There's nothing "natural" or obvious about it at all.
I disagree completely. Go out on the streets, and describe a scenario to random passers-by where I can buy a copy of somebody's book, reproduce it under my name or theirs (at my own discretion), sell their work and never give them a dime. Now ask them if what I'm describing should be legal. (Then for realism's sake go ahead and tell them that in my scenario I'm likely to be a company with huge assets at my disposal and they author is likely to be somebody struggling to even find a publisher--but we'll ignore that for now.) Most of them will oppose that behavior.
Describe to them a scenario where I buy a copy of your band's CD. I take the lyrics, "reverse engineer" the composition with my band mates and re-record it as my own, selling it and pocketing all the money. Ask if that should be legal; most of them will oppose that behavior. And note that in neither case was the original author deprived of his own product nor even of profits from the copy I bought to fuck them over, so it really is an issue that would fall (today) under copyright infringement rather than any kind of theft law, as we so often argue on this site that it should.
Describe to them how I can buy a copy of your software in the store for $50 and then re-sell copies on my own (online) store for $20 in essentially pure profits, with absolutely no work or contributions on my part on the product in question. Do you truly believe most people would say this behavior should be legal? Me, I believe most would oppose the behavior.
Ask all of these people who oppose it to design a legal framework that would cover this sort of thing under the law, and I think what you'll find is that they create a system that bears a striking resemblance to what we have. If that's the case, which I believe strongly it would be, then I'd say that it falls rather firmly on both the natural and obvious sides of the spectrum. IP law might be a construct of the mind, as you say, but so is most of the laws in a given society. The whole POINT of society is that it lays down rules for how people within that society interact when they have conflicting interests at heart. If we disagree that most people would think all of these scenarios should be illegal, well, there's nothing I can say about that; we just disagree. If you AGREE with me, though, then it's natural and it's obvious that a society creates copyright laws, and I think it's fairly obvious that "the person who creates it decides how it gets used" is going to be the basis of such a system (whether it ought to be or not).
Don't get me wrong: There are problems with copyright. There should be more exceptions to it than there are, I think (though I also recognize the difficulty of enumerating those exceptions and enforcing them even-handedly). I think the terms have gotten entirely out of hand. I'm not a fan of things like the story on/. recently about Square-Enix squashing a ROM modification game at 98% completion while they let the series stagnate and provide nothing useful to it (but ports to new systems to get more money from the same customers). But at its heart, I think copyright is a good thing that most people support.
And the atm guys don't wear bullet proof vests and carry side arms because they have inferiority issues. They do it because people in their line of work get killed in robbery attempts. It's dangerous work.
Possibly. But they also have no authority, legal or otherwise, to detain me or demand I identify myself. Nor, frankly, to get snippy if he tries and I refuse him. Particularly if the act that caused him to deputize himself on his own authority is not even a crime.
The idea that J. Random Citizen can get an attorney capable of getting them any satisfaction.
Oh, I don't know. I think I could find a good attorney willing to take a harassment case against the police department, the city that employs them, the ATM owners and potentially the owners of the store where it all happened on a contingency basis.
You are correct. For sure the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth amendments have all been incorporated to the states with the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment (and subsequent case law). You can read the brief blurb here for a little background, though it's not much.
That said, this case is also a prime one to come before the US Supreme Court at some point. Generally speaking, the Court takes cases that have serious Constitutional questions and where there are a multitude of differing opinions being handed down in lower courts. Unless there are significant factual differences between the Wisconsin and New York rulings (as opposed to different legal interpretations), this is the sort of thing the USSC likes to step in on and lay down binding precedent.
"You [should] not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered."
-- Lyndon B. Johnson
I tend to agree with your assessment; it certainly sounds like they don't want to sell.
What I would add, though, is that's actually a great position to be in. It means the worst potential outcome of this negotiation is the one they're sort of hoping for. So my advice is this: Treat it as exactly that: A negotiation. Worst case, they say "screw that we're not negotiating!" which it sounds like you almost want. No harm. Best case, you may be able to get any number of beneficial things, just a few of which might be more money and/or more autonomy.
"I don't know where you get the idea that taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for anything of which they disapprove. Lots of them don't like tanks. Even more don't like Congress."
I think he was right about the problems with your four point proposal, but he used relatively lame examples of why they're a problem. For disclosure's sake, I think the situation with Megan was absolutely horrible, but I'm not the kind out calling for laws to address it. I think it could be well handled with a wrongful death lawsuit that she would almost certainly win. So that said:
Point #1 is fine. It seems perfectly reasonable to me. Even point #2 is fine; it's ambiguous, but certainly something that can be left to a jury's discretion--or hell, just go ahead and define it.
It breaks down at point #3 for me though. If we're saying that this type of harassment is wrong, to the point it should be illegal, than I don't care at all if it's an adult harassing an adult, a child harassing an adult, or most likely and worst yet, a child harassing a child. I recall reading a story on CNN just a few days ago where some very young kid--about 10 or so I think--was constantly getting calling gay at school. The administration didn't do anything about it specifically, and it was at a school that was considered to have a great anti-bullying program. He got tired of it and he hung himself. If you don't think a child can hurt a child as much as an adult can, you're wrong. If you're claiming they shouldn't be held accountable for that... well, it's a valid position, but I'm going to disagree. And going out on a limb, I'd suggest that most people who would support some sort of anti-harassment law like this or like what you're proposing would disagree with you as well. If the goal is to redirect them to something more well-defined so they don't go crazy over free speech rights, I think it's already broken down.
Point #4 completely makes your proposal useless. In addition to a lack of definition, the more important thing is a nearly impossible situation of somebody having to know that a person is mentally unstable, or it essentially being gross negligence on their part that they didn't know. It's crazy; I would pretty much never vote to convict anybody under a law like this. Knowing somebody was mentally ill is fairly easy, I suppose, once they've killed themselves. It's much harder to know or even suspect before that, particularly if you're just some other kid's parent who doesn't even really know the person you're harassing personally. Or if you're doing it over the Internet to somebody who doesn't even live anywhere near you. I also think it's a rather superficial distinction. Harassment is wrong or it's not; it's illegal or it's not. It shouldn't be illegal based on who you're mean to.
If you're trying to hand-waive to distract people calling for these laws from running roughshod over your rights, you might succeed. If you're legitimately trying to address their concerns I think you've painted them entirely too narrowly.
I believe that on Macs it's Windows running in a virtual machine. It gets a little clever, though, by essentially "erasing" the background of the VM for everything other than the active window, meaning it looks like your app is just running inside of your Mac. (If you grab a Windows app's window on a Mac and very quickly move it back and forth, you can often see the background come through briefly.)
Personally I think that's the best approach. I've looked for programs that do similar on linux but haven't found one yet (does anybody have any suggestions?) I try to use linux/OSS apps when I can, but I'm not a zealot by any stretch and if I don't feel that measure up to a Windows app for the same task, I'll use the Windows app. I think that's the rub: Any OSS fans are probably already using linux or BSD or some non-Windows operating system. If (if!) people are concerned about expanding linux's market share, you're going to need to convince the people who just want to get things done. Cost will be a consideration in linux's favor; unfamiliarity, inability to use certain programs and related issues will be marks against it.
It's really just a choice: Do your thing your way and whoever likes it will use it, or actively try to recruit people to your OS who might not have otherwise used it. Neither is right or wrong, it's just a choice.
Even with the existing tax havens, traditional American companies like GM and Chrysler are going broke
The two are completely unrelated. These taxes are taxes on a company's PROFITS, meaning the money it has left over after it pays all of its bills. If a company is going broke, increased taxes don't matter to them. In fact they're probably not paying these taxes at all if they're failing to turn a profit. (There are SOME taxes--don't get me wrong--which people and companies pay no matter what, but they're not really the sort that offshore tax havens help you with.)
Who can afford to pay the taxes? Pretty well every company who will actually have to pay them. Remember: Profits, not revenues. If I'm making $0 profit it matters very little to me whether I have to pay 10% or 100% tax on that. I'm not paying. If some company has to put $100 million in the bank instead of $120 million, my heart doesn't exactly break for them. Particularly since if they were playing fair they would have been paying $120 million all along.
Easy. Because in the examples you're citing, the actor, singer or professional athlete IS the product. In the case of an actor, they get more money for sequels not because sequels make more money, but because the longer a series drags on the more important, generally speaking, it is that the same lead actors are involved. They could have very easily chosen a new actor to play his role in Terminator 1 and most people wouldn't even have KNOWN, much less cared. But they certainly would have known when T2 rolled around, and they'd know when T3 rolled around.
The same is true of Britney Spears. As much as I hate her music, she's not simply replaceable to her fans who are buying her records. (It's also worth noting that only the highest-echeleon of musicians/singers are this grossly "overpaid." Many other ones barely, if at all, make enough to cover their costs.) Athletes are the most simple example of being paid to be the product.
If $117 mil was Arnold's 20% cut for T3, then it means his studio made $585 million dollars off of it. I'm as jealous of the kind of money these people makes as the next guy, but if I'm capable of delivering you $585 million in profits it suddenly becomes much more reasonable that I make $150 million while doing so.
Producing a product is different than being the product, and it SHOULD be paid differently. If the studio, label or team owners don't feel somebody is worth their demands, they simply shouldn't pay it--same as if you walked into your boss' office tomorrow and asked for a million dollar raise. If they ARE worth it, based on what they're going to help you achieve in terms of success and money brought back in, then I don't see who we are to second guess that. Their employers are businesses the same as yours and mine. Bad decisions will be made along the way, but they're going to do what they believe is best for their business first and foremost.
Not if we're calling it a risk, no. But if quantity of poor-quality videos I end up paying for gets too high (and "too high" being a term I can't really define in advance) then it would turn me off of the idea pretty quickly. The fear of such an outcome may well turn me off in advance.
If I had to guess at it right now, and talking about strictly amateur content, I'd guess the ratio is somewhere around 1:1. For every video that has perfectly acceptable quality and is what I was searching for, I find one that's unacceptable. And we haven't even really delved into whether or not the CONTENT of the video was worth whatever amount of money we're talking about, which I'd say is more like 5:1 against.
You're right that at a nickle per video the margin for error is higher, but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I don't like feeling ripped off even if the sums we're talking about aren't great. If we're talking about a scenario where I have to pay for $0.30 of content to find $0.05 worth my time and money, I'm not sure it's something I'm interested in.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not opposed to paying for content. $0.30 paid for $0.30 of good content is perfectly worthwhile. Double or triple that is worthwhile. There just has to be a good signal-to-noise ratio if I'm paying. Since they're not likely to improve Random Joe's submissions, that's going to mean some system where I don't pay (or pay significantly less) when I run into that noise. What that might be... I have no earthly clue.
If we're talking about user-submitted content, I think the major problem is that, at least for me, the payment would need to take place somewhere into or after the viewing. There are a lot of problems with videos that would cause me to not want to pay, but which I would not be able to detect without actually watching the video. Just off the top of my head: Unsynchronized audio; choppy video (often done when people use a low-quality webcam to try to record video with a lot of motion); videos that either aren't what they say they are due to misleading tags/descriptions or videos that ARE what they say they are but used terms that could also apply to something else, and I was actually trying to find that something else; re-posts of old content by new users, making it seem like a new video on the topic; poor-quality encoding/source; etc.
None of these could be solved based on the description or tags, and only the last two could conceivably be solved by seeing video stills in advance of the video itself. It's a common-enough problem with random content that it's something that would need to be resolved before I'd consider using a site operating on such a scheme.
So as long as the best examples of terrorists they can produce to parade around for the news are special olympics rejects, I feel pretty confident that there are no really serious cases that they aren't telling us about.
It depends on the circumstances of the way it was foiled. I'm recounting a fictionalized account from West Wing (because I love that damn show and I know it fairly well), but the account is a close parallel to a real case of Alger Hiss.
The short of it is this: Daniel Gault (the fictionalized Hiss) was accused of being a spy. He was indicted for such, but the prosecution bungled the case and they failed to make the charge stick, much to the embarrassment of the FBI. Instead, they got him on a perjury count and he was put in jail for ten years. He died a couple of years into his term. In the story, Gault's granddaughter was trying to get her grandfather a White House pardon. She took the case to Sam Seaborn (Deputy Communications Director), who had written a thesis years before about Gault's innocence. In the course of investigating to see that he was truly innocent, he ended up in a conversation with the national security adviser, who produced a gigantic NSA file on Gault ("That's not an FBI file...") with lateral references to things he didn't have clearance to read redacted.
Essentially, as it turns out, Daniel Gault WAS a spy and a murderer and they had intelligence intercepts to prove it. The problem is that those intercepts had not been decoded at the time of the espionage trial. It was decoded years later after he had died. The NSA could easily have opened that file and cleared the FBI's name in this case, but it chose not to do so (in TV they never did, in reality it was done some 20 years after his death). The reason, in the words of the national security adviser: You don't tell somebody you've cracked their cipher unless you absolutely have to.
That was a long-winded anecdotal way of saying this: If there ARE high-profile attacks foiled, whether or not they tell anybody could easily be related to how they foiled it. If we've broken their ciphers, so to speak (or, hell, literally) we're not likely to announce it unless we have to--it's better for us to look stupid and be able to know what they're planning than it is for us to look great and have them shift to a new system we have to break all over again.
I remember a discussion about this on/. awhile ago, and somebody brought up a point I couldn't quite remember. I hopped over to the wikipedia page to look for something about found this:
"Some breath analysis machines assume a hematocrit (cell volume of blood) of 47%. However, hematocrit values range from 42 to 52% in men and from 37 to 47% in women. A person with a lower hematocrit will have a falsely high BAC reading."
and this:
"Breathalyzers assume that the subject being tested has a 2100-to-1 'partition ratio' in converting alcohol measured in the breath to estimates of alcohol in the blood [. ..] However, this assumed 'partition ratio' varies from 1300:1 to 3100:1 or wider among individuals and within a given individual over time."
I'm not sure what, exactly, I was remembering from the previous discussion; these may or may not be it. What I do remember is that it was essentially that, somewhere in this code, there are assumptions made and that the validity of the assumptions is going to directly affect the validity of the code.
Without knowing what, exactly, this machine is measuring and what it is assuming about the individual taking the test, it's impossible to know whether or not there's any reason to believe the test was inaccurate. Since both of these people argued this case to the Minnesota Supreme Court, I hope they both feel they're innocent.
I suppose this guy's lawyer should have made that argument. On the other hand, I don't think it's unreasonable for judges who are going to oversea DUI cases to understand that a breathalyzer is not, by any stretch, conclusive evidence. Use it to haul somebody in, by all means -- then get yourself a blood test. Bill the person being charged for the test for all I care. The breathalyzer itself should not be admissible in court. (I'm ignoring, by the way, the fact that something like having taken cough medicine could also affect the results.)
I will not believe that you can sign away your constitutional rights. They may try to push you to believe it, but no, you can't do it.
You can, depending on the jurisdiction, according to an Illinois judge.
It's generally assumed that you have a constitutional right to sue. We brought it up in a Constitutional law class many years ago in high school, here in Illinois, with regards to things like sports waivers agreeing not to sue your school. To get a legal opinion, our teacher asked a judge how it went. His response was that in Illinois, legal waivers are legal and enforceable, but that it will vary by state whether or not that is the case.
Your post was about Minnesota, but I know we have pretty much an identical implied consent law here in Illinois. Presumably both are jurisdictions which do not bar citizens from waiving legal rights. I think it's more an issue of contract law than anything else.
Should it be a federal issue? Should you be able to waive your rights? Is it different in civil versus criminal issues? I'm not sure. I'm just reporting the realities of the situation, at least as of... 10 years ago or so, according to a judge.
Basically the virus writer could not have reasonably foreseen the writing of this virus as causing someones death due to the huge time, distance, and number of events involved before someone died.
You may be right that it would be hard to prove, but that's not why. If that was their concern, they'd simply make the charge involuntary manslaughter, where they don't have to prove any degree of intent to harm somebody--just that what they did was criminally negligent or reckless and caused a death.
[Remove all 9/11 images] Is what the government is saying. Please forget this ever happened.
No. They don't want you to forget, not at all. In addition to everything that has already happened, there is still inevitably going to be yet more done and more excuses made related to terrorism. It's STILL happening, in fairly stupid ways and in extremely recent history. Obama released Bush's torture memos? Cheney gets on TV to whine about how he's helping the terrorists and now we're going to get attacked again*. It's an exceptionally useful tool, and "terrorism!!!" has been catapulted to the top of our list of national boogeymen with sex offenders.
* Of course we're going to get attacked again. Little that these people (claim to) care about has changed, and anybody who thinks we can stop every attempted attack anywhere and maintain any semblance of freedom is deluding themselves.
Buying stock is tied to business success - It's "investing" rather than "gambling".
That's only true indirectly. You actually make or lose money based on the moves of the other "players" (investors), which we hope is based on company success but isn't always in the way we would expect. You can literally lose money in the stock market if a company you invested in made $1/share last quarter if the speculation was saying it would make $1.05/share; it doesn't even take a long or detailed look into history to see many examples of exactly that. Either way the company was successful and profitable, but if people feel they can get a bigger return elsewhere they can and often do pull their money, leaving what you're left with worth less. Possibly less than you bought it for, depending on when you got in and what happened since.
In that sense, it really is more like poker than strict investment. In an investment, I make money if you make money. In poker, I make money if I can successfully read the other players at the table and act accordingly--even if I don't necessarily have the best hand.
Crazy. Has that ever been tested in court? It seems like an awfully hard claim to back up.
I mean, okay, I understand drinking water is not an unlimited resource and governments could lay claim to regulating that -- but seriously, regulating something that falls from the sky? What's next, a sunbathing tax to support all the poor tanning salons who lose business from those unscrupulous sunbathers?
All of that is fine, and you're probably at least partially right, but none of it explains why the records need to be sealed. "This is not a proper class" isn't something that needs to be held secret, nor is it something that should be discussed with only one party of the lawsuit involved.
You may be right that that's one of their defenses; it certainly sounds as though it should be. But it is, at best, a small part of what's going on. They're saying SOMETHING that a judge has apparently decided is so important to keep secret that not even opposing counsel can know about it. Whatever that is, it's not Noerr-Pennington. Not even a lawyer who has worked on these cases can hazard a guess as to what it might be. That's awfully irregular.
I think overall, this is a better way of moving forward. Windows has been essentially crippled from several different perspectives for years because of their need to support backward-compatibility, even with broken interfaces or insecure models. Letting a significant portion of that flow into VMs of older operating systems for those customers who absolutely, positively can not get off their old apps is a good compromise. It allows them to start with a cleaner slate for the majority who has no such requirements.
Take note in the article as to what are facts and what are allegations. The parents "claim" the "she might be impulsive because she got treated ten years ago"(para). No doctor says that.
"In third grade, Nikki was diagnosed with a brain tumor that doctors didn't think she'd survive. It turned out to be benign, but 8-year-old Nikki had to undergo intensive radiation, and doctors told her parents the effects of that treatment on her young brain might show up someday--perhaps by causing changes in her judgment, or impulse control."
If this article is to be our source, that seems pretty conclusive to me: Doctors told the parents it might affect her brain in that way. The only part that is "allegation" is that it had something to do with the cocaine use or the activities that night. If you simply want to call people liars without any particular reason to believe it is so, well, I can't stop you. But it's not a compelling argument by any stretch.
Did she have easy access to the Porsche and keys? yes.
They're bad parents because they have a car key somewhere and trusted their daughter not to steal a car? It truly astounds me how much slashdotters who obviously aren't parents think they know about parenting.
I obviously don't know their particular situation, but in my house we have four people (parents, my brother and myself), all of driving age (actually all adults, if that makes any difference). There were keys to just about every car lying around the house, because our driveway is long and we have a garage, but not enough room to put all of the cars in a position that they can leave without having to move any other cars. We can't park on the street overnight due to local legal restrictions, so it's important to us to be able to leave at whatever time we want without having to wake people up and rummage through their purse or pockets. I suppose my parents are bad parents if this leads to me stealing their car without their permission, speeding down the highway and wrecking into a tollbooth?
Was she in any way punished or grounded or restricted for use of drugs and stuff? No.
Erm, how the hell do you know? And what does "and stuff" mean?
Maybe she wasn't punished for drugs. We'll assume you're right, even though you're obviously just making shit up to fit your theory. Time and again here we belittle law enforcement for punishing drug users. Clearly, we say, what these people need is help to beat their addictions. Suddenly when it's a parent instead, trying to get help is an inappropriate response? You really believe a good grounding would set a drug addict straight? She was going to a therapist; maybe that was a bad choice and a drug addiction center would have been better. Maybe that choice and those 12 hours were the worst decision they've ever made in their lives -- but it doesn't make them bad parents, particularly if this girl's last brush with cocaine ended up with a cocaine-induced psychosis.
he responsible parties... the adults... the parents..
Aside from the fact that I obviously disagree about their responsibility, it's worth noting that this girl was 18 years old herself. If we're compelled to assign responsibility for somebody's actions, I think the adult person whose actions we're talking about is a much more appropriate place to start--particularly if all we have against the parents is "they didn't ground her!" and "they let her steal their car by having a key!" Both of which are frankly ridiculous.
Judging by your previous post... yes, you're just one of those asshats who hate "spoilt" people because they have money you don't; who tries to rationalize their ugly glee at other peoples' misfortunes by whatever means they think might stick to the wall. Give me your parent's email address. I want to let them know what a shitty job they did with you. Fair's fair you know.
I've asked several companies to "spam" me newsletters or special offers. I'm simply disputing what you state as a fact. I have proof.
Yes, the 85% market is stupid enough to leave the "Sure, I want spam!" box checked if you hide it at all cleverly
Like at the bottom of a form? Equating a checkbox sitting right above the submit button with "hiding" it is stupid, and no reputable company I've ever seen has done anything MORE than that in terms of obfuscating the checkbox. If you leave the "Yes, please send me special offers!" checkbox checked, it's not spam. You've just solicited it. And what's more, I find it highly egotistical of you to feel as though you can speak for those "85%" of people who all clearly must have been duped.
Stop talking for other people. If companies are breaking the law, report them to the proper authorities. If your personal hatred for anybody ever mailing you before you go through a five-step sign-up/verification process makes you think you're an expert on what everybody ELSE meant when they left that checkbox checked, I suggest you take a step back and try to mash your ego back down to a more suitable size.
And no: I don't work for any companies that do any kind of e-mail marketing. I just don't act as though I have any special knowledge of what anybody but me is thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree completely. Go out on the streets, and describe a scenario to random passers-by where I can buy a copy of somebody's book, reproduce it under my name or theirs (at my own discretion), sell their work and never give them a dime. Now ask them if what I'm describing should be legal. (Then for realism's sake go ahead and tell them that in my scenario I'm likely to be a company with huge assets at my disposal and they author is likely to be somebody struggling to even find a publisher--but we'll ignore that for now.) Most of them will oppose that behavior.
Describe to them a scenario where I buy a copy of your band's CD. I take the lyrics, "reverse engineer" the composition with my band mates and re-record it as my own, selling it and pocketing all the money. Ask if that should be legal; most of them will oppose that behavior. And note that in neither case was the original author deprived of his own product nor even of profits from the copy I bought to fuck them over, so it really is an issue that would fall (today) under copyright infringement rather than any kind of theft law, as we so often argue on this site that it should.
Describe to them how I can buy a copy of your software in the store for $50 and then re-sell copies on my own (online) store for $20 in essentially pure profits, with absolutely no work or contributions on my part on the product in question. Do you truly believe most people would say this behavior should be legal? Me, I believe most would oppose the behavior.
Ask all of these people who oppose it to design a legal framework that would cover this sort of thing under the law, and I think what you'll find is that they create a system that bears a striking resemblance to what we have. If that's the case, which I believe strongly it would be, then I'd say that it falls rather firmly on both the natural and obvious sides of the spectrum. IP law might be a construct of the mind, as you say, but so is most of the laws in a given society. The whole POINT of society is that it lays down rules for how people within that society interact when they have conflicting interests at heart. If we disagree that most people would think all of these scenarios should be illegal, well, there's nothing I can say about that; we just disagree. If you AGREE with me, though, then it's natural and it's obvious that a society creates copyright laws, and I think it's fairly obvious that "the person who creates it decides how it gets used" is going to be the basis of such a system (whether it ought to be or not).
Don't get me wrong: There are problems with copyright. There should be more exceptions to it than there are, I think (though I also recognize the difficulty of enumerating those exceptions and enforcing them even-handedly). I think the terms have gotten entirely out of hand. I'm not a fan of things like the story on /. recently about Square-Enix squashing a ROM modification game at 98% completion while they let the series stagnate and provide nothing useful to it (but ports to new systems to get more money from the same customers). But at its heart, I think copyright is a good thing that most people support.
Possibly. But they also have no authority, legal or otherwise, to detain me or demand I identify myself. Nor, frankly, to get snippy if he tries and I refuse him. Particularly if the act that caused him to deputize himself on his own authority is not even a crime.
Oh, I don't know. I think I could find a good attorney willing to take a harassment case against the police department, the city that employs them, the ATM owners and potentially the owners of the store where it all happened on a contingency basis.
You are correct. For sure the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth amendments have all been incorporated to the states with the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment (and subsequent case law). You can read the brief blurb here for a little background, though it's not much.
That said, this case is also a prime one to come before the US Supreme Court at some point. Generally speaking, the Court takes cases that have serious Constitutional questions and where there are a multitude of differing opinions being handed down in lower courts. Unless there are significant factual differences between the Wisconsin and New York rulings (as opposed to different legal interpretations), this is the sort of thing the USSC likes to step in on and lay down binding precedent.
"You [should] not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered."
-- Lyndon B. Johnson
I tend to agree with your assessment; it certainly sounds like they don't want to sell.
What I would add, though, is that's actually a great position to be in. It means the worst potential outcome of this negotiation is the one they're sort of hoping for. So my advice is this: Treat it as exactly that: A negotiation. Worst case, they say "screw that we're not negotiating!" which it sounds like you almost want. No harm. Best case, you may be able to get any number of beneficial things, just a few of which might be more money and/or more autonomy.
West Wing quote:
"I don't know where you get the idea that taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for anything of which they disapprove. Lots of them don't like tanks. Even more don't like Congress."
I think he was right about the problems with your four point proposal, but he used relatively lame examples of why they're a problem. For disclosure's sake, I think the situation with Megan was absolutely horrible, but I'm not the kind out calling for laws to address it. I think it could be well handled with a wrongful death lawsuit that she would almost certainly win. So that said:
Point #1 is fine. It seems perfectly reasonable to me. Even point #2 is fine; it's ambiguous, but certainly something that can be left to a jury's discretion--or hell, just go ahead and define it.
It breaks down at point #3 for me though. If we're saying that this type of harassment is wrong, to the point it should be illegal, than I don't care at all if it's an adult harassing an adult, a child harassing an adult, or most likely and worst yet, a child harassing a child. I recall reading a story on CNN just a few days ago where some very young kid--about 10 or so I think--was constantly getting calling gay at school. The administration didn't do anything about it specifically, and it was at a school that was considered to have a great anti-bullying program. He got tired of it and he hung himself. If you don't think a child can hurt a child as much as an adult can, you're wrong. If you're claiming they shouldn't be held accountable for that... well, it's a valid position, but I'm going to disagree. And going out on a limb, I'd suggest that most people who would support some sort of anti-harassment law like this or like what you're proposing would disagree with you as well. If the goal is to redirect them to something more well-defined so they don't go crazy over free speech rights, I think it's already broken down.
Point #4 completely makes your proposal useless. In addition to a lack of definition, the more important thing is a nearly impossible situation of somebody having to know that a person is mentally unstable, or it essentially being gross negligence on their part that they didn't know. It's crazy; I would pretty much never vote to convict anybody under a law like this. Knowing somebody was mentally ill is fairly easy, I suppose, once they've killed themselves. It's much harder to know or even suspect before that, particularly if you're just some other kid's parent who doesn't even really know the person you're harassing personally. Or if you're doing it over the Internet to somebody who doesn't even live anywhere near you. I also think it's a rather superficial distinction. Harassment is wrong or it's not; it's illegal or it's not. It shouldn't be illegal based on who you're mean to.
If you're trying to hand-waive to distract people calling for these laws from running roughshod over your rights, you might succeed. If you're legitimately trying to address their concerns I think you've painted them entirely too narrowly.
I believe that on Macs it's Windows running in a virtual machine. It gets a little clever, though, by essentially "erasing" the background of the VM for everything other than the active window, meaning it looks like your app is just running inside of your Mac. (If you grab a Windows app's window on a Mac and very quickly move it back and forth, you can often see the background come through briefly.)
Personally I think that's the best approach. I've looked for programs that do similar on linux but haven't found one yet (does anybody have any suggestions?) I try to use linux/OSS apps when I can, but I'm not a zealot by any stretch and if I don't feel that measure up to a Windows app for the same task, I'll use the Windows app. I think that's the rub: Any OSS fans are probably already using linux or BSD or some non-Windows operating system. If (if!) people are concerned about expanding linux's market share, you're going to need to convince the people who just want to get things done. Cost will be a consideration in linux's favor; unfamiliarity, inability to use certain programs and related issues will be marks against it.
It's really just a choice: Do your thing your way and whoever likes it will use it, or actively try to recruit people to your OS who might not have otherwise used it. Neither is right or wrong, it's just a choice.
The two are completely unrelated. These taxes are taxes on a company's PROFITS, meaning the money it has left over after it pays all of its bills. If a company is going broke, increased taxes don't matter to them. In fact they're probably not paying these taxes at all if they're failing to turn a profit. (There are SOME taxes--don't get me wrong--which people and companies pay no matter what, but they're not really the sort that offshore tax havens help you with.)
Who can afford to pay the taxes? Pretty well every company who will actually have to pay them. Remember: Profits, not revenues. If I'm making $0 profit it matters very little to me whether I have to pay 10% or 100% tax on that. I'm not paying. If some company has to put $100 million in the bank instead of $120 million, my heart doesn't exactly break for them. Particularly since if they were playing fair they would have been paying $120 million all along.
Easy. Because in the examples you're citing, the actor, singer or professional athlete IS the product. In the case of an actor, they get more money for sequels not because sequels make more money, but because the longer a series drags on the more important, generally speaking, it is that the same lead actors are involved. They could have very easily chosen a new actor to play his role in Terminator 1 and most people wouldn't even have KNOWN, much less cared. But they certainly would have known when T2 rolled around, and they'd know when T3 rolled around.
The same is true of Britney Spears. As much as I hate her music, she's not simply replaceable to her fans who are buying her records. (It's also worth noting that only the highest-echeleon of musicians/singers are this grossly "overpaid." Many other ones barely, if at all, make enough to cover their costs.) Athletes are the most simple example of being paid to be the product.
If $117 mil was Arnold's 20% cut for T3, then it means his studio made $585 million dollars off of it. I'm as jealous of the kind of money these people makes as the next guy, but if I'm capable of delivering you $585 million in profits it suddenly becomes much more reasonable that I make $150 million while doing so.
Producing a product is different than being the product, and it SHOULD be paid differently. If the studio, label or team owners don't feel somebody is worth their demands, they simply shouldn't pay it--same as if you walked into your boss' office tomorrow and asked for a million dollar raise. If they ARE worth it, based on what they're going to help you achieve in terms of success and money brought back in, then I don't see who we are to second guess that. Their employers are businesses the same as yours and mine. Bad decisions will be made along the way, but they're going to do what they believe is best for their business first and foremost.
Not if we're calling it a risk, no. But if quantity of poor-quality videos I end up paying for gets too high (and "too high" being a term I can't really define in advance) then it would turn me off of the idea pretty quickly. The fear of such an outcome may well turn me off in advance.
If I had to guess at it right now, and talking about strictly amateur content, I'd guess the ratio is somewhere around 1:1. For every video that has perfectly acceptable quality and is what I was searching for, I find one that's unacceptable. And we haven't even really delved into whether or not the CONTENT of the video was worth whatever amount of money we're talking about, which I'd say is more like 5:1 against.
You're right that at a nickle per video the margin for error is higher, but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I don't like feeling ripped off even if the sums we're talking about aren't great. If we're talking about a scenario where I have to pay for $0.30 of content to find $0.05 worth my time and money, I'm not sure it's something I'm interested in.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not opposed to paying for content. $0.30 paid for $0.30 of good content is perfectly worthwhile. Double or triple that is worthwhile. There just has to be a good signal-to-noise ratio if I'm paying. Since they're not likely to improve Random Joe's submissions, that's going to mean some system where I don't pay (or pay significantly less) when I run into that noise. What that might be... I have no earthly clue.
If we're talking about user-submitted content, I think the major problem is that, at least for me, the payment would need to take place somewhere into or after the viewing. There are a lot of problems with videos that would cause me to not want to pay, but which I would not be able to detect without actually watching the video. Just off the top of my head: Unsynchronized audio; choppy video (often done when people use a low-quality webcam to try to record video with a lot of motion); videos that either aren't what they say they are due to misleading tags/descriptions or videos that ARE what they say they are but used terms that could also apply to something else, and I was actually trying to find that something else; re-posts of old content by new users, making it seem like a new video on the topic; poor-quality encoding/source; etc.
None of these could be solved based on the description or tags, and only the last two could conceivably be solved by seeing video stills in advance of the video itself. It's a common-enough problem with random content that it's something that would need to be resolved before I'd consider using a site operating on such a scheme.
It depends on the circumstances of the way it was foiled. I'm recounting a fictionalized account from West Wing (because I love that damn show and I know it fairly well), but the account is a close parallel to a real case of Alger Hiss.
The short of it is this: Daniel Gault (the fictionalized Hiss) was accused of being a spy. He was indicted for such, but the prosecution bungled the case and they failed to make the charge stick, much to the embarrassment of the FBI. Instead, they got him on a perjury count and he was put in jail for ten years. He died a couple of years into his term. In the story, Gault's granddaughter was trying to get her grandfather a White House pardon. She took the case to Sam Seaborn (Deputy Communications Director), who had written a thesis years before about Gault's innocence. In the course of investigating to see that he was truly innocent, he ended up in a conversation with the national security adviser, who produced a gigantic NSA file on Gault ("That's not an FBI file...") with lateral references to things he didn't have clearance to read redacted.
Essentially, as it turns out, Daniel Gault WAS a spy and a murderer and they had intelligence intercepts to prove it. The problem is that those intercepts had not been decoded at the time of the espionage trial. It was decoded years later after he had died. The NSA could easily have opened that file and cleared the FBI's name in this case, but it chose not to do so (in TV they never did, in reality it was done some 20 years after his death). The reason, in the words of the national security adviser: You don't tell somebody you've cracked their cipher unless you absolutely have to.
That was a long-winded anecdotal way of saying this: If there ARE high-profile attacks foiled, whether or not they tell anybody could easily be related to how they foiled it. If we've broken their ciphers, so to speak (or, hell, literally) we're not likely to announce it unless we have to--it's better for us to look stupid and be able to know what they're planning than it is for us to look great and have them shift to a new system we have to break all over again.
Be sure to bring some exhibits. They love that sort of thing.
I remember a discussion about this on /. awhile ago, and somebody brought up a point I couldn't quite remember. I hopped over to the wikipedia page to look for something about found this:
"Some breath analysis machines assume a hematocrit (cell volume of blood) of 47%. However, hematocrit values range from 42 to 52% in men and from 37 to 47% in women. A person with a lower hematocrit will have a falsely high BAC reading."
and this:
"Breathalyzers assume that the subject being tested has a 2100-to-1 'partition ratio' in converting alcohol measured in the breath to estimates of alcohol in the blood [. . .] However, this assumed 'partition ratio' varies from 1300:1 to 3100:1 or wider among individuals and within a given individual over time."
I'm not sure what, exactly, I was remembering from the previous discussion; these may or may not be it. What I do remember is that it was essentially that, somewhere in this code, there are assumptions made and that the validity of the assumptions is going to directly affect the validity of the code.
Without knowing what, exactly, this machine is measuring and what it is assuming about the individual taking the test, it's impossible to know whether or not there's any reason to believe the test was inaccurate. Since both of these people argued this case to the Minnesota Supreme Court, I hope they both feel they're innocent.
I suppose this guy's lawyer should have made that argument. On the other hand, I don't think it's unreasonable for judges who are going to oversea DUI cases to understand that a breathalyzer is not, by any stretch, conclusive evidence. Use it to haul somebody in, by all means -- then get yourself a blood test. Bill the person being charged for the test for all I care. The breathalyzer itself should not be admissible in court. (I'm ignoring, by the way, the fact that something like having taken cough medicine could also affect the results.)
You can, depending on the jurisdiction, according to an Illinois judge.
It's generally assumed that you have a constitutional right to sue. We brought it up in a Constitutional law class many years ago in high school, here in Illinois, with regards to things like sports waivers agreeing not to sue your school. To get a legal opinion, our teacher asked a judge how it went. His response was that in Illinois, legal waivers are legal and enforceable, but that it will vary by state whether or not that is the case.
Your post was about Minnesota, but I know we have pretty much an identical implied consent law here in Illinois. Presumably both are jurisdictions which do not bar citizens from waiving legal rights. I think it's more an issue of contract law than anything else.
Should it be a federal issue? Should you be able to waive your rights? Is it different in civil versus criminal issues? I'm not sure. I'm just reporting the realities of the situation, at least as of... 10 years ago or so, according to a judge.
You may be right that it would be hard to prove, but that's not why. If that was their concern, they'd simply make the charge involuntary manslaughter, where they don't have to prove any degree of intent to harm somebody--just that what they did was criminally negligent or reckless and caused a death.
No. They don't want you to forget, not at all. In addition to everything that has already happened, there is still inevitably going to be yet more done and more excuses made related to terrorism. It's STILL happening, in fairly stupid ways and in extremely recent history. Obama released Bush's torture memos? Cheney gets on TV to whine about how he's helping the terrorists and now we're going to get attacked again*. It's an exceptionally useful tool, and "terrorism!!!" has been catapulted to the top of our list of national boogeymen with sex offenders.
* Of course we're going to get attacked again. Little that these people (claim to) care about has changed, and anybody who thinks we can stop every attempted attack anywhere and maintain any semblance of freedom is deluding themselves.
That's only true indirectly. You actually make or lose money based on the moves of the other "players" (investors), which we hope is based on company success but isn't always in the way we would expect. You can literally lose money in the stock market if a company you invested in made $1/share last quarter if the speculation was saying it would make $1.05/share; it doesn't even take a long or detailed look into history to see many examples of exactly that. Either way the company was successful and profitable, but if people feel they can get a bigger return elsewhere they can and often do pull their money, leaving what you're left with worth less. Possibly less than you bought it for, depending on when you got in and what happened since.
In that sense, it really is more like poker than strict investment. In an investment, I make money if you make money. In poker, I make money if I can successfully read the other players at the table and act accordingly--even if I don't necessarily have the best hand.
Crazy. Has that ever been tested in court? It seems like an awfully hard claim to back up.
I mean, okay, I understand drinking water is not an unlimited resource and governments could lay claim to regulating that -- but seriously, regulating something that falls from the sky? What's next, a sunbathing tax to support all the poor tanning salons who lose business from those unscrupulous sunbathers?
All of that is fine, and you're probably at least partially right, but none of it explains why the records need to be sealed. "This is not a proper class" isn't something that needs to be held secret, nor is it something that should be discussed with only one party of the lawsuit involved.
You may be right that that's one of their defenses; it certainly sounds as though it should be. But it is, at best, a small part of what's going on. They're saying SOMETHING that a judge has apparently decided is so important to keep secret that not even opposing counsel can know about it. Whatever that is, it's not Noerr-Pennington. Not even a lawyer who has worked on these cases can hazard a guess as to what it might be. That's awfully irregular.
I think overall, this is a better way of moving forward. Windows has been essentially crippled from several different perspectives for years because of their need to support backward-compatibility, even with broken interfaces or insecure models. Letting a significant portion of that flow into VMs of older operating systems for those customers who absolutely, positively can not get off their old apps is a good compromise. It allows them to start with a cleaner slate for the majority who has no such requirements.
"In third grade, Nikki was diagnosed with a brain tumor that doctors didn't think she'd survive. It turned out to be benign, but 8-year-old Nikki had to undergo intensive radiation, and doctors told her parents the effects of that treatment on her young brain might show up someday--perhaps by causing changes in her judgment, or impulse control."
If this article is to be our source, that seems pretty conclusive to me: Doctors told the parents it might affect her brain in that way. The only part that is "allegation" is that it had something to do with the cocaine use or the activities that night. If you simply want to call people liars without any particular reason to believe it is so, well, I can't stop you. But it's not a compelling argument by any stretch.
They're bad parents because they have a car key somewhere and trusted their daughter not to steal a car? It truly astounds me how much slashdotters who obviously aren't parents think they know about parenting.
I obviously don't know their particular situation, but in my house we have four people (parents, my brother and myself), all of driving age (actually all adults, if that makes any difference). There were keys to just about every car lying around the house, because our driveway is long and we have a garage, but not enough room to put all of the cars in a position that they can leave without having to move any other cars. We can't park on the street overnight due to local legal restrictions, so it's important to us to be able to leave at whatever time we want without having to wake people up and rummage through their purse or pockets. I suppose my parents are bad parents if this leads to me stealing their car without their permission, speeding down the highway and wrecking into a tollbooth?
Erm, how the hell do you know? And what does "and stuff" mean?
Maybe she wasn't punished for drugs. We'll assume you're right, even though you're obviously just making shit up to fit your theory. Time and again here we belittle law enforcement for punishing drug users. Clearly, we say, what these people need is help to beat their addictions. Suddenly when it's a parent instead, trying to get help is an inappropriate response? You really believe a good grounding would set a drug addict straight? She was going to a therapist; maybe that was a bad choice and a drug addiction center would have been better. Maybe that choice and those 12 hours were the worst decision they've ever made in their lives -- but it doesn't make them bad parents, particularly if this girl's last brush with cocaine ended up with a cocaine-induced psychosis.
Aside from the fact that I obviously disagree about their responsibility, it's worth noting that this girl was 18 years old herself. If we're compelled to assign responsibility for somebody's actions, I think the adult person whose actions we're talking about is a much more appropriate place to start--particularly if all we have against the parents is "they didn't ground her!" and "they let her steal their car by having a key!" Both of which are frankly ridiculous.
Judging by your previous post... yes, you're just one of those asshats who hate "spoilt" people because they have money you don't; who tries to rationalize their ugly glee at other peoples' misfortunes by whatever means they think might stick to the wall. Give me your parent's email address. I want to let them know what a shitty job they did with you. Fair's fair you know.
I've asked several companies to "spam" me newsletters or special offers. I'm simply disputing what you state as a fact. I have proof.
Like at the bottom of a form? Equating a checkbox sitting right above the submit button with "hiding" it is stupid, and no reputable company I've ever seen has done anything MORE than that in terms of obfuscating the checkbox. If you leave the "Yes, please send me special offers!" checkbox checked, it's not spam. You've just solicited it. And what's more, I find it highly egotistical of you to feel as though you can speak for those "85%" of people who all clearly must have been duped.
Stop talking for other people. If companies are breaking the law, report them to the proper authorities. If your personal hatred for anybody ever mailing you before you go through a five-step sign-up/verification process makes you think you're an expert on what everybody ELSE meant when they left that checkbox checked, I suggest you take a step back and try to mash your ego back down to a more suitable size.
And no: I don't work for any companies that do any kind of e-mail marketing. I just don't act as though I have any special knowledge of what anybody but me is thinking.