You may think this is a simple constitutional question, but it isn't.
In Smith v. Maryland (1979), the Supreme Court ruled that lists of telephone numbers from outgoing calls (so called "pen registers") are not constitutionally protected because the telephone subscriber voluntarily discloses that information to the telephone company. Given that precedent, it's a tenable argument (although one rejected by the court in this case) to suggest that GPS logs are also unprotected for the same reason.
Scientology has gained tax-exempt status merely by incorporating itself to operate as a church: the US Internal Revenue Code is quite lenient on this point. If it does not believe a particular organization to be a true church, it's up to the Internal Revenue Service to dispute the claimed tax exemptions.
This is explained in IRS Publication 557, which defines a church as an organization such
That the particular religious beliefs of the organization are truly and sincerely held.
That the practices and rituals associated with the organization's religious belief or creed are not illegal or contrary to clearly defined public policy.
I think that Scientology fails point (2) above, but believing it and proving it are two quite different things.
Well, it's interesting to see how people's assumption differ. Some people in this thread see a person on private land without permission as automatically guilty, and requiring an "excuse" for their presence. This is not a universally applicable stance. For example, the Massachusetts trespassing law requires a warning (or doing damage) before mere presence becomes trespassing. As some of the European commmenters have indicated, laws do differ, and they differ even within the USA.
Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 266, Section 120:
Entry upon private property after being forbidden as trespass...
Whoever, without right enters or remains in or upon the dwelling house, buildings, boats or improved or enclosed land, wharf, or pier of another... after having been forbidden so to do by the person who has lawful control of said premises, whether directly or by notice posted thereon... shall be punished by a fine of not more than one hundred dollars or by imprisonment for not more than thirty days or both such fine and imprisonment...
Well, that's certainly news to me. Suppose that you want to walk across some undeveloped land. There is no fence, no gate, no signs, and certainly no landowner warning you off. Are you saying that in some states it is illegal trespassing to pass over undeveloped land even if you haven't been warned off by the landowner directly or by signs, fences, etc.? In which states does this rule apply?
Warrantless wiretapping is unconstitutional, period.
Well, that's certainly a reasonable point of view. Unfortunately, it's not one that the Supreme Court has adopted.
In particular, the Court has authorized warrantless wiretaps of international communications and of communications with agents of foreign powers in this country. FISA was an attempt by Congress to limit the effects of this ruling.
The NIH does this very thing; perhaps not nearly enough, but it does happen.
As an example, take age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Genentech has developed and obtained approval for a drug to treat AMD: Lucentis. It's the most effective drug so approved, so it's prodigiously expensive.
It just so happens that Genentech has produced another drug that is very promising for AMD treatment, and is perhaps superior to Lucentis. This drug is Avastin, and it's already approved for colorectal cancer treatment, and is available much more cheaply than Lucentis.
Many doctors are now using Avastin off-label to treat AMD, but until it is officially approved for this purpose, such use will be limited. Genentech has no interest in seeking this approval, since it would replace sales of its very expensive drug (Lucentis) with sales of its much cheaper drug (Avastin).
This frustrating situation would likely continue until these drugs' patents expired, but it is of such importance to public health that the National Eye Institute (NEI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has funded a study to compare Avastin and Lucentis. So it is possible, if not very often, for government funding to solve these problems.
But the difference between a manufactured diamond and cubic zirconia is that, unlike cubic zirconia, it looks better than the equivalent cartel stone. I can only say that _my_ wife would appreciate a two-carat flawless diamond, whether it came from the lab or a hole in the ground. YMMV.
I'm afraid you're missing the point. Why would the man not spend the same $1200 on a one-carat artificial stone of higher quality than the natural one? If he can get a REAL diaomond (these labs are indeed making real diamonds) that's bigger and better-looking for the same money, why exactly should he be forking his money over to the DeBeers cartel?
Please post a quote where a Massachusetts official posed this as an either-or, Microsoft-vs-ODF situation. Random 'OOo advocates' may have posted some anti-MS rants, but that's irrelevant.
If you truly believe that Microsoft will actually release enough of a specification, and actually adhere to that specification, enough to eliminate "lock-in", then God bless you.
Massachusetts never formulated this as an "either-or" issue. It has consistently said that it is happy to continue buying Microsoft Office or any other office suite that might be needed, as long as that office suite can be configured to use ODF by default.
Microsoft cares deeply about what office format you use, because if you use theirs, you must continue to buy Microsoft Office if you want it to work all the time. If you use ODF and continue to use Microsoft Office, the door is open for you and/or your colleagues to switch to a competing software suite later.
This is a recurrent refrain from the wooly-headed left: the limited-liability corporation must be abolished, so that everyone associated with the corporation will have to pay when the corporation does bad things. Well, all I can say is that anyone who entertains such a thought, while living in modern society and enjoying the benefits of the modern economic system, had better realize that it would bring the level of economic activity back 200 years, causing mass starvation as one of the least objectionable effects.
The point is that if investors, or managers, are fully liable for the actions of other people who they don't control, the only prudent thing for them to do is to withdraw: dont't invest, or don't accept employment, with any company larger than your family or intimate friends. Even that is not particularly safe: before the widespread use of limited-liability corporations, people were regularly bankrupted by the actions (corrupt or merely incompetent) of their partners.
And those buyers right behind me are welcome to it. I don't deal with PayPal because they don't deal with me. After two successful credit-card purchases (no chargebacks or anything else out of the ordinary), PayPal wanted my checking account information before they would let me use my credit card again. (Note that this is only for purchasing, not selling.) I refused, and the upshot is that I am now on PayPal's perpetual blacklist: PayPal says not to bother calling, since their agents will have no information available on my account.
If PayPal wants to treat me like a criminal because I value my privacy, that's their privilege. It's my privilege not to have anything to do with them (or with any PayPal-only merchant).
Just in case you were wondering like I was, Videolan has retained the copyright in the drms.c file: * Copyright (C) 2004 VideoLAN * $Id: drms.c 10101 2005-03-02 16:47:31Z robux4 $ * * Authors: Jon Lech Johansen * Sam Hocevar
I can imagine some very interesting discussions between Videolan's lawyers and Sony-BMG's lawyers in the coming days and weeks. Unfortunately, we never hear much about them, since it seems likely that Sony would be quite willing to pay extra for a confidentiality agreement to keep this out of the news as much as possible.
GOOD for fatties, BAD for thin people
on
Drink Decaf and Die
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You didn't read closely enough.
In measuring HDL cholesterol, researchers looked specifically at HDL2, a type of HDL in which high levels are particularly associated with lower risk of heart disease
IN overweight people, decaf drinking was associated with increase of good cholesterol, so they might benefit from decaf. Thin and normal-weight people saw a decrease in good cholesterol, so they might want to avoid decaf.
This is, of course, much more complex than "Drink decaf and die". So it's probably hopeless to try to get the real message across.
I'm afraid some people are ignorant of the Fair Use limitations on copyright. Berowell must be, if he thinks that the resolution of Google's Fair Use defense is clear.
Schroeder, on the other hand, knows perfectly well that Google's Fair Use argument is plausible. It won't necessarily win in court, but it is no way a clear loser. Schroeder does what all big publishers do: pretend that Fair Use doesn't exist, and hope that they will get people to abandon their Fair Use rights.
By giving that advice, you are being rude. If the only thing you can say is that someone else is so ignorant that it's not worth entering into a substantive dialogue with them, the preferable course of action is to say nothing.
Of course, what you should REALLY do is go back and study netiquette a bit. I'm not being rude, just giving you some advice.:-)
Exactly that statement is in fact in the contract signed by both sides. The contract explicitly excludes 'all copyrights'.
SCO, bizarrely, is trying to dismiss this crystal-clear statement as some sort of 'scrivener's error', and has offered the statment of a former Novell employee (who wasn't even there when the contract was signed) to the effect that, no matter what the contract says, Novell really meant to transfer all the copyrights. The Novell Board document kills this (already absurdly weak) theory.
I'm afraid you're much mistaken. It's only the US system of easy-to-file lawsuits and 'everyone-pays' legal fees that make the US legal system what it is today: an efficient, unbiased forum equally available to all, both rich and poor. If we adopted the foreign 'loser-pays' system, we would immediately see the little people locked out of the courthouse and mercilessly persecuted by huge corporations. Such things never happen in the US now.
Under 'loser-pays', the RIAA could hound innocent file-sharers into submission just by imposing legal expenses that could never be reimbursed! Oops, I got confused: that's what happens under the US system now. Never mind, the US system is still the greatest thing on Earth.
To see just how valuable and attractive the US 'easy to sue' and 'everyone pays' system is, just consider all the other countries that have adopted it:... hmm... I guess there aren't any. Well, all those other countries are sure missing a good thing.
What isn't right is Microsoft attempting to arrogate generic computing terms to itself. Suppose I got the USPTO to let me trademark the word 'Chocolate' (by buying off all the people who would challenge it), and I sold lots of Chocolate(R) bars. Would it then be unfair for someone else to sell chocolate under that name?
Red or black in roulette will lose if a zero comes up, so you will only win between 46.2% and 48.6% of the time, depending on what kind of wheel you are playing at (single-zero, double-zero, or triple-zero). That means that, on average, you will lose between 2.8% and 7.6% of every wager at the roulette table.
While blackjack and video poker offer you the theoretical ability to turn the odds in your favor, poker odds always favor the more skilled player. Anyone can aspire to become a poker expert, and people do spend large sums of money trying. Some succeed.
Don't worry, if you read the article, you'll find that they aren't in fact proposing to cover the Sonora Desert with algae, but just using it as a comparative yardstick to indicate how much land would be needed. The Slashdot summary, as usual, is wrong: the area needed is not the whole Sonora desert, but only 9% of its area. They actually say pretty much what you say:
"The algae farms would not all need to be built in the same location, of course. In fact, it would be preferable to spread them around throughout the country, to lessen the cost and energy used in transporting the feedstocks."
The best thing is that it eliminates the contribution to global warming. While burning biodiesel releases just as much carbon into the air does burning fossil fuel, producing biodiesel takes all of that carbon right back out again.
Well, this was presumably on a severe-clear day in the desert, so I would expect the pilot to have been able to make a visual approach and landing even if his Flight Director had not come back to life. Also, I would be surprised if they didn't have at least some backup instrumentation not associated with the FD computer, such as a simple artificial horizon.
However, I agree that the pilot definitely has some cojones. He needs them just to get in the damn thing and light it off!
Not only that, but the short ratio is almost 14 days. That means that if everyone else stopped buying, and all the shorts started buying to cover their positions, it would take two weeks of normal trading volume to cover them all. We still may see someone try a short squeeze.
Aside from that, it seems that the only reason that people are still holding SCOX is to get some more money out of whoever has been manipulating the stock price for the past year. That's the only explanation I can see for SCOX not being the penny stock it was (and will be again).
While we certainly will send humans to Mars at some point, now is not the time. The cost of human spaceflight is not a small increment over the cost of a robotic mission, but a massive multiple of cost. Given this, it makes sense to have several more robotic missions to learn as much as we can before sending people.
Besides, in less than 15 years we might have a functioning Space Elevator that would make our current method of getting to space (strapping people onto a glorified Roman Candle) seem barbaric as well as wasteful. Rather than rush into spending vast sums for a follow-on Shuttle as a component of a Mars mission, it would make more sense to step back and consider what the optimal technology for space travel will be in the next 30 years, rather than just assuming that the only thing we can do is continue tweaking the same technology Robert Goddard was using in the 1930's.
I believe the human exploration of Mars will come, but it will come after improvements in space transport technology have vastly reduced both the expense and risk involved in space travel.
It's apparent that the knee-jerk rejections of.mail are coming from people who haven't bothered to actually read the.mail proposal, or else who conclude that any anti-spam initiative that will not cause an immediate, total, worldwide cessation of spam is not even worth considering. All the.mail domain proposes is a more reliable locus for distributing whitelist information. It is expressly not intended to be user-visible, but rather to be solely for the purpose of automatic sender validation by mail receivers.
Whitelists work. Do they eliminate all spam? No. Are they part of a framework for reducing spam? Yes. Snide remarks about the futility of any possible approach to the spam problem may be amusing, but they obscure the fact that real (not perfect, but real) progress is possible. A.mail domain can be part of the solution.
Slashdot Mirror
In Smith v. Maryland (1979), the Supreme Court ruled that lists of telephone numbers from outgoing calls (so called "pen registers") are not constitutionally protected because the telephone subscriber voluntarily discloses that information to the telephone company. Given that precedent, it's a tenable argument (although one rejected by the court in this case) to suggest that GPS logs are also unprotected for the same reason.
This is explained in IRS Publication 557, which defines a church as an organization such
I think that Scientology fails point (2) above, but believing it and proving it are two quite different things.
Well, that's certainly news to me. Suppose that you want to walk across some undeveloped land. There is no fence, no gate, no signs, and certainly no landowner warning you off. Are you saying that in some states it is illegal trespassing to pass over undeveloped land even if you haven't been warned off by the landowner directly or by signs, fences, etc.? In which states does this rule apply?
Well, that's certainly a reasonable point of view. Unfortunately, it's not one that the Supreme Court has adopted.
In particular, the Court has authorized warrantless wiretaps of international communications and of communications with agents of foreign powers in this country. FISA was an attempt by Congress to limit the effects of this ruling.
As an example, take age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Genentech has developed and obtained approval for a drug to treat AMD: Lucentis. It's the most effective drug so approved, so it's prodigiously expensive.
It just so happens that Genentech has produced another drug that is very promising for AMD treatment, and is perhaps superior to Lucentis. This drug is Avastin, and it's already approved for colorectal cancer treatment, and is available much more cheaply than Lucentis.
Many doctors are now using Avastin off-label to treat AMD, but until it is officially approved for this purpose, such use will be limited. Genentech has no interest in seeking this approval, since it would replace sales of its very expensive drug (Lucentis) with sales of its much cheaper drug (Avastin).
This frustrating situation would likely continue until these drugs' patents expired, but it is of such importance to public health that the National Eye Institute (NEI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has funded a study to compare Avastin and Lucentis. So it is possible, if not very often, for government funding to solve these problems.
But the difference between a manufactured diamond and cubic zirconia is that, unlike cubic zirconia, it looks better than the equivalent cartel stone. I can only say that _my_ wife would appreciate a two-carat flawless diamond, whether it came from the lab or a hole in the ground. YMMV.
I'm afraid you're missing the point. Why would the man not spend the same $1200 on a one-carat artificial stone of higher quality than the natural one? If he can get a REAL diaomond (these labs are indeed making real diamonds) that's bigger and better-looking for the same money, why exactly should he be forking his money over to the DeBeers cartel?
Please post a quote where a Massachusetts official posed this as an either-or, Microsoft-vs-ODF situation. Random 'OOo advocates' may have posted some anti-MS rants, but that's irrelevant.
If you truly believe that Microsoft will actually release enough of a specification, and actually adhere to that specification, enough to eliminate "lock-in", then God bless you.
Massachusetts never formulated this as an "either-or" issue. It has consistently said that it is happy to continue buying Microsoft Office or any other office suite that might be needed, as long as that office suite can be configured to use ODF by default.
Microsoft cares deeply about what office format you use, because if you use theirs, you must continue to buy Microsoft Office if you want it to work all the time. If you use ODF and continue to use Microsoft Office, the door is open for you and/or your colleagues to switch to a competing software suite later.
This is a recurrent refrain from the wooly-headed left: the limited-liability corporation must be abolished, so that everyone associated with the corporation will have to pay when the corporation does bad things. Well, all I can say is that anyone who entertains such a thought, while living in modern society and enjoying the benefits of the modern economic system, had better realize that it would bring the level of economic activity back 200 years, causing mass starvation as one of the least objectionable effects.
The point is that if investors, or managers, are fully liable for the actions of other people who they don't control, the only prudent thing for them to do is to withdraw: dont't invest, or don't accept employment, with any company larger than your family or intimate friends. Even that is not particularly safe: before the widespread use of limited-liability corporations, people were regularly bankrupted by the actions (corrupt or merely incompetent) of their partners.
And those buyers right behind me are welcome to it. I don't deal with PayPal because they don't deal with me. After two successful credit-card purchases (no chargebacks or anything else out of the ordinary), PayPal wanted my checking account information before they would let me use my credit card again. (Note that this is only for purchasing, not selling.) I refused, and the upshot is that I am now on PayPal's perpetual blacklist: PayPal says not to bother calling, since their agents will have no information available on my account.
If PayPal wants to treat me like a criminal because I value my privacy, that's their privilege. It's my privilege not to have anything to do with them (or with any PayPal-only merchant).
Just in case you were wondering like I was, Videolan has retained the copyright in the drms.c file:
* Copyright (C) 2004 VideoLAN
* $Id: drms.c 10101 2005-03-02 16:47:31Z robux4 $
*
* Authors: Jon Lech Johansen
* Sam Hocevar
I can imagine some very interesting discussions between Videolan's lawyers and Sony-BMG's lawyers in the coming days and weeks. Unfortunately, we never hear much about them, since it seems likely that Sony would be quite willing to pay extra for a confidentiality agreement to keep this out of the news as much as possible.
IN overweight people, decaf drinking was associated with increase of good cholesterol, so they might benefit from decaf. Thin and normal-weight people saw a decrease in good cholesterol, so they might want to avoid decaf.
This is, of course, much more complex than "Drink decaf and die". So it's probably hopeless to try to get the real message across.
I'm afraid some people are ignorant of the Fair Use limitations on copyright. Berowell must be, if he thinks that the resolution of Google's Fair Use defense is clear.
Schroeder, on the other hand, knows perfectly well that Google's Fair Use argument is plausible. It won't necessarily win in court, but it is no way a clear loser. Schroeder does what all big publishers do: pretend that Fair Use doesn't exist, and hope that they will get people to abandon their Fair Use rights.
By giving that advice, you are being rude. If the only thing you can say is that someone else is so ignorant that it's not worth entering into a substantive dialogue with them, the preferable course of action is to say nothing.
:-)
Of course, what you should REALLY do is go back and study netiquette a bit. I'm not being rude, just giving you some advice.
Exactly that statement is in fact in the contract signed by both sides. The contract explicitly excludes 'all copyrights'.
SCO, bizarrely, is trying to dismiss this crystal-clear statement as some sort of 'scrivener's error', and has offered the statment of a former Novell employee (who wasn't even there when the contract was signed) to the effect that, no matter what the contract says, Novell really meant to transfer all the copyrights. The Novell Board document kills this (already absurdly weak) theory.
I'm afraid you're much mistaken. It's only the US system of easy-to-file lawsuits and 'everyone-pays' legal fees that make the US legal system what it is today: an efficient, unbiased forum equally available to all, both rich and poor. If we adopted the foreign 'loser-pays' system, we would immediately see the little people locked out of the courthouse and mercilessly persecuted by huge corporations. Such things never happen in the US now.
... hmm ... I guess there aren't any. Well, all those other countries are sure missing a good thing.
Under 'loser-pays', the RIAA could hound innocent file-sharers into submission just by imposing legal expenses that could never be reimbursed! Oops, I got confused: that's what happens under the US system now. Never mind, the US system is still the greatest thing on Earth.
To see just how valuable and attractive the US 'easy to sue' and 'everyone pays' system is, just consider all the other countries that have adopted it:
What isn't right is Microsoft attempting to arrogate generic computing terms to itself. Suppose I got the USPTO to let me trademark the word 'Chocolate' (by buying off all the people who would challenge it), and I sold lots of Chocolate(R) bars. Would it then be unfair for someone else to sell chocolate under that name?
Red or black in roulette will lose if a zero comes up, so you will only win between 46.2% and 48.6% of the time, depending on what kind of wheel you are playing at (single-zero, double-zero, or triple-zero). That means that, on average, you will lose between 2.8% and 7.6% of every wager at the roulette table.
While blackjack and video poker offer you the theoretical ability to turn the odds in your favor, poker odds always favor the more skilled player. Anyone can aspire to become a poker expert, and people do spend large sums of money trying. Some succeed.
The best thing is that it eliminates the contribution to global warming. While burning biodiesel releases just as much carbon into the air does burning fossil fuel, producing biodiesel takes all of that carbon right back out again.
Well, this was presumably on a severe-clear day in the desert, so I would expect the pilot to have been able to make a visual approach and landing even if his Flight Director had not come back to life. Also, I would be surprised if they didn't have at least some backup instrumentation not associated with the FD computer, such as a simple artificial horizon.
However, I agree that the pilot definitely has some cojones. He needs them just to get in the damn thing and light it off!
Not only that, but the short ratio is almost 14 days. That means that if everyone else stopped buying, and all the shorts started buying to cover their positions, it would take two weeks of normal trading volume to cover them all. We still may see someone try a short squeeze.
Aside from that, it seems that the only reason that people are still holding SCOX is to get some more money out of whoever has been manipulating the stock price for the past year. That's the only explanation I can see for SCOX not being the penny stock it was (and will be again).
While we certainly will send humans to Mars at some point, now is not the time. The cost of human spaceflight is not a small increment over the cost of a robotic mission, but a massive multiple of cost. Given this, it makes sense to have several more robotic missions to learn as much as we can before sending people.
Besides, in less than 15 years we might have a functioning Space Elevator that would make our current method of getting to space (strapping people onto a glorified Roman Candle) seem barbaric as well as wasteful. Rather than rush into spending vast sums for a follow-on Shuttle as a component of a Mars mission, it would make more sense to step back and consider what the optimal technology for space travel will be in the next 30 years, rather than just assuming that the only thing we can do is continue tweaking the same technology Robert Goddard was using in the 1930's.
I believe the human exploration of Mars will come, but it will come after improvements in space transport technology have vastly reduced both the expense and risk involved in space travel.
It's apparent that the knee-jerk rejections of .mail are coming from people who haven't bothered to actually read the .mail proposal, or else who conclude that any anti-spam initiative that will not cause an immediate, total, worldwide cessation of spam is not even worth considering. All the .mail domain proposes is a more reliable locus for distributing whitelist information. It is expressly not intended to be user-visible, but rather to be solely for the purpose of automatic sender validation by mail receivers.
.mail domain can be part of the solution.
Whitelists work. Do they eliminate all spam? No. Are they part of a framework for reducing spam? Yes. Snide remarks about the futility of any possible approach to the spam problem may be amusing, but they obscure the fact that real (not perfect, but real) progress is possible. A