CO2 emissions per mile are proportional to thermodynamic efficiency of the fuel cycle and amount of energy that is needed per mile.
Of course, but the proportionality constant is different for different power plants, and a huge stationary coal power plant that can make use of economies of scale and for which weight is not a consideration has a much lower coefficient than millions of tiny power plants operating on thin auto industry margins and for whom any emission control must be weighed against the extra weight and thus fuel cost. If an air car is only 1/5th the efficiency of a gasoline car it is still going to result in fewer emissions. Augment the coal plant with wind power, and the air car only gets better in this regard without changing a thing about it, something that can't be done with ICEs.
The other issues with air cars are quite significant and valid, which is why like I said I think EVs are a much better solution. Thermodynamic efficiency is just a red herring, at least when compared to ICEs. If you want to talk efficiency, compare it to an EV where the source of the electricity is the same and thus the efficiencies are directly comparable in terms of environmental friendliness.
Uh, thermodynamic efficiency isn't the main metric of environmental friendliness. It's emissions, not waste heat, that are why gasoline engines are bad. Even a highly inefficient engine whose power originates from a big stationary coal power plant with huge scrubbers is better environmentally that tons of tiny fossil fuel burning power plants where the weight of any emission controls works against it.
Other than that though those are some good criticisms. I personally think EVs are a better option, and that Aptera looks very cool (though the exposed wheels do worry me a bit).
In France over 80% of energy is nuclear and electricity is cheap.
Exactly, and if we ever get off our asses and develop a nuclear infrastructure, then if all our cars are powered either directly or indirectly by electricity (i.e. batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, compressed air), then our cars all magically become "cleaner".
The reason the Tesla can out-accelerate a Ferrari is that there is no loss through a variable transmission, all the torque from an electric motor goes directly to the wheels.
It's also the fact that an electric motor has its highest torque at 0 rpm, whereas ICEs have a torque curve whose peak is usually a significant number of RPMs above idle. So regardless of the transmission the electric motor has an advantage in 0-60 situations. I'm not sure about 60-120 though.
As the saying goes, once you know something is possible then all the rest is simply engineering.
Damn straight, and it's good to see that people are tackling the engineering no matter what the nay-sayers think.
Well it's not like there's actually official definitions of these terms; everything from Alpha to Beta to RC or whatever all vary from company to company. What you said isn't -that- different from the definition I suggested. In a project the size of Vista, a "release candidate" could have thousands of known bugs filed on it and that constitutes minor enough changes for it to fit. So yeah, more like you said is possible too.
In any case, the upgrade to RC1 was supposed to mean the project was "mostly done" and it was okay for the project leader to leave and let the team carry it to fruition.
Or, the project wasn't close to being ready, it was a development disaster, the leader fled the company, and MS pretended it was instead the preceding case to prevent investors from panicking.
The thing is that he didn't release Vista, just RC1. RC1 isn't the shipping OS. Sounds like someone still at Microsoft is trying to point the blame at someone who left a year before. This isn't Hit and Run, it's Duck and Cover.
No, this doesn't shift blame from Microsoft at all. That's why they didn't want this to be known.
Release Candidates are supposed to be versions you *think* are worthy to ship, but need to undergo thorough testing to make sure. Any changes that need to be made should be minor.
If he upgraded the project to RC1 status, and the testing showed that it wasn't anywhere near ready for release, then Microsoft could have downgraded it in a jiffy and said more work needed to be done. Or kept it at "RC1" for a long time before making "RC2" which would be the first real Release Candidate.
Instead they ended up pushing it out the door in short order (maybe not RC1 specifically, but only a minor change from it), so as to make it look like the project was indeed almost ready for release and that's why the project leader left. As opposed to this version of events, which looks more like the project wasn't going good and the project leader got a better offer so he jumped ship and left the project to hang.
Let's take the prank out of this. She met a boy online who essentially dumped her online. Ignore that it wasn't real because she didn't know that it wasn't. Her response to being dumped was to KILL HERSELF. I assure you that the boy was not to blame.
I didn't know how I felt about this whole thing, but I'd never thought about it in this way and it really clears things up for me.
Teen suicide is a serious problem. While teen crime rates have been going down for decades, suicide rates have gone up (I don't know about recent trends, but since the 80s). And while always tragic, we rarely blame whatever the apparent proximate cause was unless it was some serious form of abuse. If we leveled charges against anyone who said bad things about someone else, or broke their heart, we'd have a serious problem. I agree that we can't in any way call this a crime of manslaughter.
That said, that woman is a fucking cunt. A mother should be above the kind of petty emotional abuse that passes for teenage socialization. She should be teaching her kid how to be better than that, not how to sink to that level and do the most damage possible. I can only hope that her kid sees what the consequences of being a manipulative conniving petty cunt are, and like many teens do she rejects her mother's ways.
Wait, so you're disappointed that it isn't some kind of perpetual motion device that "cheats" using gravity? You can't "cheat" the 2nd law of thermodynamics you know...
The springs used in garage doors to assist you in pulling the door up (which were more common before everyone started installing power-operated doors) wear out after 10-20 years, for instance.
Uh, I'm pretty sure they are still used most of the time even with automatic doors. Those chincy little motors couldn't lift the full weight of a wooden garage door, nor could their mountings handle it most of the time. The spring is still there, and is still doing most of the work. Certainly at least when the spring broke on my old house's garage door, it wasn't going anywhere manually or via the automatic opener.
Anyway, your point about the longevity of springs is correct.:)
And as a True Believer, I tell you that religion (mine , specifically) still works too, even if you don't believe it.
Just try expressing your non-belief to St. Peter when he kindly asks you to step into the Hand Basket instead of inviting you to pass through the Pearly Gates....
For some reason, this made me think of this Dresden Codak cartoon: Secular Heaven.
By rejecting the law, the Court appointed itself ultimate arbitor of Constitutionality which is not an expressly enumerated power.
Yes, it is: "The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority"
What do you think a judge does, if not arbitrate? This is the fundamental meaning of "judging", to interpret the meaning of the law, and when multiple laws conflict, to decide which applies and which must fold. And in the case of a law passed by Congress and the Constitution, the laws of Congress must always fold.
Or more to the point, what do you think should happen when a case comes before the Supreme Court, and a law passed by Congress is in conflict with the Constitution?
No it decreased the power of the other two branches, because they can only act with the approval of the Judicial Branch - not striking down a law is a tacit approval. To play devil's advocate - why can't the President serve as an arbitor of Constitutionality by rejecting the execution of a law?
The other two branches have always been subject to decisions made by the Courts in cases that came before it. To suggest otherwise is to imply that the other two branches are in fact above the law and cannot be brought to justice for violating the law. That may be a popular theory these days, at least for the Executive branch, but it has zero Constitutional basis.
As to your "devil's advocate" question: Because the Judicial power isn't granted to the President. The Executive branch can in fact decline to enforce a law, this is what the DoJ does all the time by choosing who to prosecute and who not to. But that decision does not in any way constitute a legal decision, because matters of law are decided by a Judge. And if a certain law requires action of the Executive branch, then in a case brought before the courts, the Judicial branch has the power to render judgement against them and a proscribe appropriate penalties.
So why again does Bush and Cheney want the price of oil to rise? Last time I checked they no longer own any oil assets and would not personally profit for a rise or fall in oil...
Last I checked they still have plenty of friends in the oil industry, and may want extremely cushy and well paying jobs in a ridiculously profitable industry after they're done running the country. Of course Cheney's Halliburton stock option sales all go to charity, so there's no direct personal conflict of interest. Thus there's no motivation whatsoever and all those no-bid contracts were perfectly fair? Yeah right, making huge bank for all their oil and defense contractor friends is a huge motivation, and one they themselves will ultimately reap the benefit from.
How much you want to bet Cheney ends up back on the Board of Directors for any number of companies who directly profited from the war in Iraq?
Also, the Oil futures market is much larger than anything going on in Iraq. Oil is rising not because of anything Bush or Cheney or the US is doing, but rather because you have over 2 billion people slowing rising in the middle class in Asia.
Uh yeah I'm pretty sure "Middle East insecurity" has a major impact on the futures market, what with the whole thing being speculation on the future (both near and long term) supply, and Middle East sources still being a huge portion of that supply. Prices jumped hugely after 9/11, again after the invasion of Iraq. Yes there has been an otherwise oscillating but upward trend due to general increasing consumption and lessening of reserves, and yes the market is much larger than just Iraq. To conclude that therefore nothing Bush or Cheney has done has affected the price of oil is completely illogical.
Really? You should double check the Constitution with regards to the enumerated powers (you know, what the 10th amendment discusses) of SCOTUS... in fact they are the ones (not the constitution) that declared themselves the supreme arbiter of the constitution (see Marbury v. Madison).
How you figure? The Constitution itself states that the Judicial branch shall have jurisdiction over all cases arising under the Law of the U.S. and the Constitution. Marbury v Madison was just a case where a Law passed by Congress conflicted with the Constitution -- and again, it is clear from the Constitution that in such a case, the Constitution wins. That case may have formalized the notion of "Judicial Review", but the principle itself is quite Constitutional.
Oh and by the way, the statute which the Court ruled in Marbury v Madison to be Unconstitutional was one which increased the Court's power. It's kind of hard to call this a power grab when the executed their Constitutional power to judge a case under the law in order to reject an Unconstitutional increase in power.
see cases of how they have ignored the 10th amendment
True enough, everyone pretty much ignores the 9th and 10th. But it's worth pointing out that they ignore this ammendment by not finding a law passed by Congress to be in conflict with the 10th, and thus Unconstitutional. How exactly would they do this if not via Judicial Review as established via Marbury v Madison?
In other words this is a case of the Judicial Branch abusing their powers by under-utilizing them, resulting in an increase in power of the other two branches.
Let me get this straight - we will have to rely on a suspected terrorist to sue for this to go forward?
Indications are that the government spied on thousands of people, and based on what the AT&T worker who installed the hardware said, it's quite possible that they gathered communications from millions of people in a way that would require a warrant. Ultimately this whole fiasco is due to the fact that the Executive's definition of "suspected terrorist" is so loose and flimsy that not even FISA, a court known for rubber-stamping anything that comes before it, would agree that the searches were warranted.
But yes, in order to have standing to sue the government, you have to be able to show that you were one of the people whose rights were violated by a warrant-less search. How on earth you're supposed to prove that is left as an exercise for the citizen. I saw this whole "standing" issue coming a mile away.
That's why the lawsuits against the telcos are so important -- the discovery phase is when evidence would be acquired as to exactly who was subject to spying, which would open the door for those people to have standing to sue the government. I don't know the specifics as to why it isn't the same issue with the telco lawsuits, but clearly the bar for suing the government is higher since the telco lawsuits weren't summarily rejected on the same grounds. This is why the retro-active immunity is so abhorrent -- no matter what they say, it's about the government covering its own ass.
Since the courts ruled that making a copy of the software from the install media onto your hard drive and making a copy of the software from your hard drive into memory fall under copyright restrictions, which is how all this software licensing insanity began.
I don't get how they could have, since copyright law specifically states that copies made as part of the normal course of operation of a piece of software (i.e. from disk to memory) aren't violations.
Copyright violation. In the USA, a judge has ruled that you need a contract to legally run software, since when activated the computer loads portions of the code into memory, which is considered copying, and additionally, most software also must first be copied and extracted from archives on the CD, creating a derivative work on your hard-drive
But copyright law specifically states that copies made as part of the normal operation of the software are not a violation of the copyright owner's rights. This was presumably done so as to avoid the situation where a user was violating copyright every time they ran a program. Under that judge's decision, how would you ever legally run software that didn't come with any EULA? Do you know the name of this case? I have a feeling it was a bad decision that the defendant simply didn't know or want to appeal.
The second issue with the "WWXD?" philosophy is more practical. Xenu was an evil galactic overlord. As a galactic overlord, he had lots of resources, in particular, lots of minions and henchmen to round people up and put them on spaceships, and lots of spaceships shaped like DC-8s, and lots of thermonuclear bombs. Unless you have access to similar resources, "WWXD?" is just not practical to apply to your everyday life.
I agree this is a big problem. I don't know about any of you, but all my spaceships are shaped like DC-10s.
Or maybe resistance is quantized, with one quantum of resistance being equal to the extra resistance from one extra thetan hanging around?
In my own experiments with E-meters (purchased off E-bay of course), I've found that one quantum of resistance is equal to two thetans. If you have an even number of thetans, then add one, there's no change at all, but add one more onto that, and bam, it jumps up.
Weird, I know. The universe is a mysterious place.
Makes it a great time to show up with a patent that could threaten the economy, doesn't it?
Not that I actually think this is part of the plan, or even that likely to happen, but doesn't the taxpayer having to shell out $1 billion in order to protect our banks and thus our economy itself from the threat of submarine patent trolls make a pretty damn good case for future reform? Our geeky one-click-patent or DRAM interface patent cases are perfectly clear cases to us, but this seems more mainstream.
it's racketeering, and they're getting away with it.
Yeah, probably. Sad part is that unless some major change to patent law came around, they'd probably get away with it one way or another.
It sounds like maybe the banks got themselves into this mess and perhaps deserve what is coming to them.
Yeah but sadly (or awesomely, if you're the banks), these institutions are vital to the workings of our economy, which means it is not necessarily in our best interest to let them get what's coming to them. Which is pretty crappy when you think about it, but it's more or less the same theory behind the bail outs in the subprime collapse.
Were electronic transfers allowed by the Feds or required by post 9/11 security requirements?
Maybe both, allowing electronic transfers can be separate from requiring scanning of checks so they can be sent to law enforcement. Hell, maybe neither directly applies, but the part about protecting them from patent trolling seems semi-genuine at least.
This whole thing reeks of corporate asshattery.
Indeed! I didn't emphasize it, but I'm basically assuming that this is only happening because it's going to cost the banks money, and like always they'd rather spend our nickle than their own. It's only with some bitter irony that I can also kinda maybe see the point in doing it. But damned if I like it.
Slashdot Mirror
CO2 emissions per mile are proportional to thermodynamic efficiency of the fuel cycle and amount of energy that is needed per mile.
Of course, but the proportionality constant is different for different power plants, and a huge stationary coal power plant that can make use of economies of scale and for which weight is not a consideration has a much lower coefficient than millions of tiny power plants operating on thin auto industry margins and for whom any emission control must be weighed against the extra weight and thus fuel cost. If an air car is only 1/5th the efficiency of a gasoline car it is still going to result in fewer emissions. Augment the coal plant with wind power, and the air car only gets better in this regard without changing a thing about it, something that can't be done with ICEs.
The other issues with air cars are quite significant and valid, which is why like I said I think EVs are a much better solution. Thermodynamic efficiency is just a red herring, at least when compared to ICEs. If you want to talk efficiency, compare it to an EV where the source of the electricity is the same and thus the efficiencies are directly comparable in terms of environmental friendliness.
Uh, thermodynamic efficiency isn't the main metric of environmental friendliness. It's emissions, not waste heat, that are why gasoline engines are bad. Even a highly inefficient engine whose power originates from a big stationary coal power plant with huge scrubbers is better environmentally that tons of tiny fossil fuel burning power plants where the weight of any emission controls works against it.
Other than that though those are some good criticisms. I personally think EVs are a better option, and that Aptera looks very cool (though the exposed wheels do worry me a bit).
In France over 80% of energy is nuclear and electricity is cheap.
Exactly, and if we ever get off our asses and develop a nuclear infrastructure, then if all our cars are powered either directly or indirectly by electricity (i.e. batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, compressed air), then our cars all magically become "cleaner".
The reason the Tesla can out-accelerate a Ferrari is that there is no loss through a variable transmission, all the torque from an electric motor goes directly to the wheels.
It's also the fact that an electric motor has its highest torque at 0 rpm, whereas ICEs have a torque curve whose peak is usually a significant number of RPMs above idle. So regardless of the transmission the electric motor has an advantage in 0-60 situations. I'm not sure about 60-120 though.
As the saying goes, once you know something is possible then all the rest is simply engineering.
Damn straight, and it's good to see that people are tackling the engineering no matter what the nay-sayers think.
Did you just compare recycling a compressor to recycling a battery?
Being able to line up a bullet point next to someone else's bullet point does not make it a valid counter.
Well it's not like there's actually official definitions of these terms; everything from Alpha to Beta to RC or whatever all vary from company to company. What you said isn't -that- different from the definition I suggested. In a project the size of Vista, a "release candidate" could have thousands of known bugs filed on it and that constitutes minor enough changes for it to fit. So yeah, more like you said is possible too.
In any case, the upgrade to RC1 was supposed to mean the project was "mostly done" and it was okay for the project leader to leave and let the team carry it to fruition.
Or, the project wasn't close to being ready, it was a development disaster, the leader fled the company, and MS pretended it was instead the preceding case to prevent investors from panicking.
The thing is that he didn't release Vista, just RC1. RC1 isn't the shipping OS. Sounds like someone still at Microsoft is trying to point the blame at someone who left a year before. This isn't Hit and Run, it's Duck and Cover.
No, this doesn't shift blame from Microsoft at all. That's why they didn't want this to be known.
Release Candidates are supposed to be versions you *think* are worthy to ship, but need to undergo thorough testing to make sure. Any changes that need to be made should be minor.
If he upgraded the project to RC1 status, and the testing showed that it wasn't anywhere near ready for release, then Microsoft could have downgraded it in a jiffy and said more work needed to be done. Or kept it at "RC1" for a long time before making "RC2" which would be the first real Release Candidate.
Instead they ended up pushing it out the door in short order (maybe not RC1 specifically, but only a minor change from it), so as to make it look like the project was indeed almost ready for release and that's why the project leader left. As opposed to this version of events, which looks more like the project wasn't going good and the project leader got a better offer so he jumped ship and left the project to hang.
It doesn't make MS look good at all.
Let's take the prank out of this. She met a boy online who essentially dumped her online. Ignore that it wasn't real because she didn't know that it wasn't. Her response to being dumped was to KILL HERSELF. I assure you that the boy was not to blame.
I didn't know how I felt about this whole thing, but I'd never thought about it in this way and it really clears things up for me.
Teen suicide is a serious problem. While teen crime rates have been going down for decades, suicide rates have gone up (I don't know about recent trends, but since the 80s). And while always tragic, we rarely blame whatever the apparent proximate cause was unless it was some serious form of abuse. If we leveled charges against anyone who said bad things about someone else, or broke their heart, we'd have a serious problem. I agree that we can't in any way call this a crime of manslaughter.
That said, that woman is a fucking cunt. A mother should be above the kind of petty emotional abuse that passes for teenage socialization. She should be teaching her kid how to be better than that, not how to sink to that level and do the most damage possible. I can only hope that her kid sees what the consequences of being a manipulative conniving petty cunt are, and like many teens do she rejects her mother's ways.
If you hadn't heard of Dresden Codak before, then I'm especially glad I thought of it and you're double welcome because yeah, it rocks.
Wait, so you're disappointed that it isn't some kind of perpetual motion device that "cheats" using gravity? You can't "cheat" the 2nd law of thermodynamics you know...
"Suggestions:
* Run, before he finds you"
What a terrible suggestion! Why run? I'll just die tired.
The springs used in garage doors to assist you in pulling the door up (which were more common before everyone started installing power-operated doors) wear out after 10-20 years, for instance.
:)
Uh, I'm pretty sure they are still used most of the time even with automatic doors. Those chincy little motors couldn't lift the full weight of a wooden garage door, nor could their mountings handle it most of the time. The spring is still there, and is still doing most of the work. Certainly at least when the spring broke on my old house's garage door, it wasn't going anywhere manually or via the automatic opener.
Anyway, your point about the longevity of springs is correct.
And as a True Believer, I tell you that religion (mine , specifically) still works too, even if you don't believe it.
Just try expressing your non-belief to St. Peter when he kindly asks you to step into the Hand Basket instead of inviting you to pass through the Pearly Gates....
For some reason, this made me think of this Dresden Codak cartoon: Secular Heaven.
Nice one. :)
By rejecting the law, the Court appointed itself ultimate arbitor of Constitutionality which is not an expressly enumerated power.
Yes, it is: "The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority"
What do you think a judge does, if not arbitrate? This is the fundamental meaning of "judging", to interpret the meaning of the law, and when multiple laws conflict, to decide which applies and which must fold. And in the case of a law passed by Congress and the Constitution, the laws of Congress must always fold.
Or more to the point, what do you think should happen when a case comes before the Supreme Court, and a law passed by Congress is in conflict with the Constitution?
No it decreased the power of the other two branches, because they can only act with the approval of the Judicial Branch - not striking down a law is a tacit approval. To play devil's advocate - why can't the President serve as an arbitor of Constitutionality by rejecting the execution of a law?
The other two branches have always been subject to decisions made by the Courts in cases that came before it. To suggest otherwise is to imply that the other two branches are in fact above the law and cannot be brought to justice for violating the law. That may be a popular theory these days, at least for the Executive branch, but it has zero Constitutional basis.
As to your "devil's advocate" question: Because the Judicial power isn't granted to the President. The Executive branch can in fact decline to enforce a law, this is what the DoJ does all the time by choosing who to prosecute and who not to. But that decision does not in any way constitute a legal decision, because matters of law are decided by a Judge. And if a certain law requires action of the Executive branch, then in a case brought before the courts, the Judicial branch has the power to render judgement against them and a proscribe appropriate penalties.
So why again does Bush and Cheney want the price of oil to rise? Last time I checked they no longer own any oil assets and would not personally profit for a rise or fall in oil...
Last I checked they still have plenty of friends in the oil industry, and may want extremely cushy and well paying jobs in a ridiculously profitable industry after they're done running the country. Of course Cheney's Halliburton stock option sales all go to charity, so there's no direct personal conflict of interest. Thus there's no motivation whatsoever and all those no-bid contracts were perfectly fair? Yeah right, making huge bank for all their oil and defense contractor friends is a huge motivation, and one they themselves will ultimately reap the benefit from.
How much you want to bet Cheney ends up back on the Board of Directors for any number of companies who directly profited from the war in Iraq?
Also, the Oil futures market is much larger than anything going on in Iraq. Oil is rising not because of anything Bush or Cheney or the US is doing, but rather because you have over 2 billion people slowing rising in the middle class in Asia.
Uh yeah I'm pretty sure "Middle East insecurity" has a major impact on the futures market, what with the whole thing being speculation on the future (both near and long term) supply, and Middle East sources still being a huge portion of that supply. Prices jumped hugely after 9/11, again after the invasion of Iraq. Yes there has been an otherwise oscillating but upward trend due to general increasing consumption and lessening of reserves, and yes the market is much larger than just Iraq. To conclude that therefore nothing Bush or Cheney has done has affected the price of oil is completely illogical.
Well, what do the voices say?
The voices assure me that I'm completely batshit insane.
Okay, I feel better.
Really? You should double check the Constitution with regards to the enumerated powers (you know, what the 10th amendment discusses) of SCOTUS... in fact they are the ones (not the constitution) that declared themselves the supreme arbiter of the constitution (see Marbury v. Madison).
How you figure? The Constitution itself states that the Judicial branch shall have jurisdiction over all cases arising under the Law of the U.S. and the Constitution. Marbury v Madison was just a case where a Law passed by Congress conflicted with the Constitution -- and again, it is clear from the Constitution that in such a case, the Constitution wins. That case may have formalized the notion of "Judicial Review", but the principle itself is quite Constitutional.
Oh and by the way, the statute which the Court ruled in Marbury v Madison to be Unconstitutional was one which increased the Court's power. It's kind of hard to call this a power grab when the executed their Constitutional power to judge a case under the law in order to reject an Unconstitutional increase in power.
see cases of how they have ignored the 10th amendment
True enough, everyone pretty much ignores the 9th and 10th. But it's worth pointing out that they ignore this ammendment by not finding a law passed by Congress to be in conflict with the 10th, and thus Unconstitutional. How exactly would they do this if not via Judicial Review as established via Marbury v Madison?
In other words this is a case of the Judicial Branch abusing their powers by under-utilizing them, resulting in an increase in power of the other two branches.
Let me get this straight - we will have to rely on a suspected terrorist to sue for this to go forward?
Indications are that the government spied on thousands of people, and based on what the AT&T worker who installed the hardware said, it's quite possible that they gathered communications from millions of people in a way that would require a warrant. Ultimately this whole fiasco is due to the fact that the Executive's definition of "suspected terrorist" is so loose and flimsy that not even FISA, a court known for rubber-stamping anything that comes before it, would agree that the searches were warranted.
But yes, in order to have standing to sue the government, you have to be able to show that you were one of the people whose rights were violated by a warrant-less search. How on earth you're supposed to prove that is left as an exercise for the citizen. I saw this whole "standing" issue coming a mile away.
That's why the lawsuits against the telcos are so important -- the discovery phase is when evidence would be acquired as to exactly who was subject to spying, which would open the door for those people to have standing to sue the government. I don't know the specifics as to why it isn't the same issue with the telco lawsuits, but clearly the bar for suing the government is higher since the telco lawsuits weren't summarily rejected on the same grounds. This is why the retro-active immunity is so abhorrent -- no matter what they say, it's about the government covering its own ass.
Wait, does this mean I'm not crazy? :(
Since the courts ruled that making a copy of the software from the install media onto your hard drive and making a copy of the software from your hard drive into memory fall under copyright restrictions, which is how all this software licensing insanity began.
I don't get how they could have, since copyright law specifically states that copies made as part of the normal course of operation of a piece of software (i.e. from disk to memory) aren't violations.
Copyright violation. In the USA, a judge has ruled that you need a contract to legally run software, since when activated the computer loads portions of the code into memory, which is considered copying, and additionally, most software also must first be copied and extracted from archives on the CD, creating a derivative work on your hard-drive
But copyright law specifically states that copies made as part of the normal operation of the software are not a violation of the copyright owner's rights. This was presumably done so as to avoid the situation where a user was violating copyright every time they ran a program. Under that judge's decision, how would you ever legally run software that didn't come with any EULA? Do you know the name of this case? I have a feeling it was a bad decision that the defendant simply didn't know or want to appeal.
The second issue with the "WWXD?" philosophy is more practical. Xenu was an evil galactic overlord. As a galactic overlord, he had lots of resources, in particular, lots of minions and henchmen to round people up and put them on spaceships, and lots of spaceships shaped like DC-8s, and lots of thermonuclear bombs. Unless you have access to similar resources, "WWXD?" is just not practical to apply to your everyday life.
I agree this is a big problem. I don't know about any of you, but all my spaceships are shaped like DC-10s.
Or maybe resistance is quantized, with one quantum of resistance being equal to the extra resistance from one extra thetan hanging around?
In my own experiments with E-meters (purchased off E-bay of course), I've found that one quantum of resistance is equal to two thetans. If you have an even number of thetans, then add one, there's no change at all, but add one more onto that, and bam, it jumps up.
Weird, I know. The universe is a mysterious place.
Makes it a great time to show up with a patent that could threaten the economy, doesn't it?
Not that I actually think this is part of the plan, or even that likely to happen, but doesn't the taxpayer having to shell out $1 billion in order to protect our banks and thus our economy itself from the threat of submarine patent trolls make a pretty damn good case for future reform? Our geeky one-click-patent or DRAM interface patent cases are perfectly clear cases to us, but this seems more mainstream.
it's racketeering, and they're getting away with it.
Yeah, probably. Sad part is that unless some major change to patent law came around, they'd probably get away with it one way or another.
It sounds like maybe the banks got themselves into this mess and perhaps deserve what is coming to them.
Yeah but sadly (or awesomely, if you're the banks), these institutions are vital to the workings of our economy, which means it is not necessarily in our best interest to let them get what's coming to them. Which is pretty crappy when you think about it, but it's more or less the same theory behind the bail outs in the subprime collapse.
Were electronic transfers allowed by the Feds or required by post 9/11 security requirements?
Maybe both, allowing electronic transfers can be separate from requiring scanning of checks so they can be sent to law enforcement. Hell, maybe neither directly applies, but the part about protecting them from patent trolling seems semi-genuine at least.
This whole thing reeks of corporate asshattery.
Indeed! I didn't emphasize it, but I'm basically assuming that this is only happening because it's going to cost the banks money, and like always they'd rather spend our nickle than their own. It's only with some bitter irony that I can also kinda maybe see the point in doing it. But damned if I like it.