There are several other companies making voting machines. Some of those alternates appear to be better (not necessarily safe enough for this job, but substantially closer). My own state uses machines that produce a partial paper trail (a copy of the aggregate results, per machine, not per individual voter). It's not the per individual paper trail some have discussed here, but it serves for newspaper reporters, party observers, and the general public to see, and helps block SOME forms of possible election fraud. My own state also still supports paper ballots, and it would take amending the state constitution to take away that alternative.
Right now, the evidence is that one company's voting machines are definitely below any remotely acceptable standard, and that company has indicated a motive for making them flawed deliberately.
It's not evidence that proves all forms of electronic voting should be rejected, or that paper ballots are axiomatically better. It sure doesn't prove that other forms of felonious electioneering, such as getting voters falsely dropped from the rolls, will stop too if we just go back to paper. It IS increasingly solid evidence of a crime. The public will better serve itself if it focuses on what the facts definitely prove about Diebold than what they may tenetively suggest about the overall principles of electronic information security.
I keep seeing this "they can be sued" phrase pop up, and it's time to put a stake through its heart. 1. A company can be sued by a shareholder for just about anything they do. All it takes is profits being below a prediction (or some half-assed guesstimate), and someone will point to a particular corporate action as being the alledged cause. Most (90% or so in an average year) such suits are unsuccessful. Google can still be sued for working with the PRC's laws, if profits fall (even in some other division, as that could be called a PR backlash!), or for not investing agressively enough in China, if profits fall, or for not dropping this silly internet stuff and becoming a buggy-whip manufacturer, if profits fall.
2. Google is not a majority held public company. Lawsuits would be coming from minority stock holders. Minority stock holders have a steep hurdle to prove in any suit - that is they have to prove that they don't have the ulterior motive of trying to make their minority of votes (or their non-voting influence) steer the board of directors on an extra-legal issue.
3. US law simply doesn't say what you are misquoting it as saying. The law actually requires any corporation to abide by some pretty strict standards of ethics that often go against maximizing shareholder value, as in these examples:
First, http://www.business-ethics.com/current.htm/ alwys has some examples of companies that have done the right thing, (in the opinion of the editors). You can look at what they did, and decide for yourself if they were under pressure of lawsuits or not.
Then there's the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which is intended to have a positive impact on accountability, and is sometimes misconstrued to support your position. Most significantly (for this discussion), the Act imposes new responsibilities on CEOs and CFOs who could face criminal sanctions for false certification of financial reports. This was done by congress, because so FEW shareholder lawsuits against corporations were successful, and it was deemed necessary to give suing stockholders some "teeth" in a few cases of outright fraud, sufficient in itself to lead to criminal charges.
Will go to a prety good overview of Sarbanes-Oxley, and why it DOESNT leave companies wide open to any lawsuit some shareholder attempts.
You could also read up on The U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It prohibits giving anything of value, directly or indirectly, to foreign government officials or foreign political candidates in order to obtain or retain business. It is strictly prohibited to make illegal payments to government officials of any country. Given the PRCs poor worldwide reputation on this, Google management could easily win just about any shareholder lawsuit, simply by saying bribery became a major issue.
(I give up. If I'm gonna keep biting on these legal related posts, I might as well change my sig to IANAL).
The big arguement against Pot being a gateway drug is that there's lower correlation than for several other drugs, not that there are no gateway drugs. The way I read your post, it sounds like you are saying there is no such thing as a particular non-criminal behavior that is likely to lead to a person crossing the line, not just that this particular example isn't such a case.
The real reason the gateway drug arguement has lost favor is that there are much higher correlations between early use of tabacco (sampled before ages 16, 14 and 12), and an even higher correlation between early use of alcohol (ditto), and specific opiate abuse (Morphine and Heroin) by ages 18-21. Nearly as strong correlations have been found for Cocaine (with crack and regular Cocaine looking about equal).
Most pharmacologists and related experts still accept that correlation does say something meaningful about causation in this case.
The government is reluctant to admit that, if you go by correlation, their arguement against Pot makes a much better arguement for prohibition, or else it's not much of an arguement, period. Correlation studies also suggest the laws regarding posession of crack and regular Cocaine should be pretty similar if we are trying to deter, another position the government seems uncomfortable with.
But the Dillenger gang sometimes took a break from robbing banks to knock over a police station or two. There wasn't much money there, but it was fun freaking out the cops. In WW2, the US organized crime syndicates turned down repeated financial incentives from the Overseas espionage division of Hitler's SS, with the arguement that they were patriotic American citizens, not saboteurs and Nazi stooges.
No. Technically, unless they bought full and not upgrade copies, THEY may not be able to say they have complied with the EULA. That doesn't affect MY legal status one bit. How on Earth could the law support the idea that you could give something to someone else legally at a particular time, and then make that ownership subsequently illegal for that other person by your actions and not theirs? (Choosing subsequent to the gift to buy a seperate upgrade instead of, for example, the version of XP normally shipped with a new PC).
Microsoft's EULA cannot give them a right to void a contract between themselves and me for the subsequent actions of a third party, any more than any contract can.
I'd like to know just how bad 98 is supposed to be by the way some people describe it.
At home, I've still got one box running a basically unmodified 98, and one running 98 with about a jillion changes (a non-explorer shell, complete removal of IE, and using the defrag program from an Xp disk, just for starters, plus it's the one that tests lots of freeware).
Both often get turned off every 3 days to a week, but we're talking about home applications, and I've had both up for a month a few times. Hell, that's more than I run the home Linux machine continueously. Bluescreens? Maybe every couple of months one system or the other gets one.
I've got three fully legal, not even OEM but general sale, copies of 98 (Don't blame me too much, I only bought it once, but two relatives gave me their old disks when they upgraded to Xp).
Let's say I put that third copy on a homebuilt X86 based box, that was designed to hold a few thousand MP3's, and play them out into a home stereo. I hook it up to the LAN to fill it up, and it has no modem, only modest graphics resolution, and little non-microsoft software (a music player like a late build of Winamp 2 on board). The only cards in it would be Network, Video, and Sound, and some of those might be onboard. Figure 1 HD and 1 CD player, both as masters on their own IDE cables.
I'd expect such a system to be able to stay up a minimum of a month between blue screens and lock ups. If it's in the bedroom, the machine is going to be turned off every night because of fan noise, and even in the living room, it will probably get turned off most nights. That means I'm rating windows 98 to be, say, 2,000 to 3,000% of mission capable, for that particular mission.
I'm actually building this, mostly focusing on a custom case that looks good with the home theater components and not just on the tech end this time. People keep swearing that Windows 98 can't even handle this sort of job reliably, that I should expect BSOD's daily, or at least weekly. Are any of your experiences really that bad? Is what I'm experiencing just exceptional luck?
I am not a lawyer, but it is my understanding that all of these were at least partially successful from the viewpoint of the software licensee. I found a few dozen more, but for reasons such as non-disclosure agreements, the firms involved didn't specifically comment afterwards on how successful they were. I didn't check the Wall Street journal's archives, these are fvai Chatlaw and Forbes. Oh, and you'll note these are all well before the turn of the century, because I limited the search to avoid getting peripheral hits on Y2K bug suits and all the IBM vs SCO and Microsoft vs Everybody lawsuits. There are probably some more after the year 1994.
Acme Pump Company, Inc. v. National Cash Register Corp., 337 A.2d 672, 675 (Ct. Com. Pl. Conn. 1974). Chatlos Systems v. National Cash Register Corp., 635 F.2d 1081 (3d Cir. 1980); D.P. Technology Corp. v. Sherwood Tool, Inc., 751 F.Supp. 1038 (D.Conn. 1990); Triangle Underwriters, Inc. v. Honeywell, Inc., 41 Cal.App.4th 1270, 49 Cal.Rptr. 127 (1996); DeSimone v. Sullivan, 25 U.C.C. Rep.Serv.2d 351 (Mass. 1994); Design Data Corp. v. Maryland Casualty Co., 243 Neb. 945, 503 N.W.2d 552 (1993); Delorise Brown, M.D., Inc. v. Allio, 86 Ohio App. 3d 359, 620 N.E.2d 1020 (1993);
Ah, but what I was answering was a string of observations, including yours, about how businesses "should" be acting. People are complaining that various corporations aren't "logical", that is they aren't acting like the average consumer. My point was that they are not bound by the same limits as that consumer, and that to call them illogical for not acting like they are is itself the illogical thing.
Now, If you'ld been addressing why certain small companies didn't want to change over to OSS, you might have had a point. Unfortunately, you didn't specify anything like that.
Have you ever come across a term that starts "Some states do not allow...", in a EULA? Most medium and larger companies know their rights. They know what their vendors are actually liable for despite trying to dodge the bullet. Medium and larger companies also have their own contracts to go by instead of EULAs. A good portion of smaller companies and most individual consumers don't. Yes, from a business POV, commercial software vendors are 'on the hook'.
At that temperature, CO2 will deposit if it's over a non-reactive substrate. In this context, CO2 in the air perfuses into the H2O ice already present, insinuating itself gradually along with other atmospheric gasses (even though those are still vaporous at that point), and never forms a distinct layer. You can measure an index of trapped CO2 in the regular ice, but that's not as exciting somehow.
The weather in the eastern half of the US has tended to wetter than usual for at least 4 years in a row. Locally, we just had our fourth August where rain was never more than 3 days apart, when we used to always see a two week dry stretch somewhere in August, and only call it a drouth if the whole month was dry. The southwestern USA has the exact opposite problem, again showing a solid tendency to hang in there(Noticed all those forest fires each summer and fall in CA, Ariz, Nv. N. Mex., and so on? There really are more of them lately.).
All that may be an early sign of global warming trends, which would imply it's going to keep changing. and likely in the same direction. My house isn't really built for a rain forest, and it's already costing me and other people to adjust to what increasingly looks to be a solid trend. I'm very glad to be 800 feet above the local flood plain, and to have at least a few grocery stores up here with me. I'm glad I'm not a farmer, trying to figure out what to plant next year.
Some global warming models predict more and bigger hurricanes, and the arguements there look both backed up by some specific facts and pretty logical even to an average joe lay-meteorologist like me. How would everyone in Florida vote this November if they thought those models were definitely true? Just at a guess, Global Warming would suddenly become the biggest issue they would be considering in casting their votes, and for many of them, the only one.
Some other models suggest a big southward shift in the Atlantic current is coming. If those are true, the world gets warmer on average, but at least the eastern part of those Canadian territories gets colder, against the general trend. So does Europe, and the Russians probably don't want them all moving east 3,000 miles to get to the warmer parts of Siberia, because that's where the Russians are moving, and the Overheated Chinese.
In this worst case scenario, the European population can go southeast instead, right after the newly depopulated middle east stops glowing. As these last two situations show, Global Warming is frequently considered to have strong potential to destabilize the international situation, (that's UN'ese for "someone uses nukes."). Hope this explains why some of us are at least a trifle concerned.
It's not a nitpick, it's a perfectly valid point. I didn't mention that a lot of orchestras don't live down to the level that the law theoretically allows, but tend to treat citizens better. To be fair, I probably should, so thanks for the opportunity.
Another example of this is the BBC, which i have just learned evidently allows parts of the USA that fall under its geosyncronous sattelite over the british virgin islands broadcast range to decode the TV signal for non-commercial use even though those people don't pay a BBC liscence - As I understand it, it's something about the US donating the rocket that put that bird up as part of an international development effort, so it only seems fair.
I'm not so much worried that the orchestras, PRI, and so on will all go to a cut-throat don't trust the patrons (soon to be called consumers) model, as that the actual practice of law involved is something to live down to instead of up to.
You can sue for lots of things, but sometimes you have a nitrocellulose cat riding a TNT laden, Phosporous skateboard across a minefield in Hell's chance of collecting.
The corporate defenses here are numerous:
Management decided that cleaning up the corporate image would attract new clientel from desirable target groups and was attempting to improve the bottom line.
Management was concerned with the possibility of John Ashcroft seeking to close the company down or fine it into the negative profit zone, and took steps recommended by regulatory agencies to avoid this threat to profits.
Management wants to weed out areas that are responsible for a higher than average number of complaints and administrative problems, and plans to make money for the stockholders by reducing the complaint department's staff accordingly - you sued before they could put step two into action, so you have just cost your fellow stockholders money, not them, as they will gladly testify in the countersuit the majority stockholders are bring against you.
You waited to become a stockholder until after this policy was anounced. Ergo, you approved of it, and so have no grounds to sue.
You bought a trivial amount of stock, and are actually trying to direct corporate policy with it rather than maximize your profits. You are duplicitous and so should not be allowed to profit from your actions, and so lose your standing to sue.
"those performances are owned by the people who performed them."
Yes, but why? Most, at least, of the major classical orchestras in the USA are heavily subsidized by federal grants and other forms of funding for the arts. (And I'm only saying "most" because its possible a few privately formed ones like the NBC symphony may be exceptions for at least some of their performing years - EVERY orchestra that has a place name in its title is on the grant system.
Why didn't our tax dollars buy us any rights? WE paid for wider dessemination of great classical works, only to turn over the recorded forms of those works to holding companies which are expected to make a profit for the orchestras, and our only reward is to be told, "That lets the orchestra be more self sustaining, so the government doesn't have to tax you so much", and "No we don't have to justify how the money gets spent, we don't have to keep separate accounts for the practice sessions for a live performance and for a recording session, and we don't have to let the government negotiate our recording contracts to maximize taxpayer return."
I don't see that as a rip off of Kurosawa so much as an imitation of the entire genre. After all, isn't the character Scott Glenn played in "The Challenge" doing the same thing as Han about half way through the film, with Toshiro Mifune himself playing the guy who has always stuck to a code of honor (so far as we know).
Getting the machines before the power infrastructure is in place is dumb, and NOT just for the obvious reason (having invested a lot of money into something that will take success with a second investment to become useful is always risky). It's dumb because having electricity in those isolated areas is useful for so many other things besides computers, it should have happened already.
There's tons of medical equipment that requires at least a little power, there's basic emergency communications, and there's all the simpler school supplies that require electricity. If none of these things justified getting some power to these people, computers in the classroom doesn't either.
We're not just talking relatively high powered systems (such as x-ray machines) that are the equivalent of entire desktop computer labs either. What about small centrifuges or cautery equipment for medicine? What about having enough radio for local government to report being hit by a bad storm or earthquake? What about a few lights to read by, so that school can be held indoors when it rains?
There are no compact, low energy computer systems that are any more efficient than those devices, and there are even surpluses of many of those devices in storage where they have been replaced by newer gear. Just imagine all the old filmstrip projectors or drafting tables in various urban school systems closets being put to use out in the country instead of gathering dust.
A restraining order creates some presumptions in the system. It says you at least tried to work within the law, so when you shoot the bastage anyway, it is more likely to be recognized as self defense.
Part of this is a pragmatic attitude on the part of fandom, that has developed into a tradition, particulary with the film Hugos.
For many given years, particularly pre Starwars era, Hollywood didn't release any SF movies, not just any GOOD Sf, but any, period. So it quickly became a case of either giving the award to a fantasy film or nobody, or of picking between a good fantasy film and a lousy SF film. The earlier era was mostly "It's Fantasy or Nothing this year", while the post Starwars era was the "Do I choose Good Fantasy or Bad SF" era, and unfortunately often remains so to this day.
This is also a case of 50's era SF writers tending to also do fantasy, so they weren't opposed to broadening the awards (Heinlein's Glory Road and Magic, Inc., Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, Azimov's Azaziel stories, and Blish's Black Easter all come to mind as possibly Hugo worthy in their time.).
Of the authors you cite, only Lem and Dick didn't openly call any of their own works fantasy in the sources I've seen so far, and a lot of people would argue for at least P K Dick being a fantasiast at times (Is valis SF?).
Unfortunately, the US is rated 38th in business efficiency among the 188 nations recognized by the UN. Several countries with features like 35 hour work weeks, twice our number of government recognized holidays, Manditory minima of 2 weeks vacation/year, and so on are doing about as well as us
(England, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark)
or actually better
(Australia, Holland, Germany, Sweden, and some smaller nations such as Iceland).
We rank 7th in average prices, while France, for all the problems you point out is at least 15th, partially though not completly offsetting that high unemployment. France has a much higher average income tax rate (They're 5th, with an average of 50.5%, while the US is 26th, with an average of 30.5%), and I'd argue that that extra 20% is quite enough to give them their unemployment rate.
Are the French, over all, doing worse than us? Probably yes. Are we doing the best? Probably not. Where did I get these numbers?
(On the economic menu, several of these are in the section under... more economic stats, instead of the main menu. Nationmaster gets its numbers from multiple sources, including the UN councel on economic development, but also the CIA's world factbook.
On the subject of political mangling, the worst was "Starship Troopers", where Verhoeven was so fixated on Heinlein's militarism that he turned the characters into fascists, missing not only the entire point of the book but also the libertarian philosophy that runs through most of Heinlein's work.
To be fair, Heinlein often said in discussions that a main point of his proposed government system in Starship Troopers was that people had to genuinely serve the citizenry in a capacity the society chose before they could aspire to rule it, and practice being on the reciving end of government control before they could excercise such control. However, a lot of that isn't actually spelled out in the original novel.
Starship Troopers only describes that service as specifically military service, implying that the government has to be maintaining a military large enough to create the entire pool of voters and a smaller pool of non-military government officials and employees, even when there is no obvious threat.
Since he discussed his more complex real ideas in letters and interviews within a few weeks of the novel coming out, Heinlein obviously meant to describe a more broad based system, but it's easy to miss that if all you have read is the book itself and see a society that has not been at war for several generations yet maintains a rather large military that must be in tight control of the rest of the government just to keep military spending that high.
I was more disappointed that bugs threw rocks instead of using nukes like the book. Doogie Howser - Space Nazi was kinda funny.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several other companies making voting machines. Some of those alternates appear to be better (not necessarily safe enough for this job, but substantially closer). My own state uses machines that produce a partial paper trail (a copy of the aggregate results, per machine, not per individual voter). It's not the per individual paper trail some have discussed here, but it serves for newspaper reporters, party observers, and the general public to see, and helps block SOME forms of possible election fraud. My own state also still supports paper ballots, and it would take amending the state constitution to take away that alternative.
Right now, the evidence is that one company's voting machines are definitely below any remotely acceptable standard, and that company has indicated a motive for making them flawed deliberately.
It's not evidence that proves all forms of electronic voting should be rejected, or that paper ballots are axiomatically better. It sure doesn't prove that other forms of felonious electioneering, such as getting voters falsely dropped from the rolls, will stop too if we just go back to paper. It IS increasingly solid evidence of a crime. The public will better serve itself if it focuses on what the facts definitely prove about Diebold than what they may tenetively suggest about the overall principles of electronic information security.
Kent State? That was rifles, not machine guns. (Not that it makes any difference to the 4 students who died).
I keep seeing this "they can be sued" phrase pop up, and it's time to put a stake through its heart.
a tions/articles/tatelbaum_sarbanes.asp/
1. A company can be sued by a shareholder for just about anything they do. All it takes is profits being below a prediction (or some half-assed guesstimate), and someone will point to a particular corporate action as being the alledged cause. Most (90% or so in an average year) such suits are unsuccessful. Google can still be sued for working with the PRC's laws, if profits fall (even in some other division, as that could be called a PR backlash!), or for not investing agressively enough in China, if profits fall, or for not dropping this silly internet stuff and becoming a buggy-whip manufacturer, if profits fall.
2. Google is not a majority held public company. Lawsuits would be coming from minority stock holders. Minority stock holders have a steep hurdle to prove in any suit - that is they have to prove that they don't have the ulterior motive of trying to make their minority of votes (or their non-voting influence) steer the board of directors on an extra-legal issue.
3. US law simply doesn't say what you are misquoting it as saying. The law actually requires any corporation to abide by some pretty strict standards of ethics that often go against maximizing shareholder value, as in these examples:
First,
http://www.business-ethics.com/current.htm/
alwys has some examples of companies that have done the right thing, (in the opinion of the editors). You can look at what they did, and decide for yourself if they were under pressure of lawsuits or not.
Then there's the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which is intended to have a positive impact on accountability, and is sometimes misconstrued to support your position. Most significantly (for this discussion), the Act imposes new responsibilities on CEOs and CFOs who could face criminal sanctions for false certification of financial reports. This was done by congress, because so FEW shareholder lawsuits against corporations were successful, and it was deemed necessary to give suing stockholders some "teeth" in a few cases of outright fraud, sufficient in itself to lead to criminal charges.
http://www.genusresources.com/site/content/public
Will go to a prety good overview of Sarbanes-Oxley, and why it DOESNT leave companies wide open to any lawsuit some shareholder attempts.
You could also read up on The U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It prohibits giving anything of value, directly or indirectly, to foreign government officials or foreign political candidates in order to obtain or retain business. It is strictly prohibited to make illegal payments to government officials of any country. Given the PRCs poor worldwide reputation on this, Google management could easily win just about any shareholder lawsuit, simply by saying bribery became a major issue.
(I give up. If I'm gonna keep biting on these legal related posts, I might as well change my sig to IANAL).
The big arguement against Pot being a gateway drug is that there's lower correlation than for several other drugs, not that there are no gateway drugs. The way I read your post, it sounds like you are saying there is no such thing as a particular non-criminal behavior that is likely to lead to a person crossing the line, not just that this particular example isn't such a case.
The real reason the gateway drug arguement has lost favor is that there are much higher correlations between early use of tabacco (sampled before ages 16, 14 and 12), and an even higher correlation between early use of alcohol (ditto), and specific opiate abuse (Morphine and Heroin) by ages 18-21. Nearly as strong correlations have been found for Cocaine (with crack and regular Cocaine looking about equal).
Most pharmacologists and related experts still accept that correlation does say something meaningful about causation in this case.
The government is reluctant to admit that, if you go by correlation, their arguement against Pot makes a much better arguement for prohibition, or else it's not much of an arguement, period. Correlation studies also suggest the laws regarding posession of crack and regular Cocaine should be pretty similar if we are trying to deter, another position the government seems uncomfortable with.
But the Dillenger gang sometimes took a break from robbing banks to knock over a police station or two. There wasn't much money there, but it was fun freaking out the cops. In WW2, the US organized crime syndicates turned down repeated financial incentives from the Overseas espionage division of Hitler's SS, with the arguement that they were patriotic American citizens, not saboteurs and Nazi stooges.
No. Technically, unless they bought full and not upgrade copies, THEY may not be able to say they have complied with the EULA. That doesn't affect MY legal status one bit. How on Earth could the law support the idea that you could give something to someone else legally at a particular time, and then make that ownership subsequently illegal for that other person by your actions and not theirs? (Choosing subsequent to the gift to buy a seperate upgrade instead of, for example, the version of XP normally shipped with a new PC).
Microsoft's EULA cannot give them a right to void a contract between themselves and me for the subsequent actions of a third party, any more than any contract can.
I'd like to know just how bad 98 is supposed to be by the way some people describe it.
At home, I've still got one box running a basically unmodified 98, and one running 98 with about a jillion changes (a non-explorer shell, complete removal of IE, and using the defrag program from an Xp disk, just for starters, plus it's the one that tests lots of freeware).
Both often get turned off every 3 days to a week, but we're talking about home applications, and I've had both up for a month a few times. Hell, that's more than I run the home Linux machine continueously. Bluescreens? Maybe every couple of months one system or the other gets one.
I've got three fully legal, not even OEM but general sale, copies of 98 (Don't blame me too much, I only bought it once, but two relatives gave me their old disks when they upgraded to Xp).
Let's say I put that third copy on a homebuilt X86 based box, that was designed to hold a few thousand MP3's, and play them out into a home stereo. I hook it up to the LAN to fill it up, and it has no modem, only modest graphics resolution, and little non-microsoft software (a music player like a late build of Winamp 2 on board). The only cards in it would be Network, Video, and Sound, and some of those might be onboard. Figure 1 HD and 1 CD player, both as masters on their own IDE cables.
I'd expect such a system to be able to stay up a minimum of a month between blue screens and lock ups. If it's in the bedroom, the machine is going to be turned off every night because of fan noise, and even in the living room, it will probably get turned off most nights. That means I'm rating windows 98 to be, say, 2,000 to 3,000% of mission capable, for that particular mission.
I'm actually building this, mostly focusing on a custom case that looks good with the home theater components and not just on the tech end this time. People keep swearing that Windows 98 can't even handle this sort of job reliably, that I should expect BSOD's daily, or at least weekly. Are any of your experiences really that bad? Is what I'm experiencing just exceptional luck?
I am not a lawyer, but it is my understanding that all of these were at least partially successful from the viewpoint of the software licensee. I found a few dozen more, but for reasons such as non-disclosure agreements, the firms involved didn't specifically comment afterwards on how successful they were. I didn't check the Wall Street journal's archives, these are fvai Chatlaw and Forbes. Oh, and you'll note these are all well before the turn of the century, because I limited the search to avoid getting peripheral hits on Y2K bug suits and all the IBM vs SCO and Microsoft vs Everybody lawsuits. There are probably some more after the year 1994.
Acme Pump Company, Inc. v. National Cash Register Corp., 337 A.2d 672, 675 (Ct. Com. Pl. Conn. 1974).
Chatlos Systems v. National Cash Register Corp., 635 F.2d 1081 (3d Cir. 1980);
D.P. Technology Corp. v. Sherwood Tool, Inc., 751 F.Supp. 1038 (D.Conn. 1990);
Triangle Underwriters, Inc. v. Honeywell, Inc., 41 Cal.App.4th 1270, 49 Cal.Rptr. 127 (1996);
DeSimone v. Sullivan, 25 U.C.C. Rep.Serv.2d 351 (Mass. 1994);
Design Data Corp. v. Maryland Casualty Co., 243 Neb. 945, 503 N.W.2d 552 (1993);
Delorise Brown, M.D., Inc. v. Allio, 86 Ohio App. 3d 359, 620 N.E.2d 1020 (1993);
"You've answered yourself."
Ah, but what I was answering was a string of observations, including yours, about how businesses "should" be acting. People are complaining that various corporations aren't "logical", that is they aren't acting like the average consumer. My point was that they are not bound by the same limits as that consumer, and that to call them illogical for not acting like they are is itself the illogical thing.
Now, If you'ld been addressing why certain small companies didn't want to change over to OSS, you might have had a point. Unfortunately, you didn't specify anything like that.
Have you ever come across a term that starts "Some states do not allow...", in a EULA? Most medium and larger companies know their rights. They know what their vendors are actually liable for despite trying to dodge the bullet. Medium and larger companies also have their own contracts to go by instead of EULAs. A good portion of smaller companies and most individual consumers don't. Yes, from a business POV, commercial software vendors are 'on the hook'.
At that temperature, CO2 will deposit if it's over a non-reactive substrate. In this context, CO2 in the air perfuses into the H2O ice already present, insinuating itself gradually along with other atmospheric gasses (even though those are still vaporous at that point), and never forms a distinct layer. You can measure an index of trapped CO2 in the regular ice, but that's not as exciting somehow.
The pesky neighbors keep forming mobs with pitchforks and torches while I'm still tightening the neckbolts... Oh, you said kitchen... Nevermind!
In the year 2525, SCO's lawsuit was hardly alive, it finaly got squashed, squashed by Big Blue, and Red Hat and Autozone too...
Zager & Evans
The weather in the eastern half of the US has tended to wetter than usual for at least 4 years in a row. Locally, we just had our fourth August where rain was never more than 3 days apart, when we used to always see a two week dry stretch somewhere in August, and only call it a drouth if the whole month was dry. The southwestern USA has the exact opposite problem, again showing a solid tendency to hang in there(Noticed all those forest fires each summer and fall in CA, Ariz, Nv. N. Mex., and so on? There really are more of them lately.).
All that may be an early sign of global warming trends, which would imply it's going to keep changing. and likely in the same direction. My house isn't really built for a rain forest, and it's already costing me and other people to adjust to what increasingly looks to be a solid trend. I'm very glad to be 800 feet above the local flood plain, and to have at least a few grocery stores up here with me. I'm glad I'm not a farmer, trying to figure out what to plant next year.
Some global warming models predict more and bigger hurricanes, and the arguements there look both backed up by some specific facts and pretty logical even to an average joe lay-meteorologist like me. How would everyone in Florida vote this November if they thought those models were definitely true? Just at a guess, Global Warming would suddenly become the biggest issue they would be considering in casting their votes, and for many of them, the only one.
Some other models suggest a big southward shift in the Atlantic current is coming. If those are true, the world gets warmer on average, but at least the eastern part of those Canadian territories gets colder, against the general trend. So does Europe, and the Russians probably don't want them all moving east 3,000 miles to get to the warmer parts of Siberia, because that's where the Russians are moving, and the Overheated Chinese.
In this worst case scenario, the European population can go southeast instead, right after the newly depopulated middle east stops glowing. As these last two situations show, Global Warming is frequently considered to have strong potential to destabilize the international situation, (that's UN'ese for "someone uses nukes."). Hope this explains why some of us are at least a trifle concerned.
It's not a nitpick, it's a perfectly valid point. I didn't mention that a lot of orchestras don't live down to the level that the law theoretically allows, but tend to treat citizens better. To be fair, I probably should, so thanks for the opportunity.
Another example of this is the BBC, which i have just learned evidently allows parts of the USA that fall under its geosyncronous sattelite over the british virgin islands broadcast range to decode the TV signal for non-commercial use even though those people don't pay a BBC liscence - As I understand it, it's something about the US donating the rocket that put that bird up as part of an international development effort, so it only seems fair.
I'm not so much worried that the orchestras, PRI, and so on will all go to a cut-throat don't trust the patrons (soon to be called consumers) model, as that the actual practice of law involved is something to live down to instead of up to.
IANFL (I ain't no frackin' lawyer).
You can sue for lots of things, but sometimes you have a nitrocellulose cat riding a TNT laden, Phosporous skateboard across a minefield in Hell's chance of collecting.
The corporate defenses here are numerous:
Management decided that cleaning up the corporate image would attract new clientel from desirable target groups and was attempting to improve the bottom line.
Management was concerned with the possibility of John Ashcroft seeking to close the company down or fine it into the negative profit zone, and took steps recommended by regulatory agencies to avoid this threat to profits.
Management wants to weed out areas that are responsible for a higher than average number of complaints and administrative problems, and plans to make money for the stockholders by reducing the complaint department's staff accordingly - you sued before they could put step two into action, so you have just cost your fellow stockholders money, not them, as they will gladly testify in the countersuit the majority stockholders are bring against you.
You waited to become a stockholder until after this policy was anounced. Ergo, you approved of it, and so have no grounds to sue.
You bought a trivial amount of stock, and are actually trying to direct corporate policy with it rather than maximize your profits. You are duplicitous and so should not be allowed to profit from your actions, and so lose your standing to sue.
"those performances are owned by the people who performed them."
Yes, but why? Most, at least, of the major classical orchestras in the USA are heavily subsidized by federal grants and other forms of funding for the arts. (And I'm only saying "most" because its possible a few privately formed ones like the NBC symphony may be exceptions for at least some of their performing years - EVERY orchestra that has a place name in its title is on the grant system.
Why didn't our tax dollars buy us any rights? WE paid for wider dessemination of great classical works, only to turn over the recorded forms of those works to holding companies which are expected to make a profit for the orchestras, and our only reward is to be told, "That lets the orchestra be more self sustaining, so the government doesn't have to tax you so much", and "No we don't have to justify how the money gets spent, we don't have to keep separate accounts for the practice sessions for a live performance and for a recording session, and we don't have to let the government negotiate our recording contracts to maximize taxpayer return."
I don't see that as a rip off of Kurosawa so much as an imitation of the entire genre. After all, isn't the character Scott Glenn played in "The Challenge" doing the same thing as Han about half way through the film, with Toshiro Mifune himself playing the guy who has always stuck to a code of honor (so far as we know).
Getting the machines before the power infrastructure is in place is dumb, and NOT just for the obvious reason (having invested a lot of money into something that will take success with a second investment to become useful is always risky). It's dumb because having electricity in those isolated areas is useful for so many other things besides computers, it should have happened already.
There's tons of medical equipment that requires at least a little power, there's basic emergency communications, and there's all the simpler school supplies that require electricity. If none of these things justified getting some power to these people, computers in the classroom doesn't either.
We're not just talking relatively high powered systems (such as x-ray machines) that are the equivalent of entire desktop computer labs either. What about small centrifuges or cautery equipment for medicine? What about having enough radio for local government to report being hit by a bad storm or earthquake? What about a few lights to read by, so that school can be held indoors when it rains?
There are no compact, low energy computer systems that are any more efficient than those devices, and there are even surpluses of many of those devices in storage where they have been replaced by newer gear. Just imagine all the old filmstrip projectors or drafting tables in various urban school systems closets being put to use out in the country instead of gathering dust.
A restraining order creates some presumptions in the system. It says you at least tried to work within the law, so when you shoot the bastage anyway, it is more likely to be recognized as self defense.
Part of this is a pragmatic attitude on the part of fandom, that has developed into a tradition, particulary with the film Hugos.
For many given years, particularly pre Starwars era, Hollywood didn't release any SF movies, not just any GOOD Sf, but any, period. So it quickly became a case of either giving the award to a fantasy film or nobody, or of picking between a good fantasy film and a lousy SF film. The earlier era was mostly "It's Fantasy or Nothing this year", while the post Starwars era was the "Do I choose Good Fantasy or Bad SF" era, and unfortunately often remains so to this day.
This is also a case of 50's era SF writers tending to also do fantasy, so they weren't opposed to broadening the awards (Heinlein's Glory Road and Magic, Inc., Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, Azimov's Azaziel stories, and Blish's Black Easter all come to mind as possibly Hugo worthy in their time.).
Of the authors you cite, only Lem and Dick didn't openly call any of their own works fantasy in the sources I've seen so far, and a lot of people would argue for at least P K Dick being a fantasiast at times (Is valis SF?).
Unfortunately, the US is rated 38th in business efficiency among the 188 nations recognized by the UN. Several countries with features like 35 hour work weeks, twice our number of government recognized holidays, Manditory minima of 2 weeks vacation/year, and so on are doing about as well as us
... more economic stats, instead of the main menu. Nationmaster gets its numbers from multiple sources, including the UN councel on economic development, but also the CIA's world factbook.
(England, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark)
or actually better
(Australia, Holland, Germany, Sweden, and some smaller nations such as Iceland).
We rank 7th in average prices, while France, for all the problems you point out is at least 15th, partially though not completly offsetting that high unemployment. France has a much higher average income tax rate (They're 5th, with an average of 50.5%, while the US is 26th, with an average of 30.5%), and I'd argue that that extra 20% is quite enough to give them their unemployment rate.
Are the French, over all, doing worse than us? Probably yes. Are we doing the best? Probably not.
Where did I get these numbers?
http://www.nationmaster.com/
(On the economic menu, several of these are in the section under
Ooops! Please break off that italic after the quoted part, and turn off bold face earlier, like right after the word chose. Sorry!
On the subject of political mangling, the worst was "Starship Troopers", where Verhoeven was so fixated on Heinlein's militarism that he turned the characters into fascists, missing not only the entire point of the book but also the libertarian philosophy that runs through most of Heinlein's work. To be fair, Heinlein often said in discussions that a main point of his proposed government system in Starship Troopers was that people had to genuinely serve the citizenry in a capacity the society chose before they could aspire to rule it, and practice being on the reciving end of government control before they could excercise such control. However, a lot of that isn't actually spelled out in the original novel. Starship Troopers only describes that service as specifically military service, implying that the government has to be maintaining a military large enough to create the entire pool of voters and a smaller pool of non-military government officials and employees, even when there is no obvious threat. Since he discussed his more complex real ideas in letters and interviews within a few weeks of the novel coming out, Heinlein obviously meant to describe a more broad based system, but it's easy to miss that if all you have read is the book itself and see a society that has not been at war for several generations yet maintains a rather large military that must be in tight control of the rest of the government just to keep military spending that high. I was more disappointed that bugs threw rocks instead of using nukes like the book. Doogie Howser - Space Nazi was kinda funny.
Over here in the USA, we don't bury cows, we use a funeral pyre system. (And there is no one correct way to spell Bar-be-que).