If I may say so, I truly wonder what Tolkien himself would think of all this pathetic bickering and bitter lawsuits.
I think he would recommend rising an army of Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits and horsemen to besiege the Two Towers of New Line Cinema, and shoot their Nazgul lawyers whenever you get a chance.
Yeah I know, formatting is for wussies! There I go again:
Sign a contract promising a percentage of the gross
Pay a small advance to get the job done
Once the job is done, don't pay one more cent, and laugh all the way to the bank.
Most contractants don't know a decent lawyer or can't afford them, or won't bother to sue -- too much worry.
Profit.
What's depressing is that this is becoming more and more a standard practice, as the courts do not demand enough punitive damage to seriously discourage such bullying... and New Line Cinema seems to have a long record at that.
1- Sign a contract promising a percentage of the gross
2- Pay a small advance to get the job done
3- Once the job is done, don't pay one more cent, and laugh all the way to the bank.
4- Most contractants don't know a decent lawyer or can't afford them, or won't bother to sue -- too much worry.
5- Profit.
The real problem here IMHO is the protection of domestic farming, particularly using trade barriers and protectionism. See that article (and the book it describes) and judge by yourself : asymmetric trade barriers helped Great Britain, the US and Japan achieve economic domination in their own times.
Actually, if we really wanted to help those countries, we'd help them get rid of the strangleholds of the World Bank, the WTO and the IMF, three organizations that accept to lend money under conditions of massive deregulation. This is tantamount to destroying their developing industries by letting international corporations take away the markets and profits.
Thanks for that insightful comment. If all free-market capitalists shared your views on the conditions for markets to work well, the world wouldn't be such a fucked-up place. And I might consider free-market capitalism more favorably...
...and for non-believers who deny the existence of a Force that attracts the buttered side of the toast to the ground, well... what about taping two cats together, back to back ?
Just put on your leather jacket and gloves before attempting to do so... (shhhhhh ! DO NOT WANTZ !)
The banking industry preserves the economy, and by the transitive property the Fed preserves the economy.
"The banking industry preserves the economy" ? Are you kidding? Ever heard of subprime mortgage? Ever heard of Société Générale?
Those guys will favour speculation over lending anytime. They will take as little risk as they can afford to make their profit -- and speculating over AAA-rated titles is less risky (in theory) than lending money to a start-up which would actually -- gasp -- benefit the economy !
And when their profits are slightly below expectations because some young wanker tried to make a killing on subprime mortgage titles, guess what ? Your banking fees go through the roof, to fill the gap in the bottom line.
Your stance on "banking industry preserving the economy" may have been true 30 or 40 years ago. Not now. The banking industry no longer acts responsibly in the global economy. In the subprime mortgage crisis, if it hadn't been for the Fed pumping money into the circuit, a number of banks would have gone belly up, and their clients would be out in the streets. Just like Argentina in 1997.
You forgot "e) funny people". Don't know about America (although Stephen Colbert didn't get very far with his campaign) but the Slashdot crowd moderated you 'Insightful' instead of 'funny'. Once more.
Hey, look at what France picked as a leader. I'd be more worried about that than what US choses.
As a French citizen, I'll grant you that. Can't say I voted him in, either. But you have to admit that he has considerably less power of nuisance than the President of the US.
On the flip side, I have to say that this guy is the first French president whose behaviour really reminds me of the French Taunter in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
It reminds me of this novel, "Eye in the Sky" by Philip K. Dick where the 8 protagonists get caught in several imaginary worlds reflecting the views and beliefs of each of them...
in one of these worlds, a prayer to God is the most efficient way to manage a parallel-parking. When I hear about creationists and "think of the children!" mums, I think about that book.
There are a few principles that should be kept in order to keep ballots as simple as possible:
one ballot per question. If you have more than one question to answer in a single ballot, confusion begins, and voting machines will be pushed forward as a possible solution. Instead, organize as many ballots as necessary, with (for instance) differently coloured envelopes for each issue.
paper voting, with transparent ballot boxes. A multipartisan committee (open to any voter) is there all along to check that nobody has tried to stuff the ballot box with fake votes.
any citizen should have the right to attend the whole process, from the opening of the booth up to the counting and recount by hand, and the results should be diplayed publicly at the entrance of the booth when the vote is over.
in order to have more volunteers available for vote counts and supervision, organize the vote on sundays and holidays.
never allow so-called "professionals" to meddle with the vote or the ballot boxes out of sight of every citizen. Abuse starts there. And such abuse has peen reported more than once in the last two presidential elections in the US.
That's my 2 euro cents from this side of the pond.
Amazon is basically right. The only unfair competition that I see here is coming from a heavily distorted shipping market. Which makes it very hard for small businesses to compete with Amazon, since they can't get access to the same bulk shipping prices as Amazon.
Because of Bulk Shipping I bet Amazon Get good rates for shipping. So where it would cost $2 to ship a book it will only cost Amazon $0.50. Thus making this law even more flawed.
Precisely, that's the point I developed here : the market of postal shipping is totally distorted in France. Very competitive when you're a big business with lots of goods to ship through bulk shipping, but nearly monopolistic and completely uncompetitive when you're just an individual or a mom & pop store selling (and shipping) less than 50 items a day.
That's why the lawsuit is pointless IMHO: it is not targetting the real culprit in the first place.
Even better : as I mentioned here, the distorted market of postal shipping actually favours Amazon over any brick & mortar store that would like to enter the competition: the more items you ship, the less you pay.
So maybe the complaints of unfair competition are valid after all -- it's just not Amazon that should be charged with that.
Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention: sending the slightest parcel with a commercial value (books, in this case) will cost you a minimum 5.10 euros, if you're an individual or a mom-and-pop business. Of course, you may want to take several books and gather them in a single parcel. But how can you compete with Amazon at that price ?
Agreed, that would be the easiest way for them to make the complaints go away.
But I think the french judges are barking up the wrong tree: the real culprit here in France is the french "public" postal system. It used to be a public monopoly ("La Poste"), aimed at making the service affordable at an equal price whoever you are, wherever you are in the country. I.e. if you were a marketing company with 20000 letters to send a day, you had to pay roughly the same (per item) as an individual who occasionnally posts one letter. So far, so good.
Then the UE commission pops in and says : "hey, you have to deregulate your market : postal service can no longer be a monopoly, you will have competitors from now on (DHL, UPS, FedEx, and so on)".
La Poste says "OK, so we have to adapt to that new competition. But most of our traffic comes from big businesses, which we charge the same price per letter or parcel as we do for everybody. DHL and FedEx are new on that market and they will target the same public: big businesses, corporate mail. Few clients, big opportunities, lots of mail."
"So, says La Poste, we're going to make special offers at very low prices per item for those big businesses with lots of parcels to send everyday. Let's make an initial threshold at, say, 10000 items per month to obtain those bargain prices. In order to compensate for the loss, individuals and smaller businesses will pay a higher fare."
In a really open market with lots of competitors on every segment of the market, this should all be fine and dandy: if the smaller businesses and the individuals don't want to see their fares go through the roof, they can always go and see another provider. Unfortunately, this is not the case: due to its former monopoly and public service requirements, La Poste is the only provider that has offices everywhere in the country, delivers goods everywhere (not only big cities), and therefore maintains a de facto monopoly on that market.
Now, this is why Amazon has an unfair advantage over its competitors: it is big enough and sells enough items per day to access the special fares provided by La Poste, something smaller businesses don't have, and therefore they can afford to ship for free. But should Amazon be held responsible for the unfair pricing of a monopolistic postal system ?
Microwave-boiled brains taste ugly, every brain connoisseur will tell you that. "à la coque" or deep-fried brains taste much better. This is from John Romero's "The Joy of cooking".
That being said, I wonder what kind of effect a catscan would have on those devices.
That's not what I understood. The sentence before that one mentions the damage to the eye that can occur with glass fiber optics and the associate infrared light signal. I work in a fiber optics company, and our hardware engineers are required to have their retinas examined every year. That would be the main concern to me if I had a 2-year-old running around in a room with fiber optics hardware...
It doesn't help any that NT's father, 95, produced NT via a union with his daughter, 98.
Gross. Well actually, NT (going back to 3.xx) was not the daughter of W95xW98, but rather the (already) bastard child of Win3.11 who raped his mother VMS during the First War of the OS (ugly, ugly -- you don't really want to know).
Therefore NT3.5 is W95's stepsister -- given that W95 is the legitimate heir of Win3.11. It turned out then that W95, who was a real pervert due to its dominant 16-bit gene, chkdsked his stepsister NT3.51 (they don't used words like "fscked" in that family, they have their own lingo), who begat NT4.0. Then NT4.0 and his aunt W98 both got drunk one night, and soon they gave birth to Win2K. Somehow at that point in the family tree, the 16-bit gene got culled out. But the inbreeding continues...
The paper about France indicates a higher occurence of leukemia around the La Hague nuclear waste reprocessing plant. It does not spread the same isotopes around as the nuclear fallout of Chernobyl did. But it does leak radioactive sewage waters directly into the Channel, just like the Sellafield plant in the UK. Kids that go swimming in the area will likely be in contact with radioactive isotopes of Cesium, Carbon, Iode and Krypton. Check out this page.
Slashdot Mirror
I smell a rodent.With big round ears.
I think he would recommend rising an army of Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits and horsemen to besiege the Two Towers of New Line Cinema, and shoot their Nazgul lawyers whenever you get a chance.
Wouldn't he?
Yeah I know, formatting is for wussies! There I go again:
What's depressing is that this is becoming more and more a standard practice, as the courts do not demand enough punitive damage to seriously discourage such bullying... and New Line Cinema seems to have a long record at that.
1- Sign a contract promising a percentage of the gross 2- Pay a small advance to get the job done 3- Once the job is done, don't pay one more cent, and laugh all the way to the bank. 4- Most contractants don't know a decent lawyer or can't afford them, or won't bother to sue -- too much worry. 5- Profit.
The real problem here IMHO is the protection of domestic farming, particularly using trade barriers and protectionism. See that article (and the book it describes) and judge by yourself : asymmetric trade barriers helped Great Britain, the US and Japan achieve economic domination in their own times.
Actually, if we really wanted to help those countries, we'd help them get rid of the strangleholds of the World Bank, the WTO and the IMF, three organizations that accept to lend money under conditions of massive deregulation. This is tantamount to destroying their developing industries by letting international corporations take away the markets and profits.
Thanks for that insightful comment. If all free-market capitalists shared your views on the conditions for markets to work well, the world wouldn't be such a fucked-up place. And I might consider free-market capitalism more favorably...
...and for non-believers who deny the existence of a Force that attracts the buttered side of the toast to the ground, well... what about taping two cats together, back to back ?
Just put on your leather jacket and gloves before attempting to do so... (shhhhhh ! DO NOT WANTZ !)
"The banking industry preserves the economy" ? Are you kidding? Ever heard of subprime mortgage? Ever heard of Société Générale?
Those guys will favour speculation over lending anytime. They will take as little risk as they can afford to make their profit -- and speculating over AAA-rated titles is less risky (in theory) than lending money to a start-up which would actually -- gasp -- benefit the economy !
And when their profits are slightly below expectations because some young wanker tried to make a killing on subprime mortgage titles, guess what ? Your banking fees go through the roof, to fill the gap in the bottom line.
Your stance on "banking industry preserving the economy" may have been true 30 or 40 years ago. Not now. The banking industry no longer acts responsibly in the global economy. In the subprime mortgage crisis, if it hadn't been for the Fed pumping money into the circuit, a number of banks would have gone belly up, and their clients would be out in the streets. Just like Argentina in 1997.
You forgot "e) funny people". Don't know about America (although Stephen Colbert didn't get very far with his campaign) but the Slashdot crowd moderated you 'Insightful' instead of 'funny'. Once more.
Yours sincerely,
Rincewind the Wizzard.
On the flip side, I have to say that this guy is the first French president whose behaviour really reminds me of the French Taunter in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
in one of these worlds, a prayer to God is the most efficient way to manage a parallel-parking. When I hear about creationists and "think of the children!" mums, I think about that book.
- one ballot per question. If you have more than one question to answer in a single ballot, confusion begins, and voting machines will be pushed forward as a possible solution. Instead, organize as many ballots as necessary, with (for instance) differently coloured envelopes for each issue.
- paper voting, with transparent ballot boxes. A multipartisan committee (open to any voter) is there all along to check that nobody has tried to stuff the ballot box with fake votes.
- any citizen should have the right to attend the whole process, from the opening of the booth up to the counting and recount by hand, and the results should be diplayed publicly at the entrance of the booth when the vote is over.
- in order to have more volunteers available for vote counts and supervision, organize the vote on sundays and holidays.
- never allow so-called "professionals" to meddle with the vote or the ballot boxes out of sight of every citizen. Abuse starts there. And such abuse has peen reported more than once in the last two presidential elections in the US.
That's my 2 euro cents from this side of the pond.Amazon is basically right. The only unfair competition that I see here is coming from a heavily distorted shipping market. Which makes it very hard for small businesses to compete with Amazon, since they can't get access to the same bulk shipping prices as Amazon.
That's why the lawsuit is pointless IMHO: it is not targetting the real culprit in the first place.
So maybe the complaints of unfair competition are valid after all -- it's just not Amazon that should be charged with that.
Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention: sending the slightest parcel with a commercial value (books, in this case) will cost you a minimum 5.10 euros, if you're an individual or a mom-and-pop business. Of course, you may want to take several books and gather them in a single parcel. But how can you compete with Amazon at that price ?
But I think the french judges are barking up the wrong tree: the real culprit here in France is the french "public" postal system. It used to be a public monopoly ("La Poste"), aimed at making the service affordable at an equal price whoever you are, wherever you are in the country. I.e. if you were a marketing company with 20000 letters to send a day, you had to pay roughly the same (per item) as an individual who occasionnally posts one letter. So far, so good.
Then the UE commission pops in and says : "hey, you have to deregulate your market : postal service can no longer be a monopoly, you will have competitors from now on (DHL, UPS, FedEx, and so on)".
La Poste says "OK, so we have to adapt to that new competition. But most of our traffic comes from big businesses, which we charge the same price per letter or parcel as we do for everybody. DHL and FedEx are new on that market and they will target the same public: big businesses, corporate mail. Few clients, big opportunities, lots of mail."
"So, says La Poste, we're going to make special offers at very low prices per item for those big businesses with lots of parcels to send everyday. Let's make an initial threshold at, say, 10000 items per month to obtain those bargain prices. In order to compensate for the loss, individuals and smaller businesses will pay a higher fare."
In a really open market with lots of competitors on every segment of the market, this should all be fine and dandy: if the smaller businesses and the individuals don't want to see their fares go through the roof, they can always go and see another provider. Unfortunately, this is not the case: due to its former monopoly and public service requirements, La Poste is the only provider that has offices everywhere in the country, delivers goods everywhere (not only big cities), and therefore maintains a de facto monopoly on that market.
Now, this is why Amazon has an unfair advantage over its competitors: it is big enough and sells enough items per day to access the special fares provided by La Poste, something smaller businesses don't have, and therefore they can afford to ship for free. But should Amazon be held responsible for the unfair pricing of a monopolistic postal system ?
That being said, I wonder what kind of effect a catscan would have on those devices.
There are probably a few developers who might find it useful if the site stays up !
That's not what I understood. The sentence before that one mentions the damage to the eye that can occur with glass fiber optics and the associate infrared light signal. I work in a fiber optics company, and our hardware engineers are required to have their retinas examined every year. That would be the main concern to me if I had a 2-year-old running around in a room with fiber optics hardware...
Indeed. And OS2's HPFS and NT's NTFS native file systems share more than a few similarities.
Therefore NT3.5 is W95's stepsister -- given that W95 is the legitimate heir of Win3.11. It turned out then that W95, who was a real pervert due to its dominant 16-bit gene, chkdsked his stepsister NT3.51 (they don't used words like "fscked" in that family, they have their own lingo), who begat NT4.0. Then NT4.0 and his aunt W98 both got drunk one night, and soon they gave birth to Win2K. Somehow at that point in the family tree, the 16-bit gene got culled out. But the inbreeding continues...
The paper about France indicates a higher occurence of leukemia around the La Hague nuclear waste reprocessing plant. It does not spread the same isotopes around as the nuclear fallout of Chernobyl did. But it does leak radioactive sewage waters directly into the Channel, just like the Sellafield plant in the UK. Kids that go swimming in the area will likely be in contact with radioactive isotopes of Cesium, Carbon, Iode and Krypton. Check out this page.