That's not can't, it's won't. The only line I ever had in a film was "Rodger, We just want.. yer Brainzzzz!", but for Shatner, I could have flubbed the take.
(Yes, I've played a zombie, in a 70's indy film that actually got released, although I don't think it ever made back its costs.).
No, it didn't. Just look at who is holding subprime paper. Take out all the loans to white borrowers who specifically don't live in opportunity zones, and you are already down to less than 30% of subprime loans. Apply any other standards that seem reasonable, such as loans on homes valued at over $ 500,000, loans on houses priced over the median for their neighborhood, city, or entire state, or just about any other criterion a professional would use to select the loans actually driven by the 'fair housing opportunity' law, and you will end up with less than a quarter of the subprime loans being created, in even the tiniest part, by equal opportunity demands. Depending on just what criteria different experts use, the most accurate number might be as low as 12%. I'm not saying that absolutely nothing the government did made this even the tiniest bit worse, but the problem originated with the lenders.
Then there are lots of other derivitives, not based on subprimes, that are in the process of going belly up just as these did. They were oversold in just the same ways, they got AAA ratings misapplied to them in the same ways, and you will be hearing about the new crisis they generate within a few months at most. None of them have anything in particular to do with government social engineering. Watch what BS explanations you hear as these chickens come home to roost, from the same people who are blaming this one on the government.
As I understand it, the Ayers quote was "I didn't do enough", not 'plant' enough. He claims (at least since a few weeks before 9/11) that it's not specifically about bombs or even other violence. Maybe he's spinning it, maybe if anyone had asked him the same questions in the late 70's or 80's it would have been different, but yes, the context there probably matters. Deciding whether Ayers really counted as a terrorist or not means first reading up on COINTELPRO, considering all that the plethora of double agents, false flag operations, and such may imply about what he could be and how reliable the evidence is, and then you would probably have to read a few interviews or whole letters. Some reasonable people might still decide Ayers was a terrorist, but there's definitely arguments both ways, more than there are for Kaczynski.
A context where his remarks are not incendiary? No way. Even without knowing anything about Ayer's history, without the press identifying where the quotes come from, Ayers has said plenty that would still be devisive. If he was posting here, -1 Flamebait mods would swiftly follow.
Pascal was one of the very early researchers into probability, and his wager was set up as a model probabilistic situation simple enough to be studied, in a field that was just beginning. When Pascal created it, phrases such as "non-zero probability" didn't exist yet, and wouldn't until people had reasoned about Pascal's wager, and thousands of other word problems, enough to see a need for such phrases. It's thus not very applicable to the real world, just a tool for teaching some very basic parts of probability math.
Imagine a very early problem in dynamics, where you have to ignore friction, and nobody has yet figured out how you can have signed terms for velocity, and there's no calculus yet so you can't create a formula for acceleration from what little you do know about the velocity. Pascal's Wager is like that.
Most people when they talk about God have it all wrapped up with other issues, like the survival of consciousness after death, eternal reward or punishment, omnescience and omnipotence, and many others. They even have very specific definitions of those concepts in mind. For example, if they don't like the concept of God, they often assume that God, if 'He" exists, must know everything, even where knowing certain things simultaneously supposedly creates a paradox. They then point to that paradox as proof God doesn't exist. It becomes a definition problem - Is it still fair to call something God if it only knows as much as can be known, and there are things which simply can't be known? Should we refuse to call something God if it can't make a four sided triangle?
Ideas such as the soul, supernatural phenomena, gods, life after death, heaven, enlightenment, miracles, worship, omnipotence and so on, aren't monolithic. It's logically quite possible that one or more of these things could exist without the others existing at all. Whether you would want to define a being that was morally perfect, but didn't have unlimited power, as God, is a philosophical choice. (as is the reverse, a being that is morally flawed but has unlimited power). Linking all sorts of concepts together, and not defining some of those concepts, lets people engage in circular reasoning. That doesn't mean nobody has ever done better - plenty of people, both in various religions and in the great philosophies, have gone to great efforts to define terms, and avoid at least the most obvious errors.
Unfortunately 90% or more of the discussions on places such as Slashdot will be between people who haven't ever read anything by the people who have done better, and who think their latest point has never been proposed by anyone else before.
Employment rights lawsuits wouldn't fall under the federal tax code, but would be settled in the state where the volunteer filed, or according to the laws of the state of incorporation. Without knowing whether the CCF has volunteers sign agreements making them subject to the rules of the state of incorporation in settling civil suits, I don't know which would apply. Non-discrimination lawsuits might fall under the federal statutes, but there are most certainly states that would be willing to become the venues for state suits against a non-profit that has had status revoked as well, if past example serves. (i.e. State of New York (under Elliot Spitzer) vs Persaud). So NO, state of incorporation doesn't (at least in this case) have any effect on federal tax treatment. But YES state of incorporation could affect other possible litigation if non-profit status is first revoked in federal court, both with respect to location (as I've already indicated), and likely in many other respects as well.
No, I think the convention may have broken the law, because I am a liscenced expert in tax law for non-profits, and I would have advised the convention organizers in the strongest possible terms not to do any of several things it appears they may have done, or expect the IRS to come after them with baseball bats. I'll never know for sure unless the government bothers to move on this, or the convention organizers voluntarily explain just what they did and didn't do. They haven't, and the government is (usually) somewhat rational and (usually) doesn't get all excited about a technical violation that appears motivated by simple ignorance rather than intent to profit. So all I can go on is my best guesses as to what happened.
How could the convention have broken the law, you say? All it would take is for the organizers to publicize before the event that it would help raise money for the CCF. The convention is a for-profit organization. Even if they donate some money to charity, they are still holding the convention for profit. Using the charity's name in advertising means they have used it to possibly increase profits. If the CCF appears to have assisted them in increasing their profits, then the CCF has worked as an agency of a for-profit, which means they are themselves are now a for-profit, just like an ad agency or law firm working for that same for-profit. The CCF's legal role is not about helping anybody make a profit, and they can't afford to lose their non-profit status.
Worse, the convention goes on, year to year. So even if they didn't announce anything until after the convention started, the news can affect next year's profits, even if it's just announced at the convention, after this year's memberships are all sold. If a non-profit has to get into this situation, a convention is one of the worst cases, where just about any mistake raises the significant threat of legal action.
How to avoid this? The convention would have to stress in their ads and anywhere else the CCF is mentioned, that this wasn't done with the collusion of the CCF, and the CCF hasn't sanctioned the event. That's all that's really necessary. Give the money wherever the for-profit wants, but include legal boilerplate that says the charity isn't saying you should go to this convention instead of the competition, etc. The CCF itself will help any organization wanting to give, by providing a prewritten set of legal disclaimers, or even getting their own legal advisors to work on it as needed, (done, I believe, pro bono in the CCF's case). By the CCF's explanation, apparently the convention didn't bother, so the charity now has to bend over backwards to avoid that appearance of collusion, or risk losing their non-profit status. Most charities do this by filing suit for at least a nominal amount to establish the legal record. The CCF has preferred to turn the other cheek and trust that no one in the IRS or Justice dept. thinks they colluded just because a D&D convention didn't follow all the legal steps they should have.
You can imagine this all comes down to tax receipts and call it spin if you want. I don't know if the CCF thinks you are stupid or not, but I certainly do now. You are a fool, who is trying to twist the facts to support his blind hatred, and ignoring well meant advice from people who know far more than you do on the subject. Reply all you want. I'm letting it drop now, because I don't like how much I find myself hating a damned vicious fool who will probably pay big prices many times throughout the rest of his life to cling to his hatred.
Gencon is a for profit. there are limits on what a charity can take from a for profit corporation, particularly with regard to whether it can give an endorsement in return. There are legal reasons why they can't take the money. For just one, CCF apparently has a clause in their charter of incorporation that says they don't endorse anything, even other non-profits, without working the details out in advance. Violating that charter itself means they can lose their 501 (c)(3) status. For another, US law limits what they or any charity can do with regards to a 'for profit', just as it does a PAC. For more on this, please read what I have posted to this thread already.
If that someone conducted a for profit event, and used your name in its publicity, in announcements made on site, and so on, yes there's an endorsement. For a repeat event, even announcements made after the convention started, which might serve to make people feel they had done something good by attending, and thus make them more likely to come back next year, have a potential effect on profits, and so count as an endorsement of that profit making activity. If you don't like that, you need to challenge a very large body of common law that says there is an endorsement in such things.
I've already explained in this thread, the consequences the CCF may have been risking if they took this money. All that depends, of course, on the details of how the convention management organized and publicized the event, which we don't know from the article. There are plenty of cases where a charity has sued over misuse of its name in connection with an unsanctioned event, both to protect its trademarked identity and to distance themselves from any charges that they are party to jointly violating the law regarding charities. The CCF is evidently confident this does not rise to that level, or they feel their reputation as a charity is good enough that they are not at serious risk of being blamed if the convention management has broken the law.
Given the limited facts in the article, there appears no chance the CCF has broken the law, and some chance that the convention, at least technically, has, although there is no reason to think they intended to derive any profit from their association with the CCF's name, and so most DA's would not want to follow up on it beyond a letter telling them to get their ducks in a row. But go ahead, call them names.
For any non-profit that wishes to preserve 501 status and such under the U S legal code, there are big differences in how to handle money that comes from a private person, another non-profit or a for profit entity. There are also some differences in what has to be done if money was raised by a non-profit organization with an advance agreement, or if it wasn't. This sounds like the convention either advertised that membership would help some money go to the CCF without having an advance agreement, or that there's an issue with whether the convention itself is a non-profit entity, in the full, liscensed, legal sense.
If the CCF doesn't act this way, they can do more than risk tarnishing their image. They can even lose their legal status as a non-profit. One result of this would be that any retirement funds their employees have set up (403-B's), even if funded all with the employee's own money, aren't legitimate, and all those employees would owe back taxes and penalties and interest on those taxes, for at least the last year, maybe longer. Another result is that the CCF could be sued for back wages 'owed' people who were unpaid volunteers. A third is that they would have to meet equal opportunity hiring guidelines for all those 'employees', and since they probably have no records of having ever given their management staff the necessary guidance as to conducting mandatory nondiscriminatory employee evaluations for those volunteers, they would automatically be guilty under law of discrimination should even a single person bring suit.
Since it was set up as a non-profit, the CCF has probably not incorporated under the rules of a corp friendly state such as Delaware. They might even face such lawsuits in a state such as New York or California.
But go ahead, people, make this all about nasty Christians who hate your hobby.
So you need to take other steps, such as lobbying for a system you like, and make it clear that's why you refuse to vote. Do some action, whether it's writing the politicians you disagree with least, or passing out paper, getting signatures on petitions, or explaining to interested people how you would do away with the winner takes all systems, or whatever. Do it looking like a nut on a soapbox if you must, or find more professional looking ways, but do it.
I voted early this year, and there was a couple there who went in and voted as I was waiting, then took up positions beyond the 100 foot line and passed out fliers, while explaining they had voted in the local election, but had not voted for the presidential and vice presidential offices because they were opposed to the electoral college.
Do something, and your opinion will count again, you will be entitled to complain, and you'll still have several years to regret what happens, but at least you can feel you're less responsible than the lazy people who did nothing.
That 'outright sadistic' is why I don't play Nethack. I quit after a beginning character stepped on a trapdoor, landed on a trapdoor on the next level, landed on a teleport trap on the third level that sent him two more levels down, only to land on (you guess it) another trapdoor.
No one who did that to my character in a pen and paper RPG would ever get me back to the table. I've thrown people out of conventions for doing that sort of thing to other paying members when running tournaments (and I point out, every organized gaming convention, without exception, will readily do just that to stop the cases of sadistic abuse that sometimes happen, and has a public posted policy on just that point in the membership and/or staff kits).
Some companies who feel they are losing customers thanks to sadistic GMing keep a joint industry blacklist of referees who have abused players in sanctioned tournaments that way, just to curb the 'outright sadistic' conduct. Back 30 years ago, Gary Gygax sometimes told bad DMs he observed that they were never to DM ever again, and instructed TSR's mail order dept to refuse to sell to those people so as to put some teeth into it.
Oh, but this is a computer game, that makes it different. No, it doesn't. All the good features of Nethack you've cited, the neat options for character class and so on, would make a great game, maybe the best game evah! BUT not with the 'outright sadistic' parts.
I've had legal dealings roughly 30 times with people who are not the original creators, but own something 'IP'ish - either because they are the heirs of an estate, or because they got it in lieu of normal payment for debts. Over half those times, the new owners seemed to seriously overvalue the item, and by seriously, I mean thinking it was worth its weight in flawless blue white diamonds. Creditor/Debtor relationships seem to be a bit less skewed in this respect than estates, but it's still pretty common.
If you look at the financial history of the great depression era, particularly with regard to magazine story and sheet music rights, there are huge chains of companies which got awarded assets upon their debtor's failures, and held out for way too much in turn, even as they were going bankrupt themselves. There are chains where the property was transferred by a court ordered bankruptcy times 25 times in a decade, which would mean the average case for them was a company ignoring all offers for a work even though they faced bankruptcy within, on average, less than five months. We know the offers happened, because the courts used that fact to evaluate how to split assets among multiple creditors equitably. Even if you believe we aren't currently in anything approaching a full scale depression, that still looks like a good model of what to expect today.
There's a semi-fair chance that a receiver will realize that taking 5 cents on the dollar for the server code is better than any other deal they might get. But if not, expect them to set the price like the MMO is a sure fire World of Warcraft killer, plus some.
Look at the last episodes of new season 4. The Daleks are incredibly powerful, and there's a certain Deus Ex quality to the near regeneration that turns out not to be, and to the ending. But still, the 'good guys' are constantly trying some trick or other, many of which cause real problems for the Daleks even if they don't eliminate the whole menace. At one point, the Daleks think they have killed Jack, and of course, he gets better, (but that's no surprise to the regular viewers). The Daleks keep thinking they have won various small victories such as capturing various companions, and many times the audience knows immediately they really haven't. By the second half, various of the Daleks enemies have managed to sumggle in dimension hopping devices, powerful explosives, big guns, various communicators, and a supposedly destroyed TARDIS, and the audience gets to see half a dozen setbacks for the Daleks in process. It actually looks pretty likely that at least some of this will come together into a final, successful plan.
In the end, it's a heavily bootstrapped Donna to the rescue, which is only obvious in retrospect from a few clues in previous episodes, but still, all through the two shows, the Doctor's whole side is proactive, and every single former companion, (and even some of the Torchwood cast that have never actually met the Doctor) demonstrates how they have been preparing advance contingency plans for just such crises as this one. That's really pretty rare in TV, where the heros usually just react to the more proactive villians until the last little bit of the show.
Actually, Rowan Atkinson has been The Doctor before - Google: "Dr. Who and the Curse of Fatal Death" for details. (It should all count, dammit. There have thus been at least 14 reincarnations through Tennant, including Joanna Lumley and Hugh Grant. Throw them out, and what's your justification for including McCoy? Plus tossing Lumley is sexist.).
A third thing the electoral college does is it supports the use of early voting. It serves as a safety net. In the (unlikely) event that something changes significantly within the last few weeks leading up to an election, the electors can generally change their votes. If you vote early, and your candidate gets caught, three days before the election, "with a live boy or a dead girl"*, the college could very well end up doing what you would really want them to, based on the news. 21 states don't have specific laws against what are sometimes called faithless electors, and most of the others have only small penalties, or allow it in specific circumstances. There have been, from the 2004 election back to the founding, only 156 electors who have cast their votes differently than they promised. 71 of these did so because the candidate they were pledged to died before the electoral college met, which actually makes sense.
*that's a common shorthand phrase for anything scandalous or criminal enough that most voters would wish they had voted for just about anyone else. It doesn't mean people who feel that way are right to equate the two, just that the candidate would have to do something the public at large was really opposed to, not something they would let slide.
Bankers not in jail definitely applies as well to Great Britain, Germany, and Italy, at the very least. I can also think of other examples - just for starters, Somali piracy is increasing. It's exactly the sort of thing that needs 'nipped in the bud', and it's mostly the European states that are affected, and are responsible for not having the will to do something about it - When the Russians have a boatload of tanks stolen, it's much more a specifically Russian problem than when those same pirates hijack a normal cargo ship that only peripherally affects the US. Or take the many kidnappings for ransom in Mexico by drug gangs. Somebody in the USA is doing something right, since there's been only one attempt to spread that north of the border, and that quickly collapsed with the hostage released unharmed. Maybe somebody there got the memo in time.
Suppose the table is displaying an organizational chart. You might want to display details for one branch to that branch's supervisor, but omit all the details for another branch. You could want this for legal reasons, i.e. employee privacy, or just to focus on the part the supervisor needed to know.
When I was in the army, for a time I was with a maintenance troop. There were dozens of vehicles, many of which were duplicates, and those vehicles normally loaded lots of tools and parts. There might be five vehicles equipped for servicing HUMVEEs, and two sets of two for swapping out tank engines, and only one vehicle for small arms repair. There might be a type of tool only carried on one of those vehicles, and another type that there were two sets of it on every single vehicle. We drew plenty of branching tree views, which told the NCO responsible for a certain section, what vehicles he or she had, what soldiers with what job descriptions were supposed to be on board, what shop tools mounted, what personally issued weapons, toolboxes, and camping gear went on each truck or tracked vehicle, right down to what camoflage screening (by shape and pattern, it comes in diamonds and hexes, and in desert, snow, eastern woodland, and probably twenty other color combinations, plus it all has poles, patch kits, and so on), how many full cans of what lubricants, how many sheets of gasket material or 3/4 inch UNC lagbolts were supposed to be on them. Being able to tap a few keys, and show the guy responsible for ordering drums of transmission fluid just what the last inventory had shown, unit wide, for that item only, and what vehicles were short, would have made his job a lot easier.
And the Army likes tracing paper. The underlying idea being that a map with a bullethole in it is still a good map, while the fancy electronic device with a bullethole in it is now a paperweight. You could extend this principle to a lot of work outdoors, at heights, or in dirty conditions.
Every good employee you have is an already selected and prescreened applicant for other jobs you might need done. He or she is already familiar with the company, knows many of the other employees, and you've already completed a bunch of paperwork on them. If he or she were lazy or inefficient or crooked, presumably you would have fired them, not waited until there was an excuse to lay them off. When you lay them off, they go elsewhere, and then when you need another job done, you have to pick from a bunch of unscreened applicants, fill out new paperwork, train somebody in the basics of your corporate culture, and re-incur a lot of costs you already paid once. Doing a lot of layoffs is basically committing to shrink for months after the cause of the layoffs ends, months in which a smart competitor may grow. Something like increases in efficiency should mean your company will grow, and therefore need more people in the long run. Layoffs there are the same as betting your increased efficiency won't, by itself, improve your bottom line.
I would suspect it can handle an image with a great number of layers, where the user could pick any one to be the layer that is projected through the first surface onto the upper surface. As quickly as a Photoshop type programs can manipulate layers, there are some real organizational uses for this. Any time you have a large group of people who need to schedule something complex together, being able to piecemeal copy many bits of information onto someone's basic instructions is handy, and that could certainly include paper.
For example, if you run a business, you are probably going to print employee schedules at least now and then. Imagine if a trainee employee wants to know who the most experienced fellow employee available is if he runs into something above his training. You could flick through the other schedule layers while they are projected onto his schedule, letting him make a few notes on his copy.
If there's already some printing on his copy, then what he adds by tracing will end up lined up with it if the rest is still lined up, so this prevents a lot of minor mistakes, such as copying a schedule change into the wrong box. In the same way, just about any minor change could be made swiftly, and with a reduced error rate, IF that change only needs to be copied by a few people. Obviously, if the same change or info needs to be added to 50 people's notes, it's faster in most cases to just tear up the old copies and reprint, but in a complex business the typical weekly meeting results mostly in changes that are simple and/or needed by only a few employees, so for a well organized business, where major changes don't often come up in short range planning, this will be useful. For less well organized business which buy it expecting it to help, when they make massive readjustments to policies and schedules just a few days out, this system won't help after all, and they are likely to be disappointed.
The problem with that word "generally" is when you contribute to the guy who just loses a bitterly fought political race, running against the incumbent sheriff .
But the DA didn't try to argue that (at least as the article explains it). Maybe he should have, but apparently he instead argued that scanning the drive for files wasn't a search if you calculated MD5s for them and compared them to a table instead of actually trying to open the files. I can see why the DA did it that way. Arguing that the machine wasn't the suspect's anymore might have given law enforcement probable cause, but then DA would have to prosecute against a defense lawyer who could argue about the chain of evidence. When did the suspect let go of the computer, and how many other people could have had their hands on it before the one who came forward as a witness? Did the police have an unbroken chain of evidence between when the PC left the suspect's custody and the search? Maybe the DA was hoping to avoid that, so he raised the argument that this wasn't even a search at all, and this is what happened instead.
Or looking for a file to calculate its hash is itself the search. Consider an old fashioned search of a hard drive, as it would likely be done by amateurs. The first step would probably be to use a file manager and look at the names of files themselves to see if any sounded like child porn. Notice that I said the first step, not the zeroeth step. We don't say that a person browsing a directory hasn't started searching the drive until they open the first file, that's generally at least the second step.
There are all sorts of actions before examining a single file in detail that should still count as searching the drive. For example identifying what sort of programs can open the data files is a step in some searches. On a Windows box, making sure a required.DLL actually exists, or for any box, making sure required codecs exist, is a routine part of a criminal forensics investigation (It's often handy to be able to show in court that the owner of a machine could actually play back a file, to avoid them claiming they didn't know what the file was, couldn't get it to work, and only left it on their machine because they thought it was something legal and they might get somebody to help them view it later.). So, if an investigator reads a directory, looks at file extensions for some files and checks to see if there's something that can play back those files, and maybe reads a few.ini files or the Windows registry to find a recently played list, should he be able to claim he hasn't started a search yet because he hasn't actually double clicked the first incriminating file yet?.
Felons can have their rights restored by the appropriate legislatures after serving their sentences. One famous example was Johnny Cash. It is not uncommon for the legislature to restore selected rights to a whole group of felons at once - for example Florida restored rights to over 60,000 prior felons in one bill. It is also not unusual for some states to make restoration automatic - for example, it became automatic in Maryland for all felons to regain their right to vote as soon as they have finished serving any parole or probation, on July 1st, 2007. There is a single exception for MD, felons convicted of buying or selling votes.
Usually, the right to bear arms is not restored, but the rights to vote, run for office and petition are. Rights of free association and movement may be limited, most commonly in the case of some sex offenders, even after other rights are restored.
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"who can't act to save William Shatner's life"
That's not can't, it's won't. The only line I ever had in a film was "Rodger, We just want.. yer Brainzzzz!", but for Shatner, I could have flubbed the take.
(Yes, I've played a zombie, in a 70's indy film that actually got released, although I don't think it ever made back its costs.).
No, it didn't. Just look at who is holding subprime paper. Take out all the loans to white borrowers who specifically don't live in opportunity zones, and you are already down to less than 30% of subprime loans. Apply any other standards that seem reasonable, such as loans on homes valued at over $ 500,000, loans on houses priced over the median for their neighborhood, city, or entire state, or just about any other criterion a professional would use to select the loans actually driven by the 'fair housing opportunity' law, and you will end up with less than a quarter of the subprime loans being created, in even the tiniest part, by equal opportunity demands. Depending on just what criteria different experts use, the most accurate number might be as low as 12%. I'm not saying that absolutely nothing the government did made this even the tiniest bit worse, but the problem originated with the lenders.
Then there are lots of other derivitives, not based on subprimes, that are in the process of going belly up just as these did. They were oversold in just the same ways, they got AAA ratings misapplied to them in the same ways, and you will be hearing about the new crisis they generate within a few months at most. None of them have anything in particular to do with government social engineering. Watch what BS explanations you hear as these chickens come home to roost, from the same people who are blaming this one on the government.
As I understand it, the Ayers quote was "I didn't do enough", not 'plant' enough. He claims (at least since a few weeks before 9/11) that it's not specifically about bombs or even other violence. Maybe he's spinning it, maybe if anyone had asked him the same questions in the late 70's or 80's it would have been different, but yes, the context there probably matters. Deciding whether Ayers really counted as a terrorist or not means first reading up on COINTELPRO, considering all that the plethora of double agents, false flag operations, and such may imply about what he could be and how reliable the evidence is, and then you would probably have to read a few interviews or whole letters. Some reasonable people might still decide Ayers was a terrorist, but there's definitely arguments both ways, more than there are for Kaczynski.
A context where his remarks are not incendiary? No way. Even without knowing anything about Ayer's history, without the press identifying where the quotes come from, Ayers has said plenty that would still be devisive. If he was posting here, -1 Flamebait mods would swiftly follow.
Pascal was one of the very early researchers into probability, and his wager was set up as a model probabilistic situation simple enough to be studied, in a field that was just beginning. When Pascal created it, phrases such as "non-zero probability" didn't exist yet, and wouldn't until people had reasoned about Pascal's wager, and thousands of other word problems, enough to see a need for such phrases. It's thus not very applicable to the real world, just a tool for teaching some very basic parts of probability math.
Imagine a very early problem in dynamics, where you have to ignore friction, and nobody has yet figured out how you can have signed terms for velocity, and there's no calculus yet so you can't create a formula for acceleration from what little you do know about the velocity. Pascal's Wager is like that.
Most people when they talk about God have it all wrapped up with other issues, like the survival of consciousness after death, eternal reward or punishment, omnescience and omnipotence, and many others. They even have very specific definitions of those concepts in mind. For example, if they don't like the concept of God, they often assume that God, if 'He" exists, must know everything, even where knowing certain things simultaneously supposedly creates a paradox. They then point to that paradox as proof God doesn't exist. It becomes a definition problem - Is it still fair to call something God if it only knows as much as can be known, and there are things which simply can't be known? Should we refuse to call something God if it can't make a four sided triangle?
Ideas such as the soul, supernatural phenomena, gods, life after death, heaven, enlightenment, miracles, worship, omnipotence and so on, aren't monolithic. It's logically quite possible that one or more of these things could exist without the others existing at all. Whether you would want to define a being that was morally perfect, but didn't have unlimited power, as God, is a philosophical choice. (as is the reverse, a being that is morally flawed but has unlimited power). Linking all sorts of concepts together, and not defining some of those concepts, lets people engage in circular reasoning. That doesn't mean nobody has ever done better - plenty of people, both in various religions and in the great philosophies, have gone to great efforts to define terms, and avoid at least the most obvious errors.
Unfortunately 90% or more of the discussions on places such as Slashdot will be between people who haven't ever read anything by the people who have done better, and who think their latest point has never been proposed by anyone else before.
Employment rights lawsuits wouldn't fall under the federal tax code, but would be settled in the state where the volunteer filed, or according to the laws of the state of incorporation. Without knowing whether the CCF has volunteers sign agreements making them subject to the rules of the state of incorporation in settling civil suits, I don't know which would apply. Non-discrimination lawsuits might fall under the federal statutes, but there are most certainly states that would be willing to become the venues for state suits against a non-profit that has had status revoked as well, if past example serves. (i.e. State of New York (under Elliot Spitzer) vs Persaud).
So NO, state of incorporation doesn't (at least in this case) have any effect on federal tax treatment. But YES state of incorporation could affect other possible litigation if non-profit status is first revoked in federal court, both with respect to location (as I've already indicated), and likely in many other respects as well.
No, I think the convention may have broken the law, because I am a liscenced expert in tax law for non-profits, and I would have advised the convention organizers in the strongest possible terms not to do any of several things it appears they may have done, or expect the IRS to come after them with baseball bats. I'll never know for sure unless the government bothers to move on this, or the convention organizers voluntarily explain just what they did and didn't do. They haven't, and the government is (usually) somewhat rational and (usually) doesn't get all excited about a technical violation that appears motivated by simple ignorance rather than intent to profit. So all I can go on is my best guesses as to what happened.
How could the convention have broken the law, you say? All it would take is for the organizers to publicize before the event that it would help raise money for the CCF. The convention is a for-profit organization. Even if they donate some money to charity, they are still holding the convention for profit. Using the charity's name in advertising means they have used it to possibly increase profits. If the CCF appears to have assisted them in increasing their profits, then the CCF has worked as an agency of a for-profit, which means they are themselves are now a for-profit, just like an ad agency or law firm working for that same for-profit. The CCF's legal role is not about helping anybody make a profit, and they can't afford to lose their non-profit status.
Worse, the convention goes on, year to year. So even if they didn't announce anything until after the convention started, the news can affect next year's profits, even if it's just announced at the convention, after this year's memberships are all sold. If a non-profit has to get into this situation, a convention is one of the worst cases, where just about any mistake raises the significant threat of legal action.
How to avoid this? The convention would have to stress in their ads and anywhere else the CCF is mentioned, that this wasn't done with the collusion of the CCF, and the CCF hasn't sanctioned the event. That's all that's really necessary. Give the money wherever the for-profit wants, but include legal boilerplate that says the charity isn't saying you should go to this convention instead of the competition, etc. The CCF itself will help any organization wanting to give, by providing a prewritten set of legal disclaimers, or even getting their own legal advisors to work on it as needed, (done, I believe, pro bono in the CCF's case). By the CCF's explanation, apparently the convention didn't bother, so the charity now has to bend over backwards to avoid that appearance of collusion, or risk losing their non-profit status. Most charities do this by filing suit for at least a nominal amount to establish the legal record. The CCF has preferred to turn the other cheek and trust that no one in the IRS or Justice dept. thinks they colluded just because a D&D convention didn't follow all the legal steps they should have.
You can imagine this all comes down to tax receipts and call it spin if you want. I don't know if the CCF thinks you are stupid or not, but I certainly do now. You are a fool, who is trying to twist the facts to support his blind hatred, and ignoring well meant advice from people who know far more than you do on the subject. Reply all you want. I'm letting it drop now, because I don't like how much I find myself hating a damned vicious fool who will probably pay big prices many times throughout the rest of his life to cling to his hatred.
Gencon is a for profit. there are limits on what a charity can take from a for profit corporation, particularly with regard to whether it can give an endorsement in return. There are legal reasons why they can't take the money. For just one, CCF apparently has a clause in their charter of incorporation that says they don't endorse anything, even other non-profits, without working the details out in advance. Violating that charter itself means they can lose their 501 (c)(3) status. For another, US law limits what they or any charity can do with regards to a 'for profit', just as it does a PAC. For more on this, please read what I have posted to this thread already.
If that someone conducted a for profit event, and used your name in its publicity, in announcements made on site, and so on, yes there's an endorsement. For a repeat event, even announcements made after the convention started, which might serve to make people feel they had done something good by attending, and thus make them more likely to come back next year, have a potential effect on profits, and so count as an endorsement of that profit making activity. If you don't like that, you need to challenge a very large body of common law that says there is an endorsement in such things.
I've already explained in this thread, the consequences the CCF may have been risking if they took this money. All that depends, of course, on the details of how the convention management organized and publicized the event, which we don't know from the article. There are plenty of cases where a charity has sued over misuse of its name in connection with an unsanctioned event, both to protect its trademarked identity and to distance themselves from any charges that they are party to jointly violating the law regarding charities. The CCF is evidently confident this does not rise to that level, or they feel their reputation as a charity is good enough that they are not at serious risk of being blamed if the convention management has broken the law.
Given the limited facts in the article, there appears no chance the CCF has broken the law, and some chance that the convention, at least technically, has, although there is no reason to think they intended to derive any profit from their association with the CCF's name, and so most DA's would not want to follow up on it beyond a letter telling them to get their ducks in a row. But go ahead, call them names.
For any non-profit that wishes to preserve 501 status and such under the U S legal code, there are big differences in how to handle money that comes from a private person, another non-profit or a for profit entity. There are also some differences in what has to be done if money was raised by a non-profit organization with an advance agreement, or if it wasn't. This sounds like the convention either advertised that membership would help some money go to the CCF without having an advance agreement, or that there's an issue with whether the convention itself is a non-profit entity, in the full, liscensed, legal sense.
If the CCF doesn't act this way, they can do more than risk tarnishing their image. They can even lose their legal status as a non-profit. One result of this would be that any retirement funds their employees have set up (403-B's), even if funded all with the employee's own money, aren't legitimate, and all those employees would owe back taxes and penalties and interest on those taxes, for at least the last year, maybe longer. Another result is that the CCF could be sued for back wages 'owed' people who were unpaid volunteers. A third is that they would have to meet equal opportunity hiring guidelines for all those 'employees', and since they probably have no records of having ever given their management staff the necessary guidance as to conducting mandatory nondiscriminatory employee evaluations for those volunteers, they would automatically be guilty under law of discrimination should even a single person bring suit.
Since it was set up as a non-profit, the CCF has probably not incorporated under the rules of a corp friendly state such as Delaware. They might even face such lawsuits in a state such as New York or California.
But go ahead, people, make this all about nasty Christians who hate your hobby.
So you need to take other steps, such as lobbying for a system you like, and make it clear that's why you refuse to vote. Do some action, whether it's writing the politicians you disagree with least, or passing out paper, getting signatures on petitions, or explaining to interested people how you would do away with the winner takes all systems, or whatever. Do it looking like a nut on a soapbox if you must, or find more professional looking ways, but do it.
I voted early this year, and there was a couple there who went in and voted as I was waiting, then took up positions beyond the 100 foot line and passed out fliers, while explaining they had voted in the local election, but had not voted for the presidential and vice presidential offices because they were opposed to the electoral college.
Do something, and your opinion will count again, you will be entitled to complain, and you'll still have several years to regret what happens, but at least you can feel you're less responsible than the lazy people who did nothing.
That 'outright sadistic' is why I don't play Nethack. I quit after a beginning character stepped on a trapdoor, landed on a trapdoor on the next level, landed on a teleport trap on the third level that sent him two more levels down, only to land on (you guess it) another trapdoor.
No one who did that to my character in a pen and paper RPG would ever get me back to the table. I've thrown people out of conventions for doing that sort of thing to other paying members when running tournaments (and I point out, every organized gaming convention, without exception, will readily do just that to stop the cases of sadistic abuse that sometimes happen, and has a public posted policy on just that point in the membership and/or staff kits).
Some companies who feel they are losing customers thanks to sadistic GMing keep a joint industry blacklist of referees who have abused players in sanctioned tournaments that way, just to curb the 'outright sadistic' conduct. Back 30 years ago, Gary Gygax sometimes told bad DMs he observed that they were never to DM ever again, and instructed TSR's mail order dept to refuse to sell to those people so as to put some teeth into it.
Oh, but this is a computer game, that makes it different. No, it doesn't. All the good features of Nethack you've cited, the neat options for character class and so on, would make a great game, maybe the best game evah! BUT not with the 'outright sadistic' parts.
I've had legal dealings roughly 30 times with people who are not the original creators, but own something 'IP'ish - either because they are the heirs of an estate, or because they got it in lieu of normal payment for debts. Over half those times, the new owners seemed to seriously overvalue the item, and by seriously, I mean thinking it was worth its weight in flawless blue white diamonds. Creditor/Debtor relationships seem to be a bit less skewed in this respect than estates, but it's still pretty common.
If you look at the financial history of the great depression era, particularly with regard to magazine story and sheet music rights, there are huge chains of companies which got awarded assets upon their debtor's failures, and held out for way too much in turn, even as they were going bankrupt themselves. There are chains where the property was transferred by a court ordered bankruptcy times 25 times in a decade, which would mean the average case for them was a company ignoring all offers for a work even though they faced bankruptcy within, on average, less than five months. We know the offers happened, because the courts used that fact to evaluate how to split assets among multiple creditors equitably. Even if you believe we aren't currently in anything approaching a full scale depression, that still looks like a good model of what to expect today.
There's a semi-fair chance that a receiver will realize that taking 5 cents on the dollar for the server code is better than any other deal they might get. But if not, expect them to set the price like the MMO is a sure fire World of Warcraft killer, plus some.
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Look at the last episodes of new season 4. The Daleks are incredibly powerful, and there's a certain Deus Ex quality to the near regeneration that turns out not to be, and to the ending. But still, the 'good guys' are constantly trying some trick or other, many of which cause real problems for the Daleks even if they don't eliminate the whole menace. At one point, the Daleks think they have killed Jack, and of course, he gets better, (but that's no surprise to the regular viewers). The Daleks keep thinking they have won various small victories such as capturing various companions, and many times the audience knows immediately they really haven't. By the second half, various of the Daleks enemies have managed to sumggle in dimension hopping devices, powerful explosives, big guns, various communicators, and a supposedly destroyed TARDIS, and the audience gets to see half a dozen setbacks for the Daleks in process. It actually looks pretty likely that at least some of this will come together into a final, successful plan.
In the end, it's a heavily bootstrapped Donna to the rescue, which is only obvious in retrospect from a few clues in previous episodes, but still, all through the two shows, the Doctor's whole side is proactive, and every single former companion, (and even some of the Torchwood cast that have never actually met the Doctor) demonstrates how they have been preparing advance contingency plans for just such crises as this one. That's really pretty rare in TV, where the heros usually just react to the more proactive villians until the last little bit of the show.
Actually, Rowan Atkinson has been The Doctor before - Google: "Dr. Who and the Curse of Fatal Death" for details.
(It should all count, dammit. There have thus been at least 14 reincarnations through Tennant, including Joanna Lumley and Hugh Grant. Throw them out, and what's your justification for including McCoy? Plus tossing Lumley is sexist.).
A third thing the electoral college does is it supports the use of early voting. It serves as a safety net. In the (unlikely) event that something changes significantly within the last few weeks leading up to an election, the electors can generally change their votes. If you vote early, and your candidate gets caught, three days before the election, "with a live boy or a dead girl"*, the college could very well end up doing what you would really want them to, based on the news. 21 states don't have specific laws against what are sometimes called faithless electors, and most of the others have only small penalties, or allow it in specific circumstances. There have been, from the 2004 election back to the founding, only 156 electors who have cast their votes differently than they promised. 71 of these did so because the candidate they were pledged to died before the electoral college met, which actually makes sense.
*that's a common shorthand phrase for anything scandalous or criminal enough that most voters would wish they had voted for just about anyone else. It doesn't mean people who feel that way are right to equate the two, just that the candidate would have to do something the public at large was really opposed to, not something they would let slide.
Bankers not in jail definitely applies as well to Great Britain, Germany, and Italy, at the very least. I can also think of other examples - just for starters, Somali piracy is increasing. It's exactly the sort of thing that needs 'nipped in the bud', and it's mostly the European states that are affected, and are responsible for not having the will to do something about it - When the Russians have a boatload of tanks stolen, it's much more a specifically Russian problem than when those same pirates hijack a normal cargo ship that only peripherally affects the US. Or take the many kidnappings for ransom in Mexico by drug gangs. Somebody in the USA is doing something right, since there's been only one attempt to spread that north of the border, and that quickly collapsed with the hostage released unharmed. Maybe somebody there got the memo in time.
Suppose the table is displaying an organizational chart. You might want to display details for one branch to that branch's supervisor, but omit all the details for another branch. You could want this for legal reasons, i.e. employee privacy, or just to focus on the part the supervisor needed to know.
When I was in the army, for a time I was with a maintenance troop. There were dozens of vehicles, many of which were duplicates, and those vehicles normally loaded lots of tools and parts. There might be five vehicles equipped for servicing HUMVEEs, and two sets of two for swapping out tank engines, and only one vehicle for small arms repair. There might be a type of tool only carried on one of those vehicles, and another type that there were two sets of it on every single vehicle. We drew plenty of branching tree views, which told the NCO responsible for a certain section, what vehicles he or she had, what soldiers with what job descriptions were supposed to be on board, what shop tools mounted, what personally issued weapons, toolboxes, and camping gear went on each truck or tracked vehicle, right down to what camoflage screening (by shape and pattern, it comes in diamonds and hexes, and in desert, snow, eastern woodland, and probably twenty other color combinations, plus it all has poles, patch kits, and so on), how many full cans of what lubricants, how many sheets of gasket material or 3/4 inch UNC lagbolts were supposed to be on them. Being able to tap a few keys, and show the guy responsible for ordering drums of transmission fluid just what the last inventory had shown, unit wide, for that item only, and what vehicles were short, would have made his job a lot easier.
And the Army likes tracing paper. The underlying idea being that a map with a bullethole in it is still a good map, while the fancy electronic device with a bullethole in it is now a paperweight. You could extend this principle to a lot of work outdoors, at heights, or in dirty conditions.
Every good employee you have is an already selected and prescreened applicant for other jobs you might need done. He or she is already familiar with the company, knows many of the other employees, and you've already completed a bunch of paperwork on them. If he or she were lazy or inefficient or crooked, presumably you would have fired them, not waited until there was an excuse to lay them off. When you lay them off, they go elsewhere, and then when you need another job done, you have to pick from a bunch of unscreened applicants, fill out new paperwork, train somebody in the basics of your corporate culture, and re-incur a lot of costs you already paid once. Doing a lot of layoffs is basically committing to shrink for months after the cause of the layoffs ends, months in which a smart competitor may grow. Something like increases in efficiency should mean your company will grow, and therefore need more people in the long run. Layoffs there are the same as betting your increased efficiency won't, by itself, improve your bottom line.
I would suspect it can handle an image with a great number of layers, where the user could pick any one to be the layer that is projected through the first surface onto the upper surface. As quickly as a Photoshop type programs can manipulate layers, there are some real organizational uses for this. Any time you have a large group of people who need to schedule something complex together, being able to piecemeal copy many bits of information onto someone's basic instructions is handy, and that could certainly include paper.
For example, if you run a business, you are probably going to print employee schedules at least now and then. Imagine if a trainee employee wants to know who the most experienced fellow employee available is if he runs into something above his training. You could flick through the other schedule layers while they are projected onto his schedule, letting him make a few notes on his copy.
If there's already some printing on his copy, then what he adds by tracing will end up lined up with it if the rest is still lined up, so this prevents a lot of minor mistakes, such as copying a schedule change into the wrong box. In the same way, just about any minor change could be made swiftly, and with a reduced error rate, IF that change only needs to be copied by a few people. Obviously, if the same change or info needs to be added to 50 people's notes, it's faster in most cases to just tear up the old copies and reprint, but in a complex business the typical weekly meeting results mostly in changes that are simple and/or needed by only a few employees, so for a well organized business, where major changes don't often come up in short range planning, this will be useful. For less well organized business which buy it expecting it to help, when they make massive readjustments to policies and schedules just a few days out, this system won't help after all, and they are likely to be disappointed.
The problem with that word "generally" is when you contribute to the guy who just loses a bitterly fought political race, running against the incumbent sheriff .
But the DA didn't try to argue that (at least as the article explains it). Maybe he should have, but apparently he instead argued that scanning the drive for files wasn't a search if you calculated MD5s for them and compared them to a table instead of actually trying to open the files.
I can see why the DA did it that way. Arguing that the machine wasn't the suspect's anymore might have given law enforcement probable cause, but then DA would have to prosecute against a defense lawyer who could argue about the chain of evidence. When did the suspect let go of the computer, and how many other people could have had their hands on it before the one who came forward as a witness? Did the police have an unbroken chain of evidence between when the PC left the suspect's custody and the search? Maybe the DA was hoping to avoid that, so he raised the argument that this wasn't even a search at all, and this is what happened instead.
Or looking for a file to calculate its hash is itself the search. Consider an old fashioned search of a hard drive, as it would likely be done by amateurs. The first step would probably be to use a file manager and look at the names of files themselves to see if any sounded like child porn. Notice that I said the first step, not the zeroeth step. We don't say that a person browsing a directory hasn't started searching the drive until they open the first file, that's generally at least the second step. .DLL actually exists, or for any box, making sure required codecs exist, is a routine part of a criminal forensics investigation (It's often handy to be able to show in court that the owner of a machine could actually play back a file, to avoid them claiming they didn't know what the file was, couldn't get it to work, and only left it on their machine because they thought it was something legal and they might get somebody to help them view it later.). So, if an investigator reads a directory, looks at file extensions for some files and checks to see if there's something that can play back those files, and maybe reads a few .ini files or the Windows registry to find a recently played list, should he be able to claim he hasn't started a search yet because he hasn't actually double clicked the first incriminating file yet?.
There are all sorts of actions before examining a single file in detail that should still count as searching the drive. For example identifying what sort of programs can open the data files is a step in some searches. On a Windows box, making sure a required
Felons can have their rights restored by the appropriate legislatures after serving their sentences. One famous example was Johnny Cash. It is not uncommon for the legislature to restore selected rights to a whole group of felons at once - for example Florida restored rights to over 60,000 prior felons in one bill.
It is also not unusual for some states to make restoration automatic - for example, it became automatic in Maryland for all felons to regain their right to vote as soon as they have finished serving any parole or probation, on July 1st, 2007. There is a single exception for MD, felons convicted of buying or selling votes.
Usually, the right to bear arms is not restored, but the rights to vote, run for office and petition are. Rights of free association and movement may be limited, most commonly in the case of some sex offenders, even after other rights are restored.