There are actually already a number of programs that can do that (and there are numerous voice chat/VoIP apps out there). The real question is the one that WotC didn't answer here, namely, what's their pricing structure look like, and will they be charging a monthly fee for access as opposed to the flat fees that the existing software packages charge for?
The other question (unasked) is whether 4th edition would be licensable for third-party virtual tabletop (VTT) software. When the d20/OGL license was instituted, WotC wasn't all that interested in VTT, though they did include provisions for VTT software (such as banning functionality for autocalculation of things like "did my attack roll result in a hit"). Now that they foresee that being a not insignificant part of their business model, they hold all the, er, cards in terms of preventing third-party VTT vendors from playing in the 4th edition arena.
Of course, given the openness of the previous OGL, my group is sticking with 3.5th edition and our already-paid-for VTT software.
You've struck on the actual reason for this proposal: Congress gave banks the ability to do these transactions, unaware that there was a submarine patent covering similar technology. Now that all the banks, given the blessing of Congress, are facing lawsuits due to that patent, Congress (or at least some people in Congress) are trying to shield the banks from the damages arising from adopting the new rules in good faith.
Why we should have to pay a billion dollars for it is beyond me. Congress has absolute Constitutional control over patents, including the ability to summarily revoke them (unless there's some case law involved here, which I'd be interested in reading about if anyone knows of any).
Reputable sources have indicated that the body count is somewhere in the 80,000's. The Soros-funded Lancet study's inflated claim has had numerous holes poked in it.
And there is definitely a point for us to be there now, even if there wasn't a point for us to go there in the first place: to help the Iraqis form stable internal peacekeeping mechanisms so that we can eventually leave without precipitating mass chaos.
Actually, Saddam was doing his best not to make it obvious that he didn't have WMDs. He feared the threat of attack from Iran (who, he feared, might attack if he didn't have WMDs) more than he feared the threat of an attack from the US (who might attack if he did have them), so he did what he could to prevent weapons inspectors from ever reaching the definitive conclusion that he had no WMDs. Unfortunately, our intelligence machinery failed throughout the late 1990s right on into 2003. Both Clinton and Bush were duped by the ruse, the difference being that Bush actually acted upon it.
Does the composition of the star play a big role in its luminosity? Admittedly, I didn't know about the M^3.5 relationship, but my uncertainty about the effect of composition on luminosity was why I was being so vague. IANAA, and all that;)
Maybe you haven't been keeping up with things, but the Iraqis are actually taking their country back from the insurgents/terrorists now, with US help in training their army and police. While there are still some bad spots - Al Qaeda moved to Mosul after Baghdad started getting too tough for them - things are enormously better in Iraq now. Iraqis who have day-to-day contact with US forces (and a lot of them do) have a very positive image of our troops, often trusting them to get things done because the Iraqi forces are still dealing with internal bureaucracy and corruption. That word has spread, to the point where people across Iraq are standing up to make their neighborhoods more secure.
This isn't about a simplistic "the trrrists will win if we leave", even though it's true that they will. It's about people's lives. While we shouldn't have gone into Iraq in the first place, it's too late to pretend we never went - we have to deal with the consequences of the invasion and as well as the years during which the "do more for less" policy was pushed by Rumsfeld. Yes, thousands of innocent civilians have died at our hands, and tens of thousands have died at the hands of the terrorists, but hundreds of thousands will die if we leave Iraq to be split up by Iran and Al Qaeda.
By the way, the article wasn't merely talking about preventing attacks on our troops. Part of the surge strategy was to ensure that American troops are in the neighborhoods and interacting with the Iraqi people on a constant basis rather than holing up in bases and bunkers. That opens them up to further attacks, but our troops know how to defend themselves (easily the deadliest thing for our soldiers in a combat situation is buried IEDs, because insurgents and terrorists are usually extremely poor shots using the fairly inaccurate AK-47). What kills so many civilians is suicide bombings, shootings in crowds, and other activities that the study from the article hopes to pattern and predict. Much like the current mission in Iraq, the study is about saving civilian lives first and foremost.
Insolation (sunshine intensity) decreases with the square of the distance to the star. However, the relationship between star volume/mass and its radiation are more complicated than that, and TFA doesn't go into details.
The vehicle is already designed to withstand the stresses and temperatures of launch and maneuvering (Wikipedia notes that the catalyzed reaction can result in the reaction chamber reaching 800 deg C in a matter of milliseconds). It's possible that, depending on the containment used on board the craft, the hydrazine fuel could survive re-entry. Really, there's only one way to find out for sure, and the military doesn't intend on allowing that to happen. No offense, but considering that this is a classified multi-bazillion-dollar satellite, and you probably don't have security clearance, I'd consider the military's statement on the matter to be somewhat more reliable than your conclusions.
* The dry cleaners that he was suing found his pants. This lady's laptop is still lost.
Okay, so the remedy for a lost laptop is to be compensated for the value of the laptop when it was given into Best Buy's possession, same as with any property you give into someone else's keeping for a time. If you drop your car off at the mechanic and they accidentally drop it in a car crusher, you get the Blue Book value (or thereabouts) of your car.
* The dry cleaners offered to reimburse him $12,000, which is orders of magnitude more than what his pants cost. Best Buy is lowballing this lady.
Not really. If she paid $1100 for the laptop new, plus $300 for a warranty, then their offer of $1100 in monetary compensation plus $500 store credit is more than reasonable.
* The dry cleaners were a small business, and the money he was asking for would have closed their shop down and permanently saddled them with debt. Best Buy is a major corporation that can afford this payout. It will sting them, but not completely bankrupt them.
So what. Best Buy breached a contract, plain and simple. The remedy for breach of contract is to be compensated for the damages you actually suffer, unless the conduct is so ridiculously negligent that punitive damages are merited (I have other beefs about punitive damages, but I won't go into them here). That should apply regardless of how deep the pockets are that you're trying to reach into. Best Buy may have lost her laptop - heck, one of their employees may have it at home or may have sold it for crack money, who knows. But even stalling about it for three months doesn't mean that the plaintiff was any more damaged than she would have been had they owned up to it right away.
* Crazy Pants Guy probably didn't have his social security and bank account numbers in his pants when he dropped them off. This lady probably did have such information on her laptop.
This is pretty much the only valid reason to ask the court to give the woman additional compensation, but this is dependent specifically upon DC law which specifies that the plaintiff can recover actual damages, plus court costs and reasonable attorney's fees. If actual damages turn out to be very low, the court might decide that much of the attorney's fees here are unreasonable.
* Crazy Pants Guy didn't pay $300 to guarantee that should something happen to his pants, he should be treated particularly well. This lady did.
Then the breach of the warranty contract should result in that $300 being returned to the plaintiff as damages.
* To my knowledge, Crazy Pants Guy didn't approach the dry cleaners and try to make nice with a good-faith offer to make things right. This lady did.
That's just the thing - her request wasn't reasonable, even from the outset, when she was asking for compensation in an amount that was well within the limits of a small-claims court's jurisdiction (to wit, $2110.35). She was attempting to get compensation not just for the computer itself (at the full retail price she paid for it a year earlier!) or the warranty fee, but for "pictures and music she couldn't replace" despite signing an agreement that Best Buy wouldn't be held responsible for her data, and for "time wasted being lied to," etc. etc.
Even if her request at the time was reasonable, it ballooned into an amount more than 25000 times as much (and, if you ignore the ludicrous $54 million portion of her current lawsuit, she's still asking the court to award her roughly 100 times as much as her original settlement offer. This is RIAA legal tactics, pure and simple, but somehow she gets away with it in the court of Slashdot opinion.
My judgment: $300 for breach of the warranty contract, plus the depreciated value of the laptop at the time of the loss, plus court costs. If the judge (or jury) rules the way it should, she'll probably wish she'd taken Best Buy's rather generous offer.
Next case!
Seriously, the attention she gets from filing a $54 million lawsuit, rather than filing this in small claims like she should have in the first place, could only be negative. The damages part of her lawsuit make her the female computer-owning counterpart to Crazy Pants Guy, even if she's in the right on the liability part of the suit.
The Supreme Court has made a number of decisions regarding that clause that weaken it substantially. For example, sex offender registration for offenders whose offenses were committed before the registration law was passed are still required to register. Another situation involves misdemeanor domestic violence offenders, who can also be barred from possessing firearms even if their offense was committed before the law barring firearm possession was passed.
Additionally, civil matters are generally not protected by the ex post facto clause, as well as laws that decriminalize an offense.
I think that New Line is scummy for their shady accounting practices, but they really should not have had to negotiate for the film rights to begin with. I like to view this situation as them lying in their own made bed. After all, it's the content industry that demanded ridiculous copyright terms (and multiple extensions, to boot), so it warms the cockles of my heart to see one of them get bit on the ass.
It's not like these guys are really putting anyone in a bind. Real Networks has a responsibility to inspect and maintain their own product, and since they have the source code, there's nothing preventing from doing so. And people who are uninterested in paying them umpteen bazillion dollars for their expertise are welcome to take my advice, given for free:
Plus, do you have time to drive down to the helpful, cheerful people down in the county courthouse to look up some maps during the day? They work for the government - they don't care how busy you are. Believe it or not, you can fire a corporation. The government can throw you in jail. Actually, one of the folks who works at the map room at the Kanawha County assessor's office really is a friendly guy. We chewed the fat one day last year when I was looking up some maps, and he related to me the story of an old deed they found one day that described a property boundary as, "Starting from a 1947 Ford..."
That said, having access to these maps online, as well as the county tax records (the county Sheriff actually has searchable tax records available online) has already saved me a ton of time.
People have been doing this with Flash (another now-Adobe product) for ages. One flash ad redirects you to a second flash widget on a malicious website to get around Adobe's lame attempts at cross-site protection, and that second flash ad gives you the business.
That's just the thing - you haven't already paid for it. They pay people in these offices to do their jobs, and when you walk in and say, "Yeah, I'll have one of everything, please," that person's time is diverted from whatever else they were doing so that they can make copies for you (which also requires copier toner and paper, inflicts wear on the copier/maps/deed books (some of which can be quite old)/etc.). Your tax dollars pay to run the office in general and make those records available for public perusal, but copying is extra and is (quite appropriately) charged separately so that we're not all paying the tax bill for your wasteful indiscretion.
I knew the trolls would come out eventually. I'd just like you to know that another West Virginia county was thinking about this stuff early enough to pick up assessor.org.
The level of accuracy varies wildly, dependent upon who's drawing the maps and when they were drawn. I took one of the aforementioned Kanawha County, WV, maps to do some actual research (not just for fun, but possibly for legal purposes, so I'm really glad this company put them online) and overlaid it on top of a Google map of the area (okay, this part was for fun, since I know the maps aren't meant to be used in this regard). I got all four corners to line up pretty well with the underlying terrain, and most of the rest of the map lined up as well, but the stuff I was really interested was off by a few hundred yards (in particular, some old rights-of-way that were never more than poorly-maintained dirt roads) are way off from their actual location). This was probably because the last time that land was surveyed was probably as part of the execution of a will in the 1940s to 1960s sometime, probably done on the cheap, and since then, all of the subdivided parcels were bought up by the same person, so there's been no survey to correct the issue.
As you say, not accurate. But still fun (by which I mean "nerd fun";) ).
That very wrongly assumes that tax savings by a corporation would be used to increase productivity. Many times it goes to pay large bonuses to members of the board. The stories about this are very easy to find on an almost daily basis. Well, first of all, I said usually, and secondly, in at least some cases of large executive bonuses, the company actually believes that keeping said executive on-staff and well-paid is worth the money. Labor is a cost of doing business, and you're making a value judgment by saying that paying a large sum to an executive is a detriment to productivity while paying that money out to the Joe Sixpacks working there would be beneficial.
Slashdot Mirror
There are actually already a number of programs that can do that (and there are numerous voice chat/VoIP apps out there). The real question is the one that WotC didn't answer here, namely, what's their pricing structure look like, and will they be charging a monthly fee for access as opposed to the flat fees that the existing software packages charge for?
The other question (unasked) is whether 4th edition would be licensable for third-party virtual tabletop (VTT) software. When the d20/OGL license was instituted, WotC wasn't all that interested in VTT, though they did include provisions for VTT software (such as banning functionality for autocalculation of things like "did my attack roll result in a hit"). Now that they foresee that being a not insignificant part of their business model, they hold all the, er, cards in terms of preventing third-party VTT vendors from playing in the 4th edition arena.
Of course, given the openness of the previous OGL, my group is sticking with 3.5th edition and our already-paid-for VTT software.
You've struck on the actual reason for this proposal: Congress gave banks the ability to do these transactions, unaware that there was a submarine patent covering similar technology. Now that all the banks, given the blessing of Congress, are facing lawsuits due to that patent, Congress (or at least some people in Congress) are trying to shield the banks from the damages arising from adopting the new rules in good faith.
Why we should have to pay a billion dollars for it is beyond me. Congress has absolute Constitutional control over patents, including the ability to summarily revoke them (unless there's some case law involved here, which I'd be interested in reading about if anyone knows of any).
Very interesting. Thanks much for the response. :)
Reputable sources have indicated that the body count is somewhere in the 80,000's. The Soros-funded Lancet study's inflated claim has had numerous holes poked in it.
And there is definitely a point for us to be there now, even if there wasn't a point for us to go there in the first place: to help the Iraqis form stable internal peacekeeping mechanisms so that we can eventually leave without precipitating mass chaos.
Actually, Saddam was doing his best not to make it obvious that he didn't have WMDs. He feared the threat of attack from Iran (who, he feared, might attack if he didn't have WMDs) more than he feared the threat of an attack from the US (who might attack if he did have them), so he did what he could to prevent weapons inspectors from ever reaching the definitive conclusion that he had no WMDs. Unfortunately, our intelligence machinery failed throughout the late 1990s right on into 2003. Both Clinton and Bush were duped by the ruse, the difference being that Bush actually acted upon it.
Does the composition of the star play a big role in its luminosity? Admittedly, I didn't know about the M^3.5 relationship, but my uncertainty about the effect of composition on luminosity was why I was being so vague. IANAA, and all that ;)
Maybe you haven't been keeping up with things, but the Iraqis are actually taking their country back from the insurgents/terrorists now, with US help in training their army and police. While there are still some bad spots - Al Qaeda moved to Mosul after Baghdad started getting too tough for them - things are enormously better in Iraq now. Iraqis who have day-to-day contact with US forces (and a lot of them do) have a very positive image of our troops, often trusting them to get things done because the Iraqi forces are still dealing with internal bureaucracy and corruption. That word has spread, to the point where people across Iraq are standing up to make their neighborhoods more secure.
This isn't about a simplistic "the trrrists will win if we leave", even though it's true that they will. It's about people's lives. While we shouldn't have gone into Iraq in the first place, it's too late to pretend we never went - we have to deal with the consequences of the invasion and as well as the years during which the "do more for less" policy was pushed by Rumsfeld. Yes, thousands of innocent civilians have died at our hands, and tens of thousands have died at the hands of the terrorists, but hundreds of thousands will die if we leave Iraq to be split up by Iran and Al Qaeda.
By the way, the article wasn't merely talking about preventing attacks on our troops. Part of the surge strategy was to ensure that American troops are in the neighborhoods and interacting with the Iraqi people on a constant basis rather than holing up in bases and bunkers. That opens them up to further attacks, but our troops know how to defend themselves (easily the deadliest thing for our soldiers in a combat situation is buried IEDs, because insurgents and terrorists are usually extremely poor shots using the fairly inaccurate AK-47). What kills so many civilians is suicide bombings, shootings in crowds, and other activities that the study from the article hopes to pattern and predict. Much like the current mission in Iraq, the study is about saving civilian lives first and foremost.
Insolation (sunshine intensity) decreases with the square of the distance to the star. However, the relationship between star volume/mass and its radiation are more complicated than that, and TFA doesn't go into details.
The vehicle is already designed to withstand the stresses and temperatures of launch and maneuvering (Wikipedia notes that the catalyzed reaction can result in the reaction chamber reaching 800 deg C in a matter of milliseconds). It's possible that, depending on the containment used on board the craft, the hydrazine fuel could survive re-entry. Really, there's only one way to find out for sure, and the military doesn't intend on allowing that to happen. No offense, but considering that this is a classified multi-bazillion-dollar satellite, and you probably don't have security clearance, I'd consider the military's statement on the matter to be somewhat more reliable than your conclusions.
* The dry cleaners that he was suing found his pants. This lady's laptop is still lost.
Okay, so the remedy for a lost laptop is to be compensated for the value of the laptop when it was given into Best Buy's possession, same as with any property you give into someone else's keeping for a time. If you drop your car off at the mechanic and they accidentally drop it in a car crusher, you get the Blue Book value (or thereabouts) of your car.
* The dry cleaners offered to reimburse him $12,000, which is orders of magnitude more than what his pants cost. Best Buy is lowballing this lady.
Not really. If she paid $1100 for the laptop new, plus $300 for a warranty, then their offer of $1100 in monetary compensation plus $500 store credit is more than reasonable.
* The dry cleaners were a small business, and the money he was asking for would have closed their shop down and permanently saddled them with debt. Best Buy is a major corporation that can afford this payout. It will sting them, but not completely bankrupt them.
So what. Best Buy breached a contract, plain and simple. The remedy for breach of contract is to be compensated for the damages you actually suffer, unless the conduct is so ridiculously negligent that punitive damages are merited (I have other beefs about punitive damages, but I won't go into them here). That should apply regardless of how deep the pockets are that you're trying to reach into. Best Buy may have lost her laptop - heck, one of their employees may have it at home or may have sold it for crack money, who knows. But even stalling about it for three months doesn't mean that the plaintiff was any more damaged than she would have been had they owned up to it right away.
* Crazy Pants Guy probably didn't have his social security and bank account numbers in his pants when he dropped them off. This lady probably did have such information on her laptop.
This is pretty much the only valid reason to ask the court to give the woman additional compensation, but this is dependent specifically upon DC law which specifies that the plaintiff can recover actual damages, plus court costs and reasonable attorney's fees. If actual damages turn out to be very low, the court might decide that much of the attorney's fees here are unreasonable.
* Crazy Pants Guy didn't pay $300 to guarantee that should something happen to his pants, he should be treated particularly well. This lady did.
Then the breach of the warranty contract should result in that $300 being returned to the plaintiff as damages.
* To my knowledge, Crazy Pants Guy didn't approach the dry cleaners and try to make nice with a good-faith offer to make things right. This lady did.
That's just the thing - her request wasn't reasonable, even from the outset, when she was asking for compensation in an amount that was well within the limits of a small-claims court's jurisdiction (to wit, $2110.35). She was attempting to get compensation not just for the computer itself (at the full retail price she paid for it a year earlier!) or the warranty fee, but for "pictures and music she couldn't replace" despite signing an agreement that Best Buy wouldn't be held responsible for her data, and for "time wasted being lied to," etc. etc.
Even if her request at the time was reasonable, it ballooned into an amount more than 25000 times as much (and, if you ignore the ludicrous $54 million portion of her current lawsuit, she's still asking the court to award her roughly 100 times as much as her original settlement offer. This is RIAA legal tactics, pure and simple, but somehow she gets away with it in the court of Slashdot opinion.
My judgment: $300 for breach of the warranty contract, plus the depreciated value of the laptop at the time of the loss, plus court costs. If the judge (or jury) rules the way it should, she'll probably wish she'd taken Best Buy's rather generous offer.
Next case!
Seriously, the attention she gets from filing a $54 million lawsuit, rather than filing this in small claims like she should have in the first place, could only be negative. The damages part of her lawsuit make her the female computer-owning counterpart to Crazy Pants Guy, even if she's in the right on the liability part of the suit.
The Supreme Court has made a number of decisions regarding that clause that weaken it substantially. For example, sex offender registration for offenders whose offenses were committed before the registration law was passed are still required to register. Another situation involves misdemeanor domestic violence offenders, who can also be barred from possessing firearms even if their offense was committed before the law barring firearm possession was passed.
Additionally, civil matters are generally not protected by the ex post facto clause, as well as laws that decriminalize an offense.
It's not like these guys are really putting anyone in a bind. Real Networks has a responsibility to inspect and maintain their own product, and since they have the source code, there's nothing preventing from doing so. And people who are uninterested in paying them umpteen bazillion dollars for their expertise are welcome to take my advice, given for free:
Uninstall RealPlayer.
Where did I say that Flash was an Adobe developed product?
That said, having access to these maps online, as well as the county tax records (the county Sheriff actually has searchable tax records available online) has already saved me a ton of time.
People have been doing this with Flash (another now-Adobe product) for ages. One flash ad redirects you to a second flash widget on a malicious website to get around Adobe's lame attempts at cross-site protection, and that second flash ad gives you the business.
Malware, that is. Intarweb gold. Russian tea.
That's just the thing - you haven't already paid for it. They pay people in these offices to do their jobs, and when you walk in and say, "Yeah, I'll have one of everything, please," that person's time is diverted from whatever else they were doing so that they can make copies for you (which also requires copier toner and paper, inflicts wear on the copier/maps/deed books (some of which can be quite old)/etc.). Your tax dollars pay to run the office in general and make those records available for public perusal, but copying is extra and is (quite appropriately) charged separately so that we're not all paying the tax bill for your wasteful indiscretion.
I knew the trolls would come out eventually. I'd just like you to know that another West Virginia county was thinking about this stuff early enough to pick up assessor.org.
The level of accuracy varies wildly, dependent upon who's drawing the maps and when they were drawn. I took one of the aforementioned Kanawha County, WV, maps to do some actual research (not just for fun, but possibly for legal purposes, so I'm really glad this company put them online) and overlaid it on top of a Google map of the area (okay, this part was for fun, since I know the maps aren't meant to be used in this regard). I got all four corners to line up pretty well with the underlying terrain, and most of the rest of the map lined up as well, but the stuff I was really interested was off by a few hundred yards (in particular, some old rights-of-way that were never more than poorly-maintained dirt roads) are way off from their actual location). This was probably because the last time that land was surveyed was probably as part of the execution of a will in the 1940s to 1960s sometime, probably done on the cheap, and since then, all of the subdivided parcels were bought up by the same person, so there's been no survey to correct the issue.
;) ).
As you say, not accurate. But still fun (by which I mean "nerd fun"
Maybe Paris Hilton and Dubya are just smarter than you think they are.
Hey, it could happen.
I feel strangely compelled to say: "Captain, I protest! I am not a merry man!"
Why spend $15 a month for a WoW account when you can send PGP-encrypted e-mails to each other for free?
MS certainly could build its own bridge (if not for copious government interference), but then I'm sure they would charge a toll for crossing it.