Every other western nation has seriously controlled guns and their level of gun violence is dramatically lower than in the US. Sure, people still get murdered, that's not going to go away, but it's a hell of a lot easier to kill 26 people in a short period of time with a gun than with a knife. Sure 5 year olds aren't going to put up much of a struggle if some monster comes in with a knife, but hey the adults can do something about that without having to fill our schools with more guns. This is the fundamental problem with guns, they are a significant force multiplier. So one dipshit who stole his mother's gun can't mow down an entire classroom, just as an example say, as a for instance. Not like lone dipshits ever kill dozens of people with guns, not like it hasn't happened at least 3 times this year.
And no, more guns is not the god damned solution. In order to safely have guns of any kind in a primary school class they'd have to be locked away where none of the kids can get at them(which means a real safe not one of those gun safes a 3 year old can open) which means they aren't available for anyone to use for self defense. Otherwise you're just going to have 5 year olds with guns, which is a bad god damned idea.
The dirty little secret of the programming world is that the vast majority of jobs aren't really all that different than what you're doing now. Sure a few folks work in C on the bare metal, and a few people do some really high level stuff for companies like Google or Microsoft, but the vast majority of people working as programmers are making LoB apps used by maybe a few hundred people accessing a dozen or so tables from either an existing LoB system or a custom database. For the most part these apps are accessing human readable numbers of result sets so unless you're doing something really silly you won't actually lock the tables and you won't actually give a rats about getting your performance down an extra couple of milliseconds because it'll all just be noise lost in the http latency, and you will spend the vast majority of your time dicking around with making the front end the right colour mauve for marketing and you'll be doing that in, guess what, html. You'll also in a lot of cases be handing second tier support(if you're lucky) for your own apps. In then end your understanding of business processes will be more useful than your programming knowledge, which if you have the knack will come and if you don't won't. Don't be scared by all the crap Slashdotters like to post about their jobs where they spend 8 hours thinking and 10 minutes doing or where they need to understand sql incredibly well to avoid problems(in most languages these days you won't actually touch raw sql anyway)
Fundamentally though, your plan will fail, you can't learn programming an hour at a time because you can only learn programming by doing it and an hour will just about get your IDE booted up and allow you to work out where you left off the day before.
I'm not suggesting the government stops them saying it, just stops them saying it where they're saying it. You shouldn't have the right to disrupt a funeral for any circumstances, no matter who the person is, and the patriot guard for all that I respect what they're doing isn't the solution. More noise and more disruption isn't the solution. Protecting peoples right to say good bye to their loved ones in piece is something the government ought to do. If WBC wants to hurl horrendous insults in the town square, that's fine by me, but if any venue exists where free speech does not, it's a funeral.
I don't agree with using the government to muzzle them, but I sure as hell agree with using the government to get them and everyone else the hell away from funerals in this context. I don't care if that's the funerals of kids, soldiers, or even scum like the members of the WBC.
People are against crowdsourcing(at least the model espoused by kickstarter) because it's essentially a charity for people who want to be rich. There's nothing wrong with putting your money there if you have the cash and want to feel good about bringing a product to market, but in the end the ROI is pretty much nil, your legal recourse for anything but blatant fraud is non existent. It works, and will continue to work, but it's about people who have money to burn making themselves feel good which isn't necessarily the best long term strategy.
The problem with Apple is that they are probably the largest abuser of the patent system going at the moment. They're not a young upstart, they're not "fighting the cartels", they're using patent law to form a monopoly cartel of one because they are even more greedy and evil than their competition. I hope people make an example out of Apple because they are working very hard on breaking the entire patent system and not in a "we're going to free this up for innovation" way, in a "no one will ever do anything at all in the mobile market if they're not us" way.
Cheaper isn't really all that important in the long run a positive output of course is, but while nearly free energy would be excellent a clean relatively limitless supply of expensive energy is a lot better than a cheap supply of incredibly dirty or limited energy, as the other two options get a lot more expensive over time.
Fusion is off the table because it doesn't work yet. If you're asking why nuclear is off the table it's because a large part of the left is off in a 1960's flower power fantasy land and wouldn't consider nuclear power under any circumstances and a large part of the right is off in a 1950's fantasy land and doesn't see anything wrong with burning fossil fuels as fast as we can forever. This essentially is why nothing gets done on climate change period, the left won't accept any of the viable solutions and the right doesn't think there's a problem.
Fusion is fundamentally possible. We know this because solar, wind, wave, and for that matter pretty damned near every other energy source we have was originally generated by the gigantic fusion reactor we call the Sun. There's still some question as to whether we can manage sustainable fusion, and some even bigger questions about this particular methodology, but the payoff if we succeed is pretty damned massive.
That's a great plan if you want to kill just about as many people as global warming will(possibly more).
Fundamentally the survival of modern humanity is dependent on our access to energy. With access to sufficient energy we an survive most anything(including a 5 degree temperature rise, heck we even know how to destroy nuclear waste if we have enough energy to do it), without it, we're pretty well boned. Now I'd love to see coal phased out as soon as is humanly possible, but in a world where nuclear is off the table in most places and base load renewable energy is still unproven as far as I'm aware, we don't have that luxury. What we need is something which can replace coal without forcing us to drastically reduce either the reliability or supply of electricity. All indications are that fusion might be the energy holy grail, and we're going to need one.
The man in TFA is 30, he's not a kid and he knows or at least should have known what he was doing. In addition to his acts of protest he appears to have engaged in acts which are purely criminal. I'm as sick as anyone of this attitude that no one is willing to pay for doing the right thing and cries afterwards, but this isn't that case. These idiots(and seemingly this idiot in particular) stole peoples credit cards and identities and then shared them with the world, they didn't do this because it was a strike for freedom, because it isn't, it's just a bunch of really dumb as smart people who think that because other people aren't as smart as they are that they deserve what they get.
The problem with Anonymous (and many of the ones you mentioned) is that they aren't freedom fighters so much as criminals. Taking down Mastercard and Visa when they refused payments to Wikileaks, freedom fighters, nicking innocent peoples credit cards and using them without consent, criminals. They have the usual attitude that anyone who isn't a member of their little group must be some form of sheeple and it's ok to damage or steal from the sheeple for any reason whatsoever. Problem is, the thing that keeps you from getting destroyed by the powers that be, that would be the support of the sheeple. Anonymous are a bunch of dickheads who incidentally do the right thing sometimes, just like lulzsec and a dozen other similar groups. Just because they occasionally aim their sights at "the bad guys" doesn't make them "the good guys". Tracking down identity thieves and credit card thieves is what the FBI is for, and this guy can rot for all I care.
Gold is a deflationary currency, it's one of the many reasons it makes a crappy primary currency. To give my example better clarity. Let's say I bought my house 10 years ago for 100,000 worth of gold, by that I mean that the unit I paid in and the unit I borrowed in were troy ounces not dollars. My loan today would be, by your own reasoning, the equivalent of about 400,000 without even taking into account the compound interest on the loan(which as a note is also in troy ounces and so has increased 400% over the same period of time.
It's called an affirmative defense. It works the same way that self defense does in a murder trial. They prove you committed the act, you have to prove you had a right to.
That's not entirely true. Truth is a defense in England it's just not a complete defense. If you say something that is false you're screwed, but something true also has to be the intended audience's business, at least as far as I understand it(the law here in Oz is similar). So if you were to post on the internet that you're next door neighbor is a transvestite, you could be sued for libel, even if it's true because it's no one's business that he's a transvestite. Essentially just because something is true doesn't mean you should say it. Libertarians like the creators of South Park tend to see this as a travesty of freedom, and it certainly can be if the court takes it that way, but it does provide some protection for privacy which US law simply does not provide. There are the usual exceptions for public figures and politicians (if your member of parliament cheats on his wife it's considered in the public interest where the same information about Joe Blogs from down the street isn't). It's actually quite a reasonable approach to the law IMHO.
That said of course in this particular case, while IANAL, I would guess that this woman's situation would be the same in the US and the UK as in this context she'd most likely have a right to share this particular information(the performance of a service provider is the business of people interested in hiring said service provider). She'd simply need to prove that her statements were true(most of them anyway, property damage and an incomplete job would probably cover her even if she obviously can't prove the jewelry loss).
Except of course for the fact that most precious metals have very limited inherent value beyond the psychological "ooooh shiny" which essentially makes gold not a whole lot different than a fiat currency. In the event of the total breakdown of civilization you could at least burn the money for warmth.
Innovation doesn't mean "doing something no one has ever thought of before" it means "doing something no one has done before". If Microsoft's technique works where Carnegie-Mellon's didn't then it's innovative, if it doesn't, it probably isn't. There could still be something innovative in the way they tried which could help someone else later, but mostly what we'd be looking for from an innovation point of view is "actually does what it says in the tin".
It's newsworthy because slashdot groupthink paranoia means that if anyone even remotely related to technology is charged with any crime they must be innocent and part of some vast conspiracy(see any of the slashdot articles about Hans Reiser). This feeds into a combination of the libertarian paranoia that government is only doing evil things and the "bullied in high school" persecution complex of nerds.
In addition to that we have the fact that he's been commercially successful selling a questionable product so we can all feel superior to him now that he's being chased down. Those two options will pretty much cover most of slashdot.
Welcome the world of unenforceable contract terms.
IANAL, but like non compete terms, most "all your base are belong to us" terms are overly broad and non enforceable. You of course have to actually go to court, be able to afford a lawyer who can find his or her own body parts in a darkened room and once again most importantly be able to afford a lawyer who can find his or her own body parts in a darkened room, but generally speaking as I understand it, if you create in your own time on your own equipment and can prove it the invention is yours, even if you've done it on work equipment they'll generally only end up with a free perpetual license as opposed to actual ownership of the idea. I'm fairly certain this applies to copyright which does have work for hire so I don't see why it wouldn't apply for patents as well.
It's the magic of the legal system though, your employer gets you to sign an idiotic contract clause because you're afraid you won't get the job knowing that you are incredibly unlikely to actually challenge said term, even if the legal team know full well it'd get tossed out if you did.
When was the last CEO jailed for anything whatsoever related to the performance of their jobs. I mean sure sometimes they get jailed if they decide to murder people in their spare time or the like, sometimes anyway, but for anything related to poor performance of their jobs? Never. The Enron guys committed fraud, walked away with millions. Arthur Anderson, who helped them, still in business under another name. CEO's don't go to jail for poor management. They don't even have their assets seized. You have to have committed outright and deliberate fraud to even go before a court.
It's a fair enough thing to have an issue with passing debt onto our children, but you've got to be careful to properly define debt.
If you don't pay for road maintenance for 50 years so the whole road network has to be redone at a significantly higher cost than the maintenance would have cost, that different as well as the productivity lost is a debt passed on to future generations. If you scrimp on education so that the nation doesn't have the workforce necessary to keep the economy going, that cost of fixing that problem is a debt passed on to future generations. The same goes for a lot of things that government does, even under some circumstances things like wars. Putting off any sort of problem nearly always creates a debt whether that's financial or otherwise and the financial ones are actually usually the easiest to get out of.
I'm not disagreeing with you that debt is being passed on that does not need to be. The Bush tax cuts should never have gone into place in the first instance for anyone, if there was excess money being gathered by those taxes it should have been spent paying down the debt. Given how hard getting tax increases passed tends to be tax cuts of any sort shouldn't even be contemplated unless the government is debt free and able to pay for everything it's trying to do. I would personally also argue that the Iraq and Afghan wars, Department of Homeland Security and a whole bunch of other things Bush did were also foolish expenditures, though I don't have the evidence to confirm that. None of us really know how effective Homeland Security is or isn't and it could actually be a very good investment.
Obama's not innocent either. The bailouts should have come with pink slips for everyone in the executive team at those companies or at least with some sort of strings attached to stop them doing it again. The Affordable Health Care Act is likely substantially more expensive than a single payer system(though of course a single payer system probably wouldn't have passed). That said though, if you want to tap two people on the head for causing most of the deficit it'd be Reagan and Dubya.
Nope. The Civics lesson is that when the government enters into a contract with an individual that it cannot then decide later on that it doesn't liked the contract and legislate to undo it. No matter how silly the pension agreed by some chicken shit politician who thought they could kick the can down the road to someone else.
There's a wonderful irony that republicans want to fight government tyranny by getting the government to unilaterally change the terms of binding legal contracts entered into by itself. I can buy the right of the government to invalidate portions of contract law, but to invalidate contracts it is a party to, that's fairly dodgy.
Slashdot Mirror
Every other western nation has seriously controlled guns and their level of gun violence is dramatically lower than in the US. Sure, people still get murdered, that's not going to go away, but it's a hell of a lot easier to kill 26 people in a short period of time with a gun than with a knife. Sure 5 year olds aren't going to put up much of a struggle if some monster comes in with a knife, but hey the adults can do something about that without having to fill our schools with more guns. This is the fundamental problem with guns, they are a significant force multiplier. So one dipshit who stole his mother's gun can't mow down an entire classroom, just as an example say, as a for instance. Not like lone dipshits ever kill dozens of people with guns, not like it hasn't happened at least 3 times this year.
And no, more guns is not the god damned solution. In order to safely have guns of any kind in a primary school class they'd have to be locked away where none of the kids can get at them(which means a real safe not one of those gun safes a 3 year old can open) which means they aren't available for anyone to use for self defense. Otherwise you're just going to have 5 year olds with guns, which is a bad god damned idea.
The dirty little secret of the programming world is that the vast majority of jobs aren't really all that different than what you're doing now. Sure a few folks work in C on the bare metal, and a few people do some really high level stuff for companies like Google or Microsoft, but the vast majority of people working as programmers are making LoB apps used by maybe a few hundred people accessing a dozen or so tables from either an existing LoB system or a custom database. For the most part these apps are accessing human readable numbers of result sets so unless you're doing something really silly you won't actually lock the tables and you won't actually give a rats about getting your performance down an extra couple of milliseconds because it'll all just be noise lost in the http latency, and you will spend the vast majority of your time dicking around with making the front end the right colour mauve for marketing and you'll be doing that in, guess what, html. You'll also in a lot of cases be handing second tier support(if you're lucky) for your own apps. In then end your understanding of business processes will be more useful than your programming knowledge, which if you have the knack will come and if you don't won't. Don't be scared by all the crap Slashdotters like to post about their jobs where they spend 8 hours thinking and 10 minutes doing or where they need to understand sql incredibly well to avoid problems(in most languages these days you won't actually touch raw sql anyway)
Fundamentally though, your plan will fail, you can't learn programming an hour at a time because you can only learn programming by doing it and an hour will just about get your IDE booted up and allow you to work out where you left off the day before.
I'm not suggesting the government stops them saying it, just stops them saying it where they're saying it. You shouldn't have the right to disrupt a funeral for any circumstances, no matter who the person is, and the patriot guard for all that I respect what they're doing isn't the solution. More noise and more disruption isn't the solution. Protecting peoples right to say good bye to their loved ones in piece is something the government ought to do. If WBC wants to hurl horrendous insults in the town square, that's fine by me, but if any venue exists where free speech does not, it's a funeral.
I don't agree with using the government to muzzle them, but I sure as hell agree with using the government to get them and everyone else the hell away from funerals in this context. I don't care if that's the funerals of kids, soldiers, or even scum like the members of the WBC.
People are against crowdsourcing(at least the model espoused by kickstarter) because it's essentially a charity for people who want to be rich. There's nothing wrong with putting your money there if you have the cash and want to feel good about bringing a product to market, but in the end the ROI is pretty much nil, your legal recourse for anything but blatant fraud is non existent. It works, and will continue to work, but it's about people who have money to burn making themselves feel good which isn't necessarily the best long term strategy.
Note the dashed lines are not what is patented, just the solid rounded rectangle.
The problem with Apple is that they are probably the largest abuser of the patent system going at the moment. They're not a young upstart, they're not "fighting the cartels", they're using patent law to form a monopoly cartel of one because they are even more greedy and evil than their competition. I hope people make an example out of Apple because they are working very hard on breaking the entire patent system and not in a "we're going to free this up for innovation" way, in a "no one will ever do anything at all in the mobile market if they're not us" way.
Cheaper isn't really all that important in the long run a positive output of course is, but while nearly free energy would be excellent a clean relatively limitless supply of expensive energy is a lot better than a cheap supply of incredibly dirty or limited energy, as the other two options get a lot more expensive over time.
Fusion is off the table because it doesn't work yet. If you're asking why nuclear is off the table it's because a large part of the left is off in a 1960's flower power fantasy land and wouldn't consider nuclear power under any circumstances and a large part of the right is off in a 1950's fantasy land and doesn't see anything wrong with burning fossil fuels as fast as we can forever. This essentially is why nothing gets done on climate change period, the left won't accept any of the viable solutions and the right doesn't think there's a problem.
Fusion is fundamentally possible. We know this because solar, wind, wave, and for that matter pretty damned near every other energy source we have was originally generated by the gigantic fusion reactor we call the Sun. There's still some question as to whether we can manage sustainable fusion, and some even bigger questions about this particular methodology, but the payoff if we succeed is pretty damned massive.
That's a great plan if you want to kill just about as many people as global warming will(possibly more).
Fundamentally the survival of modern humanity is dependent on our access to energy. With access to sufficient energy we an survive most anything(including a 5 degree temperature rise, heck we even know how to destroy nuclear waste if we have enough energy to do it), without it, we're pretty well boned. Now I'd love to see coal phased out as soon as is humanly possible, but in a world where nuclear is off the table in most places and base load renewable energy is still unproven as far as I'm aware, we don't have that luxury. What we need is something which can replace coal without forcing us to drastically reduce either the reliability or supply of electricity. All indications are that fusion might be the energy holy grail, and we're going to need one.
The man in TFA is 30, he's not a kid and he knows or at least should have known what he was doing. In addition to his acts of protest he appears to have engaged in acts which are purely criminal. I'm as sick as anyone of this attitude that no one is willing to pay for doing the right thing and cries afterwards, but this isn't that case. These idiots(and seemingly this idiot in particular) stole peoples credit cards and identities and then shared them with the world, they didn't do this because it was a strike for freedom, because it isn't, it's just a bunch of really dumb as smart people who think that because other people aren't as smart as they are that they deserve what they get.
The problem with Anonymous (and many of the ones you mentioned) is that they aren't freedom fighters so much as criminals. Taking down Mastercard and Visa when they refused payments to Wikileaks, freedom fighters, nicking innocent peoples credit cards and using them without consent, criminals. They have the usual attitude that anyone who isn't a member of their little group must be some form of sheeple and it's ok to damage or steal from the sheeple for any reason whatsoever. Problem is, the thing that keeps you from getting destroyed by the powers that be, that would be the support of the sheeple. Anonymous are a bunch of dickheads who incidentally do the right thing sometimes, just like lulzsec and a dozen other similar groups. Just because they occasionally aim their sights at "the bad guys" doesn't make them "the good guys". Tracking down identity thieves and credit card thieves is what the FBI is for, and this guy can rot for all I care.
Maybe I didn't make that clear enough.
Gold is a deflationary currency, it's one of the many reasons it makes a crappy primary currency. To give my example better clarity. Let's say I bought my house 10 years ago for 100,000 worth of gold, by that I mean that the unit I paid in and the unit I borrowed in were troy ounces not dollars. My loan today would be, by your own reasoning, the equivalent of about 400,000 without even taking into account the compound interest on the loan(which as a note is also in troy ounces and so has increased 400% over the same period of time.
It's called an affirmative defense. It works the same way that self defense does in a murder trial. They prove you committed the act, you have to prove you had a right to.
That's not entirely true. Truth is a defense in England it's just not a complete defense. If you say something that is false you're screwed, but something true also has to be the intended audience's business, at least as far as I understand it(the law here in Oz is similar). So if you were to post on the internet that you're next door neighbor is a transvestite, you could be sued for libel, even if it's true because it's no one's business that he's a transvestite. Essentially just because something is true doesn't mean you should say it. Libertarians like the creators of South Park tend to see this as a travesty of freedom, and it certainly can be if the court takes it that way, but it does provide some protection for privacy which US law simply does not provide. There are the usual exceptions for public figures and politicians (if your member of parliament cheats on his wife it's considered in the public interest where the same information about Joe Blogs from down the street isn't). It's actually quite a reasonable approach to the law IMHO.
That said of course in this particular case, while IANAL, I would guess that this woman's situation would be the same in the US and the UK as in this context she'd most likely have a right to share this particular information(the performance of a service provider is the business of people interested in hiring said service provider). She'd simply need to prove that her statements were true(most of them anyway, property damage and an incomplete job would probably cover her even if she obviously can't prove the jewelry loss).
They might be proof against inflation, but I'd hate to have borrowed the value of my house in troy ounces a decade ago. I'd be bankrupt.
Except of course for the fact that most precious metals have very limited inherent value beyond the psychological "ooooh shiny" which essentially makes gold not a whole lot different than a fiat currency. In the event of the total breakdown of civilization you could at least burn the money for warmth.
Innovation doesn't mean "doing something no one has ever thought of before" it means "doing something no one has done before". If Microsoft's technique works where Carnegie-Mellon's didn't then it's innovative, if it doesn't, it probably isn't. There could still be something innovative in the way they tried which could help someone else later, but mostly what we'd be looking for from an innovation point of view is "actually does what it says in the tin".
It's newsworthy because slashdot groupthink paranoia means that if anyone even remotely related to technology is charged with any crime they must be innocent and part of some vast conspiracy(see any of the slashdot articles about Hans Reiser). This feeds into a combination of the libertarian paranoia that government is only doing evil things and the "bullied in high school" persecution complex of nerds.
In addition to that we have the fact that he's been commercially successful selling a questionable product so we can all feel superior to him now that he's being chased down. Those two options will pretty much cover most of slashdot.
It's also largely unenforceable if you can afford a lawyer, but sure, it's non negotiable.
Welcome the world of unenforceable contract terms.
IANAL, but like non compete terms, most "all your base are belong to us" terms are overly broad and non enforceable. You of course have to actually go to court, be able to afford a lawyer who can find his or her own body parts in a darkened room and once again most importantly be able to afford a lawyer who can find his or her own body parts in a darkened room, but generally speaking as I understand it, if you create in your own time on your own equipment and can prove it the invention is yours, even if you've done it on work equipment they'll generally only end up with a free perpetual license as opposed to actual ownership of the idea. I'm fairly certain this applies to copyright which does have work for hire so I don't see why it wouldn't apply for patents as well.
It's the magic of the legal system though, your employer gets you to sign an idiotic contract clause because you're afraid you won't get the job knowing that you are incredibly unlikely to actually challenge said term, even if the legal team know full well it'd get tossed out if you did.
When was the last CEO jailed for anything whatsoever related to the performance of their jobs. I mean sure sometimes they get jailed if they decide to murder people in their spare time or the like, sometimes anyway, but for anything related to poor performance of their jobs? Never. The Enron guys committed fraud, walked away with millions. Arthur Anderson, who helped them, still in business under another name. CEO's don't go to jail for poor management. They don't even have their assets seized. You have to have committed outright and deliberate fraud to even go before a court.
It's a fair enough thing to have an issue with passing debt onto our children, but you've got to be careful to properly define debt.
If you don't pay for road maintenance for 50 years so the whole road network has to be redone at a significantly higher cost than the maintenance would have cost, that different as well as the productivity lost is a debt passed on to future generations. If you scrimp on education so that the nation doesn't have the workforce necessary to keep the economy going, that cost of fixing that problem is a debt passed on to future generations. The same goes for a lot of things that government does, even under some circumstances things like wars. Putting off any sort of problem nearly always creates a debt whether that's financial or otherwise and the financial ones are actually usually the easiest to get out of.
I'm not disagreeing with you that debt is being passed on that does not need to be. The Bush tax cuts should never have gone into place in the first instance for anyone, if there was excess money being gathered by those taxes it should have been spent paying down the debt. Given how hard getting tax increases passed tends to be tax cuts of any sort shouldn't even be contemplated unless the government is debt free and able to pay for everything it's trying to do. I would personally also argue that the Iraq and Afghan wars, Department of Homeland Security and a whole bunch of other things Bush did were also foolish expenditures, though I don't have the evidence to confirm that. None of us really know how effective Homeland Security is or isn't and it could actually be a very good investment.
Obama's not innocent either. The bailouts should have come with pink slips for everyone in the executive team at those companies or at least with some sort of strings attached to stop them doing it again. The Affordable Health Care Act is likely substantially more expensive than a single payer system(though of course a single payer system probably wouldn't have passed). That said though, if you want to tap two people on the head for causing most of the deficit it'd be Reagan and Dubya.
Nope. The Civics lesson is that when the government enters into a contract with an individual that it cannot then decide later on that it doesn't liked the contract and legislate to undo it. No matter how silly the pension agreed by some chicken shit politician who thought they could kick the can down the road to someone else.
There's a wonderful irony that republicans want to fight government tyranny by getting the government to unilaterally change the terms of binding legal contracts entered into by itself. I can buy the right of the government to invalidate portions of contract law, but to invalidate contracts it is a party to, that's fairly dodgy.