Frankly, you're being intentionally obstinate and daft. The OP makes an extremely important distinction: a criminal case carries possible penalties including imprisonment, fines and a permanent criminal record (and all that entails), while a civil case carries only the possibility of fines. In one case, you're a misanthrope, in the other case you're just someone who is a jerk and intentionally violated someone else's rights.
If you think it's so permissible for people to violate others' rights, please post your address, passwords and user names, etc. so all of us can interfere with your rights. That'd be fair, right?
However you feel about the RIAA (e.g. its crappy tactics, its awful music, etc.) they have legal rights. Just because you don't believe in those rights doesn't mean you can ignore them. If you don't think those rights are legitimate, you're welcome to participate in the same legislative process as the rest of us.
One thing it is perfect evidence of is the mens rea of the person sharing those files (if we assume the screenshot hasn't been altered). If the person had a file in their share-list, we know they intended to share that file. If that file is undeniably (big if) a file they had no legal right to share, then we've established that the person intended to violate the legal rights of the rightsholder.
Notice the limitations here: it means nothing if we don't know whether the file was, in fact, a copyrighted file; it means nothing if the trustworthiness is in question.
I don't think you know what blackmail is: there's nothing 'incriminating' that the backbone provider has on the ISP. The backbone provider and ISP negotiate in a simple market economy to find the most efficient price. ISPs that have more clients have more negotiating power (their business is more important to the backbone provider), but meanwhile the backbone has more power because it can threaten disconnection to the ISP. This paired set of negotiating power maintains a stable efficient price, without either side being able to extort the other.
Oh man, nerd time for me.
1) Kon-El, the latest Superboy is now dead. His powers were not based on Superman's, but rather designed (by Luthor) in imitation. Thus, while Kon-El had tactile telekinesis, Superman does not.
2) Kon-El is also dead, courtesy of Superboy Prime (who is imprisoned inside a red son, after having not only killed a ton of people, but acutally altered the reality of DC comics by punching the walls of heaven...seriously...).
There may be a general argument for this limitation I'm not aware of, but one cause would be the nature of the device.
The most plausible - in fact definite - means for time travel within General Relativity (not that this isn't necessarily valid for certain models of quantum gravity or string theory) is to create a wormhole, leave one 'mouth' on Earth (or nearby) and put the other mouth in a spaceship. The ship is sent off at relativistic speeds, and then brought back to earth. The mouth in the ship will have 'aged' less in the manner demanded by the Twin Paradox.
Conceptually, stepping into the mouth that remained on the earth would send you to the mouth in the ship, but in the past. It's disturbingly weird to think about this.
MiniDisc was a success on its own, but it failed to replace CDs like Sony wanted. I had a player/recorder for years and loved it. Only replaced it when I got my first iPod. Europe and Japan continue to have NetMD products.
1) The Wii will be less than $250 officially, possibly below $200.
2) Almost every game for the Wii looks fun. There are like...5-7 on the 360 I can say that about.
3) "Inferior" here only refers to the raw power; gameplay is primary, graphics are secondary.
So, just to clarify: you don't want your breakups made public, but you post information about those breakups on a website that's wide open to every person with an.edu email address? I bow before your brilliance in understanding the term "public".
It's worth noting that your suggestions about increased contempt and malpractice damages (against lawyers) are possible today, without any new legislation: you would probably be surprised how much existing leeway there is for judges to make such damages. For a variety of reasons, they rarely do so. I like the idea of random audits, but it'd require a very sophisticated system of deployment to prevent harassment (for example, how do you weight a lawyer's likelihood of being audited? Should a more prolific lawyer be more likely to be audited?).
The use of the phrase "you can't unring the bell" in the discussion of Free Speech is an old one, based on the concept that no matter what you do after someone rings a bell, you can't "unring" it. The use here as an analogy is appropriate, in that you cant "un-release" information from the internet.
Wow, worst formatting errors I've ever let through. Obviously, my text shouldn't be italic, and the paragraphs should be introduced as "first" and "second". Ugh.
I don't agree with any of the statements in your post.
"Unless lawyers are paid by the state, like doctors in Canada, they cannot be considered officers of the court who's job it is to represent your rights before said court. Once they accept payment from a client, either actual or pending, they become no more [than] hired sales consultants [peddling] their [clients'] version of the truth."
Second, there is no distinction between being an advocate for a client's version of the truth, and being an advocate for that same client's rights in court. Unless you presume that your client is intentionally lying or otherwise misrepresenting their case to deprive the other party/parties of rights, then these two concepts are identical. If you do, in fact, presume that the client is intentionally attempting to deprive the other party/parties of their rights, then no bar in the country believes it is ethical for that lawyer to proceed.
Third, there is no proper analogy between the hypothetical socializing of medicine and of law. Doctors attempting to heal a single patient are not competing with one another, while lawyers for adverse clients in a single case are by definition competing with one another. While I will not claim there are no possible benefits to socializing lawyers, those benefits are not based in some such analogy.
It's extremely expensive, and every time the safety-device fires (literally) it has to be replaced. The safety-device fuses together, shunting all that energy into the block as heat, which means it's a one-time-use. This cost issue, not surprisingly, is the primary obstacle.
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is that closed systems move towards greater states of entropy, i.e. disorder. The appearance of more order in an isolated area of a closed system (i.e. more information) is not problematic so long as the sum entropy of the whole system is not reduced.
The point is that the 2nd law is about information.
You seem to misunderstand how "error correction" benefits a creature. In order for evolution to work, you need natural selection, i.e. a pool of creatures (generation-n) who have slightly variable features due to mutation, which is then reduced by natural selection factors (e.g. predation, limited resources, etc.). The survivors then reproduce (generation n+1).
Now, each generation needs to have some variability. After all, if everyone is identical, then there will be no adaptability. But, they need to have a much more significant sameness, i.e. lack of variability. After all, they need to be able to breed (among other interrelationships). Moreover, like all course-corrections, it's always better to move in small steps instead of big leaps (at least, almost always).
Error correction in genetic material would help curtail big leaps, while making small steps more viable (by reducing the number of critical mutations that kill the individual).
Of course, every now and then, environmental pressures would mean that lower error correction might be beneficial - consider the near-extinction of the Cheetah's ancestor to apparently fewer than 50 individuals - because you need a larger population of genetic variation. Such situations would result in some species having more or less "correction" built in. Species that never had such a bottle-neck would be expected to have more error-correction, most likely.
"Redacted" is a legal term of art (i.e. it has a special meaning in the legal context).
For lawyers/courts/etc., redacted (Per Black's Legal Dictionary) means:
n), n. 1. The careful editing of a document, esp. to remove confidential references or offensive material. (Cases: Criminal Law 663; Federal Civil Procedure 2011; Trial 39. C.J.S. Criminal Law 1210-1211; Trial 148-153.) 2. A revised or edited document. -- redactional, adj. -- redact, vb.>
The lesson here is this: if you see a word used in a legal context (or any professional context) and it sounds entirely wrong...ask yourself first whether it might have a special meaning before complaining.
Oh it was apparent. When will the rest of the world learn to pay better attention for movie references like this?
/Seriously, I love that movie. //Great stuff.
Re:Grammar Police, Signing Off
on
Wii-mote In Action
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Actually, you can end a sentence with "off" and other prepositions. The idea of not ending English sentences with prepositions is a relatively new one, as opposed to being "classical" grammar. Moreover, it was simply imported from Latin into modern English without any reason other than the belief that Latin was more erudite somehow.
Of course, besides that, your sentence "...finally paying off." actually isn't ending on a preposition at all: it's ending on a verb-phrase. "Paying off" is a single unit, a verb-phrase that sits in a sentence as a normal verb. You can see this because you can seamlessly replace this verb-phrase with a synonymous single verb (e.g. "succeeding"), resulting in an equally clear and identical in meaning sentence ("...finally succeeding.").
No, you couldn't say the same thing about heroin, or alcohol. They have chemical addictive properties. You could, however, say the same thing about sex and marijuana which both lack actual chemical addictive properties.
I disavow the modern claim that you can be psychologically addicted to something - e.g. sex, marijuana or video games. While all three trigger pleasure centers, especially the seratonin cycle, none of them alter the body's ability to produce it's own natural happiness. Actual chemically addictive substances literally decrease or destroy the ability of the body to produce a natural happiness/pleasure response (by disabling seratonin production, decreasing sensitivity, etc.).
Things that are fun are fun, duh. That doesn't make them addictive. What makes something addictive is when your body comes to literally be physically dependent on that source of pleasure.
BR
I love playing video games, but I also like playing sports, having sex, partying with friends, reading books, sculpting, etc. None of these things are addictive, they're just fun. If you cant self-regulate activities that lack any chemical addictive properties, you're immature. Part of being an adult is self-control.
I'm sorry, you think the game somehow blinds players from making rational choice? That's ludicrous. It's just about being a mature person...don't spend too much time doing light entertainment over things that actually matter to you.
I didn't mean to imply private schools taught ID as a rule, but rather that I wasn't aware of how many did so. I was able to say there were no public schools that taught ID, because the policy has yet to ever be upheld as not violating the First Amendment. Because private schools needn't be concerned with conflating church and state, I couldn't make a blanket statement about whether any private schools taught ID.
On the one hand, you're right about the general expense of lawyers. That said, the ACLU would be ecstatic to help out such a teacher, provided they aren't lying about the cause of their termination. They would do so for free. In fact, (again assuming that the only reason for termination was the mentioning of evolution) many non-ACLU lawyers would represent your friend on contingency or on a pro bono basis simply for the prestige of the case.
Seperately, there are punitive damages to be sought.
As one caveat, if this was a private school it's all moot.
It's been over six years since I was in high school, but I find it implausible that there is a single AP physics course being taught where calculators aren't permitted in most if not all tests. The reason is simple: the AP test assumes you will be using a [graphing] calculator, which means you don't efficiently teach towards the AP test if you dont emphasize application (e.g. use of formulae, etc.) as opposed to pure calculation.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, you're being intentionally obstinate and daft. The OP makes an extremely important distinction: a criminal case carries possible penalties including imprisonment, fines and a permanent criminal record (and all that entails), while a civil case carries only the possibility of fines. In one case, you're a misanthrope, in the other case you're just someone who is a jerk and intentionally violated someone else's rights.
If you think it's so permissible for people to violate others' rights, please post your address, passwords and user names, etc. so all of us can interfere with your rights. That'd be fair, right?
However you feel about the RIAA (e.g. its crappy tactics, its awful music, etc.) they have legal rights. Just because you don't believe in those rights doesn't mean you can ignore them. If you don't think those rights are legitimate, you're welcome to participate in the same legislative process as the rest of us.
One thing it is perfect evidence of is the mens rea of the person sharing those files (if we assume the screenshot hasn't been altered). If the person had a file in their share-list, we know they intended to share that file. If that file is undeniably (big if) a file they had no legal right to share, then we've established that the person intended to violate the legal rights of the rightsholder.
Notice the limitations here: it means nothing if we don't know whether the file was, in fact, a copyrighted file; it means nothing if the trustworthiness is in question.
I don't think you know what blackmail is: there's nothing 'incriminating' that the backbone provider has on the ISP. The backbone provider and ISP negotiate in a simple market economy to find the most efficient price. ISPs that have more clients have more negotiating power (their business is more important to the backbone provider), but meanwhile the backbone has more power because it can threaten disconnection to the ISP. This paired set of negotiating power maintains a stable efficient price, without either side being able to extort the other.
Superman gets his power from all yellow sun radiation, not Earth's in particular. Most all of the suns seen n Star Wars are yellow.
Oh man, nerd time for me.
1) Kon-El, the latest Superboy is now dead. His powers were not based on Superman's, but rather designed (by Luthor) in imitation. Thus, while Kon-El had tactile telekinesis, Superman does not.
2) Kon-El is also dead, courtesy of Superboy Prime (who is imprisoned inside a red son, after having not only killed a ton of people, but acutally altered the reality of DC comics by punching the walls of heaven...seriously...).
Eesh.
There may be a general argument for this limitation I'm not aware of, but one cause would be the nature of the device.
The most plausible - in fact definite - means for time travel within General Relativity (not that this isn't necessarily valid for certain models of quantum gravity or string theory) is to create a wormhole, leave one 'mouth' on Earth (or nearby) and put the other mouth in a spaceship. The ship is sent off at relativistic speeds, and then brought back to earth. The mouth in the ship will have 'aged' less in the manner demanded by the Twin Paradox.
Conceptually, stepping into the mouth that remained on the earth would send you to the mouth in the ship, but in the past. It's disturbingly weird to think about this.
MiniDisc was a success on its own, but it failed to replace CDs like Sony wanted. I had a player/recorder for years and loved it. Only replaced it when I got my first iPod. Europe and Japan continue to have NetMD products.
Wow, there are so many things wrong there...
1) The Wii will be less than $250 officially, possibly below $200. 2) Almost every game for the Wii looks fun. There are like...5-7 on the 360 I can say that about. 3) "Inferior" here only refers to the raw power; gameplay is primary, graphics are secondary.
So, just to clarify: you don't want your breakups made public, but you post information about those breakups on a website that's wide open to every person with an .edu email address? I bow before your brilliance in understanding the term "public".
It's worth noting that your suggestions about increased contempt and malpractice damages (against lawyers) are possible today, without any new legislation: you would probably be surprised how much existing leeway there is for judges to make such damages. For a variety of reasons, they rarely do so. I like the idea of random audits, but it'd require a very sophisticated system of deployment to prevent harassment (for example, how do you weight a lawyer's likelihood of being audited? Should a more prolific lawyer be more likely to be audited?).
The use of the phrase "you can't unring the bell" in the discussion of Free Speech is an old one, based on the concept that no matter what you do after someone rings a bell, you can't "unring" it. The use here as an analogy is appropriate, in that you cant "un-release" information from the internet.
Wow, worst formatting errors I've ever let through. Obviously, my text shouldn't be italic, and the paragraphs should be introduced as "first" and "second". Ugh.
I don't agree with any of the statements in your post.
"Unless lawyers are paid by the state, like doctors in Canada, they cannot be considered officers of the court who's job it is to represent your rights before said court. Once they accept payment from a client, either actual or pending, they become no more [than] hired sales consultants [peddling] their [clients'] version of the truth."
Second, there is no distinction between being an advocate for a client's version of the truth, and being an advocate for that same client's rights in court. Unless you presume that your client is intentionally lying or otherwise misrepresenting their case to deprive the other party/parties of rights, then these two concepts are identical. If you do, in fact, presume that the client is intentionally attempting to deprive the other party/parties of their rights, then no bar in the country believes it is ethical for that lawyer to proceed.
Third, there is no proper analogy between the hypothetical socializing of medicine and of law. Doctors attempting to heal a single patient are not competing with one another, while lawyers for adverse clients in a single case are by definition competing with one another. While I will not claim there are no possible benefits to socializing lawyers, those benefits are not based in some such analogy.
It's extremely expensive, and every time the safety-device fires (literally) it has to be replaced. The safety-device fuses together, shunting all that energy into the block as heat, which means it's a one-time-use. This cost issue, not surprisingly, is the primary obstacle.
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is that closed systems move towards greater states of entropy, i.e. disorder. The appearance of more order in an isolated area of a closed system (i.e. more information) is not problematic so long as the sum entropy of the whole system is not reduced.
The point is that the 2nd law is about information.
You seem to misunderstand how "error correction" benefits a creature. In order for evolution to work, you need natural selection, i.e. a pool of creatures (generation-n) who have slightly variable features due to mutation, which is then reduced by natural selection factors (e.g. predation, limited resources, etc.). The survivors then reproduce (generation n+1).
Now, each generation needs to have some variability. After all, if everyone is identical, then there will be no adaptability. But, they need to have a much more significant sameness, i.e. lack of variability. After all, they need to be able to breed (among other interrelationships). Moreover, like all course-corrections, it's always better to move in small steps instead of big leaps (at least, almost always).
Error correction in genetic material would help curtail big leaps, while making small steps more viable (by reducing the number of critical mutations that kill the individual).
Of course, every now and then, environmental pressures would mean that lower error correction might be beneficial - consider the near-extinction of the Cheetah's ancestor to apparently fewer than 50 individuals - because you need a larger population of genetic variation. Such situations would result in some species having more or less "correction" built in. Species that never had such a bottle-neck would be expected to have more error-correction, most likely.
Seriously, no one has mentioned this yet? That's part of the point of the old optomotrist sign in the novel...the theme of watching and being watched.
For lawyers/courts/etc., redacted (Per Black's Legal Dictionary) means:
The lesson here is this: if you see a word used in a legal context (or any professional context) and it sounds entirely wrong...ask yourself first whether it might have a special meaning before complaining.
Oh it was apparent. When will the rest of the world learn to pay better attention for movie references like this?
/Seriously, I love that movie.
//Great stuff.
Actually, you can end a sentence with "off" and other prepositions. The idea of not ending English sentences with prepositions is a relatively new one, as opposed to being "classical" grammar. Moreover, it was simply imported from Latin into modern English without any reason other than the belief that Latin was more erudite somehow.
Of course, besides that, your sentence "...finally paying off." actually isn't ending on a preposition at all: it's ending on a verb-phrase. "Paying off" is a single unit, a verb-phrase that sits in a sentence as a normal verb. You can see this because you can seamlessly replace this verb-phrase with a synonymous single verb (e.g. "succeeding"), resulting in an equally clear and identical in meaning sentence ("...finally succeeding.").
No, you couldn't say the same thing about heroin, or alcohol. They have chemical addictive properties. You could, however, say the same thing about sex and marijuana which both lack actual chemical addictive properties.
I disavow the modern claim that you can be psychologically addicted to something - e.g. sex, marijuana or video games. While all three trigger pleasure centers, especially the seratonin cycle, none of them alter the body's ability to produce it's own natural happiness. Actual chemically addictive substances literally decrease or destroy the ability of the body to produce a natural happiness/pleasure response (by disabling seratonin production, decreasing sensitivity, etc.).
Things that are fun are fun, duh. That doesn't make them addictive. What makes something addictive is when your body comes to literally be physically dependent on that source of pleasure.
BR I love playing video games, but I also like playing sports, having sex, partying with friends, reading books, sculpting, etc. None of these things are addictive, they're just fun. If you cant self-regulate activities that lack any chemical addictive properties, you're immature. Part of being an adult is self-control.
I'm sorry, you think the game somehow blinds players from making rational choice? That's ludicrous. It's just about being a mature person...don't spend too much time doing light entertainment over things that actually matter to you.
I didn't mean to imply private schools taught ID as a rule, but rather that I wasn't aware of how many did so. I was able to say there were no public schools that taught ID, because the policy has yet to ever be upheld as not violating the First Amendment. Because private schools needn't be concerned with conflating church and state, I couldn't make a blanket statement about whether any private schools taught ID.
On the one hand, you're right about the general expense of lawyers. That said, the ACLU would be ecstatic to help out such a teacher, provided they aren't lying about the cause of their termination. They would do so for free. In fact, (again assuming that the only reason for termination was the mentioning of evolution) many non-ACLU lawyers would represent your friend on contingency or on a pro bono basis simply for the prestige of the case.
Seperately, there are punitive damages to be sought.
As one caveat, if this was a private school it's all moot.
It's been over six years since I was in high school, but I find it implausible that there is a single AP physics course being taught where calculators aren't permitted in most if not all tests. The reason is simple: the AP test assumes you will be using a [graphing] calculator, which means you don't efficiently teach towards the AP test if you dont emphasize application (e.g. use of formulae, etc.) as opposed to pure calculation.