The problem overall with depriving someone of a satellite on the sly is after three or so uses of any method, it's not sly any more. Nothing scales up economically for repeat use, because any sudden rash of satellite failures would have their deployer thinking it can't be coincidence to lose that many that quickly.
Ergo, any method used is likely to be either a one shot attack, or an overwhelming attack against all an enemy's space capability (which, whatever else it is, won't be sly) - nothing in between. Governments are actually highly averse to funding one shot, in extremis programs such as killer asteroid stopping missions. Exceptions for clear and present danger may exist, but (to get back to the topic) it's unlikely if the 37b is part of one of them.
Most small businesses that are service related have at least one Point Of Sale machine up front at their physical store, but the person operating it is also the person who makes appointments, so they just about have to be able to bring up a scheduler and appointment manager. A separate terminal for appointments is a serious cost, as would be keeping separate people to operate it, or training across skill sets (your cosmetologist or hair stylist or auto mechanic now needs to be trained to schedule appointments and take payments - and to log out or whatever every time they go back to what they think of as their main job - that's already likely to create an environment with much more serious security problems than having POS run other programs).
When your auto mechanics make 25 an hour, the solution is to hire a receptionist at half that, but splitting that job to a clerk for payments and a 'customer service associate' for scheduling appointments just wiped out much of the savings you would normally get by keeping the more skilled workers on their primary jobs. Meanwhile customers are constantly going to the 'wrong' desk to try to do the 'wrong' task there (Yes, even if there's a big sign saying "Payments" hanging over one desk - many customers go to whichever one's closest, and they can't all be closest).
I work for a large company, a fortune 500 - the 'skilled professionals' usually float between multiple offices to handle appointments (one of my areas of specialization is taxation and planning on author's often very irregular royalties, particularly as those of the deceased authors are being passed through LLCs set up for their heirs - you can imagine how that increases my normal operations range, but several of my co-workers have some area that they support, but for which the market is simply too spread out to draw all the customers into one location. I put up with the driving by scheduling several clients in the same area back to back, and because I often get free autographed copies as tips). Even for us, a secretary handling both appointments and payments on the same machine is common, especially where the physical layout of an office doesn't allow a separate entire room for a separate client manager to handle the appointment process. Plus, we have pros both constructing their billable hours statements and scheduling for themselves, to further link the processes.
Since some of our pros are self scheduling at distant locations, our appointment manager actually runs as an Internet app! Of course, we have VPN, damned good encryption, and UNIX based systems between anything Windows and the net, but still, I can't see most small companies doing all those things, yet they may face the same sort of problems, and the others I have outlined above, and probably many more. Saying POS should always run on a dedicated machine by itself is saying that there has to be some other good solution to all these sorts of issues, and if you really have that, there are people who would gladly pay you at least 500 K a year to implement it.
Numbers such as 2/3rds follow naturally from genuinely logical grounds. The most basic possible situation for any system with elected representation is for a simple majority to carry all votes. Since (usually) there might be situations with an even number of members voting, a 50/50 split becomes a possibilty in most cases, so the situation naturally leads to developing some tie breaker rule (such as 'vice president votes, but only to break ties').
Once you have at least this level of complexity, it usually makes sense to people that some particular types of votes need to carry by more than a simple 51 to 49 squeakingly close ratio. For example, would anyone want to go into a war based on a very slight majority? Since it is likely that there will be setbacks in any war, that would often leave the group, a few months after the war started, taking another vote, and having to extricate themselves from a war immediately no matter how awkward or dangerous that might be.
Or take any project that might take more than one term to complete. A very close vote could mean that next year, or next election cycle, or whenever, there was not enough support to continue the project. How would it be if the US had spent enough on the interstate highway system to connect 17 states and then stopped because two or three senators had been replaced. (Or for most slashdotters, if the space program had gotten as far as Gemini but not Apollo, because of an equally minor change in legislators).
If you want to make it more likely that big projects, once started, will be finished, the easiest way is to require a supermajority to start them, and only a simple majority to continue them once started.
Once somebody decides to set a threshold higher, a simple rule change, such as requiring 60%, or 2/3rds, or 75%, seems better than an odder, more arbitrary sounding change, such as 57.6 %. 75% (3/4) seems very intense, maybe fair to require to start a war, but too big a threshold for most purposes, so the simple ratios considered are usually either 2/3rds or 3/5ths. 3/5ths actually wins out more often than 2/3rds world wide, as it's usually seen as large enough to do the job.
People already convicted, particularly where it is based largely on these particular officers' testimonies, will also appeal, and the resulting costs will have to be paid even where it leaves the locality short of funds for new trials. The officers are not just worthless in the future, they have grossly negative worth in the eyes of the system, even if the system can somehow minimize the negative publicity.
We have RIAA sources claiming that ALL torrenting involves illegal files, and clueless judges who seem to believe them, and you have to ask why USENET beats torrents for legitimate binaries? Uhm, maybe because the crazy and clueless that seem to be running all too much of our society might just point to the torrent software itself as part of their 'proof' you were pirating their content.
Maybe some local cop has heard just enough about Bittorrent to 'think' he knows you are up to no good, or some person you work with 'thinks' you're stealing content just for mentioning torrents. As long as the industry shills continue to spin torrents as 100% for illegal purposes, why not use something they don't talk about, at least as much.
You've been modded funny, but just think, what happens if a court makes a legal ruling that:
a: Souls do not exist and so a contract for one can't be arbitrated or enforced on that point. b: Souls definitely do exist and are infinitely valuable because there is a God who redeems them via immortality. b: Souls do exist, but they have only a finite value that can be controlled by the government because no religion that says they are immortal is true.
How many of the people who gave you your funny will be laughing three tenths of a second after they hear the entire courtroom was taken out with a rocket propelled grenade and someone is hanging local government officials with the sign "Antichrist" (Or "Apostate of the Koran", or "Papist" or "Heretic" or whatever) around their necks? Hell, even Buddhists and Atheists sometimes kill over questions like this, and my own religion is full of aggressive nutcases (Yes, I'm a Protestant). The poor judge who has to deal with this will be walking on eggshells to avoid any ruling that even mentions whether souls exist or how much they are worth.
A few weeks ago, I bought a pack of candy. The gummy objects inside consisted of two shapes - long squiggly lines and closed circles. They had two groups of colors, warm reds and oranges and cool blues and greens, matched to the shapes. They also were dividable by sweet and sour, again with tartness matched to shape and color group.
Hey, I realized, the whole candy is binary bits, testable by any of several senses to determine state. Now who needs several different ways of reading the same binary bit? Obviously, there are at least three alien species making these things. When the bits show up on Earth, we package them and eat them, but somewhere else, they are being sequenced and stuck to very large drive platters (Obviously why they are slightly self adhesive). This explains why aliens haven't contacted us in person. Being all very large species (as their lack of miniturization in data technology should show, but if they didn't start out titanic, they have obviously grown that way from eating so many candy bits during erase operations), travel costs are proportionately magnified.
I really dislike apathy in the face of aggression.
Oh, but one Republican Representitive (Michelle Bachmann) evidently thinks an appropriate response to a cyber-attack is to NUKE somebody. Crank up the Dial-A-Yield, make their cities glow, let's make Leetspeak a language only spoken in Hell.
What the hell, apathy doesn't sound so bad, if it just keeps someone like her from starting Armageddon over some 14 year old script kiddee trying to deface Apple's website. In fact, apathy is starting to sound pretty promising. You want me to feel guilty about apathy, first you get the rabid psychopaths out of office, then I'll consider it. For now, make mine apathy! APATHY FOR THE WIN!!!
Yes, I believe I WILL stand there like a coward. You keep telling people how serious this all could be, to obscure the fact that we have at least one certifiable homicidal maniac in high office, and her handlers want just the line you are parroting put out to help her avoid being turned out for it.
It's 'amazing' how athletic healthy people carrying M-16's and sticking together in large groups 'never' get picked out by rapists.
When people getting paid 360 K a year are giving people who get paid 50 K (or less) economic advice, is it any wonder the poorer people believe it uncritically? The people who showed some caution were encouraged to abandon it. Only the ones who were both really well informed and generally suspicious sorts failed to fall for the line. What those uninformed people were uninformed about included that most of the regulations protecting them were no longer in place. Would you get a second opinion for a doctor's visit? Maybe. Would you get a third, and a fourth, and check each doctor's entire practice history, school grades, and every credential you see on his wall?
As one of my co-workers pointed out, Predatory Lending aimed at the poorest includes interest rates above 36%. Just one person who takes out a loan they can't pay at 36% undoes the good 18 more responsible people do by saving, if the average savings account is only paying 2%. You can extend this to housing. People with the level of income to realistically become home owners can probably get 2.75 to 3.5% by using CDs and similar instruments, so it's not as bad as the case of poorer people with only small savings possible, but still... When an adjustable rate mortgage hits 15% (as some did), one person's bad decision outweighs four or five good decisions in terms of overall economic effects.
You're not demanding that the average person become better informed, you are demanding that the bottom 10 to 20% of the demographic stop making the mistakes the rest of us are now paying for. Do I really need to show you why that's not going to happen? Meanwhile, some of us are demanding the rules be changed so the system can't make record profits from targeting the stupidest (or at least the least informed). We're blaming the people who cooked the rulebooks as much more guilty than the people at the bottom. There's always someone dumb enough to buy the Brooklyn Bridge - you will never eliminate the last potential sucker. We can still create proper rules against the guy trying to sell them the bridge, and enforce them.
Let's do a non-car analogy (I must be new around here).
Let's say you are the victim of a real crime, like some thief took your wheelbarrow out of your backyard. They even really climbed your fence to get to it. You call the cops, and you claim they took your coin collection and your mink coat too. Then you add that they shot your dog, so the cops now think the thief is probably armed and dangerous. Should you be busted for filing a false police report? Let's say you report the theft the same way when describing your losses on your taxes. Should the IRS have any objections?
OK, for the analogizing impaired:
Copyright violation = a real crime, just as theft does. That doesn't mean CV = Theft, just that both are crimes and both at least can result in damages.
Climbing the Fence = DMCA violations, smuggling cameras into movie theatres and such.
Inflating the loss = What the RIAA is doing here. Duh!
Armed and Dangerous = The RIAA claiming without proof, as they have, that piracy raises funds for terrorism or drug cartels. For that matter, using the loaded term "Pirates", unless we are ignoring that real pirates shoot people, feed them to sharks, and otherwise are by reputation mostly violent criminals not sneaky ones.
False Police Report = False testimony to Congress, statements by lobbyists.
Tax Fraud = Gravely overstating your potential market value as an investment if the law can just stop your losses from piracy, as various RIAA filings in public stock reports have done for many quarters (but it's the SEC, not the IRS that should care about this).
But who's the betrayer here? Somebody 'pirates' from the RIAA's instead of buying content, that's at least arguably betraying a trust. The RIAA, by your line, can treat them however they want. But then there's Joe Honest Taxpayer. he hasn't 'betrayed' anybody. So, if the RIAA lies about how bad piracy is, how destructive to the economy its effects are, how much need there is for Joe Honest Taxpayer to pay the extra costs to step up enforcement, etc., that's the RIAA 'betraying' Joe. If you're not a pirate, that's the RIAA betraying you.
A frightening portion of people with good paying jobs got there by getting less well paid people to know more and do more for free, and think it always works. The same goes for the investors at the top. They are the same crowd that demands the government step in and help them keep their positions, and yet tithes regularly to various think tanks and pundits that preach the virtues of 'unfettered capitalism'. Anything approaching a free market would result in them being kicked into the gutters, often literally.
I'm not sure why this counts as news for nerds, without at least revealing the oh-so-useful details of what vendor and software we are discussing. The type of abuse of business partners, governments and the public at large as described happens just about equally in non-tech areas. It does much more damage than this vulnerability has even the slightest potential to do in areas such as the chemical industries. (To avoid being as unspecific as the writer, I'll suggest anyone who wants to can google for "Canton" or "Little Pidgeon River" plus "Papermill" for just one example).
No, Dark matter isn't a superheavy element, inert or otherwise. Here's why:
We have some observations of nearby spiral galaxies, that seem to show dark matter. It is revealed by gravitational influences on the visible parts of those galaxies. These include the speed the visible parts rotate at, around galactic centers that are probably supermassive black holes. The speed of rotation doesn't fall off according to the normal square/cube function for gravity, and adding enough conventional type matter to get anything like the observed numbers for motions means that conventional matter would all be trying to fall into the center, not exist as a rather extended cloud that show effects all the way to outside the major arms of the spiral galaxy.
Either we see galaxies of some somewhat differing ages and seriously differing sizes and masses, and yet somehow, all of them have a cloud of normal but unilluminated matter, that is at a particular stage of infall, and all of those galaxies will be past that stage within a very few million years, or else they are surrounded by something that isn't normal matter, and doesn't want to pack down as tight as normal matter, or start clumping enough to shine like stars as normal matter does. Astronomers don't like theories that say we are observing a very statistically unusual and unstable state that just happens to look like a normal condition from our especially privileged viewpoint. Ergo, there's some kind of matter that won't fit on the periodic table no matter how much you extend it.
Now just what other restrictions there are, that's debatable. When dark matter was first proposed, it was supposed to make the whole universe have enough mass that it was just barely, exactly, geometrically flat (that is, it wouldn't expand quite forever, wouldn't have an overall curvature that counted as either 'open' or 'closed', and certain other numbers, such as the Hubble constant, would be exactly enough to give us a universe with what is called an omega of exactly 1). Some theories also proposed a role in this for what was/is called dark energy.
Recent observations of very distant galaxies have revealed a lot of previously unaccounted for normal matter, enough that normal matter may make up much more of the universe as a whole than we thought for about the last thirty years. Maybe that's even enough to mean we don't need much or any dark matter at all to make omega = 1. But, we now have actual observations of what appears to be some kind of dark matter. So even if one of the original reasons for suspecting dark matter existed is invalid, and even if we could be certain there isn't as much of the universe made of dark matter as that reason suggested, now we have to explain the observations that say there is at least some dark matter around.
The Iran invasion doesn't help the US prove they have deterrence in mind at all. Afghanistan may hurt that claim even more, but that depends on how long it drags on and what comes out about drug connections in the interim.
But, the president's policy is in keeping with a deterrence based system for Nuclear war. First, it limits use of Nukes to respond to chemical or bio warfare, and in particular it says we won't escalate to nukes for a lot of the very chem or bio type attacks that everyone else knew we would have to be crazy to respond to with nukes. To put it a bit more simply, we now know there's more to the world situation than two big superpowers that can Mutually Assure each other's Destruction (MAD), and we're not going to cling to deliberately acting irrational as a method of psyching 'the other side' out. Promising you're not going to deliberately fake crazy any more fits with not using nukes for leverage, posturing, or national vanity, so deterrence is one of the few uses left.
Yes, focusing the conventional military forces on deterrence and not using them for economic leverage, posturing or vanity, either, would send the same message better than just sending it via changes in a mostly secret and difficult to verify set of nuclear responses, but some steps are better than no steps.
Without giving away too much on the first episode of the season, watch for the one word sentence "Run!" directed at quite a different listener than David Tennant's version usually was.
The Doctor - a man with two hearts, constantly promoting cardiovascular fitness.
First, thanks for taking the time to reclaim your comment.
Second, while I'm not sure of why the OP thought the drug issue mattered, I can tell you why I think it might: This has been argued mostly on the lines of educating young people about the dangers of driving fast, and the level of privacy to be expected there. But if this relates to serious drug usage, the question is, what steps are appropriate to educate young people about knowing when drugs are making family and social problems worse, or recognizing bad coping strategies before they snowball. What's appropriate to do to reduce traffic fatalities that are likely to always exist in some numbers so long as inexperienced drivers have to learn somehow, and what's appropriate to reduce illegal drug related deaths where we already have taken steps such as criminalizing the behavior, may not be the same thing. We (as a society) have been pushing cops to reveal bad consequences of illegal drug use as part of what are ostensibly education programs - for example the various timelapse photos of prostitutes busted multiple times while they are also meth addicts. I'm not at all certain that's what the OP was implying, but maybe that's a real issue.
When he pointed out that at least four of the cases involved were actually resolved with the court recognizing the free speech rights of named human individuals and not just their corporate connections, he DID prove the GP wrong. He DID look up, and counter the claim, despite the references being provided in a fashion that made it more difficult.
Claiming that corporate standing was necessary to protect an individual in Hustler v. Falwell is particularly egregious, as if that were true, the subsequent State v. Flynt case would have to be construed as an attempt to bypass that very same protection and the only way it could possibly prove the GP's point would be if Larry Flynt lost.
While we're at it, Dartmouth College is actually largely about sanctity of contract, and the specific points covered in the decision are pre-constitutional common law matters which should apply equally well whether any of the people entering the contract are forming a corporation, representing a corporation, or otherwise connected to a corporation, or not, so make that at least five.
If each person who owns part of a corp gets a vote, why doesn't the corporation get an extra vote so the owners end up with more votes than the 'little people'? Why can't I start, say, a thousand corporations at 50$ each and have each one sign my petition, so I can automatically get enough signatures to get my referendum on the ballot if I just have enough money? For that matter, why can't I have them all vote for me, or one of themselves? If I can get the death penalty, why can't they give a corporation a lethal injection? If a corporation gets its rights before it turns 21, why did I have to wait? There are year old corporations buying beer by the truckload even as we speak.
There's no tax at all on corporations now... Oh, you meant "C" corps - yeah, that type of corporation faces income taxes. They get limited liability for them. The founders could have structured them as pass through entities with no corporate taxes instead. While it's not always easy, the current owners could still restructure their corp as one or more 'S's, LLCs, partnerships, or a whole interlocking series of such types now if they really wanted to get out of paying corporate taxes. If they wanted to pick some states for their headquarters, there are even additional options beyond the ones above. But, doing any of those makes them fully liable for their mistakes, and they would lose corporate 'personhood' as well. C corps stick with their status voluntarily, because they like what the taxes they pay gets them far better than they like competing on a level playing field.
Motive matters in some cases because we can hold more than a single, direct perpetrator guilty of the same crime. We can, for example, charge the get-away driver with bank robbery, even though he never entered the bank.
Right now in the US, there's a young girl accused of conspiracy to commit attempted murder, because she allegedly pointed out the victim to the assailant. Her motive certainly matters. Did she want at least a fight to happen? The principal assailant's motive probably doesn't matter as much in this case, maybe not at all.
As long as more than one person can be guilty for contributing the same single act, motive must be considered, or tremendous injustices would become not just possible but the norm. I'd suspect that's also the general case even where there is only one criminal, but I can see some counter arguments there.
To have sex with somebody, you have to find a partner, normally one person that agrees to have sex with you. Even people whose preferences are statistical outliers usually manage to find other people who share them. Even where some people try hard to stop other people having certain kinds of sex, the attempts to stop it are seldom even 50% effective.
To use condoms regularly and actually get the benefits, you have to be able to get them from a reliable source, such as a pharmacy or planned parenthood. Attempts to stop these sources from distributing condoms can easily be 80 or 90% effective. Any reasonably repressive dictatorship can make condom use rare as chicken's lips if that becomes a goal, but probably can't do much at all to enforce abstenence instead.
The point is, someone pretending to be you may or may not be harming you. If someone gave your name after pulling a little child from the path of a runaway bus, have they hurt you? Someone who defrauds a bank harms the bank. If they did that fraud by pretending to be you they still harm the bank, but the bank passes the costs on to you, calls it identity theft instead of fraud, and doesn't have to deal with the consequences of being tricked by a fraudster themselves (or at least, doesn't have to deal with as many of them.). Being able to label some acts of fraud as identity theft and pass the consequences on, even when the bank makes basic mistakes that make fraud easy, means the bank doesn't have to exercise normal caution or train their employees to reasonable standards.
It's a phrase like 'age discrimination'. Many people still discriminate against some race or other, or against some other groups, but there really are not a lot of people who hate middle aged or older people. There are very, very few who think the average 40 year old is senile, feeble, or likely to die before the get trained enough to work. People in hiring discriminate against older employees frequently, but it's mostly because of insurance cost issues, not because there's the sort of widespread hate for older people that there was for, say Blacks in Selma Alabama, the first day one tried to sit at a lunch counter. 'Age discrimination' is a lie, a phrase designed to cloak that the real problem is essentially entirely fixed around current insurance company practices and not because of stereotyping or other normal causes of prejudice. 'Identity theft' is a lie in much the same way.
If the companies really focus on a quick profit margin in the first couple of weeks, as another poster has claimed, why do they also want to sell downloadable content? It's not a realistic model to expect to maximize profits everywhere at once. Some area has to be your number one focus - the other options can't all be your primary revenue sources too.
I know there are companies out there that get people to pay for the 'privilege' of displaying their advertising on tee-shirts, but even Coca-cola can't get customers to pay for the 'privilege' of watching their TV ads.
Slashdot Mirror
It's humbling to realize I'm no better qualified to be an 'astronaut' than I am to be an astronaut.
Nice!
The problem overall with depriving someone of a satellite on the sly is after three or so uses of any method, it's not sly any more. Nothing scales up economically for repeat use, because any sudden rash of satellite failures would have their deployer thinking it can't be coincidence to lose that many that quickly.
Ergo, any method used is likely to be either a one shot attack, or an overwhelming attack against all an enemy's space capability (which, whatever else it is, won't be sly) - nothing in between. Governments are actually highly averse to funding one shot, in extremis programs such as killer asteroid stopping missions. Exceptions for clear and present danger may exist, but (to get back to the topic) it's unlikely if the 37b is part of one of them.
Most small businesses that are service related have at least one Point Of Sale machine up front at their physical store, but the person operating it is also the person who makes appointments, so they just about have to be able to bring up a scheduler and appointment manager. A separate terminal for appointments is a serious cost, as would be keeping separate people to operate it, or training across skill sets (your cosmetologist or hair stylist or auto mechanic now needs to be trained to schedule appointments and take payments - and to log out or whatever every time they go back to what they think of as their main job - that's already likely to create an environment with much more serious security problems than having POS run other programs).
When your auto mechanics make 25 an hour, the solution is to hire a receptionist at half that, but splitting that job to a clerk for payments and a 'customer service associate' for scheduling appointments just wiped out much of the savings you would normally get by keeping the more skilled workers on their primary jobs. Meanwhile customers are constantly going to the 'wrong' desk to try to do the 'wrong' task there (Yes, even if there's a big sign saying "Payments" hanging over one desk - many customers go to whichever one's closest, and they can't all be closest).
I work for a large company, a fortune 500 - the 'skilled professionals' usually float between multiple offices to handle appointments (one of my areas of specialization is taxation and planning on author's often very irregular royalties, particularly as those of the deceased authors are being passed through LLCs set up for their heirs - you can imagine how that increases my normal operations range, but several of my co-workers have some area that they support, but for which the market is simply too spread out to draw all the customers into one location. I put up with the driving by scheduling several clients in the same area back to back, and because I often get free autographed copies as tips). Even for us, a secretary handling both appointments and payments on the same machine is common, especially where the physical layout of an office doesn't allow a separate entire room for a separate client manager to handle the appointment process. Plus, we have pros both constructing their billable hours statements and scheduling for themselves, to further link the processes.
Since some of our pros are self scheduling at distant locations, our appointment manager actually runs as an Internet app! Of course, we have VPN, damned good encryption, and UNIX based systems between anything Windows and the net, but still, I can't see most small companies doing all those things, yet they may face the same sort of problems, and the others I have outlined above, and probably many more. Saying POS should always run on a dedicated machine by itself is saying that there has to be some other good solution to all these sorts of issues, and if you really have that, there are people who would gladly pay you at least 500 K a year to implement it.
Numbers such as 2/3rds follow naturally from genuinely logical grounds. The most basic possible situation for any system with elected representation is for a simple majority to carry all votes. Since (usually) there might be situations with an even number of members voting, a 50/50 split becomes a possibilty in most cases, so the situation naturally leads to developing some tie breaker rule (such as 'vice president votes, but only to break ties').
Once you have at least this level of complexity, it usually makes sense to people that some particular types of votes need to carry by more than a simple 51 to 49 squeakingly close ratio. For example, would anyone want to go into a war based on a very slight majority? Since it is likely that there will be setbacks in any war, that would often leave the group, a few months after the war started, taking another vote, and having to extricate themselves from a war immediately no matter how awkward or dangerous that might be.
Or take any project that might take more than one term to complete. A very close vote could mean that next year, or next election cycle, or whenever, there was not enough support to continue the project. How would it be if the US had spent enough on the interstate highway system to connect 17 states and then stopped because two or three senators had been replaced. (Or for most slashdotters, if the space program had gotten as far as Gemini but not Apollo, because of an equally minor change in legislators).
If you want to make it more likely that big projects, once started, will be finished, the easiest way is to require a supermajority to start them, and only a simple majority to continue them once started.
Once somebody decides to set a threshold higher, a simple rule change, such as requiring 60%, or 2/3rds, or 75%, seems better than an odder, more arbitrary sounding change, such as 57.6 %. 75% (3/4) seems very intense, maybe fair to require to start a war, but too big a threshold for most purposes, so the simple ratios considered are usually either 2/3rds or 3/5ths. 3/5ths actually wins out more often than 2/3rds world wide, as it's usually seen as large enough to do the job.
People already convicted, particularly where it is based largely on these particular officers' testimonies, will also appeal, and the resulting costs will have to be paid even where it leaves the locality short of funds for new trials. The officers are not just worthless in the future, they have grossly negative worth in the eyes of the system, even if the system can somehow minimize the negative publicity.
We have RIAA sources claiming that ALL torrenting involves illegal files, and clueless judges who seem to believe them, and you have to ask why USENET beats torrents for legitimate binaries? Uhm, maybe because the crazy and clueless that seem to be running all too much of our society might just point to the torrent software itself as part of their 'proof' you were pirating their content.
Maybe some local cop has heard just enough about Bittorrent to 'think' he knows you are up to no good, or some person you work with 'thinks' you're stealing content just for mentioning torrents. As long as the industry shills continue to spin torrents as 100% for illegal purposes, why not use something they don't talk about, at least as much.
You've been modded funny, but just think, what happens if a court makes a legal ruling that:
a: Souls do not exist and so a contract for one can't be arbitrated or enforced on that point.
b: Souls definitely do exist and are infinitely valuable because there is a God who redeems them via immortality.
b: Souls do exist, but they have only a finite value that can be controlled by the government because no religion that says they are immortal is true.
How many of the people who gave you your funny will be laughing three tenths of a second after they hear the entire courtroom was taken out with a rocket propelled grenade and someone is hanging local government officials with the sign "Antichrist" (Or "Apostate of the Koran", or "Papist" or "Heretic" or whatever) around their necks? Hell, even Buddhists and Atheists sometimes kill over questions like this, and my own religion is full of aggressive nutcases (Yes, I'm a Protestant). The poor judge who has to deal with this will be walking on eggshells to avoid any ruling that even mentions whether souls exist or how much they are worth.
A few weeks ago, I bought a pack of candy. The gummy objects inside consisted of two shapes - long squiggly lines and closed circles. They had two groups of colors, warm reds and oranges and cool blues and greens, matched to the shapes. They also were dividable by sweet and sour, again with tartness matched to shape and color group.
Hey, I realized, the whole candy is binary bits, testable by any of several senses to determine state. Now who needs several different ways of reading the same binary bit? Obviously, there are at least three alien species making these things. When the bits show up on Earth, we package them and eat them, but somewhere else, they are being sequenced and stuck to very large drive platters (Obviously why they are slightly self adhesive). This explains why aliens haven't contacted us in person. Being all very large species (as their lack of miniturization in data technology should show, but if they didn't start out titanic, they have obviously grown that way from eating so many candy bits during erase operations), travel costs are proportionately magnified.
I really dislike apathy in the face of aggression.
Oh, but one Republican Representitive (Michelle Bachmann) evidently thinks an appropriate response to a cyber-attack is to NUKE somebody. Crank up the Dial-A-Yield, make their cities glow, let's make Leetspeak a language only spoken in Hell.
What the hell, apathy doesn't sound so bad, if it just keeps someone like her from starting Armageddon over some 14 year old script kiddee trying to deface Apple's website. In fact, apathy is starting to sound pretty promising. You want me to feel guilty about apathy, first you get the rabid psychopaths out of office, then I'll consider it. For now, make mine apathy! APATHY FOR THE WIN!!!
Yes, I believe I WILL stand there like a coward. You keep telling people how serious this all could be, to obscure the fact that we have at least one certifiable homicidal maniac in high office, and her handlers want just the line you are parroting put out to help her avoid being turned out for it.
It's 'amazing' how athletic healthy people carrying M-16's and sticking together in large groups 'never' get picked out by rapists.
When people getting paid 360 K a year are giving people who get paid 50 K (or less) economic advice, is it any wonder the poorer people believe it uncritically? The people who showed some caution were encouraged to abandon it. Only the ones who were both really well informed and generally suspicious sorts failed to fall for the line. What those uninformed people were uninformed about included that most of the regulations protecting them were no longer in place. Would you get a second opinion for a doctor's visit? Maybe. Would you get a third, and a fourth, and check each doctor's entire practice history, school grades, and every credential you see on his wall?
As one of my co-workers pointed out, Predatory Lending aimed at the poorest includes interest rates above 36%. Just one person who takes out a loan they can't pay at 36% undoes the good 18 more responsible people do by saving, if the average savings account is only paying 2%. You can extend this to housing. People with the level of income to realistically become home owners can probably get 2.75 to 3.5% by using CDs and similar instruments, so it's not as bad as the case of poorer people with only small savings possible, but still... When an adjustable rate mortgage hits 15% (as some did), one person's bad decision outweighs four or five good decisions in terms of overall economic effects.
You're not demanding that the average person become better informed, you are demanding that the bottom 10 to 20% of the demographic stop making the mistakes the rest of us are now paying for. Do I really need to show you why that's not going to happen? Meanwhile, some of us are demanding the rules be changed so the system can't make record profits from targeting the stupidest (or at least the least informed). We're blaming the people who cooked the rulebooks as much more guilty than the people at the bottom. There's always someone dumb enough to buy the Brooklyn Bridge - you will never eliminate the last potential sucker. We can still create proper rules against the guy trying to sell them the bridge, and enforce them.
Let's do a non-car analogy (I must be new around here).
Let's say you are the victim of a real crime, like some thief took your wheelbarrow out of your backyard. They even really climbed your fence to get to it. You call the cops, and you claim they took your coin collection and your mink coat too. Then you add that they shot your dog, so the cops now think the thief is probably armed and dangerous. Should you be busted for filing a false police report? Let's say you report the theft the same way when describing your losses on your taxes. Should the IRS have any objections?
OK, for the analogizing impaired:
Copyright violation = a real crime, just as theft does. That doesn't mean CV = Theft, just that both are crimes and both at least can result in damages.
Climbing the Fence = DMCA violations, smuggling cameras into movie theatres and such.
Inflating the loss = What the RIAA is doing here. Duh!
Armed and Dangerous = The RIAA claiming without proof, as they have, that piracy raises funds for terrorism or drug cartels. For that matter, using the loaded term "Pirates", unless we are ignoring that real pirates shoot people, feed them to sharks, and otherwise are by reputation mostly violent criminals not sneaky ones.
False Police Report = False testimony to Congress, statements by lobbyists.
Tax Fraud = Gravely overstating your potential market value as an investment if the law can just stop your losses from piracy, as various RIAA filings in public stock reports have done for many quarters (but it's the SEC, not the IRS that should care about this).
But who's the betrayer here? Somebody 'pirates' from the RIAA's instead of buying content, that's at least arguably betraying a trust. The RIAA, by your line, can treat them however they want. But then there's Joe Honest Taxpayer. he hasn't 'betrayed' anybody. So, if the RIAA lies about how bad piracy is, how destructive to the economy its effects are, how much need there is for Joe Honest Taxpayer to pay the extra costs to step up enforcement, etc., that's the RIAA 'betraying' Joe. If you're not a pirate, that's the RIAA betraying you.
A frightening portion of people with good paying jobs got there by getting less well paid people to know more and do more for free, and think it always works. The same goes for the investors at the top. They are the same crowd that demands the government step in and help them keep their positions, and yet tithes regularly to various think tanks and pundits that preach the virtues of 'unfettered capitalism'. Anything approaching a free market would result in them being kicked into the gutters, often literally.
I'm not sure why this counts as news for nerds, without at least revealing the oh-so-useful details of what vendor and software we are discussing. The type of abuse of business partners, governments and the public at large as described happens just about equally in non-tech areas. It does much more damage than this vulnerability has even the slightest potential to do in areas such as the chemical industries. (To avoid being as unspecific as the writer, I'll suggest anyone who wants to can google for "Canton" or "Little Pidgeon River" plus "Papermill" for just one example).
No, Dark matter isn't a superheavy element, inert or otherwise.
Here's why:
We have some observations of nearby spiral galaxies, that seem to show dark matter. It is revealed by gravitational influences on the visible parts of those galaxies. These include the speed the visible parts rotate at, around galactic centers that are probably supermassive black holes. The speed of rotation doesn't fall off according to the normal square/cube function for gravity, and adding enough conventional type matter to get anything like the observed numbers for motions means that conventional matter would all be trying to fall into the center, not exist as a rather extended cloud that show effects all the way to outside the major arms of the spiral galaxy.
Either we see galaxies of some somewhat differing ages and seriously differing sizes and masses, and yet somehow, all of them have a cloud of normal but unilluminated matter, that is at a particular stage of infall, and all of those galaxies will be past that stage within a very few million years, or else they are surrounded by something that isn't normal matter, and doesn't want to pack down as tight as normal matter, or start clumping enough to shine like stars as normal matter does. Astronomers don't like theories that say we are observing a very statistically unusual and unstable state that just happens to look like a normal condition from our especially privileged viewpoint. Ergo, there's some kind of matter that won't fit on the periodic table no matter how much you extend it.
Now just what other restrictions there are, that's debatable. When dark matter was first proposed, it was supposed to make the whole universe have enough mass that it was just barely, exactly, geometrically flat (that is, it wouldn't expand quite forever, wouldn't have an overall curvature that counted as either 'open' or 'closed', and certain other numbers, such as the Hubble constant, would be exactly enough to give us a universe with what is called an omega of exactly 1). Some theories also proposed a role in this for what was/is called dark energy.
Recent observations of very distant galaxies have revealed a lot of previously unaccounted for normal matter, enough that normal matter may make up much more of the universe as a whole than we thought for about the last thirty years. Maybe that's even enough to mean we don't need much or any dark matter at all to make omega = 1. But, we now have actual observations of what appears to be some kind of dark matter. So even if one of the original reasons for suspecting dark matter existed is invalid, and even if we could be certain there isn't as much of the universe made of dark matter as that reason suggested, now we have to explain the observations that say there is at least some dark matter around.
The Iran invasion doesn't help the US prove they have deterrence in mind at all. Afghanistan may hurt that claim even more, but that depends on how long it drags on and what comes out about drug connections in the interim.
But, the president's policy is in keeping with a deterrence based system for Nuclear war. First, it limits use of Nukes to respond to chemical or bio warfare, and in particular it says we won't escalate to nukes for a lot of the very chem or bio type attacks that everyone else knew we would have to be crazy to respond to with nukes. To put it a bit more simply, we now know there's more to the world situation than two big superpowers that can Mutually Assure each other's Destruction (MAD), and we're not going to cling to deliberately acting irrational as a method of psyching 'the other side' out. Promising you're not going to deliberately fake crazy any more fits with not using nukes for leverage, posturing, or national vanity, so deterrence is one of the few uses left.
Yes, focusing the conventional military forces on deterrence and not using them for economic leverage, posturing or vanity, either, would send the same message better than just sending it via changes in a mostly secret and difficult to verify set of nuclear responses, but some steps are better than no steps.
Without giving away too much on the first episode of the season, watch for the one word sentence "Run!" directed at quite a different listener than David Tennant's version usually was.
The Doctor - a man with two hearts, constantly promoting cardiovascular fitness.
First, thanks for taking the time to reclaim your comment.
Second, while I'm not sure of why the OP thought the drug issue mattered, I can tell you why I think it might:
This has been argued mostly on the lines of educating young people about the dangers of driving fast, and the level of privacy to be expected there. But if this relates to serious drug usage, the question is, what steps are appropriate to educate young people about knowing when drugs are making family and social problems worse, or recognizing bad coping strategies before they snowball. What's appropriate to do to reduce traffic fatalities that are likely to always exist in some numbers so long as inexperienced drivers have to learn somehow, and what's appropriate to reduce illegal drug related deaths where we already have taken steps such as criminalizing the behavior, may not be the same thing. We (as a society) have been pushing cops to reveal bad consequences of illegal drug use as part of what are ostensibly education programs - for example the various timelapse photos of prostitutes busted multiple times while they are also meth addicts. I'm not at all certain that's what the OP was implying, but maybe that's a real issue.
When he pointed out that at least four of the cases involved were actually resolved with the court recognizing the free speech rights of named human individuals and not just their corporate connections, he DID prove the GP wrong. He DID look up, and counter the claim, despite the references being provided in a fashion that made it more difficult.
Claiming that corporate standing was necessary to protect an individual in Hustler v. Falwell is particularly egregious, as if that were true, the subsequent State v. Flynt case would have to be construed as an attempt to bypass that very same protection and the only way it could possibly prove the GP's point would be if Larry Flynt lost.
While we're at it, Dartmouth College is actually largely about sanctity of contract, and the specific points covered in the decision are pre-constitutional common law matters which should apply equally well whether any of the people entering the contract are forming a corporation, representing a corporation, or otherwise connected to a corporation, or not, so make that at least five.
If each person who owns part of a corp gets a vote, why doesn't the corporation get an extra vote so the owners end up with more votes than the 'little people'?
Why can't I start, say, a thousand corporations at 50$ each and have each one sign my petition, so I can automatically get enough signatures to get my referendum on the ballot if I just have enough money? For that matter, why can't I have them all vote for me, or one of themselves? If I can get the death penalty, why can't they give a corporation a lethal injection? If a corporation gets its rights before it turns 21, why did I have to wait? There are year old corporations buying beer by the truckload even as we speak.
There's no tax at all on corporations now...
Oh, you meant "C" corps - yeah, that type of corporation faces income taxes. They get limited liability for them. The founders could have structured them as pass through entities with no corporate taxes instead. While it's not always easy, the current owners could still restructure their corp as one or more 'S's, LLCs, partnerships, or a whole interlocking series of such types now if they really wanted to get out of paying corporate taxes. If they wanted to pick some states for their headquarters, there are even additional options beyond the ones above. But, doing any of those makes them fully liable for their mistakes, and they would lose corporate 'personhood' as well. C corps stick with their status voluntarily, because they like what the taxes they pay gets them far better than they like competing on a level playing field.
Motive matters in some cases because we can hold more than a single, direct perpetrator guilty of the same crime. We can, for example, charge the get-away driver with bank robbery, even though he never entered the bank.
Right now in the US, there's a young girl accused of conspiracy to commit attempted murder, because she allegedly pointed out the victim to the assailant. Her motive certainly matters. Did she want at least a fight to happen? The principal assailant's motive probably doesn't matter as much in this case, maybe not at all.
As long as more than one person can be guilty for contributing the same single act, motive must be considered, or tremendous injustices would become not just possible but the norm. I'd suspect that's also the general case even where there is only one criminal, but I can see some counter arguments there.
Conies are Rabbits, and six of them should properly be counted as three braces of conies and then eaten by Frodo, Sam, and Gollum.
To have sex with somebody, you have to find a partner, normally one person that agrees to have sex with you. Even people whose preferences are statistical outliers usually manage to find other people who share them. Even where some people try hard to stop other people having certain kinds of sex, the attempts to stop it are seldom even 50% effective.
To use condoms regularly and actually get the benefits, you have to be able to get them from a reliable source, such as a pharmacy or planned parenthood. Attempts to stop these sources from distributing condoms can easily be 80 or 90% effective. Any reasonably repressive dictatorship can make condom use rare as chicken's lips if that becomes a goal, but probably can't do much at all to enforce abstenence instead.
The point is, someone pretending to be you may or may not be harming you. If someone gave your name after pulling a little child from the path of a runaway bus, have they hurt you? Someone who defrauds a bank harms the bank. If they did that fraud by pretending to be you they still harm the bank, but the bank passes the costs on to you, calls it identity theft instead of fraud, and doesn't have to deal with the consequences of being tricked by a fraudster themselves (or at least, doesn't have to deal with as many of them.). Being able to label some acts of fraud as identity theft and pass the consequences on, even when the bank makes basic mistakes that make fraud easy, means the bank doesn't have to exercise normal caution or train their employees to reasonable standards.
It's a phrase like 'age discrimination'. Many people still discriminate against some race or other, or against some other groups, but there really are not a lot of people who hate middle aged or older people. There are very, very few who think the average 40 year old is senile, feeble, or likely to die before the get trained enough to work. People in hiring discriminate against older employees frequently, but it's mostly because of insurance cost issues, not because there's the sort of widespread hate for older people that there was for, say Blacks in Selma Alabama, the first day one tried to sit at a lunch counter. 'Age discrimination' is a lie, a phrase designed to cloak that the real problem is essentially entirely fixed around current insurance company practices and not because of stereotyping or other normal causes of prejudice. 'Identity theft' is a lie in much the same way.
If the companies really focus on a quick profit margin in the first couple of weeks, as another poster has claimed, why do they also want to sell downloadable content? It's not a realistic model to expect to maximize profits everywhere at once. Some area has to be your number one focus - the other options can't all be your primary revenue sources too.
I know there are companies out there that get people to pay for the 'privilege' of displaying their advertising on tee-shirts, but even Coca-cola can't get customers to pay for the 'privilege' of watching their TV ads.