Article 1, Section 8 places no limits on what Congress might tax or how it might do so, while the 16th Amendment qualifies that Congress may explicitly tax incomes, in addition to whatever else it might tax under its A1S8 powers.
"Income" is more properly defined as "sources of revenue" and not "profits".
This is all beside the point that (in the grandparent post) that if Congress meant for there to only be a 2% income tax, they would have written it explicitly into the 16th Amendment. Or, to address your concern, if they wanted to say "we'll only tax profits, and not revenues", they would have written it that way. The fact remains that they didn't, and that there's nothing in A1S8 or the 16th Amendment that prohibits them from taxing profits, revenues, or both.
Kelo v. New London is the case you're referring to, and it's only one of many emminent domain cases that the Court has heard over the years. Despite your intuition to the otherwise, the Court has consistenly ruled that the State is entitled to a fairly broad interpretation as to what constitutes a "public use/taking". The Court considers urban revitalization and a revitalization of a community's tax base to be in the community's best interest. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution can be read to provide a strong, textual legal basis for these rulings.
What's nice and democratic about Kelo (as opposed to the oft-cited "judicial activism" fiat that this case is supposed to be; the minority's opinion wants to limit what your duly elected representatives can do and the Fifth Amend. is silent as to why a state may take property) is that legislatures are generally responding to it in one of two ways:
Enacting a "no taking without more-than-just compensation" laws. That is, offering over 100% of fair market value for one's property, striving for an "everybody wins" scenario.
(To a lesser extent) Enacting no "private to private" takings laws, and thus tying their own hands with respect to certain types of future actions, reflecting more libertarian ideals.
If nothing else, Kelo brought this issue to a head, and legislatures are taking action to "correct" the decision as their communities see fit. Don't like it? Visit your legislators and tell them about it, or go vote for the other guy. This case not judicial fiat - it's democracy in action.
The way I look at things is that China has had unfettered access to our (relatively free) markets while it has severely limited Western ownership in and access to its markets. Their stance on human rights is awful. They wield draconian control over the Yuan. The balance of power has been relatively one-sided thus far. All this, even as they're in the midst of applying for membership in the WTO. At best, they pay lip-service to the WTO's (and thus, the West's) demands, including IP reform.
Anything that signals that China is becoming more willing to play the same game as the West is a welcome relief for me. Free trade must be reciprocal. That is, unless we wisen up and fully appreciate who it is we've been dumping dollars into all these years, to the detriment of our local manufacturing sectors.
The docs may be incomplete and inaccurate, and at times, confusing or misleading (I posit: which docs aren't, though?). But surely that doesn't make them non-existant, which is the sole claim that the poster makes...
*) Your 2-3MB JPEG photos will end up being not-so-small 20MB PNGs if you decoded them to RGBA and re-compressed them.
*) PNGs are nice and work a lot of places, but things like their alpha channel aren't properly supported on Windows, meaning that they don't work properly eveywhere.
*) All of GIF's patents have expired by now, or were held by IBM, never enforced, and are due to expire in ~2 months. Its lawsuit history is largely irrelevant now, except as historical anectdote. You should feel free to evaluate the recently-unencumbered format on its own merits.
If you click the 'I agree' it takes you to download some file that ends in ".DOC" - since I couldnt find any specifications for *that* file, I wasnt able to read them.
B.S. The docs were available on MSDN for years, and are now available elsewhere as well. How'd you think that OOo, AbiWord, KWord, and the like (largely) got their DOC support to where it is today?
A recipient of GPL-derived software can sue for the source code, but s/he can't sue/C&D for copyright infringement - only the copyright holder(s) have standing to do so. There's quite a difference between the two, and the GPL does not afford mere consumers of derived code the rights and priveleges of Copyright.
Unless whoever wrote that email has some affirmative copyright claim to the Linux kernel or graphics drivers, s/he does not have standing to sue for copyright infringement. The email's author is, of course, free to request that Kororaa cease distribution, but that and $0.50 will only him/her a $0.50 cup of coffee.
Further, one only needs to refer to Linus' view on binary kernel drivers and nVidia's license agreement to see that the relevant interested parties would likely agree that Kororaa is 100% in the clear.
Kororaa is not going to get C&D'd by someone who matters, and in the unlikely event that it does, Kororaa should C&D and seek competent legal counsel then, but not a moment sooner.
Reilly is running for MA's governor in 2006, and is the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee. It's even odds that this is a political stunt designed to pander to the "values" voters who might otherwise consider voting for the presumptive Republican nominee, Lt. Governor Healy.
Authored by: gary.edwards (of the Open Document Foundation) on Thursday, May 04 2006 @ 04:15 AM EDT Don't bother hunting for a download. It's not available. The ODF Plugin came out of testing last week. I wish i could say we did this last night, but it's been at least a year in development.
The first stop for the ODF Plugin will be Massachusetts, followed by the EU and California.
How is a student expected to have this familiarity? Does he/she get it while working on the project or is he/she supposed to already have it?... Has this been adressed in any way?
Each student has a mentor to guide and assist him/her throughout the SoC.
It's not a walled-off adult space, it's a foam-padded kiddie space.
Like it or not, the responsibility of raising children has largely been delegated to the children's parents. And parents have been given a great deal of leeway in determining how to best raise their own children. I don't think that you'll be able to convince many people that parents should't be in control of their children's upbringing, with all that it entails. And I don't imagine that you'll convince many people that exposing 4 year-olds to (say) hardcore porn is necessarily a good idea. They'd argue that 4 year olds simply aren't mentally mature enough to properly understand and evaluate the content on its own merits, and they may have a point.
What I instead argue is that parents' choices when upbringing their children shouldn't affect anyone who isn't their child. I'm advocating that we pick the battles we have a chance at winning, rather than fighting parents' entrenched rights to raise their own children as they see fit. Save that fight for another day...
I'm tired of my liberties evaporating because what I might do, say, see, or hear might offend little children's fragile eyes and ears. As a poster here once said, "won't someone please think of the children" is the Bill of Right's root password.
So let's beat the Feds by thinking of the children here too. Let's implement quality rating systems for websites, just like we do for TV, video games, and movies. Then, let's educate parents on how to use the V-chips in their TVs and the filtering software on their computers. We'll let the parents have a powerful, reliable filter so that they can decide what they and their children see and hear.
Then, get the FCC and the rest of government the heck out of my way, and let me see and hear "obscenity" on the damned television and library computers if I want to. Give me small government here, whose job is to make sure that I have enough reliable information in order to make an informed decision for myself and my family, and not legislate morality. And then let the market run its course.
Of course, I don't think that this is likely. We'd likely get the worst of both worlds here - the FCC legislating what is/is not "obscenity", COPPA, AND a mandatory ratings system for websites. But a man can dream, can't he?
The manuals exist for a reason. The developers generally don't have the time or ambition to develop software, write documentation, and be your on-call support team. Something must give, and since the developers are donating their time and you're asking them for a favor (they didn't ask you to use their free software, remember...), the developers get to prioritize how to spend their limited resources.
Better developers will help users help themselves (to a large degree) - user-editable Wiki-based documentation. Mailing lists. IRC channels. Forums. All signs of a vibrant community.
The problem with users *not* R'ing TFMs is that there is a huge disparity between the number of developers vs. the number of potential users. Helping each case individually is impractical. This becomes infuriating if the question has been answered before and could be found in 5 minutes using Google. You're wasting my time, and I value my donated time.
Rather than putting all of the onus on the developers to provide free software, free support, free documentation, free bug fixes, and free enhancements, the users must also buy into the community mindset. If you get help on some previously unanswered topic, take it upon yourself to document it in the project's Wiki. You too can be a producer, rather than just a consumer. Rather than taking up the community's resources without contributing anything back, please stop being leeches and contribute to the FOSS community where you can. The community only works if we all work toward a common goal, and whining about developers' lack of free time or bad attitude isn't going to help anything. Thanks.
And Microsoft gave into the Chinese government's demands and released their source code so that it could be audited. This is just the cost of doing business with powerful governments with large budgets. Lenovo should, like Microsoft, suck it up, or lose the US government's business. Turnabout is fair play, after all...
It can be changed globablly via one's gtkrc, but it's up to the applications themselves to provide an "alternate" button order (which most don't, save a few stock GTK+ dialogs).
How many people are "pirating" radio broadcasts? As opposed to CDs and pre-ripped songs? Honestly? How is this anything more than a pre-emptive power grab?
That's not really relevant. So long as the Court finds that the Constitution's copyright clause demands originality and expressiveness, the Feist ruling will stand until and unless the Constitution is amended. Any law to the contrary is null and void in the face of Feist, lest the Court re-examine its ruling and determine that it was errant (by a 9-0 margin, no less...) in the Feist decision.
For your example (which lacks even the case's name, let alone the more salient facts...), the data contained within the database (1-paragraph reviews) is expressive, and the Court has historically had a very low bar for determining expressivity. Being both original and expressive works of authorship, the individual database entries are Copyrightable, and thus the second company is guilty of violating copyright law when they copied them. Case closed.
Importantly, Feist v. Rural was a case about databases (phone books, specifically). Before Feist, courts used a "sweat of the brow" rule, which meant that anyone who invested significant effort into creating a work was entitled to copyright protection for that work. In their unanimous ruling, the Court reversed this precedent in Feist.
It is a long-standing principle of United States copyright law that "information" is not copyrightable, O'Connor notes, but "collections" of information can be. Rural claimed a collection copyright in its directory. The court clarified that the intent of copyright law was not, as claimed by Rural and some lower courts, to reward the efforts of persons collecting information, but rather "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (U.S. Const. 1.8.8), that is, to encourage creative expression.
Since facts are purely copied from the world around us, O'Connor concludes, "the sine qua non of copyright is originality".
Congress is considering new legislation to "protect" databases, thus effectively nullifying the ruling in Feist.
Of course, the MLB does not *have* to sell this data to anyone if they don't want to, and they could stop licensees from redistributing the data under contract law. But they can't stop other people from collecting this data and selling it. Nor can they enforce their "no recounts or descriptions of this game is permitted without the express written consent of MLB and $TV_STATION" clause either. No one owns facts.
No, you can't copyright facts or even collections of facts. SCOTUS has decreed that Copyright doesn't attach to them in the 1991 landmark decision of Feist v. Rural.
The ruling has major implications for any project that serves as a collection of knowledge. Information (that is facts, discoveries, etc.), from any source, is fair game, but cannot contain any of the "expressive" content added by the source author.
That's only if you assume that the majority of patches (for any piece of software, not necessarily just Microsoft's) are duct tape, rather than actual auto-body work. Following your analogy, the "new" car you bought was actually all dinged-up, scratched paint, busted taillight, etc. but you didn't really notice right away. These patches fill in the dings, replace the taillights, give you a new paint job, and generally "pimp your ride". You're left with a better ride than you had before, and maybe something a lot better than what you could buy new on the market. But then again, maybe your purchase was a "lemon" and you would just be better off trading it in and buying a Lexus instead than investing effort into repairing your junker.
The developers don't need to do a lick of work for this splash screen contest. It's fun, something a non-hacker can do, and good advertising for the Gimp. It's not like the devs are all drawing splash screens instead of making 16-bit support work (not that you have a right to demand that they do *anything*, let alone a specific feature on a specific timeline). It's not the "either-or" situation you make it out to be...
Fedora's #4 ranking on Distrowatch can hardly be called "marginal". Nevermind that one should also question the site's "page hit ranking" methodology before passing it off as representative, much less authoritative.
Slashdot Mirror
Article 1, Section 8 places no limits on what Congress might tax or how it might do so, while the 16th Amendment qualifies that Congress may explicitly tax incomes, in addition to whatever else it might tax under its A1S8 powers.
"Income" is more properly defined as "sources of revenue" and not "profits".
This is all beside the point that (in the grandparent post) that if Congress meant for there to only be a 2% income tax, they would have written it explicitly into the 16th Amendment. Or, to address your concern, if they wanted to say "we'll only tax profits, and not revenues", they would have written it that way. The fact remains that they didn't, and that there's nothing in A1S8 or the 16th Amendment that prohibits them from taxing profits, revenues, or both.
What's nice and democratic about Kelo (as opposed to the oft-cited "judicial activism" fiat that this case is supposed to be; the minority's opinion wants to limit what your duly elected representatives can do and the Fifth Amend. is silent as to why a state may take property) is that legislatures are generally responding to it in one of two ways:
If nothing else, Kelo brought this issue to a head, and legislatures are taking action to "correct" the decision as their communities see fit. Don't like it? Visit your legislators and tell them about it, or go vote for the other guy. This case not judicial fiat - it's democracy in action.
The way I look at things is that China has had unfettered access to our (relatively free) markets while it has severely limited Western ownership in and access to its markets. Their stance on human rights is awful. They wield draconian control over the Yuan. The balance of power has been relatively one-sided thus far. All this, even as they're in the midst of applying for membership in the WTO. At best, they pay lip-service to the WTO's (and thus, the West's) demands, including IP reform.
Anything that signals that China is becoming more willing to play the same game as the West is a welcome relief for me. Free trade must be reciprocal. That is, unless we wisen up and fully appreciate who it is we've been dumping dollars into all these years, to the detriment of our local manufacturing sectors.
Section 8 - Powers of Congress
... and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes
Amendment XVI - Status of Income Tax Clarified.
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived
The docs may be incomplete and inaccurate, and at times, confusing or misleading (I posit: which docs aren't, though?). But surely that doesn't make them non-existant, which is the sole claim that the poster makes...
*) Your 2-3MB JPEG photos will end up being not-so-small 20MB PNGs if you decoded them to RGBA and re-compressed them.
a tent_enforcement
*) PNGs are nice and work a lot of places, but things like their alpha channel aren't properly supported on Windows, meaning that they don't work properly eveywhere.
*) All of GIF's patents have expired by now, or were held by IBM, never enforced, and are due to expire in ~2 months. Its lawsuit history is largely irrelevant now, except as historical anectdote. You should feel free to evaluate the recently-unencumbered format on its own merits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_and_LZW_p
B.S. The docs were available on MSDN for years, and are now available elsewhere as well. How'd you think that OOo, AbiWord, KWord, and the like (largely) got their DOC support to where it is today?
http://wvware.sourceforge.net/wvInfo.html
http://www.wotsit.org/search.asp?s=text
Don't spread FUD. You don't know what you're talking about enough to do an effective job of it.
A recipient of GPL-derived software can sue for the source code, but s/he can't sue/C&D for copyright infringement - only the copyright holder(s) have standing to do so. There's quite a difference between the two, and the GPL does not afford mere consumers of derived code the rights and priveleges of Copyright.
IANAL, but...
Unless whoever wrote that email has some affirmative copyright claim to the Linux kernel or graphics drivers, s/he does not have standing to sue for copyright infringement. The email's author is, of course, free to request that Kororaa cease distribution, but that and $0.50 will only him/her a $0.50 cup of coffee.
Further, one only needs to refer to Linus' view on binary kernel drivers and nVidia's license agreement to see that the relevant interested parties would likely agree that Kororaa is 100% in the clear.
Kororaa is not going to get C&D'd by someone who matters, and in the unlikely event that it does, Kororaa should C&D and seek competent legal counsel then, but not a moment sooner.
Reilly is running for MA's governor in 2006, and is the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee. It's even odds that this is a political stunt designed to pander to the "values" voters who might otherwise consider voting for the presumptive Republican nominee, Lt. Governor Healy.
</cynicism>
Each student has a mentor to guide and assist him/her throughout the SoC.
http://code.google.com/soc/studentfaq.html#6
http://code.google.com/soc/mentorfaq.html
It's not a walled-off adult space, it's a foam-padded kiddie space.
Like it or not, the responsibility of raising children has largely been delegated to the children's parents. And parents have been given a great deal of leeway in determining how to best raise their own children. I don't think that you'll be able to convince many people that parents should't be in control of their children's upbringing, with all that it entails. And I don't imagine that you'll convince many people that exposing 4 year-olds to (say) hardcore porn is necessarily a good idea. They'd argue that 4 year olds simply aren't mentally mature enough to properly understand and evaluate the content on its own merits, and they may have a point.
What I instead argue is that parents' choices when upbringing their children shouldn't affect anyone who isn't their child. I'm advocating that we pick the battles we have a chance at winning, rather than fighting parents' entrenched rights to raise their own children as they see fit. Save that fight for another day...
I'm tired of my liberties evaporating because what I might do, say, see, or hear might offend little children's fragile eyes and ears. As a poster here once said, "won't someone please think of the children" is the Bill of Right's root password.
So let's beat the Feds by thinking of the children here too. Let's implement quality rating systems for websites, just like we do for TV, video games, and movies. Then, let's educate parents on how to use the V-chips in their TVs and the filtering software on their computers. We'll let the parents have a powerful, reliable filter so that they can decide what they and their children see and hear.
Then, get the FCC and the rest of government the heck out of my way, and let me see and hear "obscenity" on the damned television and library computers if I want to. Give me small government here, whose job is to make sure that I have enough reliable information in order to make an informed decision for myself and my family, and not legislate morality. And then let the market run its course.
Of course, I don't think that this is likely. We'd likely get the worst of both worlds here - the FCC legislating what is/is not "obscenity", COPPA, AND a mandatory ratings system for websites. But a man can dream, can't he?
The manuals exist for a reason. The developers generally don't have the time or ambition to develop software, write documentation, and be your on-call support team. Something must give, and since the developers are donating their time and you're asking them for a favor (they didn't ask you to use their free software, remember...), the developers get to prioritize how to spend their limited resources.
Better developers will help users help themselves (to a large degree) - user-editable Wiki-based documentation. Mailing lists. IRC channels. Forums. All signs of a vibrant community.
The problem with users *not* R'ing TFMs is that there is a huge disparity between the number of developers vs. the number of potential users. Helping each case individually is impractical. This becomes infuriating if the question has been answered before and could be found in 5 minutes using Google. You're wasting my time, and I value my donated time.
Rather than putting all of the onus on the developers to provide free software, free support, free documentation, free bug fixes, and free enhancements, the users must also buy into the community mindset. If you get help on some previously unanswered topic, take it upon yourself to document it in the project's Wiki. You too can be a producer, rather than just a consumer. Rather than taking up the community's resources without contributing anything back, please stop being leeches and contribute to the FOSS community where you can. The community only works if we all work toward a common goal, and whining about developers' lack of free time or bad attitude isn't going to help anything. Thanks.
And Microsoft gave into the Chinese government's demands and released their source code so that it could be audited. This is just the cost of doing business with powerful governments with large budgets. Lenovo should, like Microsoft, suck it up, or lose the US government's business. Turnabout is fair play, after all...
against 85 year old ex-MPAA mogul Jack Valenti ;)
*ducks*
It can be changed globablly via one's gtkrc, but it's up to the applications themselves to provide an "alternate" button order (which most don't, save a few stock GTK+ dialogs).
t ings.html#GtkSettings--gtk-alternative-button-orde r
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/GtkSet
How many people are "pirating" radio broadcasts? As opposed to CDs and pre-ripped songs? Honestly? How is this anything more than a pre-emptive power grab?
That's not really relevant. So long as the Court finds that the Constitution's copyright clause demands originality and expressiveness, the Feist ruling will stand until and unless the Constitution is amended. Any law to the contrary is null and void in the face of Feist, lest the Court re-examine its ruling and determine that it was errant (by a 9-0 margin, no less...) in the Feist decision.
For your example (which lacks even the case's name, let alone the more salient facts...), the data contained within the database (1-paragraph reviews) is expressive, and the Court has historically had a very low bar for determining expressivity. Being both original and expressive works of authorship, the individual database entries are Copyrightable, and thus the second company is guilty of violating copyright law when they copied them. Case closed.
That's only if you assume that the majority of patches (for any piece of software, not necessarily just Microsoft's) are duct tape, rather than actual auto-body work. Following your analogy, the "new" car you bought was actually all dinged-up, scratched paint, busted taillight, etc. but you didn't really notice right away. These patches fill in the dings, replace the taillights, give you a new paint job, and generally "pimp your ride". You're left with a better ride than you had before, and maybe something a lot better than what you could buy new on the market. But then again, maybe your purchase was a "lemon" and you would just be better off trading it in and buying a Lexus instead than investing effort into repairing your junker.
The developers don't need to do a lick of work for this splash screen contest. It's fun, something a non-hacker can do, and good advertising for the Gimp. It's not like the devs are all drawing splash screens instead of making 16-bit support work (not that you have a right to demand that they do *anything*, let alone a specific feature on a specific timeline). It's not the "either-or" situation you make it out to be...
Fedora's #4 ranking on Distrowatch can hardly be called "marginal". Nevermind that one should also question the site's "page hit ranking" methodology before passing it off as representative, much less authoritative.