You just have to remember that the President isn't elected by the people, but by the Electors. And most states let the people directly vote for the Electors.
As a matter of fact, the U.S. constitution doesn't even specify how states have to choose electors. It could be in a beer-drinking contest or the results of a cockroach race to a hunk of cheese. I don't know what state officials would be willing to do something that silly, but it isn't unconstitutional.
The first electors were simply selected by the state legislatures and encouraged to vote wisely on behalf of their citizens.
BTW, I do support popular and direct elections of electors, so don't confuse the idea that you can select them in other ways as my endorsement of those silly notions. It is just that it is up to each state to decide how it might happen, and that how Iowa is proposing to make a change here is "legal" even if it seems a bit unusual.
The one situation I can think of that would force electors to be something other than a purely ceremonial role would be in the unfortunate situation where the president elect and vice-president elect were to be assassinated or otherwise died (even accidentally) prior to the casting of the electoral votes. At that point, they would have to genuinely be called upon to vote with their heart and select somebody qualified in their minds to hold the office and do a constitutionally significant thing. IMHO this is a better thing to have electors than to hold a whole new presidential election.
No, the rules of presidential succession don't hold true until after a president is actually elected by the electoral college. Until then, it is entirely in the hands of the electors... although admittedly this is a big constitutional crisis if this were to happen.
This situation has never happened on the Presidential level, although having to deal with a dead guy getting elected to other federal offices has happened. Notably the senator from Missouri a few years ago did have this happen where he died in a plane crash and his wife replaced him before he got to take the oath of office.
They vote in the territorial boundaries of their home state.... quite often at the state capitol buildings or in the governor's office. It is an official representative of the state that counts the votes and sends the official list to the U.S. House of Representatives in order to actually tally the votes, but the electors never have to leave the state and can't leave in order to cast their vote.
That would certainly be embarrassing if an elector was put into handcuff right in the governor's office due to a failure to vote properly.
So, you are saying that the human population (which is concentrated in the cities) should not decide the president? Let a handful of people decide it instead, they should know better?
As a matter of fact, no. The larger concentrations of human population should not decide the results of the country as a whole.
There are historical reasons for this, going back to the establishment of the American Republic. Rather than rehashing that tired old issue, the main thing here was to diffuse power among a whole bunch of people so there wouldn't be any singular concentration of power among one group or one population center. In this regard, the system has worked out fantastically.
New urban centers have emerged literally out of the wilderness in the USA, in most cases eclipsing the older and more traditional centers of human concentration quite some time ago. Without safeguards like the electoral college, these new and emerging cities would have been killed through regulations and taxation policies some time ago and may not have even developed in the first place. More to the point, America is what it is today precisely because of laws like this, which have encouraged people to move to more sparsely populated areas for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that those in the more rural areas do get more individualized and local political control as a check against larger population centers that would assert political control on issues that have nothing to do with their local circumstances.
This also completely misses the point that at least in theory each U.S. state is an independently sovereign entity in control of its own territory and subject to independent bodies of law. Many (unfortunately most) Americans and even members of the U.S. Congress... and the current U.S. President... seem to have forgotten this simply concept.
I think you could hardly say that the big states like California, Texas, and New York get "zero attention". They get considerable attention.
The problem is not the proportionality of the casting of electoral votes between states but rather the winner-take-all system (BTW that is not in the constitution at all) where all of the electoral votes go to a single candidate within that state.
California and New York are perceived to be "safe" states for the Democrats and Texas is a "safe" state for the Republicans. Why should either party spend money in those states or work on any "get out the vote" campaign when the conclusion is pretty well decided.
Instead, a system like what exists in Nebraska where the electoral vote for each congressional district is decided locally.... that would at least throw a few votes to the other party.
That is also why none of those states will participate in this sort of lunacy being promoted by Iowa.... the dominant party of those states don't want to give up a single "safe" electoral vote to the other party.
BTW, "swing" states can be quite large, such as Ohio (20), Florida (27), and Pennsylvania (21). All of these states got considerable attention precisely because they were close in who would get their votes. These three together have more electoral votes than California, which is also why it was such a big deal. The only other "large" state was Illinois, which was another "safe" state for the Democrats.
Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream is one of the companies I know of that is publicly traded but does not have this in the corporate charter.... but companies like this are an exception.
Ben & Jerry's is not a publicly traded company; they're owned by Unilever.
And Unilever is in turn a publicly traded company, NYSE even. The original shareholders agreed to the buy-out, but it still is owned by publicly traded shares (more indirectly now than before).
BTW, in the terms of the buy-out, the original corporate charter of Ben & Jerry's had to be preserved, which included other measures of shareholder value besides profit. While Unilever is the holding company, their directors still have to follow the corporate charter for Ben & Jerry's when making decisions about this division of the company.
The point I'm making is that maximizing profit doesn't have to be the primary rationale for the success of a company, nor is it necessary to require that in the corporate charter.
As to if the ROI on Melenda Gates is worth the money dumped into that project is another story, but Bill Gates certainly got something from that project. You might even call that an executive perk that was paid out here.
Apple Computer also ran itself into the ground more than once.... and having Steve Jobs "come to the rescue" and try to switch the fortunes of the company around. When you go from practically zero and a company rapidly losing market share to fighting back and getting successful again, you tend to get focused as a company from the CEO down to the project manager apprentice assistant or software intern.
Microsoft clearly needs some house cleaning and removing a whole bunch of cruft that it has accumulated over the years. To me, that might be a good thing, and it would be interesting to see how that might happen. For me, however, Bill Gates and Steve Balmer might be the first to go if I were in charge. A post-Gates Microsoft would certainly be interesting.
While C# and.NET are being used, they aren't the "cornerstone" technologies that they were hyped to be and are quickly fading into the background like all similar "technologies" like COM and the Win32 API earlier.
OK, that is one thing (I'll call both C# and.NET to be the same thing in this case) that emerged from Microsoft Research. What about the dozens of other projects that have not produced any external projects?
I have to agree with the grandparent post here: MS Research is about keeping the competition from having talent to surpass Microsoft.
Microsoft is infamous for its purchase of smaller start-up companies and adding their software/hardware portfolio (traditionally computer-related companies) to Microsoft. This is so much embedded into American culture that there was a Simpson's episode of Homer Simpson creating a bogus dot-com company and having Bill Gates show up in Springfield with a check to buy the company and web server from Homer.
It is generally during such corporate buy-outs that anti-trust legislation comes into play and raises eyebrows of securities regulators. By purchasing potential or actual competitors, they remove competition in the marketplace.
The problem here really has been one of where to dump profits from the company. For years and years, Microsoft didn't even give out dividends on the philosophy that the value was in the company and the money was best spent on new innovation. Then Microsoft started to pay dividends to its shareholders. Buying high growth companies is yet another way to invest profits... and some companies seem to do this for years and grow to be quite large companies.
This appears to be more of a maturing of the company, and shareholders realizing that Microsoft as a company simply can't grow to encompass the whole world. It isn't the fast growing and highly profitable company that it once was, and the shareholders aren't getting the return on investment they one thought they should be getting.
Point is that having a place to shove profits is primary issue at stake here, and R&D is the only thing left except to simply take profits and give them directly to the shareholders themselves. That is what this group of shareholders is requesting, BTW.
So.... at the next shareholder meeting get rid of the guy!
Members of the board of directors are directly appointed to their positions (including the chair!) by the shareholders themselves. So in this case, the shareholders have nobody to complain about but themselves.
They could refer to the company charter, which often has a phrase where the primary objective of the company is "to maximize profits and increase shareholder value". If that is the case for Microsoft (I have no reason to not think so here), the directors are violating a primary tenant of their charter if they spend money frivolously. From this it would be the basis of a lawsuit by violating the basic charter of the company and its legal right to exist.
BTW, corporate charters don't have to have this clause in their charter, nor is it really necessary with even a for-profit and publicly traded company to be so focused on profits. The problem is that this is so typical that many investors won't put money into a company unless this is explicitly in the charter. Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream is one of the companies I know of that is publicly traded but does not have this in the corporate charter.... but companies like this are an exception.
It wasn't CBS that originally broadcast the original Star Trek series. That honor belonged to NBC, as CBS passed on it in favor of "Lost in Space".
The broadcast rights for some of this sort of content have been screwed up for some time, which is why it has been hard to even get DVDs for some of the shows from this era of broadcasting. In some cases, the music rights for the episodes (if there was music in the show) was not really nailed down too well and required separate licensing by the copyright holder, as most TV shows are a compilation of the talent of quite a few people.
So no, CBS doesn't really have control of this content and it is amazing they have cleared the legal hurdles to get as much out there as they have so far even in this limited format.
Star Trek was popular enough that some effort to clean up the legal loose ends of attribution and royalties has been dealt with for some time, including in "alternate media" like DVDs and network streaming.
Star Trek was the first television show to try and treat seriously science fiction as opposed to shows like Lost in Space that were clearly space operas. I wasn't really aware of "Tom Corbert, Space Cadet" as a series as it was before my time (and most/. readers as well).
One thing that did work in favor of the Star Trek original series is that they had three seasons worth of material.... which was just barely enough to be worth putting the series into syndication during the 1970's as airtime filler for local television broadcasters. While most/. readers likely don't remember the original airings of these episodes, there certainly are many who remember when they were late night re-runs (still are in some markets).
BTW, of the "classic" science fiction programs that pre-dated Star Trek, my absolute favorite is X Minus One that was broadcast on NBC radio during the 1950's. Scroll down to the bottom of the wiki page if you want to listen to them.... genuine classic hard science fiction that still hasn't been dealt with on television except for perhaps the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica or Firefly, and certainly surpasses the quality of Star Trek.
The question here isn't really if people who perform extensive duplication of copyrighted material on a large scale should be punished, but what the limits are that define that act.
I've seen "commercial scale" duplication... and often little effort to get it stopped as well. It is a matter of perspective. I do support shutting down DVD duplicators that make copies without permission of the original copyright holder... or of video games and more.
One interesting question does lie with those who make tools that can be used to make duplications of both copyrighted and "legal" content. It doesn't matter if it is a Xerox machine, a CD-ROM burner, a flash card, or in this case a P2P distributed file sharing network. Are the makers of these tools liable for the duplication of content done by individuals who use these tools for illegal duplication on a large scale?
The answer is typically "yes" until somebody can prove that the tool is necessary for ordinary life. P2P networks suffer from the problem that their use is mostly for infringing copyrighted material, in spite of the fact that legitimate communication systems and file storage can happen with these protocols. In fact, I've seen far too often when legitimate content is put onto P2P networks, cries that it is a waste of network resources often happen by those using those protocols.
If you've ever spent a winter in Minnesota dealing with the sub-zero (F) winds straight off the Arctic Ocean and trying to drive on sleet that has covered a street with a couple inches of ice (not just snow).... yeah, I think you can say that anybody else is just a pussy.
You got that one right!
Minnesotans deal with winter conditions far worse than what folks elsewhere shut down for... and call those conditions just a typical day. Yeah, I know Wisconsin and the Dakotas (not to mention Manitoba and western Ontario) get harsh weather that is similar too, but it is something unique to Minnesota to try and laugh off the weather and scorn those who complain about it.
I'm more worried about the tobacco lobby groups than the LDS Church... or groups like Energy Solutions trying to import nuclear waste from Italy and buying off legislators.
There are open meeting laws that keep most of these "consultations" from happening as any gathering of more than a couple legislators in any circumstance (even a backyard bar-b-que) is considered a "meeting" and has to be reported, notification made to the "press", and made open for public participation. The only exception is when in "executive session" for reasons of privacy (discussing the termination of an employee... to give an example) or for reasons of state security.... similar to national security or intelligence purposes of "classified" information.
Meeting with a representative of the LDS Church does not qualify for any private meeting to happen other than on a one to one basis.... just as any citizen can do on their own as well. The LDS Church does openly operate lobbying efforts for things that it considers to impact morality (aka like Prop. 8 in California.... to cite an example even if not in Utah) but other groups do similar kinds of activities and the LDS Church is required to register officially as a lobbying group with reporting of expenditures and other sorts of oversight in the process.
I will admit, however, that liquor laws are something the LDS Church does get involved with in terms of lobbying efforts.
Until you realize that the state government is in the pocket of the LDS church. I seem to recall something about separation of church and state.....
Utah: where the separation between church and state is precisely four blocks. (aka the distance between the LDS Church Office Building and the Utah State Capitol)
I'd like to disagree with you, but it is hard to argue with statistics like this.
#1 I think the waitress was just mistaken on the law. I don't know of anything specific to that, other than dram shop liability that would keep them from serving additional beers. If you are intoxicated (legally unable to operate vehicles or equipment) and the shop/restaurant/pub sells you another drink, they are legally liable for anything that happens afterward, including alcohol poisoning and your actions as a drunk.
#2 Several restaurants have been sued into oblivion throughout the USA (not just Utah) for under-cooking ground beef (aka a "hamburger") due to E. Coli and other microbial life contaminating the meat. I know for a fact that there is no state law that prohibits the sale of rare or medium-rare hamburgers, but most restaurants wouldn't dare sell them for fear of a lawsuit if a customer got sick afterward. Steaks can be cooked as rare without as much fear of contamination, but ground beef is more of a problem.
In both cases, blame lawyers and not the predominant religion of Utah. In fact, this is common law and not something as a result of a statute or legislation. I also don't think this is something restricted to just Utah either.
The reason why you don't see the number of bars in Utah as you do elsewhere is two-fold:
1) Some local communities (not the state itself) have anal liquor licensing laws that heavily restrict how many licenses they permit in the community. They have to allow at least one establishment, but it doesn't have to get beyond that. This you can blame on overzealous members of the predominant religion of that local community, and I would have to agree it is stupid. Some successful lawsuits have happened when a misguided Mormon Bishop or some other hyperactive community member (more likely a PTA president than a bishop to be honest) buys the license and then sits on it hoping to keep adult beverage businesses from being built.
2) There really aren't the customers to support the bars. This isn't entirely true everywhere, but except for mostly non-Mormon towns like Park City, Salt Lake, or Price there simply aren't patrons to keep these sort of businesses in the black in large numbers. Believe it or not, Mormons really don't drink liquor or adult beverages, even when the choice is presented to them. I'm not talking specific individuals, but as a group, they do tend to avoid those kind of purchases. Without a market or customer base, these taverns simply can't operate. The couple of pubs in Provo is about all that town can support, and the owners are struggling just to stay in business. The gay/alternative lifestyle club of Orem did shut down for a lack of business, not because of stupid laws and citizens driving it out of town with torches and pitchforks. Most citizens of Utah county (not the state of Utah... a different entity and some say a different country) don't even know about the liquor establishments in their communities.
Yes, there are conventional bars in Utah. Most of the information you read about private bars written by somebody not from Utah is wildly inaccurate (or even written about by the Utah news media).
You can read up on the private club laws elsewhere, but it isn't as bizarre as it sounds. It is intended primarily for "civic clubs" like the VFW, Elks, Moose Lodge, etc. The law is vague enough that anybody can start a club that qualifies... including a for-profit business, which is why you see so many private clubs that pretty much what would be considered a bar in most other cities. But not all bars or taverns are private clubs.
There are some pubs and taverns that serve beer and wine to patrons that aren't private clubs. It gets sort of fuzzy about that makes up a private club and what is a typical "tavern", and it can sometimes be hard to even find an ordinary tavern. Most Utah towns try to shut them down through a bunch of other silly laws, but that is on a local basis and not something necessarily as a result of the state-wide laws.
Salt Lake City is one Utah municipality that isn't quite so anal to get rid of the traditional tavern, which is why you likely were able to find one there. Showing the ID is mostly due to heavy handed law enforcement cracking down on these establishments and very stiff fines to the business owners if they get caught with a minor inside their premises.
The purpose of the "private club" law has nothing to do with bars, but rather to fraternal organizations like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Elks Club, Moose Club, and other "civic" groups that are common place throughout America. Many of these groups (not just in Utah) serve liquor and other "adult beverages" to their club members.
The point of the private club law was to allow these groups to be able to have that opportunity to serve these beverages to their members, as these clubs generally do add value to society as a whole. The problem comes that the law is incredibly vague about what is defined as a club. There is no legal requirements about membership in terms of this law, nor even a requirement that it must be a non-profit group either.
As a result of all this, the "private clubs" only require a little bit of money and you to sign the membership form to gain membership. There are even "joint-club" memberships (just like there are multiple VFW clubs across the state) where you can go from one private club to the next with the same membership card.
So the point of all this is that these "private clubs" are really taking advantage of a loophole in the law. Residency in Utah is not a requirement, but you must be a member (or a guest of a member) in order to be in these clubs even if it really is just a wink at the law.
BTW, there are taverns and "pubs" that aren't private clubs, but they are significantly more restricted in terms of what they can offer to their patrons. About all they are allowed to serve is watered down 3.2% beer... although there are some microbreweries that kind of fudge this percentage a wee bit. Wine can also be served, but that is a separate license that many communities make nearly impossible to obtain.
Private clubs are given quite a bit more latitude in terms of what they can serve, which is why both businesses and the patrons (aka "club members") go through the effort of even setting up a club in the first place.
The issue isn't really having the drinking habits tracked by bar patron, although it is suggested that when somebody is "bar hopping" and going from one place to another that serves liquor that you can refuse a patron because they are intoxicated based on the volume of their purchases for the evening.
Where the problem comes is with this bill is that the database is going to store not just where the person has been drinking, but the full itemized receipts of what was purchased by that patron, and tie that information to their vehicle registration where a police officer can call this information up on their laptops (all Utah police officers have them in their squad cars... fairly typical in the USA now and not unique to Utah) and can pull this information up just doing a license plate scan. No warrant, or even notification to the citizen that they've even been searched.
I just don't think a police officer needs to have itemized billing records for folks who go drinking.... and giving this sort of scrutiny into the lives of ordinary citizens won't stop just for those consuming alcohol. I'm sure law enforcement types would be thrilled to have this level of information available to them, but we shouldn't give up privacy for the sake of helping law enforcement at all times and places.
Unfortunately, the USPTO doesn't recognize the authority of the Library of Congress as a repository of human knowledge. So no, that doesn't work as prior art (in the eyes of some patent examiners).
Still, $35 for copyright registration is a heck of a lot cheaper than the $500 for a preliminary patent application or the typical $10,000 for a regular patent. Copyright also doesn't preclude that anybody else may have patented something prior to your publication.
You can always do what Dolby Systems does with its engineers: Three lawyers per engineer. Of course their specification documents look like they've been written by lawyers, but who cares, right?
I, too, find it a sad statement that you need lawyers just to do some engineering... or even give out a military order. Neither of these should require legal advise on anything but the most unusual situations... unfortunately they are used for both in almost any every day decision.
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As a matter of fact, the U.S. constitution doesn't even specify how states have to choose electors. It could be in a beer-drinking contest or the results of a cockroach race to a hunk of cheese. I don't know what state officials would be willing to do something that silly, but it isn't unconstitutional.
The first electors were simply selected by the state legislatures and encouraged to vote wisely on behalf of their citizens.
BTW, I do support popular and direct elections of electors, so don't confuse the idea that you can select them in other ways as my endorsement of those silly notions. It is just that it is up to each state to decide how it might happen, and that how Iowa is proposing to make a change here is "legal" even if it seems a bit unusual.
The one situation I can think of that would force electors to be something other than a purely ceremonial role would be in the unfortunate situation where the president elect and vice-president elect were to be assassinated or otherwise died (even accidentally) prior to the casting of the electoral votes. At that point, they would have to genuinely be called upon to vote with their heart and select somebody qualified in their minds to hold the office and do a constitutionally significant thing. IMHO this is a better thing to have electors than to hold a whole new presidential election.
No, the rules of presidential succession don't hold true until after a president is actually elected by the electoral college. Until then, it is entirely in the hands of the electors... although admittedly this is a big constitutional crisis if this were to happen.
This situation has never happened on the Presidential level, although having to deal with a dead guy getting elected to other federal offices has happened. Notably the senator from Missouri a few years ago did have this happen where he died in a plane crash and his wife replaced him before he got to take the oath of office.
"when they get home"?????
They vote in the territorial boundaries of their home state.... quite often at the state capitol buildings or in the governor's office. It is an official representative of the state that counts the votes and sends the official list to the U.S. House of Representatives in order to actually tally the votes, but the electors never have to leave the state and can't leave in order to cast their vote.
That would certainly be embarrassing if an elector was put into handcuff right in the governor's office due to a failure to vote properly.
As a matter of fact, no. The larger concentrations of human population should not decide the results of the country as a whole.
There are historical reasons for this, going back to the establishment of the American Republic. Rather than rehashing that tired old issue, the main thing here was to diffuse power among a whole bunch of people so there wouldn't be any singular concentration of power among one group or one population center. In this regard, the system has worked out fantastically.
New urban centers have emerged literally out of the wilderness in the USA, in most cases eclipsing the older and more traditional centers of human concentration quite some time ago. Without safeguards like the electoral college, these new and emerging cities would have been killed through regulations and taxation policies some time ago and may not have even developed in the first place. More to the point, America is what it is today precisely because of laws like this, which have encouraged people to move to more sparsely populated areas for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that those in the more rural areas do get more individualized and local political control as a check against larger population centers that would assert political control on issues that have nothing to do with their local circumstances.
This also completely misses the point that at least in theory each U.S. state is an independently sovereign entity in control of its own territory and subject to independent bodies of law. Many (unfortunately most) Americans and even members of the U.S. Congress... and the current U.S. President... seem to have forgotten this simply concept.
I think you could hardly say that the big states like California, Texas, and New York get "zero attention". They get considerable attention.
The problem is not the proportionality of the casting of electoral votes between states but rather the winner-take-all system (BTW that is not in the constitution at all) where all of the electoral votes go to a single candidate within that state.
California and New York are perceived to be "safe" states for the Democrats and Texas is a "safe" state for the Republicans. Why should either party spend money in those states or work on any "get out the vote" campaign when the conclusion is pretty well decided.
Instead, a system like what exists in Nebraska where the electoral vote for each congressional district is decided locally.... that would at least throw a few votes to the other party.
That is also why none of those states will participate in this sort of lunacy being promoted by Iowa.... the dominant party of those states don't want to give up a single "safe" electoral vote to the other party.
BTW, "swing" states can be quite large, such as Ohio (20), Florida (27), and Pennsylvania (21). All of these states got considerable attention precisely because they were close in who would get their votes. These three together have more electoral votes than California, which is also why it was such a big deal. The only other "large" state was Illinois, which was another "safe" state for the Democrats.
Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream is one of the companies I know of that is publicly traded but does not have this in the corporate charter.... but companies like this are an exception.
Ben & Jerry's is not a publicly traded company; they're owned by Unilever.
And Unilever is in turn a publicly traded company, NYSE even. The original shareholders agreed to the buy-out, but it still is owned by publicly traded shares (more indirectly now than before).
BTW, in the terms of the buy-out, the original corporate charter of Ben & Jerry's had to be preserved, which included other measures of shareholder value besides profit. While Unilever is the holding company, their directors still have to follow the corporate charter for Ben & Jerry's when making decisions about this division of the company.
The point I'm making is that maximizing profit doesn't have to be the primary rationale for the success of a company, nor is it necessary to require that in the corporate charter.
Hey, Bill Gates got a wife out of Microsoft Bob.
As to if the ROI on Melenda Gates is worth the money dumped into that project is another story, but Bill Gates certainly got something from that project. You might even call that an executive perk that was paid out here.
Apple Computer also ran itself into the ground more than once.... and having Steve Jobs "come to the rescue" and try to switch the fortunes of the company around. When you go from practically zero and a company rapidly losing market share to fighting back and getting successful again, you tend to get focused as a company from the CEO down to the project manager apprentice assistant or software intern.
Microsoft clearly needs some house cleaning and removing a whole bunch of cruft that it has accumulated over the years. To me, that might be a good thing, and it would be interesting to see how that might happen. For me, however, Bill Gates and Steve Balmer might be the first to go if I were in charge. A post-Gates Microsoft would certainly be interesting.
While C# and .NET are being used, they aren't the "cornerstone" technologies that they were hyped to be and are quickly fading into the background like all similar "technologies" like COM and the Win32 API earlier.
OK, that is one thing (I'll call both C# and .NET to be the same thing in this case) that emerged from Microsoft Research. What about the dozens of other projects that have not produced any external projects?
I have to agree with the grandparent post here: MS Research is about keeping the competition from having talent to surpass Microsoft.
Microsoft is infamous for its purchase of smaller start-up companies and adding their software/hardware portfolio (traditionally computer-related companies) to Microsoft. This is so much embedded into American culture that there was a Simpson's episode of Homer Simpson creating a bogus dot-com company and having Bill Gates show up in Springfield with a check to buy the company and web server from Homer.
It is generally during such corporate buy-outs that anti-trust legislation comes into play and raises eyebrows of securities regulators. By purchasing potential or actual competitors, they remove competition in the marketplace.
The problem here really has been one of where to dump profits from the company. For years and years, Microsoft didn't even give out dividends on the philosophy that the value was in the company and the money was best spent on new innovation. Then Microsoft started to pay dividends to its shareholders. Buying high growth companies is yet another way to invest profits... and some companies seem to do this for years and grow to be quite large companies.
This appears to be more of a maturing of the company, and shareholders realizing that Microsoft as a company simply can't grow to encompass the whole world. It isn't the fast growing and highly profitable company that it once was, and the shareholders aren't getting the return on investment they one thought they should be getting.
Point is that having a place to shove profits is primary issue at stake here, and R&D is the only thing left except to simply take profits and give them directly to the shareholders themselves. That is what this group of shareholders is requesting, BTW.
So.... at the next shareholder meeting get rid of the guy!
Members of the board of directors are directly appointed to their positions (including the chair!) by the shareholders themselves. So in this case, the shareholders have nobody to complain about but themselves.
They could refer to the company charter, which often has a phrase where the primary objective of the company is "to maximize profits and increase shareholder value". If that is the case for Microsoft (I have no reason to not think so here), the directors are violating a primary tenant of their charter if they spend money frivolously. From this it would be the basis of a lawsuit by violating the basic charter of the company and its legal right to exist.
BTW, corporate charters don't have to have this clause in their charter, nor is it really necessary with even a for-profit and publicly traded company to be so focused on profits. The problem is that this is so typical that many investors won't put money into a company unless this is explicitly in the charter. Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream is one of the companies I know of that is publicly traded but does not have this in the corporate charter.... but companies like this are an exception.
It wasn't CBS that originally broadcast the original Star Trek series. That honor belonged to NBC, as CBS passed on it in favor of "Lost in Space".
The broadcast rights for some of this sort of content have been screwed up for some time, which is why it has been hard to even get DVDs for some of the shows from this era of broadcasting. In some cases, the music rights for the episodes (if there was music in the show) was not really nailed down too well and required separate licensing by the copyright holder, as most TV shows are a compilation of the talent of quite a few people.
So no, CBS doesn't really have control of this content and it is amazing they have cleared the legal hurdles to get as much out there as they have so far even in this limited format.
Star Trek was popular enough that some effort to clean up the legal loose ends of attribution and royalties has been dealt with for some time, including in "alternate media" like DVDs and network streaming.
Star Trek was the first television show to try and treat seriously science fiction as opposed to shows like Lost in Space that were clearly space operas. I wasn't really aware of "Tom Corbert, Space Cadet" as a series as it was before my time (and most /. readers as well).
One thing that did work in favor of the Star Trek original series is that they had three seasons worth of material.... which was just barely enough to be worth putting the series into syndication during the 1970's as airtime filler for local television broadcasters. While most /. readers likely don't remember the original airings of these episodes, there certainly are many who remember when they were late night re-runs (still are in some markets).
BTW, of the "classic" science fiction programs that pre-dated Star Trek, my absolute favorite is X Minus One that was broadcast on NBC radio during the 1950's. Scroll down to the bottom of the wiki page if you want to listen to them.... genuine classic hard science fiction that still hasn't been dealt with on television except for perhaps the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica or Firefly, and certainly surpasses the quality of Star Trek.
The question here isn't really if people who perform extensive duplication of copyrighted material on a large scale should be punished, but what the limits are that define that act.
I've seen "commercial scale" duplication... and often little effort to get it stopped as well. It is a matter of perspective. I do support shutting down DVD duplicators that make copies without permission of the original copyright holder... or of video games and more.
One interesting question does lie with those who make tools that can be used to make duplications of both copyrighted and "legal" content. It doesn't matter if it is a Xerox machine, a CD-ROM burner, a flash card, or in this case a P2P distributed file sharing network. Are the makers of these tools liable for the duplication of content done by individuals who use these tools for illegal duplication on a large scale?
The answer is typically "yes" until somebody can prove that the tool is necessary for ordinary life. P2P networks suffer from the problem that their use is mostly for infringing copyrighted material, in spite of the fact that legitimate communication systems and file storage can happen with these protocols. In fact, I've seen far too often when legitimate content is put onto P2P networks, cries that it is a waste of network resources often happen by those using those protocols.
If you've ever spent a winter in Minnesota dealing with the sub-zero (F) winds straight off the Arctic Ocean and trying to drive on sleet that has covered a street with a couple inches of ice (not just snow).... yeah, I think you can say that anybody else is just a pussy.
You got that one right!
Minnesotans deal with winter conditions far worse than what folks elsewhere shut down for... and call those conditions just a typical day. Yeah, I know Wisconsin and the Dakotas (not to mention Manitoba and western Ontario) get harsh weather that is similar too, but it is something unique to Minnesota to try and laugh off the weather and scorn those who complain about it.
I'm more worried about the tobacco lobby groups than the LDS Church... or groups like Energy Solutions trying to import nuclear waste from Italy and buying off legislators.
There are open meeting laws that keep most of these "consultations" from happening as any gathering of more than a couple legislators in any circumstance (even a backyard bar-b-que) is considered a "meeting" and has to be reported, notification made to the "press", and made open for public participation. The only exception is when in "executive session" for reasons of privacy (discussing the termination of an employee... to give an example) or for reasons of state security.... similar to national security or intelligence purposes of "classified" information.
Meeting with a representative of the LDS Church does not qualify for any private meeting to happen other than on a one to one basis.... just as any citizen can do on their own as well. The LDS Church does openly operate lobbying efforts for things that it considers to impact morality (aka like Prop. 8 in California.... to cite an example even if not in Utah) but other groups do similar kinds of activities and the LDS Church is required to register officially as a lobbying group with reporting of expenditures and other sorts of oversight in the process.
I will admit, however, that liquor laws are something the LDS Church does get involved with in terms of lobbying efforts.
Until you realize that the state government is in the pocket of the LDS church. I seem to recall something about separation of church and state.....
Utah: where the separation between church and state is precisely four blocks. (aka the distance between the LDS Church Office Building and the Utah State Capitol)
I'd like to disagree with you, but it is hard to argue with statistics like this.
#1 I think the waitress was just mistaken on the law. I don't know of anything specific to that, other than dram shop liability that would keep them from serving additional beers. If you are intoxicated (legally unable to operate vehicles or equipment) and the shop/restaurant/pub sells you another drink, they are legally liable for anything that happens afterward, including alcohol poisoning and your actions as a drunk.
#2 Several restaurants have been sued into oblivion throughout the USA (not just Utah) for under-cooking ground beef (aka a "hamburger") due to E. Coli and other microbial life contaminating the meat. I know for a fact that there is no state law that prohibits the sale of rare or medium-rare hamburgers, but most restaurants wouldn't dare sell them for fear of a lawsuit if a customer got sick afterward. Steaks can be cooked as rare without as much fear of contamination, but ground beef is more of a problem.
In both cases, blame lawyers and not the predominant religion of Utah. In fact, this is common law and not something as a result of a statute or legislation. I also don't think this is something restricted to just Utah either.
The reason why you don't see the number of bars in Utah as you do elsewhere is two-fold:
1) Some local communities (not the state itself) have anal liquor licensing laws that heavily restrict how many licenses they permit in the community. They have to allow at least one establishment, but it doesn't have to get beyond that. This you can blame on overzealous members of the predominant religion of that local community, and I would have to agree it is stupid. Some successful lawsuits have happened when a misguided Mormon Bishop or some other hyperactive community member (more likely a PTA president than a bishop to be honest) buys the license and then sits on it hoping to keep adult beverage businesses from being built.
2) There really aren't the customers to support the bars. This isn't entirely true everywhere, but except for mostly non-Mormon towns like Park City, Salt Lake, or Price there simply aren't patrons to keep these sort of businesses in the black in large numbers. Believe it or not, Mormons really don't drink liquor or adult beverages, even when the choice is presented to them. I'm not talking specific individuals, but as a group, they do tend to avoid those kind of purchases. Without a market or customer base, these taverns simply can't operate. The couple of pubs in Provo is about all that town can support, and the owners are struggling just to stay in business. The gay/alternative lifestyle club of Orem did shut down for a lack of business, not because of stupid laws and citizens driving it out of town with torches and pitchforks. Most citizens of Utah county (not the state of Utah... a different entity and some say a different country) don't even know about the liquor establishments in their communities.
Yes, there are conventional bars in Utah. Most of the information you read about private bars written by somebody not from Utah is wildly inaccurate (or even written about by the Utah news media).
You can read up on the private club laws elsewhere, but it isn't as bizarre as it sounds. It is intended primarily for "civic clubs" like the VFW, Elks, Moose Lodge, etc. The law is vague enough that anybody can start a club that qualifies... including a for-profit business, which is why you see so many private clubs that pretty much what would be considered a bar in most other cities. But not all bars or taverns are private clubs.
There are some pubs and taverns that serve beer and wine to patrons that aren't private clubs. It gets sort of fuzzy about that makes up a private club and what is a typical "tavern", and it can sometimes be hard to even find an ordinary tavern. Most Utah towns try to shut them down through a bunch of other silly laws, but that is on a local basis and not something necessarily as a result of the state-wide laws.
Salt Lake City is one Utah municipality that isn't quite so anal to get rid of the traditional tavern, which is why you likely were able to find one there. Showing the ID is mostly due to heavy handed law enforcement cracking down on these establishments and very stiff fines to the business owners if they get caught with a minor inside their premises.
You are wrong.
The purpose of the "private club" law has nothing to do with bars, but rather to fraternal organizations like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Elks Club, Moose Club, and other "civic" groups that are common place throughout America. Many of these groups (not just in Utah) serve liquor and other "adult beverages" to their club members.
The point of the private club law was to allow these groups to be able to have that opportunity to serve these beverages to their members, as these clubs generally do add value to society as a whole. The problem comes that the law is incredibly vague about what is defined as a club. There is no legal requirements about membership in terms of this law, nor even a requirement that it must be a non-profit group either.
As a result of all this, the "private clubs" only require a little bit of money and you to sign the membership form to gain membership. There are even "joint-club" memberships (just like there are multiple VFW clubs across the state) where you can go from one private club to the next with the same membership card.
So the point of all this is that these "private clubs" are really taking advantage of a loophole in the law. Residency in Utah is not a requirement, but you must be a member (or a guest of a member) in order to be in these clubs even if it really is just a wink at the law.
BTW, there are taverns and "pubs" that aren't private clubs, but they are significantly more restricted in terms of what they can offer to their patrons. About all they are allowed to serve is watered down 3.2% beer... although there are some microbreweries that kind of fudge this percentage a wee bit. Wine can also be served, but that is a separate license that many communities make nearly impossible to obtain.
Private clubs are given quite a bit more latitude in terms of what they can serve, which is why both businesses and the patrons (aka "club members") go through the effort of even setting up a club in the first place.
The issue isn't really having the drinking habits tracked by bar patron, although it is suggested that when somebody is "bar hopping" and going from one place to another that serves liquor that you can refuse a patron because they are intoxicated based on the volume of their purchases for the evening.
Where the problem comes is with this bill is that the database is going to store not just where the person has been drinking, but the full itemized receipts of what was purchased by that patron, and tie that information to their vehicle registration where a police officer can call this information up on their laptops (all Utah police officers have them in their squad cars... fairly typical in the USA now and not unique to Utah) and can pull this information up just doing a license plate scan. No warrant, or even notification to the citizen that they've even been searched.
I just don't think a police officer needs to have itemized billing records for folks who go drinking.... and giving this sort of scrutiny into the lives of ordinary citizens won't stop just for those consuming alcohol. I'm sure law enforcement types would be thrilled to have this level of information available to them, but we shouldn't give up privacy for the sake of helping law enforcement at all times and places.
Unfortunately, the USPTO doesn't recognize the authority of the Library of Congress as a repository of human knowledge. So no, that doesn't work as prior art (in the eyes of some patent examiners).
Still, $35 for copyright registration is a heck of a lot cheaper than the $500 for a preliminary patent application or the typical $10,000 for a regular patent. Copyright also doesn't preclude that anybody else may have patented something prior to your publication.
You can always do what Dolby Systems does with its engineers: Three lawyers per engineer. Of course their specification documents look like they've been written by lawyers, but who cares, right?
I, too, find it a sad statement that you need lawyers just to do some engineering... or even give out a military order. Neither of these should require legal advise on anything but the most unusual situations... unfortunately they are used for both in almost any every day decision.