before you can access your money. When I was selling on ebay I gave a $1.75 rebate to anyone who paid me with a USPS money order. They're really that much better than any other form of payment, for the seller, anyway. Paypal is there to protect the buyer, and ultimately, that protection winds up costing the buyer quite a bit, probably on the order of 10-15% on a $20 purchase, when you consider insurance, delivery confirmation, and of course the paypal fees themselves. Yes, you're not allowed to pass on these fees directly, but you can be sure that they're factored in.
has a ridiculous EULA which would prevent anyone with a knowledge of law from using them
Depends. If you have a good enough knowledge of law, you'll realize that the EULA doesn't really bind you (as a buyer) to anything you can't get out of. If you don't receive the product you paid for, you have the right under the law to chargeback your credit card. Paypal can't take that right away, no matter what their EULA says.
primarily the disadvantage that you can defraud me and I have little recourse other than to beg PayPal to give me my money back.
You don't give up your right to chargeback your credit card when you buy through paypal. Paypal really doesn't want you to do that, so they'll almost always take the side of the purchaser, though.
With PayPal the burden of proof is on the purchaser.
I've sold a lot of items on ebay, and while I accepted paypal I strongly preferred a check or money order (especially a USPS money order). The reason for that is because the opposite of what you said is actually true. With a check or money order (which is actually a type of check), once the instrument cleared the burden of proof was on the purchaser (and USPS money orders can be cashed at any post office so they clear instantly). But with paypal, the burder of proof is on the vendor for the first 30 or 60 days (I forget which). And I wasn't about to wait 30 to 60 days to ship.
Paypal is WAY cheaper than egold.
Depends on your usage profile. Egold is hard to get started with, but the per transaction cost is much cheaper. Egold is a great solution if you can find people who actually use it. But there aren't that many people who use it.
No matter how many wrongs you add up, you will never create a right.
But I wasn't talking about right and wrong, I was talking about constitutional and unconstiutional.
I'm well aware of the federal government intruding in states rights in all sorts of ways.
But this wouldn't be one of them. What "right" would this infringe, anyway, the right for states to not allow its citizens to receive $10 million? I guess not, since the state could refuse to participate.
And you have just forced a state to do something they don't want to.
Presumably it's something they do want to do, otherwise they wouldn't do it.
It is not fair for people in some state that does not want a lottery to pay taxes that would then go to someone in a different state that takes the lottery money.
There's no constitutional requirement that taxation has to be "fair". More importantly, taxation applies to the person, not the state. The federal government taxes people "unfairly" in this way all the time. They even do things which are much worse, like withhold highway funds to states which refuse to lower the speed limit or raise the drinking age. This doesn't require the states to do anything.
I don't know what king of monkeys are running the elections in your precinct but the last time I voted it took me at most ten minutes, and it was probably closer to five.
I've never voted in my precinct, so I wasn't basing it on that. I'd say ten minutes is a lot more than five, and I've heard reports of places where it takes hours.
If you can't spare the time to show up in person request an absentee ballot. Fill it out at your liesure in the privacy of your own home and mail it in at your convenience. How much easier does it need to be?
I'd like to be able to vote online or via telephone. They can do it with tax returns, why not ballots?