And imagine the civil lawsuits against the city when the cameras show a crime, but the police fail to respond for any reason or if they're late in arriving.
Where this has been going on a lot recently, in Britain, it's been pretty frequent for people to file lawsuits and be told the tape or digital copies they want have already been erased, or lost. It's happened in suits over slow response, in police brutality lawsuits, and notably in the infamous case of the Brazilian man who was shot at extreme close range after being wrestled to the floor in the subway system. That's one way of keeping lawsuits from making the stupidity of this idea obvious.
So...is there a fairly easy way, to disable these cameras from a distance without getting caught??
No, unless you are one of those people who believes the wild claims made for the little known ancient occidental martial art of gun-fu. If you do believe all those wild claims that its mysterious practitioners can slay, not only at a touch, but at ranges much farther than most martial artists, striking invisibly with single blows that produce actual holes, sometimes passing all the way through the foe, then yes. But who believes that silly stuff? Still, since you are posting hypothetically...
Normally, I'd say even a mere fourth dan black belt in.223 NATO style should be able to do it reliably at 300 yards, but for such small, somewhat armored targets, at working distances of above a thousand yards, the even more esoteric 45-70 Octagon barreled Sharps school has the edge. Others may favor any of many schools that come and go, but the Sharps way is eternal. Mine own branch of the school was baptized on the field known as Shiloh, and harvested the great buffalo in the high mountains to the west (sorry about them) and my great grandfather saw the training pass to me as a humble youth. The strongest and wisest of my daughters has been similarly trained by me, and will receive the final mark of her training when I am ancient.
There's a difference in your analogy and a case like this. You haven't said anything about why the cops are investigating the alleged money launderer on the original charge. Normally, to investigate money laundering, you get a warrant to look at a person's bank accounts or bookkeeping, not their home. Why would the cops follow up on a money laundering investigation by searching a home if they didn't find anything at the bank or office? If they didn't find anything, their probable cause collapses, so why would a judge accept it as probable cause for a second warrant? Oh, you mean the cops didn't get a warrant for the home? So you're asking if cops shouldn't be able to search a home without probable cause or a warrant? Damned right they shouldn't!
I was a commissioned officer in the U. S. armed forces for 7 years. During that time, I performed and supervised legal searches of military personnel's quarters. The legal advice I was given for this, was for all personnel to have what was being searched for firmly in mind - if we were searching for a stolen boom-box, no looking inside any container or drawer too small to hold it.
We often did health and welfare inspections of barracks. In these, we sometimes seized foodstuffs such as cookies or candy, either from people on overweight lists or if the food was opened, subject to attract ants or roaches. Normally, we didn't seize them if in sealed or properly resealed containers. Drugs accidentally found during a h & w inspection were seized and destroyed, but the possessors were not charged, no written record of the situation was made, and the officers turning these drugs over to military police to be burned were not to give any identifying information about the service members.
Note that theses sorts of limitations applied to searching people in active duty service, whose rights are arguably more limited than the average citizen's, and on property belonging to the government, not the citizen. Compared to this, civilian law needs to take the doctrine that "A man's home is his castle" as absolutely fundamental.
Your arrangement can be nice, especially where there aren't a lot of physical assets to control compared to the bottom line.
Just for people who are reading this thread, and now think S-corps are always a great idea, remember any basic corporation can dissolve itself and reform as a S-corp if it meets certain common tests, such as not having more than 100 stockholders, and not having non-citizen stockholders (except for certain trusts and international funds). Since there are many medium sized firms (and a few large ones), that don't issue common stock at all, there are quite a few corps that could convert to s-corps if they found their taxes onerous.(What cayenne8 is calling double taxation - that phrase is a frequent shortcut to describe something more complex, so don't take it without a grain of salt). That they don't switch says they generally like their existing incorporation better than the alternatives, usually (but not always) because of the liability limits.
Also, where you see the phrase 'reasonable salary' in cayenne8's post, that's not some tax-cheater's code for "whatever I damned well choose" - he's phrasing it just as the IRS does. The government actually looks at these to see if they fall in the range an employee doing that sort of work could normally expect. For executive work, that's pretty broad, and you can low-ball it somewhat, but you can't pay anyone the equivalent of 5 cents/hour just to reduce FICA responsibility.
One last problem with S-corps - if you start as a partnership or LLC, and convert to an s-corp, what happens if you no longer meet the tests to stay an s-corp? You don't revert back to your old status, but instead you become a regular corporation. This can hit people with a real tax burden if the IRS rules the s-corp became invalid at a prior date, like the date it gained it's 101'st stockholder.
I actually agree strongly with your last point, but this is not really about being independent, if you mean being a corporation all by yourself and handling all the tasks it entails to be one. The problem with that sort of independence is the same as trying to be your own lawyer, civil engineer and dentist, all at once.
You don't even have to incorporate (in the US at least). You certainly don't have to incorporate just to level the playing field. You can set yourself up as a sole proprietorship, (or if there's more than one involved, a partnership), and you don't have to incorporate at all. You can enter a sole proprietorship pretty much at will (in some states this has the caveat - if you're not a convicted felon), and you can style a partnership any of many ways so that you are getting paid fairly for what you bring to it. You can even limit your liability in a partnership so you can't be left holding the whole bag, without having to create a LLC or S-corp to do it.
Here's all working for yourself really, absolutely requires. 1. When you are employed, someone else withholds taxes (both income and social security/medicare). To be self employed, you have to hold these out yourself. If you start making a real lot of money, you have to make advance payments once a quarter, but until you are getting some serious income, you can usually just keep the money in an account and keep the interest for yourself until around April 15th. If you're making more money than will allow that, you can definitely afford someone like me to advise you and file your forms for you. I have clients who can afford my services entirely on the interest they are getting on money they would have never seen at all as employees. What you can't do is expect to keep all the money you wold have been paid as an employee, plus all the extra you should be able to make being your own boss, plus all the taxes you would have paid one way or the other as an employee, plus any money (or time) it costs to learn the basics of record keeping and legal compliance for your particular business. 2. you need to learn what counts as a business related expense, and what doesn't, what you can claim on an IRS schedule and what you can't. For most people in IT, this means learning a 2 page form (Schedule C), and probably the 1 page form to cover your driving expenses, and maybe the 1 page form for having a home office. The government both prints and PDFs complete instructions for all these and gives them away free on the IRS's website. There's about 40 pages of support manuals for all this, but once you learn the basics, those are not something you have to memorize or even read cover to cover. There are all sorts of additional sections explaining what to do if you are a lobster fisherman or a non-citizen, or both, but if you can't figure out pretty quick that this area doesn't apply to you, then you should be working for somebody else, as a burger flipper (and I've known some burger flippers who picked up on these pretty damned quickly). Most people have to get over their fear that government has hidden something vitally important in a tiny footnote in that section that only applies to commercial fishermen - that really seems to be the biggest obstacle, not intelligence.
You just may need to learn how to amortize computer related hardware and software, but probably your beginning business model is simpler than that and you can usually forget about doing any amortization - i.e. you can't claim a personal laptop if you use it for various things besides business, and a cheap old one sufficient for most IT needs is small enough you can just claim the whole thing as a straight out expense in a year. Most admin and diagnostic software is free these days unless you are specializing in certain parts of Windows. Starting out in business doesn't have to be very complex, and if it is you probably need to refine your business model.
Again, this is what I'd claim for a beginning IT, tec
(I won't be a Spelling Nazi) (I won't be a Spelling Nazi) (I won't be a Spelling Nazi)...
I'm not a lawyer - this is a layman's comment, reflecting only a layman's understanding, so of course utterly worthless. Still, I had fun writing it.
No, it won't stand up (much).
A precedent isn't an automatic win for subsequent cases. If a precedent appears to have technical flaws, people opposed to it will normally ask a higher court to overturn it. In some cases, all this takes is legal status as affected party, which means that if, for example, you represented a company and they were willing to make a claim that an old precedent hurt their bottom line, you would have standing to file an appellate brief. (If someone is willing to contend they are losing serious money because of the existing precedent, in some venues they don't have to actually have lost any case themselves to appeal). Then all you would need is a line of argument you thought had a chance of winning to actually prepare one. The way a precedent helps your side is all this filing can cost money, so the other side might decide its cheaper not to fight you. But if they hire a good lawyer to evaluate what their chances are, he or she is likely to see how weak your win was.
Alternately, one side could already be involved in an actual case and the other side (your side in your example) bring up the precedent in their motions. This doesn't automatically hurt their case, let alone mean your side automatically wins. They can make motions to the effect that the precedent doesn't really apply to your case, cite other conflicting precedents, or do many other things that could still mean you don't win. Cases have been put on hold while a higher court considers whether a precedent is valid or applicable, then the lower court case finished after that court rules. Some precedents are broader than others, and judges will frequently compare such factors as whether one was originally a mixed decision or a unanimous one, too, in deciding among conflicting precedents.
Precedents become stronger if they are set at a court of appeals level, and in the U.S. are very strong if the Supreme court has heard them and agreed, but even there, a new appeal on different grounds can overturn one. Often the Supreme court refuses to even hear an appeal. When they do, they will generally give reasons, and just what those reasons are may affect whether anyone might resubmit an appeal with other grounds or accept the intermediate court's verdict as effectively final. There are even cases where the Supreme court has refused to consider an appeal, but spelled out just how to restructure one so they would consider it (and in some of these, the court has then rejected the new appeal - go figure). There are some lower court precedents the Supreme court has consistently refused to hear, that are considered very strong for that reason, perhaps as strong as if they had heard and affirmed them.
How does this apply to your scheme? First, (in most venues) if a judge thinks one side isn't presenting its case very well, he can suggest they raise points of law, or question litigants as to points of fact directly. He or she can write the decision to reflect his or her own opinion that one side is doing a poor job, and this means the decision won't necessarily give the sort of protection you want. Legal decisions are often many pages long, not some simple "Side A wins, Side B loses" document.
Second, you can't automatically get a superior court to hear an appeal, and it may be very hard to get one all the way to the Supreme court. Remember, the side that wins can't appeal a point where they got a victory, rather the side that loses on a given point has to appeal their defeat, or someone else has to become involved. If fact, most appeals happen where a complex decision gives some points to both sides. It's rare to see one side lose badly on all points and appeal, because in mo
It was only about 120 years ago that scientists were claiming rocks didn't fall from the sky, period. This was still the consensus belief among actual, degreed, professional scientists well after the time of Isaac Newton, not something older natural philosophers or pseudo-scientists were necessarily claiming. In fact, for a while there, claiming a rock had fallen from the sky was a very good way for even an established scientist to find himself characterized as a crack-pot.
I know we have a lot better observation and more established theories now, but still, a little humility wouldn't hurt, given the history.
Microsoft certainly gets the the protection of both copyright and patent law. For you people claiming that natural monopolies exist, they also get to leverage any 'natural monopoly' that trade secrets alone would give them, because they can get some of those patents issued without fully disclosing their methods as the law theoretically requires. The current government not only protects Microsoft's monopoly status by the laws it has, but by selectively enforcing some of them, or are some of you actually claiming that Microsoft can fully disclose necessary information to get the protection of patent law, and simultaniously keep that same information as a trade secret? Neat trick, that.
Microsoft also gets the protection of Trademarks, including having a trademark on the term Windows in a computer related context, even though there's prior art there (prior art restricts patents, not trademarks).
At this point, Microsoft gets the protection of IP doctrine, which mean its lawyers can contend that what they really have isn't patents, trademarks, trade secrets, contracts, and copyrights, but some generic thing called IP, and that IP is some sort of nebulous thing, that has the infinite duration of an enforced trademark, but doesn't require enforcement. It has all the rights associated with copyright, but doesn't expire. It has the rights associated with traditional written contracts, but can be handled by a EULA which takes effect without a chance for the other party to read it before purchase. And, as I noted, it gives the same protection as patents when Microsoft wants it to, but doesn't require disclosure. Note that Microsoft's stock disclosure says that IP assets make up well over 1/2 of the capital assets of their corporation and this determines their stock valuation based essentially on their own claim for that IP's value. Note that this value is not subject to property taxes or short term capital gains tax, and some of it is not taxable at all, and so Microsoft's corporate taxes are proportionately lower than a more hardware oriented competitor (i.e. Apple), or a hardware oriented partner (Dell, Intel, etc.).
Hey, hate the sin, and love the sinner, brother or sister. Of course it's not Christian to want them to burn in hell. Pray for the mote to fall from their eyes, that they should learn the value of Christian charity. In fact, pray that they become such shining examples of Christian love and charity that they outshine all others and we become inspired to do better ourselves from their humble, yet dedicated, example.
While you're at it, please pray for me, as I can't write this without feeling like there's a big beam shaped tongue in my cheek.
Keep in mind that in most cases the RIAA is suing an IP address with no knowledge of the person.
How sure is anyone of that? If the RIAA actually simply goes after ISPs randomly, then after suing several thousand people, an unbiased statistical analysis will show few or no significant patterns of economic background, ethnicity, or social status. Patterned deviations should be minor to within margin of error trivial, and any detected should be decreasing as more people are sued. If children of judges, congressmen, and the like appear on the list in proportion to their prevalence in the nation for example, then we can safely assume they do not preevaluate the targets of their suits on that grounds. However, if the average profile of the accused deviates significantly from the average of people with internet connections fast enough to share such large files, (which already corrects for some economic biases that might otherwise matter), then it becomes reasonable that there is some other pre-selection going on.
Note that selective prosecution is normally a legal issue only in criminal trials, and it is technically legal for the RIAA to selectively sue individuals they think lack the money to fight back. The RIAA may have started this whole procedure on that basis, assuming that they could legally preselect by income for thousands of prosecutions just as they could for a smaller grouping. However, people who lack the money are also more likely to be disabled, elderly, or ethnic or racial minorities. That's what the actual numbers may look more like, not just like your representative cross-section. Once you get to a number of suits where statistical modeling and analysis is reliable, that old bug-a-boo, reasonable doubt rears its head. A four to six sigma deviation from expected random results is not usually considered a reasonable doubt.
How would this matter? For one, lawyers are always officers of the court, and this is the sort of violation of principle that actually gets people disbarred where a lot of other things don't. Two, racial discrimination or violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act are tests that activate some portions of RICO if they meet any of the other criteria. Three, if you were running for office, would you accept donations from them with that sort of charge hanging over their heads, knowing your opponent might bring it up? The RIAA is a lobbying organization too, and if they can't do that part of their job effectively, they fail as a whole.
Whenever I see the interstate commerce clause mentioned like this, I think it's worthwhile to give readers a point from its history that really shows why there's so much bad law related to it:
During World War II, the U.S. imposed rationing on many goods, i.e. meat, tires, aluminum foil, and others, and passed related anti-hoarding laws. Many people started gardening to supplement their diet, and these new gardens were encouraged by the government and called Victory Gardens. However, the government also claimed the right to restrict sale of food from these gardens using the same rationing system. Since people selling extra garden produce to their neighbors didn't usually cross state lines, the government justified their legal right to include them under rationing because the seeds and garden tools used to create their gardens had often crossed state lines. Basically, it means that all U.S. commerce becomes interstate commerce whenever the Fed wants it to, because somewhere along the line at least some trivial related service or object crossed a state line somewhere.
As recent examples, the Federal government's right to control state speed limits, not just on the interstate highway system, but on state and local roads, is based on this interstate commerce interpretation. Federal spy agency rules that were written to only allow snooping on calls where at least one party isn't a U.S. citizen have been interpreted to include calls that pass out of the U.S., i.e. From a phone in California, to a satellite relay, and back to another phone in California, based on the same 'logic' and again citing the commerce clause as an example.
I don't see your criticism of Dorcas at all. As I read the book, she was a professional fair witness. She had years of formal, legally recognized and specialized training in a job as demanding as a lawyer's, for the purpose of being able to testify in court to meet specific legal standards. The whole bit with the robe she normally wears when practicing says she doesn't constantly remain in full Fair Witness mode, but does it for specific tasks. Heinlein may have been implying that it was difficult to remain in that state constantly or in an inappropriate situation - I certainly inferred it at the time. It's also very sensible that a very wealthy man, who signs lots of contracts would be just the sort to hire such a person, just as he might keep a lawyer on retainer.
Since the Michael Valentine Smith character is a messiah figure, having a person who is an exceptionally accurate witness observe at least some of his 'miracles' and his 'martyrdom' also seems to fit the overall theme of the book. Perhaps Dorcas could have been made a stage magician or James Randi's niece, but that would have made her presence more arbitrary, more like what you are complaining of. It would have made the book less SF, if you accept that a new profession, legallly recognized and legally given special status in a political system otherwise much like our own, is an SF concept.
The use at low intensities could be just as worrysome. Why inflict a lot of pain on a reporter, when you could give everyone who asked certain questions a small, perhaps not even consiously noticeable amount of discomfort that, in the long enough run, would discourage those lines of thought. Start with those reporters while they are journalism majors and by the time they are ever in the white house press room, they are already compliant.
Or take product competition. How little discomfort would it take to condition people not to by your competitor's brand? Even a tiny amount of pain, experienced by every customer who walks through a competitor's front door, could shift sales patterns pretty strongly your way over years of repetition.
Sweep the crowd at a candidate's rally, on low intensity, and see if some people don't leave early, questioners sound surlier, the candidate's speech sound flat or unappealing, and soon, local support seemingly evaporates. The national press reports candidate X doesn't seem to have enthusiastic support, and his party ends up going with another candidate.
Basically, every case where there is an infringement, and the copyright holder uses the part of the DMCA that spells out how to do a take-down notice, gets a tangible benefit from having a clear path to resolve their problem, and content hosters at least arguably benefit from that clarity too. Some businesses and individuals only resort to take-down notices where they actually own the rights to content, and even where they also think they are losing significant money by the infringement. It's generally not that those businesses or individuals had no recourse before the law, but they have a more clearly defined recourse.
The problems seem to be twofold. First, the no-reverse-engineering clauses of the DMCA don't really add much to the protection it gives legitimate parties, and they block many legitimate actions. They should either be dropped, or restricted heavily by a big list of fair use exceptions that need to be formally encoded into written law. Alternately, 30 or so more general cases of presumptive violation of the 9th amendment should be brought before the supreme court and used to re-establish it as a valid basis for restricting all such laws as the DMCA. I really can't see SCOTUS agreeing to hear anything of the sort in this era, so the closest to a just solution we are likely to get if we want to keep this part at all is probably a big formal list of fair use rights under a new law. There will still be technical injustices possible, but a decent fair use law will make them rare enough to be sure the law is doing more good than harm, overall. Groups such as the EFF could probably do enough to get new fair use exemptions added if they come up, that it's at least unlikely another Dmitry Sklyarov case would happen once we get the basic fair uses properly protected.
Second, the take-down portions are sometimes being abused by entities who don't actually have a case. The law provides for some very stiff penalties for such actions, but that part doesn't seem to be getting proper enforcement. It should either get enforced as written, or we should get rid of those parts too, if we're not going to apply them fairly. Personally, I'd rather see them kept, but with the proper protections - i.e. when a legal entity doesn't actually own content and they make a false claim, I'd like to see a fine big enough to hurt, or them being told they can't use the simple procedure anymore and must go get a court order first.
The Government (at least in the U. S. and E.U.) claims it has an actual mandate to encourage ownership. All sorts of agencies and laws exist, all supposedly justified by their increasing the percentage of the population that own their homes rather than rent, or or own their own business rather than working for someone else. If this mandate is valid, the tendencies built into many EULAs, copyright suits, and the like go against it. In this light, the DCMA and refusal to codify fair use restrictions are both regressive, in the exact same sense as a property tax break only for rental property owners, subsidized by a higher tax on single family homes, would be.
That's: Voldimort is Harry's dad! Sirius Black is People! Those Damned Dirty Muggles blew it all to hell! Harry rides the glass Hallow-svator up to where Mr. Dumbledore can show him the whole Horcrux-factory! Ron gets shot in slow motion to the music of Samuel Barber as the rest of them fly away on a giant broomstick! Harry-Six rips off Voldy-One's gorilla mask, to reveal his own face!
Bard's Tale 3 - Thief of Fate: The player tries to fix what Tarjan the Mad god did (killing all the other gods). The first attempt looks like it's possibly going to revive a god of the forests, and it doesn't really accomplish anything except making a nice memorial to him. You play through the whole game feeling like you're not accomplishing what it looks like you are really supposed to accomplish, and are going to have to settle for revenge on Tarjan and a world without its apparently well beloved deities. When you get to the god of war part, you fight, not just in fantasy worlds, but at real places such as Hiroshima and Stalingrad. Cheap, 4 color graphics and short prose snippets somehow give you the feel of mutual assured destruction and poor, dumb 15 year olds dieing by the millions for their countries.
The game has a happy ending though. If all of it was like I described, it would have probably sold 3 copies. Still, its art.
There's other studies that break the other way though. For just one, a research project analyzed some of Jackson Pollack's paintings using fractal-based math, and got what they called a complexity index. Pollack's works tend to fall in a narrow range for this index, and photos of natural settings tend to fall in the same range. In particular, sufficiently large photos of woodlands and jungles to capture good detail for single trees, fall in this range 90% of the time or so, whether they are of just one tree or many. Photos of other types, i.e. cityscapes and street scenes will almost invariably have higher indexes, and certain natural areas (such as deserts) will almost invariably have lower ones. Various artists tend to have their own numbers, but there is usually a pretty narrow bell curve distribution for a given artist or school.
People who tried to produce Pollack imitations resulted in numbers that were very close to randomly distributed, all over the range. Even though many professionals have a great deal of trouble telling an authentic Pollack painting from a fake, this index seems to work.
And none that emit nymphomaniacal, life draining, magenta tinted, gaseous aliens when you accidentally throw a large chisel at them on your first day on the job.
Chernobyl was an RBMK design. Because it was configured to convert on demand to a military apps operation mode that could produce lots of Plutonium 239 for quickly building bombs, it was built without a containment vessel, at a time when all U S commercial reactors were already encased in multiple meters of steel and concrete.
The soviet union deliberately compromised safety for military advantage, and yes it was a known bad design.
"The test in question was meant to determine how much power could be extracted from a nuclear plant in meltdown."
Not exactly - the test initially conducted was an extreme low power test, where the reactor was being run at such a low level it didn't provide enough power to run all the feedback systems designed to control the reactor itself. Extra power to run control systems was supposed to come from outside sources. A reactor near meltdown under some configurations may be producing much less power than usual and so this test had applicability to some meltdown research, but this particular design, in weapons production mode, would also have greatly reduced spare power for control in normal operation, so this test was probably to confirm the military applications of Chernobyl 4.
Here's a link to Gordon Prather's page, which is a good explanation for the non-technical. Note Dr. Prather's credentials at the bottom if you think he's just some guy spouting off.
You're presenting a serious argument, not just shouting that copyright violation equals theft. You deserve a good explanation, and not abuse. But there are several reasons why copyright violation isn't theft, and they have nothing to do with who gets compensated for what (in the US at least).
1. Copyright law, at least originally, was all under title 17 of the US legal code. Criminal actions are kept organized in a completely different section, Title 18. So the congress drafted our most basic federal laws to say copyright violation was not only not theft, but not criminal at all. Some parts of CV have become criminal of late, but they are still not all properly incorporated into that part of the code.
2. Copyrights expire. There is no such thing as an object becoming old enough that it is no longer theft to steal it. So long as the constitution says "for a limited time" copyright violation is being treated as automatically not theft by the U S Constitution.
3. There is still a non-criminal class of copyright violations, including 'violations' that are not even torts because of fair use. 'Non-criminal theft' is an absurdity. If copyright violation = theft, then there can be no fair use, as stealing even part of something is still theft just as much as stealing the whole thing. CV=T means no quotation of even a small portion without permission, and makes negative reviews illegal.
4. All copyright law in the US is federal, and the courts have ruled it cannot be delegated to the states. If copyright violation is theft, then the Federal government has no legal grounds for prohibiting the individual states from passing laws to prohibit theft taking place within their borders.
Now, you could argue that the U S Congress, the Justice Dept., and the Supreme Court are all wrong on various points, and the Constitution itself needs amended. Maybe. But I have yet to see any of the persons who are yelling "CV=T!" on Slashdot accuse their congressman of pandering to thieves, or demand a recall of the Supreme Court because they are misapplying the constitution so egregiously, or even lobby their state to pass its own copyright laws that make CV=T locally, and fight the court decisions prohibiting them. The CV=T! crowd seems to love calling typical slashdot posters thieves, but until one of them stands up in the capital rotunda and applies their very same logic to the congress, I'm assuming they either don't really believe it, or are too cowardly to speak truth to power. (That's very much not directed at you, OK?)
On the same note, I've been repeatedly called a thief, just for making these very same points before. Since I have never either uploaded or downloaded music (except downloading by fully legal methods where I have paid properly for every track), I think I can safely say I am not a thief, even by the strictest CV=T definition. So, if the CV=T! shouters are right, and "the law is the law, its all so simple, there are no other factors and only a crook would think otherwise", I know 15 or so Slashdot posters who have committed Libel. I don't see anyone posting to these endless copyright threads with "What you've just said = Libel" when this comes up. None of the CV=T! people seem to give a damn about whether a crime is being committed against me, just against the RIAA. They come off like they live by the George Orwell phrase "Everybody's equal, but some are more equal than others.", and I suspect that's why a lot of people are fed up with them. Personally, I'd rather let them insult me than complain - their lack of rational behavior will eventually make it clear what they really want is very far from justice for all.
If all critical remarks should have been withheld until at least a week after his death, then where would they be expressed? This thread will be well over by then. Is Slashdot planning to start a new thread in a week or so? (And how could they announce it, if that itself might be taken as critical? "{Please hold all negative comments about Mr. Jordan for next week, when Slashdot will re-open the thread." Oooh! that sounds pretty critical, implying that not everyone has a high opinion of Robert Jordan's works!). So, we're in a thread where some people can post their opinion, free from any criticism, because criticism of each other's posts becomes criticism of the deceased? Handy for one side!
And seriously, the attempt to stifle one poster you're referring to (by resorting to negative personal comments) was not just illogical, it was mean spirited, petty, and vindictive. For a moment, it made me personally think less of Mr. Jordan, that he was attracting the sort of fans who would stoop so low. You resorted to the same technique by labeling people hyperactive. Apparently, there is an ad hominem fallacy in your argument for decency, so excuse me if I don't just take your word that the previousl referenced post was free of them.
That part of the thread where you joined in doesn't just concern Mr. Jordan, although I grant he's certainly central to it. By the time you posted, there was also a living person who was being insulted and abused. Your defense of this act shows you may think well of the dead, but have less respect for the living.
Now I'm going to have to read at least one of the WoT series. To do otherwise would be to commit a logical fallacy myself and judge the man by the quality of his fans.
Leave earned can also be affected by the transfer of prior military leave for persons who have recently entered civil service employment (They will generally have leave well above what their years in civil service would normally entail). Anomalous appearing leave earnings can identify personnel who are prior service and give a fairly good estimation of their years in service, and possibly even time in combat zones. Entire service histories have on occasion been classified at federal Secret level, and normally are at least Service-member related confidential (requiring the person's signed permission to release singly in association with his or her name, but usually releasable in aggregate). California's laws and courts simply cannot authorize making that information public, any more that they can veto the Federal budget or declare a French national holiday.
Slashdot Mirror
They're being Un-mutual! Send out MS-rover.
It's because the gun-fu is strong that there is a bang. Subsonic rounds can be silenced.
And imagine the civil lawsuits against the city when the cameras show a crime, but the police fail to respond for any reason or if they're late in arriving.
Where this has been going on a lot recently, in Britain, it's been pretty frequent for people to file lawsuits and be told the tape or digital copies they want have already been erased, or lost. It's happened in suits over slow response, in police brutality lawsuits, and notably in the infamous case of the Brazilian man who was shot at extreme close range after being wrestled to the floor in the subway system. That's one way of keeping lawsuits from making the stupidity of this idea obvious.
So...is there a fairly easy way, to disable these cameras from a distance without getting caught??
.223 NATO style should be able to do it reliably at 300 yards, but for such small, somewhat armored targets, at working distances of above a thousand yards, the even more esoteric 45-70 Octagon barreled Sharps school has the edge. Others may favor any of many schools that come and go, but the Sharps way is eternal. Mine own branch of the school was baptized on the field known as Shiloh, and harvested the great buffalo in the high mountains to the west (sorry about them) and my great grandfather saw the training pass to me as a humble youth. The strongest and wisest of my daughters has been similarly trained by me, and will receive the final mark of her training when I am ancient.
No, unless you are one of those people who believes the wild claims made for the little known ancient occidental martial art of gun-fu. If you do believe all those wild claims that its mysterious practitioners can slay, not only at a touch, but at ranges much farther than most martial artists, striking invisibly with single blows that produce actual holes, sometimes passing all the way through the foe, then yes. But who believes that silly stuff? Still, since you are posting hypothetically...
Normally, I'd say even a mere fourth dan black belt in
There's a difference in your analogy and a case like this. You haven't said anything about why the cops are investigating the alleged money launderer on the original charge. Normally, to investigate money laundering, you get a warrant to look at a person's bank accounts or bookkeeping, not their home. Why would the cops follow up on a money laundering investigation by searching a home if they didn't find anything at the bank or office? If they didn't find anything, their probable cause collapses, so why would a judge accept it as probable cause for a second warrant? Oh, you mean the cops didn't get a warrant for the home? So you're asking if cops shouldn't be able to search a home without probable cause or a warrant? Damned right they shouldn't!
I was a commissioned officer in the U. S. armed forces for 7 years. During that time, I performed and supervised legal searches of military personnel's quarters. The legal advice I was given for this, was for all personnel to have what was being searched for firmly in mind - if we were searching for a stolen boom-box, no looking inside any container or drawer too small to hold it.
We often did health and welfare inspections of barracks. In these, we sometimes seized foodstuffs such as cookies or candy, either from people on overweight lists or if the food was opened, subject to attract ants or roaches. Normally, we didn't seize them if in sealed or properly resealed containers. Drugs accidentally found during a h & w inspection were seized and destroyed, but the possessors were not charged, no written record of the situation was made, and the officers turning these drugs over to military police to be burned were not to give any identifying information about the service members.
Note that theses sorts of limitations applied to searching people in active duty service, whose rights are arguably more limited than the average citizen's, and on property belonging to the government, not the citizen. Compared to this, civilian law needs to take the doctrine that "A man's home is his castle" as absolutely fundamental.
Your arrangement can be nice, especially where there aren't a lot of physical assets to control compared to the bottom line.
Just for people who are reading this thread, and now think S-corps are always a great idea, remember any basic corporation can dissolve itself and reform as a S-corp if it meets certain common tests, such as not having more than 100 stockholders, and not having non-citizen stockholders (except for certain trusts and international funds). Since there are many medium sized firms (and a few large ones), that don't issue common stock at all, there are quite a few corps that could convert to s-corps if they found their taxes onerous.(What cayenne8 is calling double taxation - that phrase is a frequent shortcut to describe something more complex, so don't take it without a grain of salt). That they don't switch says they generally like their existing incorporation better than the alternatives, usually (but not always) because of the liability limits.
Also, where you see the phrase 'reasonable salary' in cayenne8's post, that's not some tax-cheater's code for "whatever I damned well choose" - he's phrasing it just as the IRS does. The government actually looks at these to see if they fall in the range an employee doing that sort of work could normally expect. For executive work, that's pretty broad, and you can low-ball it somewhat, but you can't pay anyone the equivalent of 5 cents/hour just to reduce FICA responsibility.
One last problem with S-corps - if you start as a partnership or LLC, and convert to an s-corp, what happens if you no longer meet the tests to stay an s-corp? You don't revert back to your old status, but instead you become a regular corporation. This can hit people with a real tax burden if the IRS rules the s-corp became invalid at a prior date, like the date it gained it's 101'st stockholder.
I actually agree strongly with your last point, but this is not really about being independent, if you mean being a corporation all by yourself and handling all the tasks it entails to be one. The problem with that sort of independence is the same as trying to be your own lawyer, civil engineer and dentist, all at once.
You don't even have to incorporate (in the US at least). You certainly don't have to incorporate just to level the playing field. You can set yourself up as a sole proprietorship, (or if there's more than one involved, a partnership), and you don't have to incorporate at all. You can enter a sole proprietorship pretty much at will (in some states this has the caveat - if you're not a convicted felon), and you can style a partnership any of many ways so that you are getting paid fairly for what you bring to it. You can even limit your liability in a partnership so you can't be left holding the whole bag, without having to create a LLC or S-corp to do it.
Here's all working for yourself really, absolutely requires.
1. When you are employed, someone else withholds taxes (both income and social security/medicare). To be self employed, you have to hold these out yourself. If you start making a real lot of money, you have to make advance payments once a quarter, but until you are getting some serious income, you can usually just keep the money in an account and keep the interest for yourself until around April 15th. If you're making more money than will allow that, you can definitely afford someone like me to advise you and file your forms for you. I have clients who can afford my services entirely on the interest they are getting on money they would have never seen at all as employees. What you can't do is expect to keep all the money you wold have been paid as an employee, plus all the extra you should be able to make being your own boss, plus all the taxes you would have paid one way or the other as an employee, plus any money (or time) it costs to learn the basics of record keeping and legal compliance for your particular business.
2. you need to learn what counts as a business related expense, and what doesn't, what you can claim on an IRS schedule and what you can't. For most people in IT, this means learning a 2 page form (Schedule C), and probably the 1 page form to cover your driving expenses, and maybe the 1 page form for having a home office. The government both prints and PDFs complete instructions for all these and gives them away free on the IRS's website. There's about 40 pages of support manuals for all this, but once you learn the basics, those are not something you have to memorize or even read cover to cover. There are all sorts of additional sections explaining what to do if you are a lobster fisherman or a non-citizen, or both, but if you can't figure out pretty quick that this area doesn't apply to you, then you should be working for somebody else, as a burger flipper (and I've known some burger flippers who picked up on these pretty damned quickly). Most people have to get over their fear that government has hidden something vitally important in a tiny footnote in that section that only applies to commercial fishermen - that really seems to be the biggest obstacle, not intelligence.
You just may need to learn how to amortize computer related hardware and software, but probably your beginning business model is simpler than that and you can usually forget about doing any amortization - i.e. you can't claim a personal laptop if you use it for various things besides business, and a cheap old one sufficient for most IT needs is small enough you can just claim the whole thing as a straight out expense in a year. Most admin and diagnostic software is free these days unless you are specializing in certain parts of Windows. Starting out in business doesn't have to be very complex, and if it is you probably need to refine your business model.
Again, this is what I'd claim for a beginning IT, tec
(I won't be a Spelling Nazi)
(I won't be a Spelling Nazi)
(I won't be a Spelling Nazi)...
I'm not a lawyer - this is a layman's comment, reflecting only a layman's understanding, so of course utterly worthless. Still, I had fun writing it.
No, it won't stand up (much).
A precedent isn't an automatic win for subsequent cases. If a precedent appears to have technical flaws, people opposed to it will normally ask a higher court to overturn it. In some cases, all this takes is legal status as affected party, which means that if, for example, you represented a company and they were willing to make a claim that an old precedent hurt their bottom line, you would have standing to file an appellate brief. (If someone is willing to contend they are losing serious money because of the existing precedent, in some venues they don't have to actually have lost any case themselves to appeal). Then all you would need is a line of argument you thought had a chance of winning to actually prepare one. The way a precedent helps your side is all this filing can cost money, so the other side might decide its cheaper not to fight you. But if they hire a good lawyer to evaluate what their chances are, he or she is likely to see how weak your win was.
Alternately, one side could already be involved in an actual case and the other side (your side in your example) bring up the precedent in their motions. This doesn't automatically hurt their case, let alone mean your side automatically wins. They can make motions to the effect that the precedent doesn't really apply to your case, cite other conflicting precedents, or do many other things that could still mean you don't win. Cases have been put on hold while a higher court considers whether a precedent is valid or applicable, then the lower court case finished after that court rules. Some precedents are broader than others, and judges will frequently compare such factors as whether one was originally a mixed decision or a unanimous one, too, in deciding among conflicting precedents.
Precedents become stronger if they are set at a court of appeals level, and in the U.S. are very strong if the Supreme court has heard them and agreed, but even there, a new appeal on different grounds can overturn one. Often the Supreme court refuses to even hear an appeal. When they do, they will generally give reasons, and just what those reasons are may affect whether anyone might resubmit an appeal with other grounds or accept the intermediate court's verdict as effectively final. There are even cases where the Supreme court has refused to consider an appeal, but spelled out just how to restructure one so they would consider it (and in some of these, the court has then rejected the new appeal - go figure). There are some lower court precedents the Supreme court has consistently refused to hear, that are considered very strong for that reason, perhaps as strong as if they had heard and affirmed them.
How does this apply to your scheme? First, (in most venues) if a judge thinks one side isn't presenting its case very well, he can suggest they raise points of law, or question litigants as to points of fact directly. He or she can write the decision to reflect his or her own opinion that one side is doing a poor job, and this means the decision won't necessarily give the sort of protection you want. Legal decisions are often many pages long, not some simple "Side A wins, Side B loses" document.
Second, you can't automatically get a superior court to hear an appeal, and it may be very hard to get one all the way to the Supreme court. Remember, the side that wins can't appeal a point where they got a victory, rather the side that loses on a given point has to appeal their defeat, or someone else has to become involved. If fact, most appeals happen where a complex decision gives some points to both sides. It's rare to see one side lose badly on all points and appeal, because in mo
It was only about 120 years ago that scientists were claiming rocks didn't fall from the sky, period. This was still the consensus belief among actual, degreed, professional scientists well after the time of Isaac Newton, not something older natural philosophers or pseudo-scientists were necessarily claiming. In fact, for a while there, claiming a rock had fallen from the sky was a very good way for even an established scientist to find himself characterized as a crack-pot.
I know we have a lot better observation and more established theories now, but still, a little humility wouldn't hurt, given the history.
Microsoft certainly gets the the protection of both copyright and patent law. For you people claiming that natural monopolies exist, they also get to leverage any 'natural monopoly' that trade secrets alone would give them, because they can get some of those patents issued without fully disclosing their methods as the law theoretically requires. The current government not only protects Microsoft's monopoly status by the laws it has, but by selectively enforcing some of them, or are some of you actually claiming that Microsoft can fully disclose necessary information to get the protection of patent law, and simultaniously keep that same information as a trade secret? Neat trick, that.
Microsoft also gets the protection of Trademarks, including having a trademark on the term Windows in a computer related context, even though there's prior art there (prior art restricts patents, not trademarks).
At this point, Microsoft gets the protection of IP doctrine, which mean its lawyers can contend that what they really have isn't patents, trademarks, trade secrets, contracts, and copyrights, but some generic thing called IP, and that IP is some sort of nebulous thing, that has the infinite duration of an enforced trademark, but doesn't require enforcement. It has all the rights associated with copyright, but doesn't expire. It has the rights associated with traditional written contracts, but can be handled by a EULA which takes effect without a chance for the other party to read it before purchase. And, as I noted, it gives the same protection as patents when Microsoft wants it to, but doesn't require disclosure. Note that Microsoft's stock disclosure says that IP assets make up well over 1/2 of the capital assets of their corporation and this determines their stock valuation based essentially on their own claim for that IP's value. Note that this value is not subject to property taxes or short term capital gains tax, and some of it is not taxable at all, and so Microsoft's corporate taxes are proportionately lower than a more hardware oriented competitor (i.e. Apple), or a hardware oriented partner (Dell, Intel, etc.).
Hey, hate the sin, and love the sinner, brother or sister. Of course it's not Christian to want them to burn in hell. Pray for the mote to fall from their eyes, that they should learn the value of Christian charity. In fact, pray that they become such shining examples of Christian love and charity that they outshine all others and we become inspired to do better ourselves from their humble, yet dedicated, example.
While you're at it, please pray for me, as I can't write this without feeling like there's a big beam shaped tongue in my cheek.
Keep in mind that in most cases the RIAA is suing an IP address with no knowledge of the person.
How sure is anyone of that?
If the RIAA actually simply goes after ISPs randomly, then after suing several thousand people, an unbiased statistical analysis will show few or no significant patterns of economic background, ethnicity, or social status. Patterned deviations should be minor to within margin of error trivial, and any detected should be decreasing as more people are sued. If children of judges, congressmen, and the like appear on the list in proportion to their prevalence in the nation for example, then we can safely assume they do not preevaluate the targets of their suits on that grounds. However, if the average profile of the accused deviates significantly from the average of people with internet connections fast enough to share such large files, (which already corrects for some economic biases that might otherwise matter), then it becomes reasonable that there is some other pre-selection going on.
Note that selective prosecution is normally a legal issue only in criminal trials, and it is technically legal for the RIAA to selectively sue individuals they think lack the money to fight back. The RIAA may have started this whole procedure on that basis, assuming that they could legally preselect by income for thousands of prosecutions just as they could for a smaller grouping. However, people who lack the money are also more likely to be disabled, elderly, or ethnic or racial minorities. That's what the actual numbers may look more like, not just like your representative cross-section. Once you get to a number of suits where statistical modeling and analysis is reliable, that old bug-a-boo, reasonable doubt rears its head. A four to six sigma deviation from expected random results is not usually considered a reasonable doubt.
How would this matter? For one, lawyers are always officers of the court, and this is the sort of violation of principle that actually gets people disbarred where a lot of other things don't. Two, racial discrimination or violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act are tests that activate some portions of RICO if they meet any of the other criteria. Three, if you were running for office, would you accept donations from them with that sort of charge hanging over their heads, knowing your opponent might bring it up? The RIAA is a lobbying organization too, and if they can't do that part of their job effectively, they fail as a whole.
Whenever I see the interstate commerce clause mentioned like this, I think it's worthwhile to give readers a point from its history that really shows why there's so much bad law related to it:
During World War II, the U.S. imposed rationing on many goods, i.e. meat, tires, aluminum foil, and others, and passed related anti-hoarding laws. Many people started gardening to supplement their diet, and these new gardens were encouraged by the government and called Victory Gardens. However, the government also claimed the right to restrict sale of food from these gardens using the same rationing system. Since people selling extra garden produce to their neighbors didn't usually cross state lines, the government justified their legal right to include them under rationing because the seeds and garden tools used to create their gardens had often crossed state lines. Basically, it means that all U.S. commerce becomes interstate commerce whenever the Fed wants it to, because somewhere along the line at least some trivial related service or object crossed a state line somewhere.
As recent examples, the Federal government's right to control state speed limits, not just on the interstate highway system, but on state and local roads, is based on this interstate commerce interpretation. Federal spy agency rules that were written to only allow snooping on calls where at least one party isn't a U.S. citizen have been interpreted to include calls that pass out of the U.S., i.e. From a phone in California, to a satellite relay, and back to another phone in California, based on the same 'logic' and again citing the commerce clause as an example.
I don't see your criticism of Dorcas at all. As I read the book, she was a professional fair witness. She had years of formal, legally recognized and specialized training in a job as demanding as a lawyer's, for the purpose of being able to testify in court to meet specific legal standards. The whole bit with the robe she normally wears when practicing says she doesn't constantly remain in full Fair Witness mode, but does it for specific tasks. Heinlein may have been implying that it was difficult to remain in that state constantly or in an inappropriate situation - I certainly inferred it at the time. It's also very sensible that a very wealthy man, who signs lots of contracts would be just the sort to hire such a person, just as he might keep a lawyer on retainer.
Since the Michael Valentine Smith character is a messiah figure, having a person who is an exceptionally accurate witness observe at least some of his 'miracles' and his 'martyrdom' also seems to fit the overall theme of the book. Perhaps Dorcas could have been made a stage magician or James Randi's niece, but that would have made her presence more arbitrary, more like what you are complaining of. It would have made the book less SF, if you accept that a new profession, legallly recognized and legally given special status in a political system otherwise much like our own, is an SF concept.
The use at low intensities could be just as worrysome. Why inflict a lot of pain on a reporter, when you could give everyone who asked certain questions a small, perhaps not even consiously noticeable amount of discomfort that, in the long enough run, would discourage those lines of thought. Start with those reporters while they are journalism majors and by the time they are ever in the white house press room, they are already compliant.
Or take product competition. How little discomfort would it take to condition people not to by your competitor's brand? Even a tiny amount of pain, experienced by every customer who walks through a competitor's front door, could shift sales patterns pretty strongly your way over years of repetition.
Sweep the crowd at a candidate's rally, on low intensity, and see if some people don't leave early, questioners sound surlier, the candidate's speech sound flat or unappealing, and soon, local support seemingly evaporates. The national press reports candidate X doesn't seem to have enthusiastic support, and his party ends up going with another candidate.
Basically, every case where there is an infringement, and the copyright holder uses the part of the DMCA that spells out how to do a take-down notice, gets a tangible benefit from having a clear path to resolve their problem, and content hosters at least arguably benefit from that clarity too. Some businesses and individuals only resort to take-down notices where they actually own the rights to content, and even where they also think they are losing significant money by the infringement. It's generally not that those businesses or individuals had no recourse before the law, but they have a more clearly defined recourse.
The problems seem to be twofold. First, the no-reverse-engineering clauses of the DMCA don't really add much to the protection it gives legitimate parties, and they block many legitimate actions. They should either be dropped, or restricted heavily by a big list of fair use exceptions that need to be formally encoded into written law. Alternately, 30 or so more general cases of presumptive violation of the 9th amendment should be brought before the supreme court and used to re-establish it as a valid basis for restricting all such laws as the DMCA. I really can't see SCOTUS agreeing to hear anything of the sort in this era, so the closest to a just solution we are likely to get if we want to keep this part at all is probably a big formal list of fair use rights under a new law. There will still be technical injustices possible, but a decent fair use law will make them rare enough to be sure the law is doing more good than harm, overall. Groups such as the EFF could probably do enough to get new fair use exemptions added if they come up, that it's at least unlikely another Dmitry Sklyarov case would happen once we get the basic fair uses properly protected.
Second, the take-down portions are sometimes being abused by entities who don't actually have a case. The law provides for some very stiff penalties for such actions, but that part doesn't seem to be getting proper enforcement. It should either get enforced as written, or we should get rid of those parts too, if we're not going to apply them fairly. Personally, I'd rather see them kept, but with the proper protections - i.e. when a legal entity doesn't actually own content and they make a false claim, I'd like to see a fine big enough to hurt, or them being told they can't use the simple procedure anymore and must go get a court order first.
The Government (at least in the U. S. and E.U.) claims it has an actual mandate to encourage ownership. All sorts of agencies and laws exist, all supposedly justified by their increasing the percentage of the population that own their homes rather than rent, or or own their own business rather than working for someone else. If this mandate is valid, the tendencies built into many EULAs, copyright suits, and the like go against it. In this light, the DCMA and refusal to codify fair use restrictions are both regressive, in the exact same sense as a property tax break only for rental property owners, subsidized by a higher tax on single family homes, would be.
That's:
Voldimort is Harry's dad!
Sirius Black is People!
Those Damned Dirty Muggles blew it all to hell!
Harry rides the glass Hallow-svator up to where Mr. Dumbledore can show him the whole Horcrux-factory!
Ron gets shot in slow motion to the music of Samuel Barber as the rest of them fly away on a giant broomstick!
Harry-Six rips off Voldy-One's gorilla mask, to reveal his own face!
Bard's Tale 3 - Thief of Fate: The player tries to fix what Tarjan the Mad god did (killing all the other gods). The first attempt looks like it's possibly going to revive a god of the forests, and it doesn't really accomplish anything except making a nice memorial to him. You play through the whole game feeling like you're not accomplishing what it looks like you are really supposed to accomplish, and are going to have to settle for revenge on Tarjan and a world without its apparently well beloved deities. When you get to the god of war part, you fight, not just in fantasy worlds, but at real places such as Hiroshima and Stalingrad. Cheap, 4 color graphics and short prose snippets somehow give you the feel of mutual assured destruction and poor, dumb 15 year olds dieing by the millions for their countries.
The game has a happy ending though. If all of it was like I described, it would have probably sold 3 copies. Still, its art.
There's other studies that break the other way though.
For just one, a research project analyzed some of Jackson Pollack's paintings using fractal-based math, and got what they called a complexity index. Pollack's works tend to fall in a narrow range for this index, and photos of natural settings tend to fall in the same range. In particular, sufficiently large photos of woodlands and jungles to capture good detail for single trees, fall in this range 90% of the time or so, whether they are of just one tree or many. Photos of other types, i.e. cityscapes and street scenes will almost invariably have higher indexes, and certain natural areas (such as deserts) will almost invariably have lower ones. Various artists tend to have their own numbers, but there is usually a pretty narrow bell curve distribution for a given artist or school.
People who tried to produce Pollack imitations resulted in numbers that were very close to randomly distributed, all over the range. Even though many professionals have a great deal of trouble telling an authentic Pollack painting from a fake, this index seems to work.
And none that emit nymphomaniacal, life draining, magenta tinted, gaseous aliens when you accidentally throw a large chisel at them on your first day on the job.
Chernobyl was an RBMK design. Because it was configured to convert on demand to a military apps operation mode that could produce lots of Plutonium 239 for quickly building bombs, it was built without a containment vessel, at a time when all U S commercial reactors were already encased in multiple meters of steel and concrete.
The soviet union deliberately compromised safety for military advantage, and yes it was a known bad design.
"The test in question was meant to determine how much power could be extracted from a nuclear plant in meltdown."
Not exactly - the test initially conducted was an extreme low power test, where the reactor was being run at such a low level it didn't provide enough power to run all the feedback systems designed to control the reactor itself. Extra power to run control systems was supposed to come from outside sources. A reactor near meltdown under some configurations may be producing much less power than usual and so this test had applicability to some meltdown research, but this particular design, in weapons production mode, would also have greatly reduced spare power for control in normal operation, so this test was probably to confirm the military applications of Chernobyl 4.
Here's a link to Gordon Prather's page, which is a good explanation for the non-technical. Note Dr. Prather's credentials at the bottom if you think he's just some guy spouting off.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=20062
You're presenting a serious argument, not just shouting that copyright violation equals theft. You deserve a good explanation, and not abuse. But there are several reasons why copyright violation isn't theft, and they have nothing to do with who gets compensated for what (in the US at least).
1. Copyright law, at least originally, was all under title 17 of the US legal code. Criminal actions are kept organized in a completely different section, Title 18. So the congress drafted our most basic federal laws to say copyright violation was not only not theft, but not criminal at all. Some parts of CV have become criminal of late, but they are still not all properly incorporated into that part of the code.
2. Copyrights expire. There is no such thing as an object becoming old enough that it is no longer theft to steal it. So long as the constitution says "for a limited time" copyright violation is being treated as automatically not theft by the U S Constitution.
3. There is still a non-criminal class of copyright violations, including 'violations' that are not even torts because of fair use. 'Non-criminal theft' is an absurdity. If copyright violation = theft, then there can be no fair use, as stealing even part of something is still theft just as much as stealing the whole thing. CV=T means no quotation of even a small portion without permission, and makes negative reviews illegal.
4. All copyright law in the US is federal, and the courts have ruled it cannot be delegated to the states. If copyright violation is theft, then the Federal government has no legal grounds for prohibiting the individual states from passing laws to prohibit theft taking place within their borders.
Now, you could argue that the U S Congress, the Justice Dept., and the Supreme Court are all wrong on various points, and the Constitution itself needs amended. Maybe. But I have yet to see any of the persons who are yelling "CV=T!" on Slashdot accuse their congressman of pandering to thieves, or demand a recall of the Supreme Court because they are misapplying the constitution so egregiously, or even lobby their state to pass its own copyright laws that make CV=T locally, and fight the court decisions prohibiting them. The CV=T! crowd seems to love calling typical slashdot posters thieves, but until one of them stands up in the capital rotunda and applies their very same logic to the congress, I'm assuming they either don't really believe it, or are too cowardly to speak truth to power. (That's very much not directed at you, OK?)
On the same note, I've been repeatedly called a thief, just for making these very same points before. Since I have never either uploaded or downloaded music (except downloading by fully legal methods where I have paid properly for every track), I think I can safely say I am not a thief, even by the strictest CV=T definition. So, if the CV=T! shouters are right, and "the law is the law, its all so simple, there are no other factors and only a crook would think otherwise", I know 15 or so Slashdot posters who have committed Libel. I don't see anyone posting to these endless copyright threads with "What you've just said = Libel" when this comes up. None of the CV=T! people seem to give a damn about whether a crime is being committed against me, just against the RIAA. They come off like they live by the George Orwell phrase "Everybody's equal, but some are more equal than others.", and I suspect that's why a lot of people are fed up with them. Personally, I'd rather let them insult me than complain - their lack of rational behavior will eventually make it clear what they really want is very far from justice for all.
If all critical remarks should have been withheld until at least a week after his death, then where would they be expressed? This thread will be well over by then. Is Slashdot planning to start a new thread in a week or so? (And how could they announce it, if that itself might be taken as critical? "{Please hold all negative comments about Mr. Jordan for next week, when Slashdot will re-open the thread." Oooh! that sounds pretty critical, implying that not everyone has a high opinion of Robert Jordan's works!). So, we're in a thread where some people can post their opinion, free from any criticism, because criticism of each other's posts becomes criticism of the deceased? Handy for one side!
And seriously, the attempt to stifle one poster you're referring to (by resorting to negative personal comments) was not just illogical, it was mean spirited, petty, and vindictive. For a moment, it made me personally think less of Mr. Jordan, that he was attracting the sort of fans who would stoop so low. You resorted to the same technique by labeling people hyperactive. Apparently, there is an ad hominem fallacy in your argument for decency, so excuse me if I don't just take your word that the previousl referenced post was free of them.
That part of the thread where you joined in doesn't just concern Mr. Jordan, although I grant he's certainly central to it. By the time you posted, there was also a living person who was being insulted and abused. Your defense of this act shows you may think well of the dead, but have less respect for the living.
Now I'm going to have to read at least one of the WoT series. To do otherwise would be to commit a logical fallacy myself and judge the man by the quality of his fans.
Leave earned can also be affected by the transfer of prior military leave for persons who have recently entered civil service employment (They will generally have leave well above what their years in civil service would normally entail). Anomalous appearing leave earnings can identify personnel who are prior service and give a fairly good estimation of their years in service, and possibly even time in combat zones. Entire service histories have on occasion been classified at federal Secret level, and normally are at least Service-member related confidential (requiring the person's signed permission to release singly in association with his or her name, but usually releasable in aggregate). California's laws and courts simply cannot authorize making that information public, any more that they can veto the Federal budget or declare a French national holiday.