No, the UK court can't put him in prison because libel is a civil and not a criminal matter.
As for damages, you'd be surprised what reciprocal enforcement proceedings can do. I'm not sure of the US-UK position for libel but it's quite common, where a judgment is obtained against a foreign person, to go off to the foreign courts and ask them to enforce that judgment. It depends what treaties are in force. Plus of course if the person you're suing has any assets in the UK - or in any other country where there are reciprocal enforcement arrangements - then you can enforce the judgment against them.
As for UK citizens libelling US citizens, skylarov is irrelevant because that was a criminal matter and as I said, libel is civil. Sure they could be sued in the US, but enforcement would again be subject to whatever reciprocal enforcement agreements were in force. You can't extradite someone for libel, or arrest them/prevent them leaving the country if they happen to be in the US.
Sigh... I wonder if there's a website where lawyers can spend their time making ill-informed comments about tech issues.
I used to work for a journal. Reviewing a paper is not like moderating a slashdot comment. It's an in-depth editing process that takes a lot of time. Firstly, most papers are on very specialised subjects. You can't randomly distribute it to a reviewer - it's quite possible that there will only be a small number of people out there qualified to review it, and half of those are probably working on the same problem so you can't send it to them in case they nick all the ideas and then reject the paper. (Oh yes, scientists will do that)
Once you've found some decent reviewers, it's not a question of the reviewer reading it in 5 minutes and marking it +1 insightful. It will probably take them a few days to read and understand the paper properly. Then they need to consider whether it makes sense and, just as important, whether what it reports is worth publishing. (Someone reviewing a paper for Nature or Science is going to have a very different view on whether it should be accepted than someone reviewing it for the Journal of Pointless Periwinkle Research.)
If the paper seems good enough on those grounds, then the reviewer will still usually suggest a raft of changes to make it better. The review then has to go back to the author so that the author can make the changes. When that's done, it goes out to review again, & so on until finally the reviewers think it's ready to publish.
It's true that the reviewer generally does all this work for free (and peer reviewing can be one of the biggest demands on a scientist's time). But someone has to choose the reviewers and act as go-between (since for obvious reasons, the identity of the reviewers and the authors are kept secret from one another); most importantly that go-between needs to act as a fair referee and realise where a reviewer is making unreasonable demands or being too easy and so find more reviewers. Someone has to perform those little tasks like sub-editing (which can be a major task with a paper submitted in English by a group of Japanese researchers - and let's face it, most american scientists aren't great writers either). Then there's those little matters of layout, style and consistency that are necessary in a professional product.
And finally, people still like paper journals. It's a lot easier to read a long paper on paper, the diagrams are better quality than most office printers can manage, and some people just prefer it. And paper journals add a new layer of costs - not just the cost of paper and ink but typesetting, delivery etc.
As for cost, if journals seem massively expensive compared to consumer magazines, remember that most of the cost of consumer magazines is paid for by advertisers, not subscribers. And when people complain about paying $10,000s for a journal - that's usually for access to be shared between hundreds if not thousands of subscribers at that lab or university. Per-reader costs are comparatively low.
>>This means that while European software firms have been explicitly denied the right to get patents on their inventions, US firms have been aquiring rights that will be enforced in Europe.
That's very misleading. European companies are not denied the right to patent software. They (and all other companies and people, wherever they are based) are denied the right to patent software in the EU. They're free to patent it in the US and if they have any sense will do have done so. Similarly US companies are free to ignore software patents insofar as they are doing business in the EU and don't try and sell the results in the US.
Firstly, what losses did your parents actually suffer? a lawsuit is not like playing the lottery. you're not suppose to win back any more than you lost.
Secondly, it's irrelevant how much the lawyer got in total ; what's relevant is how much he got as a percentage of the total award. If the award was $1000 per person and lawyers took $700, then it's pretty unfair. If the award was $350 per person and the lawyer took $50, then it's not so unreasonable. A stockholder doesn't whine that a CEO is paid far more than the stockholder's annual dividend. This is no different, except that when the lawyer loses he usually doesn't get paid at all, whereas the CEO continues to get paid even if the company's stock tanks.
The constitutional position is not clear. Theoretically the UK Parliament can override EC legislation. And yet in the Factortame case the House of Lords threw out an Act of Parliament because it failed to comply with EC law. Now that wasn't an act which was explicitly passed to infringe EC law, but it was the first time since before the Civil War that a British court felt it had jurisdiction to strike down primary legislation. According to the 'unwritten' rules of the UK constitution, if an earlier act of parliament is contradicted by a later one, the later one wins, no questions. Factortame showed that different rules apply to EC legislation.
Moreover, under the current EC treaties it is actually not possible for a state to secede from the union. So secession could not be done unilaterally - it would need an amendment to the treaties which in turn would need ratification by every other member state. (By contrast, the proposed constitution allows any state to leave on giving a few years' notice - don't remember how many).
So, as a matter of EC law, the UK can't just amend the 1972 act and secede. Trying to work out what would happen if Parliament tried to do so keeps a lot of law professors in their jobs. There's a fair number on both sides. (there's no doubt the ECJ would not recognise it.) Amending the 1972 Act for Maastricht proves nothing, since it didn't involve any attempt to break EC law.
(It's even harder to work out what's going on in countries with written constitutions according to which their own supreme court is supreme. E.g. the German constitutional court has ruled that EC laws that infringe the German constitution are not valid, while the ECJ decided the opposite. Since then the EU has been very careful to make sure there is no conflict between EC and German constitutional law. If it happens, who knows what the outcome will be.)
The EU has had federal-like powers right from its start - that was the whole point of the exercise. If you think of it a an arbitration body between governments, then you're very mistaken. EU law governs everything from employment rights to environmental protection. The EU has an executive, a legislature and a supreme court with the power to overrule national governments.
In effect, it's very similar to the US federal government, with the member nations being like US states - except that EU members still retain control over foreign affairs and defence.
However whereas the people in the US federal government are elected directly, with the exception of the EU parliament (a fairly toothless body), appointments to the EU governing institutions are done at one remove: they are made by the national governments (who are democratically elected). It's basically as if the state legislatures in the US got to pick the Senate and the President, with just the House of Reps being directly elected.
by and large what you say is right, but you're wrong that the EU cannot legislate directly into national law. (and yes, I am a European lawyer)
The EU can issue three types of legislation: regulations, decisions and directives. The first two are "directly effective", meaning that they automatically become part of national law. A directive is meant to be implemented by the national parliament before it takes effect in national law, but if the national parliament fails to do so, then the directive itself can take direct effect and be enforced through the national courts.
You're also wrong in saying that "there is nothing in principle stopping a national parliament from refusing to accept a new EU law". One of the fundamental concepts of EU law is its supremacy over national law.
The legislative process in the EU is basically that the commission (the executive) has to propose legislation, which can then be adopted by the Council (the legislature). The Parliament is also part of the legislature but has fairly limited powers - hence why it has taken so long for its repeated rejection of the software patent directive to get anywhere.
Alternatively you could get an iBook. I dropped mine a few months back - well, actually I tripped on the power cable while it was on my desk; in any case it hit the ground pretty hard.
The result? Not a scratch, everything (so far) working fine. (Though I spent a fair penny having an engineer check it out and tell me so.) The power adapter was trashed, though. Maybe they should work on that.
By comparison, when my sister dropped her 12" powerbook last year, she ended up with a bent case and several broken parts. Moral: metal cases may look cool, but plastic does a better job.
I disagree. They do and they should. That's what the common law system is all about: the idea that, except where legislation holds otherwise, the courts have the right, the power and the duty to develop the law as they see fit, in order to meet the needs of justice. That's a duty separate, though closely related, to their duty to decide the interpretation legislation.
This is obscured in much of the US because most states have codified their law - i.e. passed legislation that enacts the old common-law rules and puts them on a statutory footing. But you'd do well to remember that the underpinning of almost every area of US (and English, and Australian, and Canadian, and New Zealand) law is based on the creations of judges, often dating from medieval times.
That's also the reason that Congressional attempts to prevent US judges referring to foreign judgments are so misguided. It shows a complete lack of understanding of how the common law works. It's not importing foreign law into the US. It's seeing how another judge, working from the same common-law principles, has reached a decision, and deciding whether similar reasoning would be applicable in the current case (taking account of the fact the other decision was in a different political, social and cultural climate). It's precisely because of the way all the common law jurisdictions support each other that the system is so strong - because you're drawing on the wisdom of all the judges in all the common law jurisdictions in all history. Not the decisions of a few hundred corporate-funded cronies in Congress.
It's slightly off-topic, but one of the things I find hardest to understand is how those people who are keenest on Creationism are very often the same people who have the most blase attitude towards the environment.
I mean, if you thought that every single species was individually designed by God, wouldn't causing the destruction of a species be the ultimate act of vandalism against the creator? Since he presumably designed each species to fit their ecosystem, isn't the deliberate damaging or destruction of an ecosystem sticking two fingers in God's face. Isn't it saying "Thanks for all the work you put in, God, but we've decided we don't need that crap any more so we're flushing it down the pan".
If you really believe that God created the world and everything in it, how about showing it a little respect?
Simple - just use "paste special" instead of "paste" on the edit menu, and choose "unformatted text" or "unformatted unicode text". The only annoying thing is that this option isn't available via just right-clicking (as regular paste is), even though paste special is included on the right-click menu in excel. MS still needs to work on their interface consistency...
I'm sorry, but as a lawyer I feel compelled to point out that copyright has nothing at all to do with region coding. It's simply not true that the owner of the copyright has "complete control" over the work. If that were the case, the copyright owner could call you up and demand you stop watching his DVD, or tell you to only watch it on Thursdays and then only if you eat at Burger King. Copyright is in fact a very limited right - and rightly so: it gives the owner the right to control how the goods are first marketed (I'm not dealing with issues of public performance here). The person who owns the copyright in a movie can control who sells the DVD; he can sell the right to different people in different countries. But once the consumer has bought the DVD, the copright holder loses all his rights as to where that person uses the DVD. If I buy my DVDs dirt cheap (but legally) in Asia, then there is nothing in copyright law to stop me from bringing them into the US and watching them - I can even sell them on to someone else in the US since under the "first sale" rule, once the item has been sold on the copyright holder loses his right to control its marketing.
DVD region coding goes far beyond copyright. It tries to stop me watching the DVDs I purchased in the US after I moved back to the UK (lucky it's easy to buy region-free machines here). It tries to stop me ordering cheap DVDs from overseas online stores.
It is without any doubt, monopolistic, anticompetitive price-fixing with no justification in copyright law and I'm sorry, but it's the job of government to prevent businesses from abusing the marketplace and screwing the consumer.
>>John Kerry would no real war-fighting president. He's the kind of Democrat bin Laden wants in the oval office. You can bet he sure doesn't want Bush re-elected, and that alone is adequate reason to vote for Bush.
Tha's funny, I would have thought Bush was Bin Laden's dream President. Think about it:
(i) As Iraq showed, going after Bin Laden himself is clearly not Bush's no. 1 priority. Hell, he's basically subcontracted the job of looking for Osama to the Pakistan security forces - the same people who created the Taliban in the first place.
(ii) By invading Iraq and supporting Sharon, Bush has increased support for Bin Laden exponentially in the middle east. Bush has single-handedly made Al Qaeda into a mainstream organisation.
(iii) At the same time, by pissing on his allies and acting unilaterally, Bush has destroyed almost any trace of sympathy for the US among other nations. Bush may have "allies" in Blair and Berlusconi, but he won't find many supporters among Italians and Brits. Even right-wing British politicians are openly saying that they have had enough of Bush.
The US is like the Cyclops in the Odyssey. Blinded, friendless and mad with rage, tossing rocks into the sea while the wily Odysseus laughs at giant's impotence.
'Remember the beginning of the movie, "Snatch"? Remember how they were able to disguise themselves as old Hassidic Jews and they got the metal detector people to let them go by unsearched?'
So, if that's how it is in the movies, it must be true.
It's true that the USSR played a far, far larger role in defeating Nazi Germany than the USA. (Indeed one of the main reasons for launching D-Day when they did was that Churchill & Roosevelt were worried that Stalin would defeat the Germans all by himself and end up occupying the whole of Europe - in a sense it was the first battle of the cold war.)
However, one thing you can't claim is that the Russians achieved superpower status "without having to terrorize any civilian populations". Aside from the fact that Stalin managed to kill more Russians than Hitler, do you think that the rest of Eastern Europe submitted to communism voluntarily?
So I take it you never flip TV channels during commercials, take a leak, make some coffee etc - after all, it's your duty to watch the ads or who'll pay for the shows?
I think you've forgotten something. The purpose of advertising is not to display as many ads as possible, it's to people to buy stuff. If an advertiser has to make 2 million impressions to make a single sale, then the cost per impression will be very low. If he can make that sale with 10 impressions, he'll pay a lot more. It's not in anyone's interest to bombard people with ads if they're not going to buy anything. Since people who block web ads are pretty much saying "I'm not interested in what you've got to sell", it's actually meaning that the ads which do go out are better targeted - so they should be worth more.
There's actually an article (subscription) on this in this week's edition of Nature. It's about a guy who was blind from birth but - at the age of 52 - received a corneal graft that enabled him to see for the first time.
The psychologists were dumbfounded to discover that he could read the time on clocks and even the titles of books straight away, without any learning. It turned out that he had a "blind" watch (a clock without a cover over the face, so he could tell the time from feeling the positions of the fingers), and at school he'd been taught to recognise capital letters by their shape. Somehow this shape information was transferred from touch into sight ("cross-modal transfer").
However, when it came to objects that were out of his tactile knowledge, he was unable to respond to them properly - e.g. he had no way of estimating the distance of any object further away than the length of his arm, and pictures and photographs were just meaningless blobs of colour.
"1. They'd more likely have to patent a device or method to make those paintings. So someone might have got a patent on something new like flinging colours at the canvas, but then someone else might just as well get the same result (or close enough) by using the old methods (using a brush). For which plenty of prior art existed."
But inventing a method to make paintings is exactly what the pointillistes did. They researched how the brain interpreted colours, working out how large to make spots of primary and how close to put them together for the viewer to see them as one dot of colour. Another earlier method for making pictures was perspective. Lucky Brunelleschi didn't patent that. ("A method for giving 2-dimensional figures the appearance of depth by mapping parallel lines extending into the distance onto the plane such that they meet at a single point....")
"There's only one real reason management gives a crap about stock price--not because it is any real indicator of a company's performance or health--it's because they personally have options & compensation dependant on it."
That plus the fact that the stockholders can sack the management...
Well, my Nokia 3300 lets me use any mp3 file as a ringtone. It has a USB connection so I can download them from my PC, and a microphone socket so I can record from any audio source. Oh, and a radio which I can also record from.
Naturally it has a built-in MP3 player too, with 128Mb storage on standard compact flash cards. Which I can also use as a regular USB storage device for transferring files around. Battery life when not playing music is around 4 days; charge it nightly and it has enough juice to use it for 2-3 hours of music a day (more than my commute) plus regular phone use the rest of the time. And yes, it was free with my contract (second-cheapest contract on offer).
Mind you, this was last year's model. It was discontinued 3 months ago. The 7600 plays AAC and video as well.
Come on guys, anyone who uses "Segway" and "status symbol" in the same sentence deserves to be modded funny. I can just imagine it now... hordes of Armani-clad, rolex-wearing film stars segwaying down the red carpet at the premier of the next big blockbuster. Or - no, even better - a girl dumping her ferrari-driving boyfriend for that stylish guy with two-wheels and a skating helmet.
Man, what planet are you on? Ferraris and rolexes are status symbols because they ooze style and exclusivity. A Segway is just proof of laziness.
Well, so long as we take decent care of this planet we have a few billion years until the sun turns red and swallows us up. So maybe, from the survivalist point of view, we should focus our resources on saving the world we have got instead of trying to export our destructive tendencies to the rest of the universe. Of course, in the long term we should still work on escape, but it's hardly urgent.
Unless of course we ignore the environmental threats and thus hasten the demise of dear old Earth. Then you might have a point... not that our chances would be much higher anywhere else. If we can't even keep Earth habitable, what chance Mars?
Slashdot Mirror
No, the UK court can't put him in prison because libel is a civil and not a criminal matter.
As for damages, you'd be surprised what reciprocal enforcement proceedings can do. I'm not sure of the US-UK position for libel but it's quite common, where a judgment is obtained against a foreign person, to go off to the foreign courts and ask them to enforce that judgment. It depends what treaties are in force. Plus of course if the person you're suing has any assets in the UK - or in any other country where there are reciprocal enforcement arrangements - then you can enforce the judgment against them.
As for UK citizens libelling US citizens, skylarov is irrelevant because that was a criminal matter and as I said, libel is civil. Sure they could be sued in the US, but enforcement would again be subject to whatever reciprocal enforcement agreements were in force. You can't extradite someone for libel, or arrest them/prevent them leaving the country if they happen to be in the US.
Sigh... I wonder if there's a website where lawyers can spend their time making ill-informed comments about tech issues.
Linus is storing up trouble. Now everyone knows he runs a dual processor machine, SCO will be after him for two licences.
I used to work for a journal. Reviewing a paper is not like moderating a slashdot comment. It's an in-depth editing process that takes a lot of time. Firstly, most papers are on very specialised subjects. You can't randomly distribute it to a reviewer - it's quite possible that there will only be a small number of people out there qualified to review it, and half of those are probably working on the same problem so you can't send it to them in case they nick all the ideas and then reject the paper. (Oh yes, scientists will do that) Once you've found some decent reviewers, it's not a question of the reviewer reading it in 5 minutes and marking it +1 insightful. It will probably take them a few days to read and understand the paper properly. Then they need to consider whether it makes sense and, just as important, whether what it reports is worth publishing. (Someone reviewing a paper for Nature or Science is going to have a very different view on whether it should be accepted than someone reviewing it for the Journal of Pointless Periwinkle Research.) If the paper seems good enough on those grounds, then the reviewer will still usually suggest a raft of changes to make it better. The review then has to go back to the author so that the author can make the changes. When that's done, it goes out to review again, & so on until finally the reviewers think it's ready to publish. It's true that the reviewer generally does all this work for free (and peer reviewing can be one of the biggest demands on a scientist's time). But someone has to choose the reviewers and act as go-between (since for obvious reasons, the identity of the reviewers and the authors are kept secret from one another); most importantly that go-between needs to act as a fair referee and realise where a reviewer is making unreasonable demands or being too easy and so find more reviewers. Someone has to perform those little tasks like sub-editing (which can be a major task with a paper submitted in English by a group of Japanese researchers - and let's face it, most american scientists aren't great writers either). Then there's those little matters of layout, style and consistency that are necessary in a professional product. And finally, people still like paper journals. It's a lot easier to read a long paper on paper, the diagrams are better quality than most office printers can manage, and some people just prefer it. And paper journals add a new layer of costs - not just the cost of paper and ink but typesetting, delivery etc. As for cost, if journals seem massively expensive compared to consumer magazines, remember that most of the cost of consumer magazines is paid for by advertisers, not subscribers. And when people complain about paying $10,000s for a journal - that's usually for access to be shared between hundreds if not thousands of subscribers at that lab or university. Per-reader costs are comparatively low.
>>This means that while European software firms have been explicitly denied the right to get patents on their inventions, US firms have been aquiring rights that will be enforced in Europe.
That's very misleading. European companies are not denied the right to patent software. They (and all other companies and people, wherever they are based) are denied the right to patent software in the EU. They're free to patent it in the US and if they have any sense will do have done so. Similarly US companies are free to ignore software patents insofar as they are doing business in the EU and don't try and sell the results in the US.
Firstly, what losses did your parents actually suffer? a lawsuit is not like playing the lottery. you're not suppose to win back any more than you lost.
Secondly, it's irrelevant how much the lawyer got in total ; what's relevant is how much he got as a percentage of the total award. If the award was $1000 per person and lawyers took $700, then it's pretty unfair. If the award was $350 per person and the lawyer took $50, then it's not so unreasonable. A stockholder doesn't whine that a CEO is paid far more than the stockholder's annual dividend. This is no different, except that when the lawyer loses he usually doesn't get paid at all, whereas the CEO continues to get paid even if the company's stock tanks.
The constitutional position is not clear. Theoretically the UK Parliament can override EC legislation. And yet in the Factortame case the House of Lords threw out an Act of Parliament because it failed to comply with EC law. Now that wasn't an act which was explicitly passed to infringe EC law, but it was the first time since before the Civil War that a British court felt it had jurisdiction to strike down primary legislation. According to the 'unwritten' rules of the UK constitution, if an earlier act of parliament is contradicted by a later one, the later one wins, no questions. Factortame showed that different rules apply to EC legislation.
Moreover, under the current EC treaties it is actually not possible for a state to secede from the union. So secession could not be done unilaterally - it would need an amendment to the treaties which in turn would need ratification by every other member state. (By contrast, the proposed constitution allows any state to leave on giving a few years' notice - don't remember how many).
So, as a matter of EC law, the UK can't just amend the 1972 act and secede. Trying to work out what would happen if Parliament tried to do so keeps a lot of law professors in their jobs. There's a fair number on both sides. (there's no doubt the ECJ would not recognise it.) Amending the 1972 Act for Maastricht proves nothing, since it didn't involve any attempt to break EC law.
(It's even harder to work out what's going on in countries with written constitutions according to which their own supreme court is supreme. E.g. the German constitutional court has ruled that EC laws that infringe the German constitution are not valid, while the ECJ decided the opposite. Since then the EU has been very careful to make sure there is no conflict between EC and German constitutional law. If it happens, who knows what the outcome will be.)
Someone should tell intel that 133*4=532. Looks like they still haven't fixed that multiplication bug from the original pentium...
The EU has had federal-like powers right from its start - that was the whole point of the exercise. If you think of it a an arbitration body between governments, then you're very mistaken. EU law governs everything from employment rights to environmental protection. The EU has an executive, a legislature and a supreme court with the power to overrule national governments.
In effect, it's very similar to the US federal government, with the member nations being like US states - except that EU members still retain control over foreign affairs and defence.
However whereas the people in the US federal government are elected directly, with the exception of the EU parliament (a fairly toothless body), appointments to the EU governing institutions are done at one remove: they are made by the national governments (who are democratically elected). It's basically as if the state legislatures in the US got to pick the Senate and the President, with just the House of Reps being directly elected.
by and large what you say is right, but you're wrong that the EU cannot legislate directly into national law. (and yes, I am a European lawyer)
The EU can issue three types of legislation: regulations, decisions and directives. The first two are "directly effective", meaning that they automatically become part of national law. A directive is meant to be implemented by the national parliament before it takes effect in national law, but if the national parliament fails to do so, then the directive itself can take direct effect and be enforced through the national courts.
You're also wrong in saying that "there is nothing in principle stopping a national parliament from refusing to accept a new EU law". One of the fundamental concepts of EU law is its supremacy over national law.
The legislative process in the EU is basically that the commission (the executive) has to propose legislation, which can then be adopted by the Council (the legislature). The Parliament is also part of the legislature but has fairly limited powers - hence why it has taken so long for its repeated rejection of the software patent directive to get anywhere.
Alternatively you could get an iBook. I dropped mine a few months back - well, actually I tripped on the power cable while it was on my desk; in any case it hit the ground pretty hard.
The result? Not a scratch, everything (so far) working fine. (Though I spent a fair penny having an engineer check it out and tell me so.) The power adapter was trashed, though. Maybe they should work on that.
By comparison, when my sister dropped her 12" powerbook last year, she ended up with a bent case and several broken parts. Moral: metal cases may look cool, but plastic does a better job.
I disagree. They do and they should. That's what the common law system is all about: the idea that, except where legislation holds otherwise, the courts have the right, the power and the duty to develop the law as they see fit, in order to meet the needs of justice. That's a duty separate, though closely related, to their duty to decide the interpretation legislation.
This is obscured in much of the US because most states have codified their law - i.e. passed legislation that enacts the old common-law rules and puts them on a statutory footing. But you'd do well to remember that the underpinning of almost every area of US (and English, and Australian, and Canadian, and New Zealand) law is based on the creations of judges, often dating from medieval times.
That's also the reason that Congressional attempts to prevent US judges referring to foreign judgments are so misguided. It shows a complete lack of understanding of how the common law works. It's not importing foreign law into the US. It's seeing how another judge, working from the same common-law principles, has reached a decision, and deciding whether similar reasoning would be applicable in the current case (taking account of the fact the other decision was in a different political, social and cultural climate). It's precisely because of the way all the common law jurisdictions support each other that the system is so strong - because you're drawing on the wisdom of all the judges in all the common law jurisdictions in all history. Not the decisions of a few hundred corporate-funded cronies in Congress.
It's slightly off-topic, but one of the things I find hardest to understand is how those people who are keenest on Creationism are very often the same people who have the most blase attitude towards the environment. I mean, if you thought that every single species was individually designed by God, wouldn't causing the destruction of a species be the ultimate act of vandalism against the creator? Since he presumably designed each species to fit their ecosystem, isn't the deliberate damaging or destruction of an ecosystem sticking two fingers in God's face. Isn't it saying "Thanks for all the work you put in, God, but we've decided we don't need that crap any more so we're flushing it down the pan". If you really believe that God created the world and everything in it, how about showing it a little respect?
You can't compare Apples to Oranges! Steve Jobs is the living reincarnation of God! Wait...oh, I see. Sorry. Was in the wrong fundamentalist forum.
>> I just want to past clean text that's all.
Simple - just use "paste special" instead of "paste" on the edit menu, and choose "unformatted text" or "unformatted unicode text". The only annoying thing is that this option isn't available via just right-clicking (as regular paste is), even though paste special is included on the right-click menu in excel. MS still needs to work on their interface consistency...
I'm sorry, but as a lawyer I feel compelled to point out that copyright has nothing at all to do with region coding. It's simply not true that the owner of the copyright has "complete control" over the work. If that were the case, the copyright owner could call you up and demand you stop watching his DVD, or tell you to only watch it on Thursdays and then only if you eat at Burger King. Copyright is in fact a very limited right - and rightly so: it gives the owner the right to control how the goods are first marketed (I'm not dealing with issues of public performance here). The person who owns the copyright in a movie can control who sells the DVD; he can sell the right to different people in different countries. But once the consumer has bought the DVD, the copright holder loses all his rights as to where that person uses the DVD. If I buy my DVDs dirt cheap (but legally) in Asia, then there is nothing in copyright law to stop me from bringing them into the US and watching them - I can even sell them on to someone else in the US since under the "first sale" rule, once the item has been sold on the copyright holder loses his right to control its marketing.
DVD region coding goes far beyond copyright. It tries to stop me watching the DVDs I purchased in the US after I moved back to the UK (lucky it's easy to buy region-free machines here). It tries to stop me ordering cheap DVDs from overseas online stores.
It is without any doubt, monopolistic, anticompetitive price-fixing with no justification in copyright law and I'm sorry, but it's the job of government to prevent businesses from abusing the marketplace and screwing the consumer.
>>John Kerry would no real war-fighting president. He's the kind of Democrat bin Laden wants in the oval office. You can bet he sure doesn't want Bush re-elected, and that alone is adequate reason to vote for Bush.
Tha's funny, I would have thought Bush was Bin Laden's dream President. Think about it:
(i) As Iraq showed, going after Bin Laden himself is clearly not Bush's no. 1 priority. Hell, he's basically subcontracted the job of looking for Osama to the Pakistan security forces - the same people who created the Taliban in the first place.
(ii) By invading Iraq and supporting Sharon, Bush has increased support for Bin Laden exponentially in the middle east. Bush has single-handedly made Al Qaeda into a mainstream organisation.
(iii) At the same time, by pissing on his allies and acting unilaterally, Bush has destroyed almost any trace of sympathy for the US among other nations. Bush may have "allies" in Blair and Berlusconi, but he won't find many supporters among Italians and Brits. Even right-wing British politicians are openly saying that they have had enough of Bush.
The US is like the Cyclops in the Odyssey. Blinded, friendless and mad with rage, tossing rocks into the sea while the wily Odysseus laughs at giant's impotence.
'Remember the beginning of the movie, "Snatch"? Remember how they were able to disguise themselves as old Hassidic Jews and they got the metal detector people to let them go by unsearched?'
So, if that's how it is in the movies, it must be true.
It's true that the USSR played a far, far larger role in defeating Nazi Germany than the USA. (Indeed one of the main reasons for launching D-Day when they did was that Churchill & Roosevelt were worried that Stalin would defeat the Germans all by himself and end up occupying the whole of Europe - in a sense it was the first battle of the cold war.)
However, one thing you can't claim is that the Russians achieved superpower status "without having to terrorize any civilian populations". Aside from the fact that Stalin managed to kill more Russians than Hitler, do you think that the rest of Eastern Europe submitted to communism voluntarily?
So I take it you never flip TV channels during commercials, take a leak, make some coffee etc - after all, it's your duty to watch the ads or who'll pay for the shows?
I think you've forgotten something. The purpose of advertising is not to display as many ads as possible, it's to people to buy stuff. If an advertiser has to make 2 million impressions to make a single sale, then the cost per impression will be very low. If he can make that sale with 10 impressions, he'll pay a lot more. It's not in anyone's interest to bombard people with ads if they're not going to buy anything. Since people who block web ads are pretty much saying "I'm not interested in what you've got to sell", it's actually meaning that the ads which do go out are better targeted - so they should be worth more.
There's actually an article (subscription) on this in this week's edition of Nature. It's about a guy who was blind from birth but - at the age of 52 - received a corneal graft that enabled him to see for the first time.
The psychologists were dumbfounded to discover that he could read the time on clocks and even the titles of books straight away, without any learning. It turned out that he had a "blind" watch (a clock without a cover over the face, so he could tell the time from feeling the positions of the fingers), and at school he'd been taught to recognise capital letters by their shape. Somehow this shape information was transferred from touch into sight ("cross-modal transfer").
However, when it came to objects that were out of his tactile knowledge, he was unable to respond to them properly - e.g. he had no way of estimating the distance of any object further away than the length of his arm, and pictures and photographs were just meaningless blobs of colour.
"1. They'd more likely have to patent a device or method to make those paintings. So someone might have got a patent on something new like flinging colours at the canvas, but then someone else might just as well get the same result (or close enough) by using the old methods (using a brush). For which plenty of prior art existed."
But inventing a method to make paintings is exactly what the pointillistes did. They researched how the brain interpreted colours, working out how large to make spots of primary and how close to put them together for the viewer to see them as one dot of colour. Another earlier method for making pictures was perspective. Lucky Brunelleschi didn't patent that. ("A method for giving 2-dimensional figures the appearance of depth by mapping parallel lines extending into the distance onto the plane such that they meet at a single point....")
"There's only one real reason management gives a crap about stock price--not because it is any real indicator of a company's performance or health--it's because they personally have options & compensation dependant on it."
That plus the fact that the stockholders can sack the management...
Well, my Nokia 3300 lets me use any mp3 file as a ringtone. It has a USB connection so I can download them from my PC, and a microphone socket so I can record from any audio source. Oh, and a radio which I can also record from.
Naturally it has a built-in MP3 player too, with 128Mb storage on standard compact flash cards. Which I can also use as a regular USB storage device for transferring files around. Battery life when not playing music is around 4 days; charge it nightly and it has enough juice to use it for 2-3 hours of music a day (more than my commute) plus regular phone use the rest of the time. And yes, it was free with my contract (second-cheapest contract on offer).
Mind you, this was last year's model. It was discontinued 3 months ago. The 7600 plays AAC and video as well.
Come on guys, anyone who uses "Segway" and "status symbol" in the same sentence deserves to be modded funny. I can just imagine it now... hordes of Armani-clad, rolex-wearing film stars segwaying down the red carpet at the premier of the next big blockbuster. Or - no, even better - a girl dumping her ferrari-driving boyfriend for that stylish guy with two-wheels and a skating helmet.
Man, what planet are you on? Ferraris and rolexes are status symbols because they ooze style and exclusivity. A Segway is just proof of laziness.
Well, so long as we take decent care of this planet we have a few billion years until the sun turns red and swallows us up. So maybe, from the survivalist point of view, we should focus our resources on saving the world we have got instead of trying to export our destructive tendencies to the rest of the universe. Of course, in the long term we should still work on escape, but it's hardly urgent.
Unless of course we ignore the environmental threats and thus hasten the demise of dear old Earth. Then you might have a point... not that our chances would be much higher anywhere else. If we can't even keep Earth habitable, what chance Mars?