If they want to tax virtual assets then they should also accept virtual money to be used for tax payments.
Alas, only US currency is held "Legal tender for all debts public and private." I don't think the IRS is willing to accept a couple of sheep if your only form of income is in barter, either. Or in nose candy if you get paid for your hitman mob contracts in powder cocaine — meaning you might need to commit another felony by selling some of the blow to pay your taxes. =)
Also, do players actually own the virtual assets? Because [as] far as I can tell it's the game operator that actually owns them since they can always take those assets away from the player (for example by cancelling their account).
The IRS would probably take the position on your hypothetical that you should declare a loss against income of the fair market value of the asset if that happens... and pay your taxes meanwhile.
Surely 911 wasn't required...there's a "normal", non-emergency number one can use to contact their local police department.
Depends on the area, and on whether you actually want anyone's attention. I'm currently just outside city limits, and currently serve by the county cops. There have been a couple minor incidents (a crank caller who didn't know about *69 in one case, in another idiots illegally setting off fireworks — not just sparklers, but serious peonies and salutes!) where I called the main desk and asked for dispatch so I could speak with an officer. I was told to call 911, which in at least the case of the crank caller surely seemed overkill. I guess the desk guy just wanted to finish his donuts?
Does anyone have the actual transcript of his speech there so we can figure out who's full of BS and who's not?
There's no transcript for this one on the Newt's website. Several articles listed by Google News are giving the context that the remarks were pertaining to limiting free speech, not just to Geneva treatment of terrorists. If he wants to restrict free speech, he's an idiot. Leave them recruiting on the internet; have the NSA start getting better at hacking into servers to identify where the recruits are located. If he wants the Geneva conventions to address terrorists, there's not much there that needs changing from what I see.
Glancing through the conventions, there seem to be two types of groupings: those based on physiological condition (the blind, women, pregnant women, children based on age), and those based on what they do. The latter in turn may be oversimplified as Civilians/Non-Combatants (civilian non-combatant populace, chaplains, doctors, journalists), Lawful Combatants (members of organized armed forces and guerrillas conforming to the conventions), and Unlawful Combatants (mercenaries, spies, non-conforming guerrillas, et cetera). Forcing someone into a category they have not claimed requires a competent tribunal.
I would propose adding the following rules:
1) Any prisoner before a competent tribunal must claim a status under the Geneva conventions.
2) Falsely claiming a non-Combatant status before a competent tribunal shall be considered an act of perfidy, and a grave violation of the conventions.
At that point, terrorists can be brought before "competent tribunals" to determine their status. If they claim unlawful combatant status, they're idiots. If they claim lawful combatant status, and you can prove they weren't lawful, you can treat them accordingly; if not, you can just lock them up until this mess ends (IE, indefinitely). If they claim non-combatant status, and you can prove they were combatants, they've just violated the Geneva conventions; in the case of guerrillas, that's a failure to follow the conventions, and renders them Unlawful Combatants thereby. In the case of anyone else, well, they just got a War Crimes charge to address.
But if he wants to engage in commerce and earn a profit, he does so with society's help in terms of market regulation and authority to enforce contracts.
And he pays for society's help in the form of taxes.
and in market regulation. You err, as do many free-market Libertarians, in presuming that money is the only form of payment extant or requirable.
Furthermore, I would argue — on principle only, as any knowledgeable lawyer could rip my argument to shreds from the case law — that in the case of an incorporated entity, since corporations require a state charter, they may be justly forbidden from actions that would be unlawful for the state itself. Thus in the case of rentals, any instance where the owner has incorporated to limit liability (and protect his own house) or makes use of an incorporated property management agency, such regulation is reasonable under the Commerce Clause and 14th Amendments. (I might even have a hope of such position under case law, since incorporation is usually done for financial benefit, and it was held in Norwood v. Harrison that "A State may not grant the type of tangible financial aid here involved if that aid has a significant tendency to facilitate, reinforce, and support private discrimination.")
I admit, this leaves a separate question of the extent that the nonenumerated right of association (derived from the right of Freedom of Speech) may be limited by regulation under the commerce clause, to address descrimination by private unincorporated renters. I'll leave addressing that to someone who actually has a clue what the hell they're talking about. =)
Oooh! If the case with New Line turns really nasty, perhaps the Harvard Lampoon will dredge up the Bored of the Rings parody, and hire Jackson to turn that gobbler about Dildo and Frito Bugger into a movie. And if New Line screws over everybody as badly as they did Jackson, perhaps the rest of the cast will reunite to help.
And, after all, parody is well established as constitutionally protected here in the US. International distribution may be a bit of a challenge, but that's what lawyers are for....
This explains why the terminology in The Hobbit is different (The orcs are referred to as Goblins, etc) and the other inconsistencies.
He has characters who have five different names, depending on who's talking about them. Why shouldn't one race being refered to by two names? Come to that, the Goblins wouldn't be the only one; the race that Men call the Elves called themselves the Quendi (not to mention various tribe-like differences within the race).
Irrelevantly, George R.R. Martin has mentioned how much he envies Tolkien, who routinely gave multiple names to everything; GRRM oft has trouble just coming up with one in his Song of Ice and Fire.
I have decided that paper is the most reliable backup/journal mechanism. I have decided that instead of using DVD media to backup, I am going to print 2d bar codes to paper for every disk operation.
Actually, I think Slashdot covered a story on this a couple years back, with a company that had developed a way to store around 1GB of data on a standard 8.5x11 page. 256-bit color 2D barcode at 1200dpi would do it, I guess. More seriously, I was told by a chap at the Corning Glass works that the most important material for backup there (financials data, IIR) gets printed direct to microfiche.
"War on malware! Everyone is REQUIRED to let investigators install remote operated 'agent software' "
Probably not. The US gov't actually does have some competent people, who would point out that such a program would instantly head the list of software targetted for penetration/perversion. I'd expect Federal law prohibiting the exclusion of consequential damages from software licenses before that.
The disinfection must be done before the spammers are deal[t] with.
That depends on whether you're depending on software as the primary weapon in such a War, or if you're willing to make bullets the preferred choice. While it's not fashionable these days, I'm quite partial to the assasination of enemy leadership as a tactic once war has been formally declared.
Congratulations; you are now a finalist in our "Understatement of the Month" contest.
The Penny Stock botnet very definitely gets past greylisting. It's available as an opt-in service here at my job; I recommend it as the first step these days in addressing user Spam complaints. I get a list of what hit the greylist filter once per day; I can deal with that. We also have a secondary central Spam filter (SpamAssassin?) using some standard definitions, updated weekly, that can catch most of the rest. I have mine set so that anything that gets more than 8 points is moved to my Spam folder.
Around early October, I noticed that I was getting sizable amounts of Spam again. So, I started reading headers. Most of the crap coming through was random text excepts (a mix of Guternberg and various web-accessible mail archives), one to three word subject lines, GIF inserts with penny stock pushes, and at most 2 points from the central spam detector. Within a week, I was getting user complaints-- and I since I try to keep my users both scared and happy, this was a bad sign. So, I pushed the question to the mail list for local support people, asking if anyone else had noticed, and come up with a solution. In then walked away from my desk to help someone; big mistake. I had a dozen "Yes, No clue, HELP!!!" responses in twice as many minutes — and most of the IT crowd doesn't check their Email very regularly.
After sending out a request to limit further responses to helpful suggestions, and sorting through the responses that came in by the end of the day, I didn't have squat. One guy thought Thunderbird's spam filter helped, another swore it didn't. One guy suggested The Fuzzy OCR Plug-in be added to SpamAssassin (which I forwarded to the relevant IT Powers). Another guy suggested a commercial hardware product might be needed; ditto. One guy had resorted to a whitelist (that I was luckily on).
My final solution was to check my email archives for gif attatchments, whitelist those who had sent them, and move anything else with a.gif included to a new category of spam-folder. I get an average of ten messages per day, and check that folder once per week. I've had one false positive since (dumb HTML stationary user), and warned the sender that I expected my new practice to become more widespread.
The problem is, these bad guys are NOT stupid; they're learning, and adapting. Switching from GIF to JPG attachments is the next obvious step. The botnets are growing in sophistication, although not yet to Warhol-worm grade. And the only measures I can think of range are at best grey-hat hacker; some are just plain old-west style black hat.
But frankly, it doesn't seem hopeful. Utah is a deep-red state (71% Bush in 2004). The Votemaster shows Ashdown is polling as bad, especially since undecideds generally break for the incumbent or incumbent party.
So, barring photos of Orin Hatch raping a dead sheep in front of the Salt Lake City Mormon Temple hitting the press between now and election day, I don't think the senator from the RIAA can lose. However, hopefully the run will at least help stir public discussion of policy.
That process might not seem bad to you, but when you're there, in the classroom, going through all these steps - it's an eternity.
It's bad, I'll agree. It helps if you make it clear that you have no patience for nonsense, by having no patience for nonsense, and giving the (at least temporary) boot from the class as fast as justification arises. But no matter what, there system has far too much tolerance built in at the moment, and the "No Child Left Behind" nonsense isn't helping. Some kids need a serious kick in the ass.
In our district, physical science is for 9th graders who are not on the "college track" (although the district likes to pretend no such tracks exist).
They called it "Earth Science" in my district when I went through; some superficial geology, climatology, and so forth that might be of some use for farm kids. (The school district ranged from suburb to rural.) I can see how that one might be a problem. With biology, there's the "gross/yuck" factor to hold their attention (along with the material on sex, if your district will let you teach it); chemistry has the nifty ability to make things go "BOOM" with pretty colors and really disgusting smells; and physics is half about how to throw galonking huge rocks at the castle three countries over, and half about making big honking sparks, lasers, nuclear bombs, and attaching students to the ceiling I-beams by their belt buckle. Or at least that's how our attention was kept fixed by my teachers in school.
But I can't think of anything quite so effective at holding the attention in "Physical Science", particularly with an uninspired crowd. Maybe a mention of How To Destroy The Earth? It might instill some of them with a sense of ambition, perhaps....
they could release Tiger 10.4 for generic x86 machines for a very low price (say $50).
If you think Apple's margin on a computer is $50, you really need to think harder.
I'll agree that $50 is a stupidly low price. The educational price for a copy of OS X.4 in the local shop is $69 this morning. I'd argue it's priced as an "upgrade" copy, since (ignoring the hack) any machine it runs on will already have an Apple OS on it. There's usually about $100 difference between retail-upgrade and retail-full on Windows, so call it around $170 as the absolute MINIMUM price.
On the other hand, assigning the full profit of an "average" Mac to that cost is also stupid. I hang out on a Mac user-support mailing list (I support *anything* at work, except the crawling horrors that are AIX and OS/2), and most of the users there seem to upgrade the OS on their Mac at least every other X.point release. And since high-end Macs get built with nigh bleeding edge hardware, they're routinely flogged along until the motherboard craps out; machines from 1999 are still considered "usable". Depending on Apple's intentions, they might sell a retail and an upgrade, or branch out and have Apple upgrade, OEM retail, and upgrade pricings. It all depends on what exact business they want to be in, and what attacks (both legal and pirate) they want to thave to deal with.
Oh, before anyone accuses me of partisanship: Mac OS X, Windows XP, and the major flavors of BSD and Linux all suck, in roughly the same degree. They just each do it in different ways and in different aspects.
As someone who used to teach in a public school, I can tell you how much easier my job would have been if I could have gotten rid of 5 misbehaving kids from each of my classes with 30+ students in them.
Oh, so many things to say.
First, fundamentally problem students can be gotten rid of, or at least could be. IIR, one kid got booted from the school system from my oldest sister's class. But it only happened after he refused to accept repeated attempts to enforce discipline. He disrupted class, the teachers would send him to the principle's office; he failed to go, he was assigned detention. He acted up there, and would get suspended. He missed so many days of school from the suspensions they could not legally send him to the next grade; he was held back a year. Eventually, he not only acted up in detention, but took a swing at the history teacher who was supervising it, and got a close-and-personal history lesson: the teacher had been a marine sargeant in 'Nam. He was frogmarched to the main office, where a phone call to the police led to his arrest. This, along with all the other incidents, gave grounds for a hearing before the school board for his removal from public schools. Motion granted, appeal in court heard and refused, and the parents had to make arrangements to either home-school or private-school him until he hit his majority.
Discipline can be maintained if you have the will for it, and can make the administration (or the local teacher's union) back you up. Some people's main purpose in the universe seems to be to serve as a hideous warning; doing so once or twice often snaps them out of whatever la-la land they live in, as well as intimidate other would-be-troublemakers into being less trouble.
Contrariwise, some "discipline" problems are simply kids who are smarter (albeit more ignorant) than their teachers. My siblings and I often found ourselves in that boat. My oldest sister was prone to argue with teachers about the contents of the lessons. My other older sister helped organize a picket line and strike over a nigh-impossible homework assignment — the six largest libraries within 30 miles only had 45% of the answers available; she was also prone to taking her notes with either hand, and as either regular or mirror-writing, and after her penmanship improved, sometimes took quizzes that way. I spent half of my 10th grade math class in the back of the room, quietly reading my way through the school library's 40 year collection of Analog SF magazines, and mostly ignoring the proceedings; the two kids on either side of me chatted (except during tests) via tapping their pens in morse. Et Cetera.
Fortunately, we had seriously talented teachers, who could generally keep disruptions by the over-creative minimal. (Property tax rates in the district were the third highest in the state, but the system got its money's worth.) Eventually, one of the brighter teachers told my oldest sister to take notes and discuss them with the teachers during her lunch; it served her well in college. The principal got an interim agreement to postpone my other sister's strike, by promising an extension on the assignment until after arbitration by a mutually acceptable third-party; a meeting was held after school a few days later, with a popular teacher from another department (and the head of the Teacher's Union) serving as arbiter. My math teacher never caught on about the morse (I think), and just interrupted my reading every so often to make sure I could continue the problem from wherever it was at.
The main key was, find something to keep the "troublemaker" occupied; foremost in a manner to be minimally disruptive to other students learning, preferably in an educational manner and ideally with something related to the class's nominal material. This is not at all easy, and in hindsight I am amazed at how effortless our teachers often seemed to make it.
And then there's the case (that I lamentably can't find a link to right now) of the teacher wh
If you ever get a chance (/. "girlfriend" jokes aside), buy the lab diamonds, or buy your to-be a genuinely rare gem such as a Ruby (diamonds are not rare).
About a year ago or so an article came up somewhere about LifeGem, one of the companies in the "cultured diamond" business. (Yes, "cultured" is just a dumb marketing term; not the point, here.) For those who haven't heard of them before, LifeGem's twist is they make diamonds as a memorial to "the dear departed", using carbon harvested before cremation. (Insert old "that's not grandma's ring, that is grandma on the ring" jokes here.)
Since I regularly donate blood, I wondered if one's own donated blood could be used as a suitible carbon source, thus allowing for an engagement ring that truly comes "from the heart". While it would tend to be pricier than a boring white stone, they usually make very nice colored stones, and the only human exploited would be the willing donor. After looking at their website to see how much carbon was required, and making some rough calculations, it looked possible, although IIR about three pints would be needed (and thus, a minimum of 16 weeks prep time) for a ring-worthy gem. So, being curious, I called Lifegem and asked about the idea.
Since it's a small company, I talked with one of the founders. He seemed to think I was a weirdo (true), and that it wasn't their usual fare, but said that "if you supply the carbon, we can make the diamond". He also said that he wasn't sure what the (hypothetical) girl would think of the idea of a "cultured" stone. He said he has access to some of the largest and finest synthetics ever made, but when proposal time came, his financee would settle for nothing but a "real" rock.
Still, not all women are that way. My sister (a mechanical engineer) got a little tipsy at the family reunion this summer, and admitted that the huge 2.5 carat rock on her finger for the last decade is actually a cubic zirconia. The pricetag for the real ring was put as a downpayment for a house; the wedding reception was held in the huge backyard. Mom still doesn't know. =)
Flying cars, or homescale nuclear power, or moon colonies were never just engineering problems, even in the 50s and 60s. They were never realized for reasons that had far more to do with politics, practicalities, and economics.
The second you get U.S. dollars for your work, the IRS gets to claim a chunk of them.
Worse; barter income is also taxable. This has some silly implications.
Suppose your primary source of income is from working in the US as a hitman for a Columbian cartel, and the cartel pays you in smuggled cocaine -- in weights valued far more than the rest of your personal net worth combined. You owe tax on the income based on the street value of the nose candy, even though the employment behind the income is illegal, the income is barter instead of cash, your posession of the barter item is illegal, and that converting the barter to a legal tender medium for paying your taxes would require comission of a separate felony.
I'll agree, the automatic translation is probably bad. The question is, is it worse than nothing?
Leaving aside new lieutenants, most US military get the stupid kicked out of them early. If the translation is unreliable, they'll figure that out pretty damn fast, and will up their salt intake appropriately when the machine talks. However, it might give them a slightly better idea of what frantic-looking woman screaming at them is saying, whether it's "Get down before the sniper removes what little brains you have!", "You killed Kenny you bastards!" or "Eat C-4, infidel pig-dogs!"
The real problem won't come until the translation gets into an analog of the uncanny valley, where both they and the arabs think it may be trustworthy, but subtle context and ambiguity is the main source of screw-up. It's always the stuff that you trust that has the easiest time getting you killed.
having my passport labelled a forgery at a bank because the date was 14/6/68. To quote the teller "there's no 14th month". Let me tell you - that creates an interesting scene in a busy bank.
Let me apologize for the increased restrictions on the ownership and use of firearms in the United States that have allowed an ignoramus so massive to continue to walk about.
Youtube is a "private" site. It can, and obviously will, censor whatever the hell it will.
Almost. The problem dates back to the Stratton v. Prodigy and Cubby v. Compuserve cases. Increasing censorship of content indicates increased control over content, and was ruled as changing the legal status of the entity from a content distributor, to a content publisher, and thus making them much more liable for anything in the content. This court ruling was later modified by 47 USC 230 (one of the few parts of the CDA that survived the SCOTUS's glare), which says that no "interactive computer service" may be considered the publisher of any content provided by someone else; and that action in good faith to restrict access to objectionable material can't make them civilly liable for anything.
The problem is that selectively censoring only one set of political opinions might make either a judge or jury very skeptical about the "good faith", weakening a critical legal protection. This doesn't make it illegal... just very, very risky.
IAmNotALawyer. I suspect this is reason for anyone planning to do some censorship to talk over the matter with their lawyer.
How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
A singleton star, reddish and dim. A ragtag of asteroids, and a single
planet, more like a moon. In this era the star hung near the galactic plane,
just beyond the Beyond. The structures on the surface were gone from normal
view, pulverized into regolith across a span of aeons. The treasure was far
underground, beneath a network of passages, in a single room filled with
black. Information at the quantum density, undamaged. Maybe five billion
years had passed since the archive was lost to the nets.
The curse of the mummy's tomb, a comic image from mankind's own
prehistory, lost before time. They had laughed when they said it, laughed
with joy at the treasure... and determined to be cautious just the same.
They would live here a year or five, the little company from Straum, the
archaeologist programmers, their families and schools. A year or five would
be enough to handmake the protocols, to skim the top and identify the
treasure's origin in time and space, to learn a secret or two that would
make Straumli Realm rich. And when they were done, they would sell the
location; perhaps build a network link (but chancier that -- this was beyond
the Beyond; who knew what Power might grab what they'd found).
So now there was a tiny settlement on the surface, and they called it
the High Lab. It was really just humans playing with an old library. It
should be safe, using their own automation, clean and benign. This library
wasn't a living creature, or even possessed of automation (which here might
mean something more, far more, than human). They would look and pick and
choose, and be careful not to be burned.... Humans starting fires and
playing with the flames.
The archive informed the automation. Data structures were built,
recipes followed. A local network was built, faster than anything on Straum,
but surely safe. Nodes were added, modified by other recipes. The archive
was a friendly place, with hierarchies of translation keys that led them
along. Straum itself would be famous for this.
[...]
"Then you know that an archive is a fundamentally vaster thing than the
database on a conventional local net. For practical purposes the big ones
can't even be duplicated. The major archives go back millions of years, have
been maintained by hundreds of different races -- most now extinct or
Transcended into Powers. Even the archive at Relay is a jumble, so huge that
indexing systems are laid on top of indexing systems. Only in the Transcend
could such a mass be well organized and even then only the Powers could
understand it."
"So?"
"There are thousands of archives in the Beyond -- tens of thousands if
you count the ones that have fallen into disrepair or dropped off the Net.
Along with unending trivia, they contain important secrets and important
lies. There are traps and snares." Millions of races played with the advice
that filtered unsolicited across the Net. Tens of thousands had been burned
thereby. Sometimes the damage was relatively minor, good inventions that
weren't quite right for the target environment. Sometimes it was malicious,
viruses that would jam a local net so thoroughly that a civilization must
restart from scratch. Where-Are-They-Now and Threats carried stories of
worse tragedies: planets kneedeep in replicant goo, races turned brainless
by badly programmed immune systems.
Delaying actions against the pirates, at the cost of pissing off the techies most likely to be early adopters of any new tech they put out.
Can't say I blame them. Also can't say I have any sympathy with them over their current troubles with Blu-Ray adoption. They've called the damned tune; they'll pay Hamelin's piper.
Slashdot Mirror
If you insists on comparing MS security with a cheese product, then compare it with foam-cheese
Something vaguely cheesy, that has more holes than substance? Works for me....
And if you had left off the smiley, you probably would have gotten the +5 as "Insightful" instead of "Funny".
If they want to tax virtual assets then they should also accept virtual money to be used for tax payments.
Alas, only US currency is held "Legal tender for all debts public and private." I don't think the IRS is willing to accept a couple of sheep if your only form of income is in barter, either. Or in nose candy if you get paid for your hitman mob contracts in powder cocaine — meaning you might need to commit another felony by selling some of the blow to pay your taxes. =)
Also, do players actually own the virtual assets? Because [as] far as I can tell it's the game operator that actually owns them since they can always take those assets away from the player (for example by cancelling their account).
The IRS would probably take the position on your hypothetical that you should declare a loss against income of the fair market value of the asset if that happens... and pay your taxes meanwhile.
Surely 911 wasn't required...there's a "normal", non-emergency number one can use to contact their local police department.
Depends on the area, and on whether you actually want anyone's attention. I'm currently just outside city limits, and currently serve by the county cops. There have been a couple minor incidents (a crank caller who didn't know about *69 in one case, in another idiots illegally setting off fireworks — not just sparklers, but serious peonies and salutes!) where I called the main desk and asked for dispatch so I could speak with an officer. I was told to call 911, which in at least the case of the crank caller surely seemed overkill. I guess the desk guy just wanted to finish his donuts?
By my count, "less time than it takes to release an operating system" is now running longer than a single presidential term.
Does anyone have the actual transcript of his speech there so we can figure out who's full of BS and who's not?
There's no transcript for this one on the Newt's website. Several articles listed by Google News are giving the context that the remarks were pertaining to limiting free speech, not just to Geneva treatment of terrorists. If he wants to restrict free speech, he's an idiot. Leave them recruiting on the internet; have the NSA start getting better at hacking into servers to identify where the recruits are located. If he wants the Geneva conventions to address terrorists, there's not much there that needs changing from what I see.
Glancing through the conventions, there seem to be two types of groupings: those based on physiological condition (the blind, women, pregnant women, children based on age), and those based on what they do. The latter in turn may be oversimplified as Civilians/Non-Combatants (civilian non-combatant populace, chaplains, doctors, journalists), Lawful Combatants (members of organized armed forces and guerrillas conforming to the conventions), and Unlawful Combatants (mercenaries, spies, non-conforming guerrillas, et cetera). Forcing someone into a category they have not claimed requires a competent tribunal.
I would propose adding the following rules:
1) Any prisoner before a competent tribunal must claim a status under the Geneva conventions.
2) Falsely claiming a non-Combatant status before a competent tribunal shall be considered an act of perfidy, and a grave violation of the conventions.
At that point, terrorists can be brought before "competent tribunals" to determine their status. If they claim unlawful combatant status, they're idiots. If they claim lawful combatant status, and you can prove they weren't lawful, you can treat them accordingly; if not, you can just lock them up until this mess ends (IE, indefinitely). If they claim non-combatant status, and you can prove they were combatants, they've just violated the Geneva conventions; in the case of guerrillas, that's a failure to follow the conventions, and renders them Unlawful Combatants thereby. In the case of anyone else, well, they just got a War Crimes charge to address.
and in market regulation. You err, as do many free-market Libertarians, in presuming that money is the only form of payment extant or requirable.
Furthermore, I would argue — on principle only, as any knowledgeable lawyer could rip my argument to shreds from the case law — that in the case of an incorporated entity, since corporations require a state charter, they may be justly forbidden from actions that would be unlawful for the state itself. Thus in the case of rentals, any instance where the owner has incorporated to limit liability (and protect his own house) or makes use of an incorporated property management agency, such regulation is reasonable under the Commerce Clause and 14th Amendments. (I might even have a hope of such position under case law, since incorporation is usually done for financial benefit, and it was held in Norwood v. Harrison that "A State may not grant the type of tangible financial aid here involved if that aid has a significant tendency to facilitate, reinforce, and support private discrimination.")
I admit, this leaves a separate question of the extent that the nonenumerated right of association (derived from the right of Freedom of Speech) may be limited by regulation under the commerce clause, to address descrimination by private unincorporated renters. I'll leave addressing that to someone who actually has a clue what the hell they're talking about. =)
Who gets to play the role of Dildo?
Oooh! If the case with New Line turns really nasty, perhaps the Harvard Lampoon will dredge up the Bored of the Rings parody, and hire Jackson to turn that gobbler about Dildo and Frito Bugger into a movie. And if New Line screws over everybody as badly as they did Jackson, perhaps the rest of the cast will reunite to help.
And, after all, parody is well established as constitutionally protected here in the US. International distribution may be a bit of a challenge, but that's what lawyers are for....This explains why the terminology in The Hobbit is different (The orcs are referred to as Goblins, etc) and the other inconsistencies.
He has characters who have five different names, depending on who's talking about them. Why shouldn't one race being refered to by two names? Come to that, the Goblins wouldn't be the only one; the race that Men call the Elves called themselves the Quendi (not to mention various tribe-like differences within the race).
Irrelevantly, George R.R. Martin has mentioned how much he envies Tolkien, who routinely gave multiple names to everything; GRRM oft has trouble just coming up with one in his Song of Ice and Fire.
I have decided that paper is the most reliable backup/journal mechanism. I have decided that instead of using DVD media to backup, I am going to print 2d bar codes to paper for every disk operation.
Actually, I think Slashdot covered a story on this a couple years back, with a company that had developed a way to store around 1GB of data on a standard 8.5x11 page. 256-bit color 2D barcode at 1200dpi would do it, I guess. More seriously, I was told by a chap at the Corning Glass works that the most important material for backup there (financials data, IIR) gets printed direct to microfiche.
Alas, this seems irrelevant to voting issues.
"War on malware! Everyone is REQUIRED to let investigators install remote operated 'agent software' "
Probably not. The US gov't actually does have some competent people, who would point out that such a program would instantly head the list of software targetted for penetration/perversion. I'd expect Federal law prohibiting the exclusion of consequential damages from software licenses before that.
The disinfection must be done before the spammers are deal[t] with.
That depends on whether you're depending on software as the primary weapon in such a War, or if you're willing to make bullets the preferred choice. While it's not fashionable these days, I'm quite partial to the assasination of enemy leadership as a tactic once war has been formally declared.
Greylisting is no longer completely effective.
Congratulations; you are now a finalist in our "Understatement of the Month" contest.
The Penny Stock botnet very definitely gets past greylisting. It's available as an opt-in service here at my job; I recommend it as the first step these days in addressing user Spam complaints. I get a list of what hit the greylist filter once per day; I can deal with that. We also have a secondary central Spam filter (SpamAssassin?) using some standard definitions, updated weekly, that can catch most of the rest. I have mine set so that anything that gets more than 8 points is moved to my Spam folder.
Around early October, I noticed that I was getting sizable amounts of Spam again. So, I started reading headers. Most of the crap coming through was random text excepts (a mix of Guternberg and various web-accessible mail archives), one to three word subject lines, GIF inserts with penny stock pushes, and at most 2 points from the central spam detector. Within a week, I was getting user complaints-- and I since I try to keep my users both scared and happy, this was a bad sign. So, I pushed the question to the mail list for local support people, asking if anyone else had noticed, and come up with a solution. In then walked away from my desk to help someone; big mistake. I had a dozen "Yes, No clue, HELP!!!" responses in twice as many minutes — and most of the IT crowd doesn't check their Email very regularly.
After sending out a request to limit further responses to helpful suggestions, and sorting through the responses that came in by the end of the day, I didn't have squat. One guy thought Thunderbird's spam filter helped, another swore it didn't. One guy suggested The Fuzzy OCR Plug-in be added to SpamAssassin (which I forwarded to the relevant IT Powers). Another guy suggested a commercial hardware product might be needed; ditto. One guy had resorted to a whitelist (that I was luckily on).
My final solution was to check my email archives for gif attatchments, whitelist those who had sent them, and move anything else with a .gif included to a new category of spam-folder. I get an average of ten messages per day, and check that folder once per week. I've had one false positive since (dumb HTML stationary user), and warned the sender that I expected my new practice to become more widespread.
The problem is, these bad guys are NOT stupid; they're learning, and adapting. Switching from GIF to JPG attachments is the next obvious step. The botnets are growing in sophistication, although not yet to Warhol-worm grade. And the only measures I can think of range are at best grey-hat hacker; some are just plain old-west style black hat.
But frankly, it doesn't seem hopeful. Utah is a deep-red state (71% Bush in 2004). The Votemaster shows Ashdown is polling as bad, especially since undecideds generally break for the incumbent or incumbent party.
So, barring photos of Orin Hatch raping a dead sheep in front of the Salt Lake City Mormon Temple hitting the press between now and election day, I don't think the senator from the RIAA can lose. However, hopefully the run will at least help stir public discussion of policy.
That process might not seem bad to you, but when you're there, in the classroom, going through all these steps - it's an eternity.
It's bad, I'll agree. It helps if you make it clear that you have no patience for nonsense, by having no patience for nonsense, and giving the (at least temporary) boot from the class as fast as justification arises. But no matter what, there system has far too much tolerance built in at the moment, and the "No Child Left Behind" nonsense isn't helping. Some kids need a serious kick in the ass.
In our district, physical science is for 9th graders who are not on the "college track" (although the district likes to pretend no such tracks exist).
They called it "Earth Science" in my district when I went through; some superficial geology, climatology, and so forth that might be of some use for farm kids. (The school district ranged from suburb to rural.) I can see how that one might be a problem. With biology, there's the "gross/yuck" factor to hold their attention (along with the material on sex, if your district will let you teach it); chemistry has the nifty ability to make things go "BOOM" with pretty colors and really disgusting smells; and physics is half about how to throw galonking huge rocks at the castle three countries over, and half about making big honking sparks, lasers, nuclear bombs, and attaching students to the ceiling I-beams by their belt buckle. Or at least that's how our attention was kept fixed by my teachers in school.
But I can't think of anything quite so effective at holding the attention in "Physical Science", particularly with an uninspired crowd. Maybe a mention of How To Destroy The Earth? It might instill some of them with a sense of ambition, perhaps....
I'll agree that $50 is a stupidly low price. The educational price for a copy of OS X.4 in the local shop is $69 this morning. I'd argue it's priced as an "upgrade" copy, since (ignoring the hack) any machine it runs on will already have an Apple OS on it. There's usually about $100 difference between retail-upgrade and retail-full on Windows, so call it around $170 as the absolute MINIMUM price.
On the other hand, assigning the full profit of an "average" Mac to that cost is also stupid. I hang out on a Mac user-support mailing list (I support *anything* at work, except the crawling horrors that are AIX and OS/2), and most of the users there seem to upgrade the OS on their Mac at least every other X.point release. And since high-end Macs get built with nigh bleeding edge hardware, they're routinely flogged along until the motherboard craps out; machines from 1999 are still considered "usable". Depending on Apple's intentions, they might sell a retail and an upgrade, or branch out and have Apple upgrade, OEM retail, and upgrade pricings. It all depends on what exact business they want to be in, and what attacks (both legal and pirate) they want to thave to deal with.
Oh, before anyone accuses me of partisanship: Mac OS X, Windows XP, and the major flavors of BSD and Linux all suck, in roughly the same degree. They just each do it in different ways and in different aspects.
As someone who used to teach in a public school, I can tell you how much easier my job would have been if I could have gotten rid of 5 misbehaving kids from each of my classes with 30+ students in them.
Oh, so many things to say.
First, fundamentally problem students can be gotten rid of, or at least could be. IIR, one kid got booted from the school system from my oldest sister's class. But it only happened after he refused to accept repeated attempts to enforce discipline. He disrupted class, the teachers would send him to the principle's office; he failed to go, he was assigned detention. He acted up there, and would get suspended. He missed so many days of school from the suspensions they could not legally send him to the next grade; he was held back a year. Eventually, he not only acted up in detention, but took a swing at the history teacher who was supervising it, and got a close-and-personal history lesson: the teacher had been a marine sargeant in 'Nam. He was frogmarched to the main office, where a phone call to the police led to his arrest. This, along with all the other incidents, gave grounds for a hearing before the school board for his removal from public schools. Motion granted, appeal in court heard and refused, and the parents had to make arrangements to either home-school or private-school him until he hit his majority.
Discipline can be maintained if you have the will for it, and can make the administration (or the local teacher's union) back you up. Some people's main purpose in the universe seems to be to serve as a hideous warning; doing so once or twice often snaps them out of whatever la-la land they live in, as well as intimidate other would-be-troublemakers into being less trouble.
Contrariwise, some "discipline" problems are simply kids who are smarter (albeit more ignorant) than their teachers. My siblings and I often found ourselves in that boat. My oldest sister was prone to argue with teachers about the contents of the lessons. My other older sister helped organize a picket line and strike over a nigh-impossible homework assignment — the six largest libraries within 30 miles only had 45% of the answers available; she was also prone to taking her notes with either hand, and as either regular or mirror-writing, and after her penmanship improved, sometimes took quizzes that way. I spent half of my 10th grade math class in the back of the room, quietly reading my way through the school library's 40 year collection of Analog SF magazines, and mostly ignoring the proceedings; the two kids on either side of me chatted (except during tests) via tapping their pens in morse. Et Cetera.
Fortunately, we had seriously talented teachers, who could generally keep disruptions by the over-creative minimal. (Property tax rates in the district were the third highest in the state, but the system got its money's worth.) Eventually, one of the brighter teachers told my oldest sister to take notes and discuss them with the teachers during her lunch; it served her well in college. The principal got an interim agreement to postpone my other sister's strike, by promising an extension on the assignment until after arbitration by a mutually acceptable third-party; a meeting was held after school a few days later, with a popular teacher from another department (and the head of the Teacher's Union) serving as arbiter. My math teacher never caught on about the morse (I think), and just interrupted my reading every so often to make sure I could continue the problem from wherever it was at.
The main key was, find something to keep the "troublemaker" occupied; foremost in a manner to be minimally disruptive to other students learning, preferably in an educational manner and ideally with something related to the class's nominal material. This is not at all easy, and in hindsight I am amazed at how effortless our teachers often seemed to make it.
And then there's the case (that I lamentably can't find a link to right now) of the teacher wh
About a year ago or so an article came up somewhere about LifeGem, one of the companies in the "cultured diamond" business. (Yes, "cultured" is just a dumb marketing term; not the point, here.) For those who haven't heard of them before, LifeGem's twist is they make diamonds as a memorial to "the dear departed", using carbon harvested before cremation. (Insert old "that's not grandma's ring, that is grandma on the ring" jokes here.)
Since I regularly donate blood, I wondered if one's own donated blood could be used as a suitible carbon source, thus allowing for an engagement ring that truly comes "from the heart". While it would tend to be pricier than a boring white stone, they usually make very nice colored stones, and the only human exploited would be the willing donor. After looking at their website to see how much carbon was required, and making some rough calculations, it looked possible, although IIR about three pints would be needed (and thus, a minimum of 16 weeks prep time) for a ring-worthy gem. So, being curious, I called Lifegem and asked about the idea.
Since it's a small company, I talked with one of the founders. He seemed to think I was a weirdo (true), and that it wasn't their usual fare, but said that "if you supply the carbon, we can make the diamond". He also said that he wasn't sure what the (hypothetical) girl would think of the idea of a "cultured" stone. He said he has access to some of the largest and finest synthetics ever made, but when proposal time came, his financee would settle for nothing but a "real" rock.
Still, not all women are that way. My sister (a mechanical engineer) got a little tipsy at the family reunion this summer, and admitted that the huge 2.5 carat rock on her finger for the last decade is actually a cubic zirconia. The pricetag for the real ring was put as a downpayment for a house; the wedding reception was held in the huge backyard. Mom still doesn't know. =)
Flying cars, or homescale nuclear power, or moon colonies were never just engineering problems, even in the 50s and 60s. They were never realized for reasons that had far more to do with politics, practicalities, and economics.
EXACTLY. I now point back to the post I commented on...
It's just an engineering problem.
In that sense, so is the mass market flying car that I'm STILL waiting for.
The second you get U.S. dollars for your work, the IRS gets to claim a chunk of them.
Worse; barter income is also taxable. This has some silly implications.
Suppose your primary source of income is from working in the US as a hitman for a Columbian cartel, and the cartel pays you in smuggled cocaine -- in weights valued far more than the rest of your personal net worth combined. You owe tax on the income based on the street value of the nose candy, even though the employment behind the income is illegal, the income is barter instead of cash, your posession of the barter item is illegal, and that converting the barter to a legal tender medium for paying your taxes would require comission of a separate felony.
Don't you love this country?
Right question: can they write it off without getting audited?
Cue Gene Hackman: "I don't care about an indictment. I just don't want them getting a conviction."
I'll agree, the automatic translation is probably bad. The question is, is it worse than nothing?
Leaving aside new lieutenants, most US military get the stupid kicked out of them early. If the translation is unreliable, they'll figure that out pretty damn fast, and will up their salt intake appropriately when the machine talks. However, it might give them a slightly better idea of what frantic-looking woman screaming at them is saying, whether it's "Get down before the sniper removes what little brains you have!", "You killed Kenny you bastards!" or "Eat C-4, infidel pig-dogs!"
The real problem won't come until the translation gets into an analog of the uncanny valley, where both they and the arabs think it may be trustworthy, but subtle context and ambiguity is the main source of screw-up. It's always the stuff that you trust that has the easiest time getting you killed.
having my passport labelled a forgery at a bank because the date was 14/6/68. To quote the teller "there's no 14th month". Let me tell you - that creates an interesting scene in a busy bank.
Let me apologize for the increased restrictions on the ownership and use of firearms in the United States that have allowed an ignoramus so massive to continue to walk about.
Youtube is a "private" site. It can, and obviously will, censor whatever the hell it will.
Almost. The problem dates back to the Stratton v. Prodigy and Cubby v. Compuserve cases. Increasing censorship of content indicates increased control over content, and was ruled as changing the legal status of the entity from a content distributor, to a content publisher, and thus making them much more liable for anything in the content. This court ruling was later modified by 47 USC 230 (one of the few parts of the CDA that survived the SCOTUS's glare), which says that no "interactive computer service" may be considered the publisher of any content provided by someone else; and that action in good faith to restrict access to objectionable material can't make them civilly liable for anything.
The problem is that selectively censoring only one set of political opinions might make either a judge or jury very skeptical about the "good faith", weakening a critical legal protection. This doesn't make it illegal... just very, very risky.
IAmNotALawyer. I suspect this is reason for anyone planning to do some censorship to talk over the matter with their lawyer.
[...]
what are they really gaining?
Delaying actions against the pirates, at the cost of pissing off the techies most likely to be early adopters of any new tech they put out.
Can't say I blame them. Also can't say I have any sympathy with them over their current troubles with Blu-Ray adoption. They've called the damned tune; they'll pay Hamelin's piper.