Taxes: Virginia 911 tax: 0.75 Virginia sales tax: 1.70
Surcharges (the phone company is permitted by the government to assess these charges due to specific regulations and requirements that the government places upon them): Federal Universal Service Fund: 0.77 Virginia Gross Receipts: 0.16 Virginia Special Revenue: 0.03
Other charges: Administrative Charge: 0.75 Regulatory Charge: 0.20
The headline here is misleading. Blizzard has won summary judgment on a portion of their lawsuit during pre-trial motions, and MDY won summary judgment on a couple of the counts of Blizzard's suit against them (though Blizzard's victories here are hugely more devastating to MDY than the parts that MDY has prevailed on). The trial on the rest of the suit is still pending, and only after that comes the calculation and awarding of damages.
According to the court opinion, you bought a license to use the software in accordance with the terms of the EULA/TOS. You therefore don't own the copy of the software in your possession, and therefore aren't entitled to load a copy of the software into RAM except in accordance with the EULA/TOS.
People keep touting ex post facto as the reason for unconstitutionality here. I say that's bunk, and comes from naivete re: the Constitution.
So, allow me to add my own naive perspective: If this is unconstitutional, it will be far more likely to be so due to a violation of either the separation of powers or the first amendment right of petition.
We do not know if he actually intended to complete the transaction, or simply highlight the fact that lobbyists buy votes all the time.
Intent can be inferred from the fact that he listed his auction on eBay, where the expectation is that you will follow through on all successful auctions.
I was going to post something similar. I was apartment shopping earlier this year, and the amount of astroturfing and astrotrolling* was incredible.
Any filter that decreases the amount of information that I can use to evaluate the "truthiness" of a review is a bad thing. What's more, if filters like this catch on, people will be selling FEO (filter engine optimization) services to game the filters with their astroturf, and then the reviews will become completely useless.
* In case I just made up a word, what I mean by "astrotrolling" is people who post shit about a product to get people not to buy it because they have a separate axe to grind against the seller. In the case of apartments, it's often poor tenants who tore up the apartment/broke the lease/got evicted and still amazingly expected their security back.
Maybe there are other sources for these materials, maybe not. But you can't just call "bullshit" on the idea that higher prices often result in greater availability.
No company is going to mine gallium at a loss, so as long as gallium prices are low enough to make mining from more difficult sources unprofitable, that gallium is essentially unavailable. Let the market raise the price as current gallium supplies deplete, and this new gallium source suddenly becomes worthwhile.
For all we know, there's 10,000 years' worth of gallium hidden a few miles deeper than our deepest mines, and the only reason we haven't started mining it is because it's currently too expensive to find it. Of course, maybe there's not, but we won't know until prices go up and speculators start looking for it.
Flash for DRM is (as you've sort of noted) about as silly as Javascript for DRM. After all, "anyone who can make screenshots" would be anyone who knows where the magic PrtSc key is on their keyboard and also knows what it does. Javascript used to be popular to suppress the right-click context menu, so that web developers could "prevent" people from ripping off their uber kewl web programming leetness. Now, Firefox still pops up the message box that the web developer put in to tell you that you can't use the context menu, and then it shows you the context menu anyway. (And that's with Javascript enabled, to say nothing of NoScript.)
Who has the authority to limit functionality of my devices, and how do they get that authority? In this order: the Content Cabal, Russian hackers, and federal law enforcement. The Content Cabal gets the authority because they pay Congress and/or the FCC for it, the Russian hackers get that authority because our own security-fu is weak, and law enforcement gets it because terrorists scare the shit out of us.
What prevents them from abusing that power? Content Cabal: Nothing (once their power is ensconced in law, it's too late); Russian hackers: Nothing (the teeming masses of neophyte device users will never learn to make themselves secure); and Law Enforcement: Nothing (you can't complain about what you don't know about).
Do I get the ability to override their limitations? In what circumstances, and how? I want some of what you're smoking. But seriously, the only guaranteed way to override these limitations is to use devices that are not equipped with such "functionality". (In the case of the Content Cabal and law enforcement, this may eventually not be legally possible.)
Can they override my override? As with any form of DRM, it will be a war of escalation between those who want control over their own devices and those who have a vested interest in wresting that control away from you. Any security you manage to get for yourself will eventually become obsolete, either because (a) the device itself reaches obsolescence, through format changes, licensing, insufficient processing power, or plain old wear and tear, or (b) the security measures you obtain are eventually counteracted through countersecurity measures. Neither side will win, of course, which is why the Content Cabal and law enforcement will seek criminal penalties against those who try to maintain control over their own devices.
Well, at the end of the Diablo II expansion, Tyrael destroys the Worldstone, and the gist of things is that Anything Could Happen after that. (Including Blizzard co-branding a new Diablo III mouse with extra-rugged buttons.)
All I see is fifty bazillion unnecessary Flash widgets, with a smidgen of text way at the bottom. They even apparently require Flash just to show a fancy capital "T".
Maybe that's the point. In Diablo III, you, the hapless adventurer, are given the Nerd's Gaming Rig of Total Righteousness (Unique Item), and must venture through the Gates of Hell to destroy Diablo's armies of pointless Flash widgets.
In the expansion, you essentially do the same thing, except now they're all Silverlight widgets, and you face off against a chair-throwing Steve Ballmer at the end.
I'm pretty sure that closing down a distribution center is part of a cost-benefit analysis. If the additional taxes result in less profit than simply closing down the distribution center, then they close it down. It's not done out of vengeance - it's merely a rational business decision.
On the other hand, attempting to ensure that companies like Amazon.com pay sales tax when they can easily move their operations out of state is a foolhardy proposition for state legislators. Considering that there are states that have effectively pushed Amazon out of their jurisdiction through their taxation decisions, it's fairly clear that state legislators are not making rational business decisions.
Also keep in mind that the coding for base triplets into amino acids is governed by tRNA, which are short segments of RNA that conform to provide one end that holds an amino acid and the other end (actually the middle, but folded over) that has a three-base segment that binds to mRNA during translation. tRNA are coded in the cell's DNA, so if you really wanted to change the translation table, you would just change the genes that produce tRNA in the first place.
It is possible, however, that the idea here is to form tRNAs that can accommodate new molecules other than the amino acids normally appearing in proteins.
Gates also ripped on the filesystem (or possibly Explorer, more specifically), Windows networking, and the registry. He was also disappointed that Microsoft-provided apps and patches, from both microsoft.com and the Windows Update site were taking a huge crap in the add/remove programs list.
I need to learn how to use Thomas? Here's what I found out about your citations in less than five minutes:
109th Congress, S.2590: Half the freakin' Senate (47 senators) cosponsored this bill. Tom Coburn was the bill's sponsor. How does that translate into Obama being responsible for passing it into law?
110th Congress, S.2433: Neither it nor its House version (H.R.1302) have passed. The bill had been introduced in the 109th Congress in the House but not the Senate.
109th Congress, S.1949: Also did not pass. Obama is listed as its only cosponsor.
Actually, Obama claimed three pieces of legislation in one of his ads, and FactCheck.org debunked all three claims to varying degrees.
But a more careful review via thomas.loc.gov reveals the following:
110th Congress: 19 amendments to other bills sponsored and passed. All of these amendments (including parent poster's "ethics and lobbying reform" were passed by voice vote or unanimous consent.
109th Congress: S. 2125, Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006. Passed both Senate and House without recorded vote. S. 3757, Named a post office after someone. House version passed both House and Senate without recorded vote. A variety of other amendments to other bills were passed as well.
I didn't see any major pieces of legislation at all, and I must have missed the other ones the parent mentioned above (though I was only looking at legislation that became law).
As for compromise, Obama pales in comparison to his opponent.
The CEO did say that, should anything happen to LGP, he and all of his dev team are authorized to distribute patches which remove the check. So if they're able to issue a patch that removes the check, what prevents, say, anybody else on the face of the planet from doing the same?
Slashdot Mirror
My phone bill last month included the following:
Taxes:
Virginia 911 tax: 0.75
Virginia sales tax: 1.70
Surcharges (the phone company is permitted by the government to assess these charges due to specific regulations and requirements that the government places upon them):
Federal Universal Service Fund: 0.77
Virginia Gross Receipts: 0.16
Virginia Special Revenue: 0.03
Other charges:
Administrative Charge: 0.75
Regulatory Charge: 0.20
That's on a normally $35 bill.
The headline here is misleading. Blizzard has won summary judgment on a portion of their lawsuit during pre-trial motions, and MDY won summary judgment on a couple of the counts of Blizzard's suit against them (though Blizzard's victories here are hugely more devastating to MDY than the parts that MDY has prevailed on). The trial on the rest of the suit is still pending, and only after that comes the calculation and awarding of damages.
According to the court opinion, you bought a license to use the software in accordance with the terms of the EULA/TOS. You therefore don't own the copy of the software in your possession, and therefore aren't entitled to load a copy of the software into RAM except in accordance with the EULA/TOS.
I tried to mod you up, but my connection timed o
I don't know if there's another Nelnet, or if Nelnet has holdings in the telecom industry, but they're actually in the student loan business.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelnet
Actually, 60 votes would have been required to adopt any of these amendments (not sure why, though - perhaps someone else can elucidate us).
People keep touting ex post facto as the reason for unconstitutionality here. I say that's bunk, and comes from naivete re: the Constitution.
So, allow me to add my own naive perspective: If this is unconstitutional, it will be far more likely to be so due to a violation of either the separation of powers or the first amendment right of petition.
(Standard "I, Anal" clause applies.)
btw, http://www.c64web.com/ is hosted on a smoldering heap of slag.
Fixed.
We do not know if he actually intended to complete the transaction, or simply highlight the fact that lobbyists buy votes all the time.
Intent can be inferred from the fact that he listed his auction on eBay, where the expectation is that you will follow through on all successful auctions.
I was going to post something similar. I was apartment shopping earlier this year, and the amount of astroturfing and astrotrolling* was incredible.
Any filter that decreases the amount of information that I can use to evaluate the "truthiness" of a review is a bad thing. What's more, if filters like this catch on, people will be selling FEO (filter engine optimization) services to game the filters with their astroturf, and then the reviews will become completely useless.
* In case I just made up a word, what I mean by "astrotrolling" is people who post shit about a product to get people not to buy it because they have a separate axe to grind against the seller. In the case of apartments, it's often poor tenants who tore up the apartment/broke the lease/got evicted and still amazingly expected their security back.
Pink text on green background.
Hey, stop ripping off my MySpace page!
Beavis: (clutching heart) My liver! My liver!
Butt-Head: Uhhh.... lower down, dude.
Beavis: (clutching nads) My liver! My liver!
Maybe there are other sources for these materials, maybe not. But you can't just call "bullshit" on the idea that higher prices often result in greater availability.
No company is going to mine gallium at a loss, so as long as gallium prices are low enough to make mining from more difficult sources unprofitable, that gallium is essentially unavailable. Let the market raise the price as current gallium supplies deplete, and this new gallium source suddenly becomes worthwhile.
For all we know, there's 10,000 years' worth of gallium hidden a few miles deeper than our deepest mines, and the only reason we haven't started mining it is because it's currently too expensive to find it. Of course, maybe there's not, but we won't know until prices go up and speculators start looking for it.
Flash for DRM is (as you've sort of noted) about as silly as Javascript for DRM. After all, "anyone who can make screenshots" would be anyone who knows where the magic PrtSc key is on their keyboard and also knows what it does. Javascript used to be popular to suppress the right-click context menu, so that web developers could "prevent" people from ripping off their uber kewl web programming leetness. Now, Firefox still pops up the message box that the web developer put in to tell you that you can't use the context menu, and then it shows you the context menu anyway. (And that's with Javascript enabled, to say nothing of NoScript.)
Hmm. Maybe I should try to get "not having Flash installed" classified as a disability, because Flash content is totally inaccessible to me.
Well, at the end of the Diablo II expansion, Tyrael destroys the Worldstone, and the gist of things is that Anything Could Happen after that. (Including Blizzard co-branding a new Diablo III mouse with extra-rugged buttons.)
All I see is fifty bazillion unnecessary Flash widgets, with a smidgen of text way at the bottom. They even apparently require Flash just to show a fancy capital "T".
Maybe that's the point. In Diablo III, you, the hapless adventurer, are given the Nerd's Gaming Rig of Total Righteousness (Unique Item), and must venture through the Gates of Hell to destroy Diablo's armies of pointless Flash widgets.
In the expansion, you essentially do the same thing, except now they're all Silverlight widgets, and you face off against a chair-throwing Steve Ballmer at the end.
I'm pretty sure that closing down a distribution center is part of a cost-benefit analysis. If the additional taxes result in less profit than simply closing down the distribution center, then they close it down. It's not done out of vengeance - it's merely a rational business decision.
On the other hand, attempting to ensure that companies like Amazon.com pay sales tax when they can easily move their operations out of state is a foolhardy proposition for state legislators. Considering that there are states that have effectively pushed Amazon out of their jurisdiction through their taxation decisions, it's fairly clear that state legislators are not making rational business decisions.
Also keep in mind that the coding for base triplets into amino acids is governed by tRNA, which are short segments of RNA that conform to provide one end that holds an amino acid and the other end (actually the middle, but folded over) that has a three-base segment that binds to mRNA during translation. tRNA are coded in the cell's DNA, so if you really wanted to change the translation table, you would just change the genes that produce tRNA in the first place.
It is possible, however, that the idea here is to form tRNAs that can accommodate new molecules other than the amino acids normally appearing in proteins.
Dear Sir,
We will have your obligatory Futurama reference done by next Tuesday. Please transfer the funds to the aforementioned offshore bank account.
Gates also ripped on the filesystem (or possibly Explorer, more specifically), Windows networking, and the registry. He was also disappointed that Microsoft-provided apps and patches, from both microsoft.com and the Windows Update site were taking a huge crap in the add/remove programs list.
I need to learn how to use Thomas? Here's what I found out about your citations in less than five minutes:
109th Congress, S.2590: Half the freakin' Senate (47 senators) cosponsored this bill. Tom Coburn was the bill's sponsor. How does that translate into Obama being responsible for passing it into law?
110th Congress, S.2433: Neither it nor its House version (H.R.1302) have passed. The bill had been introduced in the 109th Congress in the House but not the Senate.
109th Congress, S.1949: Also did not pass. Obama is listed as its only cosponsor.
Actually, Obama claimed three pieces of legislation in one of his ads, and FactCheck.org debunked all three claims to varying degrees.
But a more careful review via thomas.loc.gov reveals the following:
110th Congress: 19 amendments to other bills sponsored and passed. All of these amendments (including parent poster's "ethics and lobbying reform" were passed by voice vote or unanimous consent.
109th Congress:
S. 2125, Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006. Passed both Senate and House without recorded vote.
S. 3757, Named a post office after someone. House version passed both House and Senate without recorded vote.
A variety of other amendments to other bills were passed as well.
I didn't see any major pieces of legislation at all, and I must have missed the other ones the parent mentioned above (though I was only looking at legislation that became law).
As for compromise, Obama pales in comparison to his opponent.