The answer is usually the longest answer. Why would the prof go into great detail for a wrong answer, after all?;) I believe it's the law of conservation of detail. It's the same law that dictates that if Grissom finds a gum wrapper, the murderer dropped it. It's completely inconceivable that the victim dropped it earlier, or even that a friend was over earlier and dropped it! (Or that it's been under the couch for months).
The average euthanasia rate for animal shelters is 60%. The average for PETA owned shelters, which have budgets millions of dollars more than the other shelters, is over 90%. PETA does this to tug on wallet strings. Their official stance is "Ketamine is cheaper than kibble. We could save them all if only more people donated." True champions of animal rights. Not OK to kill for food. OK to kill if food is too damn expensive and they have attack ads to fund. It goes beyond that. Their roving death vans don't even bring animals back to the shelter. They pick them up and promise to find good homes for these cute newborn kittens, and they put them down right there in the van as soon as the doors are closed, then dump them in the dumpster at the end of the day. PETAs director says this is acceptable, says that the people want to be fooled, they know it's impossible to find homes for these animals, that's why they call PETA to do their dirty work. And this is nothing new. In 1994 PETA staged a daring raid to rescue some roosters and rabbits from testing. Then they immediately put them down, saying there was no room at their shelters.
So you're right, PETA primarily makes banners telling children that they are going to hell for drinking milk, and assaulting women wearing fur (and telling children to attack their mothers for wearing fur), and telling people that putting animals down is wrong, and animal testing is wrong, and we should just let AIDS run its course and wipe out all of humanity to spare the poor defenseless animals. Get yourself sterilized, breeding a purebred human is just as cruel and vain as breeding a purebred dog. Ben & Jerry's should switch from cow milk to human milk to be less cruel. PETA also use their funds to domain squat Vouge magazine, and Barnem and Bailey, while suing People for Eating Tasty Animals for doing the exact same thing back to them! They stage vocal protests when animals are killed in terrorist attacks, begging and pleading for the terrorists to stick to suicide bombings, and make sure there are no animals near by. Posters showing chained up black people next to chained up animals "Animals are the new slaves/" Don't drink milk kids, drink beer instead! Replace that milk mustache with a foam mustache. (Not targeting kids honest!) "Your daddy is a murderer. Keep your pets away from him he might not be able to keep his violent urges constrained to fish for long!" "Your daddy is lying to you and teaching you the wrong lessons about right and wrong. Teach him the truth about murder." They plead with places like Hamburg, NY, and Rodeo, California, to change their names to less cruel names. They buy up stock in fast food restaurants to try to get enough votes to get meat off the menu. Great investment. When Steve Irwin died, PETA's stance was that he was a cheap reality star teaching animal cruelty to children.
And with all that money spent, their poor unfunded animal shelters put down 90% of the animals received, sometimes within minutes of receiving them, sometimes before they even get to the building. Sometimes they put down the animals they sue to save from euthanasia, or animal testing, right after they get them. If their $20 million in donations per year cannot fund animal shelters, they should leave it to the non-profits to run them. They seem to be saving almost half of the animals they receive, unlike PETA, who doesn't even TRY. The founder of PETA got involved in animal rights after she brought kittens to an animal shelter, and learned they had been put down. That's the most utterly ironic thing ever, that she would now be in charge of animal shelters that put down more animals than any other shelter, by an astronomical degree. The fact that you think this is acceptable policy is sickening. When is it not acceptable? Would it only be unacceptable when it reaches 100% death rate, that they NEVER make it all the way to the shelter before being put down, instead of just most of the time?
Oh yes, don't forget to not use a leash, or tie your dog up, that's cruel. Getting hit by cars is natures way to keep the population down. If you only had let your animals run unsupervised, PETA would have less animals to put down.
Two things. One, you can't just void all the contracts that a company you bought out signed. Two, even the companies why didn't license would be protected by promissory estoppel. They can't say "We will not sue over these patents" and then do so later. If not for promissory estoppel, there would be so many awesome money making schemes. Take a song and say "Feel free to share this on P2P" and then track down people who share it and sue their asses of! Put up signs that say "free parking" on your private parking lots, then give them tickets anyway for trespassing! You don't need a contract to be bound by your promises. And you can't have a shell corporation buy yourself out to escape from your legal obligations!
Some of them "run" Vista Basic in the same way a P2 266 with 128 MB of ram "run" Windows XP, so no, some of these things labeled as Vista Capable can't even actually run Vista Basic in a usable way. MS's argument is they said it could run Vista. They never said which Vista, and they never said it could run it in a way that was usable!
It also fooled MS employees. One of the damning e-mails was a VP who bought a Vista capable laptop and was pissed it couldn't run Vista in a usable way.
Skinheads think it's immoral to allow white people to marry black people and pollute their racial purity. Therefore, it is a morally questionable practice?
Whoever modded this flamebait instead of funny either didn't read your sig, or didn't remember Star Control II! How very *frumple*! *Happy Campers* enjoy the *sauce*! Come *dance* in the *heavy space*!
They don't have to. All they have to do is say they used forensics just like on CSI, and it shows it was taken by the same kind of camera you own. Sure, you can say there are a lot of them out there so it proves nothing. But you know who else says that? The bad guys on CSI, and their smug, latte drinking lawyers. Always demanding warrants and to be released if they aren't being charged with anything! EVIL
Without cool stunts that have never been done before, there will be no new fodder for "Movie Myths" episodes of Mythbusters! Don't you dare try to take away what could be Grant's one and only chance to build a bank vault punching robot. (You mention catching bullets in teeth but that's already been done with explosive results).
The point is that out of these however many solutions, (or looked at without string theory, out of the possible values for all the constants), there are very few solutions in which you even get matter forming at all, let alone matter sticking together to form plants and stars, let alone the atoms under pressure in the star fusing together in a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Sure, life might be able to exist without matter...but maybe not! The anthropomorphic principle says simply that an observation of the universe is biased, since we can only observe the universe where life arose, exactly as you said. It says that it doesn't matter how rare life is in the universe, because living observers must always be present only at locations it occurs (at least initially). Scientists get mad about applying it to the universe though, since there's no evidence of more than one, and it's sure not testable any time soon!
He's not saying it's the same at all. He's making an analogy. Steal a loaf of bread to eat, they will go easy on you. Steal it to sell it they will not. Record a movie for your own use, they can't even charge you under this law. Record a movie and sell copies, they can!
Would it make you feel less righteous indignation if he compared it to breaking and entering? If you break into a home with intent to rob, they'll throw the book at you. If you are caught in a storm and break into a remote cabin you stumble across, that's a completely different situation. Better?
Or at least misleading. While he MAY not like the fact that they link him to the Stasi, the reason for the injunction is that the German Wikipedia page claims he never finished his university degree, and was involved in pornography in some way or other. The fact that he was in the Stasi was well known, and caused a political shitstorm when it first hit the presses, though he somehow managed to evade impeachment. He denies having not finished his degree, as well as his involvement in a pornography business. Whether or not they are true is unknown to me, but it DOES say so on Wikipedia (without sources)!
It's a little one sided because it's written by PickupPal;) Or rather, the techdirt is a copy & paste from the press release on PickupPal's site, along with some uneducated editorializing, that is based only on the PickupPal press release, and not on actual fact.
Say I own a bus and have the right driver's license to drive it. I can make an offer on
PickupPal and on Craigslist to drive people to and from Toronto. Nice and legal. If PickupPal charges me a commission, suddenly they need to follow the rules for employing a driver and selling his services! The questionable ruling was that since they no longer charge a commission, but make money off of ads, they are still commissioning these drivers to provide a driving service. Since they would then count as proving a transportation service, they have to follow the rules. Based on the court transcripts, the chief regulation they are charged with violating is not ensuring that their drivers are licensed and insured. This would have applied even if they were a carpool service, which is less regulated (but still regulated). This is different than being a carpool, in the same way as splitting the dinner you made with a fried (for the cost of ingredients) is different than running a restaurant. PickupPal actually got busted for saying their drivers are safe because the EULA when you sign up says that you warrant that you have a license and insurance. Since they don't check, they are negligent in their duties. A daycare has to get a background check on employees, at least in most places. If they hired a pedophile they could NOT get out of that legal obligation by saying "We asked if he was a pedo and he said no, so the onus is on him now!"
In a way it's weird. If I allow people to post wants and haves, it's just classified ads, I can do it legally. But if I make them automatically search, and notify you that there is a matching "want" to your "have", then it's a service, and I have to follow the regulations? I would have hoped that if they aren't paid, they aren't employees, so even if I make automated matching and searching, it's still just ads, not me offering a service from my employees. Still, I admit it's a gray area.
If I want to share a ride with a complete stranger and split the gas
Allowed
I can't drive myself and my mom to the airport and split the gas cost
Allowed.
It's my car and I'd much prefer to do with it what I'd please- I see absolutely no reason the government has any say in this!!
Allowed. You clearly only read the article (Written by PickupPal and passed on by somebody full of rightous indignation at techdirt).
If you drive point to point in a one-off manner, it is a taxi service. If you have a set routine with a set driver and weekly pay, rather than pay-per-trip, then it's a carpool service. SERVICE. The rule about how a carpool has to be within a single city, applies to carpool services only, not a general "carpool" as you may define it. And it's being amended to be more general
However, nothing stops you from doing whatever you want. What it does do is prevent you from running a business to arrange this! If I say "Hey man I'm heading to Toronto tomorrow, need a lift? I'll take you if you split the gas" that's fine. I can even post so on Craigslist! But this website used to charge. It doesn't now, but it still makes the matches for you. It's not a search, you search for people going there. It's a match-maker, it arranges the trips FOR YOU. Therefore, it counts as a transportation service. As a transportation service, it must follow the rules established for such services.
One of the rules it must follow is ensuring that the drivers it arranges for are insured and hold a valid drivers license. The public transportation rules have exceptions for carpool services and taxi services. (However the exemptions exist because they have separate rules to follow, not because carpool and taxi services are unregulared). It's not a carpool service if the driver/vehicle is different each time because that's really a taxi service with a prearranged pickup and drop-off schedule. If you pay per trip it's not a carpool service because again, not really different from a taxi is it, just one where you happen to have the same driver? Dunno the justification for not leaving the city, most carpools I know of DO because it's a big commute, but as I said that's being fixed in the legislature.
PickupPal tried to get out of this in two ways. 1) They tried to argue they are a carpool service, because they allow carpools. However, this was rejected since they also allow trips that are not carpools. For example, I could say "I've got a bus you can charter it" and that's allowed! The other rules are more stupid but still, it's usable to arrange a carpool, but also a taxi or a bus trip, and thus must fall under the larger umbrella of general public transit services.
2) They tried to argue that they don't arrange anything. They just take drivers info, and when somebody wants a ride they inform the driver of the possible fare. This was rejected as trying to say "I don't do it the computer does it." If it was a craigslist style thing, where you search manually, they would be OK. But since they do the matching for you, they are offering a service.
Anyway, They tried to argue that one way or the other, they do not offer a public transportation service. Had they won by arguing they offer a carpool service they would still lose, since they didn't follow the carpool service regulations either. Namely, they represent that their drivers are licensed and insured. However, they "check" by making it part of the EULA that you have one. If you got in a taxi cab and he got in an accident, and had no insurance, and didn't even have a driver's license, would you accept the disclaimer that when the cab company hired him, they asked him if he was insured and had a license, and he said yes? No need to check? Same deal. The rules say that to arrange a bus or other public transportation service, you need to make sure you have a qualified
1. Please show me where I said the ALCB wasn't making a profit.
OK, here we go:
*You are paying* for the availability and the relative "cheapness" of the government-subsidized liquor store... and so is everyone else, *even those who don't drink*. The funds you pay are called "taxes."
This isn't like an American company where it's turning a profit but only because of government bailouts and subsidies. They aren't a private entity at all. It's a branch of the government. There is no subsidy. If it turns a profit, that money isn't kept by the CEO. It goes into government coffers. If they turn a profit, it is a revenue source for the government. Therefore, the government can spend more and tax exactly the same. Thus, ALCB lowered taxes, or rather, allowed more government spending without raising taxes. There are cases of government run corporations that don't turn a profit. Back to BC again, BC ferries eats a loss. People want it privatized since it is using up tax dollars. The counter argument is that if it is privatized, the new corporate owners will terminate unprofitable runs. Therefore, the smaller BC islands will suddenly have no ferry service. This argument is not so cut and dry, as it's a pretty essential service to be able to get food in your grocery store! Remote towns need more roads to reach them, but the taxes they pay for those roads are the same as mine, even though my city needed less roads built to it to keep it connected.
Anyway, the previous poster is wrong. LCBO in Ontario, and BC Liquor in BC are actually slightly more expensive than the private providers in Ontario and BC. And they sure aren't open later! BC Liquor in particular is a very governmental type business. I think it's what, 10AM-4PM most days. Open till 8PM on Friday nights only. In BC if you wanted wine with dinner and it wasn't Friday, you had to go to a private store, at least if you worked a 9-5. The LCBO in Ontario is a bit better, they all seem to be open later, but have a lot less selection than say, The Beer Store.
In summary, you did pretend to have special knowledge by assuming that the province run stores were eating a loss and thus requiring government bailouts.
Yes, the US uses first-to-invent, with no prior user rights.
If GE invents a fancy new molding technique for making plastic parts for a widget of some sort, and keeps it secret for over a year, they lose all rights to patent it, having "suppressed concealed or abandoned" the invention. In a similar vein, if Big Bad Drug Company (tm) invents the 5 cent cure for AIDS and tells the researches to lock it away and never bring it up again or publish their findings, and somebody else invents it, all the documentation in the world that they invented it first won't save them, now the other drug company owns it! At the very worst, you MIGHT be able to invalidate their patent if it wasn't under NDA, just unpublished. But under no circumstances can you take control over their own patent, if you made any acts to conceal or otherwise hide your invention from the public eye.
Business Patents, on the other hand, do have a prior user right codified in law, where you cannot be liable for infringing on a patent if you were using the patented process prior to the "invention" date. HR.2795 and HR.1908/S.1145 both broadened this defense to all patents but neither was passed into law. These bills also would have change it from "first to invent" to "first to file" like the rest of the world has.
In your specific example, were recipes patentable in the USA, then yes, KFC would have to licence Haliburton's new patent or change their own recipe. On the other hand, if somebody invents a new widget and doesn't patent it, it's not a secret even if the manufacturing technique is not published, because anybody can go and buy the widget. The manufacturing technique could still be patented out from under them though!
As long as patent rules are enforced (they aren't!), meaning that it has to be non-trivial, and non-obvious, then there's nothing wrong with this. The reason it's designed this way is to punish people who try to hide their inventions from the public. If GE invents a new manufacturing technique, and refits all their factories under an NDA, but waits 5 years to patent it so their monopoly lasts longer, they should lose all their rights for trying to subvert the system! I don't think it's right that they could get sued over something they invented first, especially since it's open for abuse where they didn't so much suppress it, as think it was trivial and therefore not patentable anyway, and then got sued for billions! But they certainly shouldn't be able to take control of the patent, no way.
They don't want it to magically make them faster. They just want MS to undo the thing that made them magically slower compared to an identical machine running XP.
You must have missed the big thing when Vista came out that showed that such tasks as LAME MP3 encoding took from 25% to (on occasion) 50% longer with Vista installed than with XP installed, on an identical system. SP1 improved it slightly but only slightly, XP is still much faster for any task at all. Games, encoding, photoshop, any benchmark you throw at Vista, an XP machine on the same hardware will be faster.
But they are OS dependent, because Vista and (according to the article) Windows 7 are 10%-25% slower at the task than XP is for an identical system. SP1 sped it up a bit, but being 10% slower instead of 25% slower isn't that great...
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Incorrect, your answer does not fit with the question. The correct phrasing is "none, you are none more refreshed."
The answer is usually the longest answer. Why would the prof go into great detail for a wrong answer, after all? ;) I believe it's the law of conservation of detail. It's the same law that dictates that if Grissom finds a gum wrapper, the murderer dropped it. It's completely inconceivable that the victim dropped it earlier, or even that a friend was over earlier and dropped it! (Or that it's been under the couch for months).
When he was diagnosed in 1963, he was given 2 to 3 years to live.
What part of Ontario are you from? Because I say "about" like about, not like normal!
The average euthanasia rate for animal shelters is 60%. The average for PETA owned shelters, which have budgets millions of dollars more than the other shelters, is over 90%. PETA does this to tug on wallet strings. Their official stance is "Ketamine is cheaper than kibble. We could save them all if only more people donated." True champions of animal rights. Not OK to kill for food. OK to kill if food is too damn expensive and they have attack ads to fund. It goes beyond that. Their roving death vans don't even bring animals back to the shelter. They pick them up and promise to find good homes for these cute newborn kittens, and they put them down right there in the van as soon as the doors are closed, then dump them in the dumpster at the end of the day. PETAs director says this is acceptable, says that the people want to be fooled, they know it's impossible to find homes for these animals, that's why they call PETA to do their dirty work. And this is nothing new. In 1994 PETA staged a daring raid to rescue some roosters and rabbits from testing. Then they immediately put them down, saying there was no room at their shelters.
So you're right, PETA primarily makes banners telling children that they are going to hell for drinking milk, and assaulting women wearing fur (and telling children to attack their mothers for wearing fur), and telling people that putting animals down is wrong, and animal testing is wrong, and we should just let AIDS run its course and wipe out all of humanity to spare the poor defenseless animals. Get yourself sterilized, breeding a purebred human is just as cruel and vain as breeding a purebred dog. Ben & Jerry's should switch from cow milk to human milk to be less cruel. PETA also use their funds to domain squat Vouge magazine, and Barnem and Bailey, while suing People for Eating Tasty Animals for doing the exact same thing back to them! They stage vocal protests when animals are killed in terrorist attacks, begging and pleading for the terrorists to stick to suicide bombings, and make sure there are no animals near by. Posters showing chained up black people next to chained up animals "Animals are the new slaves/" Don't drink milk kids, drink beer instead! Replace that milk mustache with a foam mustache. (Not targeting kids honest!) "Your daddy is a murderer. Keep your pets away from him he might not be able to keep his violent urges constrained to fish for long!" "Your daddy is lying to you and teaching you the wrong lessons about right and wrong. Teach him the truth about murder." They plead with places like Hamburg, NY, and Rodeo, California, to change their names to less cruel names. They buy up stock in fast food restaurants to try to get enough votes to get meat off the menu. Great investment. When Steve Irwin died, PETA's stance was that he was a cheap reality star teaching animal cruelty to children.
And with all that money spent, their poor unfunded animal shelters put down 90% of the animals received, sometimes within minutes of receiving them, sometimes before they even get to the building. Sometimes they put down the animals they sue to save from euthanasia, or animal testing, right after they get them. If their $20 million in donations per year cannot fund animal shelters, they should leave it to the non-profits to run them. They seem to be saving almost half of the animals they receive, unlike PETA, who doesn't even TRY. The founder of PETA got involved in animal rights after she brought kittens to an animal shelter, and learned they had been put down. That's the most utterly ironic thing ever, that she would now be in charge of animal shelters that put down more animals than any other shelter, by an astronomical degree. The fact that you think this is acceptable policy is sickening. When is it not acceptable? Would it only be unacceptable when it reaches 100% death rate, that they NEVER make it all the way to the shelter before being put down, instead of just most of the time?
Oh yes, don't forget to not use a leash, or tie your dog up, that's cruel. Getting hit by cars is natures way to keep the population down. If you only had let your animals run unsupervised, PETA would have less animals to put down.
Two things. One, you can't just void all the contracts that a company you bought out signed. Two, even the companies why didn't license would be protected by promissory estoppel. They can't say "We will not sue over these patents" and then do so later. If not for promissory estoppel, there would be so many awesome money making schemes. Take a song and say "Feel free to share this on P2P" and then track down people who share it and sue their asses of! Put up signs that say "free parking" on your private parking lots, then give them tickets anyway for trespassing! You don't need a contract to be bound by your promises. And you can't have a shell corporation buy yourself out to escape from your legal obligations!
Some of them "run" Vista Basic in the same way a P2 266 with 128 MB of ram "run" Windows XP, so no, some of these things labeled as Vista Capable can't even actually run Vista Basic in a usable way. MS's argument is they said it could run Vista. They never said which Vista, and they never said it could run it in a way that was usable!
It also fooled MS employees. One of the damning e-mails was a VP who bought a Vista capable laptop and was pissed it couldn't run Vista in a usable way.
Nothing, if the rule is no more internets after 3 convictions, not after 3 complaints from a private third party?
Skinheads think it's immoral to allow white people to marry black people and pollute their racial purity. Therefore, it is a morally questionable practice?
Whoever modded this flamebait instead of funny either didn't read your sig, or didn't remember Star Control II! How very *frumple*! *Happy Campers* enjoy the *sauce*! Come *dance* in the *heavy space*!
They don't have to. All they have to do is say they used forensics just like on CSI, and it shows it was taken by the same kind of camera you own. Sure, you can say there are a lot of them out there so it proves nothing. But you know who else says that? The bad guys on CSI, and their smug, latte drinking lawyers. Always demanding warrants and to be released if they aren't being charged with anything! EVIL
Without cool stunts that have never been done before, there will be no new fodder for "Movie Myths" episodes of Mythbusters! Don't you dare try to take away what could be Grant's one and only chance to build a bank vault punching robot. (You mention catching bullets in teeth but that's already been done with explosive results).
Reminds me of a Flanders and Swann line "Some have said that architecture is like frozen music. Our music is like defrosted architecture."
The point is that out of these however many solutions, (or looked at without string theory, out of the possible values for all the constants), there are very few solutions in which you even get matter forming at all, let alone matter sticking together to form plants and stars, let alone the atoms under pressure in the star fusing together in a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Sure, life might be able to exist without matter...but maybe not! The anthropomorphic principle says simply that an observation of the universe is biased, since we can only observe the universe where life arose, exactly as you said. It says that it doesn't matter how rare life is in the universe, because living observers must always be present only at locations it occurs (at least initially). Scientists get mad about applying it to the universe though, since there's no evidence of more than one, and it's sure not testable any time soon!
He's not saying it's the same at all. He's making an analogy. Steal a loaf of bread to eat, they will go easy on you. Steal it to sell it they will not. Record a movie for your own use, they can't even charge you under this law. Record a movie and sell copies, they can!
Would it make you feel less righteous indignation if he compared it to breaking and entering? If you break into a home with intent to rob, they'll throw the book at you. If you are caught in a storm and break into a remote cabin you stumble across, that's a completely different situation. Better?
Giving aid or comfort to the enemy is treason, and by God if those muffins aren't comforting!
Or at least misleading. While he MAY not like the fact that they link him to the Stasi, the reason for the injunction is that the German Wikipedia page claims he never finished his university degree, and was involved in pornography in some way or other. The fact that he was in the Stasi was well known, and caused a political shitstorm when it first hit the presses, though he somehow managed to evade impeachment. He denies having not finished his degree, as well as his involvement in a pornography business. Whether or not they are true is unknown to me, but it DOES say so on Wikipedia (without sources)!
It's a little one sided because it's written by PickupPal ;) Or rather, the techdirt is a copy & paste from the press release on PickupPal's site, along with some uneducated editorializing, that is based only on the PickupPal press release, and not on actual fact.
Say I own a bus and have the right driver's license to drive it. I can make an offer on PickupPal and on Craigslist to drive people to and from Toronto. Nice and legal. If PickupPal charges me a commission, suddenly they need to follow the rules for employing a driver and selling his services! The questionable ruling was that since they no longer charge a commission, but make money off of ads, they are still commissioning these drivers to provide a driving service. Since they would then count as proving a transportation service, they have to follow the rules. Based on the court transcripts, the chief regulation they are charged with violating is not ensuring that their drivers are licensed and insured. This would have applied even if they were a carpool service, which is less regulated (but still regulated). This is different than being a carpool, in the same way as splitting the dinner you made with a fried (for the cost of ingredients) is different than running a restaurant. PickupPal actually got busted for saying their drivers are safe because the EULA when you sign up says that you warrant that you have a license and insurance. Since they don't check, they are negligent in their duties. A daycare has to get a background check on employees, at least in most places. If they hired a pedophile they could NOT get out of that legal obligation by saying "We asked if he was a pedo and he said no, so the onus is on him now!"
In a way it's weird. If I allow people to post wants and haves, it's just classified ads, I can do it legally. But if I make them automatically search, and notify you that there is a matching "want" to your "have", then it's a service, and I have to follow the regulations? I would have hoped that if they aren't paid, they aren't employees, so even if I make automated matching and searching, it's still just ads, not me offering a service from my employees. Still, I admit it's a gray area.
Allowed
Allowed.
Allowed. You clearly only read the article (Written by PickupPal and passed on by somebody full of rightous indignation at techdirt).
If you drive point to point in a one-off manner, it is a taxi service. If you have a set routine with a set driver and weekly pay, rather than pay-per-trip, then it's a carpool service. SERVICE. The rule about how a carpool has to be within a single city, applies to carpool services only, not a general "carpool" as you may define it. And it's being amended to be more general
However, nothing stops you from doing whatever you want. What it does do is prevent you from running a business to arrange this! If I say "Hey man I'm heading to Toronto tomorrow, need a lift? I'll take you if you split the gas" that's fine. I can even post so on Craigslist! But this website used to charge. It doesn't now, but it still makes the matches for you. It's not a search, you search for people going there. It's a match-maker, it arranges the trips FOR YOU. Therefore, it counts as a transportation service. As a transportation service, it must follow the rules established for such services.
One of the rules it must follow is ensuring that the drivers it arranges for are insured and hold a valid drivers license. The public transportation rules have exceptions for carpool services and taxi services. (However the exemptions exist because they have separate rules to follow, not because carpool and taxi services are unregulared). It's not a carpool service if the driver/vehicle is different each time because that's really a taxi service with a prearranged pickup and drop-off schedule. If you pay per trip it's not a carpool service because again, not really different from a taxi is it, just one where you happen to have the same driver? Dunno the justification for not leaving the city, most carpools I know of DO because it's a big commute, but as I said that's being fixed in the legislature.
PickupPal tried to get out of this in two ways. 1) They tried to argue they are a carpool service, because they allow carpools. However, this was rejected since they also allow trips that are not carpools. For example, I could say "I've got a bus you can charter it" and that's allowed! The other rules are more stupid but still, it's usable to arrange a carpool, but also a taxi or a bus trip, and thus must fall under the larger umbrella of general public transit services. 2) They tried to argue that they don't arrange anything. They just take drivers info, and when somebody wants a ride they inform the driver of the possible fare. This was rejected as trying to say "I don't do it the computer does it." If it was a craigslist style thing, where you search manually, they would be OK. But since they do the matching for you, they are offering a service.
Anyway, They tried to argue that one way or the other, they do not offer a public transportation service. Had they won by arguing they offer a carpool service they would still lose, since they didn't follow the carpool service regulations either. Namely, they represent that their drivers are licensed and insured. However, they "check" by making it part of the EULA that you have one. If you got in a taxi cab and he got in an accident, and had no insurance, and didn't even have a driver's license, would you accept the disclaimer that when the cab company hired him, they asked him if he was insured and had a license, and he said yes? No need to check? Same deal. The rules say that to arrange a bus or other public transportation service, you need to make sure you have a qualified
OK, here we go:
This isn't like an American company where it's turning a profit but only because of government bailouts and subsidies. They aren't a private entity at all. It's a branch of the government. There is no subsidy. If it turns a profit, that money isn't kept by the CEO. It goes into government coffers. If they turn a profit, it is a revenue source for the government. Therefore, the government can spend more and tax exactly the same. Thus, ALCB lowered taxes, or rather, allowed more government spending without raising taxes. There are cases of government run corporations that don't turn a profit. Back to BC again, BC ferries eats a loss. People want it privatized since it is using up tax dollars. The counter argument is that if it is privatized, the new corporate owners will terminate unprofitable runs. Therefore, the smaller BC islands will suddenly have no ferry service. This argument is not so cut and dry, as it's a pretty essential service to be able to get food in your grocery store! Remote towns need more roads to reach them, but the taxes they pay for those roads are the same as mine, even though my city needed less roads built to it to keep it connected.
Anyway, the previous poster is wrong. LCBO in Ontario, and BC Liquor in BC are actually slightly more expensive than the private providers in Ontario and BC. And they sure aren't open later! BC Liquor in particular is a very governmental type business. I think it's what, 10AM-4PM most days. Open till 8PM on Friday nights only. In BC if you wanted wine with dinner and it wasn't Friday, you had to go to a private store, at least if you worked a 9-5. The LCBO in Ontario is a bit better, they all seem to be open later, but have a lot less selection than say, The Beer Store.
In summary, you did pretend to have special knowledge by assuming that the province run stores were eating a loss and thus requiring government bailouts.
Yes, the US uses first-to-invent, with no prior user rights.
If GE invents a fancy new molding technique for making plastic parts for a widget of some sort, and keeps it secret for over a year, they lose all rights to patent it, having "suppressed concealed or abandoned" the invention. In a similar vein, if Big Bad Drug Company (tm) invents the 5 cent cure for AIDS and tells the researches to lock it away and never bring it up again or publish their findings, and somebody else invents it, all the documentation in the world that they invented it first won't save them, now the other drug company owns it! At the very worst, you MIGHT be able to invalidate their patent if it wasn't under NDA, just unpublished. But under no circumstances can you take control over their own patent, if you made any acts to conceal or otherwise hide your invention from the public eye.
Business Patents, on the other hand, do have a prior user right codified in law, where you cannot be liable for infringing on a patent if you were using the patented process prior to the "invention" date. HR.2795 and HR.1908/S.1145 both broadened this defense to all patents but neither was passed into law. These bills also would have change it from "first to invent" to "first to file" like the rest of the world has.
In your specific example, were recipes patentable in the USA, then yes, KFC would have to licence Haliburton's new patent or change their own recipe. On the other hand, if somebody invents a new widget and doesn't patent it, it's not a secret even if the manufacturing technique is not published, because anybody can go and buy the widget. The manufacturing technique could still be patented out from under them though!
As long as patent rules are enforced (they aren't!), meaning that it has to be non-trivial, and non-obvious, then there's nothing wrong with this. The reason it's designed this way is to punish people who try to hide their inventions from the public. If GE invents a new manufacturing technique, and refits all their factories under an NDA, but waits 5 years to patent it so their monopoly lasts longer, they should lose all their rights for trying to subvert the system! I don't think it's right that they could get sued over something they invented first, especially since it's open for abuse where they didn't so much suppress it, as think it was trivial and therefore not patentable anyway, and then got sued for billions! But they certainly shouldn't be able to take control of the patent, no way.
They don't want it to magically make them faster. They just want MS to undo the thing that made them magically slower compared to an identical machine running XP.
You must have missed the big thing when Vista came out that showed that such tasks as LAME MP3 encoding took from 25% to (on occasion) 50% longer with Vista installed than with XP installed, on an identical system. SP1 improved it slightly but only slightly, XP is still much faster for any task at all. Games, encoding, photoshop, any benchmark you throw at Vista, an XP machine on the same hardware will be faster.
But they are OS dependent, because Vista and (according to the article) Windows 7 are 10%-25% slower at the task than XP is for an identical system. SP1 sped it up a bit, but being 10% slower instead of 25% slower isn't that great...