"- people who believe not that a theocracy is desirable, but that the separation of Church and State has been overemphasized to the nation's detriment. "
Precisely. Take the 10 commandments cases in the southern US of late. The current decision bars putting up a monument with the 10 commandments, but allows a statue of a Greek goddess in their place. Estimates for that belief show there are probably only about 5,000 Olympian oriented pagans in the U.S., and the rest of us treat Athena or blind Justice symbolicly, but to a few of us, those are religious symbols, and the constitution doesn't say "no law respecting an establishment of religion, unless they are really tiny".
I'm personally a Christian, and I'd much rather see the Two Commandments from the sermon on the mount than the 10. People who call themselves Christians and get all their quotes from the Old Testament worry me. I'd still rather see them have the right to put up monuments, and let everyone else put up monuments too. Laws controlling spending public funds on religious sculpture, sure, but banning voluntary funding if it's to be erected in a government place? This issue has made me tempted to vote Republican before, and I'm sure it's driven some solidly into the Republican camp.
I'm at 850 feet above sea level altitiude right now, with a beautiful view of where an arm of the great Meditamerican sea will extend when sea level rises 200 feet. Once the national BATF offices are under 150 feet of water, many of my neigbors will probably again take up their traditional industries, chiefly involving ethanol distillation. I think I'll look at shipping across the Meditamerican, as it ought to be the calmest sea left with all those storms in the broadened Atlantic. Shipping sure beats fishing for actual work. As much of the coasts go 'Glub", I'll probably have to switch to wireless internet or something, but the hillbilly Nuke plant is high enough to stay dry. Heck, we can even shut down the coal fired plants and go to a completly Hudro-Nuclear economy once we aren't shipping half our power generation to the old north east seaboard. Our local estimates on despeciation (done on our hillbilly VAX's and PDP-11s) are that we will lose about 5% of our wild species (mostly some northern adapted evergreens that will die out in this area), while some of you might want to gene-geneer paddle tailed rats just so you have something to hunt through the decaying,waterlogged, lightless ruins of your former civilization.
Local machines in my area (from Shouptronic) use memory enchased in a largish cartridge. I could hold five of them stacked in both hands with some difficulty, but would have a hard time palming one and substituting another without it being seen. Maybe a stage magician level of skill and large hands would still allow swapping one out, but that method makes it very hard to find enough trained cheaters to fix a whole election.
There's also a ribbon printer included, although it only prints total votes/candidate or issue and some checksums. The ribbon is signed at opening of polls by at least 4 workers who review that it shows all zeros at the start, and signed again on the other end when it is removed to verify it's the same one. It's filed so the cartridge totals can be checked later if there's a challenge.
All voters fill out a 'request for ballot', signed by them and numbered sequentially. As they pass through the lines, that ends up back on a stack. Total number of requests should match total number of votes at that precinct (with adjustments for voided requests - such as relatively rare cases when a voter finds out they are registered to vote at some other precinct and goes there). Total votes should match total in the machines, plus any paper ballots cast. We've hit that right on the money 4 elections in a row at my precinct.
We've recently added procedures to keep those cartridges and printer ribbons in sight of at least 2 workers from the time they come out of the machines until they get sealed in a bank-bag. This isn't totally foolproof either, but again makes cheating harder.
All records for actual votes for up to about 2,000 voters per precinct will fit in one bank-bag.
So to answer your questions - 1. encasing those memory cards in something a little bulkier and implementing a two man rule gives you at least some safeguards besides just the code, and 2. It's either not hard to add a little printer, or else those guys at Shouptronics must be genius hardware hackers cause they did it (12 years ago).
Quake 1 - Pick an area where you can be sure to gib lots of low level monsters and can move around without any jumping. Set the gravity waaaaay up, like 500000. (Console: R_GRAVITY 500000)
Ogres now drop their grenades at their own feet. (Unfortunately, the explosion flashes from the grenades tunnel underground and so the Ogres don't take much damage). Fiends progress in little tiny hops that make them take all day to cross the room. All gibbed monsters become a pile of meat with the head spinnning in the middle like it was on a turntable. They all spin at different speeds too. Rockets fly straight still, but their smoke trails depart upwards at tremendous speeds.
You want violent slapstick?
Set the gravity down to a very low value like 10, or even all the way to 0. Watch the spinning heads fly. (This last works best in a big open courtyard full of gibbed monsters.). Negative Gravity can be very strange and unsophisticatedly humourous too.
You can also tinker with the coefficient of friction and other variables. It's Alice in Wonderland physics (with a big tendency to get the POV whimsically dead).
Your link makes a pretty good case against the law as a whole, but this particular exemption is probably driven completely by money and not reliability issues.
As a cost cutting measure, many National Guard units are still equipped with the Vietnam Era M16-A1 as their primary weapon, and often the biggest upgrade in years is purchaseing a cheap "stamped-metal-tab" modification kit to lock out full auto setting so the gun is only capable of semi-auto fire rather than 'Rambo' mode. If your NJ units are combat support or combat service support, they probably fall in this category.
If NJ has an actual combat line unit with a low number rating for deployment, citizens should probably be more concerned about sending their own fellow New Jerseyans into combat trained only on such old weapons systems than whether it's with or without biometric locks.
I would also think state law has to exempt federal law enforcement and active duty armed forces or face a constitutional challenge.
You're talking about events that scale to where they kill nearly every human within 200 miles of the eruption by parboiling them in a cloud of superheated steam. The amount of ash dumped in such a case would create a year without a summer, and such erruptions probably kill 20% to half the living creatures on the planet every time one happens.
So what's your point? Everyone disagreeing with you on the amount hunams contribute to the greenhouse effect right now is a fool that isn't more concerned about the 0.0005% chance of another Thera scale erruption instead? Nature could hit us with something that would dwarf all our efforts, so we should just lie down and wait for the ash to bury us all?
I have some bad news for you that you evidently haven't heard. You're going to die someday. Better quit striving now and avoid the rush. Let's not stop at your big picture - the really big one is the Sun is going to blow up in a few billion years. The even bigger one is the fine structure constant isn't constant, and the universe will eventually fly apart as even individual elementary partuicles push each other away at ever increasing speeds.
For microsoft, compatability is inconvenient. In a lot of areas where they haven't competed, compatability means giving up that area - for example.NET will never grow on that sort of level playing field you describe. Apache won't lose market share under such conditions. While to Microsoft, giving up hopes of expanding forever probably feels like suicide, it really isn't.
In areas like the OS and office tools markets, Microsoft can hold onto a sizeable share even in the face of open source alternatives. Their products are well known, and work well enough. Anything taking market share from them has to look clearly superior, and not just as good or a little bit better.
This is whay the browser wars are heating back up. Tabbed browsing is a 'little bit better' feature - useful, but not enough reason for most people to bother. Good pop-up blocking is a clearly superior feature, hence Mozilla and Firefox are grabbing share.
Open source or otherwise independent news browsers have clearly superior features over Outlook and OE, but mostly only for people who use Usenet alt.binaries groups. The rest of the world rates those features as 'little bit better', and so doesn't change.
Here's a tip for OS developers. Stability is now a 'little bit better' area, for small businesses and home users (and really for just about everyone who doesn't need 4 sigmas up time). A crash every few months isn't worth switching over. Security is increasingly seen as a clearly superior advantage for the UNIXoids (even Apple). If Microsoft doesn't get security under control, they will lose big in a few quarters, but they could coast for a decade or more on stability. TCO can easily be a clearly superior area as well.
There are lots of 'little bit better's' that can be incorporated into Gnome or KDE, but not one of them will make it clearly superior to Xp's GUI.
Re:Well, since I can't get to the article...
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1. I am a former commissioned officer who has held a couple of posts in military intelligence, and have read existing classified papers on this subject and had imput into some of the newer ones, circa 1992-7. I have said and am saying here as much on this subject as it is legally and morally permissable for me to say without improperly accessing or quoting classified information. I did not make anything whatsoever up in doing so. You are simply 100% wrong on this point.
2. Doctrine is to assume a decapitation strike when it becomes apparent multiple links in the chain of command are being targeted, and stick to that assumption until it is strongly proven otherwise, because the alternative is to risk so much additional damage, almost any alternative procedure is foolish. The Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon and the Vice President and Secretary of Def. were all then in Washington. (Sec State Powell was in Peru, and communications difficulties made it impossible to determine his status for at least an hour after the first attacks). These constitute all the multiple links needed. Even when it became apparent there were some other facts that suggested this wasn't a decapitation strategy attack, it took some substantial time to build a strong case it wasn't, and particularly to confirm those facts. The system kept working as planned until strong enough disproof was obtainable.
3. The decision to move the president includes not moving him in such a way that he gets farther from command and control. Doctrine is to move him closer to communications links, so he has more time to make decisions about his options if a launch warning comes, never to move him even temporarily farther away from them until a specific risk assessment is made. Secret service would likely not move him instantaniously, but only after that risk assessment. You seem to be thinking of a risk assesment to the President himself from your last post, but we are in fact talking about a risk assesment to the entire nation. Even the President's own life becomes secondary in such cases.
4. The president orders the Secret service and Military on the strategic or operations levels. He is usually briefed almost immediately on entering the office on how foolish it would be for him to order them on a tactical level, and guarding and moving him are definitely tactics. This one listened, which was the right thing to do.
He took charge quickly enough that he spoke to the public from the White House by 8:30 that evening, having determined some time in the first 10 hours after the attack that it was a terrorist action. We don't know for sure how much of that 10 hours was spent on other things than preparing for a speech, but it is worth noting that the Budget amendment to pay 20 Billion for New York City's recovery, and the first airport reopenings, were both done early on the 13th, and much of the 12th and 13th were taken up by the NSA, NSC and Congressional 'council of war' proceedings, so it is at least likely the President did some work on these points the 11th.
5. Expecting the enemy to use nukes as a necessary part of the decapitation strategy isn't U.S. doctrine. In fact it is considered unlikely, as they make it obvious that a nuclear war is upon us, and Admirals in command of carrier groups gain individual release authority at that time (or they did circa 1994 - I was Army, so I don't keep up with the Navy much), guarenteeing we are likely to at least be able to respond with cruise missle based and sub based nukes. The initial use of non-nuclear methods is therefore considered likely, particularly by a foe that wishes to blunt the seaward leg of the 'nuclear response tripod'.
The president is routinely briefed and presented with training exercises on such possible decapitation scenarios as a string of individual assassinations, or even a string of what appear at first to be car crashes, medical events, and similar personnel losses. President Bush, like several of his predecessors, often skipped these training scen
Re:Well, since I can't get to the article...
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I'm not a big fan of GWB, and I really wish I didn't have to stick up for him on this, but...
He hopped on Air Force One and ran like a scared rabbit for days. Rudy Guilianni deserves some credit for showing balls on 9/11. George W. didn't actually show any backbone during the actual emergency. He didn't start talking big until well after.
Bush was first told that multiple planes were known to be attacking, and got his first warning about what was going on after the Pentagon itself was hit. At that point, it was suspected that the 4th plane was targeting the capitol as well.
The US military in such cases assumes the goal is to to take out the command and control of the US as part of a Nuclear War based decapitation strategy. They have to make that assumption, as not doing so has a strong chance of getting 130 Million or so Americans killed. That's what the President was told - that an enemy was acting in a way that apparently fit the start of a nuclear war, by trying to kill enough links in the chain of people who could authorize a launch response to stop a retaliatory strike.
From that time, the President went where the military moved him, until it was clear that this was not an actual decapitation strike. He sat in that school, probably until everything from sattelite redirect to battalion or larger level ground forces were moved into the appropriate positions to keep the nuclear launch authority links up for him as needed. He then went to locations where he could quickly direct a retaliatory launch while gaining near maximum time to check any indicators of an enemy launch. Doing anything else would have been playing politics with the lives of hundreds of millions of people world wide. Rudy may have acted ballsier, but then he didn't have to worry that the wrong choice could mean loseing WW3.
If Al-Quida had successfully hit the Capital dome or White house with plane 4, or worse yet had a few more resources to put into targeting the President where he was at the time as well, we would have come closer to the brink than in the Cuban missle crisis. As it was, we came closer than most of the public appreciates.
So you vote two weeks before the election, and one week later the press reveals your choice has been
o diagnosed with Alzheimer's. o Caught in bed with a live boy AND a dead girl. o quoted saying they are in favor of repealing the
14th amendment, so the country can sell random
citizens to pay off the national debt.
There's trade offs either way.
So why is the USA in NAFTA?
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Mexico was rated 95th this year. The reason given is violence against journalists in several specific states, which are mostly the same northern border states where most of the US businesses have relocated under NAFTA and where Mexican businesses that export to us under NAFTA have the substantial majority of their factories.
How can we judge whether Mexico is in compliance with NAFTA requirements on such factors as pollution control or reciprocal use of US made systems? Do these places actually commit violence up to and including murder against the Mexican investigative press, but cooperate fully with gringo inspectors?
The original points of this were: it's easier to trace small leaks with neon or florescent dyes in use. Use opaque hose, and bring an actual black light near it, and you have one of the world's best cheap tests for system integrity. Stock antifreeze is florescent green anyway, and it prevents some kinds of corrosion, so why not use it. Now the case modders are going for the whole hobby effect, with transparent case windows to show off the glowing water inside, and built in UV sources to heat up that case they are trying to cool down (and even cold cathode lights produce some heat), so they are worrying more about apperance than substance. It's the geek equivalent of oversized exaust extensions on a rice burner. But originally, this was about being reliable and effective.
... is the real alternative sucks. Citys aren't doing this to squeeze out private companys that want to offer service to everyone. Cities aren't even competing with companies that want to offer service to everyone making above 30,000 $ a year, or to neigherborhoods where everyone owns their home.
Cities are looking at getting into providing access because the companies in their areas are generally targeting the top 5% of the market only. They are tired of dealing with companies that want to wire broadband only to people making 200,000 $ a year plus, and living in sufficiently large groups of interested users.
My city dropped plans to create a utilities model wireless service when the local Bell brought in a multi-tiered ADSL system that swiftly ended up competeing with local cable internet. Before that, we'd seen such problems as a small high speed provider that wanted to connect up just a few new streets, only to see the economic downturn hit, the local developers put off building houses on those streets, and their investmwent go down the toilet.
While I'm qute happy that we have some competitive interest in this area and didn't end up setting up a new local utility, we waited about 4 years for the situation to resolve itself. 4 years of businesses that weren't interested in profit margens of less than 15%, and didn't recognize when they were taking bigger risks by cherry-picking than they would have by trying to provide service to the majority.
Possibly Rutherford had it passed through rollers instead of beaten. When you get to the limit where spacing the rollers any closer causes them to flatten out due to machining irregularities, you can stack multiple sheets and then peel them apart after rolling. (This trick is still done commercially in making aluminum foil. It's easier to roll two sheets at once in the final stage, than to make rolling machines that can go smaller without flattening.) Since Rutherford was working with a soft metal that requires little pressure to flatten, and didn't need industrial quantities, automated manufacturing processes, and the like, this process was available to him, and had been for about 40 years, as goldsmiths used it for preparing book inlays.
Windows has only recently evolved from a single-user design to a multi-user model Just how recently depends on whether we're talking home users on the 9x path or business on the NT path. If the latter, recently is stretching it a bit, as we're talking about a very sizable fraction of the time Linux has existed, depending on just when you want to add words such as "in a useable form". Windows is Monolithic by Design, not Modular Windows Depends Too Heavily on the RPC model 'too heavily' is certainly an opinion. Yes there are some facts that support it, but the idea is to present those first, not state it as a conclusion. A statement such as "Windows relies on the RPC model, which causes security vulnerabilities such as A, (and maybe B, C, D... if you can hold a PHB's attention that long)." would be less opinionated. Windows focuses on its familiar graphical desktop interface
Linux Design
Linux is based on a long history of well fleshed-out multi-user design 'well fleshed out' is an emotional arguement. That Linux is a multiuser OS is unambiguously clear to the clueful, from its derivation fron UNIX. That the implementation is robust and includes all, or at least most necessary elements is something frequently debated even here on Slashdot. Linux is Modular by Design, not Monolithic Linux is Not Constrained by an RPC Model Linux servers are ideal for headless non-local administration As you yourself point out, this shows some opinion - no surprise there, superlatives such as 'ideal' very often signal opinions.
That works out to 4 out of 8 points. Actually, for journalism, 50% is pretty good, but not great.
The European 'moral' copyright issue there is what I found interesting. I mean, you can quote Paul's letter to the Romans where he compares entering into lawsuits to fornication, prostitution and homosexuality to see what one of the known author's moral positions was. As my limited understanding of the European law goes, it's not about agreeing with the originator's moral position, but protecting it anyway, and it applies even after normal finacial rights expire.
This looks to be a catch 22 in my opinion (read my signature). It's sort of like defending your copyright on a book you claim was written by a 10,000 year old Atlantean you were merely channeling, and sold as non-fiction. If you're telling the truth, you can't claim a violation because the author died too long ago, while if you're lieing, you can persue the copyright violation but have just admitted fraud if anyone wants to persue the counterclaim. For another example along rather different moral grounds, what happens if you sue in France over a postumous translation of Abby Hoffman's "Steal this Book", or for that matter "Das Kapital"?
In their own ways, such cases remind me of the GPL. There's a certain sense that the normal purpose of some rules is twisted around until it butts heads with its context, and the outcome is counter-intuitive. Unfortunately, my intuition tells me for these example cases the outcome will probably be determined wherever the money goes in.
The mercenary clauses are indeed relevant, particularly in Iraq, and I could only wish that the President and Donald Rumsfeld had focused on such cases. It is also possible for a recognized combatant to have comitted crimes, and be subject to normal prosecution. The convention only says that recognized acts of war cannot be counted as those crimes.
This is all way off topic re. Russian bootlegging, and will probably draw some negative mod points. (Hopefully directed at the first to broach the topic as well as me, but I'll stand by what I said).
I've been wondering how iTunes and such handle the odd sized track. I notice for example, that all of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells 1 is just two tracks on the CD, but Tubular Bells 2 is divided into 12 tracks, and #3 has about 17 if I recall correctly. Does iTunes carry tracks like Yes's Tales from Topographic Oceans (I LP side each, 90+ minutes of music in 4 tracks). What about classical works, where a 33 minute movement is often originally recorded as a single track? Do things like iTunes create pressure for artists to chop their works up into more small pieces. I saw a CD of Copland's Appalachian spring recently that had it chopped into 8 tracks. Is this somehow because of iTunes?
I'm not sure what he's trying to say, especially with the double negative, but I'll try for a related take.
1. When I go to the gas pump, several of my area gas stations have stickers on the pump that show what portion of each gallon's price is state and federal taxes. I can also get a breakdown from the government of where those taxes go, with a ltitle more work. I can also get financial info on the company selling my retailer the gas, since they are publicly traded. The only thing I can't check up on too easily is the financial situation of the local retailer, and that's partly a matter of justified privacy. Overall, I can get a pretty good picture of who's making how much. 2. If I buy a CD or DVD, I have little or no idea how much goes to the artists, songwriters, and so on. I know that some industry spokesman said 100,000$ a year is not much to live on, so I have some idea how much he makes, but that's about it.
Looking deeper, I find that judging the amounts involved is very different than for the oil companies reports. Those 'distributer' guys in the middle seem to be a much bigger and less well defined share of the music industry's costs and profits than the truck drivers working for the oil industry. Often, I can't tell when an artist is making no real money because they actually signed a really bad deal, when they give all their money back because it goes to contract perks like bowls of green M&M's backstage, and when they make no money from CD sales, but get quite a bit from touring, and use the CD proceeeds to subsidize the tours. 3.The music industry takes huge risks that I would expect investors to get upset about (Like tieing a whole years P&L to whether Michael Jackson can sell like he did 10 years before, while knowing that it's been 10 years, and he has a few little rumors following him about.). I can look at what happens to Exxon's stock when they run the Valdez into a rock, and it makes sense. Even their corporate spinmeisters can't mislead me too much.
For the music industry, I literally can't tell, even with careful study, how much of a bad year is from the general economic downturn, how much from bad decisions, and how much from piracy.
Now maybe the poster is just taking the old 'information want's to be free' line. But maybe, he's referring to the need for some types of information (like some financial info) to be freely available so that the rest of them (like the works themselves) can retain value.
The music industry seems to be desseminating enough misinformation that people find it hard to judge the situation. If bootlegging goes up, is it because a huge number of people are generally that crooked AND that shortsighted, or is it because they are being denied information that would let them better judge those long term consequences? I honestly don't know for sure.
Or since the work is internally attributed to his father, should they have waited until 70 years after Nietzsche's famous pronouncment? Seriously, has any group producing a contemporary translation of the Bible claimed a copyright violation against anyone else? What would be the legal status for a work that is supposed to be freely copyable by its original authors? In the more general case, would some of the European laws on moral copyright figure in to such cases? What's the law going to do where the original author(s) are long dead, and a translator produces a new version, and then sues copiers even though this appears counter the intent of the original author(s)?
"The 1977 Protocols extend the definition of combatant to include any fighters who carry arms openly during preparation for an attack and during the attack itself, (Protocol I, Art. 44, Sec. 3)
Article 44 1. Any combatant, as defined in Article 43, who falls into the power of an adverse Party shall be a prisoner of war.
2. While all combatants are obliged to comply with the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, violations of these rules shall not deprive a combatant of his right to be a combatant or, if he falls into the power of an adverse Party, of his right to be a prisoner of war , except as provided in paragraphs 3 and 4.
3. In order to promote the protection of the civilian population from the effects of hostilities, combatants are obliged to distinguish themselves from the civilian population while they are engaged in an attack or in a military operation preparatory to an attack. Recognizing, however, that there are situations in armed conflicts where, owing to the nature of the hostilities an armed combatant cannot so distinguish himself, he shall retain his status as a combatant, provided that, in such situations, he carries his arms openly:
(a) during each military engagement, and (b) during such time as he is visible to the adversary while he is engaged in a military deployment preceding the launching of an attack in which he is to participate.
Acts which comply with the requirements of this paragraph shall not be considered as perfidious within the meaning of Article 37, paragraph 1 (c).
4. A combatant who falls into the power of an adverse Party while failing to meet the requirements set forth in the second sentence of paragraph 3 shall forfeit his right to be a prisoner of war, but he shall, nevertheless, be given protections equivalent in all respects to those accorded to prisoners of war by the Third Convention and by this Protocol. This protection includes protections equivalent to those accorded to prisoners of war by the Third Convention in the case where such a person is tried and punished for any offences he has committed."
To: Joe College
Your current auto insurance rate has been adjusted to reflect your driving related habits. Your next six months premium is now 1,649$.
Reasons: 1. You are now dating a blonde. Our studies have shown that teenage males who date blondes have a higher tendency than average to attempt to impress them while driving. 2. You have changed majors. Our studies show that people who are uncommitted in their freshman year have a tendency to fail to use turn signals. 3. You were recently heard publicly muttering about how big corporations collect too much data on people. Our studies show that this sort of paranoid verbalization may correlate to an increased risk of road rage.
That "could be an indicator" is an awfully broad area. I'm sure you are not thinking of trivial correlations such as hair color, but if insurors do enough data mining, they will find occasional odd, non-causal correlations like girlfriend's hair color to number of speeding tickets. Many if not all of those will be random effects, often unlikely to persist for more than a few years at most. In a sufficiently large pool of data, some totally non-causal correlations have to occur.
Insurors don't have to give you a discount if there is a positive effect from some of these, and won't unless it looks good for attracting business. They don't have to give you a rate reduction for having voted during early voting, just to balance that rate increase for preferring seedless grapes over cantelope.
Now for your more serious example. Please assume I completely agree with you that alchohol or cannabis can impair a person's driving skill, and that people who use them before driving (regularly or irregularly) pose an increased risk to themselves and others. It doesn't follow that the best response from the data gatherer's view is to observe a particular limit such as 24 hours.
An insuror could, for example, find out who is a member of Alchoholics Anonomous. Since some recovering alchoholics fall off the wagon, they would be a higher than average risk group. Finding this out could be very cheap compared to finding out who is an alchoholic non-member without prior DUIs. That second group is a much higher risk group to insure, but it's also much more expensive to find out who is in that group.
So an insuror might choose to selectively target one group with moderately higher risk factors rather than another group with larger ones, just because identifying who is a member of one group is sufficiently easier or cheaper - that is it gives the company more bang for its buck. The law tends to oppose such actions, because the courts don't want to have to arbitrate cases where such capriciousness enters in. It has been know to allow some examples, such as car color, because the statistical correlation is very strong and the data is necessary for the insurance company and the state to gather anyway.
My property = taxes paid to give copyright holders legal protection under 1970's law. Paid under a law that protected all copyright holders for an equal time. Paid with the assurance from the government that it would protect, not just your right to be paid for your work, but my interm rights to fair use and the enjoyment of an eventual public domain.
If you really published anything in the 1970's, you got an 'insurance policy' protecting that property, a 'policy' from me and about 150 million other people like me who were taxpayers that far back. The government then broke a few promises to us, supposedly on your behalf. Even if you really sincerely believe that our collective promise to our own posterity doesn't represent a value every bit as tangible as that oh so solid IP, are you really willing to claim that my tax money is less a property than your IP? Sounds like you believe that my money is yours to take without compensation, ergo, you are one of the thieves here, with the government's assistance. Simple, Obvious, Inherently Logical, True.
Note: I am not calling you a thief. I am saying that if I accepted your logic, then I should have to agree you fit your own definition.
By your definition, either you have robbed me, an honest man who has not taken any of your precious IP, but has paid for the protection of your rights, only to see some of his his own rights taken away, just as the 'pirates' have robbed you, or you have not robbed me, but only because the government's changing the law has given you a get out of jail free card.
Which is it, is a thief a thief regardless of these excuses you offer, or are you not a thief simply because the government has given you a legal excuse? By your own arguements, if these people you denounce are pirates, you are at least a privateer. The laws you defend steal for you. Sophist arguements won't change that, and a Letter of Marque won't turn a privateer into an upright seacaptain.
This is why the constitution doesn't support your take on IP. To do so is to define these works as property even though they are intangibles, but also to define other intangibles such as the public domain as non-property, and in the end to define something as real as money as non-property as well when it conflicts with IP. To make 'IP' paramount above all other intangibles will be to destroy all rights in the end.
This is a situation where one side has already paid in. That side has honored the right of creators to make money for a limited time. That side has paid to protect that right. The other side was supposed to pay back by release to the public domain after the time expired. Now ask yourself, in cases where it's physical property, who usually breaks their promise? The guy who pays in advance or the guy who is going to pay back later? In every other case besides IP, who frequently lies? Who frequently cheats? Where do the crooks cluster, lenders or borrowers? Now why do we have any reason to believe IP is significantly different?
Oh, but it's so easy to copy now there are a lot of cheats on the customer's side too? They don't pay in, whether the IP holder is crooked or scrupulously honest. Precisely, and those cheats are enough excuse for some of the IP holders to stiff the rest of us in turn. In fact, if there aren't a lot of pirates, then the more dishonest a copyright holder is, the more it's in his interest to exaggerate their numbers.
Oh? Let's see. Every producer of 'IP' is also a customer for other's 'IP' - No one ever learned to write without reading, or to play music without listening. It doesn't get much more equal than that. Oh, and since we are talking about a law that now favors the long lived or those who write their works early, why aren't you raising the issue of equality there?
Here's something to ask yourself. If the artists release nothing to the general public, what does that do to your "natural right"? Are you going to torture them, so you can exercise your "natural right"? Didn't work for slavery.
Yes, I'm a fool, and I never thought to ask that question. The founding fathers were fools too, and never asked that question before they framed the original law. All those writings from Madison and Jefferson that show they were well aware of this question can be ignored. It's not like the constitution's authors considered this novel point you raise, and still saw a need to balance it with other points you leave unconsidered, and so set copyright to a limited time, and only as necessary to give creators an incentive to create.
The answer is simply, there can be no natural right to copy a work that does not yet exist. So what? That doesn't prove what you seem to think it does. I have no right to life either, until I am alive, but once I have become alive, do I still have no right? Certain uses of my right to copy may conflict with other's interests, or it may even be in my own self interest not to use that right in some cases (i.e. it's actually in my own self interest that any author I enjoy gets paid at least enough to want to write more). But there are other uses of my right to copy, or other rights I claim, being taken away by these new laws.
As just two examples, It's not in an author's interest to stop me from space shifting or time shifting viewing a work I've purchased. My using my right to copy there doesn't impact the author's right to get paid for his work. My right to swing my arm may be limited where your nose begins, but that's far different from saying I have no right to swing my arm at all. As the second example, it may (sometimes) be in the author's interest to stop me from reselling a book I've bought, but that doesn't mean he has the right to put a no-resale clause inside the cover, anymore than Ford has a right to ban all other people from founding a car manufactureing business.
After that, you respond to several points with extreme non-sequiteurs. Where, for example, did I say artists were now the government? I said that the government rewrote the copyright laws and the creators of copyrighted works supposedly benefit from that. Are you claiming the government didn't repeatedly rewrite the copyright laws? Are you claiming that the government didn't say this was on behalf of those creators?
Slashdot Mirror
"- people who believe not that a theocracy is desirable, but that the separation of Church and State has been overemphasized to the nation's detriment. "
Precisely. Take the 10 commandments cases in the southern US of late. The current decision bars putting up a monument with the 10 commandments, but allows a statue of a Greek goddess in their place. Estimates for that belief show there are probably only about 5,000 Olympian oriented pagans in the U.S., and the rest of us treat Athena or blind Justice symbolicly, but to a few of us, those are religious symbols, and the constitution doesn't say "no law respecting an establishment of religion, unless they are really tiny".
I'm personally a Christian, and I'd much rather see the Two Commandments from the sermon on the mount than the 10. People who call themselves Christians and get all their quotes from the Old Testament worry me. I'd still rather see them have the right to put up monuments, and let everyone else put up monuments too. Laws controlling spending public funds on religious sculpture, sure, but banning voluntary funding if it's to be erected in a government place? This issue has made me tempted to vote Republican before, and I'm sure it's driven some solidly into the Republican camp.
I'm at 850 feet above sea level altitiude right now, with a beautiful view of where an arm of the great Meditamerican sea will extend when sea level rises 200 feet. Once the national BATF offices are under 150 feet of water, many of my neigbors will probably again take up their traditional industries, chiefly involving ethanol distillation. I think I'll look at shipping across the Meditamerican, as it ought to be the calmest sea left with all those storms in the broadened Atlantic. Shipping sure beats fishing for actual work. As much of the coasts go 'Glub", I'll probably have to switch to wireless internet or something, but the hillbilly Nuke plant is high enough to stay dry. Heck, we can even shut down the coal fired plants and go to a completly Hudro-Nuclear economy once we aren't shipping half our power generation to the old north east seaboard. Our local estimates on despeciation (done on our hillbilly VAX's and PDP-11s) are that we will lose about 5% of our wild species (mostly some northern adapted evergreens that will die out in this area), while some of you might want to gene-geneer paddle tailed rats just so you have something to hunt through the decaying,waterlogged, lightless ruins of your former civilization.
Local machines in my area (from Shouptronic) use memory enchased in a largish cartridge. I could hold five of them stacked in both hands with some difficulty, but would have a hard time palming one and substituting another without it being seen. Maybe a stage magician level of skill and large hands would still allow swapping one out, but that method makes it very hard to find enough trained cheaters to fix a whole election.
There's also a ribbon printer included, although it only prints total votes/candidate or issue and some checksums. The ribbon is signed at opening of polls by at least 4 workers who review that it shows all zeros at the start, and signed again on the other end when it is removed to verify it's the same one. It's filed so the cartridge totals can be checked later if there's a challenge.
All voters fill out a 'request for ballot', signed by them and numbered sequentially. As they pass through the lines, that ends up back on a stack. Total number of requests should match total number of votes at that precinct (with adjustments for voided requests - such as relatively rare cases when a voter finds out they are registered to vote at some other precinct and goes there). Total votes should match total in the machines, plus any paper ballots cast. We've hit that right on the money 4 elections in a row at my precinct.
We've recently added procedures to keep those cartridges and printer ribbons in sight of at least 2 workers from the time they come out of the machines until they get sealed in a bank-bag. This isn't totally foolproof either, but again makes cheating harder.
All records for actual votes for up to about 2,000 voters per precinct will fit in one bank-bag.
So to answer your questions - 1. encasing those memory cards in something a little bulkier and implementing a two man rule gives you at least some safeguards besides just the code, and 2. It's either not hard to add a little printer, or else those guys at Shouptronics must be genius hardware hackers cause they did it (12 years ago).
Quake 1 - Pick an area where you can be sure to gib lots of low level monsters and can move around without any jumping. Set the gravity waaaaay up, like 500000. (Console: R_GRAVITY 500000)
Ogres now drop their grenades at their own feet. (Unfortunately, the explosion flashes from the grenades tunnel underground and so the Ogres don't take much damage). Fiends progress in little tiny hops that make them take all day to cross the room. All gibbed monsters become a pile of meat with the head spinnning in the middle like it was on a turntable. They all spin at different speeds too. Rockets fly straight still, but their smoke trails depart upwards at tremendous speeds.
You want violent slapstick?
Set the gravity down to a very low value like 10, or even all the way to 0. Watch the spinning heads fly. (This last works best in a big open courtyard full of gibbed monsters.). Negative Gravity can be very strange and unsophisticatedly humourous too.
You can also tinker with the coefficient of friction and other variables. It's Alice in Wonderland physics (with a big tendency to get the POV whimsically dead).
Your link makes a pretty good case against the law as a whole, but this particular exemption is probably driven completely by money and not reliability issues.
As a cost cutting measure, many National Guard units are still equipped with the Vietnam Era M16-A1 as their primary weapon, and often the biggest upgrade in years is purchaseing a cheap "stamped-metal-tab" modification kit to lock out full auto setting so the gun is only capable of semi-auto fire rather than 'Rambo' mode. If your NJ units are combat support or combat service support, they probably fall in this category.
If NJ has an actual combat line unit with a low number rating for deployment, citizens should probably be more concerned about sending their own fellow New Jerseyans into combat trained only on such old weapons systems than whether it's with or without biometric locks.
I would also think state law has to exempt federal law enforcement and active duty armed forces or face a constitutional challenge.
You're talking about events that scale to where they kill nearly every human within 200 miles of the eruption by parboiling them in a cloud of superheated steam. The amount of ash dumped in such a case would create a year without a summer, and such erruptions probably kill 20% to half the living creatures on the planet every time one happens.
So what's your point? Everyone disagreeing with you on the amount hunams contribute to the greenhouse effect right now is a fool that isn't more concerned about the 0.0005% chance of another Thera scale erruption instead? Nature could hit us with something that would dwarf all our efforts, so we should just lie down and wait for the ash to bury us all?
I have some bad news for you that you evidently haven't heard. You're going to die someday. Better quit striving now and avoid the rush. Let's not stop at your big picture - the really big one is the Sun is going to blow up in a few billion years. The even bigger one is the fine structure constant isn't constant, and the universe will eventually fly apart as even individual elementary partuicles push each other away at ever increasing speeds.
For microsoft, compatability is inconvenient. In a lot of areas where they haven't competed, compatability means giving up that area - for example .NET will never grow on that sort of level playing field you describe. Apache won't lose market share under such conditions. While to Microsoft, giving up hopes of expanding forever probably feels like suicide, it really isn't.
In areas like the OS and office tools markets, Microsoft can hold onto a sizeable share even in the face of open source alternatives. Their products are well known, and work well enough. Anything taking market share from them has to look clearly superior, and not just as good or a little bit better.
This is whay the browser wars are heating back up. Tabbed browsing is a 'little bit better' feature - useful, but not enough reason for most people to bother. Good pop-up blocking is a clearly superior feature, hence Mozilla and Firefox are grabbing share.
Open source or otherwise independent news browsers have clearly superior features over Outlook and OE, but mostly only for people who use Usenet alt.binaries groups. The rest of the world rates those features as 'little bit better', and so doesn't change.
Here's a tip for OS developers. Stability is now a 'little bit better' area, for small businesses and home users (and really for just about everyone who doesn't need 4 sigmas up time). A crash every few months isn't worth switching over. Security is increasingly seen as a clearly superior advantage for the UNIXoids (even Apple). If Microsoft doesn't get security under control, they will lose big in a few quarters, but they could coast for a decade or more on stability. TCO can easily be a clearly superior area as well.
There are lots of 'little bit better's' that can be incorporated into Gnome or KDE, but not one of them will make it clearly superior to Xp's GUI.
1. I am a former commissioned officer who has held a couple of posts in military intelligence, and have read existing classified papers on this subject and had imput into some of the newer ones, circa 1992-7. I have said and am saying here as much on this subject as it is legally and morally permissable for me to say without improperly accessing or quoting classified information. I did not make anything whatsoever up in doing so. You are simply 100% wrong on this point.
2. Doctrine is to assume a decapitation strike when it becomes apparent multiple links in the chain of command are being targeted, and stick to that assumption until it is strongly proven otherwise, because the alternative is to risk so much additional damage, almost any alternative procedure is foolish. The Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon and the Vice President and Secretary of Def. were all then in Washington. (Sec State Powell was in Peru, and communications difficulties made it impossible to determine his status for at least an hour after the first attacks). These constitute all the multiple links needed. Even when it became apparent there were some other facts that suggested this wasn't a decapitation strategy attack, it took some substantial time to build a strong case it wasn't, and particularly to confirm those facts. The system kept working as planned until strong enough disproof was obtainable.
3. The decision to move the president includes not moving him in such a way that he gets farther from command and control. Doctrine is to move him closer to communications links, so he has more time to make decisions about his options if a launch warning comes, never to move him even temporarily farther away from them until a specific risk assessment is made. Secret service would likely not move him instantaniously, but only after that risk assessment. You seem to be thinking of a risk assesment to the President himself from your last post, but we are in fact talking about a risk assesment to the entire nation. Even the President's own life becomes secondary in such cases.
4. The president orders the Secret service and Military on the strategic or operations levels. He is usually briefed almost immediately on entering the office on how foolish it would be for him to order them on a tactical level, and guarding and moving him are definitely tactics. This one listened, which was the right thing to do.
He took charge quickly enough that he spoke to the public from the White House by 8:30 that evening, having determined some time in the first 10 hours after the attack that it was a terrorist action. We don't know for sure how much of that 10 hours was spent on other things than preparing for a speech, but it is worth noting that the Budget amendment to pay 20 Billion for New York City's recovery, and the first airport reopenings, were both done early on the 13th, and much of the 12th and 13th were taken up by the NSA, NSC and Congressional 'council of war' proceedings, so it is at least likely the President did some work on these points the 11th.
5. Expecting the enemy to use nukes as a necessary part of the decapitation strategy isn't U.S. doctrine. In fact it is considered unlikely, as they make it obvious that a nuclear war is upon us, and Admirals in command of carrier groups gain individual release authority at that time (or they did circa 1994 - I was Army, so I don't keep up with the Navy much), guarenteeing we are likely to at least be able to respond with cruise missle based and sub based nukes. The initial use of non-nuclear methods is therefore considered likely, particularly by a foe that wishes to blunt the seaward leg of the 'nuclear response tripod'.
The president is routinely briefed and presented with training exercises on such possible decapitation scenarios as a string of individual assassinations, or even a string of what appear at first to be car crashes, medical events, and similar personnel losses. President Bush, like several of his predecessors, often skipped these training scen
I'm not a big fan of GWB, and I really wish I didn't have to stick up for him on this, but...
He hopped on Air Force One and ran like a scared rabbit for days. Rudy Guilianni deserves some credit for showing balls on 9/11. George W. didn't actually show any backbone during the actual emergency. He didn't start talking big until well after.
Bush was first told that multiple planes were known to be attacking, and got his first warning about what was going on after the Pentagon itself was hit. At that point, it was suspected that the 4th plane was targeting the capitol as well.
The US military in such cases assumes the goal is to to take out the command and control of the US as part of a Nuclear War based decapitation strategy. They have to make that assumption, as not doing so has a strong chance of getting 130 Million or so Americans killed. That's what the President was told - that an enemy was acting in a way that apparently fit the start of a nuclear war, by trying to kill enough links in the chain of people who could authorize a launch response to stop a retaliatory strike.
From that time, the President went where the military moved him, until it was clear that this was not an actual decapitation strike. He sat in that school, probably until everything from sattelite redirect to battalion or larger level ground forces were moved into the appropriate positions to keep the nuclear launch authority links up for him as needed. He then went to locations where he could quickly direct a retaliatory launch while gaining near maximum time to check any indicators of an enemy launch. Doing anything else would have been playing politics with the lives of hundreds of millions of people world wide. Rudy may have acted ballsier, but then he didn't have to worry that the wrong choice could mean loseing WW3.
If Al-Quida had successfully hit the Capital dome or White house with plane 4, or worse yet had a few more resources to put into targeting the President where he was at the time as well, we would have come closer to the brink than in the Cuban missle crisis. As it was, we came closer than most of the public appreciates.
So you vote two weeks before the election, and one week later the press reveals your choice has been
o diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
o Caught in bed with a live boy AND a dead girl.
o quoted saying they are in favor of repealing the
14th amendment, so the country can sell random
citizens to pay off the national debt.
There's trade offs either way.
Mexico was rated 95th this year. The reason given is violence against journalists in several specific states, which are mostly the same northern border states where most of the US businesses have relocated under NAFTA and where Mexican businesses that export to us under NAFTA have the substantial majority of their factories.
How can we judge whether Mexico is in compliance with NAFTA requirements on such factors as pollution control or reciprocal use of US made systems? Do these places actually commit violence up to and including murder against the Mexican investigative press, but cooperate fully with gringo inspectors?
The original points of this were:
it's easier to trace small leaks with neon or florescent dyes in use. Use opaque hose, and bring an actual black light near it, and you have one of the world's best cheap tests for system integrity.
Stock antifreeze is florescent green anyway, and it prevents some kinds of corrosion, so why not use it.
Now the case modders are going for the whole hobby effect, with transparent case windows to show off the glowing water inside, and built in UV sources to heat up that case they are trying to cool down (and even cold cathode lights produce some heat), so they are worrying more about apperance than substance. It's the geek equivalent of oversized exaust extensions on a rice burner. But originally, this was about being reliable and effective.
... is the real alternative sucks.
Citys aren't doing this to squeeze out private companys that want to offer service to everyone.
Cities aren't even competing with companies that want to offer service to everyone making above 30,000 $ a year, or to neigherborhoods where everyone owns their home.
Cities are looking at getting into providing access because the companies in their areas are generally targeting the top 5% of the market only. They are tired of dealing with companies that want to wire broadband only to people making 200,000 $ a year plus, and living in sufficiently large groups of interested users.
My city dropped plans to create a utilities model wireless service when the local Bell brought in a multi-tiered ADSL system that swiftly ended up competeing with local cable internet. Before that, we'd seen such problems as a small high speed provider that wanted to connect up just a few new streets, only to see the economic downturn hit, the local developers put off building houses on those streets, and their investmwent go down the toilet.
While I'm qute happy that we have some competitive interest in this area and didn't end up setting up a new local utility, we waited about 4 years for the situation to resolve itself. 4 years of businesses that weren't interested in profit margens of less than 15%, and didn't recognize when they were taking bigger risks by cherry-picking than they would have by trying to provide service to the majority.
Possibly Rutherford had it passed through rollers instead of beaten. When you get to the limit where spacing the rollers any closer causes them to flatten out due to machining irregularities, you can stack multiple sheets and then peel them apart after rolling. (This trick is still done commercially in making aluminum foil. It's easier to roll two sheets at once in the final stage, than to make rolling machines that can go smaller without flattening.) Since Rutherford was working with a soft metal that requires little pressure to flatten, and didn't need industrial quantities, automated manufacturing processes, and the like, this process was available to him, and had been for about 40 years, as goldsmiths used it for preparing book inlays.
Beg to differ -
... if you can hold a PHB's attention that long) ." would be less opinionated.
Windows Design
Windows has only recently evolved from a single-user design to a multi-user model
Just how recently depends on whether we're talking home users on the 9x path or business on the NT path. If the latter, recently is stretching it a bit, as we're talking about a very sizable fraction of the time Linux has existed, depending on just when you want to add words such as "in a useable form".
Windows is Monolithic by Design, not Modular
Windows Depends Too Heavily on the RPC model
'too heavily' is certainly an opinion. Yes there are some facts that support it, but the idea is to present those first, not state it as a conclusion. A statement such as "Windows relies on the RPC model, which causes security vulnerabilities such as A, (and maybe B, C, D
Windows focuses on its familiar graphical desktop interface
Linux Design
Linux is based on a long history of well fleshed-out multi-user design
'well fleshed out' is an emotional arguement. That Linux is a multiuser OS is unambiguously clear to the clueful, from its derivation fron UNIX. That the implementation is robust and includes all, or at least most necessary elements is something frequently debated even here on Slashdot.
Linux is Modular by Design, not Monolithic
Linux is Not Constrained by an RPC Model
Linux servers are ideal for headless non-local administration
As you yourself point out, this shows some opinion - no surprise there, superlatives such as 'ideal' very often signal opinions.
That works out to 4 out of 8 points. Actually, for journalism, 50% is pretty good, but not great.
All these posts and no one mentioned Bambi vs Godzilla?m l
http://www.lowcomdom.com/film/b/bambi_godzilla.ht
The European 'moral' copyright issue there is what I found interesting. I mean, you can quote Paul's letter to the Romans where he compares entering into lawsuits to fornication, prostitution and homosexuality to see what one of the known author's moral positions was. As my limited understanding of the European law goes, it's not about agreeing with the originator's moral position, but protecting it anyway, and it applies even after normal finacial rights expire.
This looks to be a catch 22 in my opinion (read my signature). It's sort of like defending your copyright on a book you claim was written by a 10,000 year old Atlantean you were merely channeling, and sold as non-fiction. If you're telling the truth, you can't claim a violation because the author died too long ago, while if you're lieing, you can persue the copyright violation but have just admitted fraud if anyone wants to persue the counterclaim. For another example along rather different moral grounds, what happens if you sue in France over a postumous translation of Abby Hoffman's "Steal this Book", or for that matter "Das Kapital"?
In their own ways, such cases remind me of the GPL. There's a certain sense that the normal purpose of some rules is twisted around until it butts heads with its context, and the outcome is counter-intuitive. Unfortunately, my intuition tells me for these example cases the outcome will probably be determined wherever the money goes in.
The mercenary clauses are indeed relevant, particularly in Iraq, and I could only wish that the President and Donald Rumsfeld had focused on such cases. It is also possible for a recognized combatant to have comitted crimes, and be subject to normal prosecution. The convention only says that recognized acts of war cannot be counted as those crimes.
This is all way off topic re. Russian bootlegging, and will probably draw some negative mod points. (Hopefully directed at the first to broach the topic as well as me, but I'll stand by what I said).
I've been wondering how iTunes and such handle the odd sized track. I notice for example, that all of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells 1 is just two tracks on the CD, but Tubular Bells 2 is divided into 12 tracks, and #3 has about 17 if I recall correctly. Does iTunes carry tracks like Yes's Tales from Topographic Oceans (I LP side each, 90+ minutes of music in 4 tracks). What about classical works, where a 33 minute movement is often originally recorded as a single track? Do things like iTunes create pressure for artists to chop their works up into more small pieces. I saw a CD of Copland's Appalachian spring recently that had it chopped into 8 tracks. Is this somehow because of iTunes?
I'm not sure what he's trying to say, especially with the double negative, but I'll try for a related take.
1. When I go to the gas pump, several of my area gas stations have stickers on the pump that show what portion of each gallon's price is state and federal taxes. I can also get a breakdown from the government of where those taxes go, with a ltitle more work. I can also get financial info on the company selling my retailer the gas, since they are publicly traded. The only thing I can't check up on too easily is the financial situation of the local retailer, and that's partly a matter of justified privacy. Overall, I can get a pretty good picture of who's making how much.
2. If I buy a CD or DVD, I have little or no idea how much goes to the artists, songwriters, and so on. I know that some industry spokesman said 100,000$ a year is not much to live on, so I have some idea how much he makes, but that's about it.
Looking deeper, I find that judging the amounts involved is very different than for the oil companies reports. Those 'distributer' guys in the middle seem to be a much bigger and less well defined share of the music industry's costs and profits than the truck drivers working for the oil industry. Often, I can't tell when an artist is making no real money because they actually signed a really bad deal, when they give all their money back because it goes to contract perks like bowls of green M&M's backstage, and when they make no money from CD sales, but get quite a bit from touring, and use the CD proceeeds to subsidize the tours.
3.The music industry takes huge risks that I would expect investors to get upset about (Like tieing a whole years P&L to whether Michael Jackson can sell like he did 10 years before, while knowing that it's been 10 years, and he has a few little rumors following him about.). I can look at what happens to Exxon's stock when they run the Valdez into a rock, and it makes sense. Even their corporate spinmeisters can't mislead me too much.
For the music industry, I literally can't tell, even with careful study, how much of a bad year is from the general economic downturn, how much from bad decisions, and how much from piracy.
Now maybe the poster is just taking the old 'information want's to be free' line. But maybe, he's referring to the need for some types of information (like some financial info) to be freely available so that the rest of them (like the works themselves) can retain value.
The music industry seems to be desseminating enough misinformation that people find it hard to judge the situation. If bootlegging goes up, is it because a huge number of people are generally that crooked AND that shortsighted, or is it because they are being denied information that would let them better judge those long term consequences? I honestly don't know for sure.
Or since the work is internally attributed to his father, should they have waited until 70 years after Nietzsche's famous pronouncment?
Seriously, has any group producing a contemporary translation of the Bible claimed a copyright violation against anyone else? What would be the legal status for a work that is supposed to be freely copyable by its original authors?
In the more general case, would some of the European laws on moral copyright figure in to such cases? What's the law going to do where the original author(s) are long dead, and a translator produces a new version, and then sues copiers even though this appears counter the intent of the original author(s)?
Non-uniformed soldiers are not subject to the convention and are not required to be treated in accordance with it.
http://www.genevaconventions.org/
"The 1977 Protocols extend the definition of combatant to include any fighters who carry arms openly during preparation for an attack and during the attack itself, (Protocol I, Art. 44, Sec. 3)
Article 44
1. Any combatant, as defined in Article 43, who falls into the power of an adverse Party shall be a prisoner of war.
2. While all combatants are obliged to comply with the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, violations of these rules shall not deprive a combatant of his right to be a combatant or, if he falls into the power of an adverse Party, of his right to be a prisoner of war , except as provided in paragraphs 3 and 4.
3. In order to promote the protection of the civilian population from the effects of hostilities, combatants are obliged to distinguish themselves from the civilian population while they are engaged in an attack or in a military operation preparatory to an attack. Recognizing, however, that there are situations in armed conflicts where, owing to the nature of the hostilities an armed combatant cannot so distinguish himself, he shall retain his status as a combatant, provided that, in such situations, he carries his arms openly:
(a) during each military engagement, and (b) during such time as he is visible to the adversary while he is engaged in a military deployment preceding the launching of an attack in which he is to participate.
Acts which comply with the requirements of this paragraph shall not be considered as perfidious within the meaning of Article 37, paragraph 1 (c).
4. A combatant who falls into the power of an adverse Party while failing to meet the requirements set forth in the second sentence of paragraph 3 shall forfeit his right to be a prisoner of war, but he shall, nevertheless, be given protections equivalent in all respects to those accorded to prisoners of war by the Third Convention and by this Protocol. This protection includes protections equivalent to those accorded to prisoners of war by the Third Convention in the case where such a person is tried and punished for any offences he has committed."
To: Joe College
Your current auto insurance rate has been adjusted to reflect your driving related habits. Your next six months premium is now 1,649$.
Reasons:
1. You are now dating a blonde. Our studies have shown that teenage males who date blondes have a higher tendency than average to attempt to impress them while driving.
2. You have changed majors. Our studies show that people who are uncommitted in their freshman year have a tendency to fail to use turn signals.
3. You were recently heard publicly muttering about how big corporations collect too much data on people. Our studies show that this sort of paranoid verbalization may correlate to an increased risk of road rage.
That "could be an indicator" is an awfully broad area. I'm sure you are not thinking of trivial correlations such as hair color, but if insurors do enough data mining, they will find occasional odd, non-causal correlations like girlfriend's hair color to number of speeding tickets. Many if not all of those will be random effects, often unlikely to persist for more than a few years at most. In a sufficiently large pool of data, some totally non-causal correlations have to occur.
Insurors don't have to give you a discount if there is a positive effect from some of these, and won't unless it looks good for attracting business. They don't have to give you a rate reduction for having voted during early voting, just to balance that rate increase for preferring seedless grapes over cantelope.
Now for your more serious example. Please assume I completely agree with you that alchohol or cannabis can impair a person's driving skill, and that people who use them before driving (regularly or irregularly) pose an increased risk to themselves and others. It doesn't follow that the best response from the data gatherer's view is to observe a particular limit such as 24 hours.
An insuror could, for example, find out who is a member of Alchoholics Anonomous. Since some recovering alchoholics fall off the wagon, they would be a higher than average risk group. Finding this out could be very cheap compared to finding out who is an alchoholic non-member without prior DUIs. That second group is a much higher risk group to insure, but it's also much more expensive to find out who is in that group.
So an insuror might choose to selectively target one group with moderately higher risk factors rather than another group with larger ones, just because identifying who is a member of one group is sufficiently easier or cheaper - that is it gives the company more bang for its buck. The law tends to oppose such actions, because the courts don't want to have to arbitrate cases where such capriciousness enters in. It has been know to allow some examples, such as car color, because the statistical correlation is very strong and the data is necessary for the insurance company and the state to gather anyway.
My property = taxes paid to give copyright holders legal protection under 1970's law. Paid under a law that protected all copyright holders for an equal time. Paid with the assurance from the government that it would protect, not just your right to be paid for your work, but my interm rights to fair use and the enjoyment of an eventual public domain.
If you really published anything in the 1970's, you got an 'insurance policy' protecting that property, a 'policy' from me and about 150 million other people like me who were taxpayers that far back. The government then broke a few promises to us, supposedly on your behalf. Even if you really sincerely believe that our collective promise to our own posterity doesn't represent a value every bit as tangible as that oh so solid IP, are you really willing to claim that my tax money is less a property than your IP? Sounds like you believe that my money is yours to take without compensation, ergo, you are one of the thieves here, with the government's assistance. Simple, Obvious, Inherently Logical, True.
Note: I am not calling you a thief. I am saying that if I accepted your logic, then I should have to agree you fit your own definition.
By your definition, either you have robbed me, an honest man who has not taken any of your precious IP, but has paid for the protection of your rights, only to see some of his his own rights taken away, just as the 'pirates' have robbed you, or you have not robbed me, but only because the government's changing the law has given you a get out of jail free card.
Which is it, is a thief a thief regardless of these excuses you offer, or are you not a thief simply because the government has given you a legal excuse? By your own arguements, if these people you denounce are pirates, you are at least a privateer. The laws you defend steal for you. Sophist arguements won't change that, and a Letter of Marque won't turn a privateer into an upright seacaptain.
This is why the constitution doesn't support your take on IP. To do so is to define these works as property even though they are intangibles, but also to define other intangibles such as the public domain as non-property, and in the end to define something as real as money as non-property as well when it conflicts with IP. To make 'IP' paramount above all other intangibles will be to destroy all rights in the end.
This is a situation where one side has already paid in. That side has honored the right of creators to make money for a limited time. That side has paid to protect that right. The other side was supposed to pay back by release to the public domain after the time expired. Now ask yourself, in cases where it's physical property, who usually breaks their promise? The guy who pays in advance or the guy who is going to pay back later? In every other case besides IP, who frequently lies? Who frequently cheats? Where do the crooks cluster, lenders or borrowers? Now why do we have any reason to believe IP is significantly different?
Oh, but it's so easy to copy now there are a lot of cheats on the customer's side too? They don't pay in, whether the IP holder is crooked or scrupulously honest. Precisely, and those cheats are enough excuse for some of the IP holders to stiff the rest of us in turn. In fact, if there aren't a lot of pirates, then the more dishonest a copyright holder is, the more it's in his interest to exaggerate their numbers.
Trade implies "among equals".
Oh? Let's see. Every producer of 'IP' is also a customer for other's 'IP' - No one ever learned to write without reading, or to play music without listening. It doesn't get much more equal than that.
Oh, and since we are talking about a law that now favors the long lived or those who write their works early, why aren't you raising the issue of equality there?
Here's something to ask yourself. If the artists release nothing to the general public, what does that do to your "natural right"? Are you going to torture them, so you can exercise your "natural right"? Didn't work for slavery.
Yes, I'm a fool, and I never thought to ask that question. The founding fathers were fools too, and never asked that question before they framed the original law. All those writings from Madison and Jefferson that show they were well aware of this question can be ignored. It's not like the constitution's authors considered this novel point you raise, and still saw a need to balance it with other points you leave unconsidered, and so set copyright to a limited time, and only as necessary to give creators an incentive to create.
The answer is simply, there can be no natural right to copy a work that does not yet exist. So what? That doesn't prove what you seem to think it does. I have no right to life either, until I am alive, but once I have become alive, do I still have no right? Certain uses of my right to copy may conflict with other's interests, or it may even be in my own self interest not to use that right in some cases (i.e. it's actually in my own self interest that any author I enjoy gets paid at least enough to want to write more). But there are other uses of my right to copy, or other rights I claim, being taken away by these new laws.
As just two examples, It's not in an author's interest to stop me from space shifting or time shifting viewing a work I've purchased. My using my right to copy there doesn't impact the author's right to get paid for his work. My right to swing my arm may be limited where your nose begins, but that's far different from saying I have no right to swing my arm at all. As the second example, it may (sometimes) be in the author's interest to stop me from reselling a book I've bought, but that doesn't mean he has the right to put a no-resale clause inside the cover, anymore than Ford has a right to ban all other people from founding a car manufactureing business.
After that, you respond to several points with extreme non-sequiteurs. Where, for example, did I say artists were now the government? I said that the government rewrote the copyright laws and the creators of copyrighted works supposedly benefit from that. Are you claiming the government didn't repeatedly rewrite the copyright laws? Are you claiming that the government didn't say this was on behalf of those creators?