IRC section 501(c)(3) technically has nothing to do with the deductibility of contributions. That is governed by section 170, which merely happens to cover almost, but not quite, exactly the same entities as sec. 501(c)(3).
It is conceivable, but just barely, that the "contribution" could be deductible for some other reason -- if it's just an ordinary and necessary business expense, and for some reason exempt from capitalization, say -- but not for most "contributors." I'm fairly certain it is a crime for SearchKing to falsely claim these contributions are deductible.
I suspect literally every person I work with of, at least, taking the occasional personal phone call or surfing the web. Thus, I would have to report everyone who works for my firm, presumably every day.
I wonder how many days it would take before they let me stop.
More precisely, they are hearsay, but admissible hearsay.
Welcome to one of the 37 exceptions to the hearsay rule.
Of course, that does not guarantee they are admissible; you need to worry about the Best Evidence Rule, for one thing, though I don't think that should be a problem.
Like, duh. We're talking about reals here, my cowardly friend. I mean the ordinary topology of R, as was totally obvious from the message I was replying to.
Now, did you really not understand that, or did you just want a chance to quote a textbook?
Yes: Omega is such a number. It is not computable, but it is describable. (Unless you mean something stronger by "Turing machine with infinite running time." Within a finite time, an ordinary TM cannot produce any digits of Omega (or any beyond a small fixed number, for a weaker definition).)
Reasoning about noncomputable numbers gets tricky, but there are formal ways to go about it. Consider even a Turing machine augmented with an oracle for Omega. It can compute (or accept) a much larger class than an ordinary Turing machine, such as numbers algebraic over Omega.
Obviously, you would want a more formal system than English for defining finite describability formally, but any sufficiently rich language will give you a definition that comes out about the same.
You can make much stronger statements. Even Omega is part of the miniscule class of reals which are finitely describable: there's a string of English words which uniquely identifies it. The same is true of all computable numbers, including the trivially small classes like the algebraic numbers.
There are only aleph-null many finite strings of words, but 2^aleph-null reals, so the finitely describable are an insignificant minority.
It may not be in the first trillion digits, but it's not just in there, it's in there infinitely many times (assuming pi is normal). There are no probabilities about it.
I always get confused with that Lionel Hutz guy. I assumed I'd be taken seriously after he died.
Seriously, I've been using this name, and spelling it this way, for too long to change now, and my firm would fire me very, very quickly if I used my real name. (I'm contractually barred from participating in any Internet "chat room," on any subject, even from home. How's that for enlightened Internet usage policies?)
Despite the repeal of the most obnoxious part of the Glass-Steagal Act, we still have a separation between banking and "commerce": the only affiliates banks can have are certain finance-related companies. Unlike European banks, which own everything from car companies to grocery stores, U.S. banks can't sell anything but investment-type products. (The exception for merchant banking arms of financial services holding companies is not broad enough to create common control between a bank and a nonfinancial company.) And the companies they can own are heavily regulated, and almost certainly subject to Federal Reserve regulation as to their use of information they receive from bank affiliates.
This means, yes, they can tell their credit-card arm, or their financial-planning subsidiary, about your bank account, but they definitely can't tell the rest of the world. I don't have a problem with that.
Again, I wouldn't trust any regulatory regime that purported to forbid information sharing within a corporate group: it's just not meaningful to tell a single company (no matter how legally organized) that certain of its employees can't tell others something. We make rules like that only for very sensitive information, and generally just assume that the whole company knows, and must keep, any secrets anyone in it knows.
I humbly apologize to the community: I meant Regulation P, of course, not Reg E. The definition of affitiate I gave was, however, correct: it requires at least enough common ownership to constitute control. Amazon's "affiliates" are not Reg P affiliates.
This requirement has nothing to do with the Privacy Act (and neither does the Verizon case, for that matter, though that's a different law too). This is from Regulation E of the Federal Reserve, which defines "affiliate" for banks in roughly the way the U.S. securities laws do: as a company controlled by, controlling, or under common control with another. The fact that Amazon uses the word in another sense is totally irrelevant.
See that word "affiliate" in there? That means, basically, other divisions of the same corporate family. If they have a broker-dealer unit, for example, that's not technically part of the bank, so its ads are sent to you by an "affiliate." It's pointless to try to regulate information sharing within a single business, and don't believe anyone who says they will.
"Not actionable" would mean that it is legal: that doing it does not expose you to suit. That is not at all what the court held: it held only that the California courts do not have jurisdiction.
Par for the course for Slashdot reporting, I guess.
I think the problem is that most web designers would really rather be designing magazine pages or something, where they can force us to see the page the way they see it.
Even the thought of dreaming up precise semantics for HTML to even give designers that option in theory makes my head hurt.
I don't get it. Microsoft already knows the message was sent to you by a real, live person actually using the Hotmail web site (unless spammers will go through the trouble of automating that). I mean, I get spam with Hotmail return addresses, but they must all be forged, right? I'd say genuine Hotmail mail is pretty strongly presumptively non-spam and going to be read.
With web bugs, MS could figure out the IP addresses of people to whom messages are forwarded, but that's about it. If they wanted to build a database of people getting messages from Hotmail users, they don't need web bugs.
All hotmail users' outboxes are belong to them already.
That's an arms race the spammers can't win. Sending spam is an ultra-low-margin business: with response rates of a fraction of a basis point, and probably only a fraction of them actually spending any money, the cost and effort per message sent must be very, very, very low for the spammers to make any money at all. Most spam recipients would gladly put in, say, $20 worth of effort to spamproof their addresses; there is no way even a spammer with huge scale could invest even $5 worth of effort for one more address. We will all have different Bayesian rules, remember. Combine that with the fact that I have perfect information about what spam and nonspam I get, and the sender has little or no information about what gets through, and it's clear that even hours of effort by senders wouldn't do much.
And, even if they could afford to keep it up for a while, my spam filter will get better faster than their spam. This is the "Ambassador's criterion" from SDI (briefly: Star Wars won't lead to an arms race if it gets to the point where shooting down an the marginal missile is cheaper than building the marginal missile).
Only a fraction of business sales are structured as sales of (interests in) an entity, such as stock sales, with the sold entity surviving the transaction. Many are direct sales of assets and assumptions of liabilities, and many are mergers, which have more in common with asset transfers than with stock sales.
In any case, the structure of the transaction doesn't necessarily determine whether assets are treated as transfered. Many commercial leases, for example, require the consent of the lessor not only for an assignment of the lease but for a sale of the lessee no matter how structured.
That's fine in theory, but, if it works correctly, why would anyone want to turn it off? Remember, it's only prefetching pages when the server says to. It also automatically interrupts prefetches if the browser is not idle.
Unfortunately for your political point, it sounds like you are not actually breaking the law. Everything you listed that you do (though not what your students do) -- photocopying sections (not whole books) for classroom use, encouraging use of legitimate libraries, celebrating others' use of P2P networks -- should be fair use or otherwise noninfringing.
Not that copyright law doesn't forbid other completely reasonable things, of course.
Generally speaking, copyrights only cover the territory where granted. If you only have a country-A copyright, people are free to copy or otherwise use the work in country-B. If you have a country-B copyright that expires after 10 years, that's it.
All of this is nearly completely irrelevant, though, since the law of granting copyrights (as distinguished from the law of the rights of copyright holders) is now virtually identical everywhere, and copyrights automatically exist wherever you need them, due to the magic of copyright treaties. The exception is the few countries that do not have "copyright relations" with, e.g., the U.S. Taliban-held Afghanistan was such a place; it is possible Iraq is today. In any such country (if there are any), people are free to violate U.S. copyrights, and Americans are free to copy works created in those places (and not published elsewhere).
IAALBNAIPL (I am a lawyer, but not an IP lawyer), so I will defer to others' expertise, but this really is a moot point given the modern treaties.
Slashdot Mirror
IRC section 501(c)(3) technically has nothing to do with the deductibility of contributions. That is governed by section 170, which merely happens to cover almost, but not quite, exactly the same entities as sec. 501(c)(3).
It is conceivable, but just barely, that the "contribution" could be deductible for some other reason -- if it's just an ordinary and necessary business expense, and for some reason exempt from capitalization, say -- but not for most "contributors." I'm fairly certain it is a crime for SearchKing to falsely claim these contributions are deductible.
I suspect literally every person I work with of, at least, taking the occasional personal phone call or surfing the web. Thus, I would have to report everyone who works for my firm, presumably every day.
I wonder how many days it would take before they let me stop.
Hey, what's wrong with that?
-- your resident parody
More precisely, they are hearsay, but admissible hearsay.
Welcome to one of the 37 exceptions to the hearsay rule.
Of course, that does not guarantee they are admissible; you need to worry about the Best Evidence Rule, for one thing, though I don't think that should be a problem.
Like, duh. We're talking about reals here, my cowardly friend. I mean the ordinary topology of R, as was totally obvious from the message I was replying to.
Now, did you really not understand that, or did you just want a chance to quote a textbook?
No, you didn't.
What's the smallest positive number, period? There isn't one.
All you've shown is that the non-describable numbers are not closed.
Yes: Omega is such a number. It is not computable, but it is describable. (Unless you mean something stronger by "Turing machine with infinite running time." Within a finite time, an ordinary TM cannot produce any digits of Omega (or any beyond a small fixed number, for a weaker definition).)
Reasoning about noncomputable numbers gets tricky, but there are formal ways to go about it. Consider even a Turing machine augmented with an oracle for Omega. It can compute (or accept) a much larger class than an ordinary Turing machine, such as numbers algebraic over Omega.
Obviously, you would want a more formal system than English for defining finite describability formally, but any sufficiently rich language will give you a definition that comes out about the same.
You can make much stronger statements. Even Omega is part of the miniscule class of reals which are finitely describable: there's a string of English words which uniquely identifies it. The same is true of all computable numbers, including the trivially small classes like the algebraic numbers.
There are only aleph-null many finite strings of words, but 2^aleph-null reals, so the finitely describable are an insignificant minority.
No, it isn't. Pi's digits are the same every time I look.
What exactly do you think "random" means? If "random" means "normal," noticing that random numbers are normal isn't much of a shocker.
It may not be in the first trillion digits, but it's not just in there, it's in there infinitely many times (assuming pi is normal). There are no probabilities about it.
Does anyone seriously doubt that pi is normal?
I always get confused with that Lionel Hutz guy. I assumed I'd be taken seriously after he died.
Seriously, I've been using this name, and spelling it this way, for too long to change now, and my firm would fire me very, very quickly if I used my real name. (I'm contractually barred from participating in any Internet "chat room," on any subject, even from home. How's that for enlightened Internet usage policies?)
Despite the repeal of the most obnoxious part of the Glass-Steagal Act, we still have a separation between banking and "commerce": the only affiliates banks can have are certain finance-related companies. Unlike European banks, which own everything from car companies to grocery stores, U.S. banks can't sell anything but investment-type products. (The exception for merchant banking arms of financial services holding companies is not broad enough to create common control between a bank and a nonfinancial company.) And the companies they can own are heavily regulated, and almost certainly subject to Federal Reserve regulation as to their use of information they receive from bank affiliates.
This means, yes, they can tell their credit-card arm, or their financial-planning subsidiary, about your bank account, but they definitely can't tell the rest of the world. I don't have a problem with that.
Again, I wouldn't trust any regulatory regime that purported to forbid information sharing within a corporate group: it's just not meaningful to tell a single company (no matter how legally organized) that certain of its employees can't tell others something. We make rules like that only for very sensitive information, and generally just assume that the whole company knows, and must keep, any secrets anyone in it knows.
I humbly apologize to the community: I meant Regulation P, of course, not Reg E. The definition of affitiate I gave was, however, correct: it requires at least enough common ownership to constitute control. Amazon's "affiliates" are not Reg P affiliates.
Absolutely not.
This requirement has nothing to do with the Privacy Act (and neither does the Verizon case, for that matter, though that's a different law too). This is from Regulation E of the Federal Reserve, which defines "affiliate" for banks in roughly the way the U.S. securities laws do: as a company controlled by, controlling, or under common control with another. The fact that Amazon uses the word in another sense is totally irrelevant.
Once again, everyone, do your homework.
See that word "affiliate" in there? That means, basically, other divisions of the same corporate family. If they have a broker-dealer unit, for example, that's not technically part of the bank, so its ads are sent to you by an "affiliate." It's pointless to try to regulate information sharing within a single business, and don't believe anyone who says they will.
Nothing to see here, move along.
"Not actionable" would mean that it is legal: that doing it does not expose you to suit. That is not at all what the court held: it held only that the California courts do not have jurisdiction.
Par for the course for Slashdot reporting, I guess.
Amen to that!
I think the problem is that most web designers would really rather be designing magazine pages or something, where they can force us to see the page the way they see it.
Even the thought of dreaming up precise semantics for HTML to even give designers that option in theory makes my head hurt.
And yet EulerX07 gets moderated "Insightful" for confusing us, and any metamod who is not following this will call that "fair."
Welcome to life on Slashdot, I guess.
I don't get it. Microsoft already knows the message was sent to you by a real, live person actually using the Hotmail web site (unless spammers will go through the trouble of automating that). I mean, I get spam with Hotmail return addresses, but they must all be forged, right? I'd say genuine Hotmail mail is pretty strongly presumptively non-spam and going to be read.
With web bugs, MS could figure out the IP addresses of people to whom messages are forwarded, but that's about it. If they wanted to build a database of people getting messages from Hotmail users, they don't need web bugs.
All hotmail users' outboxes are belong to them already.
That's an arms race the spammers can't win. Sending spam is an ultra-low-margin business: with response rates of a fraction of a basis point, and probably only a fraction of them actually spending any money, the cost and effort per message sent must be very, very, very low for the spammers to make any money at all. Most spam recipients would gladly put in, say, $20 worth of effort to spamproof their addresses; there is no way even a spammer with huge scale could invest even $5 worth of effort for one more address. We will all have different Bayesian rules, remember. Combine that with the fact that I have perfect information about what spam and nonspam I get, and the sender has little or no information about what gets through, and it's clear that even hours of effort by senders wouldn't do much.
And, even if they could afford to keep it up for a while, my spam filter will get better faster than their spam. This is the "Ambassador's criterion" from SDI (briefly: Star Wars won't lead to an arms race if it gets to the point where shooting down an the marginal missile is cheaper than building the marginal missile).
I think we may just win the Spam Wars yet.
Only a fraction of business sales are structured as sales of (interests in) an entity, such as stock sales, with the sold entity surviving the transaction. Many are direct sales of assets and assumptions of liabilities, and many are mergers, which have more in common with asset transfers than with stock sales.
In any case, the structure of the transaction doesn't necessarily determine whether assets are treated as transfered. Many commercial leases, for example, require the consent of the lessor not only for an assignment of the lease but for a sale of the lessee no matter how structured.
That's fine in theory, but, if it works correctly, why would anyone want to turn it off? Remember, it's only prefetching pages when the server says to. It also automatically interrupts prefetches if the browser is not idle.
You have no idea what you're talking about. o(N) means something, which is why I wrote what you meant that way. It happens to be wrong here.
Unfortunately for your political point, it sounds like you are not actually breaking the law. Everything you listed that you do (though not what your students do) -- photocopying sections (not whole books) for classroom use, encouraging use of legitimate libraries, celebrating others' use of P2P networks -- should be fair use or otherwise noninfringing.
Not that copyright law doesn't forbid other completely reasonable things, of course.
Generally speaking, copyrights only cover the territory where granted. If you only have a country-A copyright, people are free to copy or otherwise use the work in country-B. If you have a country-B copyright that expires after 10 years, that's it.
All of this is nearly completely irrelevant, though, since the law of granting copyrights (as distinguished from the law of the rights of copyright holders) is now virtually identical everywhere, and copyrights automatically exist wherever you need them, due to the magic of copyright treaties. The exception is the few countries that do not have "copyright relations" with, e.g., the U.S. Taliban-held Afghanistan was such a place; it is possible Iraq is today. In any such country (if there are any), people are free to violate U.S. copyrights, and Americans are free to copy works created in those places (and not published elsewhere).
IAALBNAIPL (I am a lawyer, but not an IP lawyer), so I will defer to others' expertise, but this really is a moot point given the modern treaties.