It's not just a brilliant idea, it's almost self implementing. The more draconian the changes to History books under the Texas school board, the more desperate need other states are going to feel for a solution. As this gets under people's skins more and more, a solution that would actually save money anyway looks better and better, so expect to see this implemented somewhere, and spread.
I'd have to agree that 1984 is about telling the big lie until it becomes the truth, including the historical truth. But in the AC's defense, the quote is about both real control and the illusion of control. Where Big Brother's regime can really control something, they can override any past influences, let just those parts of the past they want to allow to influence the future. Where they don't really have direct power to deal with real events, they can fake it with the big lie technique.
I.e. if there's a famine, it was objectively caused by past events (such as screwing up centralized agricultural planning). In the present, the Orwellian society can aim things so the famine mostly impacts regions where there are lots of suspected dissidents. They can also or alternatively rewrite official history to say the famine happened because of Eastasian saboteurs or that treasonous Emanuel Goldsmith, or they can rewrite current rumors to say it isn't happening at all, and it's double plus ungood to spread such untruths. In practice, they are likely to use all these techniques in overlapping series.
Turn any historical current towards accomplishing their present goals - lie as needed to deflect any organised opposition - and lie extra, just in case.
1. Stopping the existing leak. 2. Cleanup and damage mitigation. 3. Figuring out what is and isn't reasonable to attempt for oil drilling in the future.
Maybe there's a meta-problem, which is that people will eventually do one, but then act like two is solved as well, and not even bother to address three.
Reiser is basically out - it's simply not being developed fast enough to keep up with the curve. EXT 4 seems unstable.
(Just my humble opinion, but I went back to EXT 3 for a complete reinstall of Kubuntu 9.4 after giving it a try for a good 3 months, and I've been installing various Linux's since stormlinux back in 2001. I haven't completely wiped an install (well, not at the cost of losing any data that might have even minimal value at all) and rebuilt from scratch in years, outside of that one case.).
EXT 3 is sufficient for most users needs, probably 90% of users overall, but I have to respect the ones who feel its limits - they are probably right to chafe under them. People do the damnedest things with Linux, and some of those things genuinely need very specific, perhaps idiosyncratic journaling methods, and other specialised file management techniques.
That's the real crux isn't it. Will this law be used to charge any large corporations? If not, doesn't that say the people enforcing this law know it's not really valid by their system and wouldn't stand against someone able to afford a good lawyer's challenges. Isn't it entirely probable for this particular case that people are using business's free wi-fi sites for illegal downloading at least as much as their neighbors?
If you define enough real world processes as calculation, you prove none of our laws of physics are the real ones.
For just one example, Nature can't be storing irrational numbers as infinite series expressions (where would the infinitely large registers to store them be?). Another way to put this is, if some process in Nature counts as a calculation, Nature can't be doing that calculation using numbers such as pi or e, but rather finite approximations of such numbers, that allow results in finite time.
(Otherwise, somewhere 'outside' the observable universe, there is an infinite amount of storage available for each number needed, and some sort of mechanism that handles those calculations in what looks like finite time to any point of view inside the universe - congratulations, you've just proved both the omnipresence and the omnipotence of God - probably not what you were aiming to do).
There are other ways around this, such as claiming real world events are just approximations - but what does it mean to say that nature has approximated what would happen to that apple that just fell on Newton's noggin, if there had been an exact inverse square law of gravity inside our computationally finite universe? This sort of claim sounds suspiciously like Plato's cave. Is there an ideal law of gravity that is somehow more real than the law of gravity actually expressed in the universe?
Alternately, maybe the problem is with claiming that some things are computations, just because they can be interpreted as approximate (usually analog) computations by an observer, that also has other knowledge necessary to parse the events as the results of computations. That's probably just as likely to lead to wild implications, but at least they are different wild implications.
Things like ACTA, DMCA, PATRIOT, etc are what you get with a government that's big enough and powerful enough for five permanent standing armed forces, seventeen different armed civilian agencies. the highest percentage of its citizens in prison of anywhere, ever, and a permanent state of war against a non-political entity (drugs) being fought on over two dozen fronts. You can close down every single one of the programs you listed and there will be exactly as many government employees bearing arms as now.
Your post is like the case of a man running past with a pack of rabid weasels clinging to his form and his shoelaces untied, and you saying "I know how to fix the whole problem, let's just tie his left shoe!".
Whenever I see something about Nature having a method or similar phrases, I remember what they call Nature's methods of population control: The Four Horsemen - War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. Saying 'Nature' has a solution should never be a shortcut to relaxing, or worse, stopping rationally assessing our own possible roles, as normally, 'Nature's' solutions are 'Darwinian'.
OK, but that's hardly capitalism. If BP can simply raise its prices to cover all costs of this clean up, then its "competition" has to be nothing of the sort. You're claiming that there definitely exists a collusive monopoly in oil. Next you'll be saying there's some sort of hereditary entitled class holding the reins to keep things that way, and the rest of us are just wage slaves.
The photos in circulation of the twin towers attack weren't taken as part of the terrorism. They weren't taken by the terrorists themselves, or by accomplices to their crime. There was no plan to take photos as a means of either making money for the terrorists or encouraging others to start doing terrorist acts and send more photos to the terrorists in exchange.
You can't claim any of the same points about child pornography, and that's the justification. Note, not the "justification", but the justification. A witness to the twin towers attack was not an accessory to the crime, a witness to child rape is at the very least an accessory.
images are not "crimes". Those quotation marks constitute begging the question. For shame, for shame. Beyond that, money is not a crime (or a "crime"), but stealing money is a crime. A gun is not a crime, but possessing a gun if you are a convicted felon generally is a crime. The real argument here is about whether simply possessing these images should be a crime, and if so, should it be as serious a crime as producing those same images. There's arguments worth considering on those points, but your little sound-bite isn't one of them.
The poster you are disagreeing with was trying desperately to find a loophole. It's the "What you said only applies in 99.9% of all cases, so I'm really right and you're really wrong" defense. Ooooh! Only in East Texas, where just about everybody in the industry files because they know what the judges will do. Ooooh! Only in the USA, like nobody in other countries is influenced by what happens in the USA.
For the same reason, you were modded troll in one of the worst abuses of the mod system I have ever seen, and I'm sure somebody has enough points left to mod me the same way, and will. You were somewhat inaccurate, mind you, as there are lots of countries (particularly in western Europe), where copyright lasts as long as in the US. As I post this, mikael_i is oddly marked as a +2 troll as well. (He's wrong but he probably doesn't deserve that appellation, and it's obvious there has been a mod point battle here.).
They should be providing it. Alternately, they should work out procedures that let employees providing equipment get the normal legal benefits of providing it, i.e. claiming employee business expenses.
Systems paid for by the employer can be 100% under the employer's control. But, systems owned by employees can't be partially controlled by the employer without clearly and legally marking where that control stops, and why it is a job requirement. There is no employer/employee relationship possible that lets an employer say it is not responsible for tax reporting consequences it has imposed on the employee, and ambiguously owned home equipment is always a tax issue.
The company needs a written contract with each employee that it wants to be able to access their network from outside, and that contract needs to spell out what limitations on the employee's assets are imposed, and why they are necessary, and particularly the effects on ownership of those assets (Just off the top of my head, the contract would have to address at least these questions: Can the employee sell the laptop without first bringing it back to the company for software removal? Can the employee still choose who services the laptop? What are the limits of the employee's responsibility to keep software records for the BSA and others? What are the employee's reporting requirements if the laptop is lost or stolen?). There are probably a dozen more issues that should be in the legal forms.
From what the OP said, I gather there isn't anything nearly this comprehensive being done. That's bad. It's risky not only for the employees, but there are a lot of hidden risks the company probably thinks it has avoided, which can blow back on it with little or no warning. (And hanging your employees out to dry en masse is not smart, nor safe, even if your legal advisor says you can get away with it, so the company should write the legalese so it really protects everybody.).
A contractor has to meet the final job requirements. The methods they use are generally under their control. Demand a contractor do everything by your methods, and they become closely controlled - which means if the company does enough of it, the person becomes an employee, not a contractor. So yes, it's a difference, but not in the way people would think if they just reverse the first sentence.
(You can't just say "An employer does not have to buy a contractor equipment that is required to perform their job.", because the employer does not get to unilaterally determine what is required to perform the job, rather requirements are jointly worked out in the contract, or become a matter of the contractor's choice.).
If you actually signed a contract that required you to provide equipment and then let the company have unlimited access (unlimited in the sense that they could physically hold the machine for a time and install software), then hopefully, you charged on that basis.
Normally, you write a contract so it says Person X agrees to get these results for Person Y. You can add specifications about how in limited cases, i.e. you can definitely add a section that says for example, all software used will meet standard X for record security, or provide output in format Y compatible with Person Y's equipment. You don't usually add specifications such as "Machine will be a Foo-3000, running Bar-7, and purchased new from Baz vendor". Try too much of that, and you start being that 'contractor's' employer and get all the fun of paying years of retroactive Social Security witholding, plus penalties (and getting a contract of adhesion issue, or one that the courts will simply refuse to support, or driving all the decent contractors away). There are actually people who specialise in finding stupid companies that offer contracts that would fail the IRS's employer/contractor tests and then holding them up over it, just as there are people who deliberately cut in front of you while driving and hit their brakes hard, just so you can pay for their son's college.
Even where the situation involves national security, the most a contract limits a contractor is typically prescheduled equipment audits or use of only equipment and software from an approved list to interface with the governments gear. I've seen much more restrictive, one-sided contracts in private areas, and it's obvious that some employers think they should write contracts so they get as much control as they would for an employee, without the benefits, pay, or decreased responsibility. I have also seen an IRS agent tell a small business owner who wrote a contract like that "No, we don't have to let you keep your house, not in cases like this".
The normal rule for US individual tax returns is now to keep them for just 3 years. Those 2006 1040s just became unneeded records.
However, there are some caveats to this: 1. The reason for saying three years is enough, is at that point, the burden of proof has shifted. After three years, federal law says it stops being that you need to prove anything to the IRS, rather the IRS must actively disprove anything it disputes. Ergo, your unsupported word is now theoretically as good as having actual records. Technically, THIS DOES NOT MEAN THE IRS CAN"T AUDIT BACK FARTHER! It's gotten much more challenging for them, but not necessarily impossible. They don't seem to audit back past three in practice, but it's at least remotely possible they could make exceptions. And, they can still audit suspected fraud cases for up to 10 years. 2. There's a general rule in accounting circles. If you start a business, save the tax return for the first year of that business until you close that business down. This goes for sole proprietorships and small partnerships as much as C or S corps. I take this to include keeping the first individual return that has a Schedule C attached so long as you are continuing to declare self employed income from the same sources year after year. That's probably overcautious in most small business cases, but if your business model is novel, something that the IRS might later have special concerns over, you might want to keep records for a long time indeed.
New copyright on revamped works is limited to the changes. Anyone can make their own copy of the original work. I can go reprint Tarzan of the Apes based on the original edition or a manuscript, and I can write my own preface to my edition, paint my own cover art and so on (actually, I'm not polymath enough to do all that, so presumably I'd hire some people). What I can't copy legally are the new parts of a competitor's edition.
Fair use is quantifiable in many cases, but it's not simple enough to always put numbers on it. It's been up to the courts to decide in many cases, because fair use also impacts cases such as libel suits.
Someone quotes a paragraph from a one page essay by someone else. Is that fair use? We could go by some simple rule, i.e. it's 1/4 or less of the whole by word count, but why did someone quote an entire paragraph in the first place? Was that much needed to establish context? Were there several ideas in the same paragraph that the second writer wished to comment on separately? Has the first writer been complaining that people were taking her remarks out of context, quoting isolated sentences in a misleading way, and yet is now complaining people are quoting too much of her works? It's the real world - deciding what's fair in general is part of fair use.
We need more actual legal codification, but it should probably be to set minima, as in using no more than this percentage of a song is absolutely allowable, higher percentages may be fair use also for various reasons. We also need to expand that list of various reasons, which now cites some examples such as satire or parody, academic use, and others, as there was no intent to make that list comprehensive when it was developed.
Powerpoint is simple to use to pretty up information, harder to use to present it well. Doesn't putting a professional looking wrapper on data make it harder to challenge? There's people who are genuinely thinking a problem is simple, and there's people dissembling, afraid to admit they don't understand and overcompensating by saying it's simple or obvious.
I'm imagining an analogy with a book. Maybe in one case, the information is in manuscript, and in the other, the same information is in a nice font, on good acid-free paper, between leather bound boards. There's meta-information there - somebody already thought the manuscript was good, better than the 90% plus of manuscripts they rejected, and invested considerably in packaging it to last and be protected. That somebody had resources which make them seem more reliable than the average source - after all, they couldn't afford to spend that money paying a cover artist to design a dust jacket, if they weren't usually right in picking manuscripts.
If nobody sees the information until it's been converted to powerpoint slides, then nobody considers whether there are flaws in the information until it already has a certain momentum for acceptance built up.
The Afghanistan slide is a case in point. By showing the Afghan Economy as a whole at one scale, and the opium growing part of the economy in a separate section, at a very different scale, it's fundamentally misleading. Read as presented, the slide is saying that it would be much easier to win the Afghan side of the drug war than it is to win our own domestic drug war, we can do it without winning in the USA first, we must do it first if we are to win the other trivial little war against the Taliban, but we will win the drug war first by winning the other war firster, so we can convert the Afghan military to a massive million man drug interdiction force, which won't in turn have any negative consequences for the stability of the region.
If some of the people viewing that slide had been the ones who sat down and decided how big the opium part of the Afghan economy was compared to the rest, and how to present that relationship accurately, they might have understood the final slide as it would have been. They would have upped font sizes in some places, drawn some new arrows, and changed the weight of a lot of existing arrows, at the very least. This assumes there aren't a lot of people who really do understand, but want the slide to be deliberately misleading to the ones who don't, of course.
One of my great grandfathers was a union organiser for (Arkansas) coal miners, who were called rednecks by the local newspaper, starting in a coordinated campaign that began about six weeks before the Pinkertons came into town and beat them for daring to unionize. The Pinkertons shot a couple of them too, allegedly raped at least one woman, etc. I've read my great grandfather's letters to his brother, where he describes the night when over fifty shots were fired into his house, and they hid in the root cellar except for my grandmother, who was then a child of eight, trapped upstairs in her room with no time for them to get her. If it didn't start out as derogatory, redneck soon became derogatory from events such as those. That was way back in 1904, well before your twenties citation.
The term redneck is historically of confused origin. It may actually have something to do with the red kerchiefs worn by socialist inclined union organizers, but more probably goes back to the much more common attribution of red sunburn on fair skinned southern farmers. Best evidence is it came into existence to refer specifically to the Irish immigrant farmers of the 1870's era, who swiftly became notorious for sunburning easily. It was already a derogatory term when used by non-members of that group, and got self applied by the miners later in an ironic manner, as these people were also frequently of Irish extraction. There has thus always been a racial connotation to the word.
You may have a hard time finding anything on the internet better than Wikipedia, but there are real books that will tell you about the mine workers struggle going back way before the 1920s. Hell, Alan Pinkerton, founder of one of the worst groups of thugs in American history, was part of the Civil war era. Joe Hill was a mine worker in Utah in 1914, and supposedly wore a red bandanna when he supposedly committed the murders he was hanged for in 1915. This is why we say 'not a real source, blah, blah, blah".
If I'm understanding your second and third paragraphs, doesn't that translate to: "You wouldn't want to use this on a general purpose machine, but it might work very well for a specialised machine."?
This works both ways though. I can think of both at least one good counter-example and a good supporting example for your statements, so i suspect the truth on this one really falls somewhere near the middle:
It took us years to prove the USSR had a serious plan to land on the moon ahead of the USA, once they started denying they were ever in the Moonrace. In particular, there was a civilian analyst who tracked down publications in a lot of european aero-space magazines and tech papers and showed how the various items such as rocket engines and fuel tank emergency vents and such would make a damned good Soviet lunar lander, and even after he published, it took another 5 years or so before official sources would admit he was over 98% right in saying all those engine and frame designs, onboard computers, shock absorbing leg mechanisms and such came from the Soviet lander program, and yes, their version of a LEM was actually completed and looked damned near identical to the one he reconstructed.
That's at least one case where the USSR thoroughly hid their capabilities after they scrapped the project, and since it wasn't even a strictly military project and they had left lots of clues during the time they were openly in the space race, it's only reasonable to assume they hid at least some of the full blown military capabilities and plans better. Those started out secret and stayed that way so they were easier to hide, and some of them (such as some Soviet airborne bio-weapons research that we do now have good intel on) would have been very frightening at the time to the rest of the world, and would have had a big negative impact on immediately post Soviet era relations.
On the other hand, I'm a former armored cav officer, and I know that Soviet era tanks, helecoptors and artillery generally weren't as tough as the public sometimes heard. We had briefings where we were given corrected info on Opfor (Opposition Forces), and were often told something (approximately) like this: "6 months ago, based on a CIA report, we told you the opposition had 108 T-72 tanks in this unit. We have found out that they have only 68 tanks assigned, and only 30 up and running on average, and half their tanks are still Korean war era...". Meanwhile, we read the papers, and it became pretty obvious that what the public at large heard was based almost entirely on the high number reports (and usually exaggerated from those) and the 'corrections' weren't making it to the press.
It probably should be a recognised right, but you do realise that won't matter much in this case? The accused allegedly misrepresented himself in various ways, also called fraud. You have a right to buy real estate, and if you already own it, to sell it, but if somebody offers to sell you the Brooklyn bridge, the case doesn't hinge on anybody's rights being limited by a fraud prosecution. This is not a case such as Dr. Kevorkian's, where there may be a legitimate first amendment issue, but the sort of case that would have happened if 'Dr. Death' had never been awarded an MD degree.
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It's not just a brilliant idea, it's almost self implementing. The more draconian the changes to History books under the Texas school board, the more desperate need other states are going to feel for a solution. As this gets under people's skins more and more, a solution that would actually save money anyway looks better and better, so expect to see this implemented somewhere, and spread.
I'd have to agree that 1984 is about telling the big lie until it becomes the truth, including the historical truth. But in the AC's defense, the quote is about both real control and the illusion of control. Where Big Brother's regime can really control something, they can override any past influences, let just those parts of the past they want to allow to influence the future. Where they don't really have direct power to deal with real events, they can fake it with the big lie technique.
I.e. if there's a famine, it was objectively caused by past events (such as screwing up centralized agricultural planning). In the present, the Orwellian society can aim things so the famine mostly impacts regions where there are lots of suspected dissidents. They can also or alternatively rewrite official history to say the famine happened because of Eastasian saboteurs or that treasonous Emanuel Goldsmith, or they can rewrite current rumors to say it isn't happening at all, and it's double plus ungood to spread such untruths. In practice, they are likely to use all these techniques in overlapping series.
Turn any historical current towards accomplishing their present goals - lie as needed to deflect any organised opposition - and lie extra, just in case.
There's at least three "The Problem"s here.
1. Stopping the existing leak.
2. Cleanup and damage mitigation.
3. Figuring out what is and isn't reasonable to attempt for oil drilling in the future.
Maybe there's a meta-problem, which is that people will eventually do one, but then act like two is solved as well, and not even bother to address three.
Reiser is basically out - it's simply not being developed fast enough to keep up with the curve. EXT 4 seems unstable.
(Just my humble opinion, but I went back to EXT 3 for a complete reinstall of Kubuntu 9.4 after giving it a try for a good 3 months, and I've been installing various Linux's since stormlinux back in 2001. I haven't completely wiped an install (well, not at the cost of losing any data that might have even minimal value at all) and rebuilt from scratch in years, outside of that one case.).
EXT 3 is sufficient for most users needs, probably 90% of users overall, but I have to respect the ones who feel its limits - they are probably right to chafe under them. People do the damnedest things with Linux, and some of those things genuinely need very specific, perhaps idiosyncratic journaling methods, and other specialised file management techniques.
That's the real crux isn't it. Will this law be used to charge any large corporations? If not, doesn't that say the people enforcing this law know it's not really valid by their system and wouldn't stand against someone able to afford a good lawyer's challenges. Isn't it entirely probable for this particular case that people are using business's free wi-fi sites for illegal downloading at least as much as their neighbors?
Governor Schwartzenegger, is that you?
If you define enough real world processes as calculation, you prove none of our laws of physics are the real ones.
For just one example, Nature can't be storing irrational numbers as infinite series expressions (where would the infinitely large registers to store them be?). Another way to put this is, if some process in Nature counts as a calculation, Nature can't be doing that calculation using numbers such as pi or e, but rather finite approximations of such numbers, that allow results in finite time.
(Otherwise, somewhere 'outside' the observable universe, there is an infinite amount of storage available for each number needed, and some sort of mechanism that handles those calculations in what looks like finite time to any point of view inside the universe - congratulations, you've just proved both the omnipresence and the omnipotence of God - probably not what you were aiming to do).
There are other ways around this, such as claiming real world events are just approximations - but what does it mean to say that nature has approximated what would happen to that apple that just fell on Newton's noggin, if there had been an exact inverse square law of gravity inside our computationally finite universe? This sort of claim sounds suspiciously like Plato's cave. Is there an ideal law of gravity that is somehow more real than the law of gravity actually expressed in the universe?
Alternately, maybe the problem is with claiming that some things are computations, just because they can be interpreted as approximate (usually analog) computations by an observer, that also has other knowledge necessary to parse the events as the results of computations. That's probably just as likely to lead to wild implications, but at least they are different wild implications.
Things like ACTA, DMCA, PATRIOT, etc are what you get with a government that's big enough and powerful enough for five permanent standing armed forces, seventeen different armed civilian agencies. the highest percentage of its citizens in prison of anywhere, ever, and a permanent state of war against a non-political entity (drugs) being fought on over two dozen fronts. You can close down every single one of the programs you listed and there will be exactly as many government employees bearing arms as now.
Your post is like the case of a man running past with a pack of rabid weasels clinging to his form and his shoelaces untied, and you saying "I know how to fix the whole problem, let's just tie his left shoe!".
Whenever I see something about Nature having a method or similar phrases, I remember what they call Nature's methods of population control: The Four Horsemen - War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. Saying 'Nature' has a solution should never be a shortcut to relaxing, or worse, stopping rationally assessing our own possible roles, as normally, 'Nature's' solutions are 'Darwinian'.
I don't see the bleeding hearts going off on a rampage to ban windows.
You know, everybody who read this sentence looked up to check your user ID next. Round here, banning Windows is hardly a novel idea.
Can I get the well depth in Smoots?
And projected time to seal in Attoseconds, please?
(Or since sealing is a chancy business, Monarch Butterfly Half-Lives will do.).
OK, but that's hardly capitalism. If BP can simply raise its prices to cover all costs of this clean up, then its "competition" has to be nothing of the sort. You're claiming that there definitely exists a collusive monopoly in oil. Next you'll be saying there's some sort of hereditary entitled class holding the reins to keep things that way, and the rest of us are just wage slaves.
The photos in circulation of the twin towers attack weren't taken as part of the terrorism. They weren't taken by the terrorists themselves, or by accomplices to their crime. There was no plan to take photos as a means of either making money for the terrorists or encouraging others to start doing terrorist acts and send more photos to the terrorists in exchange.
You can't claim any of the same points about child pornography, and that's the justification. Note, not the "justification", but the justification. A witness to the twin towers attack was not an accessory to the crime, a witness to child rape is at the very least an accessory.
images are not "crimes".
Those quotation marks constitute begging the question. For shame, for shame.
Beyond that, money is not a crime (or a "crime"), but stealing money is a crime. A gun is not a crime, but possessing a gun if you are a convicted felon generally is a crime. The real argument here is about whether simply possessing these images should be a crime, and if so, should it be as serious a crime as producing those same images. There's arguments worth considering on those points, but your little sound-bite isn't one of them.
The poster you are disagreeing with was trying desperately to find a loophole. It's the "What you said only applies in 99.9% of all cases, so I'm really right and you're really wrong" defense. Ooooh! Only in East Texas, where just about everybody in the industry files because they know what the judges will do. Ooooh! Only in the USA, like nobody in other countries is influenced by what happens in the USA.
For the same reason, you were modded troll in one of the worst abuses of the mod system I have ever seen, and I'm sure somebody has enough points left to mod me the same way, and will. You were somewhat inaccurate, mind you, as there are lots of countries (particularly in western Europe), where copyright lasts as long as in the US. As I post this, mikael_i is oddly marked as a +2 troll as well. (He's wrong but he probably doesn't deserve that appellation, and it's obvious there has been a mod point battle here.).
They should be providing it. Alternately, they should work out procedures that let employees providing equipment get the normal legal benefits of providing it, i.e. claiming employee business expenses.
Systems paid for by the employer can be 100% under the employer's control. But, systems owned by employees can't be partially controlled by the employer without clearly and legally marking where that control stops, and why it is a job requirement. There is no employer/employee relationship possible that lets an employer say it is not responsible for tax reporting consequences it has imposed on the employee, and ambiguously owned home equipment is always a tax issue.
The company needs a written contract with each employee that it wants to be able to access their network from outside, and that contract needs to spell out what limitations on the employee's assets are imposed, and why they are necessary, and particularly the effects on ownership of those assets (Just off the top of my head, the contract would have to address at least these questions: Can the employee sell the laptop without first bringing it back to the company for software removal? Can the employee still choose who services the laptop? What are the limits of the employee's responsibility to keep software records for the BSA and others? What are the employee's reporting requirements if the laptop is lost or stolen?). There are probably a dozen more issues that should be in the legal forms.
From what the OP said, I gather there isn't anything nearly this comprehensive being done. That's bad. It's risky not only for the employees, but there are a lot of hidden risks the company probably thinks it has avoided, which can blow back on it with little or no warning. (And hanging your employees out to dry en masse is not smart, nor safe, even if your legal advisor says you can get away with it, so the company should write the legalese so it really protects everybody.).
A contractor has to meet the final job requirements. The methods they use are generally under their control. Demand a contractor do everything by your methods, and they become closely controlled - which means if the company does enough of it, the person becomes an employee, not a contractor. So yes, it's a difference, but not in the way people would think if they just reverse the first sentence.
(You can't just say "An employer does not have to buy a contractor equipment that is required to perform their job.", because the employer does not get to unilaterally determine what is required to perform the job, rather requirements are jointly worked out in the contract, or become a matter of the contractor's choice.).
If you actually signed a contract that required you to provide equipment and then let the company have unlimited access (unlimited in the sense that they could physically hold the machine for a time and install software), then hopefully, you charged on that basis.
Normally, you write a contract so it says Person X agrees to get these results for Person Y. You can add specifications about how in limited cases, i.e. you can definitely add a section that says for example, all software used will meet standard X for record security, or provide output in format Y compatible with Person Y's equipment. You don't usually add specifications such as "Machine will be a Foo-3000, running Bar-7, and purchased new from Baz vendor". Try too much of that, and you start being that 'contractor's' employer and get all the fun of paying years of retroactive Social Security witholding, plus penalties (and getting a contract of adhesion issue, or one that the courts will simply refuse to support, or driving all the decent contractors away). There are actually people who specialise in finding stupid companies that offer contracts that would fail the IRS's employer/contractor tests and then holding them up over it, just as there are people who deliberately cut in front of you while driving and hit their brakes hard, just so you can pay for their son's college.
Even where the situation involves national security, the most a contract limits a contractor is typically prescheduled equipment audits or use of only equipment and software from an approved list to interface with the governments gear. I've seen much more restrictive, one-sided contracts in private areas, and it's obvious that some employers think they should write contracts so they get as much control as they would for an employee, without the benefits, pay, or decreased responsibility. I have also seen an IRS agent tell a small business owner who wrote a contract like that "No, we don't have to let you keep your house, not in cases like this".
"Planes have suffocated auto-pilots"
I've seen the movie - cut off their air and they deflate.
The normal rule for US individual tax returns is now to keep them for just 3 years. Those 2006 1040s just became unneeded records.
However, there are some caveats to this:
1. The reason for saying three years is enough, is at that point, the burden of proof has shifted. After three years, federal law says it stops being that you need to prove anything to the IRS, rather the IRS must actively disprove anything it disputes. Ergo, your unsupported word is now theoretically as good as having actual records. Technically, THIS DOES NOT MEAN THE IRS CAN"T AUDIT BACK FARTHER! It's gotten much more challenging for them, but not necessarily impossible. They don't seem to audit back past three in practice, but it's at least remotely possible they could make exceptions. And, they can still audit suspected fraud cases for up to 10 years.
2. There's a general rule in accounting circles. If you start a business, save the tax return for the first year of that business until you close that business down. This goes for sole proprietorships and small partnerships as much as C or S corps. I take this to include keeping the first individual return that has a Schedule C attached so long as you are continuing to declare self employed income from the same sources year after year. That's probably overcautious in most small business cases, but if your business model is novel, something that the IRS might later have special concerns over, you might want to keep records for a long time indeed.
New copyright on revamped works is limited to the changes. Anyone can make their own copy of the original work. I can go reprint Tarzan of the Apes based on the original edition or a manuscript, and I can write my own preface to my edition, paint my own cover art and so on (actually, I'm not polymath enough to do all that, so presumably I'd hire some people). What I can't copy legally are the new parts of a competitor's edition.
Fair use is quantifiable in many cases, but it's not simple enough to always put numbers on it. It's been up to the courts to decide in many cases, because fair use also impacts cases such as libel suits.
Someone quotes a paragraph from a one page essay by someone else. Is that fair use? We could go by some simple rule, i.e. it's 1/4 or less of the whole by word count, but why did someone quote an entire paragraph in the first place? Was that much needed to establish context? Were there several ideas in the same paragraph that the second writer wished to comment on separately? Has the first writer been complaining that people were taking her remarks out of context, quoting isolated sentences in a misleading way, and yet is now complaining people are quoting too much of her works? It's the real world - deciding what's fair in general is part of fair use.
We need more actual legal codification, but it should probably be to set minima, as in using no more than this percentage of a song is absolutely allowable, higher percentages may be fair use also for various reasons. We also need to expand that list of various reasons, which now cites some examples such as satire or parody, academic use, and others, as there was no intent to make that list comprehensive when it was developed.
Powerpoint is simple to use to pretty up information, harder to use to present it well. Doesn't putting a professional looking wrapper on data make it harder to challenge? There's people who are genuinely thinking a problem is simple, and there's people dissembling, afraid to admit they don't understand and overcompensating by saying it's simple or obvious.
I'm imagining an analogy with a book. Maybe in one case, the information is in manuscript, and in the other, the same information is in a nice font, on good acid-free paper, between leather bound boards. There's meta-information there - somebody already thought the manuscript was good, better than the 90% plus of manuscripts they rejected, and invested considerably in packaging it to last and be protected. That somebody had resources which make them seem more reliable than the average source - after all, they couldn't afford to spend that money paying a cover artist to design a dust jacket, if they weren't usually right in picking manuscripts.
If nobody sees the information until it's been converted to powerpoint slides, then nobody considers whether there are flaws in the information until it already has a certain momentum for acceptance built up.
The Afghanistan slide is a case in point. By showing the Afghan Economy as a whole at one scale, and the opium growing part of the economy in a separate section, at a very different scale, it's fundamentally misleading. Read as presented, the slide is saying that it would be much easier to win the Afghan side of the drug war than it is to win our own domestic drug war, we can do it without winning in the USA first, we must do it first if we are to win the other trivial little war against the Taliban, but we will win the drug war first by winning the other war firster, so we can convert the Afghan military to a massive million man drug interdiction force, which won't in turn have any negative consequences for the stability of the region.
If some of the people viewing that slide had been the ones who sat down and decided how big the opium part of the Afghan economy was compared to the rest, and how to present that relationship accurately, they might have understood the final slide as it would have been. They would have upped font sizes in some places, drawn some new arrows, and changed the weight of a lot of existing arrows, at the very least. This assumes there aren't a lot of people who really do understand, but want the slide to be deliberately misleading to the ones who don't, of course.
One of my great grandfathers was a union organiser for (Arkansas) coal miners, who were called rednecks by the local newspaper, starting in a coordinated campaign that began about six weeks before the Pinkertons came into town and beat them for daring to unionize. The Pinkertons shot a couple of them too, allegedly raped at least one woman, etc. I've read my great grandfather's letters to his brother, where he describes the night when over fifty shots were fired into his house, and they hid in the root cellar except for my grandmother, who was then a child of eight, trapped upstairs in her room with no time for them to get her. If it didn't start out as derogatory, redneck soon became derogatory from events such as those. That was way back in 1904, well before your twenties citation.
The term redneck is historically of confused origin. It may actually have something to do with the red kerchiefs worn by socialist inclined union organizers, but more probably goes back to the much more common attribution of red sunburn on fair skinned southern farmers. Best evidence is it came into existence to refer specifically to the Irish immigrant farmers of the 1870's era, who swiftly became notorious for sunburning easily. It was already a derogatory term when used by non-members of that group, and got self applied by the miners later in an ironic manner, as these people were also frequently of Irish extraction. There has thus always been a racial connotation to the word.
You may have a hard time finding anything on the internet better than Wikipedia, but there are real books that will tell you about the mine workers struggle going back way before the 1920s. Hell, Alan Pinkerton, founder of one of the worst groups of thugs in American history, was part of the Civil war era. Joe Hill was a mine worker in Utah in 1914, and supposedly wore a red bandanna when he supposedly committed the murders he was hanged for in 1915. This is why we say 'not a real source, blah, blah, blah".
If I'm understanding your second and third paragraphs, doesn't that translate to:
"You wouldn't want to use this on a general purpose machine, but it might work very well for a specialised machine."?
This works both ways though. I can think of both at least one good counter-example and a good supporting example for your statements, so i suspect the truth on this one really falls somewhere near the middle:
It took us years to prove the USSR had a serious plan to land on the moon ahead of the USA, once they started denying they were ever in the Moonrace. In particular, there was a civilian analyst who tracked down publications in a lot of european aero-space magazines and tech papers and showed how the various items such as rocket engines and fuel tank emergency vents and such would make a damned good Soviet lunar lander, and even after he published, it took another 5 years or so before official sources would admit he was over 98% right in saying all those engine and frame designs, onboard computers, shock absorbing leg mechanisms and such came from the Soviet lander program, and yes, their version of a LEM was actually completed and looked damned near identical to the one he reconstructed.
That's at least one case where the USSR thoroughly hid their capabilities after they scrapped the project, and since it wasn't even a strictly military project and they had left lots of clues during the time they were openly in the space race, it's only reasonable to assume they hid at least some of the full blown military capabilities and plans better. Those started out secret and stayed that way so they were easier to hide, and some of them (such as some Soviet airborne bio-weapons research that we do now have good intel on) would have been very frightening at the time to the rest of the world, and would have had a big negative impact on immediately post Soviet era relations.
On the other hand, I'm a former armored cav officer, and I know that Soviet era tanks, helecoptors and artillery generally weren't as tough as the public sometimes heard. We had briefings where we were given corrected info on Opfor (Opposition Forces), and were often told something (approximately) like this: "6 months ago, based on a CIA report, we told you the opposition had 108 T-72 tanks in this unit. We have found out that they have only 68 tanks assigned, and only 30 up and running on average, and half their tanks are still Korean war era...". Meanwhile, we read the papers, and it became pretty obvious that what the public at large heard was based almost entirely on the high number reports (and usually exaggerated from those) and the 'corrections' weren't making it to the press.
It probably should be a recognised right, but you do realise that won't matter much in this case? The accused allegedly misrepresented himself in various ways, also called fraud. You have a right to buy real estate, and if you already own it, to sell it, but if somebody offers to sell you the Brooklyn bridge, the case doesn't hinge on anybody's rights being limited by a fraud prosecution. This is not a case such as Dr. Kevorkian's, where there may be a legitimate first amendment issue, but the sort of case that would have happened if 'Dr. Death' had never been awarded an MD degree.