The same reason you're not allowed to use CD players, ipods, laptops or any electronic device during liftoff/landing: they erroneously believe those devices may by chance emit some small amount of radiation that - coupled with others near you on the plane - could disrupt pilot control/communication. There are no studies that confirm this (I'm not talking about cellphones/wifi/etc here, but only non-emissive devices) but they stand by it...
Re:The battles would have been a lot better
on
Message in a Battle
·
· Score: 1
Notice that in the movie for FotR, Legolas is walking atop the snow as they make the mountain pass, even while his compatriots are knee deep.
Frankly, you people are forgetting that Legolas is, indeed, an elf. They are preternaturally strong, fast and agile, not to mention that he's had centuries to practice his warfare techniques.
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me.
on
Message in a Battle
·
· Score: 1
Of course, the reason it didn't match your expectations is that your expectations have been shaped by the utterly unrealistic explosions of various things in movies/TV.
Well, there are plenty of trolls in the movies: in the third, you notice not only several trolls pushing their seige towers, but armored trolls employed in the seige of Minas Tirinth.
I feel I should respond to one film in particular: Gummo. I watched this while I was in Oz last fall, and frankly was certainly interested but unimpressed. I felt I was just watching an ethnography of a bunch of Southerners, more than watching a 'movie'. Thats not a direct insult: its still good, but its not a film.
Actually, I think the value of 28 Days Later lies not in the fact that it somehow managed to reinvent zombies: I cant think of a single movie/video game in the past few decades that had a zombie move quickly. Any movie that takes what would reasonably be called a standard like "zombies", and reinvents it, deserves a hell of a lot of credit.
It had scientific flaws - such as the speed of the viral infection, or the fact that the rageaholics dont attack each other - but what story isn't a little fantastical?
Frankly, American Splendor was utterly uniteresting to me. Lost in Translation, however, was brilliant. I dont think I ever respected Murray as an actor before - though I've thought him to be a fantastic comedian - but this movie showed that he actually had the ability to evoke complex emotion. Scarlett similarly was impressive. The two of them are the movie, and I'd be shocked if they're utterly excluded from the Oscars.
The Washington Sniper (are you referring to Muhammed, or Malvo? Its true of both, regardless) are being tried in MD, DC and VA for seperate murders! Note in particular that the first set of convictions and sentencing was also tied into the new terrorist laws (i.e. it is a seperate crime to murder someone, than to try and terrorize the populace with that murder).
See, again, this is because those are seperate crimes. The murder of a federal agent is, by definition, a federal crime. If in a single act you murder a federal agent and a non-agent citizen, you have committed two crimes (in the same way as if you had simply murdered to non-agent citizens). However, in this case the federal jurisdiction is seperate from the state jurisdiction over normal murder.
Now, your silly example of charging a spammer in Virginia for that crime then charging him for B&E in another state, is a joke. This law isn't going to allow you to inexplicably add crimes (like B&E) to a perpetrator simply because they spam. If a criminal spams, they'll be charged with spam: thats it.
Yes, each spam can be tried as a seperate crime, because each [instance of] spam is a seperate crime. However, the grandparent poster (i.e. the poster whom I was replying to originally) was saying that a single instance would expose you to a "minimum" of 50 prosecutions, which is absurd.
The point of this type of law - similar to the law arround which the No-Call-List is based - is that you make each individual offense a crime/fine of a certain value, relying on the fact that such spammers [of both email and phone calls] rarely call only a single person. In other words, when they're caught, they're caught with dozens, hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of offenses. Ideally, a single 'arrest' would permanently remove a spammer from the market.
You cannot be prosecuted more than once in the United states for a single crime, period, no matter how many jurisdictions you entered/exited in doing that crime. When a crime crosses state lines, one of two things can happen: the states' prosecutors can agree which state will prosecute the crime (or alternately, the judge in a given state may demand that the crime not be tried there, because of bias or some such reason), or it can become a Federal case.
Besides the fact that I've never experienced any "run around" when trying to return defective merchandise, and never been stupid enough to purchase anything without having used it or read reviews of it, I have no validation that what you're talking about even happens. Frankly, I'd attribute it - if it occurs - to poorly trained employees.
Man, I was really optimistic that there'd be some sort of inner-earth, i.e. a civilization living on the inside of the earth's crust, looking inward toward the core...
Ah well, I guess when its been decades since your theory has been debunked, sometimes you've just got to give it up.
You dont have any such right to be an informed consumer, any more than its illegal for stores to refuse opened merchandise. First of all, your consumer rights (which are carefuly listed in law, at least here in America) are simply to not be deceived, i.e. you're protected from intentional deceit. However, you have no right to demand information (except for safety issues) from the companies that make these products.
As for return policies, there isn't a single law or court case that I've ever heard of that indicates that you have any "right" right return merchandise that isn't faulty. If you buy a book, they dont have to let you return it after you read the whole thing because you didn't like the story. Its the same thing with CDs, especially since you can browse music in the store these days.
You misunderstood me slightly: I wasn't suggesting that gnosticism originated in the 15th century. In fact, I was comparing the form of gnosticism that was popular in the 15th century to Tolkien's text.
Its worth mentioning that content wise, there is almost no parallel between the Silmarillion and the Bible. Combined with Tolkien's stated desire to create a pagan mythological history for England, this makes it pretty clear that its not "Tolkien's rewrite of the Bible".
Moreover, the simple structure of his myths contain, if anything, a parallel to the Gnostic pseudo-christian myths of the 15th century with a creator-god with no direct intervention in the world, not to mention the lack of any Christ-figure, is quite contrary to normal Christian mythos.
No, you're missing the point. The argument [presented by the grandparent post] is that just because some true theories were initially scoffed at, not all theories which are scoffed at will eventually be proved as true.
This is a simple logical truth, if you dont realize it already: using the Lemmon notation, you can see it as the following-
(Ex)(Sx&Tx)->(x)(Sx>Tx)
This is clearly not true, and is thus unprovable. You can demonstrate this with truth tables if you need to, but thats rather hard with quantifiers. Just remember the basic rule: the existential quantifier will almost NEVER lead to a universal quantifier (except in the quantifier inversion principle, i.e. (Ex)(A)-(x)(-A) )
At least in America, where studies have repeatedly demonstrated that supposedly "subliminal" advertising has zero effect, its not at all illegal to try to do so. Its just stupid. All it means is that when you're found out, people will negatively react to that company.
Clearly, you dont understand how fair use works. There's a specific legal protection for your ability to make duplicates of your own purchased intellectual property, for your use. There's no problem whatsoever with this. The problem is when you distribute it to others. I'll agree with the people who claim that the DCMA is illegal, and frankly I'll agree that its a waste of resources for these companies to figure out ways to implement copyprotection (since they're inevitably broken), but thats not what we were talking about. We were talking about a man stealing a service. Stealing is a crime, period, always. Speeding is a crime, period, always (with the single exception granted by law being a life-threatening emergency).
See, here's the problem with your definition here (which is disturbingly similar to the standard rationale for freely spreading illegal copies of copyrighted material): you say that "using somebody else's...connection isn't depriving anybody of any property", but that shows a misunderstanding of what the nature of our economy is. You see, in our system you may purchase precisely two things: goods or services. Both are equally protected legally, in terms of your entitlement to them after your purchase.
The reasoning is this: when you steal physical property, you clearly deprive someone of the goods they legally are entiteled to. When you create illegal copies of copyrighted material you depreive someone [copyright owner] of the money they're entiteld to for each use of their good (which is, by nature a form of service/good hybrid). When you illegally degrade someone's service (in this case by stealing bandwidth, but the more typical analogue would be if you were to perhaps steal half the water out their housepipes) you clearly depreive them of the service to which they're legally entitled to.
This is why so many people in the legal community are disgusted with so many internet users: growing up in an online community that lets you steal without thinking about it, our generation has somehow forgotten that people paid for these things, and we're just taking it away.
Here's the difference between peeking into a window (which, incidentally, is only legal if you do it while walking by: as soon as you stand there and stare [in the USA] its illegal, since its being a peeping-tom) and stealing wifi service: when you use their access to the internet through their wifi network, you degrade the quality of their connection. By nature, you steal bandwidth, and deprive them of legally purchased service.
I find it comical, incidentally, that you say "stealing misrepresents the situation - it may be 'theft of service',,,". Now, how exactly do you define "theft" and "stealing", because they're pretty much interchangeable in my mind.
"Imagine a composer getting up in the middle of the night, going to his newfangled magical "keyboard" and whipping up an entire symphony without the need for a full orchestra..... ooooh... scary."
Thats not scary, thats dreamlike. I'm an artist by hobby (its a minor, not a full degree), and one of the largest frustrations is the variety of ways you need help for things - in my case, sculpture often requires assistance in casting objects, for example - and in music its only worse: if you're a composer, you need individual artists to play all those parts. If I were a composer, I'd be PRAYING for them to release such a toolset...
Actually, you're mistaken. The very act of Wardriving in certain countries (obviously including canada) and certain states in the US is illegal, for a variety of reasons.
The simple point is this: they [the homeowner] are paying for a service, whereas you [the wardriver] are accessing their service without permission, and in doing so stealing. Crime, period.
You're just being intentionally obstinate, by suggesting there aren't natural laws, such as those which dominate evolution [i.e. survival of fittest, etc.], which is precisely what's being discussed here. The suggestion is that prior to technology [i.e. with pre-intelligent animals], natural pressures prevented any behavior which was too self-destructive from existing for too long, since it would drive the animal extict. Technology, along with social 'altruism' has resulted in a situation where behavior which should result in its actor dying off and failing to reproduce [for example, morbid obesity due to being too dumb to stop eating] failing to do so, since we save them.
Okay, AGAIN, I'm being misread (man, maybe I need to edit my posts before posting) to suggest that Microsoft is correct. Far from it, I disagree with them outright. See other posts.
Slashdot Mirror
The same reason you're not allowed to use CD players, ipods, laptops or any electronic device during liftoff/landing: they erroneously believe those devices may by chance emit some small amount of radiation that - coupled with others near you on the plane - could disrupt pilot control/communication. There are no studies that confirm this (I'm not talking about cellphones/wifi/etc here, but only non-emissive devices) but they stand by it...
Notice that in the movie for FotR, Legolas is walking atop the snow as they make the mountain pass, even while his compatriots are knee deep.
Frankly, you people are forgetting that Legolas is, indeed, an elf. They are preternaturally strong, fast and agile, not to mention that he's had centuries to practice his warfare techniques.
Of course, the reason it didn't match your expectations is that your expectations have been shaped by the utterly unrealistic explosions of various things in movies/TV.
Well, there are plenty of trolls in the movies: in the third, you notice not only several trolls pushing their seige towers, but armored trolls employed in the seige of Minas Tirinth.
I feel I should respond to one film in particular: Gummo. I watched this while I was in Oz last fall, and frankly was certainly interested but unimpressed. I felt I was just watching an ethnography of a bunch of Southerners, more than watching a 'movie'. Thats not a direct insult: its still good, but its not a film.
Actually, I think the value of 28 Days Later lies not in the fact that it somehow managed to reinvent zombies: I cant think of a single movie/video game in the past few decades that had a zombie move quickly. Any movie that takes what would reasonably be called a standard like "zombies", and reinvents it, deserves a hell of a lot of credit.
It had scientific flaws - such as the speed of the viral infection, or the fact that the rageaholics dont attack each other - but what story isn't a little fantastical?
Frankly, American Splendor was utterly uniteresting to me. Lost in Translation, however, was brilliant. I dont think I ever respected Murray as an actor before - though I've thought him to be a fantastic comedian - but this movie showed that he actually had the ability to evoke complex emotion. Scarlett similarly was impressive. The two of them are the movie, and I'd be shocked if they're utterly excluded from the Oscars.
The Washington Sniper (are you referring to Muhammed, or Malvo? Its true of both, regardless) are being tried in MD, DC and VA for seperate murders! Note in particular that the first set of convictions and sentencing was also tied into the new terrorist laws (i.e. it is a seperate crime to murder someone, than to try and terrorize the populace with that murder).
See, again, this is because those are seperate crimes. The murder of a federal agent is, by definition, a federal crime. If in a single act you murder a federal agent and a non-agent citizen, you have committed two crimes (in the same way as if you had simply murdered to non-agent citizens). However, in this case the federal jurisdiction is seperate from the state jurisdiction over normal murder.
Now, your silly example of charging a spammer in Virginia for that crime then charging him for B&E in another state, is a joke. This law isn't going to allow you to inexplicably add crimes (like B&E) to a perpetrator simply because they spam. If a criminal spams, they'll be charged with spam: thats it.
Yes, each spam can be tried as a seperate crime, because each [instance of] spam is a seperate crime. However, the grandparent poster (i.e. the poster whom I was replying to originally) was saying that a single instance would expose you to a "minimum" of 50 prosecutions, which is absurd.
The point of this type of law - similar to the law arround which the No-Call-List is based - is that you make each individual offense a crime/fine of a certain value, relying on the fact that such spammers [of both email and phone calls] rarely call only a single person. In other words, when they're caught, they're caught with dozens, hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of offenses. Ideally, a single 'arrest' would permanently remove a spammer from the market.
You cannot be prosecuted more than once in the United states for a single crime, period, no matter how many jurisdictions you entered/exited in doing that crime. When a crime crosses state lines, one of two things can happen: the states' prosecutors can agree which state will prosecute the crime (or alternately, the judge in a given state may demand that the crime not be tried there, because of bias or some such reason), or it can become a Federal case.
This is a good thing.
Besides the fact that I've never experienced any "run around" when trying to return defective merchandise, and never been stupid enough to purchase anything without having used it or read reviews of it, I have no validation that what you're talking about even happens. Frankly, I'd attribute it - if it occurs - to poorly trained employees.
Man, I was really optimistic that there'd be some sort of inner-earth, i.e. a civilization living on the inside of the earth's crust, looking inward toward the core...
Ah well, I guess when its been decades since your theory has been debunked, sometimes you've just got to give it up.
You dont have any such right to be an informed consumer, any more than its illegal for stores to refuse opened merchandise. First of all, your consumer rights (which are carefuly listed in law, at least here in America) are simply to not be deceived, i.e. you're protected from intentional deceit. However, you have no right to demand information (except for safety issues) from the companies that make these products.
As for return policies, there isn't a single law or court case that I've ever heard of that indicates that you have any "right" right return merchandise that isn't faulty. If you buy a book, they dont have to let you return it after you read the whole thing because you didn't like the story. Its the same thing with CDs, especially since you can browse music in the store these days.
You misunderstood me slightly: I wasn't suggesting that gnosticism originated in the 15th century. In fact, I was comparing the form of gnosticism that was popular in the 15th century to Tolkien's text.
Its worth mentioning that content wise, there is almost no parallel between the Silmarillion and the Bible. Combined with Tolkien's stated desire to create a pagan mythological history for England, this makes it pretty clear that its not "Tolkien's rewrite of the Bible".
Moreover, the simple structure of his myths contain, if anything, a parallel to the Gnostic pseudo-christian myths of the 15th century with a creator-god with no direct intervention in the world, not to mention the lack of any Christ-figure, is quite contrary to normal Christian mythos.
No, you're missing the point. The argument [presented by the grandparent post] is that just because some true theories were initially scoffed at, not all theories which are scoffed at will eventually be proved as true.
This is a simple logical truth, if you dont realize it already: using the Lemmon notation, you can see it as the following-
(Ex)(Sx&Tx)->(x)(Sx>Tx)
This is clearly not true, and is thus unprovable. You can demonstrate this with truth tables if you need to, but thats rather hard with quantifiers. Just remember the basic rule: the existential quantifier will almost NEVER lead to a universal quantifier (except in the quantifier inversion principle, i.e. (Ex)(A)-(x)(-A) )
At least in America, where studies have repeatedly demonstrated that supposedly "subliminal" advertising has zero effect, its not at all illegal to try to do so. Its just stupid. All it means is that when you're found out, people will negatively react to that company.
Clearly, you dont understand how fair use works. There's a specific legal protection for your ability to make duplicates of your own purchased intellectual property, for your use. There's no problem whatsoever with this. The problem is when you distribute it to others. I'll agree with the people who claim that the DCMA is illegal, and frankly I'll agree that its a waste of resources for these companies to figure out ways to implement copyprotection (since they're inevitably broken), but thats not what we were talking about. We were talking about a man stealing a service. Stealing is a crime, period, always. Speeding is a crime, period, always (with the single exception granted by law being a life-threatening emergency).
See, here's the problem with your definition here (which is disturbingly similar to the standard rationale for freely spreading illegal copies of copyrighted material): you say that "using somebody else's...connection isn't depriving anybody of any property", but that shows a misunderstanding of what the nature of our economy is. You see, in our system you may purchase precisely two things: goods or services. Both are equally protected legally, in terms of your entitlement to them after your purchase.
The reasoning is this: when you steal physical property, you clearly deprive someone of the goods they legally are entiteled to. When you create illegal copies of copyrighted material you depreive someone [copyright owner] of the money they're entiteld to for each use of their good (which is, by nature a form of service/good hybrid). When you illegally degrade someone's service (in this case by stealing bandwidth, but the more typical analogue would be if you were to perhaps steal half the water out their housepipes) you clearly depreive them of the service to which they're legally entitled to.
This is why so many people in the legal community are disgusted with so many internet users: growing up in an online community that lets you steal without thinking about it, our generation has somehow forgotten that people paid for these things, and we're just taking it away.
Here's the difference between peeking into a window (which, incidentally, is only legal if you do it while walking by: as soon as you stand there and stare [in the USA] its illegal, since its being a peeping-tom) and stealing wifi service: when you use their access to the internet through their wifi network, you degrade the quality of their connection. By nature, you steal bandwidth, and deprive them of legally purchased service.
I find it comical, incidentally, that you say "stealing misrepresents the situation - it may be 'theft of service',,,". Now, how exactly do you define "theft" and "stealing", because they're pretty much interchangeable in my mind.
"Imagine a composer getting up in the middle of the night, going to his newfangled magical "keyboard" and whipping up an entire symphony without the need for a full orchestra..... ooooh... scary."
Thats not scary, thats dreamlike. I'm an artist by hobby (its a minor, not a full degree), and one of the largest frustrations is the variety of ways you need help for things - in my case, sculpture often requires assistance in casting objects, for example - and in music its only worse: if you're a composer, you need individual artists to play all those parts. If I were a composer, I'd be PRAYING for them to release such a toolset...
Actually, you're mistaken. The very act of Wardriving in certain countries (obviously including canada) and certain states in the US is illegal, for a variety of reasons.
The simple point is this: they [the homeowner] are paying for a service, whereas you [the wardriver] are accessing their service without permission, and in doing so stealing. Crime, period.
You're just being intentionally obstinate, by suggesting there aren't natural laws, such as those which dominate evolution [i.e. survival of fittest, etc.], which is precisely what's being discussed here. The suggestion is that prior to technology [i.e. with pre-intelligent animals], natural pressures prevented any behavior which was too self-destructive from existing for too long, since it would drive the animal extict. Technology, along with social 'altruism' has resulted in a situation where behavior which should result in its actor dying off and failing to reproduce [for example, morbid obesity due to being too dumb to stop eating] failing to do so, since we save them.
Okay, AGAIN, I'm being misread (man, maybe I need to edit my posts before posting) to suggest that Microsoft is correct. Far from it, I disagree with them outright. See other posts.