The device obviously got through security in Dallas thus it must not have been a threat. It isn't like that was something that was easily concealed or concealed in a bag if the crew found it.
The pieces probably went through security in Kansas City where the flight originated. We don't know, because the story didn't tell us, if the device was dissassembled when going through security ("ok, a cell phone and a toy car...") or not ("ok, a cell phone attached to what looks like a toy car with extra wires...").
Firemen don't get a warrant to knock down the door to put out a fire either. I don't think either example violates the 4th amendment. If you think it does, I suggest proposing an amendment to fix that.
You're right, firemen can bust right in. But then, there is no law that says that firemen must get a warrant to enter a burning building. The proposed law says that police must get a warrant to get tracking info. While the 4th amendment might allow warrantless tracking in the case of lost persons, a law can override that and require it.
So you're comparing "type email, click send" with "type email, select all, exclude the signature block, cut the message (not copy - or they'll dupe the content), open a new application, click a button, enter the passphrase, switch back to the message, paste in the signed text, click send" and you don't understand why a user might think it's "too hard"?
No. Comparing "select template, copy template, fill in template, copy filled in template, paste into email, select routing, click send" with "select template, copy template, fill in template, copy filled in template, paste into email, select routing, select all, click on the WinPT icon in the task bar, select 'sign clipboard', enter passphrase, click ok, paste text, send". You are making it harder than it seems by trying to exclude things and thinking you need to cut before you paste, or that opening a new application is so very very difficult when it's on the taskbar all the time.
You wouldn't sign the signature block itself? That's the closest to authentication the system currently has. If you don't sign that, then a MIM could replace that text with something else. Oila, a document allegedly signed by someone it wasn't. all authenticated by a valid digital signature. And you don't need to cut the text you're signing. If you paste the signed clipboard back into the email, it will replace the selected text. Select all, copy, sign, paste.
Yes, you'll have to do more work. You might even have to fire up Visual Studio to do it rather than hacking in vi.
Unfortunately, the software is proprietary and there is no documented API to use visual basic to talk to.
Now, explain who is going to write the multiple versions of the signing software for the parents at home, and then explain to each one how to use it with their MUA, so that it can be your simple "one-click" signing. Explain how it isn't going to be harder than simply clicking "type email, send" for them.
Thinking about it briefly, you should be smart about the dialog only showing up when messages go to a particular address,
Signing messages only really works if you sign them all. If you don't do them all, then how does your recipient know that the message he's seeing is bogus, compared to one that you just decided not to sign today? As for this particular application, the recipient address doesn't matter, so maybe "be[ing] smart" requires a bit more information than was necessary to make the point that signing something electronically is beyond the capability of many people. Then factor in the schism that is created between the electronic haves and have nots when Janey doesn't have to hand in a signed form and Billy and Marcia do... and the teacher has to keep track of who gets paper and who doesn't, and who doesn't get to go if there is no signed paperwork.
No, there are many ways to electronically sign things.
Of course there are, and as slashdot readers we probably know all about them. Try teaching every parent in the US how to use them.
Then make it as simple as looking at a pile of signed permission slips for a teacher who is dealing with 30 8 year olds who are waiting in line to get on the bus to go to the zoo.
I came up with a system for signatures on email documents that are used in emergency services. I thought it was trivial. I offered to provide the public key server for the system. I wrote up the step by step procedure to do it. "Copy the message into the clipboard. Use WinPT to sign the clipboard. Enter a passphrase. Paste the signed message back into the editor. Hit 'send'". We aren't doing it because "it's too hard". And guess what? I've come to agree that it is simply too hard for most people to do something even that simple, because it has to do with computers and "computers is hard".
And access would cost another $20/month in a world where (gasp!) many kids are going to school without breakfast and are relying on the school district to provide them with lunch, since their parents simply can't afford it.
That is amost certainly the nail in the coffin of the electronic notifications to parents system. Imagine the "social stigma" if a teacher sent email notices to most parents, but had to give Billy and Marcia printed notices because their families are too poor to have the Internet and can't get email? Or if Roger is a bright kid and he tells the teacher that his parent's email address is a gmail address he controls?
That, and if it is a notice that requires a signature of a parent (field trip authorization, etc.) it will have to be paper anyway.
So when the police decide to monitor someone's cell phone without a warrant, they are giving that evidence up -- it can't be used. But if in the course of listening to that cell phone
You're conflating tracking with listening. Two very different things, and two very different levels of request. I looked at TFA and it doesn't say "listening" from what I saw, only tracking, and it doesn't differentiate tracking for criminal prosecution from tracking for health and safety.
How does law enforcement make a request to track a cell phone? Is it a phone call? A web-based system?
For the carriers I am familiar with, there is a form that needs to be faxed with an official signature. I think a police dispatcher signature is sufficient, maybe it takes a dispatch supervisor. At that point, you can talk to the technical people to get the info you need.
A limitation of the US Constitution is that it requires the government to get warrants for things,
"Dear Judge: there is a lost hiker in the coastal range, somewhere to the west of Eugene. He called his girlfriend to get help but didn't have enough battery left to call 911. We know his cell number but not his location, and he didn't know enough to be specific. It's winter, he's cold and unprepared, and it's 2AM. We'll be right over to get a warrant signed, once we can find the county prosecutor to write it up. Thanks."
Cell phone tracking has become a major tool for search and rescue. Even if they don't call 911 from a CDMA phone (gsm doesn't have E911 gps, or maybe it's vice versa), the cellphone company can provide rather accurate data about location. Some mushroom hunters near Coos Bay could have been found quickly, if one of them didn't have a warrant out for his arrest and he was hiding from the people looking for him.
It works on the theory that the EM spectrum can support many different broadcasts on the same frequency, and the receiver will filter out the One broadcast desired (code-division), therefore we no longer need a central authority to assign specific frequencies.
Yes, this works just fine, until someone sets up a transmitter on the same frequency you're using with a signal that is within -12dB of yours at the intended receiver. Then, not so good it works. And good luck to the normal user figuring out why.
Example: WiFi providers. Coffeeshops, restuarants, universities, cities... I could use channel collisions as the example, but instead I'll say that all of these make using bluetooth headsets extremely difficult if not impossible. There are two locations on my drive to work where my bluetooth headset loses pairing always. God forbid I'm trying to make a 911 call to report a serious accident when I'm near one of those locations. A couple of places in my building at work, too. And as I walk around campus, more locations. That's with the bluetooth radios about 6 inches apart. Six inches, and they cannot communicate.
It is a litmus test to check your legal status to begin with. Why would an employer spent a single cent in the hiring process, in even a second of an interviewer's precious time that piece of legal status verification token that he's legally entitled to ask?
You mention some minimun level of trust, and then deny that there is any reason for the potential employer to trust anyone who applies.
You've yet to understand that an SSN is not proof of citizenship or hireability. Using either as an excuse to ask for that number from an interviewee is, well, a breach of that minimum trust you claim should exist. If they'll lie to you about that, what else will they lie about?
If they're having you fill out the W2, that means they're offering you a job.
If they don't say "we're offering you the job", they aren't offering you the job. Until I say "I'm taking the offer", I'm not taking the offer. And I think you mean the W4. The employee doesn't fill out the wage and tax statement (W2), he fills out the W4 (withholding allowance).
This whole discussion is about how to deal with questions they aren't supposed to ask you in an interview. It's a bit naive to think that if you are in a situation where you are being asked questions that they can't legally ask they won't hand you forms asking for that information, too.
Every job I've had, the W4 wasn't handed to me until after I showed up and started. work. (And the W2 didn't come until the end of January after that.)
Sorry, but it is hardly silly, and certainly not a troll. I lived through the price control era of the 70's in the US, where there were mandates on prices of gasoline. It wasn't pretty. Shortages meant things like "alternate day" purchases. If your license plate ended in an odd number, you got gas on odd days. Even then, lines around the block.
Telling merchants what they have to do to their prices isn't going to happen. "You must round your prices down" will result in exactly the kinds of workarounds that I suggested. You can legislate rounding if you legislate the removal of the penny, but you can't legislate away price increases.
The price comes to $13.32 you pay with a $20 note. Since the 5c is the smallest coin the and the seller owes you $6.68 in change they round up and pay you $6.70.
Is that really that hard to grasp?
All the people who have west-facing windows see wonderful sunrises. Realtors always push this as a feature when selling a house. Well, they would, IF THE SUN CAME UP IN THE WEST.
The price won't come to $13.32. It will be rounded UP to $13.35. You pay with a $20, your change will be $6.65. No rounding of the change will happen. So yes, it is hard to grasp how change will be rounded when it will never happen that way.
The far better and just as simple system is the one I said that even Australian's can grasp (but apparently not you, thats a low bar you missed...)
Yes, it would be far better for buyers to have change rounded and not the selling price, but since it will never happen, why claim that it will? Apparently that's something that you fail to grasp.
Yet somehow, I manage to make it through every day with nobody but my wife telling me what to do.
is the kind of ridiculous hyperbole...
The truth is, of course, somewhere in the middle. Everytime you stop your car at a stop sign, you are doing so because someone else told you to stop there, and that stop signs mean "stop". If you don't drive, you cross at marked crosswalks (are told to do so, even if you don't) and with the light (ditto).
You go through the checkout at the grocery store because someone told you you had to or else you'd be arrested for shoplifting (or simply can't get anything from the store). You clicked the "submit" button to post your comment because the person who programmed the webpage told you that you had to click the submit button to submit your comment.
There are thousands of pages of laws and rules and regulations telling us what we can and cannot do, whether we obey them or not.
Don't blame them if they haven't covered "every conceivable activity in life". They're working as fast as they can to fill in the gaps. Their bosses told them to.
If the seller has rounded the price, then the change will already be in the minimum currency unit.
1-2c -> 0c. 3-4c -> 5c
If you have paid someone using money that has no pennies, how would you manage to be owed 4c as change? He's rounded to a nickel, up. Anything you can pay him will be a multiple of a nickel. There will only be multiples of a nickel in change.
He rounded the price up. There is nothing to round in the change.
It's the world's simplest algorithm, heck even Australians can manage it in their heads.
But not figure out when it will be applicable, it seems.
You pay him X. X is a multiple of a nickel, because you have no pennies anymore that you can use to pay him. The price is Y. Y is a multiple of a nickel, because the seller has rounded up in a currency with no pennies. X/5 (the number of nickels) is an integer. Y/5 is an integer. The change (X/5 - Y/5) must also be an integer. You pay an integer number of nickels for a product that costs an integer number of nickels. There will be no pennies in your change to be rounded either way.
Further, if Y is rounded UP to the next multiple of five (nickel) from the original price Z, then X - Y (your change) will be smaller than X - Z (your change using pennies) (assuming both Z and Y are positive, which they will be). You lose. Seller wins. Every time.
Why doesn't the original author just write from scratch a VERY similar episode, with a few lines swapped around, maybe a different setting (medbay instead of hallway, for instance) for a scene or two, and call it a brand new work?
Probably for the same reason Spinrad wouldn't want you taking one of his books, changing the name of a planet or swapping a few paragraphs around, and calling it a brand new work so you could publish it.
Why qouldn't there? In Norway it works fine, same in Denmark (almost same system). Merchants are required by law to round the way GP describes.
In the US this would be called "price controls" and the merchants would oppose them adamantly. They want to set the prices for what they sell. Any law forcing them to round "to the closest" would be followed if the "closest" is up. If the "closest" is down, they would obey the law and then immediately apply a price increase UP.
I.e., a 97 cent item forced to be rounded up will become $1. A 92 cent item forced to be rounded down will become 90 cents, and then the price will go up ten cents to make it $1 anyway. You can't prohibit price increases, except when you are enacting price controls.
Interesting that it doesn't state that it replaces the prior law, I guess we get to choose which law we follow?
You can always choose which law you follow. And they can always choose which law they enforce. Your answer is irrelevant to them, and they choose "both".
The melting law adds criminal acts above the previous "defacement" law, so I would assume both would be still in force.
The melting law does allow "amusement". As:
(b) The prohibition contained in
 82.1 against the treatment of 5-cent
coins and one-cent coins shall not apply
to the treatment of these coins for
educational, amusement, novelty,
jewelry, and similar purposes as long as
the volumes treated and the nature of
the treatment makes it clear that such
treatment is not intended as a means by
which to profit solely from the value of
the metal content of the coins.
The all copper ones are heavier than the copper plated ones and if you have a digital scale accurate to the 0.1 gram they are easy to find.
They've changed weight several times. I got the bright idea to count my pennies using a lab scale, weighing one penny and then the whole set and dividing, and I got a really wrong answer. I tried several single pennies and got different weights for most of them.
This may be an outrageously conservative opinion, but if finding Bug Bunny "sexy" is important to you, you have worse problems than what accent is used in telly programs.
It's a good bit of fun to file off the copper in a couple of small spots on the edge of the coin and then drop them in hydrochloric acid. The acid will slowly eat the zinc, leaving you with a copper shell of a penny.
Hmm, I wonder if the ferric chloride I have to make printed ciruits would eat the copper out of the middle of a quarter without eating the rest. I'll have to try it tonight.
Copyright should protect me from having Random House take my book, slap a different cover on it, and resell it as their own work. It shouldn't prevent people from making derivative works.
If the cover is different, it is a derivative work.
What if they scan your book and release it in PDF form? That's a derivative work because the format changed, according to the "movie is a derivative work" argument.
What if they run the scanned, OCRd version of your book through Google translate and then publish the resulting versions?
What if they pay someone to read your book into a microphone and then sell audio books from your book? Different medium, derivative work.
Reductio ad absurdum. The real answer is that a movie made from a book is not a derivative work, and the movie producers are not released from the responsibility of getting licenses to use it.
It's pretty much impossible to write a completely original novel or movie.
It is. Stories that sell well are usually based on a limited number of themes. Basing a story on the same theme as another work isn't copying that work, but taking your book and making a movie out of it is. The copy is in a different medium, and they may have left important (to you) parts out (goodbye Tom Bombadillo, we hardly knew 'ya), or added small bits of their own, but it is your book as a movie.
Slashdot Mirror
The device obviously got through security in Dallas thus it must not have been a threat. It isn't like that was something that was easily concealed or concealed in a bag if the crew found it.
The pieces probably went through security in Kansas City where the flight originated. We don't know, because the story didn't tell us, if the device was dissassembled when going through security ("ok, a cell phone and a toy car...") or not ("ok, a cell phone attached to what looks like a toy car with extra wires ...").
Firemen don't get a warrant to knock down the door to put out a fire either. I don't think either example violates the 4th amendment. If you think it does, I suggest proposing an amendment to fix that.
You're right, firemen can bust right in. But then, there is no law that says that firemen must get a warrant to enter a burning building. The proposed law says that police must get a warrant to get tracking info. While the 4th amendment might allow warrantless tracking in the case of lost persons, a law can override that and require it.
So you're comparing "type email, click send" with "type email, select all, exclude the signature block, cut the message (not copy - or they'll dupe the content), open a new application, click a button, enter the passphrase, switch back to the message, paste in the signed text, click send" and you don't understand why a user might think it's "too hard"?
No. Comparing "select template, copy template, fill in template, copy filled in template, paste into email, select routing, click send" with "select template, copy template, fill in template, copy filled in template, paste into email, select routing, select all, click on the WinPT icon in the task bar, select 'sign clipboard', enter passphrase, click ok, paste text, send". You are making it harder than it seems by trying to exclude things and thinking you need to cut before you paste, or that opening a new application is so very very difficult when it's on the taskbar all the time.
You wouldn't sign the signature block itself? That's the closest to authentication the system currently has. If you don't sign that, then a MIM could replace that text with something else. Oila, a document allegedly signed by someone it wasn't. all authenticated by a valid digital signature. And you don't need to cut the text you're signing. If you paste the signed clipboard back into the email, it will replace the selected text. Select all, copy, sign, paste.
Yes, you'll have to do more work. You might even have to fire up Visual Studio to do it rather than hacking in vi.
Unfortunately, the software is proprietary and there is no documented API to use visual basic to talk to.
Now, explain who is going to write the multiple versions of the signing software for the parents at home, and then explain to each one how to use it with their MUA, so that it can be your simple "one-click" signing. Explain how it isn't going to be harder than simply clicking "type email, send" for them.
Thinking about it briefly, you should be smart about the dialog only showing up when messages go to a particular address,
Signing messages only really works if you sign them all. If you don't do them all, then how does your recipient know that the message he's seeing is bogus, compared to one that you just decided not to sign today? As for this particular application, the recipient address doesn't matter, so maybe "be[ing] smart" requires a bit more information than was necessary to make the point that signing something electronically is beyond the capability of many people. Then factor in the schism that is created between the electronic haves and have nots when Janey doesn't have to hand in a signed form and Billy and Marcia do... and the teacher has to keep track of who gets paper and who doesn't, and who doesn't get to go if there is no signed paperwork.
If they can't afford $20/mo for Internet access, they can't afford the lawyer to sue.
The ACLU and many social issue legal aide groups work pro bono. The lawyers for the school district do not, and they are paid from tax revenue.
No, there are many ways to electronically sign things.
Of course there are, and as slashdot readers we probably know all about them. Try teaching every parent in the US how to use them.
Then make it as simple as looking at a pile of signed permission slips for a teacher who is dealing with 30 8 year olds who are waiting in line to get on the bus to go to the zoo.
I came up with a system for signatures on email documents that are used in emergency services. I thought it was trivial. I offered to provide the public key server for the system. I wrote up the step by step procedure to do it. "Copy the message into the clipboard. Use WinPT to sign the clipboard. Enter a passphrase. Paste the signed message back into the editor. Hit 'send'". We aren't doing it because "it's too hard". And guess what? I've come to agree that it is simply too hard for most people to do something even that simple, because it has to do with computers and "computers is hard".
And access would cost another $20/month in a world where (gasp!) many kids are going to school without breakfast and are relying on the school district to provide them with lunch, since their parents simply can't afford it.
That is amost certainly the nail in the coffin of the electronic notifications to parents system. Imagine the "social stigma" if a teacher sent email notices to most parents, but had to give Billy and Marcia printed notices because their families are too poor to have the Internet and can't get email? Or if Roger is a bright kid and he tells the teacher that his parent's email address is a gmail address he controls?
That, and if it is a notice that requires a signature of a parent (field trip authorization, etc.) it will have to be paper anyway.
So when the police decide to monitor someone's cell phone without a warrant, they are giving that evidence up -- it can't be used. But if in the course of listening to that cell phone
You're conflating tracking with listening. Two very different things, and two very different levels of request. I looked at TFA and it doesn't say "listening" from what I saw, only tracking, and it doesn't differentiate tracking for criminal prosecution from tracking for health and safety.
How does law enforcement make a request to track a cell phone? Is it a phone call? A web-based system?
For the carriers I am familiar with, there is a form that needs to be faxed with an official signature. I think a police dispatcher signature is sufficient, maybe it takes a dispatch supervisor. At that point, you can talk to the technical people to get the info you need.
A limitation of the US Constitution is that it requires the government to get warrants for things,
"Dear Judge: there is a lost hiker in the coastal range, somewhere to the west of Eugene. He called his girlfriend to get help but didn't have enough battery left to call 911. We know his cell number but not his location, and he didn't know enough to be specific. It's winter, he's cold and unprepared, and it's 2AM. We'll be right over to get a warrant signed, once we can find the county prosecutor to write it up. Thanks."
Cell phone tracking has become a major tool for search and rescue. Even if they don't call 911 from a CDMA phone (gsm doesn't have E911 gps, or maybe it's vice versa), the cellphone company can provide rather accurate data about location. Some mushroom hunters near Coos Bay could have been found quickly, if one of them didn't have a warrant out for his arrest and he was hiding from the people looking for him.
It works on the theory that the EM spectrum can support many different broadcasts on the same frequency, and the receiver will filter out the One broadcast desired (code-division), therefore we no longer need a central authority to assign specific frequencies.
Yes, this works just fine, until someone sets up a transmitter on the same frequency you're using with a signal that is within -12dB of yours at the intended receiver. Then, not so good it works. And good luck to the normal user figuring out why.
Example: WiFi providers. Coffeeshops, restuarants, universities, cities... I could use channel collisions as the example, but instead I'll say that all of these make using bluetooth headsets extremely difficult if not impossible. There are two locations on my drive to work where my bluetooth headset loses pairing always. God forbid I'm trying to make a 911 call to report a serious accident when I'm near one of those locations. A couple of places in my building at work, too. And as I walk around campus, more locations. That's with the bluetooth radios about 6 inches apart. Six inches, and they cannot communicate.
It is a litmus test to check your legal status to begin with. Why would an employer spent a single cent in the hiring process, in even a second of an interviewer's precious time that piece of legal status verification token that he's legally entitled to ask?
You mention some minimun level of trust, and then deny that there is any reason for the potential employer to trust anyone who applies.
You've yet to understand that an SSN is not proof of citizenship or hireability. Using either as an excuse to ask for that number from an interviewee is, well, a breach of that minimum trust you claim should exist. If they'll lie to you about that, what else will they lie about?
If they're having you fill out the W2, that means they're offering you a job.
If they don't say "we're offering you the job", they aren't offering you the job. Until I say "I'm taking the offer", I'm not taking the offer. And I think you mean the W4. The employee doesn't fill out the wage and tax statement (W2), he fills out the W4 (withholding allowance).
This whole discussion is about how to deal with questions they aren't supposed to ask you in an interview. It's a bit naive to think that if you are in a situation where you are being asked questions that they can't legally ask they won't hand you forms asking for that information, too.
Every job I've had, the W4 wasn't handed to me until after I showed up and started. work. (And the W2 didn't come until the end of January after that.)
Telling merchants what they have to do to their prices isn't going to happen. "You must round your prices down" will result in exactly the kinds of workarounds that I suggested. You can legislate rounding if you legislate the removal of the penny, but you can't legislate away price increases.
The price comes to $13.32 you pay with a $20 note. Since the 5c is the smallest coin the and the seller owes you $6.68 in change they round up and pay you $6.70. Is that really that hard to grasp?
All the people who have west-facing windows see wonderful sunrises. Realtors always push this as a feature when selling a house. Well, they would, IF THE SUN CAME UP IN THE WEST.
The price won't come to $13.32. It will be rounded UP to $13.35. You pay with a $20, your change will be $6.65. No rounding of the change will happen. So yes, it is hard to grasp how change will be rounded when it will never happen that way.
The far better and just as simple system is the one I said that even Australian's can grasp (but apparently not you, thats a low bar you missed...)
Yes, it would be far better for buyers to have change rounded and not the selling price, but since it will never happen, why claim that it will? Apparently that's something that you fail to grasp.
I have an answer. FeCL eats the entire quarter. Bummer.
Yet somehow, I manage to make it through every day with nobody but my wife telling me what to do.
is the kind of ridiculous hyperbole ...
The truth is, of course, somewhere in the middle. Everytime you stop your car at a stop sign, you are doing so because someone else told you to stop there, and that stop signs mean "stop". If you don't drive, you cross at marked crosswalks (are told to do so, even if you don't) and with the light (ditto).
You go through the checkout at the grocery store because someone told you you had to or else you'd be arrested for shoplifting (or simply can't get anything from the store). You clicked the "submit" button to post your comment because the person who programmed the webpage told you that you had to click the submit button to submit your comment.
There are thousands of pages of laws and rules and regulations telling us what we can and cannot do, whether we obey them or not. Don't blame them if they haven't covered "every conceivable activity in life". They're working as fast as they can to fill in the gaps. Their bosses told them to.
Not if you round up the change :)
If the seller has rounded the price, then the change will already be in the minimum currency unit.
1-2c -> 0c. 3-4c -> 5c
If you have paid someone using money that has no pennies, how would you manage to be owed 4c as change? He's rounded to a nickel, up. Anything you can pay him will be a multiple of a nickel. There will only be multiples of a nickel in change.
He rounded the price up. There is nothing to round in the change.
It's the world's simplest algorithm, heck even Australians can manage it in their heads.
But not figure out when it will be applicable, it seems.
You pay him X. X is a multiple of a nickel, because you have no pennies anymore that you can use to pay him. The price is Y. Y is a multiple of a nickel, because the seller has rounded up in a currency with no pennies. X/5 (the number of nickels) is an integer. Y/5 is an integer. The change (X/5 - Y/5) must also be an integer. You pay an integer number of nickels for a product that costs an integer number of nickels. There will be no pennies in your change to be rounded either way.
Further, if Y is rounded UP to the next multiple of five (nickel) from the original price Z, then X - Y (your change) will be smaller than X - Z (your change using pennies) (assuming both Z and Y are positive, which they will be). You lose. Seller wins. Every time.
Why doesn't the original author just write from scratch a VERY similar episode, with a few lines swapped around, maybe a different setting (medbay instead of hallway, for instance) for a scene or two, and call it a brand new work?
Probably for the same reason Spinrad wouldn't want you taking one of his books, changing the name of a planet or swapping a few paragraphs around, and calling it a brand new work so you could publish it.
Why qouldn't there? In Norway it works fine, same in Denmark (almost same system). Merchants are required by law to round the way GP describes.
In the US this would be called "price controls" and the merchants would oppose them adamantly. They want to set the prices for what they sell. Any law forcing them to round "to the closest" would be followed if the "closest" is up. If the "closest" is down, they would obey the law and then immediately apply a price increase UP.
I.e., a 97 cent item forced to be rounded up will become $1. A 92 cent item forced to be rounded down will become 90 cents, and then the price will go up ten cents to make it $1 anyway. You can't prohibit price increases, except when you are enacting price controls.
Interesting that it doesn't state that it replaces the prior law, I guess we get to choose which law we follow?
You can always choose which law you follow. And they can always choose which law they enforce. Your answer is irrelevant to them, and they choose "both".
The melting law adds criminal acts above the previous "defacement" law, so I would assume both would be still in force.
The melting law does allow "amusement". As:
(b) The prohibition contained in  82.1 against the treatment of 5-cent coins and one-cent coins shall not apply to the treatment of these coins for educational, amusement, novelty, jewelry, and similar purposes as long as the volumes treated and the nature of the treatment makes it clear that such treatment is not intended as a means by which to profit solely from the value of the metal content of the coins.
The all copper ones are heavier than the copper plated ones and if you have a digital scale accurate to the 0.1 gram they are easy to find.
They've changed weight several times. I got the bright idea to count my pennies using a lab scale, weighing one penny and then the whole set and dividing, and I got a really wrong answer. I tried several single pennies and got different weights for most of them.
Does Bugs Bunny sound sexy to you?
This may be an outrageously conservative opinion, but if finding Bug Bunny "sexy" is important to you, you have worse problems than what accent is used in telly programs.
Well in Switzerland, they round up to the nearest (not only to the seller's advantage)
Rounding up is always to the seller's advantage. That's exactly how we should expect sellers to do things when the penny is eliminated.
No, they are Zinc.
Copper-clad zinc.
It's a good bit of fun to file off the copper in a couple of small spots on the edge of the coin and then drop them in hydrochloric acid. The acid will slowly eat the zinc, leaving you with a copper shell of a penny.
Hmm, I wonder if the ferric chloride I have to make printed ciruits would eat the copper out of the middle of a quarter without eating the rest. I'll have to try it tonight.
Copyright should protect me from having Random House take my book, slap a different cover on it, and resell it as their own work. It shouldn't prevent people from making derivative works.
If the cover is different, it is a derivative work.
What if they scan your book and release it in PDF form? That's a derivative work because the format changed, according to the "movie is a derivative work" argument.
What if they run the scanned, OCRd version of your book through Google translate and then publish the resulting versions?
What if they pay someone to read your book into a microphone and then sell audio books from your book? Different medium, derivative work.
Reductio ad absurdum. The real answer is that a movie made from a book is not a derivative work, and the movie producers are not released from the responsibility of getting licenses to use it.
It's pretty much impossible to write a completely original novel or movie.
It is. Stories that sell well are usually based on a limited number of themes. Basing a story on the same theme as another work isn't copying that work, but taking your book and making a movie out of it is. The copy is in a different medium, and they may have left important (to you) parts out (goodbye Tom Bombadillo, we hardly knew 'ya), or added small bits of their own, but it is your book as a movie.
Me too, but what the fuck does ownership of property have to do with copyright?
When most people refer to ownership of intellectual property, they are referring to either copyright or patent.
Did you think the problem was ownership of the specific pieces of paper that the script was printed on, or the specific copy of that script?