Of course it did. There's no reason whatsoever to think that basic laws of supply and demand would apply to music any differently than any other product. There's a lot more supply in the form of artists and songs, and relatively constant demand in the form of disposable income, therefore the music is worth less than it was back before the Internet broke the distribution monopoly.
Not very many. You have whatever is negotiated in your employment contract (if you have one), and depending on where you work you may have the protection of a collective bargaining agreement. Otherwise, you're almost always an "at-will" employee and can be dismissed for any reason or no reason at all. Hell, my state (Florida) doesn't even have laws that make it illegal to not pay employees for work performed, so if you get screwed out of a paycheck, you can either complain to the federal Department of Labor and *maybe* get minimum wage + penalties for the hours you worked (which in my experience still has been substantially less than what I should have been paid anyway), or you can take your chances and spend a whole lot of money to sue your employer in civil court. Some states such as California actually do implement some strong labor laws that make it more difficult for employees to be abused, but they're definitely in the minority.
The server division might be doing better if they had some more competent folks in sales, too. Late last year I spent six weeks just trying to get a damned quote on a SAN. In that entire time, I got exactly one sales rep (not mine) to return a call, and during the few times I was able to get my own rep on the phone, each time I had to explain what I wanted a quote on. Even after all of that, when I finally did get a quote after six weeks, it was from a VAR he'd apparently pawned me off on, and the quote was for a $150K package after the rep been told repeatedly that the budget was $40K. The VAR was quite confused as he apparently had been told by the rep that the budget was $150K, and was quite unhappy with the HP rep by the time we got off the phone. At that point, I dismissed HP out of hand, and wrote a note to the HP regional sales manager about the fiasco, and of course got no response. I'd been quite pleased a number of years ago with the quality of their DL servers, but If they can't even get their act together in the pre-sales phase I don't have much faith in being taken care of if I need support.
Apple is not even a party to the sale - the transaction is between the buyer and whatever store he purchases the package from, not Apple (barring Apple Store sales, perhaps). Prior to that, there was a sales transaction between Apple (potentially via a distributor) and the store, but that's in the past and has nothing to do with the end-user sale.
In the U.S. anyway, all of the necessary elements of a contract are present and said contract is formed when you give a store/vendor your money for the OS X package, and the sale is complete. Saying otherwise requires arguing against many, many years of well-established contract law.
The only "probability" that must be satisfied is, "could a reasonable person reasonably SUSPECT that a crime may be in progress, may have occurred, or is about to occur."
And I would argue that there is no more reason to suspect someone of a crime merely because they set off a radiation detector than there would be to suspect that any random person carrying a newspaper had stolen it from a newsstand. The idea that a detector hit should result in pulling someone over is predicated on the assumption that radioactivity among the traveling public are A.) exceedingly rare, and B.) the result of criminal activity. Neither assumption is true.
You're implying that I said a lot more than actually did - please show me where I said "police have no public safety role whatsoever", nor did I give you any indication as to what level of understanding of legal terminology I may or may not have. All I did was show that it seems substantially more likely for the average law enforcement officer to have a radiation detector triggered by radioactive medical tracers than nefarious criminal activity.
Since most people transporting radioactive materials do so in properly shielded, marked, and placarded vehicles
I believe the evidence suggests that most people transporting radioactive materials are doing so with a very small amount of short half-life substances within their own unshielded, unmarked, and unplacarded bodies as a result of perfectly legal medical testing. I'm certainly open to other evidence suggesting anything else, though.
yes that is what those little white box's that hang over the highway are
No, those are PrePass transponders that are used to "pre-clear" trucks belonging to carriers that participate in the PrePass program, usually allowing them to bypass the weigh station based on a variety of criteria. That's not to say that there aren't radioactivity sensors in places along the highway (dunno if there are or not), but the six-sided elongated devices mounted in widely-spaced pairs right before weigh stations are most definitely PrePass boxes.
Actually, no, it's not a "*lot* more common," because patients that walk around constantly emitting ionizing radiation would be dead from radiation poisoning in very short order.
Lantheus Medical Imaging, who manufactures the Cardiolite technetium marker that was involved in TFA, claims that "for almost two decades" there have been "more than 40 million patients in the U.S." that have been given the substance. That averages to two million patients a year, or about 5500 every day. Now that's just Cardiolite patients - it doesn't include people that have had may have been given technetium or radioactive iodine for a thyroid scan, or other medical procedure involving radioactive materials. The parent poster is 100% correct that it's far, far, far more likely for someone triggering a radioactive sensor to have been recently subjected to some form of medical nuclear procedure than to be involved in terrorist activity.
Sorry about that - I've seen other folks earnestly arguing exactly what you were saying. After re-reading your post the sarcasm comes through loud and clear.:-)
Then the little guy who wants to start a company can go head-to-head with the likes of Oracle
But then there's the problem of having no protection at all. Let's say you develop a spiffy new widget that solves a need in a genuinely novel way, but don't really have the capital to manufacture/distribute it. You talk to a manufacturer who passes on the idea, and then the next thing you know, your widget is available to the masses at Wal-Mart, made by an arm's-length affiliate of the original manufacturer, and soon after that by a multitude of manufacturers. It'll be impossible to prove breach of contract, and you get to sit by and watch as the widget sells by the million. After that experience you won't be nearly as eager to create something else novel that might benefit society, and this is the specific concern that copyrights/patents are supposed to address. I don't know that there's a good answer to the problem.
Thanks for the info re: the MPPC. I find it more than a little ironic that the modern film industry, who does everything in their power to prevent copyright infringement, has its genesis (in part) in the desire to commit patent infringement.
I believe TFA is saying that only the plaintiff, NOT the defendant, would face this liability
Okay, lets say you (an individual or small company) sue Microsoft for stealing your patent. What will then happen is that Microsoft ties you up in court long enough to force you to drop the suit (or they just win outright), and then *you* might find yourself on the hook for triple damages when they counter-sue to recover their costs. It's still the same basic tort reform idea that has been proposed for years, and won't work for the same reason. It doesn't address the fundamental problem that in the U.S., you often get as much justice as you can afford and no more, regardless of which table you sit at in the courtroom.
here's another profession rooted in the old ways for no good reason. The pharmacy takes pills out of one container, counts them, puts them into another container, and sticks a label on it and bills my insurance.
Because the pharmacist is the one that's likely to see that the doc-in-a-box prescribed indomethacin to deal with that gout attack you're having, but that you're already on an ACE inhibitor for your high blood pressure and thus at risk for getting dangerously high potassium levels from the combination of the two drugs. The doctor *should* know this, but my experience has been that pharmacists are a lot more on-the-ball than doctors when it comes to pharmacology and especially knowing how drugs can interact with one another.
Especially when there are generics that a Iot of doctors don't even try before going for the top-shelf meds because they get the free bennies from Big Pharma.
and setting up the worlds largest piracy site YouTube
YouTube was purchased after the fact by Google, not founded by them, not to mention that YouTube is quite good about taking down copyrighted content when served with the proper legal notice.
I wonder when government and law enforcement are going to get the message
When the people stand up and force a degree of unavoidable personal accountability and cost upon those who would carry out such actions against the people. For instance, if every SWAT team that served a questionable rubber-stamped no-knock warrant lost two or three members every time they did that, they'd start doing it a lot less.
I was just speaking as to the applicability of the First Amendment to the states in general. In this particular case the guy clearly states that he's not a dietitian and that he has no formal credentials, but accepting money for his services is definitely going to make it hard for him to argue against the state's reasoning.
Yeah, incorporation is one of those things that they don't seem to cover in high school civics courses, although they really should. I'd wager that most of the kids that graduate from American secondary schools don't really have a good handle on how the government and the law actually work.
they've decided that only government licensed counselors speak the truth.
And it gets downright entertaining when you have the licensed elite battling it out between themselves. Some cardiologists recommend diets that are in direct opposition to what some dietitians would tell you, for instance.
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Of course it did. There's no reason whatsoever to think that basic laws of supply and demand would apply to music any differently than any other product. There's a lot more supply in the form of artists and songs, and relatively constant demand in the form of disposable income, therefore the music is worth less than it was back before the Internet broke the distribution monopoly.
Oh, but it was. The U.S. film industry being based in Southern California is due in large part to that fact.
A sort of 'appeal to authority by association'.
Or alliteration.
Don't you have employment rights in the US?
Not very many. You have whatever is negotiated in your employment contract (if you have one), and depending on where you work you may have the protection of a collective bargaining agreement. Otherwise, you're almost always an "at-will" employee and can be dismissed for any reason or no reason at all. Hell, my state (Florida) doesn't even have laws that make it illegal to not pay employees for work performed, so if you get screwed out of a paycheck, you can either complain to the federal Department of Labor and *maybe* get minimum wage + penalties for the hours you worked (which in my experience still has been substantially less than what I should have been paid anyway), or you can take your chances and spend a whole lot of money to sue your employer in civil court. Some states such as California actually do implement some strong labor laws that make it more difficult for employees to be abused, but they're definitely in the minority.
The server division might be doing better if they had some more competent folks in sales, too. Late last year I spent six weeks just trying to get a damned quote on a SAN. In that entire time, I got exactly one sales rep (not mine) to return a call, and during the few times I was able to get my own rep on the phone, each time I had to explain what I wanted a quote on. Even after all of that, when I finally did get a quote after six weeks, it was from a VAR he'd apparently pawned me off on, and the quote was for a $150K package after the rep been told repeatedly that the budget was $40K. The VAR was quite confused as he apparently had been told by the rep that the budget was $150K, and was quite unhappy with the HP rep by the time we got off the phone. At that point, I dismissed HP out of hand, and wrote a note to the HP regional sales manager about the fiasco, and of course got no response. I'd been quite pleased a number of years ago with the quality of their DL servers, but If they can't even get their act together in the pre-sales phase I don't have much faith in being taken care of if I need support.
Until you agree there is no actual sale.
Apple is not even a party to the sale - the transaction is between the buyer and whatever store he purchases the package from, not Apple (barring Apple Store sales, perhaps). Prior to that, there was a sales transaction between Apple (potentially via a distributor) and the store, but that's in the past and has nothing to do with the end-user sale.
In the U.S. anyway, all of the necessary elements of a contract are present and said contract is formed when you give a store/vendor your money for the OS X package, and the sale is complete. Saying otherwise requires arguing against many, many years of well-established contract law.
The only "probability" that must be satisfied is, "could a reasonable person reasonably SUSPECT that a crime may be in progress, may have occurred, or is about to occur."
And I would argue that there is no more reason to suspect someone of a crime merely because they set off a radiation detector than there would be to suspect that any random person carrying a newspaper had stolen it from a newsstand. The idea that a detector hit should result in pulling someone over is predicated on the assumption that radioactivity among the traveling public are A.) exceedingly rare, and B.) the result of criminal activity. Neither assumption is true.
You're implying that I said a lot more than actually did - please show me where I said "police have no public safety role whatsoever", nor did I give you any indication as to what level of understanding of legal terminology I may or may not have. All I did was show that it seems substantially more likely for the average law enforcement officer to have a radiation detector triggered by radioactive medical tracers than nefarious criminal activity.
Since most people transporting radioactive materials do so in properly shielded, marked, and placarded vehicles
I believe the evidence suggests that most people transporting radioactive materials are doing so with a very small amount of short half-life substances within their own unshielded, unmarked, and unplacarded bodies as a result of perfectly legal medical testing. I'm certainly open to other evidence suggesting anything else, though.
No, just that "unusual radioactivity" seen on the highways is almost always due to perfectly legal activities that harm no one.
yes that is what those little white box's that hang over the highway are
No, those are PrePass transponders that are used to "pre-clear" trucks belonging to carriers that participate in the PrePass program, usually allowing them to bypass the weigh station based on a variety of criteria. That's not to say that there aren't radioactivity sensors in places along the highway (dunno if there are or not), but the six-sided elongated devices mounted in widely-spaced pairs right before weigh stations are most definitely PrePass boxes.
You were given a substance containing technetium-99m, most likely under the trade name Cardiolite.
Actually, no, it's not a "*lot* more common," because patients that walk around constantly emitting ionizing radiation would be dead from radiation poisoning in very short order.
Lantheus Medical Imaging, who manufactures the Cardiolite technetium marker that was involved in TFA, claims that "for almost two decades" there have been "more than 40 million patients in the U.S." that have been given the substance. That averages to two million patients a year, or about 5500 every day. Now that's just Cardiolite patients - it doesn't include people that have had may have been given technetium or radioactive iodine for a thyroid scan, or other medical procedure involving radioactive materials. The parent poster is 100% correct that it's far, far, far more likely for someone triggering a radioactive sensor to have been recently subjected to some form of medical nuclear procedure than to be involved in terrorist activity.
Sorry about that - I've seen other folks earnestly arguing exactly what you were saying. After re-reading your post the sarcasm comes through loud and clear. :-)
I agree that software patents are ridiculous, but this is an issue that extends to patents outside the software world.
Then the little guy who wants to start a company can go head-to-head with the likes of Oracle
But then there's the problem of having no protection at all. Let's say you develop a spiffy new widget that solves a need in a genuinely novel way, but don't really have the capital to manufacture/distribute it. You talk to a manufacturer who passes on the idea, and then the next thing you know, your widget is available to the masses at Wal-Mart, made by an arm's-length affiliate of the original manufacturer, and soon after that by a multitude of manufacturers. It'll be impossible to prove breach of contract, and you get to sit by and watch as the widget sells by the million. After that experience you won't be nearly as eager to create something else novel that might benefit society, and this is the specific concern that copyrights/patents are supposed to address. I don't know that there's a good answer to the problem.
Thanks for the info re: the MPPC. I find it more than a little ironic that the modern film industry, who does everything in their power to prevent copyright infringement, has its genesis (in part) in the desire to commit patent infringement.
I believe TFA is saying that only the plaintiff, NOT the defendant, would face this liability
Okay, lets say you (an individual or small company) sue Microsoft for stealing your patent. What will then happen is that Microsoft ties you up in court long enough to force you to drop the suit (or they just win outright), and then *you* might find yourself on the hook for triple damages when they counter-sue to recover their costs. It's still the same basic tort reform idea that has been proposed for years, and won't work for the same reason. It doesn't address the fundamental problem that in the U.S., you often get as much justice as you can afford and no more, regardless of which table you sit at in the courtroom.
You know that and I know that, but try telling that to a doctor sometime. ;-)
here's another profession rooted in the old ways for no good reason. The pharmacy takes pills out of one container, counts them, puts them into another container, and sticks a label on it and bills my insurance.
Because the pharmacist is the one that's likely to see that the doc-in-a-box prescribed indomethacin to deal with that gout attack you're having, but that you're already on an ACE inhibitor for your high blood pressure and thus at risk for getting dangerously high potassium levels from the combination of the two drugs. The doctor *should* know this, but my experience has been that pharmacists are a lot more on-the-ball than doctors when it comes to pharmacology and especially knowing how drugs can interact with one another.
Especially when there are generics that a Iot of doctors don't even try before going for the top-shelf meds because they get the free bennies from Big Pharma.
and setting up the worlds largest piracy site YouTube
YouTube was purchased after the fact by Google, not founded by them, not to mention that YouTube is quite good about taking down copyrighted content when served with the proper legal notice.
I wonder when government and law enforcement are going to get the message
When the people stand up and force a degree of unavoidable personal accountability and cost upon those who would carry out such actions against the people. For instance, if every SWAT team that served a questionable rubber-stamped no-knock warrant lost two or three members every time they did that, they'd start doing it a lot less.
I was just speaking as to the applicability of the First Amendment to the states in general. In this particular case the guy clearly states that he's not a dietitian and that he has no formal credentials, but accepting money for his services is definitely going to make it hard for him to argue against the state's reasoning.
Yeah, incorporation is one of those things that they don't seem to cover in high school civics courses, although they really should. I'd wager that most of the kids that graduate from American secondary schools don't really have a good handle on how the government and the law actually work.
they've decided that only government licensed counselors speak the truth.
And it gets downright entertaining when you have the licensed elite battling it out between themselves. Some cardiologists recommend diets that are in direct opposition to what some dietitians would tell you, for instance.