The answer is extremely simple. There is precedent in the courts that says a fax signature is acceptable and legally binding. There is no precedent saying that an e-mailed document in digital form is.
Hence on a contract, fax is accepted. Cite please. Based on what I learned in law school, this is dead wrong. Contracts are very easy to make and require little in the way of formalities. Even contracts covered by the Statute of Frauds can be made with any kind of written record, and email certainly qualifies.
Under US law, which I'm not citing first thing in the morning, a fax is a "legal facsimile" of the original. Under law, if you have a faxed copy of something you may as well have an original. Email doesn't have that legal status, so a scanned and emailed original won't cut it. Well I'm going to ask for a cite anyway, because according to what I learned in law school, this is complete BS. There is no reason that I'm aware of that a fax would have more legal merit than an emailed scan.
Faxed copies of documents are legally binding, scanned+printed are not. Blame the law that hasn't caught up yet. I'm going to call BS on this one. Do you have a citation to the law of any state that holds faxes to be legally binding but not scanned and printed documents? Seriously, where are you getting this point of law?
All that is required to be legally binding is an offer and acceptance. This can even happen orally. For some kinds of contracts -- covered by the Statute of Frauds -- you need to have a written document which must be "signed," but this refers only to some indication in the document that the person has knowingly agreed to be bound; a suitable email will suffice.
Here, some googling found this:
"Signature" merely means any authentication which identifies the party to be charged. Even a letterhead or an "X" will do, provided it is placed on the wriiting with the intent to authenticate it. (Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc. v. Cole 457 A.2d 656, 663 (Conn.,1983).) http://www.west.net/~smith/frauds.htm
(I'm not your lawyer and none of this was legal advice, obviously.)
If there were a market, I'm sure we'd see tiny, low-powered and low-cost chips that generate random numbers based on some kind of quantum gate, or chaotic fluctuations in thermal energy, or something physical of that nature. One-time pads are, as the parent said, not that hard to do; it's just that in general, public key encryption or no encryption at all is good enough, so there's no market incentive to really nail the problem in the way that engineering-types find satisfying. (I empathize.)
This video is a few months old, but for what it's worth, Larry Lessig has been an Obama champion since the days where everyone thought Clinton would win in a walk; here's his written endorsement from back in November of 2007 talking about why Obama is a superior choice on the issues that matter to most copyright and technology geeks.
I don't know, it seems like it solves a fairly significant problem. Ordinarily, to adjust their orbits, satellites need propellant, and their propellant tank means the satellite has a limited life before its tank needs to be refilled. This is an alternative to propellant, which means our satellites would have a much longer lifespan.
And it really has nothing to do with "deep space" since it relies on Earth's magnetosphere.
<pedantry>I think since a positive charge is actually too few electrons, instead of solar wind carrying away the positive charge, it's depositing a negative charge (nothing is carried away).</pedantry> Well, unless I'm missing something, you can't create electrons ex nihilo, which means you'd have to take them away from another particle. Then you have excess electrons (negative charge) and a particle with too few electrons (positive charge). Then you jettison that particle to leave the satellite with a net negative charge.
That being said, even if these drugs are significantly safer, it just seems to be a bad idea to depend on drugs to run your everyday life.
Okay, I'm going to push you on this one. If the drug makes you smarter with no unpleasant short or long-term side-effects, why on earth would it be a bad idea? Any time we can get a benefit that outweighs its cost, we should do it. Very little in our lives resembles "nature" in the true pre-technology sense, and that's a good thing. If there's a particular reason why it "just seems to be a bad idea" to take medication regularly, by all means, spit it out so we can critique it. Otherwise, it sounds like you're basically being a luddite.
Besides, when you get right down to it, increasing your intelligence IS therapeutic in the sense that it helps you to avoid a surprising number of potential ailments.
Here is the story, based on my admittedly non-expert reading: To use the (very exciting) Lorentz steering technology, the sattelite has to have an electric charge. The method they used to obtain the charge is to apply a voltage to a radioactive substance and then allow solar wind to carry away the positive charge, leaving the sattelite negatively charged. The problem seemed to be that this process caused sparks to arc across the sattelite, which in turn damaged electronics and dislodged soldering.
I'm not sure why this is a big deal. Couldn't they just use a different kind of solder, or at least insulate vulnerable electronics from the charge?
Actually, I believe I own that phone already, and I got it for $50. Turning combat mode completely off, for a second, what phone is it? I'm curious.
The guy didn't say he was buying Apple products because he likes the interface and can't get it anywhere else; he said he was buying Apple products to save money, and that's clearly not true. Fair. My point was that usability is different from "flashy or cute or whatever," which goes against the mindset that unfortuately pervades Slashdot and explains why the crowd here is so singularly terrible at predicting the success of certain gadgets. Remember CmdrTaco's initial reaction to the original iPod announcement back in 2001? It was catastrophically incorrect, and the crowd here repeated the error when the iPhone was announced.
For example, you could've gotten a feature phone that does 95% of the same stuff as an iPhone for 15% of the price, Except much of what the iPhone "does" in that sense is be really easy to use. The features themselves were relatively cheap to implement, but Apple spent a ton on interface design. If you can really find a feature-equivalent phone that is 95% as pleasant to use as the iPhone for 15% of the price of the iPhone, more power to you, but I doubt such a phone exists. I'd guess you're one of the people who pulls up the feature list and assumes that feature parity means value parity, which is really about as useful as saying that a leather couch is as valuable as an row of upside-down plastic buckets, since you can sit on both of them.
Voice acting is basically a commodity, particularly in video games. The skills it takes to be a voice actor are probably only slightly rarer than those required to be a janitor. And it doesn't matter if the product makes fifty dollars or a billion dollars; there's no way the janitor is going to make more than $100k per year.
True -- but by that point, if you're into farming, you should already have done it with the bats in the sewer entrance. Alma #1: definitely. The Dokus I never had much trouble with. Murai Master Ninja is indeed a very tough fight, but then, what isn't. The skeletal pteradactyl thingy that comes after the ruins and just before the moat always gave me enormous difficulty. I still don't know how to fight him effectively.
The Black Spider Ninjas and dancing cat things are tough but fair, IMO. Learning to fight them is satisfying. Not so much with the ghost fish.
Yeah, I agree that the video was boring, but the game was never really about great graphics, plot, or a sandbox world. It basically optimized the first for framerate and for artistry and swept the other two largely aside. The game was 100% about gameplay: the fighting system is probably the deepest single-player fighter available, and possibly the greatest fighting system period if you exclude games that rely heavily on combo-mashing (Soul Calibur).
It doesn't surprise me that the video was so boring when a viewer can't appreciate the skill or depth involved in the fighting and all you see is whirling blades and blood flying everywhere.
Really? I played through the game several times, and then several times again when they released Ninja Gaiden Black, and I never found the camera irritating. Maybe part of it is that Ryu is such a defensive powerhouse that you can typically roll into a room and hold block and be safe while you adjust the camera, scratch an itch, make a sandwich, whatever, until you're ready to start engaging. This is less true when fighting bosses, but then again, the camera is basically set for you when you fight bosses.
It was a very interesting game. Of say 40 hours of play time, you're probably holding block for 30, even as you roll around and perform certain moves.
Actually the final boss is comparatively easy, especially if you've saved up some magic bottles. Spamming Ninpo (fire on the first form, lightning on the second) pretty much does it.
The toughest enemy in the game is, oddly enough, tiny little ghostly fish that swim around in mid-air in between serious battles. They are pure evil.
But how does Microsoft help Yahoo? There is no "Yahoo" after the merger. Maybe the trademark remains, and maybe the corporate structure remains more or less in tact, but they'll work for the Microsoft board and shareholders after that; what will be good for Microsoft will be good for post-merger Yahoo. The question is, what does Microsoft offer to get Yahoo shareholders to take the deal? And the answer is easy: Buckets and buckets of cash.
If Yang had owned 51% of the shares then that is his right. Even then, in Delaware, majority shareholders, directors, and CEO's all have distinct fiduciary responsibilities to minority shareholders. So even if he owned 51% of the shares, he'd likely still have to get approval for his decision from the majority of the OTHER shareholders or find some other way to cleanse his decision.
Greenmail is making a takeover bid yourself and then withdrawing it once you're paid off. Icahn is not trying to take over Yahoo; he's trying to facilitate someone else's takeover. No one is paying off Microsoft, and even if they were, there's no reason to think that Icahn would see a cent of it.
Furthermore, greenmail basically doesn't exist anymore. From Wikipedia:
Prevention
Changes in the details of corporate ownership structure, in the investment markets generally, and the legal requirement in some jurisdictions for companies to impose limits for launching formal bids, or obligations to seek shareholder approval for the buyback of its own shares, and in Federal tax treatment of greenmail gains (a 50% excise tax)[1] have all made greenmail far less common since the early 1990s. Can you point to a single recent example of Icahn taking greenmail?
Icahn is an idiot if he believes that a) Yahoo and MS can merge peacefully, and b) Yahoo brings anything other than a brand to MS.
It doesn't matter whether that happens. If the merger can work, then MS will make a lot of money off of it. If the merger can't work, then MS will lose a lot of money off of it. But either way, the shareholders of Yahoo receive 172% of the previous value of their shares. The Yahoo board, being stewards of the shareholders' investments, should act in the interest of the shareholders. And it's really hard for me to see how a guaranteed and instantaneous 72% increase in the value of an investment could be a bad deal.
Instead, the board is opposing the merger because they would rather screw their shareholders than lose their cushy jobs. It's unjustifiable, and the shareholders are completely justified in firing the bastards and installing people who will better respect the shareholders' investment. Icahn is just facilitating that transition.
If you're referring to the 1826 trial, Joseph Smith was not convicted. The sole complainant actually defended him at the trial (for whatever reason) and so Joseph Smith was acquitted. Then there was a lawsuit in 1827 involving the lost 116 pages (so clearly involving Mormonism) and then the next trial didn't come about until after the BOok of Mormon was published.
Joseph Smith was convicted in 1826 in Bainbridge, New York. Check out Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism: Correspondence and a New History. The Book of Mormon was not released until 1830.
This is patently absurd. Archeology can not, and never will be able to prove that such an advanced civilization did not exist. First of all, there's nothing more advanced in those people than the S. American civilizations that we know. It's not like we're talking gun powder and light bulbs. And secondly the Book of Mormon narrative can easily be confined to a small (100 miles X 100 miles) region that ended at least 1600 years ago. Are you honestly going to tell me we know *every* such civilization that has existed?
YES, that is EXACTLY what I am telling you, at least in North America. We know this land. Even small civilizations leave footprints. We can track individual Indian tribes by their remains. The South American civilizations left towering ruins that still stand to this day. Mysteriously, the civilization that Joseph Smith claimed existed left no such remnants. Any civilization that knew how to build anything from stone would have been found by now, even if confined to a plot of land of 10,000 square miles.
Sure. A neutral third party. In upstate New York. About a claim involving angels and gold plates. You think that's likely? There weren't a whole lot of neutral parties to be found.
What the hell does this mean? Because they're rural, they don't have trusted third parties? He was so off the deep end that even the most staid of his rural village elders was too biased by his antics to be neutral? Even if so, it seems to me that this cuts against his case rather than for.
The interesting thing is that Joseph Smith had 36 or 37 wives. I forget how many. His first wife, Emma Smith, became pregnant many times. Not a single one of his plural wives ever became pregnant. The historical record seems clear that Joseph Smith was not actually sexually involved in a single plural marriage. (Don't get me wrong, subseqent practitioners of polygamy definitely were.) So the motive of sex doesn't work either.
Yes it does. First of all, there are some 11 or so claimed offspring of Joseph Smith allegedly begotten by his other wives. Genetic tests, funded by Mormon activists, have demonstrated that five of them were not his. The rest are inconclusive. This is hardly proof to me that sex was not a motive, particularly since even in those days primitive contraception existed, and like in modern times, a relatively small proportion of sexual encounters resulted in pregnancy. Let me put it to you: why, exactly, did he marry a 14-year-old? True love?
I'm not asking you to believe that Mormons are right, but there's a long, long way to go between being opposed to homosexuality and actively persecuting homosexuals.
The attitude that "homosexuality is a sin" means that families are sundered, immigration rights are denied on account of the sex of the partners, visitation rights are denied, tax penalties are inflicted, and there is no federal anti-discrimination law on the basis of sexual orientation -- which means that plenty of loving, stable, child-bearing families with parents of the same sex can and have lost their jobs, benefits, citizenship, hospital visitation rights, and so on, because they have the audacity to be born with the ability to fall in love with the same sex and the inability to fall in love with the opposite sex. That's persecution. No, it's not as bad as being murdered or raped -- although plenty of that happens to gay people in other count
There is simply no way whatsoever that the Book of Mormon could be made up in that fashion. We're talking hundreds of pages of narrative including some *extremely* complex narratives, multiple timeline, dozens of characters, significant references to past events. It's out of the question for anyone to compose a work of the complexity without screwing up a single element of internal consistency. For all the anti-Mormon claims out there, no one has found a single glaring error in the text of that nature. Give me a break. John Milton was a blind man and dictated Paradise Lost verbatim to various scribes, and it is one of the most complex works of the 1800's. The Book of Mormon is significantly shorter and is, frankly, no work of literary genius by any account.
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Hence on a contract, fax is accepted. Cite please. Based on what I learned in law school, this is dead wrong. Contracts are very easy to make and require little in the way of formalities. Even contracts covered by the Statute of Frauds can be made with any kind of written record, and email certainly qualifies.
All that is required to be legally binding is an offer and acceptance. This can even happen orally. For some kinds of contracts -- covered by the Statute of Frauds -- you need to have a written document which must be "signed," but this refers only to some indication in the document that the person has knowingly agreed to be bound; a suitable email will suffice.
Here, some googling found this: "Signature" merely means any authentication which identifies the party to be charged. Even a letterhead or an "X" will do, provided it is placed on the wriiting with the intent to authenticate it. (Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc. v. Cole 457 A.2d 656, 663 (Conn.,1983).) http://www.west.net/~smith/frauds.htm
(I'm not your lawyer and none of this was legal advice, obviously.)
If there were a market, I'm sure we'd see tiny, low-powered and low-cost chips that generate random numbers based on some kind of quantum gate, or chaotic fluctuations in thermal energy, or something physical of that nature. One-time pads are, as the parent said, not that hard to do; it's just that in general, public key encryption or no encryption at all is good enough, so there's no market incentive to really nail the problem in the way that engineering-types find satisfying. (I empathize.)
This video is a few months old, but for what it's worth, Larry Lessig has been an Obama champion since the days where everyone thought Clinton would win in a walk; here's his written endorsement from back in November of 2007 talking about why Obama is a superior choice on the issues that matter to most copyright and technology geeks.
I don't know, it seems like it solves a fairly significant problem. Ordinarily, to adjust their orbits, satellites need propellant, and their propellant tank means the satellite has a limited life before its tank needs to be refilled. This is an alternative to propellant, which means our satellites would have a much longer lifespan.
And it really has nothing to do with "deep space" since it relies on Earth's magnetosphere.
Okay, I'm going to push you on this one. If the drug makes you smarter with no unpleasant short or long-term side-effects, why on earth would it be a bad idea? Any time we can get a benefit that outweighs its cost, we should do it. Very little in our lives resembles "nature" in the true pre-technology sense, and that's a good thing. If there's a particular reason why it "just seems to be a bad idea" to take medication regularly, by all means, spit it out so we can critique it. Otherwise, it sounds like you're basically being a luddite.
Besides, when you get right down to it, increasing your intelligence IS therapeutic in the sense that it helps you to avoid a surprising number of potential ailments.
Here is the story, based on my admittedly non-expert reading: To use the (very exciting) Lorentz steering technology, the sattelite has to have an electric charge. The method they used to obtain the charge is to apply a voltage to a radioactive substance and then allow solar wind to carry away the positive charge, leaving the sattelite negatively charged. The problem seemed to be that this process caused sparks to arc across the sattelite, which in turn damaged electronics and dislodged soldering.
I'm not sure why this is a big deal. Couldn't they just use a different kind of solder, or at least insulate vulnerable electronics from the charge?
Voice acting is basically a commodity, particularly in video games. The skills it takes to be a voice actor are probably only slightly rarer than those required to be a janitor. And it doesn't matter if the product makes fifty dollars or a billion dollars; there's no way the janitor is going to make more than $100k per year.
True -- but by that point, if you're into farming, you should already have done it with the bats in the sewer entrance. Alma #1: definitely. The Dokus I never had much trouble with. Murai Master Ninja is indeed a very tough fight, but then, what isn't. The skeletal pteradactyl thingy that comes after the ruins and just before the moat always gave me enormous difficulty. I still don't know how to fight him effectively.
The Black Spider Ninjas and dancing cat things are tough but fair, IMO. Learning to fight them is satisfying. Not so much with the ghost fish.
Oh yeah -- forgot about that. Fair enough.
Yeah, I agree that the video was boring, but the game was never really about great graphics, plot, or a sandbox world. It basically optimized the first for framerate and for artistry and swept the other two largely aside. The game was 100% about gameplay: the fighting system is probably the deepest single-player fighter available, and possibly the greatest fighting system period if you exclude games that rely heavily on combo-mashing (Soul Calibur).
It doesn't surprise me that the video was so boring when a viewer can't appreciate the skill or depth involved in the fighting and all you see is whirling blades and blood flying everywhere.
Really? I played through the game several times, and then several times again when they released Ninja Gaiden Black, and I never found the camera irritating. Maybe part of it is that Ryu is such a defensive powerhouse that you can typically roll into a room and hold block and be safe while you adjust the camera, scratch an itch, make a sandwich, whatever, until you're ready to start engaging. This is less true when fighting bosses, but then again, the camera is basically set for you when you fight bosses.
It was a very interesting game. Of say 40 hours of play time, you're probably holding block for 30, even as you roll around and perform certain moves.
Ah, true. In that case, I'd say both Halo 3 and Oblivion were pretty solid, though admittedly not revolutionary.
Actually the final boss is comparatively easy, especially if you've saved up some magic bottles. Spamming Ninpo (fire on the first form, lightning on the second) pretty much does it.
The toughest enemy in the game is, oddly enough, tiny little ghostly fish that swim around in mid-air in between serious battles. They are pure evil.
Furthermore, greenmail basically doesn't exist anymore. From Wikipedia: Prevention
Changes in the details of corporate ownership structure, in the investment markets generally, and the legal requirement in some jurisdictions for companies to impose limits for launching formal bids, or obligations to seek shareholder approval for the buyback of its own shares, and in Federal tax treatment of greenmail gains (a 50% excise tax)[1] have all made greenmail far less common since the early 1990s. Can you point to a single recent example of Icahn taking greenmail?
It doesn't matter whether that happens. If the merger can work, then MS will make a lot of money off of it. If the merger can't work, then MS will lose a lot of money off of it. But either way, the shareholders of Yahoo receive 172% of the previous value of their shares. The Yahoo board, being stewards of the shareholders' investments, should act in the interest of the shareholders. And it's really hard for me to see how a guaranteed and instantaneous 72% increase in the value of an investment could be a bad deal.
Instead, the board is opposing the merger because they would rather screw their shareholders than lose their cushy jobs. It's unjustifiable, and the shareholders are completely justified in firing the bastards and installing people who will better respect the shareholders' investment. Icahn is just facilitating that transition.
If you're referring to the 1826 trial, Joseph Smith was not convicted. The sole complainant actually defended him at the trial (for whatever reason) and so Joseph Smith was acquitted. Then there was a lawsuit in 1827 involving the lost 116 pages (so clearly involving Mormonism) and then the next trial didn't come about until after the BOok of Mormon was published.
Joseph Smith was convicted in 1826 in Bainbridge, New York. Check out Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism: Correspondence and a New History. The Book of Mormon was not released until 1830.
This is patently absurd. Archeology can not, and never will be able to prove that such an advanced civilization did not exist. First of all, there's nothing more advanced in those people than the S. American civilizations that we know. It's not like we're talking gun powder and light bulbs. And secondly the Book of Mormon narrative can easily be confined to a small (100 miles X 100 miles) region that ended at least 1600 years ago. Are you honestly going to tell me we know *every* such civilization that has existed?
YES, that is EXACTLY what I am telling you, at least in North America. We know this land. Even small civilizations leave footprints. We can track individual Indian tribes by their remains. The South American civilizations left towering ruins that still stand to this day. Mysteriously, the civilization that Joseph Smith claimed existed left no such remnants. Any civilization that knew how to build anything from stone would have been found by now, even if confined to a plot of land of 10,000 square miles.
Sure. A neutral third party. In upstate New York. About a claim involving angels and gold plates. You think that's likely? There weren't a whole lot of neutral parties to be found.
What the hell does this mean? Because they're rural, they don't have trusted third parties? He was so off the deep end that even the most staid of his rural village elders was too biased by his antics to be neutral? Even if so, it seems to me that this cuts against his case rather than for.
The interesting thing is that Joseph Smith had 36 or 37 wives. I forget how many. His first wife, Emma Smith, became pregnant many times. Not a single one of his plural wives ever became pregnant. The historical record seems clear that Joseph Smith was not actually sexually involved in a single plural marriage. (Don't get me wrong, subseqent practitioners of polygamy definitely were.) So the motive of sex doesn't work either.
Yes it does. First of all, there are some 11 or so claimed offspring of Joseph Smith allegedly begotten by his other wives. Genetic tests, funded by Mormon activists, have demonstrated that five of them were not his. The rest are inconclusive. This is hardly proof to me that sex was not a motive, particularly since even in those days primitive contraception existed, and like in modern times, a relatively small proportion of sexual encounters resulted in pregnancy. Let me put it to you: why, exactly, did he marry a 14-year-old? True love?
I'm not asking you to believe that Mormons are right, but there's a long, long way to go between being opposed to homosexuality and actively persecuting homosexuals.
The attitude that "homosexuality is a sin" means that families are sundered, immigration rights are denied on account of the sex of the partners, visitation rights are denied, tax penalties are inflicted, and there is no federal anti-discrimination law on the basis of sexual orientation -- which means that plenty of loving, stable, child-bearing families with parents of the same sex can and have lost their jobs, benefits, citizenship, hospital visitation rights, and so on, because they have the audacity to be born with the ability to fall in love with the same sex and the inability to fall in love with the opposite sex. That's persecution. No, it's not as bad as being murdered or raped -- although plenty of that happens to gay people in other count