With any luck, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - Commander of the 101st Airborne - Captain X, and Sergeant Y, who will get to actually deliver the message via 2.33 NATO round.
I could actually take a good guess at this. Director of the CIA - Head of Field Operations, CIA Afghanistan - Local Warlord - Infiltrator for the Taliban working both sides of the fence - Taliban herearchy person X - Osama. That leaves one more that could be plugged in if needed and still get your six degrees.
Any two people probably are six degrees or less apart. People who live in what we optomistically call western civilisation are down to about 4 degrees currently. Anyone famous or infamous (with a few exceptions who are hiding in caves) is within about 3 of anyone reading slashdot.
Joe Convict wants to talk to GWB directly. He's an uneducated and only semi-literate career petty criminal. BUT, he can talk to the prison chaplain, who can talk to the warden, who can talk to the governor of his state, who can talk to GWB. Now convincing the warden to pass something Joe Convict wants to say onto the governor is not usually likely to happen, but the link is there. Joe Convict likely has at least one other link that long, but maybe this one passes through lawyer doing pro bono work and local Republican party Chairman.
Think about it. If even Joe Convict is within 4 degrees, maybe on multiple paths, isn't the average for free individuals likely to be at 3.22 or even 2.74?
The judge in the IBM vrs SCO case has already been assigned, and has a reasonably good history in this area. He's dealt with software firms, IP issues and tech before, and shown a good degree of familiarity with all the legal aspects so far made public. It's not like the legal system goes through all these discovery processes and motions and only then does either side (or the public) learn who will actually be judging the case.
Now if you are concerned not just about the first case, but the possibility that others as yet unfiled may go before other courts, you may want to stay concerned, but on the situation as is, you might as well relax.
If you want to stay worried, you might assume this case will be well managed, and SCO will lose, but they will somehow be able to stay in business long enough to appeal, and the three Appellate judges won't be as clueful. Above that there's the Supremes, for a real worry.
My local police dept. just implemented a multi-monitor dispatch system, where each dispatcher has several screens with information such as which ambulance servieces are already on call, what police and fire units are where, and such. It's projected to save time and reduce the error rate associated with having to tab through multiple screens and aggregate the information needed.
The amount of information involved is surprisingly high. For example, there's often a need to find, not the closest patrol unit, but the closest units of several kinds that have persons currently trained in Hazmat or paramedic assist functions.
This upgrade was first considered when MS OS products started supporting multiple monitors (I think that was Windows 98, but it might have been a little earlier, in the NT version of about that time). The 98 version was definitely considered way to unstable for this sort of mission critical use. Microsoft's quotes for system support integrated with existing dispatch software weren't encouraging either. At least part of the delay in fielding this system came from looking to closed source solutions only, and an initial feasability study influenced by MS sales dept. FUD.
These hypothetical arguements about delays in getting out an Amber alert or a terror warning may be speculative, but here's a real world example, not a hypothetical. Whether anyone died or suffered major injury solely as a result of the delay, or whether time to completion was also affected by budget and other concerns, these might be speculative points, but it's pretty hard to believe the open source/closed source factor didn't have some impact.
The general population often cares quite a bit about the right of SOMEONE to see the source code, if they have any idea what the situation entails. That someone is usually a person who can interpret code. From companies with IT departments to concerned voters using electronic machines, many people endorse the idea in one form or another, i.e. by independent auditing.
The general population often differs about just how open code should be, i.e. should auditing be controlled by the government, should a company be able to use NDAs to keep auditors from spilling trade secrets, and such issues. Not a lot of them believe in an unlimited access model, but most think some kind of external inspection is needed where it doesn't already exist.
The people who don't care are a subset of the general population. It's like clean water. there are people who don't care about that too, but most of them don't understand water treatment in its broadest aspect. You don't have to look just to people who can discuss sedementation rates and parts per trillion of organic clathrates to get an informed opinion, but you do have to go to people who understand the germ theory of diseases or the broad idea of water polution to find a group that cares.
You don't have to look to programmers to get informed opinions here either, but you may need to ask people who know that voting machines are using proprietary software and that the state's auditing processes are not able to check the code, to find people who care. You might need to ask the right questions, such as "Don't you wish we could change that software so the people in payroll dept. don't see all that extranious personal information?", or "Why do we have to wait 6 weeks for an update from this vendor?", to find out what the person's opinion is.
The real question is why Investors aren't noticing the link between sudden moves towards outsourcing and other cost cutting measures, and this lack of long term profitability. In the same way, why don't more seem to realize that suing everyone over IP isn't a sustainable business model even where it's profitable in the short term.
Eiter we have a lot of foolish investing going on, or the rules controlling investment have become seriously skew with reality, and it really is possible to make more profit by bringing down the GNP than by raising it. (And not just possible but a frequent best option).
Here's a URL to a paper on what's possible using amplitude based detection circa 5 years ago. It mentions both some hardware and some PC related software based methods of detection, but please note that software based solutions at that time were a lot more expensive than they should be now, so the hardware described is only relatively cheap, i.e. compared to PCs priced above what was then affordable in most homes.
As I understand it, some of these systems were well above the 90% accuracy that is now normal for black frame detection even back then (Although I have heard that this 90% figure is actually a bit low for most real commercials, and black frame actually does better than that outside the laboratory).
Some of this may not be available in consumer level devices even now, and is more likely to turn up on machines made for the industry, which is probably why you're not seeing it advertised. For consumer designs and brands, you might try looking in some of the magazines devoted to building high-grade media centers and listening rooms. Still even the 4,000$+ system shows the same problems with the law.
Until you worry about doing it hanging upside down and in the dark, it's not obsessive... Really... Point is, she'd be far less likely to harm some random individual if she had an unsecured rocket launcher at home, than some people's kids are with an old hunting rifle.
As the poster mentioned, about 77% of the copying done is an inside job, by the industry's own claims. While technically, a technician working in the booth may also be covered by this law, that part is seldom enforcable.
The projectionist is in a room where most observers don't have access, and may be duping with the encouragement or even at the behest of the theatre owner. That makes his version of the crime much harder to detect. Since he is more likely to be part of a commercial pirate group, and his copy may be rapidly multiplied and sold for cash, this makes the law effectively analogous to a drunk driving law that catches many of the people with blood alchohol just over the limit, say 0.08, but comparatively few of the most serious offenders, with the equivalency of 0.25 or so.
This is just one reason why laws like this seldom help the situation. A law which had tougher penalties for those duping for resale than for amateurs would probably do better. Specific penalties for people who abuse an insider position to get access for duping might also be feasable and if so would be a great improvement.
Yes, if there was a conspiracy here, it was not a very effective one. RAM prices may have had a few plateaus, but overall, they've declined rapidly. Compared to diamonds, or my favorite - energy utilitys, or even things like bandwidth, why has the federal government focused on the possibility of price fixing here in the first place?
It looks like DoJ tends to only investigate if some company offers to turn state's evidence relating to other charges, and doesn't care whether the industry in question is showing other signs of price fixing, unless an industry insider makes the claim.
I could have sworn those boys had a rifle, not a shotgun. If it helps, Tennessee has an age 18 limit for buying rifles or shotguns, but age 21 for handguns (there's also waiting periods, background checks, and so on). Access in this case was provided by the children's parents, who were allegedly unaware the weapon was missing for close to a week.
My daughter has known how to treat a firearm since age 6 or so, but wasn't actually instructed in shooting until age 16. She's now a sane, responsible woman in her mid 20's. She's thinking of joining the army, and I'm glad she already knows something of gun safety (and how to field strip an M16-A2 in under 60 seconds).
I've got mixed feelings about gun control. Parents like those kids' tend to shift me towards more of it.
Why are games considered speech? Lets see, do these games have fictional characters in them, like novels, plays, or films? Do those characters generally speak, as in either the spoken or written word is employed?
When it conmes to computer games, with a very few exceptions, the answer to these questions is yes.(Even Quake is speech. Minesweeper is not speech).Indeed, your distinction that a game is merely commercial speech is not even right, unless we want to also class any book or play that has an admission charge as commercial speech, or at least class all fiction published for profit as commercial speech. Last I looked, to read a political editorial in Newsweek took buying a copy (for someone at least), but that doesn't make that editorial commercial speech.
Is a comic book speech? If not, what was the comics code authority censoring, when it banned portraying elected officials in a negative light? How can you portray whole professions of real people in a negative light without speech being involved? Could a game do that too? What about the part of the code that required criminals not be shown using methods that might actually work to commit a real crime, could a game do that?
Spam is sometimes commercial speech (Ads for Herbal Viagra are commercial speech, cute stories with wholesome morals, that some aunt just can't resist passing on to ten friends like it says are thought viruses and spam, but not commercial). Speech in general can be restricted with regard to minors. The game in question is rated M, for age 17, and that limit can be enforced by local or state law, or municipalities can even set that bar higher, so long as they don't go above 18.
Law enforcement, in the line of duty, is not restricted by that government policy. There is a specific exemption written right into the code to cover such cases. Even posting a disclaimer on a site that says clicking on the "I Accept" button means you have declared you are not Law enforcement doesn't have any legal validity at all.
It's called reasonable doubt. It may not be reasonable to suppose that the local government would fake pictures just to get a conviction, but it is reasonable these days that the pictures might have been faked by the poster herself, and not be real evidence of a crime.
She could have had taken clothed pictures of herself at the local landmarks, and then mimicked the same poses nude in private and swapped body shots. Depending on the photos, there are also possibilities such as taking a picture outside the local jurisdiction and swapping in a sign or local landmark to make it look like a local location.
In addition, the statute of limitations on this offense is probably no more than a year or two. If she had claimed they were older than that, the local jurisdiction would have the burden of proving otherwise.
Ruling out as many of these doubts as she could have raised would require spending some real money on forensics tests to see if the photos showed evidence of tampering. Evidently, she chose to pay the fines rather than contest it, or this would be ballooning into a major case by now.
Do commercials actually work? There's increasing evidence they don't. For example, there have been some new studies on movie theatre subliminal type methods, and the researchers announced that the old claim that they didn't influence behavior was actually wrong, but that they didn't influence behavior in the desired way, instead.
It seems that a quick subliminal picture of a Coca-cola product, for example, actually influences viewers a great deal. They apparently all get reminded to think about whether they are thirsty. Then they either decide they aren't, or go ahead and respond to their decision that they are. They go get water from the fountain, or buy a Coke, or buy a Lemonade, or decide not to pay movie theatre prices and wait until later.
By this model, subliminals don't increase Coke sales at all, but instead of people trickling up to the counter throughout the movie, more of them cluster in the times just after showing the commercial. They also still pick the brands they prefer, among the available alternatives.
Now what if regular commercials work the same way? You see a Geico ad, you think "I really do need car insurance. I think I'll compare their price with some local agents and make a final decision. Huummm, I wonder if Allstate can do any better? What was that insurance company that used to sponsor Wild Kingdom?", and so on.
IANAL, NDIPOOTV (I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV).
As it stands, it looks like automating the skipping process is what takes away the substantial non-infringing use claim for customers. (Of course, this is likely to change rapidly in the existing legal environment, but that looks to be the case for now).
The court should have recognized that being able to detect commercials automatically in the first place shouldn't have been possible at the accuracy the devices are capable of, unless broadcasters are themselves infringing on both laws and FCC regulations. For example, some of these devices detect differences in the peak or mean amplitude of the audio track. Others detect digital labeling originally used internally by the broadcast studios, and so are not just detecting commercials, but public service broadcasts, tests of the EBS, and station identification.
That last would not be necessary if local stations didn't sometimes broadcast 10 or 12 commercials in a row, broken up by a station identification segment to give a superficial legal defense against violating the FCC rulings.
That being the case, it's like a drug dealer going to court for taking a bad check. Their own violations mean they should not have standing to bring the lawsuits. Unfortunately, their own violations have been largely ignored by the system, which is often reluctant to enforce the law, and powerless to give FCC rules the full weight of law.
This cliche has gotten somewhat garbled in historical dvelopment and is normally written backwards - it makes more sense if you point out the problem with eating your cake and still having it too, in chronologically impossible order. The clche has been mangled in much the same way as when people say "I could care less", meaning they couldn't. The people responsible have been sacked. Please feel free to stop using this broken cliche.
I'm not trying to take the Government should stay out of everything except the military and legal areas side, but one of the areas that's shown big improvement lately is the meat packing industry, which has been pressured largely by the fast food chains into cleaning up a lot of plants. If you want safe meat, buy from a packer that has a contract with McDonalds, or Pepsi (KFC/Taco Bell/PizzaHut).
Couldn't food package labelling be improved by getting the grocery store chains to line up with customer interests in a similar way? And environmental laws - surely there are plenty of industries that are downriver or downwind from other industries?
I don't know how we could take the government out of financial regulation, as some of the economic forces involved can do enormous danage. (The US had no less than three depressions in the late 19th century, triggered in each case by a different couple of guys that tried to corner the market on some metal, such as copper, and jack up prices. In each case, the idiots who started the problem were short sighted in the simplest of senses about the consequences, but still screwed up the economy).
Tax subsidies for OS development fall firmly in the leave the government out category, simply because it's unneeded. Even if the government might do a good job, there's so many alternatives that are already working well.
How in the hell you got that from my post is beyond me. The point I was making is exactly opposite. EVERYBODY in this society pays for science to be done. EVERYBODY chooses leadership at least partly on their record in choosing which scientific enterprises to support. (Granted, there's a few people who vote so one issue only that they probably don't think about a single other factor, but they are far from a majority). You can respect their basic intelligence in making these decisions, even ones you may disagree with, or not. Your own posts strongly suggest you do not.
I've read the report. So why does this repair kit exist if it can't make a good repair? Why are we paying current payload costs to lift it into LEO if it is useless? Why was it included on a mission where EVA suits and EVA trained personnel were not linked to it? Isn't that like taking the jack out of the car to save weight but leaving the spare tire in? And why do we respect a 20-20 hindsight opinion from the same people who didn't promptly detect the problem, dismissed concerns from their own technical advisors, and have a vested interest in saying, "well, even if we had acted more promptly, it wouldn't have helped"? Oh, and wasn't Apollo 13 brought back with essentially toilet paper and bondo?
It was a solid piece per wing in the first few designs, but the final version involves six sections. The materials are overlaid on some carbon fiber and other high strength materials, but the surface is still the same stuff as the belly/wing underside. Also, if it's true as some other poster has related that there were no EVA suits aboard for this particular mission, you could cut your last sentence short, as in "That would mean the tile repair components would be of no use" (.)
If your'e starting a business, maybe working your own ass off will help. If you're working in one, probably not.
By the last set of figures I saw, the US currently ranks #1 in number of hours worked in the industrialized world, but only #3 in per person productivity. (The average US worker produces a contribution to the GNP of about 30 $ US per hour, while Great Britain was 50 cents (again US) or so higher, and the reunified Germany had assimilated the east German economy and was back up to about 33 $ US per worker hour.
These are estimates circa 2002, and no I don't remember just where I read them, probably some scandal sheet like the Wall St. Journal.
The interesting thing was Germany had just made it manditory for most businesses to give DEC 26th off to facilitate people traveling to be with familys over the Christmas holiday. Many business owners had complained that the German economy would suffer from this and other new increases in non-work time (new maternity leave rules, increased minimums for vacation weeks/years employed, and such). Instead, the economy had apparently benefited.
So if you want to be a successful creator of a new company, by all means work your tail off, put in those 16 hour days and six week stretches, but hire people who want to work smarter not harder.
Slashdot Mirror
With any luck, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - Commander of the 101st Airborne - Captain X, and Sergeant Y, who will get to actually deliver the message via 2.33 NATO round.
I could actually take a good guess at this. Director of the CIA - Head of Field Operations, CIA Afghanistan - Local Warlord - Infiltrator for the Taliban working both sides of the fence - Taliban herearchy person X - Osama. That leaves one more that could be plugged in if needed and still get your six degrees.
Any two people probably are six degrees or less apart. People who live in what we optomistically call western civilisation are down to about 4 degrees currently. Anyone famous or infamous (with a few exceptions who are hiding in caves) is within about 3 of anyone reading slashdot.
Joe Convict wants to talk to GWB directly. He's an uneducated and only semi-literate career petty criminal. BUT, he can talk to the prison chaplain, who can talk to the warden, who can talk to the governor of his state, who can talk to GWB. Now convincing the warden to pass something Joe Convict wants to say onto the governor is not usually likely to happen, but the link is there. Joe Convict likely has at least one other link that long, but maybe this one passes through lawyer doing pro bono work and local Republican party Chairman.
Think about it. If even Joe Convict is within 4 degrees, maybe on multiple paths, isn't the average for free individuals likely to be at 3.22 or even 2.74?
The judge in the IBM vrs SCO case has already been assigned, and has a reasonably good history in this area. He's dealt with software firms, IP issues and tech before, and shown a good degree of familiarity with all the legal aspects so far made public. It's not like the legal system goes through all these discovery processes and motions and only then does either side (or the public) learn who will actually be judging the case.
Now if you are concerned not just about the first case, but the possibility that others as yet unfiled may go before other courts, you may want to stay concerned, but on the situation as is, you might as well relax.
If you want to stay worried, you might assume this case will be well managed, and SCO will lose, but they will somehow be able to stay in business long enough to appeal, and the three Appellate judges won't be as clueful. Above that there's the Supremes, for a real worry.
My local police dept. just implemented a multi-monitor dispatch system, where each dispatcher has several screens with information such as which ambulance servieces are already on call, what police and fire units are where, and such. It's projected to save time and reduce the error rate associated with having to tab through multiple screens and aggregate the information needed.
The amount of information involved is surprisingly high. For example, there's often a need to find, not the closest patrol unit, but the closest units of several kinds that have persons currently trained in Hazmat or paramedic assist functions.
This upgrade was first considered when MS OS products started supporting multiple monitors (I think that was Windows 98, but it might have been a little earlier, in the NT version of about that time). The 98 version was definitely considered way to unstable for this sort of mission critical use. Microsoft's quotes for system support integrated with existing dispatch software weren't encouraging either. At least part of the delay in fielding this system came from looking to closed source solutions only, and an initial feasability study influenced by MS sales dept. FUD.
These hypothetical arguements about delays in getting out an Amber alert or a terror warning may be speculative, but here's a real world example, not a hypothetical. Whether anyone died or suffered major injury solely as a result of the delay, or whether time to completion was also affected by budget and other concerns, these might be speculative points, but it's pretty hard to believe the open source/closed source factor didn't have some impact.
The general population often cares quite a bit about the right of SOMEONE to see the source code, if they have any idea what the situation entails. That someone is usually a person who can interpret code. From companies with IT departments to concerned voters using electronic machines, many people endorse the idea in one form or another, i.e. by independent auditing.
The general population often differs about just how open code should be, i.e. should auditing be controlled by the government, should a company be able to use NDAs to keep auditors from spilling trade secrets, and such issues. Not a lot of them believe in an unlimited access model, but most think some kind of external inspection is needed where it doesn't already exist.
The people who don't care are a subset of the general population. It's like clean water. there are people who don't care about that too, but most of them don't understand water treatment in its broadest aspect. You don't have to look just to people who can discuss sedementation rates and parts per trillion of organic clathrates to get an informed opinion, but you do have to go to people who understand the germ theory of diseases or the broad idea of water polution to find a group that cares.
You don't have to look to programmers to get informed opinions here either, but you may need to ask people who know that voting machines are using proprietary software and that the state's auditing processes are not able to check the code, to find people who care. You might need to ask the right questions, such as "Don't you wish we could change that software so the people in payroll dept. don't see all that extranious personal information?", or "Why do we have to wait 6 weeks for an update from this vendor?", to find out what the person's opinion is.
The real question is why Investors aren't noticing the link between sudden moves towards outsourcing and other cost cutting measures, and this lack of long term profitability. In the same way, why don't more seem to realize that suing everyone over IP isn't a sustainable business model even where it's profitable in the short term.
Eiter we have a lot of foolish investing going on, or the rules controlling investment have become seriously skew with reality, and it really is possible to make more profit by bringing down the GNP than by raising it. (And not just possible but a frequent best option).
Here's a URL to a paper on what's possible using amplitude based detection circa 5 years ago. It mentions both some hardware and some PC related software based methods of detection, but please note that software based solutions at that time were a lot more expensive than they should be now, so the hardware described is only relatively cheap, i.e. compared to PCs priced above what was then affordable in most homes.
8 .p df
As I understand it, some of these systems were well above the 90% accuracy that is now normal for black frame detection even back then (Although I have heard that this 90% figure is actually a bit low for most real commercials, and black frame actually does better than that outside the laboratory).
Some of this may not be available in consumer level devices even now, and is more likely to turn up on machines made for the industry, which is probably why you're not seeing it advertised. For consumer designs and brands, you might try looking in some of the magazines devoted to building high-grade media centers and listening rooms. Still even the 4,000$+ system shows the same problems with the law.
http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu/documents/adl9
Until you worry about doing it hanging upside down and in the dark, it's not obsessive... Really ... Point is, she'd be far less likely to harm some random individual if she had an unsecured rocket launcher at home, than some people's kids are with an old hunting rifle.
OK, so she has a bit of a blind spot there...
As the poster mentioned, about 77% of the copying done is an inside job, by the industry's own claims. While technically, a technician working in the booth may also be covered by this law, that part is seldom enforcable.
The projectionist is in a room where most observers don't have access, and may be duping with the encouragement or even at the behest of the theatre owner. That makes his version of the crime much harder to detect. Since he is more likely to be part of a commercial pirate group, and his copy may be rapidly multiplied and sold for cash, this makes the law effectively analogous to a drunk driving law that catches many of the people with blood alchohol just over the limit, say 0.08, but comparatively few of the most serious offenders, with the equivalency of 0.25 or so.
This is just one reason why laws like this seldom help the situation. A law which had tougher penalties for those duping for resale than for amateurs would probably do better. Specific penalties for people who abuse an insider position to get access for duping might also be feasable and if so would be a great improvement.
Yes, if there was a conspiracy here, it was not a very effective one. RAM prices may have had a few plateaus, but overall, they've declined rapidly. Compared to diamonds, or my favorite - energy utilitys, or even things like bandwidth, why has the federal government focused on the possibility of price fixing here in the first place?
It looks like DoJ tends to only investigate if some company offers to turn state's evidence relating to other charges, and doesn't care whether the industry in question is showing other signs of price fixing, unless an industry insider makes the claim.
I could have sworn those boys had a rifle, not a shotgun. If it helps, Tennessee has an age 18 limit for buying rifles or shotguns, but age 21 for handguns (there's also waiting periods, background checks, and so on). Access in this case was provided by the children's parents, who were allegedly unaware the weapon was missing for close to a week.
My daughter has known how to treat a firearm since age 6 or so, but wasn't actually instructed in shooting until age 16. She's now a sane, responsible woman in her mid 20's. She's thinking of joining the army, and I'm glad she already knows something of gun safety (and how to field strip an M16-A2 in under 60 seconds).
I've got mixed feelings about gun control. Parents like those kids' tend to shift me towards more of it.
Why are games considered speech? Lets see, do these games have fictional characters in them, like novels, plays, or films? Do those characters generally speak, as in either the spoken or written word is employed?
When it conmes to computer games, with a very few exceptions, the answer to these questions is yes.(Even Quake is speech. Minesweeper is not speech).Indeed, your distinction that a game is merely commercial speech is not even right, unless we want to also class any book or play that has an admission charge as commercial speech, or at least class all fiction published for profit as commercial speech. Last I looked, to read a political editorial in Newsweek took buying a copy (for someone at least), but that doesn't make that editorial commercial speech.
Is a comic book speech? If not, what was the comics code authority censoring, when it banned portraying elected officials in a negative light? How can you portray whole professions of real people in a negative light without speech being involved? Could a game do that too? What about the part of the code that required criminals not be shown using methods that might actually work to commit a real crime, could a game do that?
Spam is sometimes commercial speech (Ads for Herbal Viagra are commercial speech, cute stories with wholesome morals, that some aunt just can't resist passing on to ten friends like it says are thought viruses and spam, but not commercial). Speech in general can be restricted with regard to minors. The game in question is rated M, for age 17, and that limit can be enforced by local or state law, or municipalities can even set that bar higher, so long as they don't go above 18.
Careful there! I'm sure if you ask Microsoft that question, they will gladly tell you exactly where they would like you to stick them.
Law enforcement, in the line of duty, is not restricted by that government policy. There is a specific exemption written right into the code to cover such cases. Even posting a disclaimer on a site that says clicking on the "I Accept" button means you have declared you are not Law enforcement doesn't have any legal validity at all.
It's called reasonable doubt. It may not be reasonable to suppose that the local government would fake pictures just to get a conviction, but it is reasonable these days that the pictures might have been faked by the poster herself, and not be real evidence of a crime.
She could have had taken clothed pictures of herself at the local landmarks, and then mimicked the same poses nude in private and swapped body shots. Depending on the photos, there are also possibilities such as taking a picture outside the local jurisdiction and swapping in a sign or local landmark to make it look like a local location.
In addition, the statute of limitations on this offense is probably no more than a year or two. If she had claimed they were older than that, the local jurisdiction would have the burden of proving otherwise.
Ruling out as many of these doubts as she could have raised would require spending some real money on forensics tests to see if the photos showed evidence of tampering. Evidently, she chose to pay the fines rather than contest it, or this would be ballooning into a major case by now.
Do commercials actually work? There's increasing evidence they don't. For example, there have been some new studies on movie theatre subliminal type methods, and the researchers announced that the old claim that they didn't influence behavior was actually wrong, but that they didn't influence behavior in the desired way, instead.
It seems that a quick subliminal picture of a Coca-cola product, for example, actually influences viewers a great deal. They apparently all get reminded to think about whether they are thirsty. Then they either decide they aren't, or go ahead and respond to their decision that they are. They go get water from the fountain, or buy a Coke, or buy a Lemonade, or decide not to pay movie theatre prices and wait until later.
By this model, subliminals don't increase Coke sales at all, but instead of people trickling up to the counter throughout the movie, more of them cluster in the times just after showing the commercial. They also still pick the brands they prefer, among the available alternatives.
Now what if regular commercials work the same way? You see a Geico ad, you think "I really do need car insurance. I think I'll compare their price with some local agents and make a final decision. Huummm, I wonder if Allstate can do any better? What was that insurance company that used to sponsor Wild Kingdom?", and so on.
IANAL, NDIPOOTV (I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV).
As it stands, it looks like automating the skipping process is what takes away the substantial non-infringing use claim for customers. (Of course, this is likely to change rapidly in the existing legal environment, but that looks to be the case for now).
The court should have recognized that being able to detect commercials automatically in the first place shouldn't have been possible at the accuracy the devices are capable of, unless broadcasters are themselves infringing on both laws and FCC regulations. For example, some of these devices detect differences in the peak or mean amplitude of the audio track. Others detect digital labeling originally used internally by the broadcast studios, and so are not just detecting commercials, but public service broadcasts, tests of the EBS, and station identification.
That last would not be necessary if local stations didn't sometimes broadcast 10 or 12 commercials in a row, broken up by a station identification segment to give a superficial legal defense against violating the FCC rulings.
That being the case, it's like a drug dealer going to court for taking a bad check. Their own violations mean they should not have standing to bring the lawsuits. Unfortunately, their own violations have been largely ignored by the system, which is often reluctant to enforce the law, and powerless to give FCC rules the full weight of law.
This cliche has gotten somewhat garbled in historical dvelopment and is normally written backwards - it makes more sense if you point out the problem with eating your cake and still having it too, in chronologically impossible order. The clche has been mangled in much the same way as when people say "I could care less", meaning they couldn't. The people responsible have been sacked. Please feel free to stop using this broken cliche.
- Federal department of cliche retirement.
I'm not trying to take the Government should stay out of everything except the military and legal areas side, but one of the areas that's shown big improvement lately is the meat packing industry, which has been pressured largely by the fast food chains into cleaning up a lot of plants. If you want safe meat, buy from a packer that has a contract with McDonalds, or Pepsi (KFC/Taco Bell/PizzaHut).
Couldn't food package labelling be improved by getting the grocery store chains to line up with customer interests in a similar way? And environmental laws - surely there are plenty of industries that are downriver or downwind from other industries?
I don't know how we could take the government out of financial regulation, as some of the economic forces involved can do enormous danage. (The US had no less than three depressions in the late 19th century, triggered in each case by a different couple of guys that tried to corner the market on some metal, such as copper, and jack up prices. In each case, the idiots who started the problem were short sighted in the simplest of senses about the consequences, but still screwed up the economy).
Tax subsidies for OS development fall firmly in the leave the government out category, simply because it's unneeded. Even if the government might do a good job, there's so many alternatives that are already working well.
Well, that's one movie people will pay 20 bucks to see.
How in the hell you got that from my post is beyond me. The point I was making is exactly opposite. EVERYBODY in this society pays for science to be done. EVERYBODY chooses leadership at least partly on their record in choosing which scientific enterprises to support. (Granted, there's a few people who vote so one issue only that they probably don't think about a single other factor, but they are far from a majority). You can respect their basic intelligence in making these decisions, even ones you may disagree with, or not. Your own posts strongly suggest you do not.
I've read the report. So why does this repair kit exist if it can't make a good repair? Why are we paying current payload costs to lift it into LEO if it is useless? Why was it included on a mission where EVA suits and EVA trained personnel were not linked to it? Isn't that like taking the jack out of the car to save weight but leaving the spare tire in? And why do we respect a 20-20 hindsight opinion from the same people who didn't promptly detect the problem, dismissed concerns from their own technical advisors, and have a vested interest in saying, "well, even if we had acted more promptly, it wouldn't have helped"? Oh, and wasn't Apollo 13 brought back with essentially toilet paper and bondo?
It was a solid piece per wing in the first few designs, but the final version involves six sections. The materials are overlaid on some carbon fiber and other high strength materials, but the surface is still the same stuff as the belly/wing underside. Also, if it's true as some other poster has related that there were no EVA suits aboard for this particular mission, you could cut your last sentence short, as in "That would mean the tile repair components would be of no use" (.)
If your'e starting a business, maybe working your own ass off will help. If you're working in one, probably not.
By the last set of figures I saw, the US currently ranks #1 in number of hours worked in the industrialized world, but only #3 in per person productivity. (The average US worker produces a contribution to the GNP of about 30 $ US per hour, while Great Britain was 50 cents (again US) or so higher, and the reunified Germany had assimilated the east German economy and was back up to about 33 $ US per worker hour.
These are estimates circa 2002, and no I don't remember just where I read them, probably some scandal sheet like the Wall St. Journal.
The interesting thing was Germany had just made it manditory for most businesses to give DEC 26th off to facilitate people traveling to be with familys over the Christmas holiday. Many business owners had complained that the German economy would suffer from this and other new increases in non-work time (new maternity leave rules, increased minimums for vacation weeks/years employed, and such). Instead, the economy had apparently benefited.
So if you want to be a successful creator of a new company, by all means work your tail off, put in those 16 hour days and six week stretches, but hire people who want to work smarter not harder.