That's nice if you're planning a procedure where you can schedule a date.
If you are in the hospital because you just had a stroke or heart attack then it isn't like you can take a month to work your network.
And most likely for the average person their network isn't worth much as you suggest. I get better review data when making a purchase decision on amazon.com.
Sure, evidence based medicine has its limitations, but what are you going to replace it with? "Hi, Medicare, this is Dr. Smith, and yes, I think that mailing my practice a check for $50k is the best way to handle this patient's problem, thanks."
Why not just execute trades once per day, collecting asks/bids all day long. The close of the day will be sometime between 4PM and 6PM each day, determined randomly and with the time not announced in advance. After the close all bids/asks go to the next day. You can cancel a bid/ask an hour after you make it.
Oh, to place a bid you put money in escrow with the exchange, and to place an ask you must hold the stock in escrow with the exchange.
Then you run the whole exchange off of a website that anybody can create an account on for some nominal fee like $10/yr. There are no designated brokers/traders/etc.
Suddenly anybody can trade stocks on the exchange with just about equal access. Investments actually get based on the valuation of companies (which people can ponder all day long), rather than trends measured in minutes. Wall Street firms can still operate as proxies for ordinary people giving them advice/etc, but they aren't the only way to access the markets.
It has nothing to do with who holds the copyright so much as how lucrative it is. If a copyright makes a ton of money, then either an individual or a corporation could easily afford to extend it for a while. If it doesn't make a ton of money, then why would a corporation bother to extend it even if it had the cash to do so?
This is more about orphan works and ensuring that society benefits one way or another from copyrighted works. Plus, big corporations currently get copyrights for 100 years or so (and likely more in the future) - I'd consider 26 a pretty good break for society. And we can always tweak the formula.
The starving artist probably won't really make their art all that available. If they are making it available and it is widely sought after, then they wouldn't be starving.
The basic idea is for orphan works to enter the public domain. You know - all those books rotting in libraries that librarians get sued over if they try to scan them.
It isn't about the rich getting richer so much as allowing actively used copyrights to still have commercial value, but exacting a greater and greater tax for this protection. Eventually everything goes into the public domain, and generally a lot faster than it does now.
This is no different than putting a house up for sheriff sale - the richer people can buy bigger houses that way too.
The point is for works that are being actively commercialized (ie are available to the public) to remain copyrighted, but with an increasing fee to compensate society for the rights afforded to the artist. Orphan works would immediately enter the public domain.
A million dollar fee might be no big deal for some works, but obviously many others would enter the public domain long before. Is it important that some random letter I got in the mail be copyrighted for 100 years, as it is today?
The benefit to society of shorter copyrights is that it allows others to extend creative works and find new uses for them, and so on. It enriches society. Authors can still profit for 10-20 years, and that is longer than most people profit off of anything they do.
It is basically an auction of sorts. Orphan works enter the public domain immediately. Everything gets there eventually, since nobody wants to pay $1T to extend a copyright for year #40.
And the first ten years of copyright will cost all of about $2000.
And of course the exact function can be tweaked, but I think it is important for it to be exponential to ensure limited copyrights.
Like most things aging is a curve - some people can still be CEOs or dig ditches at 60, and some people just are ready to be put out to pasture. However, most people don't really get the luxury of being able to retire in their 40s, regardless of whether it "makes sense" for them to do so.
The government pension system is facing a meltdown one of these years. Actually, the whole financial system is facing one of sorts. My guess is that once the previous generation starts to really collect on retirement/medicare/etc in earnest the next generation is going to one way or another drive inflation into the double-digits so that very rapidly those pensions and retirement funds are worth nothing. Then everybody is back looking for work, though people in their 70s will probably have a harder time of it.
It isn't like seniors are going to be able to do anything about it - even if they can vote. When everybody and their uncle has a ton of cash and isn't willing to work, those who are willing to work are going to insist on higher and higher wages to do it. Supply of cash is high, supply of labor is low, do the math.
I don't see why the duration of a copyright should depend on whether an artist lives to 28 or 98. Just set a fixed term, or require annual renewals with an exponentially increasing fee or something.
Do you really think that U2's ticket sales are going to be impacted significantly by the fact that some garage band can set up their speakers in a park somewhere and perform their songs license-free? Artists who still do performances will be the ones least impacted by limited copyright. They just won't be able to write one song and cash in for 90 years. In any case, it is rare for the artists to cash in anyway unless they write a LOT of music and can negotiate a better deal on a subsequent contract. Most artists just get a modest advance and a decent income for a few years, while the record executives milk the franchise for the next century.
There was a teacher in high school that assigned these crazy projects to her students that involved picking some obscure country (anything of significance was marked as do-not-use) and doing this holistic portfolio of analysis on their art, culture, literature, etc. You had to have examples of poems, artwork, essays contrasting this with that, and so on.
In the end, many if not most of the students just ended up making things up. The teacher only had a week or two to grade it and the submissions ended up being tomes of considerable size. The whole thing was just an exercise in busywork, and nobody really learned much about the country they were assigned. Since this was the early 90s there was almost no way to verify anything - determining if "Ode to a Zebra" was a legitimate Zimbabwe poem is even harder than finding a legitimate Zimbabwe poem. Maybe if this were a class on Zimbabwe taught by an expert on Zimbabwe they'd have a chance of figuring it out.
Students talked openly about what they were doing. The teacher was completely snowed. In the end all the project really did was educate everybody on the pointlessness of projects like this.
I've even gotten burned on essay questions in the sciences in the opposite way. We were given a paper to read to prepare for a test, and the nature of these tests made it clear that you needed to REALLY understand the topic of the paper (which usually involves reading up on related area of study, reviews, cited articles, and so on). In the grading of my response it was clear that the professor didn't actually know what I was talking about, and that was probably because I followed the trail into some area that he hadn't - we both had relatively superficial knowledge of the topic but it didn't completely overlap. While I'm sure I could have been incorrect in some of my details the sense I got was that the grading wasn't really reflecting that so much as I didn't come up with the type of response the guy was looking for. This was at the graduate level on new research so it is entirely possible that even experts on the field might have differing opinions. The bottom line is that you need to be careful in how things like essays are used. In my case the test was pass/fail and I passed, so I never really pressed the issue - and in fact that is a good way to make use of essays to balance things out.
That makes me wonder if I could just create a college term paper creator that goes out and writes paper after paper much like the postmodernism essay generator or whatever it is called. It could look for quotes on other sites and then mangle them in 40 bazillion ways. Then i just create "blogs" that dynamically generate essay after essay, and let turnitin spider them. High school students could make use of the site as well.:)
How many essays can elementary schoolers write on the American Revolution anyway?
I think the biggest example of the crazy standards for plagiarism is the concept that you can plagiarize your own work. While I can see the value in citing your own work in an article or something, having to do so in an essay is just crazy.
If the paper you wrote for Psychology 101 meets the requirements of your Sociology 101 class then you should be allowed to turn it in again. It represents your own work, and can be evaluated to determine how well you understand the material. Presumably understanding the material includes determining if your prior paper is really relevant to the assignment.
The only reason that schools object to this is that what they are really measuring is your ability to do good work for the sake of doing work - something utterly useless in the real or academic world.
Well, it is just considered unfashionable to go to trade school. What will all the other parents think of little Johnny's parents for not letting him pursue his dream of being...uh, well, Johnny isn't sure what he wants to be but everybody knows that four years of college must be just the trick for whatever it ends up being.
For most kids college is just the 13th grade - you make new friends and do the stuff you did in high school, which mainly consists of doing what you're told in class and then partying with friends all the time. Anything other than college involves change, and likely personal responsibility and initiative.
I have friends who sent their kids to college and they are working retail making far less than just about anybody who graduates from a trade school.
Sounds like online training at work - the latest fashion is to administer quizzes at the end of each course to prove that you learned the material. You'd be amazed at the kinds of silly details they put into them. So, what most people do is basically what you outlined.
Eventually they'll refine the algorithm further. For each paper submitted the school and the student pay an extra fee of their choosing (neither disclosed to the other). The results come out in favor of whoever paid the most.
Uh, if modern employers cared about English skills they wouldn't be farming out all the work to countries where they don't speak English to native standards. (Don't get me wrong - they speak English better than I speak their tongues, but that isn't the point.)
Employers just are looking for ways to filter resumes and college degrees are a typical first step. If you hire somebody without a degree and it doesn't pan out, then you look like an incompetent manager. If you hire somebody with a degree and it doesn't pan out, then that's just the luck of the draw.
Yup, typical approach is to use INS continuously, and update INS position from GPS and other sources. Even airliners work this way. This gives an aircraft some idea of where it is all the time (and a pretty accurate one - INS is very accurate for short periods of time, but suffers drift). As long as you get an occasional GPS signal to update the INS position you could do anything short of autolanding a plane fairly reliably.
A similar deception campaign was mounted against Japanese balloon attacks (launch balloon with bomb and timer, timer counts down a few days, bomb releases over US). Bombs actually hit random places in the US but it was covered up. The Japanese gave up.
As a terror weapon it might have been effective - as a weapon of war of course it is useless (the US is an easy target to hit, but bombs in forests don't do much for the war). However, if the news had covered the hits the Japanese could probably have improved targeting a little.
Well, one of the big advantages of distros is that your apps stay up to date, and without needing 500 different daemons running 24x7 looking for updates (one for each application). I uninstalled Office ages ago because it was way too annoying checking for security bugs (maybe newer versions are better). Flash is also one of those things that everybody tends to be behind on with Windows (but not on distros).
The other big issue is library dependencies. On windows every application tends to ship a full set of libraries (such as ancient copies of zlib with security holes, or whatever). If you have 30 apps built against 15 versions of the same library, then that library will be loaded in RAM 15 times. A linux distro minimizes the number of libraries that need to be installed, and more importantly, resident in RAM. In fact, this is the main thing that drives having coordinated releases on binary distros in the first place (source-based distros tend to be exempt from this making rolling releases pretty common in that world).
The last thing I want is every application working like Picasa or Chrome on Linux. Google has this nasty tendency to just re-bundle all the deps like everybody does on Windows which results in huge RAM waste - their Picasa app includes a whole WINE install. Gentoo has been steadily trying to dissect chromium but it still ends up building its own version of webkit, and who knows what else (hint - most of the space in the source tarball is 3rd-party packages that often have minor tweaks applied).
I've been thinking about that lately. I suspect that you can get around this by having a binpkg repository of everything in the system set. That is where the circular dependencies tend to get out of control - everything else should be buildable from an up-to-date system set.
What Gentoo really should do is build a binary package repository at the same time that it builds the stage3s - it takes no more work.
With a binary repository handy you can just do an emerge -Ku system to update all the packages in system - since it is a binary update it is pretty unlikely to break. Now, if you really tweak your USE or CFLAGS you might want to follow that with an emerge system to rebuild it your way, but that shouldn't run into dependency issues since everything is generally there.
If you can't borrow somebody else's binary repository you can make your own pretty easily. Just install a generic gentoo box, set the features to build binary packages, and then do an emerge system. Your binary package dir will have a full system set in it - just get it over to your other box and emerge away.
However, all that said, you're not going to get security backports or anything else resembling true LTS this way. You could just try updating only individual packages as required, and you'll probably be fine until you hit some hard dependency on a newer library or something. You could still try to minimize the impact, but if you're talking three years forget it.
Oh, and be sure to monitor bugzilla for security flaws - the GLSAs are horribly out of date. Security issues are generally being updated in the tree in a timely manner, but the problem is that the notices aren't going out so unless you do a daily emerge -u world you're going to have issues.
Well, the fact that it took years to de-orbit even after lowering the orbit suggests that they just ran out of fuel.
De-orbiting a satellite takes quite a bit of fuel, actually. I doubt that most carry that much. They are trying to carry enough to get the satellite into a low enough orbit that it eventually de-orbits, so that they aren't stuck up there forever. Things like geosync satellites don't have nearly enough fuel to do even that - you'd need something resembling the booster rocket that put it in orbit to get it back down, and it might almost be as energy efficient to just send it to the moon or something.
An provisional injunction that prevents you from selling something for a year is effectively a judgment. What, is the court going to say Ok, we were wrong, Samsung can go back in time and sell their tablets? No, they'll probably say "ok, in 2013 you can go ahead and sell your 2011 tablet" when the product isn't even being manufactured any longer...
Like I said - the courts feel it is constitutional, and I don't. Whether A->B and C->D implies that A->D is a matter of logic and not subject to anybody's interpretation, and so the courts can call something constitutional but that doesn't make it so. Now, what the courts say does have a great deal of impact on whether armed guys with guns will storm your house if you refuse to pay the tax, and my opinion on the matter has little bearing on that. So, believe what you want and do what you want but be aware of the consequences...:)
Certainly I'd agree with that. I wasn't aware that Amazon owned property in California. Most arguments thus far have centered around affiliates, which I think is a bit of a stretch.
Slashdot Mirror
That's nice if you're planning a procedure where you can schedule a date.
If you are in the hospital because you just had a stroke or heart attack then it isn't like you can take a month to work your network.
And most likely for the average person their network isn't worth much as you suggest. I get better review data when making a purchase decision on amazon.com.
Sure, evidence based medicine has its limitations, but what are you going to replace it with? "Hi, Medicare, this is Dr. Smith, and yes, I think that mailing my practice a check for $50k is the best way to handle this patient's problem, thanks."
Yup. This isn't much different than offering a new TLD - everybody has to pay an extra $20/yr or whatever to make yet another clone of .com.
Why not just execute trades once per day, collecting asks/bids all day long. The close of the day will be sometime between 4PM and 6PM each day, determined randomly and with the time not announced in advance. After the close all bids/asks go to the next day. You can cancel a bid/ask an hour after you make it.
Oh, to place a bid you put money in escrow with the exchange, and to place an ask you must hold the stock in escrow with the exchange.
Then you run the whole exchange off of a website that anybody can create an account on for some nominal fee like $10/yr. There are no designated brokers/traders/etc.
Suddenly anybody can trade stocks on the exchange with just about equal access. Investments actually get based on the valuation of companies (which people can ponder all day long), rather than trends measured in minutes. Wall Street firms can still operate as proxies for ordinary people giving them advice/etc, but they aren't the only way to access the markets.
It has nothing to do with who holds the copyright so much as how lucrative it is. If a copyright makes a ton of money, then either an individual or a corporation could easily afford to extend it for a while. If it doesn't make a ton of money, then why would a corporation bother to extend it even if it had the cash to do so?
This is more about orphan works and ensuring that society benefits one way or another from copyrighted works. Plus, big corporations currently get copyrights for 100 years or so (and likely more in the future) - I'd consider 26 a pretty good break for society. And we can always tweak the formula.
The starving artist probably won't really make their art all that available. If they are making it available and it is widely sought after, then they wouldn't be starving.
The basic idea is for orphan works to enter the public domain. You know - all those books rotting in libraries that librarians get sued over if they try to scan them.
It isn't about the rich getting richer so much as allowing actively used copyrights to still have commercial value, but exacting a greater and greater tax for this protection. Eventually everything goes into the public domain, and generally a lot faster than it does now.
This is no different than putting a house up for sheriff sale - the richer people can buy bigger houses that way too.
The point is for works that are being actively commercialized (ie are available to the public) to remain copyrighted, but with an increasing fee to compensate society for the rights afforded to the artist. Orphan works would immediately enter the public domain.
A million dollar fee might be no big deal for some works, but obviously many others would enter the public domain long before. Is it important that some random letter I got in the mail be copyrighted for 100 years, as it is today?
The benefit to society of shorter copyrights is that it allows others to extend creative works and find new uses for them, and so on. It enriches society. Authors can still profit for 10-20 years, and that is longer than most people profit off of anything they do.
It is basically an auction of sorts. Orphan works enter the public domain immediately. Everything gets there eventually, since nobody wants to pay $1T to extend a copyright for year #40.
And the first ten years of copyright will cost all of about $2000.
And of course the exact function can be tweaked, but I think it is important for it to be exponential to ensure limited copyrights.
Like most things aging is a curve - some people can still be CEOs or dig ditches at 60, and some people just are ready to be put out to pasture. However, most people don't really get the luxury of being able to retire in their 40s, regardless of whether it "makes sense" for them to do so.
The government pension system is facing a meltdown one of these years. Actually, the whole financial system is facing one of sorts. My guess is that once the previous generation starts to really collect on retirement/medicare/etc in earnest the next generation is going to one way or another drive inflation into the double-digits so that very rapidly those pensions and retirement funds are worth nothing. Then everybody is back looking for work, though people in their 70s will probably have a harder time of it.
It isn't like seniors are going to be able to do anything about it - even if they can vote. When everybody and their uncle has a ton of cash and isn't willing to work, those who are willing to work are going to insist on higher and higher wages to do it. Supply of cash is high, supply of labor is low, do the math.
I don't see why the duration of a copyright should depend on whether an artist lives to 28 or 98. Just set a fixed term, or require annual renewals with an exponentially increasing fee or something.
Do you really think that U2's ticket sales are going to be impacted significantly by the fact that some garage band can set up their speakers in a park somewhere and perform their songs license-free? Artists who still do performances will be the ones least impacted by limited copyright. They just won't be able to write one song and cash in for 90 years. In any case, it is rare for the artists to cash in anyway unless they write a LOT of music and can negotiate a better deal on a subsequent contract. Most artists just get a modest advance and a decent income for a few years, while the record executives milk the franchise for the next century.
There was a teacher in high school that assigned these crazy projects to her students that involved picking some obscure country (anything of significance was marked as do-not-use) and doing this holistic portfolio of analysis on their art, culture, literature, etc. You had to have examples of poems, artwork, essays contrasting this with that, and so on.
In the end, many if not most of the students just ended up making things up. The teacher only had a week or two to grade it and the submissions ended up being tomes of considerable size. The whole thing was just an exercise in busywork, and nobody really learned much about the country they were assigned. Since this was the early 90s there was almost no way to verify anything - determining if "Ode to a Zebra" was a legitimate Zimbabwe poem is even harder than finding a legitimate Zimbabwe poem. Maybe if this were a class on Zimbabwe taught by an expert on Zimbabwe they'd have a chance of figuring it out.
Students talked openly about what they were doing. The teacher was completely snowed. In the end all the project really did was educate everybody on the pointlessness of projects like this.
I've even gotten burned on essay questions in the sciences in the opposite way. We were given a paper to read to prepare for a test, and the nature of these tests made it clear that you needed to REALLY understand the topic of the paper (which usually involves reading up on related area of study, reviews, cited articles, and so on). In the grading of my response it was clear that the professor didn't actually know what I was talking about, and that was probably because I followed the trail into some area that he hadn't - we both had relatively superficial knowledge of the topic but it didn't completely overlap. While I'm sure I could have been incorrect in some of my details the sense I got was that the grading wasn't really reflecting that so much as I didn't come up with the type of response the guy was looking for. This was at the graduate level on new research so it is entirely possible that even experts on the field might have differing opinions. The bottom line is that you need to be careful in how things like essays are used. In my case the test was pass/fail and I passed, so I never really pressed the issue - and in fact that is a good way to make use of essays to balance things out.
That makes me wonder if I could just create a college term paper creator that goes out and writes paper after paper much like the postmodernism essay generator or whatever it is called. It could look for quotes on other sites and then mangle them in 40 bazillion ways. Then i just create "blogs" that dynamically generate essay after essay, and let turnitin spider them. High school students could make use of the site as well. :)
How many essays can elementary schoolers write on the American Revolution anyway?
I think the biggest example of the crazy standards for plagiarism is the concept that you can plagiarize your own work. While I can see the value in citing your own work in an article or something, having to do so in an essay is just crazy.
If the paper you wrote for Psychology 101 meets the requirements of your Sociology 101 class then you should be allowed to turn it in again. It represents your own work, and can be evaluated to determine how well you understand the material. Presumably understanding the material includes determining if your prior paper is really relevant to the assignment.
The only reason that schools object to this is that what they are really measuring is your ability to do good work for the sake of doing work - something utterly useless in the real or academic world.
Well, it is just considered unfashionable to go to trade school. What will all the other parents think of little Johnny's parents for not letting him pursue his dream of being...uh, well, Johnny isn't sure what he wants to be but everybody knows that four years of college must be just the trick for whatever it ends up being.
For most kids college is just the 13th grade - you make new friends and do the stuff you did in high school, which mainly consists of doing what you're told in class and then partying with friends all the time. Anything other than college involves change, and likely personal responsibility and initiative.
I have friends who sent their kids to college and they are working retail making far less than just about anybody who graduates from a trade school.
Sounds like online training at work - the latest fashion is to administer quizzes at the end of each course to prove that you learned the material. You'd be amazed at the kinds of silly details they put into them. So, what most people do is basically what you outlined.
Eventually they'll refine the algorithm further. For each paper submitted the school and the student pay an extra fee of their choosing (neither disclosed to the other). The results come out in favor of whoever paid the most.
Uh, if modern employers cared about English skills they wouldn't be farming out all the work to countries where they don't speak English to native standards. (Don't get me wrong - they speak English better than I speak their tongues, but that isn't the point.)
Employers just are looking for ways to filter resumes and college degrees are a typical first step. If you hire somebody without a degree and it doesn't pan out, then you look like an incompetent manager. If you hire somebody with a degree and it doesn't pan out, then that's just the luck of the draw.
Yup, typical approach is to use INS continuously, and update INS position from GPS and other sources. Even airliners work this way. This gives an aircraft some idea of where it is all the time (and a pretty accurate one - INS is very accurate for short periods of time, but suffers drift). As long as you get an occasional GPS signal to update the INS position you could do anything short of autolanding a plane fairly reliably.
A similar deception campaign was mounted against Japanese balloon attacks (launch balloon with bomb and timer, timer counts down a few days, bomb releases over US). Bombs actually hit random places in the US but it was covered up. The Japanese gave up.
As a terror weapon it might have been effective - as a weapon of war of course it is useless (the US is an easy target to hit, but bombs in forests don't do much for the war). However, if the news had covered the hits the Japanese could probably have improved targeting a little.
Yeah, but the fact that others can patent the other parts makes no difference if I have no plans to ever build a reactor.
And, the point of patents isn't to win court cases - it is to get paid off to never fight them in the first place.
Well, one of the big advantages of distros is that your apps stay up to date, and without needing 500 different daemons running 24x7 looking for updates (one for each application). I uninstalled Office ages ago because it was way too annoying checking for security bugs (maybe newer versions are better). Flash is also one of those things that everybody tends to be behind on with Windows (but not on distros).
The other big issue is library dependencies. On windows every application tends to ship a full set of libraries (such as ancient copies of zlib with security holes, or whatever). If you have 30 apps built against 15 versions of the same library, then that library will be loaded in RAM 15 times. A linux distro minimizes the number of libraries that need to be installed, and more importantly, resident in RAM. In fact, this is the main thing that drives having coordinated releases on binary distros in the first place (source-based distros tend to be exempt from this making rolling releases pretty common in that world).
The last thing I want is every application working like Picasa or Chrome on Linux. Google has this nasty tendency to just re-bundle all the deps like everybody does on Windows which results in huge RAM waste - their Picasa app includes a whole WINE install. Gentoo has been steadily trying to dissect chromium but it still ends up building its own version of webkit, and who knows what else (hint - most of the space in the source tarball is 3rd-party packages that often have minor tweaks applied).
I've been thinking about that lately. I suspect that you can get around this by having a binpkg repository of everything in the system set. That is where the circular dependencies tend to get out of control - everything else should be buildable from an up-to-date system set.
What Gentoo really should do is build a binary package repository at the same time that it builds the stage3s - it takes no more work.
With a binary repository handy you can just do an emerge -Ku system to update all the packages in system - since it is a binary update it is pretty unlikely to break. Now, if you really tweak your USE or CFLAGS you might want to follow that with an emerge system to rebuild it your way, but that shouldn't run into dependency issues since everything is generally there.
If you can't borrow somebody else's binary repository you can make your own pretty easily. Just install a generic gentoo box, set the features to build binary packages, and then do an emerge system. Your binary package dir will have a full system set in it - just get it over to your other box and emerge away.
However, all that said, you're not going to get security backports or anything else resembling true LTS this way. You could just try updating only individual packages as required, and you'll probably be fine until you hit some hard dependency on a newer library or something. You could still try to minimize the impact, but if you're talking three years forget it.
Oh, and be sure to monitor bugzilla for security flaws - the GLSAs are horribly out of date. Security issues are generally being updated in the tree in a timely manner, but the problem is that the notices aren't going out so unless you do a daily emerge -u world you're going to have issues.
Well, the fact that it took years to de-orbit even after lowering the orbit suggests that they just ran out of fuel.
De-orbiting a satellite takes quite a bit of fuel, actually. I doubt that most carry that much. They are trying to carry enough to get the satellite into a low enough orbit that it eventually de-orbits, so that they aren't stuck up there forever. Things like geosync satellites don't have nearly enough fuel to do even that - you'd need something resembling the booster rocket that put it in orbit to get it back down, and it might almost be as energy efficient to just send it to the moon or something.
This is the problem with the courts.
An provisional injunction that prevents you from selling something for a year is effectively a judgment. What, is the court going to say Ok, we were wrong, Samsung can go back in time and sell their tablets? No, they'll probably say "ok, in 2013 you can go ahead and sell your 2011 tablet" when the product isn't even being manufactured any longer...
Like I said - the courts feel it is constitutional, and I don't. Whether A->B and C->D implies that A->D is a matter of logic and not subject to anybody's interpretation, and so the courts can call something constitutional but that doesn't make it so. Now, what the courts say does have a great deal of impact on whether armed guys with guns will storm your house if you refuse to pay the tax, and my opinion on the matter has little bearing on that. So, believe what you want and do what you want but be aware of the consequences... :)
Certainly I'd agree with that. I wasn't aware that Amazon owned property in California. Most arguments thus far have centered around affiliates, which I think is a bit of a stretch.